by Chris Ryan
‘Sit down,’ Michael said.
Zak did as he was told. A solitary duck swooped onto the water a few metres in front of them. Zak looked at the two men in turn. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. No reply. ‘Don’t give me the silent treatment,’ Zak said, his voice trembling slightly. ‘This is turning into a really rotten day.’
Michael gave him a severe look. ‘I’m sorry, Zak,’ he said. ‘But it’s about to get worse.’
5
SNIPER
‘How can it get any worse?’ Zak demanded. He started to tell them about everything that had happened that night, but Michael held up one hand to interrupt him.
‘I know all about Calaca,’ he said.
‘No you don’t,’ Zak said, a bit impatiently. ‘I mean, he could have killed me, but he decided to—’
‘Rafael and Gabriella have been abducted.’
Zak stared hard at him. ‘What? How? They were on the island just a few hours ago. Nobody can take them from there.’
‘They had help.’
‘Who from?’
‘Stan,’ Michael said shortly.
Zak blinked. ‘Stan?’
‘He betrayed us.’
Zak sat in stunned silence for a moment. The duck that had just landed waddled out of the water and started pecking at his feet. ‘When did this happen?’ he asked.
‘About the time your friend Calaca was blowing up Incarceration Unit Three B,’ Michael said. ‘Our people noticed an unexpected radar splash above St Peter’s Crag. We sent a unit to investigate. They found the house empty, and Stan’s body lying at the front door.’
‘Stan’s body?’ Zak said. ‘You mean he’s—’
‘Our working theory is that they used Stan to disable Raf and Gabs, then killed him when he was of no more use to them.’
‘We’ve got to find them,’ Zak said. All thoughts of Calaca had left his mind. ‘Which way did the aircraft fly? We’ve got to start looking, now . . .’ Michael surveyed him carefully, saying nothing more, and Zak suddenly felt irrationally angry that his handler seemed to be taking all this so calmly. He got to his feet. ‘Now, Michael.’
Michael turned to Felix. ‘That’s the trouble with these young agents,’ he observed. ‘They’re so hot-headed.’
‘You’ve noticed?’ Felix said.
‘Sit down, Zak. I haven’t finished.’
‘So what? Raf and Gabs are missing. Don’t you even care?’
Michael stood too. His face was suddenly angry, with deep frown lines on his forehead. ‘I care more than you can possibly imagine, Zak. Now sit down.’
Zak took a deep breath, then sat down again. Michael joined him. ‘He doesn’t understand how this looks,’ he said to Felix.
‘That’s hardly surprising, old friend,’ said Felix. ‘Like you said, they’re very young. They haven’t had time to become as untrusting as we have.’
‘To trust nobody is the first thing we teach them,’ Michael pointed out.
‘It’s a long lesson to learn,’ Felix said. ‘A very long lesson to learn.’
‘Will you two stop talking as if I’m not here?’ Zak said. ‘What do you mean, I don’t understand how this looks?’
Michael took a deep breath. ‘At midday yesterday, January second, Agent 21 left St Peter’s Crag. Fourteen hours later, his Guardian Angels are abducted thanks to a traitor within the agency. How very convenient that Agent 21 himself happened not to be there that night.’
Zak stared at him. Was Michael saying what he thought he was?
‘At the same time as the abduction was taking place, Agent 21 walks into a high-security incarceration unit. Ten minutes later, an extremely dangerous convict has escaped, several men are wounded or dead and Agent 21 is on the run from the police.’
‘You told me to run from the police!’ Zak half shouted.
‘I know,’ Michael said calmly.
‘Then why the hell are you suggesting I’m the traitor?’
‘I’m suggesting nothing of the sort, Zak. I’m just telling you how it looks.’ He glanced at Felix again. ‘I’m just telling you how other people in our agency are seeing the situation.’
‘How could I be a traitor?’ Zak demanded. ‘Look at all the things I’ve done for the Agency. All the missions . . .’
‘To someone with a suspicious turn of mind,’ Felix interrupted, ‘that doesn’t mean you’re not a traitor. That means you’ve got good cover.’
Silence. Zak considered what Michael and Felix had just said. He had to admit that they were right. ‘Are you handing me in?’ he asked quietly.
Michael shook his head. ‘That’s what the Agency thinks we’re here to do. We won’t, of course. But we’re running a risk. You don’t know anybody else in the Agency apart from us, for very good reasons of secrecy. But they know who you are, and every one of them has agreed in the last four hours that you need to be deactivated.’
‘Deactivated?’ Zak repeated.
‘Permanently.’
‘But that’s insane.’
‘Not if you look at it from their point of view, Zak. They don’t know you personally. They just look at the facts. Now maybe – maybe – I’ll be able to talk them round. But in the meantime, you need to disappear. And I mean, disappear. You need to be totally off the grid. You know how good the Agency is at finding people. That’s why I’ve brought Felix along. He’s in the middle of training up Agent 22, but that will have to wait. He’ll help you.’
‘I don’t need any help,’ Zak said. ‘I’m not disappearing. Surely they’ll see sense . . .’ His voice trailed off for a moment. ‘I’ve been set up,’ he said finally. ‘Someone’s set this up to make it look like I’ve gone bad.’
Michael nodded seriously.
‘But who would . . .’ Zak’s voice trailed off again as the answer dawned on him. ‘Cruz,’ he breathed.
‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ Michael said, ‘that Cruz’s right-hand man escapes from prison the very same night that two of our agents are abducted and a third, whom Cruz loathes, is – forgive the phrase – stitched up like a kipper.’
‘But when they see Cruz is involved, surely the Agency will realize that I’m not a traitor.’
‘The Agency,’ Michael said, ‘has it on file that several times in the past you’ve been in a position to deal with Cruz permanently, and on each occasion you failed to do so. It hardly helps your cause, Zak. Now listen carefully. Felix is going to take you away right now and install you in a safe house a long way from London. I can’t promise that it will be very comfortable, but it was the best we could come up with at short notice. Don’t worry about Calaca: we’ll find him. And don’t worry about Rafael or Gabriella. We’ll find them too. All we need to do is—’
Zak didn’t hear what they needed to do. At that precise moment two shots rang out in quick succession from the other side of the Serpentine. An entire flock of ducks rose noisily up from the water, squawking and screaming as they took to the air. A dog barked somewhere nearby.
Zak reacted instinctively. The gunshot had come from behind them. He slid off the bench and onto the ground, bunching himself up in order to present a smaller target, protected by the bench itself. He was momentarily surprised that Michael and Felix hadn’t done the same. ‘Get down!’ he hissed. ‘Get down . . .’
He sensed movement on either side of the bench.
But neither Michael nor Felix joined him on the ground.
Zak looked to his right. Michael was slumped where he sat. His chin was resting on his chest. The bench itself was spattered with blood.
He looked left. Felix was in the same position. More blood. And from this angle he could see a wound in the back of Felix’s head.
Zak wanted to shout out – ‘No!’ – but the word stuck in his throat. For the second time that morning, the world seemed to spin. He quickly grabbed Michael’s wrist and checked his pulse.
Nothing.
He did the same for Felix.
Nothing.
A hot wave of anger washed over him. He spun round and raised his head over the back of the bench. High risk, but he had to know what was going on. At a distance of 100 metres, he spotted movement in the same copse of trees from which he had observed Michael and Felix.
It went against all his training, where rule number one was: stay alive. But someone had just killed his handler, and he was fuelled with anger. He jumped over the back of the bench and sprinted as fast and as hard as he could towards the trees. Everything around him was a blur. His eyes were filling with hot tears. Through them, he could only just make out the copse ahead. And though there was, he thought, still movement there, it was obscured by the tears. When he wiped them away, more came. They made it impossible to spot the gunman.
Zak burst through the tree line, gasping as he inhaled great lungfuls of air, and ferociously wiping his eyes as he looked around desperately for any sign of the shooter.
None.
He spun round again and looked down. Instantly, his well-trained eyes picked up two cartridge cases. He touched them, and found that they were still warm. The evidence of the gunman was here, but the gunman himself was gone.
Panic surged through him. What should he do? He had nobody to go to. Nobody to call. He found himself, almost by instinct, running back towards the bench. When he was thirty metres out, he saw Michael’s body move, and for a wild moment of hope he thought he was still alive. But as he drew nearer, he realized that the corpse had simply slipped further down on the bench. And now he could see the terrible entry wounds in the back of each man’s skull. Nobody could have survived that. He averted his eyes from the horror.
Someone was shouting. Zak looked over his shoulder and saw three people huddled together, about fifty metres away, pointing at him. One of them was on the phone. And as he looked, Zak heard sirens for the second time that morning.
He froze.
From what Michael had said, the police already suspected him of helping Calaca escape. The Agency suspected him of being a traitor. Now he was at the scene of the brutal murder of two of their top men.
His world was collapsing. He needed to think fast and clearly.
His eyes fell on Felix.
With Raf and Gabs out of the game, Felix’s agent, Ricky, was one of the few people he could think of who understood who and what Zak was. And with Felix dead, Ricky was now in the same boat as him.
But he had no way to contact him.
The sirens were getting louder. The police would be here any second. He needed to get away.
First, though, he hurried round to Felix’s slumped body. He started patting down his clothes, trying to ignore the sticky blood spatter and the gruesome smell of a freshly dead body. He heard more shouts from the group of people watching him. With a single glance, he saw that one of them was filming him with his phone, though they did all keep their distance. That video footage wouldn’t look good for Zak. He’d appear to be looting Felix’s body.
Which, in a way, he was.
He found Felix’s phone after about ten seconds. It was locked, of course, so Zak grabbed the dead man’s left hand and pressed his thumb against the start button. Within seconds, Zak was scrolling through his recently dialled calls. He didn’t think for a moment that Felix would have Ricky’s name programmed into his address book. Instead, over the course of the next ten seconds, he identified the five numbers Felix had called most often in the past few days. Back on St Peter’s Crag, Raf and Gabs had trained him to recall lists of numbers after reading them only once. It had seemed a useless skill back then. Now, yet again, he was grateful to his Guardian Angels for their instruction.
There was no point taking Felix’s phone with him. Without the fingerprint it was inaccessible, and in any case it could be used to track him. Looking across the park, he could see neon lights flashing in the distance. The sirens were louder than ever.
He had to go.
He stepped over to where Michael’s body lay slumped, and put a trembling palm on his handler’s shoulder. He felt he should say something. But then he heard Michael’s voice ringing in his head. It was urgent and waspish. Run, Agent 21, it said. Run!
Zak ran.
6
GREASY SPOON
‘Listen up, Coco. I’m going under the radar for a while. It means I won’t be around. Don’t bother trying to call.’
Felix always called Ricky ‘Coco’. Ricky didn’t like it at all. But when Felix had called at 5 a.m. that morning, his voice was taut and he’d sounded stressed, so Ricky hadn’t made a thing of it.
‘How long for?’ Ricky had asked – rather groggily, as the phone call had woken him up.
‘Could be a few days, could be a few weeks. Could even be a few months. Just try not to get into trouble, OK? Remember, you’re not a petty thief any more, but you’re not a fully-fledged agent yet either. I know you think you’re quite the big shot, but your training is only half complete and you’ve got a lot to learn. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Ricky had replied in a mock-tired voice. ‘Holiday . . . no trouble . . . not a petty thief . . . lots to learn.’ He considered concluding with ‘blah blah blah’, but Felix had already hung up.
After a call like that, further sleep was impossible. Ricky had hauled himself out of bed, pulled on his jeans and the hooded top Felix had given him as a present (‘reversible, in case you need to change appearance quickly’) and padded out into the main room of his flat, where he dumped his mobile phone on the glass-topped coffee table. He looked around. He’d come to the conclusion that his flat was flash, but bland. He’d wanted to put up a few photos of his dead sister on the wall, but Felix had put his foot down about that – he said it made him too easy to identify. And there simply hadn’t been time to go shopping for pictures to hang. The only thing approaching decoration was a line of ten different coloured baseball caps hanging on the wall. Ricky liked baseball caps. Stick a new one on, or turn it backwards, and you could change your appearance in an instant. A useful trick, in his line of work.
He still sometimes couldn’t quite believe he lived here, in the penthouse suite of this flash tower block overlooking London. The apartment came with the job. A lot of people would think that Ricky was too young to be in a job that came with its own flat – or indeed in any job at all. But this wasn’t an ordinary job, and Ricky wasn’t an ordinary kid. Felix had plucked him from the streets and persuaded him to stop pickpocketing and do something more worthwhile. He’d certainly done that. His first mission had been completed over Christmas. Thanks to Ricky, a young girl had escaped an abusive father; a traitor had been brought to justice; and everyone in the UK was just a little bit safer.
The bottom line was that Ricky owed Felix. Big time.
He watched dawn creep over the London skyline as cold air blew in from the open window, giving him goose bumps. He always kept this window open, even when it was very cold out. It made him feel like he had a way out. He felt strangely uneasy as he stood there. His days were normally so filled with training exercises that he barely ever had time to himself. Now that the day stretched emptily ahead of him, he didn’t quite know what to do. At 7 a.m. he glanced over at the free weights sitting on the floor in the corner of the room.
– You could do a workout.
There existed in Ricky’s mind a little voice, which was always questioning and – more often than not – arguing with him. Ricky had even given the voice a name: Ziggy. And Ziggy was about to be overruled, because Ricky’s stomach was rumbling.
– Yeah, I could do a workout. Or I could eat a big breakfast and go back to bed. I’m on holiday, remember?
He walked to the fridge. It was crammed full of food, as always. But after a few seconds he swung the door shut.
– I thought you were hungry.
– I am hungry. But maybe I’ll go out for breakfast. That’s what people do on vacation, right?
Ricky was just grabbing his coat when his mobile – still sitting on the coffee table – started to buzz. It shifted
along the glass table top with each ring. Ricky’s eyes narrowed. Nobody ever called that number apart from Felix, and he’d gone ‘under the radar’, as he put it.
Ricky stepped over to the phone. The screen said ‘Number withheld’.
– Probably just a junk caller.
– What if it’s Felix?
– Felix just told me he has to go under the radar. I hardly think he’d be calling so soon after that. Anyway, I’m starving, let’s go.
The phone was still ringing as Ricky locked the apartment door behind him.
At the front of the building in which Ricky lived there was a large plaza. It was busy. Ricky pulled his hood over his head, hunched his shoulders and started to cross it. He was halfway across when something made him stop. He’d seen something from the corner of his eye that didn’t make sense. He looked back at the apartment block.
A building like that had a lot of windows that needed cleaning. From time to time, a large cradle lifted the window cleaners up the entire height of the building. The cradle was there this morning. It was about halfway up, but there was nobody in it.
– That’s weird. If there’s nobody in the cradle, who’s operating it?
– Maybe it’s just malfunctioning.
– Yeah. Maybe.
He turned again, and continued on his way. At the far side of the plaza, he noticed a man sitting on a bench, reading a copy of The Times. For the briefest moment, their eyes met. The man immediately pulled his gaze back to the newspaper. Ricky felt a little uneasy. This was turning into an odd morning.
Ricky had a bit of a problem with cafés. Last time he’d been in one, exactly a week ago, a man had died and Ricky had been lucky to escape with his life – thanks to a kid his own age who went by ‘Agent 21’. Agent 21 had got him out of there by smashing the whole glass frontage of the café to smithereens.
But surely something bad couldn’t happen every time he went into a café. There was a greasy spoon just five minutes’ walk away. He reckoned today was as good a day as any to try it. What could possibly go wrong?
