Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Agent 21: Briefing Document

  Prologue: Northern Ireland, 1973

  15 June

  1. The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

  2. Advance/Retreat

  3. Green Light

  4. Room 7

  16 June

  5. Hidden in Plain Sight

  6. The Puzzle Master

  7. The Second Bomb

  8. St Oswald’s

  9. Casualty of War

  10. 00:00:00

  11. Dishonourable Discharge

  17 June

  12. NY Hero

  13. Liquid Lunch

  14. Tilt Switch

  15. Hangman

  16. Evorgdul

  18 June

  17. The Graveyard Shift

  18. The Long-tailed Shrike

  19. Chalker Mews

  20. Blackout

  21. Murder in his Eyes

  Epilogue: One Week Later

  Decoding Messages

  About the Author

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Special agent Zak Darke is back for his third mission – and the stakes have never been higher.

  An unknown bomber is conducting a terror campaign in London. After an explosion on the tube leaves someone dead, Zak and his team are brought in to try and work out how this terror cell operates – but clues are scarce and they have no idea where, or when, the bomber will strike next. A teenage boy, currently detained in a young offender’s institute, claims he has the answer – but before Zak can question him, the boy is shot and falls into a coma. Will Zak be able to break the cipher before the bomber strikes again?

  AGENT 21: BRIEFING DOCUMENT

  AGENT 21

  Real name: Zak Darke

  Known pseudonyms: Harry Gold, Jason Cole

  Age: 15

  Date of birth: March 27

  Parents: Al and Janet Darke [DECEASED]

  Operational skills: Weapons handling, navigation, excellent facility with languages, excellent computer and technical skills.

  Previous operations: (1) Inserted under cover into the compound of Mexican drug magnate Cesar Martinez Toledo. Befriended target’s son Cruz. Successfully supplied evidence of target’s illegal activities. Successfully guided commando team in to compound. Target eliminated. (2) Inserted into Angola to place explosive device on suspected terrorist ship, the the MV Mercantile. Vessel destroyed, Agent 21 extracted.

  AGENT 17

  Real name: classified

  Known pseudonyms: ‘Gabriella’, ‘Gabs’

  Age: 27

  Operational skills: Advanced combat and self-defence, surveillance, tracking.

  Currently charged with ongoing training of Agent 21 on remote Scottish island of St Peter’s Crag.

  AGENT 16

  Real name: classified

  Known pseudonyms: ‘Raphael’, ‘Raf’

  Age: 30

  Operational skills: Advanced combat and self-defence, sub-aqua, land-vehicle control.

  Currently charged with ongoing training of Agent 21 on remote Scottish island of St Peter’s Crag.

  ‘MICHAEL’

  Real name: classified

  Known pseudonyms: ‘Mr Bartholomew’

  Age: classified

  Recruited Agent 21 after death of his parents. Currently his handler. Has links with MI5, but represents a classified government agency.

  CRUZ MARTINEZ (presumed dead)

  Age: 17

  Significant information: Succeeded Cesar Martinez as head of largest Mexican drug cartel. Thought to blame Agent 21 for death of father. Highly intelligent. Profile remained low since coming to power. Thought to have drowned during sinking of MV Mercantile.

  PROLOGUE

  Northern Ireland. 18 June, 1973

  ‘County Armagh? Oh, it’s as pretty as a picture.’

  That’s what old Mrs Herder told her sons, and she was right. It is as pretty as a picture. Unless you’re a member of the British Army, in which case it’s hell on earth.

  Lee Herder doesn’t notice the scenery. He’s blind to the little cobbled streets and the tiny cottages in this sleepy village of Ballycork. Blind to the cotton-wool clouds in an otherwise blue sky. All he sees is the group of Parachute Regiment soldiers, twelve of them, each carrying an L64 assault rifle as they keep a fifty-metre cordon around the central square. In the middle of the square is a stone monument to the fallen of two world wars, and a white Ford Capri.

  Lee looks to his right. His older brother Richard – Sonny to their late mum and dad, Dick to everybody else – is there. The two brothers are dressed the same. Blast-resistant body armour on the outside of their standard-issue camouflage gear. Helmet. A belt containing the tools the two brothers need to disarm the car bomb under the Capri.

  From the edge of the cordon, Lee sees a bird land on the driver’s-side wing mirror of the vehicle. Black and white wings. Green rump. He recognizes it as a chaffinch.

  ‘Let’s hope Tweetie Pie doesn’t hop onto the pressure plate,’ Dick says. ‘Could be noisy.’

  Lee nods as they pass through the Paras’ cordon. This is their third car bomb in as many days. They were good bomb-disposal guys before their tour to Northern Ireland. Now they’re just about the best. But being the best doesn’t calm your nerves before each new job. No two devices are the same, and bomb-makers take pride in inventing clever booby traps for guys like Lee and Dick.

  Clever ways to kill them.

  They are kneeling down by the car now, staring at the rear wheel. Sweat trickles down the back of Lee’s neck. Whoever called this one in did well to notice the tiny triggers, one just in front of the tyre, one just behind it. Each trigger is made from a tiny ball of Blu-tack, sandwiched between two iron nails. Each nail has a wire attached to it. As soon as the car moves forward or backwards, the tyre will squash one of the triggers. The nails will touch and complete the circuit. Bang.

  Defusing it is not going to be straightforward. The wires leading from each nail are taut, which rings alarm bells in the brothers’ minds.

  ‘Motion sensor?’ Lee suggests.

  ‘Motion sensor,’ his brother agrees.

  They lie on their bellies as Dick shines a torch under the car. Sure enough, fifty centimetres in, a metal ring – no bigger than a wedding band – surrounds each bare wire. Lee remembers a game their dad had built for them when they were kids – a wiggly wire connected to a battery and a buzzer. You had to move a metal loop from one end of the wire to the other. If they touched, the buzzer would sound and you had to go back to the beginning. Same idea here, only there’s no buzzer and no starting again. The rings are connected to a mess of wires fixed to the undercarriage of the car, and the mess of wires is connected to enough bright orange Semtex plastic explosive to send the car sky high. He smiles as he wonders what his dad would say now if he could see them using their skills today. And he wishes – not for the first time – that their mum and dad had not been so cruelly taken from them, courtesy of a drunken teenage driver one wet night.

  The brothers look at each other now. ‘Controlled explosion?’ Lee says. Dick nods. This device is crude and simple, but they can be the most difficult. The slightest movement will detonate the explosives. They stand up and walk back to the cordon.

  An officer is waiting for them with an expectant look on his face. A glance at his stripes tell the brothers he’s in charge. ‘Well?’ he asks.

  ‘You need to evacuate everyone within a two-hundred-metre radius,’ Dick tells him. ‘It’s too risky to defuse and there’s a lot of orange cake under there. We’ll ne
ed to carry out a controlled explosion.’

  Dick is already turning away when the officer says: ‘No.’

  The two brothers give him a dangerous look.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dick says.

  ‘I have my orders. The IRA will get almost as much attention if that thing explodes without killing anybody.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ Lee says. ‘It’s booby-trapped . . . too dangerous . . .’

  ‘Fine.’ The officer is looking around now, as if hunting for someone else. ‘If you two aren’t up to the job, we’ll bring in somebody who is.’

  Lee glances at his brother. He knows they’re both thinking the same thing: there’s nobody else in the British Army even half as qualified as them. It’s not arrogance. It’s just the truth. Do as the rupert says and send in another bomb-disposal guy and it would be sending them to their death.

  Dick swears under his breath. ‘Get these soldiers further back,’ he says, talking not to the Para but to Lee.

  ‘Mate . . .’ Lee starts to say, but he doesn’t finish. His brother is already walking back to the car, his gait stiff on account of his protective gear. Lee thinks about calling after him, but doesn’t. He knows his brother too well. When his mind is made up, it’s made up. Instead he shouts to the Paras, ‘OK, everyone, move back! Move back! It’s a big one . . .’

  The soldiers don’t move. It takes a barked instruction from the officer to make them retreat. By now, Dick has reached the Ford Capri. He’s lying on his back and is slowly easing himself under the car, like a mechanic. Lee can see nothing but his protective boots sticking out from underneath. He realizes he’s holding his breath.

  A cloud passes in front of the sun. Lee feels a chill. He tells himself to stay calm. Dick taught him everything he knows about bomb disposal, and what his brother doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.

  A minute passes.

  Two.

  Movement. Lee startles. The chaffinch has returned, only now it’s not perched on the side mirror. It’s pecking at something on the road, fifty metres from his own position, but only a hand’s breadth away from one of the triggers. Lee wants to shout out, but he stops himself. The last thing his brother needs is a sudden surprise. Instead he takes a step forward, hoping to frighten away the little bird.

  He can hear his own pulse as he takes another step.

  And another.

  The bird stops pecking and looks up. It stares at Lee, its head slightly cocked, as though listening carefully.

  ‘Fly away, birdie,’ Lee breathes.

  But the bird doesn’t fly away. It stays where it is, inches from the trigger, still staring.

  And so Lee takes another step forward.

  It’s the worst mistake he’s ever made. The chaffinch does move, but in the wrong direction. It scuttles towards the undercarriage of the car.

  Three things happen almost at once.

  Lee shouts. He can’t help himself. ‘NO!’

  The chaffinch knocks the wire leading from the detonator.

  And the car explodes.

  The noise of the explosion is ear-splitting. The thought crosses Lee’s mind, as he is thrown backwards five metres by the thunderous, pulsating shock waves, that it must surely be audible from thirty miles away. As he lands with a thump onto the cobbles, he feels a strange regret for the death of the chaffinch. But it is only as the dust starts to fall that the brutal truth hits him, harder than any shrapnel.

  His brother.

  Lee pushes himself up to his feet and staggers through the dust cloud, unable to see clearly more than a couple of metres, but aware of a fiery glow where the Ford Capri had been. The closer he comes, the brighter it glows. And hotter too. When he is five metres away, he stops and falls to his knees. The heat scorches the skin of his face even underneath his mask, but Lee doesn’t care about that. He finds himself praying that his brother had managed miraculously to escape before the detonation, but he knows that’s a vain hope. And it’s not only because he witnessed the moment of the blast.

  It’s because two metres from where he kneels he can see the stump of a dismembered leg, burning like a well-seasoned log on a winter’s night.

  It’s all that remains of Dick ‘Sonny’ Herder, the finest bomb-disposal guy Her Majesty’s army had to offer . . .

  THE PRESENT DAY

  15 JUNE

  1

  THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME

  ‘ARE YOU HERE to kill me?’

  The boy’s voice didn’t sound scared. Curious, if anything. And calm. Ready for what was to come.

  Agent 21 peered through the darkness. In his right hand he held a 9mm snubnose and he knew, if it came to it, that his hand would be steady.

  ‘Because if you’re going to kill me,’ the boy continued, ‘please do it quickly. A shot to the head should do it. I won’t feel that.’

  A pause.

  ‘At least, I don’t think I will,’ he said.

  Agent 21 gripped the handgun a little harder. The safety was off. The weapon was loaded.

  He’d had no idea when he’d woken up that morning that this was how his day would turn out.

  * * *

  But then, nobody had any idea when they woke up that morning how the day would turn out. Not least Amelia Howard who, eighteen hours earlier, had left her home in Brixton in order to catch the first train into central London.

  Amelia had been making this journey every day for the past nine years. She often noticed that the other commuters who joined her on the platform looked a good deal less happy than she was to be up at this early hour. It was always the same faces, and the faces were always the same: gloomy, tired, un-enthusiastic. Amelia was the opposite. She enjoyed her job working at a children’s home in Islington. Oh, it didn’t pay very well, but she felt as though she was making a difference, and that was what mattered.

  The arrival of the train was preceded by a rush of air from the tunnel. It messed Amelia’s hair, but that didn’t worry her. She was pretty, but not the type to worry too much about her appearance. While other women on the tube held tiny make-up mirrors to their faces and fixed their lipstick, Amelia was more likely to be lost in a book. It made the journey pass more quickly.

  The train thundered into the station and the doors hissed open. Amelia stepped into one of the middle carriages and took a seat. A man in a suit sat on her right, an older woman on her left. Amelia took her book from her handbag, placed the bag behind her feet and started to read.

  It was her habit to look up from the pages every time the train slowed down. That way, she could see each stop slide into view and keep track of where she was on her journey. So it was that she saw Brixton become Stockwell, where she immersed herself once more in her book, then Stockwell became Vauxhall, and she looked up a minute later as the train slowed down on its approach to Pimlico.

  But Amelia did not realize she had already seen Pimlico station for the last time.

  The explosion that rocked the train was immense. It shocked Amelia in two distinct ways. First, the noise. There was a series of eruptions in quick succession, each one sounding like a firework detonating an inch from her ear. And then the movement. She felt the train derailing, then a moment of sudden nausea as the front of the carriage rose two metres in the air.

  The lights went out. Amelia could only see on account of the sparks outside as the carriage scraped against the tunnel wall. By that faint orange light, she could see the terror in the faces of her fellow passengers as they gripped the arms of their seats tightly.

  The screaming started at about the same time that the walls of the carriage buckled. What had seemed so tough and sturdy crumpled like tinfoil and burned like paper. The glass windows cracked and shattered. Amelia had never seen anybody die before, but now, by the scant light of the sparks, she saw a shard of twisted metal drill into the chest of the woman sitting next to her, and felt the splatter of blood on her face. Amelia fell forward onto the floor.

  The train had been m
oving all this time, but now it came to a halt. There was a moment of sinister silence – the passengers had stopped screaming – and it was utterly dark. Amelia groped around for her handbag with trembling hands. When she found it, she pulled out her mobile phone and turned it on. The screen glowed, lighting up the gruesome sight of the dead woman who had also fallen to the floor, and whose dead eyes were staring up at her.

  Amelia wasn’t the only person to light up a phone. All along the carriage, screens glowed like little beacons. They dimly revealed a scene of total devastation – and Amelia’s neighbour wasn’t the only dead body: she saw the grey silhouettes of corpses all around. She looked at the back of her hand. A shard of glass from one of the shattered windows had sliced it open and blood was slipping down onto the sleeve of her lightweight jacket.

  Little by little, the soft sound of weeping filled the carriage. Amelia staggered to her feet – not easy, because the floor of the train was at an incline. ‘We . . . we should move to the front of the carriage,’ she called out shakily.

  Nobody heard her. Because as she spoke there was an immense groaning sound from up above. Cold dread surged through Amelia’s veins. The sound was like nothing she had ever heard before and something told her that the end was near.

  Her whole body was shaking as she lifted her phone above her head and looked up. The roof of the carriage was sagging and buckled. It was on the point of collapsing.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. She looked along the carriage. The sagging roof extended as far as she could see.

  The groaning sound again. Louder this time. The roof sagged a little more.

  Amelia Howard was not a religious woman. She hadn’t been to church since she was a child. But now she fell to her knees with her head bowed, and whispered a prayer. She knew she was going to die and so she didn’t pray for life. She simply prayed that her death wouldn’t hurt too much.

  She was still praying when the roof collapsed, but her prayer was not answered. Countless tons of rubble crushed down on top of her. She felt the unspeakable agony of bones breaking along her spine while her arms and legs shattered like brittle twigs. Her head was crushed between the floor of the carriage and the weight above her. She screamed in pain, but the scream was muffled by her coffin of earth. She tried to breathe in, but instead of air she swallowed a throatful of dust. Her mouth filled up with blood and the world went dim.