Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 Read online

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ Zak said, unable to keep the note of outrage from his voice. ‘I don’t know if any of you remember, but I’ve had quite a busy couple of days. Why am I the one that has to go and sit around some boring newspaper office talking about the lesser-spotted . . . whatever it is?’

  Michael suddenly grew serious again. ‘I’ve already told you, Zak. Nobody notices the work-experience boy. And don’t for a minute think that this isn’t important work. Lives could depend on how well you do it.’

  Chastened, Zak fell silent. He watched as Michael pulled a cigarette case from his inside pocket and lit the pungent cherry tobacco he favoured. The smell instantly filled the whole room.

  ‘The Puzzle Master’s anonymous tormentor wanted him to plant three crosswords in the paper,’ Michael continued. ‘I think we can reasonably assume that this points to three separate bombings. You have very cleverly identified two of them and our analysts have now examined the crossword the Daily Post are planning to run tomorrow. It gives no indication of a third device. Of course, it may be that the third message is encrypted differently to the first two, but I’d say that was rather unlikely. I suspect either that the perpetrator saw the evacuation of the hospital and is holding off for a few days, or that he’s giving London a breather before his final spectacular. I don’t know about you, though, but I’d rather not sit around waiting for it. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Zak.

  ‘Excellent. I suggest you catch up on some reading – not only the bird book, but also Ludgrove’s file.’ He nodded at Gabs, who passed Zak a brown file with the name LUDGROVE pencilled on the front, then Michael continued. ‘Get some sleep too. Master Harry Gold is expected at the offices of the Daily Post at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’ He stood up. ‘Gabriella, Raphael, you’ll need to come with me.’ He headed towards the door, but had only gone a couple of metres before he stopped and turned, slapping the palm of his hand dramatically against his forehead. ‘I almost forgot,’ he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph, which he handed to Zak. It showed a middle-aged man, rather paunchy, with unfashionable circular glasses that were wonky on his face, and an unkempt, greying beard.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Zak asked.

  The mischievous sparkle had returned to Michael’s eyes. ‘Your new boss,’ he said. ‘The Daily Post’s nature correspondent. You’ll need to ask for him when you get there in the morning.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Rodney,’ said Michael.

  ‘Rodney?’

  ‘That’s right, Zak. Rodney. Rodney Hendricks. I’m sure you’ll get on like a house on fire. Word is he’s fond of a pint or two at lunch time. That should give you ample time for snooping.’

  Gabs sighed. ‘I do wish he’d stop using that word,’ she said to nobody in particular.

  ‘Why? It’s what we do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course. But it sounds so uncouth.’

  Michael shrugged. ‘Not as uncouth as killing hundreds of innocent people,’ he said. And without another word, he led Gabs and Raf out of the flat, leaving Zak alone with the picture of his new boss, the file on Joshua Ludgrove, and his thoughts.

  Gabs had been right. Everything in Ludgrove’s file suggested he was a nasty piece of work. Zak was surprised at how detailed it was. He’d been expelled from two schools for bullying and had joined the army at the age of sixteen because his father, himself a military man, had insisted on it. The bullying hadn’t stopped when he joined the armed forces. The file contained seven notes from his commanding officer stating that he had received complaints of both physical and verbal violence from the young Ludgrove. There were two complaints that he had stolen personal property from his fellow recruits. On being discharged from the army, he had found himself a job on a local newspaper, lying about his CV in the process. From there, he had worked his way up the ladder. He had been married once. It had lasted six months before she left, complaining that he beat her up, although she never pressed charges. Reading between the lines, Zak deduced that it was his ability to bully a story out of people that made him such a good journalist.

  He put the file to one side, stretched out on the sofa and switched on the TV – he needed a pause before trying to become a sudden fount of knowledge on the habits of sparrows. The same reporter he had watched at St Peter’s Crag was talking breathlessly, but it was the constantly updated ribbon of text along the bottom of the screen that grabbed Zak’s attention. 1 ADULT CONFIRMED MISSING PRESUMED DEAD IN HOSPITAL BOMBING . . . PRIME MINISTER: ‘IT IS A MIRACLE NO MORE PEOPLE WERE HURT IN THIS COWARDLY ACT. MY THANKS GO TO THE EMERGENCY AND SECURITY SERVICES FOR THEIR OUTSTANDING WORK.’ . . . 37 CONFIRMED DEAD IN TUBE BOMBING. 60 STILL MISSING. RESCUE WORKERS SAY CHANCES OF FINDING ANY FURTHER SURVIVORS ARE ‘SMALL’ . . . MIDNIGHT GUNSHOTS REPORTED IN VICINITY OF HARRINGTON SECURE HOSPITAL, SOUTH LONDON. METROPOLITAN POLICE HAVE ISSUED REQUEST FOR MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC WHO SAW ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS TO COME FORWARD . . . CHIEF COMMISSIONER AND HOME SECRETARY CONFIRM TERRORISM THREAT LEVEL HAS INCREASED TO ‘CRITICAL’ FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 7/7. LONDONERS URGED TO BE ‘EXTREMELY VIGILANT’, AND REASSURED THAT THE SECURITY SERVICES ARE TAKING ‘ALL POSSIBLE PRECAUTIONS AT THIS TIME OF HIGH ALERT’.

  Zak stared at those words. All possible precautions at this time of high alert? If only that were true. Michael was right. Three crosswords surely meant three bombings, and at the moment they were barely any closer to working out where or when the third bombing was going to take place.

  And time, as it had a habit of doing, was running out.

  17 JUNE

  12

  NY HERO

  LONDON HAD CHANGED.

  The Victoria Line was still down, of course, on account of the Pimlico bombing just two days ago. Every other line was delayed. The passengers on buses and even pedestrians on the street eyed each other with suspicion and Zak noticed glimpses of fear on the faces of many going down the steps to the tube.

  He was standing on the edge of Victoria railway station, near those stairs, holding a free newspaper someone had just shoved into his fist. On the front cover was the hospital at the moment of collapse, and the picture quite clearly showed the chopper with two people dangling from it on a rope. The journalists had enlarged the image of Zak and Gabs, but their faces were blurred and unrecognizable, thank God. It would be difficult for him to keep a low profile if everyone at the newspaper – many of them digging into the news story around the bombs – had seen his features. He heard two sirens in the distance, both travelling in different directions. When one of them faded away, a third came into earshot. The area itself was swarming with flak-jacketed armed police.

  Yes. London had changed. It was a city on the edge of panic, and it had good reason to be.

  Zak had changed too, in the months that had passed since he last considered himself a Londoner. Changed since he had lived with Ellie and her parents in Camden, gone to school like any normal teenager, hung round the park at the weekends. Now he immediately picked out the MP5s clipped to the jackets of the armed police teams and his mind automatically processed everything he knew about that weapon. Nine mill rounds, rate of fire 800 rounds per minute. But it wasn’t that he could identify a firearm with the same ease as other kids his own age could identify a new model of mobile phone that made him realize how different he was. It was that he was looking at the world in a different way. By the entrance to M&S, ten metres to his eleven o’clock, he saw a man in a leather jacket surreptitiously raise his sleeve to his mouth, and his lips move. The armed police, he realized, were just a visible sign of security. There were covert personnel in situ too, whom ordinary members of the public would never notice.

  ‘No loitering, son.’ One of the armed officers had approached him. Zak nodded and hitched his rucksack over his shoulder. He made to leave, but the officer held up one palm. ‘Hold your horses,’ he said.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Zak asked, innocently.

  ‘Open your rucksac
k, please.’ His words were polite, but his tone of voice wasn’t.

  Zak did as he was asked. The officer poked around inside, but found nothing more exciting than a couple of rounds of cheese sandwiches, the battered guide to birds and a Harry Potter book that was well thumbed even though Zak hadn’t read a word of it. The officer nodded. ‘On your way,’ he said, before turning his attention to a confused-looking Japanese tourist. Zak left the area.

  The offices of the Daily Post were situated on the top two floors of an office building 100 metres to the north of Victoria Station. Zak walked through the revolving glass door into the building’s comfortable reception area at eight a.m. precisely. He removed his phone from his pocket and held down number one on the keypad, checking in with Michael almost absent-mindedly as the rest of his attention focused on the layout of his surroundings. Second exit, fifteen metres to his left. A barrier to the right of the reception desk, blocking the reception from the area around the lifts. As he approached the desk, a receptionist looked over her half-moon glasses at a sheet of paper.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked impatiently.

  ‘My name’s Harry Gold. I’m here to see Rodney Hendricks.’

  Thirty seconds passed as she tapped at a keyboard and peered at her computer screen.

  ‘Harry Gold, did you say?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Zak replied, quietly and politely. ‘G – O – L—’

  ‘No Harry Gold here, young man,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you have the right place? This is a newspaper office, you know. Who are you supposed to be visiting again?’

  ‘Rodney Hendricks.’

  ‘I say, did I hear my name?’

  Zak looked around. Standing behind him was the man whose photo he had seen. He was about his own height but a good deal older – comfortably in his fifties. His little round glasses made him look rather like a mole and his blue eyes sparkled, making his ruddy face look very jolly. Zak was bizarrely put in mind of Father Christmas. If Rodney Hendricks had been wearing a red outfit instead of his crumpled grey suit, the similarity would have been astonishing.

  ‘Hi, Mr Hendricks,’ Zak said offering his hand. ‘I’m Harry. Harry . . .’

  ‘Harry Gold? Yes, of course, of course. I must say, it’s jolly nice of head office to send me a bit of help. Usually it’s the news desk who get all the work experience. Or features, of course. Mustn’t forget features. Don’t worry, Elspeth, I’ll take him up. Follow me, Harry, follow me.’

  The words tumbled out of Hendricks’s mouth as though he couldn’t stop them. They continued to tumble as Hendricks led him across the marble reception towards the lift.

  ‘So, young Harry, what brings you to the hallowed halls of the fourth estate? Hundred years old, the Daily Post, m’boy. Rich in tradition. British institution. Floors seven and eight, m’boy, we’ll be needing seven.’ He pressed the button to call the lift, then stuck his hands in his pocket and stood there, whistling rather aimlessly as the lift rose from the basement level.

  ‘I’m hoping to be a journalist,’ Zak said, repeating the story he had worked out yesterday. ‘I have an uncle who—’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I was just saying that—’

  ‘Ah, here we are!’ The lift doors slid open. ‘After you, m’boy. After . . . Ah, Ludgrove . . . what an unexpected pleasure.’ Hendricks didn’t sound like it was a pleasure at all. He looked at the solitary figure in the lift. He was tall – much taller than Zak or Hendricks – and thick-set. He was very cleanly shaven, with the exception of a mole on his left cheek from which three hairs sprung. His hair was very precisely combed into a centre parting, and his forehead was creased into what looked like a permanent frown. In his right hand he held a ballpoint pen. Every couple of seconds, his thumb pressed the button at the end of the pen a couple of times, clicking the nib in and out.

  ‘Hendricks,’ Ludgrove said without much enthusiasm.

  Click click. Click click.

  ‘In you go, Harry m’boy. After you, chop chop.’

  There was something about Ludgrove. Zak sensed it the moment he stepped into the lift. It was like he had an invisible force field of contempt around him. ‘Yeah,’ the Daily Post’s defence correspondent said. ‘It would be a great shame for the nature notes desk to go unmanned. How would the newspaper possibly survive?’

  ‘Very popular, the nature notes, Harry m’boy,’ Hendricks said, ignoring the barely concealed criticism. ‘Very, very popular.’

  ‘Right up there with the horoscopes,’ Ludgrove said with a sneer. ‘Or the TV listings.’

  Click click. Click click.

  ‘Or the crossword?’ Zak asked.

  He was watching Ludgrove carefully when he said it. He noticed the tightening of his eyes, and the irritable glance he flashed Zak. And he noticed the way the clicking stopped. But there was no time for Ludgrove to reply. A gentle chime announced their arrival on the seventh floor. The doors hissed open and Ludgrove barged his way out, clicking the ballpoint once again as he went. Hendricks scratched his beard. He had a slightly confused look on his face, like a school child who had just been bullied and didn’t know what to say about it. ‘Funny old cove, Ludgrove,’ he said. ‘Best to stay clear of him, eh?’

  The lift doors started to shut. Zak stopped them with his foot and they slid open again. ‘Should we—’

  ‘Yes!’ Hendricks said, as though he had suddenly woken up. ‘Onwards!’ He shuffled out of the lift and onto the seventh floor.

  The vast open-plan office of the Daily Post was very busy. As Hendricks led Zak through a maze of glass desks, computer terminals and whirring photocopiers, he estimated that there must be at least a hundred people working here, but they were doing just that: working, not talking. There was a constant clackety-clack of computer keyboards as journalists typed up stories. Anybody on the phone spoke in a loud voice just to be heard above the hubbub. As Hendricks and Zak passed through the office, the nature notes correspondent greeted his colleagues in a breezy voice. ‘Alan . . . Pippa . . . morning, George, morning, Emma.’ The Alans, Pippas, Georges and Emmas didn’t reply, but Zak felt their eyes on him as he passed. They clearly all thought Rodney Hendricks was a bit of a weirdo and, as he was with him, the opinion extended to Zak too.

  Hendricks’s desk was in a far corner of the office, just next to the toilets. It was covered in books and papers, and had a very old computer. Hendricks stared at the chaos, then started rather ineffectively to move some of the papers around. ‘You’ll be needing somewhere to sit,’ he murmured, slightly flustered.

  Zak couldn’t help smiling. ‘Why don’t I find us both a cup of tea?’ he suggested.

  ‘Of course, m’boy,’ Hendricks said without looking at him. ‘Kettle that way.’ He waved vaguely at the centre of the room. Zak went exploring.

  Now that he was no longer with Hendricks, Zak could immediately see that Michael had been right. Nobody noticed him. He found he could wander among the desks with barely a glance from the journalists sitting at them. As he walked, he caught glimpses of half-formed headlines. SECOND BOMBING . . . POLICE BAFFLED . . . MINISTER CALLS FOR CALM . . . There was no doubt that this would be the big story for several days to come.

  What Hendricks had referred to as a kettle was in fact an urn of boiling water surrounded by a collection of plastic cups, teabags and instant coffee granules. Three moveable screens surrounded the table on which they sat to form a makeshift room in the centre of the open-plan office, but at the corners where the screens met there was a gap of a couple of inches. Zak peered nonchalantly through these gaps as he made two cups of tea. About ten metres beyond one of them, he could see a large window with an impressive vista over London. Through it, he could just see the roof of Buckingham Palace, a Union Jack on the flagpole hanging limply. He remembered going to see the Changing of the Guard when he was much younger. His mum had told him that if the flag was up, it meant the Queen was at home. Zak was older now, and a bit wiser. He wondered if she was really there, given that the ci
ty was on high terror alert.

  It took a few moments for Zak to realize what else he could see. Between the window and the gap where the screens met, about five metres away, was a glass desk, much neater than Hendricks’s. Its occupant sat with his back to Zak. His right elbow was resting on the arm of his chair and he was holding a ballpoint in his fist.

  Click click. Click click. Ludgrove.

  Between Ludgrove’s body and his forearm, Zak could just make out a small section of the computer screen. He could see a line of text, cut off at the beginning and the end. It read: ‘… NY HER . . .’

  Click click. Click click.

  Zak edged forward, leaning over the table holding the hot-water urn. He squinted, hoping that Ludgrove would move his arm enough for Zak to see more of what was written on his screen. Was the next letter an ‘O’? Or maybe a ‘D’ . . .?

  Suddenly, Ludgrove spun round. It was almost as if he had sensed Zak’s eyes on him. His gaze pierced the gap between the screening panels and his dark eyes narrowed. As quickly as he had spun round to catch Zak staring at him, he twirled his seat again and clicked his mouse. His computer screen went blank.

  ‘Ah, Harry, m’boy.’ Now it was Zak’s turn to spin round. Hendricks was there, peering at him from behind his little round glasses, a leather-bound book in his hands. ‘Come along, come along, I’ve something most fascinating for you . . .’ He shuffled out of the tea-making area and back to his desk. Zak followed him, but as he glanced over his shoulder, he saw Ludgrove staring at him with thinly veiled suspicion. Zak cursed his lack of subtlety. Things hadn’t started well.

  Hendricks’s desk was only slightly tidier. The bearded man had swiped a spot for Zak on the opposite side and found a chair from somewhere which he’d placed in front of this gap in the mess. Zak accepted a sheaf of papers from him. ‘The sparrow!’ Hendricks said, as though he were announcing an Oscar winner.

  Zak looked down at the paper uncomprehendingly. ‘Er . . . what about it?’ he asked.