Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 (8 page)

The key. Hidden in plain sight. Both the code and the key in the same place. You only had to know how to look. Malcolm had seen it immediately – it was just the way his brain worked. And now so had Zak.

‘Gabs!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Raf! Wake up! Now!’

They stared groggily at him. They hadn’t taken too kindly to being woken, and they were clearly a bit confused.

‘The crossword. It’s a message and a cipher key all in one. Look.’

He showed them what he’d discovered.

‘Michael told us that Malcolm sees patterns where nobody else can. It was obvious to him.’

His two Guardian Angels were looking at him with an awed expression. ‘Very good, sweetie,’ Gabs breathed. ‘Our little cub is growing up.’ She turned to Raf. ‘I think we need to tell Michael, don’t you?’

Raf nodded. He pulled out his phone and touched the screen, before stepping into the next room to make the call.

‘Did you find anything else in the crossword?’ Gabs asked. ‘A time? A date?’

‘The date the crossword appears could be the date of the bomb,’ Raf called from the other room. ‘Too much of a coincidence otherwise. But could there be something about a time in there, Zak?’

Zak shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. But that doesn’t mean there
isn’t
anything else. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look for it. There’s something I don’t understand, though.
Why?
’

‘Why what?’

‘If you’re going to plant a bomb, why advertise it in such a weird way? I mean, either you want people to know about it, or you
don’t
, right?’

Gabs nodded her agreement. The problem had clearly crossed her mind too. ‘If you’re going to do something like this, you’re clearly not right in the head. Maybe the bomber’s on some kind of crazy power trip. Maybe he gets a thrill out of knowing he’s put the information out there in plain sight.’

‘Yeah,’ Zak replied. ‘Maybe.’ He wasn’t convinced.

Raf returned. ‘We’re going straight to the horse’s mouth.’

‘What do you mean?’ Zak asked.

‘Somebody
set
this crossword,’ Raf said. ‘I think we ought to have a little word with them, don’t you? Michael’s sending me the details.’ As Raf spoke, his phone buzzed. He checked the screen and nodded with satisfaction. ‘A Mr Alan Hinton,’ he announced. ‘Thirty-one St Mary’s Crescent, Ealing. Let’s go. With a bit of luck we’ll get to him before he’s even had his Weetabix.’

Raf gave a grim smile, and led them out of the apartment.

6

THE PUZZLE MASTER

0638hrs

ST MARY’S CRESCENT
was a pleasant, leafy street in a well-to-do residential area of west London. On the way, Gabs had read out information on their target that Michael had transmitted to her phone. ‘Alan Michael Hinton, age fifty-three. Unmarried. No children. Writes crosswords, Sudokus, chess puzzles, that kind of thing – mostly for the
Daily Post
newspaper on a freelance basis. Uses the pseudonym “Puzzle Master”. No criminal record. Not even a blip on the radar of the security services. Just about the last person on earth you’d expect to be involved in terrorist hit.’

‘Either that,’ Raf had said, ‘or he’s just got good cover.’

As they climbed out of the CR-V – Zak had sat awkwardly in the back seat to avoid getting stained again by Malcolm’s blood – he counted three men in suits leaving their houses to go to work. They all carried colourful umbrellas against the pouring rain. A milk van trundled up the road, its glass bottles rattling. A bedraggled urban fox scuttled under a car. It was a very ordinary – if drenched – suburban street.

And number thirty-one was a very ordinary suburban house. A neat front garden with beige gravel and pot plants; a smartly painted red front door; a low brick boundary wall and an iron gate; all the curtains closed. The gate squeaked as Raf opened it and Zak followed him up the garden path to the door, while Gabs hurried off down the street, trying to gain access round the back.

It took Raf approximately thirty seconds to pick the lock on the front door using a set of standard lock picks and tension tools. Time enough for the rain to soak them through. Zak could tell instantly that something was wrong. As the door opened, he heard the scraping of mail against the floor on the other side. Either the Puzzle Master was extremely popular, or he hadn’t been picking up his post. They closed the door behind them and took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dim light.

The hallway led all the way along to a kitchen at the back of the house. A door to their left, a staircase straight ahead. And a strange smell. Very faint, but unpleasantly sweet. Zak had an uncomfortable feeling, and from the look on his face, so did Raf. Neither of them spoke. They just stepped forward to start searching the house.

The door on the left led into the front room. Wall-to-wall bookcases, stuffed full of hardback books and CDs of classical music. A TV in the corner, its standby light on. A very old three-piece suite with a floral pattern, and a russet carpet. But Zak had never seen such chaos. The floor was piled high with books and stacks of old newspapers and a coffee table was littered with perhaps fifty crosswords, all cut out from newspapers. It was incredibly dusty – thousands of dust particles danced in a shard of light that entered the room from a gap at the top of the closed curtains – and two large, black flies buzzed around the air. Occasionally they hit the mirror above the fireplace with a gentle thump, before returning to their aerial dance.

‘Nice gaff,’ Raf murmured, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

The kitchen was more sparse – and it gave the definite impression that the occupant of this house was not a keen cook. There was a dirty frying pan on the stove with a layer of congealed grease. Another fly was crawling on the white fat. A Yale key was sitting in the lock of the back door. When Zak saw Gabs appear, soaking wet, in the tiny rear garden, he unlocked it to let her in. Nobody spoke. Together, the three of them climbed the stairs.

As they approached the first floor, the sweet smell grew stronger. More unpleasant. Zak found himself covering his nose and throat, and he noticed the look Raf and Gabs exchanged.

‘You should go back downstairs, sweetie,’ Gabs said as they stood on the landing. But Zak shook his head. He could make his own decisions, and Gabs appeared to respect that. Zak peered into the small bathroom. A white bath with yellow stains, and a mildewing shower curtain hanging from a rail. A ring of stubble and shaving scum around the inside of the sink. The toilet seat was up, and it didn’t smell too fresh. Zak noticed another fly buzzing around, at least as big as the two he’d seen downstairs. It was
only
a fly, but still: something about it made his flesh creep.

Zak froze. He could hear something. He looked up. There was a scratching sound above him. Movement above the bathroom ceiling. He looked over his shoulder at Raf and Gabs. They had noticed it too.

The scratching sound stopped. The only noise now was the buzzing of the fly.

There was a closed door at the end of the landing. Raf drew a gun as he approached it. Zak and Gabs followed a metre behind. The smell was now even more pungent, and Zak wasn’t sure but he thought he could hear something else. A gentle hum. It came from behind the door.

A click. It was Raf releasing the safety catch on his pistol. He was a metre from the door and holding the gun out in front of him. He raised three fingers of his left hand.

Two.

One.

The force with which he kicked down the door was immense. It almost seemed to make the frame itself rattle. And as Raf burst into the room, something else burst out: a swarm of flies, perhaps several hundred of them, greasy and black, and a stench so bad it made Zak gag.

Through the open door, he could see Raf looking towards the ceiling. Zak stepped forward, waving his hand in front of his face to swat the flies, and hitting a couple of insects with each swipe. Gabs was close behind him, also gagging as they entered the room.

The air was thick with flies, all buzzing. The room itself contained nothing but a single bed and a bedside table with a glass of stale water beside it. Near the wall opposite the window, however, there was a trapdoor in the ceiling, with a loft ladder descending from it down to the ground. The flies were coming from up there, and so was the scurrying sound. Raf extracted a torch from inside his jacket and shone it through the opening and up into the loft. It lit up the soles of a pair of feet, seemingly suspended in midair to one side of the opening. It didn’t take too much imagination to realize they were staring up at a hanged man.

‘You don’t have to look at this, sweetie,’ Gabs said. Zak clenched his jaw and ignored her as Raf climbed the ladder. Then Gabs.

Then Zak.

He was sure, as he stared at the corpse, that he would not be able to stay there for very long. He had already seen two fat rats with long, scaly tails scurry away into the corner of the loft, and up here the flies were darting around so furiously that one hit his face every couple of seconds. The stink was putrid, but none of these were as bad as the sight of the body hanging from the central rafters high above. It was naked for a start. The skin was yellow and waxy, and it glistened in places where fluid had escaped. Rolls of fat seemed to have sunk from his torso to his belly, as though the skin were slipping down off his bones.

But his face was the worst.

The mouth and eyes were wide open, the nostrils flared. In the corner of the left eye Zak saw something move. It was, he realized, a maggot. More movement around the mouth. A scaly black cockroach crawled into the cavity, hiding from the light of Raf’s torch. For the second time in as many minutes, Zak forced himself not to vomit.

‘I don’t know about you,’ Raf breathed, ‘but I don’t think the Puzzle Master has set any puzzles for a good few days now.’

Neither Zak nor Gabs replied. They just hurried back down the loft ladder and returned to the ground floor where the smell was less malodorous, and they could at least breathe freely.

Back in the kitchen, Zak still felt nauseous and Raf opened the back door to let in some fresh air, and they all breathed deeply for a minute without speaking. Gabs broke the silence. ‘Suicide?’ she said.

Raf shook his head. ‘I don’t think he did it himself – there’s nothing up there for him to leap from. No, the poor guy was killed.’

‘How long has he been dead for, do you think?’ Zak asked.

‘Difficult to say. The roof wasn’t insulated, so it could get pretty hot up there, accelerate the decomposition process. Even so, from the smell of him I’d say he’s been there at least a week. A coroner will be more precise when they perform a postmortem.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘I need to report the death, update Michael.’

‘We should search the place before any police or clean-up people get here,’ Gabs said. ‘See if anything shows up.’

Zak nodded. Together they went into the front room and started to turn it upside down.

At the end of St Mary’s Crescent, a figure in a wide-brimmed hat and a heavy raincoat leaned against a pillar box. He had stood here watching as a black CR-V pulled up outside number thirty-one, and had counted three figures emerge from the vehicle. The rain was too heavy for him to make out their features clearly. Two of them were clearly adults, but could it really be the case that one of them was still only a youngster?

He allowed the intruders a few minutes to enter, then started to walk towards their vehicle. His right hand was in the pocket of his coat, and his fingers fiddled sweatily with a heavy, circular, metallic object. It was a magnet that provided the bulk of the object’s weight. Remove that and the tiny battery-powered transmitter would barely register in the palm of his hands. Still, it was very powerful for such a small thing. There weren’t many places on earth that the device’s GPS capability wouldn’t work, but he doubted that the people he was tracking would be taking a holiday under the thick canopy of the jungles of Belize, or underwater.

As he sidled up to the car, he wondered if they had found what they were looking for yet. He pictured them opening the bedroom door and looking upwards. Idly, he wondered if the corpse had decomposed enough for the body to separate from the head, or whether Mr Alan Hinton, the Puzzle Master, was still hanging intact from the rafters.

And as he walked round to the side of the car furthest from the pavement, bent down and slipped the magnetic tracking device onto the undercarriage, he found himself smiling grimly. Somebody may well have worked out his clever little code, but it didn’t matter. He had other ways of getting his message out. Other ways that the right people would be watching.

That the right
person
would be watching.

The device clamped itself firmly to the undercarriage. The man crossed the road and continued walking through the rain to the opposite end of St Mary’s Crescent. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. His job was done.

‘I don’t know how people can live like this,’ Gabs said as she flicked through a dusty pile of books on the armchair. ‘This place can’t have been cleaned for years.’

Zak nodded in agreement, but in truth his mind was elsewhere. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

In his hands he had a pale blue exercise book, like he used to write on at primary school. He had found it beneath a cushion on the sofa. It was mostly empty. Only the first couple of pages were filled with messy but compact handwriting.

‘Listen,’ he breathed, and he started to read.

Monday, 2 June

All the journalists I know say that when something strange happens you should take notes. So here goes. I had a phone call today. It was just before midnight. I was working on a puzzle. It was a man. His voice sounded strange. I saw a film once when the baddie used some contraption to disguise his voice. It sounded like that. I can’t remember exactly what he said. I was too surprised, really. He asked me if I’d like to earn £1,000. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You don’t earn much writing puzzles,’ I said. All I had to do, he told me, was replace three of my crosswords with three of his. Send them into the paper and make sure they were printed. I got spooked when he said that. I don’t know why. I put the phone down straight away
.