Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2

by Chris Ryan

  Let’s see how brave he is by morning …

  How much longer till sunrise? How much longer would this storm last? How many more waves would he have to suffer? How many more times would he have to be on the brink of drowning?

  Zak didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. All he knew was that the next few hours would be among the most difficult of his life.

  That he would need every ounce of courage he possessed to make it till morning with his body – and his mind – intact.

  It was wet, too, at 63 Acacia Drive. The snow had given way to rain – a freezing, driving rain that could chill you to the bone. A man looked out at it from the rear window of a white Transit van.

  The van bore no unusual markings. A bit of rust on the driver’s side panel. A sticker on the back that said NO TOOLS ARE KEPT IN THIS VAN OVERNIGHT. The tiny rear windows had a reflective mirror film to stop anybody looking in, and a good thing too. If any nosy parker had peeked through those windows and seen the face staring out, they’d probably have died of fright.

  The occupant of the Transit had only one eye. He was as thin as a skeleton and looked about as friendly as one too. It was for this reason that back home they called him Calaca – although only the bravest did so to his face. Calaca hated this rain and this cold. He wished he could be back in Mexico. Back in the heat. His late employer, Cesar Martinez Toledo, would never have sent him on a fool’s mission like this. Him! Adan Ramirez. Head of security for the cartel for fifteen years, carrying out a job that should have been given to a subordinate.

  But Martinez was dead. And in his place was his son. Cruz Martinez. Just a kid. But a kid with more power and money than the leaders of most countries. A kid who, in the months since he had taken his late father’s place, had developed an unusual gift for cruelty – so much so that that even Calaca had grown afraid of him. And Calaca wasn’t afraid of anybody.

  More than anything, though, Cruz Martinez was a kid with just one aim in life. To find the boy he blamed for the death of his father. The boy who had called himself Harry Gold but who Cruz and Calaca now knew was called Zak Darke. He had checked the DNA extracted from the finger he had removed two nights ago from Zak Darke’s so-called grave. Proof positive that the kid was still very much alive.

  And now he had just one more job to do. To eliminate Darke’s cousin. Cruz had been quite determined that she should die. He’d said it was because he didn’t want the girl identifying Calaca, but the one-eyed man had his own suspicions. Thanks to Darke, Cruz’s father was dead. Killing the boy’s cousin didn’t fully avenge that death, but it went some of the way …

  But eliminating her was proving more difficult than he had imagined it would be. A good job, then, that he had decided to carry out this particular killing himself, rather than entrusting it to less skilled minions.

  Calaca was a practised assassin. There were few better. Which was why he felt angry that he had failed simply to kill a little girl. She must have had help. He remembered the man calling himself Mr Bartholomew. Calaca didn’t know who he was, but he was sure to have something to do with it.

  The headphones suddenly burst into life. A voice. It was the girl. Calaca smiled. The listening device he had secreted in her bedroom was doing its job well.

  ‘Hello? Is that you?’

  Her voice was quiet. As though she was nervous anyone might hear her talking to someone now, in the small hours of the morning. Calaca listened carefully.

  The girl giggled and Calaca wondered what the person she was talking to had said.

  ‘You can’t come here. My mum and dad wouldn’t have it. Honestly – they’d, I dunno, my dad would chase you down the street with a gun or something …’

  Interference. A crackling sound in Calaca’s headphones. He scowled and adjusted a knob on the receiver that lay on the floor of the van. The interference disappeared. The girl was giggling again.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you. But not here. Saturday night. Hampstead Heath. You know the lake – I’ll be there at eight o’clock. Don’t be late, though. If I’m not back home by nine-thirty, I’ll be grounded for a week …’

  A slow smile crept over Calaca’s face. Hampstead Heath. Eight o’clock. By the lake. How convenient it was, he thought to himself, that his target should choose the time and place of her own execution. He could wait until Saturday for such an easy location.

  The phone call continued, but Calaca had stopped paying attention. He had no need to listen to the girlish gabbling of a kid talking to her boyfriend. He had all the information he needed to terminate Ellie Lewis. And when he’d done that, he’d be on the first flight out of London. Back to Mexico City.

  Back to where he belonged.

  If Zak had the chance, he would have wept with fear and agony. He would have screamed out loud. He would have begged anyone listening to remove the hood, untie the ropes and take him back inside. He’d have spilled any secret. Admitted anything. Told Antonio Acosta, Karlovic – anyone – about Agent 21 and about his mission.

  But he didn’t have the chance.

  The hood remained. So did the ropes. The ship continued to lurch and the waves to crash over his head. The wet material stuck to his face each time the water hit and it only seemed to separate from his skin when his lungs were screaming for oxygen. Then he would gasp, trying to get as much air into his body as possible before enduring the dreadful sensation of drowning once more.

  Every inch of him felt bruised by the impact of the waves. Never again, he knew, would he think of water as being soft. Each time the waves hit, it was like he had slammed into a sheet of iron. After a while he couldn’t even feel the pain any more. Just an icy numbness.

  He didn’t know how long it lasted. Time meant nothing in the darkness. Gradually, though, he became aware that the waves were perhaps slightly fewer and further between. They still left him breathless and gasping for air, but the moments of relief were longer than the moments of agony. Through the sodden material of his hood, he was aware of it growing lighter.

  Morning was coming. The storm was abating.

  It stopped suddenly, as though someone had flicked a switch to change the weather. The Mercantile no longer lurched and yawed. The roaring of the waves and the wind no longer screamed in his ears. Zak felt sunlight on him, then the hood dried out and grew hot. The skin on his arms and legs crackled with salt. It grew sore and started to burn. He found himself almost glad to be tied to the ship. If he hadn’t been, he felt sure he would have collapsed.

  The sun became stronger and Zak started to sweat. His mouth was dry and he grew dizzy. All night he had been wishing – praying – for the water to stop. Now all he could think about was quenching his thirst. Getting out of the sun.

  His head lolled.

  He felt himself on the verge of consciousness as the hours passed …

  The voices, when he heard them, made no sense. Were they talking a language Zak didn’t understand, or was he just too out of it to understand anything? They approached, and he felt them untying the ropes that bound his body, their conversation still nothing but a blur. As soon as he was unbound, he collapsed onto the deck, his battered muscles unable to keep him upright. He lay there, his head still hooded, and didn’t even have the energy to groan when he felt a boot in his guts.

  ‘Get up.’

  Zak was so dizzy he couldn’t tell where the voice came from; and he was so weak that he knew he couldn’t obey.

  ‘Get up!’

  Another sharp kick just below his ribs. He gasped for air but still didn’t move. He couldn’t. And so he felt himself being dragged by his legs across the metal deck, back inside the ship. He tried to keep track of where they were going, but he was too disorientated for that. All he knew was that they dragged him over the threshold of two doorways, each one painful to cross, until finally they came to a halt.

  ‘Take the hood off.’

  Zak recognized Acosta’s voice. Rough hands removed the hood and he saw the
Mercantile’s skipper standing above him, before closing his eyes again against the brightness he wasn’t used to.

  ‘Who are you working for?’

  Zak couldn’t have answered even if he had wanted to. His throat was like granite. He had no energy. When the skipper kicked him, he didn’t bother with the ribs but booted him in the side of his face.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Zak’s face stung. He could feel the wound Acosta had inflicted with his sharp ring opening up, and blood seeping over his cheek. But somehow, that didn’t seem so bad. He forced his eyes open and looked up. The skipper was still standing above him, and despite the bleariness and the pain, Zak saw something in his face. Not panic, exactly, but concern. Doubt. El capitán, Zak realized, had thrown everything he had at his prisoner. He had fully expected Zak to be compliant by now. What had Karlovic said? Push him too far and you’ll be begging for death anyway …

  Only Zak wasn’t begging for death. And whatever Acosta did now, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d just endured. Could it?

  ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ the skipper roared.

  ‘Jason Cole,’ he whispered.

  He didn’t see the fury in el capitán’s face. But he felt it. The skipper kicked him in the face twice as hard as before.

  Zak wasn’t even conscious for long enough to feel the pain. Darkness surrounded him as he passed out on the floor of the bridge.

  16

  MAYDAY

  Saturday, 02.20 hrs West Africa time

  ZAK’S NEXT MEMORIES were only of waking, exhausted, and then falling semi-conscious again. And again. Hours and hours for his body to recover from the ordeal. And when he finally woke up, aware of his surroundings, everything was dark. He was lying on his back on a hard floor. Groggily, he reached out his right hand. His fingers brushed up against what felt like the base of a bed. Even then it took him another thirty seconds to realize he had been back in his tiny cell all this time. How long had he been there?

  It took all his strength just to sit up. He sat motionless in the darkness for a full minute. His skin felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper. His lungs and muscles ached. The cuts on his face throbbed and his throat was so parched with salt and dehydration that it hurt. In short, he was a mess.

  But at least he was still alive. After everything he’d endured since boarding the Mercantile, that was something. How long he’d stay alive was a different matter. He needed to get help. The volunteer group would surely have declared him and Bea missing by now, but that was scant comfort. As Michael had said, the sea is big and ships are small. Moreover, due to his own actions, the finger of suspicion would be on Ntole, not the Mercantile. No, now that the sea had settled and the ship was no longer yawing and lurching, he could try and return to his original plan: to force the skipper to raise a Mayday call.

  He winced as he pushed himself to his feet, and he had to stumble against a wall in the darkness just to keep his balance. Breathing deeply, he waited for his nausea to pass. Then he staggered in the direction of the light switch and turned it on. The glow of the bulb burned his retinas. He had to keep his eyes clenched shut for thirty seconds before he could even think of opening them fully.

  Sitting on the table was a plate of food. There was also a bottle of water, though this had tumbled onto the floor and rolled to the far end. Zak rushed towards it, unscrewed the top and gulped down half the precious liquid in one. He turned his attention to the food. It was nothing but a few scraps of greasy, fatty, gristly meat and it tasted disgusting, but he knew he had to get some energy from somewhere and he forced the filthy stuff down his throat before finishing the rest of the water.

  The room was just as he’d left it. The folded and torn safety poster was still in pieces on the floor. Clearly none of the crew had bothered to look around the room – or if they had, they hadn’t worked out why he had cut up this laminated plastic. Zak rooted around under his mattress for the credit-card-sized cut-out and approached the door.

  With the fingertips of his left hand, he felt around the frame. The gap between it and the door was very narrow. He gently slipped the short edge of his plastic card into the crevice and slid it down until he could feel the catch. When the plastic was pressed against it, he worked deftly, easing his makeshift key-card against the curved edge of the catch. Within seconds he could feel the catch working away from the frame.

  And then, suddenly, the door opened inwards, creaking slightly as it did so.

  Zak took a deep breath, then stepped out into the corridor. He examined the door. There was a latch that could be operated from the outside. It meant he could close the door now and be able to return.

  It was deserted. Deserted and dark. He realized he had no idea what time it was – or even what day it was. It was impossible to say how long he’d been unconscious for. He shut the door behind him and stood quietly for a moment, listening carefully. All he could hear was the low buzz of the engine room, down the corridor to his right. Other than that, nothing.

  He turned towards the room next to his. Bea’s room. He pressed his ear against the door. No sound. Her room had a similar latch on the outside. It would have been easy for Zak to enter, but several things stopped him.

  He remembered seeing Bea through the night sight from the end of the pier.

  Bea had alerted Black Wolf to his presence on the ship.

  And then there was the strange Morse code message she had tapped on the wall between their two rooms.

  Something wasn’t right about her. If she knew he had escaped, could he trust her not to alert his captors? But if she wasn’t the enemy, how could he fail to help her, annoying as she was? He decided to creep silently past her door. If he was to go through with his plan to force the skipper to raise a Mayday call, he needed to stay unnoticed; and if it worked, and Bea was innocent, the Mayday would help her too.

  A minute later he was out on deck, having moved through the ship without encountering anybody. It was dark again. Zak realized he must have been unconscious for the whole day. There was a wind. It made him shiver and his hair blow around, but he realized it was only caused by the forward motion of the ship. From the hull of the boat, Zak saw powerful jets of water spurting out to sea. He remembered first seeing the Mercantile make its way towards Lobambo. It had been shooting out these jets of water then too. Zak still didn’t know what they were for.

  The moon was out. It was very bright and, beyond where the jets hit the water, it reflected off an almost still ocean. Zak felt like he was a million miles from the storms and terror he had endured the previous night. But he also felt a million miles from safety. He wished he at least had his iPhone, but no: he had no means of communication. He was alone. The sound of the Mercantile ploughing through the water was enough to make him shiver. In a corner of his mind he wondered if he’d ever be able to think about the sea again without remembering his horrible ordeal.

  For now, though, he had to put the memory out of his head. He had work to do.

  Zak kept his back pressed against the body of the ship as he moved towards its stern. Every five metres he stopped and listened. He heard nothing except the ploughing of the ship through the water. He’d been on deck for approximately thirty seconds, however, when something blocked his view of the moon.

  He froze and looked up into the sky. The moon reappeared, but Zak was aware of something floating nearby. Something big. He squinted into the darkness and saw a great shadow floating alongside the ship. It was an enormous bird, with wings the size of a dinosaur’s. And as it hovered in the air, it emitted a loud, lonely cry that seemed to fill the empty skies all around.

  ‘Albatross,’ Zak muttered to himself. He’d never before seen one of these enormous rare birds, of course. But he’d read about them at school. Legend said that it was bad luck to encounter them at sea. Surely his luck couldn’t get any worse …

  He left the albatross to its flight and continued his journey to the stern of the ship. Ten metres along he passed a lifeboat. It was
sitting on the deck itself, attached to the main body of the Mercantile by an enormous crane-like arm. The arm appeared to be operated by a control panel on deck consisting of a keyhole and a large red button, though Zak assumed that it could also be operated from inside the lifeboat in case of an emergency. At the back of the boat there was a huge outboard motor – much bigger than the one Gabs had operated on the RIB back at Scapa Flow. The boat was covered by a sheet of thick canvas, and there was still a pool of salt water on top of this, which Zak assumed was left over from last night’s storm. It crossed Zak’s mind that this would be a good escape vessel, but he also knew that to launch himself into the middle of the ocean without any means of navigating back to land would be suicide. Better to trust his luck here in the clutches of Black Wolf than to perish slowly of dehydration, exposure or drowning.

  Voices.

  Zak spun round. He could vaguely make out two figures at the bow end of the deck. He didn’t hesitate. The canvas on top of the lifeboat was tied on by a thin cord, woven through eyeholes about thirty centimetres apart. He headed round to the far side of the boat where anyone passing would be less likely to see that he had loosened the cord, peeled back the canvas and climbed inside the lifeboat, returning the cover to its position from inside the vessel. He heard the puddle of water sloshing above him and waited several excruciating seconds for it to fall still.

  It was dark and rather damp inside the lifeboat, despite the canvas. Zak ignored the water seeping into his salt-encrusted clothes again. Another cry from the albatross pierced the air. Five seconds after that, he could hear the voices again.

  ‘I’d like to shoot that stupid bird.’ Zak recognized the voice of Barker’s friend. He sounded sour and discontented.

  ‘If you do that, you’re the stupid one.’ The second man was Eduardo, who had taken Zak to the engine room to retrieve the bomb. ‘El capitán is superstitious about things like that. Shoot an albatross, he’ll do the same to you.’