Under Cover (Agent 21) (16 page)

‘We need to be quiet. Mustn’t wake Hunter,’ he murmured.

He carefully led her back to the main basement room, where he tried to pick out Tommy in the darkness, but couldn’t. Still holding Izzy’s hand, he headed straight for the door.

But he was only halfway there when the room suddenly filled with light.

Dazzled, Ricky covered his eyes with his right arm, which was still holding the newspaper truncheon. He uncovered them a fraction of a second later, because he had heard Izzy scream.

Hunter was there, five metres away, bearing down on them like a madman. His eyes were wild and angry, his leathery face curled into a vicious snarl. In his right hand he held a wicked-looking knife. Ricky’s mind flashed back to the last time someone had drawn a knife on him: the witch-like woman in Bloomsbury Square. Back then, he’d had Felix to rescue him. But now he was on his own.

‘Run!’ he barked at Izzy. She staggered towards the door. Ricky was aware of the other Thrownaways drowsily waking up. He had to deal with Hunter before any of them decided to come to the man’s aid.

Three metres between them. Hunter was raising his arm, ready to strike.

How had Felix dealt with the witch?
Ricky pictured that scene. He’d gone for the wrist of her knife hand with his stick.

Ricky had no stick. But he did have the truncheon.

He moved almost on instinct. Hunter was almost upon him now, just about to strike with the knife. With a sudden movement, Ricky whacked the truncheon against Hunter’s knife hand with all the force he could muster. It connected sharply. Hunter roared out in pain, and the knife went clattering to the floor.

– GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!

Ricky spun round. Izzy was already at the door, but she was staring towards them, her eyes wide and horrified.

‘Move!’ Ricky shouted, and he sprinted in her direction as Hunter, still roaring with pain, scrambled to pick up the knife.

‘
Get ’em!
’ Hunter yelled. Suddenly Ricky was aware that at least ten of the Thrownaways were on their feet. Tommy was one of them, but he was holding back, clearly reluctant to try to catch Ricky. But Ricky knew that if Hunter forced him, he wouldn’t have a choice. None of them would.

Izzy was halfway up the stairs now and Ricky was already by the door. But Hunter and the Thrownaways were bearing down on him, and some of them had knives – there was no way he could deal with them all using just a rolled-up newspaper.

Again, instinct took over. He dropped the truncheon and plunged one hand into the pocket of his jeans. When he removed it, he was clutching a handful of coins.

‘You can’t pay your way out of this one, sunshine,’ Hunter snarled.

Ricky ignored the threat. What had Felix said?
If I throw a handful of coins hard enough at your face, you’re going to know about it . . .

Ricky didn’t hesitate. He hurled the coins towards Hunter and his boys, as hard as he could. As he turned his back on them, he heard several of them shouting in pain. But he was already clattering up the steps after Izzy, taking two steps at a time. He looked over his shoulder. One of the Thrownaways – a small kid with ginger hair – was already at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Move!’ Ricky hissed at Izzy. ‘
Move!
’

Five seconds later, they burst out of Keeper’s House. Izzy was already out of breath, but they couldn’t stop now. He grabbed her by the hand and yanked her towards the end of the street.

‘They’re following!’ she cried as they turned right onto Berwick Street. ‘
They’re following us!
’

‘Keep running,’ Ricky hissed. And then he added: ‘
In a straight line!
’

They sprinted down the slidy, snowy road. Every ten paces or so, Ricky would lose his grip and slip. But somehow he and Izzy managed to keep each other up. The further they ran towards Piccadilly, the more people they encountered. And after three or four minutes, Ricky stopped and looked back, his lungs burning.

‘We’ve lost them,’ he panted.

Izzy was gasping for air. She was shivering too. Hardly surprising. Even though they’d been running, it was freezing outside.

‘Let’s get a hot drink,’ he said.

Izzy nodded gratefully, then said: ‘You’re really
not
going to tell my dad where I am, right?’

Ricky gave her a serious kind of look. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said. He checked again for any sign of pursuing Thrownaways, but there were none. And so without another word, he took her hand and led her into a nearby McDonald’s.

McDonald’s wasn’t busy. It was gone midnight on Boxing Day, after all. A few drunk youths were making a noise in the far corner and everyone else in the restaurant – there were fifteen or twenty others – kept their distance and did their best not to look in that direction. Ricky told Izzy to take a seat near the door, and kept half an eye on her as he went to buy hot tea, burgers and fries with the last of his remaining loose change. He didn’t want her to run off.

But she didn’t. When he placed the food in front of her, she devoured it hungrily. While she ate, Ricky looked out of the window. London was still busy, despite the late hour and the snow. A red bus trundled past, a line of traffic close behind. Everyone was driving carefully in the bad weather. Ricky watched a well-wrapped-up cyclist wobble past, then noticed a second cyclist on the other side of the road – his bike was propped up against a street lamp and he had crouched down to fix something on the drive chain.

Ricky’s senses were immediately ultra-alert. What had Felix told him?
Nobody looks twice at a cyclist fiddling with his chain. It means you can stay in the same place, watching and waiting, for ages.

– It’s probably just a regular cyclist
, said the voice in his head.
You’re being paranoid
. But Ricky took careful note of the cyclist’s clothes – black puffa jacket, red scarf. If he saw that figure again, he’d know to be suspicious . . .

He turned back to Izzy and couldn’t help staring at her. She was so like Madeleine. He waited until she had drunk half of her steaming hot tea before even asking her a question.

‘Do you think your dad is up to anything dodgy?’

He watched her face carefully as he said this, looking for any flicker of surprise or annoyance. There was none. But she didn’t answer. She just took another sip of her tea and stared at him over the brim of the cup.

‘
I
think he is,’ said Ricky.

Izzy put the cup down. ‘How would you know that?’

‘Let’s just say I’ve got a source.’

‘A good source?’

Ricky thought of Felix, limping furiously around the apartment, and all that he had said.

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘A very good source.’

Izzy bowed her head. ‘He’s a monster,’ she whispered. ‘He only thinks about himself.’

‘Can you remember anything he has ever said about’ – Ricky lowered his voice slightly – ‘nuclear location codes, or any dealings he’s had with Russians?’

Izzy’s eyes widened and she nodded her head. ‘I heard him shouting down the phone. It was just a few hours before I ran away. He was talking to someone called Dmitri, saying that this Dmitri guy wouldn’t get anything until Dad got his money first.’

‘How did he sound when he was talking?’ Ricky asked.

‘Really angry. He had a massive argument with Mum afterwards.’ She looked down again and touched the side of her still-bruised face. ‘That was when he did
this
.’

Ricky had to hold down a feeling of contempt for this man who would hit his daughter like that. But he put that from his mind as he tried to decide how he was going to explain everything to Izzy.

– You could try the truth.

– She’d never believe it.

– Then tell her as much as you think she
will
believe
.

Ricky frowned. ‘There are these people,’ he said. ‘They think your dad’s doing something wrong. They wanted me to find you and persuade you to go back home so you can spy on him and get hard evidence of what he’s up to.’

Izzy was already sliding off her chair, her eyes a bit wild, getting ready to run. Ricky grabbed her wrist. ‘I told them I wouldn’t do it. Nobody’s sending you back home, not if you don’t want to go. That’s a promise.’

The girl seemed to relax a little. She sat down again.

‘But listen,’ Ricky continued. ‘This thing they’re accusing your dad of, it’s really bad. It could hurt a lot of people. I thought . . . I thought, maybe . . .’ Now that he had to say it, Ricky’s plan sounded stupid. But it was the only plan he had, so he blurted it out. ‘I thought you could tell
me
a good way to break into your parents’ house. Maybe I can, you know,
find
something.’

Izzy looked around nervously, then stared at him. ‘If my dad gets his hands on you . . .’ she whispered.

‘I know,’ Ricky said quietly. ‘Look, if you don’t want to do it . . .’

‘Might he go to prison?’ Izzy asked, her voice suddenly fierce.

Ricky thought about that for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think so. Then you could move back in with your mum.’

But Izzy shook her head. ‘No way. She’s just as bad. She
let
him do this to me.’ A determined look crossed her face. ‘There are security cameras covering the outside of the house,’ she told him. ‘Front, back, everywhere. Dad thinks he’s got the whole house covered, but there’s a blind spot. It’s possible to get from the bottom of the garden up to the back door of the house without being seen, if you know the route. And,
and
’ – she was almost getting excited now – ‘I dropped a back-door key in the snow when I left. It’s probably still there . . .’

‘Can you tell me what the route is?’

Izzy nodded. ‘Of course. From the gate at the bottom of the garden you go about ten paces forward till you get to this kind of bird-bath thing, then—’ She suddenly fell silent. ‘It’s too hard to describe,’ she said. ‘I can walk it with my eyes closed, but that’s only because I’ve been doing it since I was a little kid. Like a kind of game.’

Disappointed, Ricky nodded. He looked out of the window onto Shaftesbury Avenue. The buses were still passing and the cyclist in the black puffa jacket was still adjusting his bike. A fresh layer of snow was falling.

Snow
.

It gave him an idea.

He turned back to Izzy.

‘I need to ask you a favour,’ he said.

Jacob Cole, MP, sat alone in his office. It was very late and he was very tired. But they
still
hadn’t called. He stared at the mobile phone on his desk in front of him, willing it to ring. It didn’t.

He looked at his watch. One o’clock in the morning. How much longer would he have to wait for those accursed Russians to make contact?

He sighed heavily, then stood up and walked to the window. His office looked out over the garden, dark and thick with snow. He wondered where his daughter was, in weather like this. It would be her own fault if the stupid girl was freezing. After everything he’d done for her.

He sat down at the desk again, and continued to stare at his phone. What if it ran out of charge? He plugged it into the charger – there was no way he would miss the call when it came . . .

Izzy looked horrified at Ricky’s suggestion. He knew he’d have to talk fast to persuade her.

‘You won’t have to enter the house, I promise. And if anything goes wrong, I’ll help you escape.’

Izzy closed her eyes. ‘OK,’ she said quickly, as if scared that she might change her mind. ‘OK. When do we do it?’

‘How does now suit you?’

‘
Now?
’

‘It’s important, Izzy. I’ve got the feeling we don’t have much time to lose.’

Forty-five minutes later, they were standing in a narrow, deserted alleyway in the centre of Mayfair. Izzy was trembling, but Ricky suspected that was nothing to do with the cold. Five metres to their right there was a heavy gate, but Izzy was examining the brick wall beside it. ‘About here,’ she murmured. She bent down and rummaged in the snow. A moment later she straightened up. She was holding a key, which she handed to Ricky. ‘That will get you into the kitchen,’ she said. ‘There’s an alarm, but they don’t turn it on while they’re in the house – the outside security cameras are the main thing.’ She looked up to the top of the wall. ‘You can’t see it, but there’s barbed wire. We’ll both have to be careful.’

Ricky nodded. ‘I’ll give you a leg-up,’ he said.

With Ricky holding her foot, Izzy easily climbed the wall, then swung her legs over the top to avoid the wire. It was harder for Ricky and he found himself wishing that his lessons from Felix had included learning how to scale a wall. But they hadn’t, so he had to make do. He turned his Nike cap so it was pointing backwards again, out of the way, and jumped as high as he could, grabbing the top of the snow-covered wall with his fingertips, then pulling himself up with all his strength. His muscles burned by the time his head was level with the top of the wall. He kept straining, and a few seconds later he too was swinging his legs over the top, trying to avoid the wire but snagging his jeans and adding another rip to them at one point. He landed with a thump next to Izzy.

She was crouching in the snow, looking towards the house, which was large and imposing. The lights of all the rooms were switched off, except one in the centre of the house on the first floor. Its window was long and rectangular, floor to ceiling, and vertical blinds were pulled so they could see a figure standing there, looking out over the garden. The light from the room shone down onto the pure, untouched blanket of snow below, and the figure cast an elongated shadow.

Ricky groaned inwardly. He had been relying on the whole house being asleep.

‘Is that your dad?’ he breathed.

Izzy nodded silently. She was still shaking. He grabbed her hand. ‘He’s in the light, we’re in the dark. He can’t see us, OK? And look up, there’s no moon visible, but lots of cloud. We will be as good as invisible.’ He wasn’t sure he totally believed this, but he did need to convince Izzy.

‘OK.’ Izzy’s voice was slightly hoarse. ‘Shouldn’t we wait until he’s asleep?’