Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Agent 21: Briefing Document

  1. Stranger Danger

  2. Dead Men Can’t Hurt You

  3. Galileo

  4. Black Wolf

  5. Antisocial Behaviour

  6. In-country

  7. Night Fishing

  8. A Midnight Visit

  9. A Shot in the Dark

  10. Russian Roulette

  11. El Capitán

  12. Advance to Contact

  13. Do Not Escape

  14. In the Dark

  15. Waterboard

  16. Mayday

  17. Sweetie

  18. RV

  19. Fear Him

  20. Positive ID

  21. Not by Strength, by Guile

  22. Endgame

  23. Lift Off

  24. Revenge

  About the Author

  Also by Chris Ryan

  Praise for Chris Ryan

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Sneak on board an enemy ship. Gather information. And then destroy it …

  A year ago Zak Darke became Agent 21, working undercover for a shadowy government agency. But for now, training is over. Zak is in seriously deep water.

  AGENT 21

  Real name: Zak Darke

  Known pseudonyms: Harry Gold

  Age: 14

  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: 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.

  AGENT 17

  Real name: classified

  Known pseudonyms: ‘Gabriella’, ‘Gabs’

  Age: 26

  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: 29

  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.

  ADAN RAMIREZ

  Also known as: ‘Calaca’

  Distinguishing features: Right eye missing. Skin grown over eye socket.

  Significant information: Formerly head of security for Cesar Martinez Toledo. Currently holds same role for Martinez’s son and heir, Cruz. Highly dangerous.

  CRUZ MARTINEZ

  Age: 16

  Significant information: Has succeeded Cesar Martinez as head of largest Mexican drug cartel. Thought to blame Agent 21 for death of father. Highly intelligent. Profile has remained low since coming to power.

  1

  STRANGER DANGER

  Sunday, 16.30 hrs GMT

  THERE ARE GOOD times and bad times to do almost everything in life. Everything, that is, except visit a grave.

  Ellie Lewis always walked away from the churchyard of All Hallows in Camden feeling worse than when she arrived, with tears welling up in her eyes. She had to keep blinking and swallowing hard to keep them at bay. She was fifteen now, and shouldn’t be crying in public. But somehow she couldn’t stop herself visiting. Once a week – twice, sometimes – she wandered past the sheltered porch at the front of the church, through the tombstones to a quiet corner of the churchyard. Here, under an old oak tree and ten metres from the nearest grave, was a narrow mound of earth, the length of a body. And at the head end, a plain stone with two words engraved upon it: ZAK DARKE.

  All the other gravestones in the churchyard contained more information than this. Date of birth and date of death at the very least. And according to their stones, the deceased were sadly missed or always in somebody’s hearts. They would rest in peace.

  But not Zak Darke’s. Ellie remembered the argument well. Her mum and dad had been Zak’s guardians after his parents died, but they had never really liked him. Never really wanted him there. When the time had come to decide which words would be carved on his headstone, they’d been stubborn. ‘Each letter costs an extra seventeen pounds fifty, Ellie. We’re not made of money, you know …’ And so they hadn’t even bothered with his full name, Zachary. It was much cheaper to keep it simple.

  Her cousin’s grave was not well tended. The mound of soil had only really begun to settle about nine months after the burial. Now, little tufts of grass were sprouting from it. In the summer months, Ellie would collect wild flowers and lay them over the grave. But they soon died and now the soil was covered with these withered posies. Ellie didn’t have the heart to remove them. Nobody else was going to bring flowers, after all.

  It was cold today. Ellie had woken to see a hard frost covering the front lawn of 63 Acacia Drive, and it hadn’t disappeared all day. Now it was half-past four and it was almost fully dark as she stomped through the graveyard, her breath steaming and the cold making her fingertips sting. A priest walked out of the church and stood in the porch. As Ellie passed him, she sneezed.

  ‘You should be in the warm, dearie,’ the priest said.

  Ellie just smiled at him and hurried on. In less than a minute she had made her usual way through the graveyard and was standing at Zak’s final resting place.

  Ellie still remembered the awful day he had disappeared. The police said he’d disturbed an intruder robbing their house. For weeks, Ellie hadn’t believed them. Neither she nor her mum and dad had heard anything that night, for a start. How could all that have happened without one of them being woken? And then there had been the weird thing Zak had said to her just the day before. Something’s about to happen. Don’t ask me what. I want you to know I’ll be safe.

  She’d kept quiet about that, but for the longest time she’d expected Zak to reappear at any moment and offer a perfectly reasonable excuse for his disappearance. But then they’d found the corpse. A thirteen-year-old boy. Mutilated. Unrecognizable. Lying in muddy water in a ditch in Hertfordshire. Mum and Dad had tried to keep the details from her, but they couldn’t stop her reading the papers. The police could only identify the remains by taking a DNA sample. The sample confirmed the body was Zak’s.

  The thought of it made the tears flood up in Ellie’s eyes again. She missed him. Really missed him. She turned away from his frosty grave, wrapped her school coat more tightly around herself and stumbled back through the graveyard. Maybe, she thought to herself as she held back the tears, she should come here less often.

  Because there are good times and bad times to do almost everything in life. Everything, that is, except visit a grave.

  All Hallows Church was situated alongside Camden Road, a busy main street where there was always a lot of traffic. From here to 63 Acacia Drive was about a fifteen-minute walk, but Ellie didn’t want to go home. Her mum and dad would be watching TV and she felt like being by herself. So instead, she walked to the centre of Camden and through the doors of Burger King. Katy Perry was playing quietly in the background. Ellie immediately saw several kids from her sc
hool gathered around a table along the left-hand wall. They were laughing loudly at something. She pretended not to see them and walked up to the counter. ‘Diet Coke, please,’ she asked the young man who was serving. ‘Regular.’

  ‘Very sensible, if I may say so.’

  It wasn’t the guy at the counter who had spoken, but somebody behind Ellie. She turned round to see a rather shabby old man. He had grey, shoulder-length hair, piercing green eyes and a stoop to his shoulders. He smelled strongly of tobacco.

  ‘Too much sugar is very bad for you. Rots the teeth.’

  ‘Er, right …’ Ellie murmured as she removed some change from her purse and handed it over to the young man, who was looking at this old guy like he was some sort of nutter. ‘Thanks for the advice.’ She took her Coke and looked around for a table.

  The raised area on the other side of the restaurant was almost empty. Most of the tables were covered with the debris of other diners’ meals, but that didn’t matter to Ellie. She just didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Couldn’t trust her voice not to wobble. There were two used cups on the table she selected, a little puddle of spilled drink – chocolate milkshake, maybe – and an empty cheeseburger wrapper, still greasy. Ellie took a sip of her Diet Coke. She saw with relief that the weird old guy had sat five tables away and wasn’t paying her any attention.

  Absent-mindedly, Ellie folded the cheeseburger wrapper in half, then half again, and then in half for a third time. She remembered Zak telling her once that you could never fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times, no matter how big it was. He was clever about stuff like that. Ellie was on the fifth fold when she realized a man had approached her table.

  What is it with everyone today? she thought to herself. Why can’t they just leave me alone?

  She looked up to see a tall man so skinny that she briefly wondered when he had last eaten. His hair was shaved but his chin wasn’t – he had a good three or four days’ stubble – and he wore jeans that looked too big for him and a shapeless white T-shirt. The most noticeable thing about him, though, was the patch over his right eye. It was attached to his head by a thin piece of black cord and reminded Ellie of a pirate’s outfit she’d had in her dressing-up box when she was very small.

  The stranger was staring at her and Ellie felt uncomfortable. She took a slurp of her Diet Coke and stood up, but the stranger wasn’t having it. ‘Sit down,’ he said under his breath. He dug his bony fingertips into Ellie’s shoulder and pushed her down into her plastic seat.

  ‘Hey!’ Ellie gasped. ‘Get off me – that hurt!’ She looked over to where her schoolmates were sitting. None of them had noticed what was going on and she almost shouted out to them. But something stopped her. A photograph.

  The man with the eye patch had dropped it onto the table. It landed at an angle to Ellie and one corner blotted up the puddle of spilled milkshake. It wasn’t a very good picture. It looked like it had been taken from a distance, then enlarged and cropped. As a result it was grainy and slightly out of focus. It showed a young man with unruly hair and a serious face. He was wearing a hooded top and his face was somehow leaner – somehow older – than when Ellie had seen him last.

  Which had been just a few hours before he’d disappeared.

  The skinny man with the eye patch was sitting opposite her now. His hands were palm down on the dirty table and his good eye managed to look straight through her. It wasn’t a nice sensation.

  Silence.

  Ellie stared at the photograph. The skinny man stared at Ellie.

  ‘You know this boy?’

  His accent was foreign. Spanish, maybe? Ellie wasn’t very good at languages.

  She couldn’t stop looking at the photograph. ‘Of course I know him,’ she said. She dragged her eyes away. ‘Who are you?’

  The man didn’t answer immediately. He picked up the photograph and hid it inside his coat before staring at Ellie again.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ellie whispered. Was this some kind of horrible joke?

  ‘I don’t like it,’ the man replied quietly, ‘when people pretend they don’t understand me.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’

  ‘My question was very simple. Where is he?’

  For the second time that day, Ellie felt the tears coming and she was angry with herself because of it. Who was this man? What right did he have to ask her questions like that.

  She stood up. ‘He’s in the same place he’s been for the last eighteen months,’ she hissed. ‘All Hallows Church. And you … you should be ashamed of yourself.’

  But if the stranger did feel any shame, he didn’t show it. As Ellie stormed away from the table towards the exit, she looked over her shoulder to see him sitting there, quite calmly, watching her leave. There was something about him that made her flesh prickle. She couldn’t wait to get away from him. To get home, where she could lock her bedroom door firmly behind her.

  It had started to snow outside. Ellie didn’t care. She ran through the wintry night all the way back to number 63 Acacia Drive.

  * * *

  In Burger King, the man with the eye patch sat quite still, his palms still face down on the table. He was breathing very slowly and the veins on either side of his Adam’s apple were pulsing. He didn’t look pleased.

  ‘Would you like a French fry? They’re a little salty, but quite delicious.’

  The man with the patch looked round. Standing a metre behind him he saw a much older man with shoulder-length grey hair, penetrating green eyes and a pronounced stoop. He popped a chip into his mouth, munched it thoughtfully and offered the paper carton containing the remainder.

  ‘Go away, old man.’

  But the old man didn’t go away. He pointed at the seat Ellie had vacated. ‘Do you mind? My legs aren’t what they used to be.’ He sat down without waiting for permission and smiled broadly.

  The smile was not returned.

  ‘Bartholomew’s the name. Very pleased to meet you. Sweet girl, that. Be a shame if anything happened to her. A great shame. Are you sure you won’t have one?’

  No reply. No movement.

  ‘Still,’ the older man continued, ‘I’m sure that won’t happen. That family’s had more than its fair share of bad luck.’ His smile grew broader. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that you showed the young lady a photograph.’ He popped another chip into his mouth. ‘Would you care to share it with me?’

  The skinny man stood up rather suddenly. ‘You should be careful, Mr Bartholomew, who you interfere with.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t worry about that. I’m a very careful person.’

  The one-eyed man turned his back on the newcomer and marched straight for the exit. He stopped at the door and looked back towards the old man, before smiling an unpleasant smile. Very slowly he raised the forefinger of his right hand up to his neck and made a slicing movement. Then he opened the door and walked out into the darkness and the snow.

  Mr Bartholomew watched him go. For a full minute after the skinny man had left the restaurant he barely moved, other than to wipe his salty fingers with a paper napkin. Then he too stood up. The stoop in his back had disappeared. If his legs truly weren’t as good as they used to be, he must have been quite an athlete in his youth, because now he walked out of Burger King with the gait of a man half his age.

  It was half-past two in the morning. Ellie stared at the red glow of her alarm clock as she lay in bed. There was no way she could sleep. Her mind was full of the man with the eye patch and of the picture he had shown her.

  Full of questions.

  Full of fear.

  How had he known to find her in Burger King? She hadn’t even planned to go there. Which meant he must have been following her. And where did he get that picture of Zak? When did he get it? Ellie’s cousin looked older than he ever had when he was alive, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? She shivered as she lay there, and not just because she was cold.

  Five to three. Abso
lute silence. Ellie crept out of bed and got dressed. Thick socks. Jeans. Two jumpers. Gloves. A woollen hat. A few minutes later she was tiptoeing downstairs, holding her breath and praying that her mum and dad wouldn’t wake up.

  In the dining room at the bottom of the stairs, she jumped. There was a noise. A mechanical whirring sound. Ellie swallowed hard, then realized what it was. Her parents had bought a cuckoo clock just a couple of weeks ago. They were delighted with it, and cooed with pleasure every time the little bird emerged from its cubbyhole and tweeted the time. ‘Look, Ellie!’ they kept saying, talking to her like she was a little kid. ‘The cuckoo!’ They hadn’t seemed to notice that she was a bit old to be excited by babyish things like that.

  The cuckoo cheeped now. Three times. Three o’clock. It returned to its cubbyhole with another whirr.

  Ellie left the house through the back door because she knew it would make less noise than the front when she opened and closed it. Two minutes later she was stomping to the end of Acacia Drive, her footprints the only ones in the thick layer of snow that had fallen that night.

  What on earth was she doing? She didn’t even know. She’d never left the house in the middle of the night before. Her mum and dad would go nuts. Somehow, though, her feet knew which way to take her.

  It started to blizzard as she walked along Camden Road. There were hardly any cars outside at this time of night. A bus edged down the road, but it moved slower than Ellie because of the snow. On the other side of the road she saw two policemen, the collars of their bright yellow jackets turned up against the cold. Ellie pulled her woollen hat further down over her ears and walked a bit more quickly.

  It was ten minutes before she reached All Hallows and by now the snow was falling heavier than ever. Only the inside of the porch remained uncovered. She could barely see ten metres ahead of her and the spire of the church was lost in the snowy darkness. But Ellie could have found her way blindfolded. She walked round the side of the church and into the graveyard at the back.

  The tombstones all had ten centimetres of virgin snow settled on the top. There was a muffled silence all around. A rustling to her left and she saw the glinting eyes of an urban fox. It stared bravely at her for a few seconds and quickly scampered away, leaving a trail of tiny footprints. Ellie walked on, her feet crunching as she disturbed the new snow, weaving her way through the tombstones towards the oak tree that she knew so well.