Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  There was a parting in the middle of the sea of beds, a narrow path that led straight to the entrance of the hospital. Zak manoeuvred the stretcher bed along it, fully prepared to be challenged at any moment. But nobody did. Before he knew it, he was inside.

  The reception area was not as full as it had been when Zak had looked at it on the monitor, but it was still chaotic. Red-faced soldiers were barking commands at scared-looking hospital staff; those few children whose beds remained here were still crying. Zak took a moment to get his bearings. Left was north. The surveillance guy had said that the sniffer dog had been on the ground floor. If Zak’s instinct was right, that meant he had to get down to the basement. He looked over towards the lift. There was a set of double doors just to its right, and a blue sign saying ‘Stairs’. Still pushing the stretcher bed, he headed towards them. He smashed the bed through the double doors and then, while they were still swinging shut, abandoned it and hurtled down the stairs three at a time.

  Keep your bearings, he told himself. Head north.

  Fraser Willis couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He was a grown man, after all. But he was on the edge of tears now. All he wanted to do was to get out of the hospital. To safety.

  All he wanted to do was make sure that he didn’t die.

  Fraser would have run away already if it hadn’t been for the anti-terrorist officer in the leather jacket. He always seemed to be there, keeping his steely eye on Fraser. He was bearing down on him now, as Fraser stood, sweaty-palmed, in the almost empty reception area with one eye on the exit.

  ‘The kid in the isolation ward.’ The officer started talking loudly before he had even reached Fraser. ‘We’ve no isolation suits in the vicinity. What are our options?’

  Fraser tried to clear the panic from his head. ‘I . . . I may be able to find something,’ he stuttered. ‘There’s a storeroom in the basement . . . perhaps . . .’

  The officer’s lip curled. ‘Are you telling me,’ he hissed, ‘that you had an isolation suit here all the time?’

  ‘I . . . I can’t be sure . . . very confusing, all this . . .’ He felt his eyes drawn once more to the exit.

  The officer grabbed the frightened hospital administrator by the scruff of the neck. ‘Find it,’ he growled, before pushing him away.

  Fraser almost fell. He scampered backwards, then scurried towards the double doors to the right of the lift. He ignored the stretcher bed that somebody had abandoned at the top of the stairs and hurried down into the basement of the hospital. He moved quickly, not because he feared for the life of little Ruby MacGregor on the fifth floor, but because he feared for his own.

  * * *

  Zak tried not to think of the weight of the hospital building above him, or of how totally he would be crushed if the device he was hunting detonated now. It wasn’t easy. He passed two empty wards and a storeroom, all the while trying to work out his position in relation to where he had seen the dog chasing its tail. At the end of the corridor was a closed door. He burst through it and took a moment to look around. It was some kind of locker room. It reminded him a bit of the changing rooms at the swimming pool his mum and dad used to take him to – benches along the middle, with hooks above, and metal lockers along each wall. He presumed that this was where the hospital staff got changed.

  Zak looked up. The ceiling was a grid of square plaster panels. Removable. For a moment he was back at Harrington Secure Hospital, hiding in a linen cupboard and wondering when he had become the sort of person who looked at a ceiling and saw an escape route, or a place to hide.

  A place to hide . . .

  He swallowed nervously and tried to rid himself of the cold sensation that ran through his veins. Then he stood on one of the benches, stretched up on tiptoes, and pushed gingerly at one of the panels.

  It moved.

  Zak edged the panel to the left so that a square opening appeared in the ceiling. He grabbed two edges of the opening and hauled himself up. The muscles in his upper arms burned, but he had enough strength from Raf and Gabs’s intensive training regimes back on the island to pull himself up and into the ceiling. The cavity between the plaster panels and the underside of the floor was about a metre deep, which meant he had to stay in a crouching position. He was slightly out of breath now, but the pumping of his pulse was down to anxiety, not exertion. He blinked. He had fully expected it to be dark up here.

  But it wasn’t.

  There was a blue glow. It was approximately ten metres away. Zak took a deep breath to calm himself, then carefully started crawling in the direction of the glow.

  He had a good idea of what he was looking at by the time he was five metres away. But he crawled up close to the glow just to be sure.

  It was a small digital display, half the size of a mobile phone. The blue glow came from the numbers on the display. They were counting down.

  Zak stared at the display for a moment, almost paralysed with the shock of knowing he had found the detonator. His fingers edged towards the display, but they were a centimetre away when he stopped himself from touching it. He scrambled in his pocket for his mobile phone. With a couple of taps of the screen, he had turned the camera flash into a high-powered torch beam. He shone it at the display to reveal two wires leading from it. The display itself was balanced on a tiny see-saw mechanism, and there were wires leading from this too. Zak instantly saw that if he had touched it, he would have triggered the booby-trapped device.

  Barely daring to move, he allowed the torch beam to follow one of the wires. It ran along the ceiling for a couple of metres before reaching a thick steel post, sturdy enough, Zak reckoned, to be part of the skeleton of the building. He followed the wire upwards. When the torch beam reached the underside of the ground floor, he stopped and, despite himself, drew a sharp intake of breath.

  They were everywhere.

  The cakes of plastic explosive were strapped to the underside of the ground floor with thick black gaffer tape. Each one was about twenty centimetres by twenty, and Zak couldn’t even count them all – at a glance he estimated that there were more than fifty. No wonder the sniffer dog was going wild on the floor just above. Whoever had planted these explosives had concentrated on the area around the steel post, and another one a few metres beyond it. Zak was no engineer, but he could immediately tell why: bring down these weight-bearing structures, and you’d bring down the whole building.

  His eyes flickered back to the detonator.

  His limbs were like jelly as he backed away, terrified that the wrong movement would spring the booby trap. His body shrank away from the underside of the floor above him, and the moment he reached the opening he jumped back down into the locker room. He sprinted out of the room and back along the corridor.

  It was just as he was passing the storeroom that the door opened and a man stepped out. He was wearing a crumpled suit and his thinning red hair was damp with sweat. He was carrying a package, but as Zak collided with him, he dropped it.

  ‘Get out of the building!’ Zak screamed at him. ‘I’ve found the bomb. We’ve got less than four minutes.’

  The man gave him a sickened look. Then he dropped the package and sprinted for the stairs, with Zak only metres behind him.

  They burst through into the reception area. The red-haired man ran straight for the exit while Zak looked desperately around until his eyes fell on Gabs. She was on the opposite side of the room and was helping move what looked like the final patient out of the building. When she saw Zak her face darkened, but Zak ran towards her anyway.

  ‘I’ve found it,’ he said breathlessly. ‘It’s on a timer in the space between the basement ceiling and the first floor. Less than three minutes to go.’

  No trace of panic crossed Gabs’s face. She strode up to a plainclothes officer whose nose looked like it had been broken and spoke a few quiet words to him. The officer’s face paled. He headed over to the reception desk, where he spoke into a microphone. His voice echoed around the hospital tannoy sy
stem. ‘All emergency and non-emergency personnel to evacuate the building immediately. Repeat, all emergency and non-emergency personnel to evacuate the building immediately.’

  Chaos. Panic. A rush for the exit. All the patients, it seemed, had been extracted. The thirty or so people who started running into the reception area from other parts of the hospital were military, police, bomb-disposal and medical staff. They crowded round the exit, pushing against each other. Jostling. Gabs and Zak joined them. His Guardian Angel was giving him a strange look, clearly wondering how he’d found the device. But now wasn’t the time to talk about it. Besides, something else had caught Zak’s attention. Standing a couple of metres away were two men, one in a leather jacket, the other with the broken nose.

  ‘What about the kid on the fifth-floor isolation unit?’

  ‘Doctors wouldn’t let us move her without a protective suit. Apparently she’s on such strong drugs that any infection from elsewhere – picked up from anyone around her, even her own mother – could kill her. That wimp of an administrator went down to the basement to get one, but it’s too late now.’ The face of the man with the broken nose was grim. ‘I guess the poor kid’s going to be a casualty of war.’

  The words of these men were like a knife in Zak’s stomach. He turned to Gabs, who had obviously also overheard the conversation, and just as obviously felt the same way. He remembered the red-haired man and the package he’d dropped in the basement.

  ‘I think I know where the protective suit is,’ Zak stated.

  Gabs nodded. ‘Get it. I’ll meet you on the fifth floor. Use the stairs.’

  And with that, they were both sprinting from the exit towards the stairwell, where Gabs sprinted up and Zak descended once more into the bowels of the hospital.

  In the dark cavity above the locker room, the small blue display continued to count down. It was only a machine, so it was oblivious to the destruction and human suffering it was about to cause.

  … it read.

  10

  00:00:00

  THE PROTECTIVE SUIT was where the hospital administrator had dropped it. Zak scooped it up from the floor and sprinted back to the stairwell.

  He felt sick at the thought of what he was doing as he lunged up the stairs, his lungs burning from exhaustion. He found it impossible to keep track of the time. How long until detonation? Two minutes? One minute? Less? He was drenched with sweat as he burst out into the deserted fifth-floor corridor and hurtled down it, following the blue and white sign to the isolation ward. He’d only run a few metres when he heard a desperate wailing coming from up ahead. It was only when he turned left into the isolation ward’s observation room that he saw who was crying: a blonde woman who had her face and palms pressed against the glass window that faced onto the ward. Gabs had her arms around her, and was trying to pull her away, but the woman was screaming at her to let go. ‘I won’t leave my daughter. I won’t leave my daughter!’ Next to them, a brown-skinned doctor was looking very agitated, wringing his hands.

  Beyond the glass, Zak could make out an occupied hospital bed, surrounded by machines. On the far side of the ward was an exterior window, through which he could see, but not hear, the chopper hovering about twenty metres beyond the building. Zak turned to the doctor. ‘Help me,’ he said, before sprinting across the observation room, unzipping the package that held the suit as he went. He shook it out to its full length and then, without hesitating, pulled the canvas mask he had stolen from the ambulance over his face and opened the door to the isolation ward. The doctor followed close behind while Gabs still tried to calm the little girl’s now-hysterical mother.

  If the little girl, lying alone on her hospital bed, had any understanding of what was happening, she didn’t show it. She wore a see-through oxygen mask, and the cannula attached to her drip feed had been inserted into the back of a very limp right hand. She was awake, though, and she blinked at Zak as he approached and gently removed the oxygen mask from her face.

  ‘What’s her name?’ he asked the doctor, doing his best to hide the panic from his voice.

  ‘Ruby,’ he whispered.

  Zak looked over his shoulder. He could see Ruby’s mother staring at him, and Gabs too.

  ‘Do you think you can get up, Ruby? We need to put this suit on you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I haven’t got time to explain.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘You must do what he says,’ the real doctor said. He pressed a button on the side of the bed that raised Ruby up into a sitting position.

  It was difficult to get the suit on since Ruby was very weak. Zak and the doctor had to lift her arms up for her, and help her slip her legs into the suit. The doctor detached the cannula, then threaded it back through a flap in the suit, before zipping Ruby up.

  ‘OK, Ruby,’ Zak said. ‘We need to get you out of here.’

  ‘Why?’ the little girl asked.

  Zak was on the point of explaining. He didn’t get the chance.

  For a moment, everything happened in slow motion. There was a deafening boom and Zak heard his voice shouting ‘NO!’ as the whole building shook.

  It felt like an earthquake had hit. Dust fell from the ceiling. The glass between the ward and the observation room shattered. So did the window, and from the corner of his eye Zak saw the chopper jerk backwards several metres from the force of the blast. The floor moved. Little Ruby fell from her bed. Zak grabbed her, and as they both tumbled to the floor, his arms automatically covered her head to protect it from any rubble that might fall her way.

  The doctor fell beside them. Despite the dust, he was close enough for Zak to see what killed the man.

  It was a chunk of rubble. It had fallen from the ceiling with the shaking of the building, and struck the doctor on the head as he lay on the ground. Blood flowed from his nose and his ear; the side of his face was smashed and indented. Zak reached over and felt his pulse. There was none. He had gone.

  There was no time to mourn. The shock wave of the explosion had rocked Zak to his core; his visibility in the cloud of dust was less than half a metre. But somehow, now that detonation had occurred, he didn’t feel scared any more. It was too late for that. The little girl was crying inside her suit. Zak had to get her out of the building. Somehow.

  He could hear the thudding of the chopper’s rotor blades. Other than that, and the weeping of the little girl, there was a strange kind of silence. It didn’t last long. There was a deafening, sinister creaking, and Zak felt the whole building shift again.

  ‘Zak! Are you there?’ Gabs’s voice, hoarse and more than a little panicked.

  ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘Ruby?’ The mother’s voice was high-pitched.

  ‘I’ve got her . . . the doctor’s dead . . .’

  Zak forced himself to his feet, lifting Ruby and her saline drip bag up at the same time. The dust stung his eyes, but through the cloud that had filled the isolation ward, he could just make out a silhouette approaching. Gabs appeared. Her blonde hair was dark grey, her face dirty. But her eyes shone with determination. ‘We need to get to the roof,’ she shouted.

  Zak nodded, and together they picked their way through the debris of the isolation ward, Zak cradling the little girl in his arms. ‘The mother’s in a bad way,’ Gabs shouted. ‘I’ll have to help her . . .’

  Gabs was right. The mother’s face wasn’t just painted with fear, it was painted with pain. She was kneeling, surrounded by shattered glass that had cut her face in several places, holding her left arm as though it was broken. She looked stricken as Zak appeared with Ruby, but Gabs didn’t give her the time to say or do anything. She helped the woman to her feet, draped her good arm around her neck and together they staggered over the uneven floor and out into the corridor.

  Zak was horrified when he saw it.

  The corridor itself was no longer level. The south end of it had subsided about two metres so the floor was on an incline. Huge cracks had appeared in the ce
iling, and sections of the wall had collapsed. Burst pipes were spraying from both floor and ceiling, and one part of the wall had sewage dripping down it. The smell of burning reached Zak’s nose. There was a fire nearby.

  ‘That way!’ Gabs pointed north just as another horrible creaking sound echoed through the whole building, and the floor beneath them shifted again. Zak looked in the direction she had pointed. There was a green emergency exit door, wonky in its frame, about fifteen metres away. Zak started towards it, struggling to carry the thin frame of little Ruby up the shifting incline. He started coughing with the dust, and sweat poured off his brow and into his already watering and stinging eyes.

  Another creaking. Another shifting of the floor. ‘HURRY!’ Gabs shouted. ‘THE BUILDING’S COLLAPSING! IT WON’T HOLD MUCH LONGER . . .’

  Zak gritted his teeth and redoubled his efforts.

  The emergency exit door was warped. Once he had raised the security bar, Zak tried to shoulder it open. It wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Stand back!’ Gabs shouted. Zak did as he was told, to see Gabs’s heel kick the door with stunning force. It flew open to reveal a set of stone stairs leading up to the roof. Zak burst through. As he ran up the cracked steps, the building gave another sickening lurch. He stumbled, and immediately heard Gabs’s voice behind him. ‘MOVE!’

  He moved.

  It was only as he emerged onto the roof of the hospital that Zak saw the full extent of the devastation the bomb had caused. The north-eastern corner of the building was already crumbling away, and the roof itself was subsiding just as the corridor had been. He was only half aware of the London skyline from up here, even though the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral and the London Eye were all perfectly clear in the morning sun. And he only half heard the wail of sirens from the ground below. His attention was elsewhere – on the chopper that had just risen to the same height as them. Gabs had let Ruby’s mother sink to the ground, and was waving her arms at the helicopter, her desperate screams of ‘Over here!’ lost in the chuntering noise of the rotors.