Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3

by Chris Ryan

  It was a glow much like that which Zak had seen coming from the detonator of the second bomb.

  In the Knightsbridge flat, Malcolm Mann stared quietly at the computer screen, monitoring the #palacebomb hashtag. In his mind, he saw a globe, and as his simple message was retweeted by millions of people, little dots of light appeared on that imaginary globe, illuminating entire continents.

  He considered hacking into the mainframe of GCHQ, the UK Government Communication Headquarters, to see what kind of response his viral campaign was having, but that would take time, and there was, he realized, an easier way. He stood up, wincing on account of the sharp pain that tore through his wounded shoulder. Weakly, he moved over to the television set and switched on BBC News 24. Then he moved over to the window that looked out over the London skyline.

  Dark clouds had gathered. As a streak of lightning flashed, it looked as if the sky itself was boiling. Cutting across the skyline, however, he spotted four helicopters. They were heading in the direction of Buckingham Palace.

  He heard the news in the background. The reporting was feverish. ‘The body found hanging from Westminster Bridge has been identified as one Joshua Ludgrove . . . the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has urged Londoners to remain highly vigilant . . .’ But there was no breaking news. No word of this new disturbance in the skies above the capital. Malcolm understood what that meant. There had been a news blackout. His plan was working.

  And his job, he decided, was done.

  He looked around. This was a safe place, he supposed, but how long would it remain safe? He was in danger of his life, that much was clear. Harry had promised to help him, but now he’d gone chasing bombs and that was a suicide mission. No, he had only himself to rely on. There was no way, absolutely no way, he was going to let them send him back to the secure hospital. He’d rather die. His decision was made. He saw no reason to linger. Rather weakly, he left the apartment. Moments later, he was walking down the empty street into the night, just another faceless member of the public in a city gripped by terror.

  Rodney Hendricks stood halfway up the Mall, leaning against a lamppost. He was wet through, but he hardly felt it.

  Lightning zigzagged across the sky. It lit up the flagpole on the top of the palace, and Hendricks saw the Union Jack hanging limply in the rain. He allowed himself a grim smile. If this morning’s operation went particularly well, perhaps the flags of London would soon be hanging at half-mast as the country mourned the death of its Queen.

  From here he had a perfect view of the palace, at a safe enough distance to avoid the fallout. He would watch the fruits of his labour, then return to his flat safe in the knowledge that he would have a great deal more funds at his disposal. This was just the beginning.

  He watched, and waited. The show was about to begin.

  But then he caught his breath.

  Shapes were emerging from the rain-filled sky. Three – no, four – silhouettes, suddenly hovering above the high walls of the palace.

  Helicopters.

  His excitement turned to nausea as he saw figures fast-roping from the aircraft onto the roof of the palace.

  Hendricks restrained the howl that came to his lips. He kept watching as the choppers, having delivered their human cargo, rose higher into the air and started to circle.

  He checked the time. Less than ten minutes to go. He calmed himself. With any luck, the arrival of these newcomers would do nothing but add to the collateral damage of the explosion.

  Another flash of lightning.

  A crack of thunder.

  The rain continued to fall.

  Time continued to tick.

  The watcher continued to watch.

  * * *

  Under other circumstances that glow of the detonator would have seized all Zak’s attention, but suddenly there was a voice echoing around the chamber. ‘Hendricks! Hendricks! Is that you?’

  Zak’s immediate instinct was to switch off the torch and plunge the chamber into near darkness. But even as he did so, he knew he recognized that voice.

  ‘Raf?’ he called.

  There was a silence.

  And then, two voices, a male and a female: ‘Zak?’

  Zak turned the torch on again and held it above his head. Twenty metres from his position he saw two figures sitting on the ground, their backs up against some kind of post, twisting their heads away from the dazzling beam of light.

  The moment of astonishment – of relief – passed quickly. There wasn’t time for that, and the tone of their voices told him there was little to be relieved about. ‘Walk carefully, Zak,’ Raf called. ‘We’re surrounded by explosives.’

  ‘How much longer on the timer?’ he asked, tersely.

  A brief pause.

  ‘Seven minutes. Don’t get too close to us. We’re tied to pressure pads. And no heroics, Zak. Just do exactly what I tell you to.’

  Zak lowered the beam of the torch to the ground. He stepped carefully forward. One pace. Two. Three. He found himself between two of the enormous crates.

  ‘OK, Zak,’ Raf said. ‘Listen carefully. Hendricks was down here. He’s the bomber.’

  ‘I know. Hendricks isn’t his real name. He’s called—’

  ‘We haven’t got time for that. Listen. He told us that detonator is booby-trapped. If we try to defuse it, it’ll go off.’

  ‘Then what are we going to do?’ Zak breathed. It was cold down here, but he realized he was sweating.

  ‘While he was talking, I tried to examine his setup as best I could. I want you to approach the crate that has the detonator. I think I saw single wires leading from that crate to each of the others. Am I right?’

  Zak did as he was told. As he edged round the central crate, the details of the clock face came into view.

  He tried to focus on the job in hand, and not on the time that felt like it was slipping through his fingers. Raf was right. He counted nine wires, creeping like spiders’ legs down the side of the central crate, one leading to each of the others.

  ‘I’ve got them,’ he said.

  ‘Good. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to defuse the central crate if that’s attached directly to the booby-trapped detonator. But I think there’s a high chance that we can minimize the damage the blast is going to cause up above if we sever each of those wires to stop the charge carrying to the other crates. Do you have a knife?’

  ‘No,’ Zak breathed. Raf swore under his breath, but then Zak remembered something. He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out Gabs’s star-shaped hairpin. He held it up in the light. ‘Yours?’ he asked Gabs.

  ‘Mine,’ Gabs whispered, an awed relief in her voice.

  Zak took one of the wires in his left hand and held the sharp edge with which he had cut himself to it. He was about to slice through the wire when Raf spoke again.

  ‘Zak?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘This is just a guess. You understand that, don’t you? I can’t promise that cutting that wire won’t activate the booby trap.’

  Zak looked over at his shoulder at his Guardian Angels. They were both staring anxiously at it.

  ‘I thought you were both dead,’ he said.

  A pause.

  ‘We will be soon, sweetie,’ said Gabs.

  Her words were like a trigger. Zak’s eyes went flat. He looked back down at the wire.

  And then he cut it.

  There was silence.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  ‘Cut the other wires,’ Raf instructed, but Zak was already on it. He carefully cut the second, and the third. No explosion. Within a minute, he had severed all nine wires. He looked up at the clock – five minutes and three seconds – before turning back to Raf and Gabs. They looked haunted.

  ‘You need to go now, sweetie,’ Gabs said. ‘Get out of here as quickly as you can.’

  Zak ignored her. He picked up his torch and shone it at their feet. The pressure pads on which they were sitting were simply two
sheets of metal. He didn’t know what kind of mechanism was underneath the sheets themselves, but a mess of coloured wires sprouted from each one, leading up to the central crate and the detonator.

  ‘I told you, Zak,’ Raf said, his voice dangerously low, ‘no heroics. You need to catch up with Hendricks, to stop him doing this again . . .’

  But Zak had turned his back on them. He ran to the nearest of the crates of explosives – it was about fifteen metres from Raf and Gabs’s position – and rapped his fist against the wood. It was thin, flimsy balsa wood. It needed to be, Zak realized, so that it didn’t deaden the blast at all. He clutched the diamond star firmly in his right hand and cut along the grain of one of the side panels. The blade sliced easily into it, scoring a line twenty centimetres long through the wood and into the crates deadly contents.

  ‘Zak!’ Gabs urged. ‘Go!’

  He kept his back to his Guardian Angels and scored another line parallel to the first. With a little more difficulty, he cut against the grain at either end of the parallel lines. The wood fell away to reveal a rectangular hole. Zak wormed his fingers behind the lower edge of the hole, steadied his right foot against the bottom of the crate, and pulled as hard as he could.

  The flimsy wood around the crate splintered and broke. The noise echoed around the chamber, clearly scaring the rats by the sudden chorus of squeaking that filled the space. Raf and Gabs were shouting at him, but he barely heard them as, ignoring the splinters in his sore, dirty hands, he continued to rip the crate to shreds. Within forty-five seconds, he had pulled away one entire side, and was shining his torch at it to see what he had revealed.

  The plastic explosives inside the crate were neatly stacked. Little parcels of death, each one the size of a brick. They were about as heavy as a brick too. Zak piled six of them in his arms, then headed back to where Raf and Gabs were standing. They were silent now, staring at him in blank astonishment as he carefully laid the cakes of plastic explosive around Gabs’s feet.

  He ran back to the open crate, glancing at the clock as he went. Three minutes and counting. He grabbed another armful of explosives, ran back and added them to the stockpile.

  It was only when he had deposited a third armful that he pulled the diamond star from his pocket and cut the ropes binding Gabs’s wrists and ankles.

  ‘Stand up slowly and then step off,’ he told her. ‘The weight of the explosives should keep the pressure plate down.’

  Gabs looked over at Raf. He nodded once.

  And then she rose carefully to her feet, wincing as her stiff muscles protested, then stepped over the explosives and onto the solid floor.

  Zak saw the pressure plate move – a faint wobble. One of the cakes of explosive tumbled from the top of its pile and his heart almost stopped. But then it fell still. It had worked.

  Time check.

  00:02:17

  ‘Help me,’ he told Gabs. She didn’t need telling twice. They ran over to the open crate and filled their arms with more cakes of explosive, before depositing them around Raf’s feet. A second trip and they were done. Zak cut the ropes that bound him, then held his breath as his friend slowly stood up, then stepped over the weights.

  00:01:23

  ‘Let’s get out of here!’ Raf barked. ‘There’s nothing else we can do . . .’

  Zak led the way, his torch lighting their path. He ran like he was in a dream, urging his legs to move quickly, but never feeling he was going as fast as he could. With every pace he took, he expected to hear the explosion behind him. All they could do was hope that only the central crate would detonate, and that the force of the blast would not cause the remainder to blow up. But even then, it was going to be a blast to write home about.

  It came without warning, just as Zak was entering the first, smaller chamber. He heard the sound of the explosion first – a low, monstrous rumble that echoed ominously around the chamber – before the shock wave hit him. It was as forceful as if somebody had struck him squarely in the back with a heavy, blunt instrument. Zak flew forward at least two metres, before landing on his front and scraping his face against the hard, wet floor. He ignored the sudden flood of terrified rodents that shrieked past and over him, turning instead to check that Gabs and Raf were OK.

  They weren’t.

  Hendricks looked at his watch. Ten seconds to go. His skin tingled. It wasn’t because he was cold or wet. It was more elemental than that. In ten seconds, the moment for which he had been waiting for years would come to fruition, and he was here to watch it happen.

  Five seconds.

  A single chopper rose up from the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Hendricks watched it with a frown. Was it carrying a precious cargo? He imagined so, and the thought made him bitter. But he did not allow himself to become disheartened. The building was the thing. The crumbling of the palace would be an image as potent as 9/11.

  Two seconds to go.

  One second.

  Zero.

  There was a rumble. Hendricks heard it quite clearly. Like a distant earthquake, or maybe that was just what he wanted to believe. He narrowed his eyes, waiting for the building to collapse in on itself. He had planned it carefully, each crate of explosives precisely positioned to cause maximum impact.

  Nothing happened.

  Give it time, he told himself. It will take a while, once the foundations are destroyed, to see the effects.

  He gave it time.

  Still nothing happened.

  A hot surge of anger rose in his gut. It was impossible. Impossible. The fools in the underground chamber were in no position to compromise the device, and he knew he had made no mistake in its construction. And yet, nothing had happened.

  A red mist descended. He found himself striding towards the palace. Unbidden, a face had arisen in his mind. A young teenager. Tall for his age. Unruly hair. He had said his name was Harry Gold, but Hendricks was beginning to have his doubts about that. He knew better than anyone how easily a name could be changed.

  And he knew how easily a person could be killed. He had seen it happen enough times, after all.

  * * *

  Gabs had made it into the chamber but had been thrown to the floor just like Zak. She jumped up again, cat-like, and looked back just in time to see the tunnel from which they had emerged collapsing. ‘Raf!’ she screamed, as both she and Zak threw themselves in the direction of the rubble collapsing above him. ‘RAF!’

  Bricks showered down from the ceiling, a solid version of the rain that had soaked Zak outside. It continued for about five seconds, after which there was a sudden, terrible silence. The entrance to the tunnel was entirely blocked. There was no sign of their friend.

  Neither Zak nor Gabs needed to say a word. They grabbed chunks of brick and rock from the mouth of the tunnel. The debris was immensely heavy, and Zak felt the muscles in his arms and across his chest harden as he strained to move the larger pieces.

  A minute of heavy labour passed when, ten metres into the chamber, there was another shower of rubble. They continued to work as if they hadn’t heard the sound, but when it happened again thirty seconds later, it couldn’t go unremarked upon. ‘Ceiling’s collapsing,’ Gabs rasped, her voice like sandpaper. ‘If you want to go, go.’ She didn’t look at Zak as she said it, nor did she sound at all hopeful that he would take her up on the suggestion. Zak didn’t reply. He just carried on working, relentlessly dragging and pulling the fallen rubble away from the mouth of the tunnel.

  They saw Raf’s hand first. It was poking out from a gap between two boulders, and it was deadly still.

  ‘Raf . . .’ Gabs whispered.

  There was no reply.

  They redoubled their efforts. Zak tore away a boulder which, if adrenalin hadn’t been surging through his veins, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to budge. It revealed Raf’s forearm, his sleeve ripped and the skin scratched and bloodied. And still not moving. Gabs went into a frenzy, scrabbling at the rubble, pulling it away from the area around Raf’s arm, thr
owing it behind her as if it was made of polystyrene. Her lips were moving but no sound came from them. It was almost as if she was muttering a silent prayer.

  And suddenly, her prayer was answered.

  Raf’s arm moved. The fingers clenched then spread out again. The forearm bent at the elbow. Moments later, Zak pulled away a rock that revealed his torso, and another that revealed his head. He had fallen on his side and his face was streaked with blood. He looked dazed, almost as though he was wondering where he was and how he had got there.

  The sound of more rubble falling from the ceiling of the chamber brought him to his senses, however. ‘We need to get out of here,’ Zak told him. He grabbed Raf’s arm and helped his friend as he clambered through the gap they had made. Shining his torch into the chamber, Zak’s stomach turned as he saw a curtain of debris showering down just metres from them.

  ‘RUN!’ Gabs shouted.

  And so they did, covering their heads with their hands as they sprinted through the solid rain, to the other side of the chamber and into the tunnel again.

  It felt smaller. More claustrophobic. The ceiling lower, the walls narrower. Or maybe that was just Zak. He couldn’t run fast enough. When they arrived back at the T-junction, he yelled at the others to take a left-hand turn, and he had seldom felt so relieved as when he saw the open cover of the manhole, and the heavy rain sluicing into it. He scrambled up the ladder into the open air, then leaned over to help Raf and Gabs up.

  But as he did so, he heard a click and felt something hard and cold against the back of his head.

  ‘Stand up very slowly,’ said a voice. ‘I want your hands where I can see them. Any sharp moves, my young friend, and I promise I will not hesitate to kill you.’

  Zak swallowed hard. He stood up slowly, his hands in the air, his palms outstretched.

  ‘Turn around,’ said the voice.