Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (10 page)

‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, Jay?’

‘Trust me.’

The Angolan boy gave a sigh, as if to say he didn’t think this was a good idea, and walked away from the camp fire, disappearing into the darkness as he made his way back up towards the village. Zak said his good-nights and returned to his tent, where he lay on his bed and waited for everything to become silent outside.

Eleven o’clock came and went. Eleven-thirty. There was no noise. No light. Zak crept over to the doorway of his tent where he had left his tackle bag. He removed the reel and silently left the tent. No sign of anyone, just like the previous night. He crept away from the encampment, stopping every twenty metres to look over his shoulder. But he didn’t see anyone as he made his way, not to the pier this time, but back up into Lobambo.

It was very quiet in the village. Zak passed the occasional villager – none of whom seemed to be doing anything but sitting outside their shacks enjoying the clear night – but most people were inside.

It was 11.55 precisely when he reached the building site. Malek was already there. ‘Jay,’ he whispered, looking around, ‘what are we doing?’ He looked at the reel in Zak’s hand. ‘Fishing?’

‘Yeah,’ Zak said. ‘Sort of. Just not for fish.’

Malek grabbed his arm. ‘You have to be careful with those men, Jay. They are very violent. When they say they will shoot people, they mean it.’

‘I know,’ Zak breathed. He sounded a lot less nervous than he felt. ‘And when I say they can’t stop people building that school, I mean it too.’ He paused. ‘Nobody should call your mother names, Malek. I don’t care who they are, or how many guns they’ve got.’

‘I do not want other people to get hurt for my sake, or my mother’s.’

‘Nobody’s going to get hurt, Malek. I promise you. So are you going to show me where they live? Let’s start with Ntole.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Just pay him a little visit. You’ll see.’

Malek was obviously wrestling with himself. He sighed and nodded, but as he took the lead he was muttering to himself in an African dialect Zak couldn’t understand.

The first compound he led Zak to was very close – just fifty metres north of the building site. It consisted of eight shacks around a central courtyard about fifteen metres wide. The moon was so bright that the shacks cast shadows on the ground. Zak could see an old football in the middle of the courtyard, and a motorbike against one of the shacks.

‘Which one?’

Malek pointed in the direction of the shack with the motorbike.

‘Wait here,’ Zak told him. ‘Whistle if you see anybody coming.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘You’ll find out,’ Zak told him. Better that he kept his plan to himself, otherwise Malek would try to talk him out of it.

‘Jay, I think we should go back …’

But Zak was already heading stealthily towards the shack.

When he reached the motorbike, he stopped. He was in shadow now, and it was difficult to see. He flicked the switch on the bottom of his fishing reel and raised it to his eye. The night sight lit the courtyard up brightly. He could see Malek at the entrance to the compound, chewing on the thumbnail of his good hand and looking left and right. Zak turned his attention to the door of the shack. There was no lock on the outside – just a block of wood that acted as a handle. He listened carefully at the door. There was a sound. Regular. Quite loud. Snoring.

The occupant of the shack was asleep.

Slowly, Zak opened the door.

He stepped inside.

The first thing he saw in the hazy green glow of the
night sight was Ntole. The young Angolan man was sprawled in a chair. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans. There were empty bottles littered around his chair, and a further bottle still in his right hand, hanging at an angle. The whole place stank of sweat and alcohol. It made Zak want to retch but Ntole, he could see, wasn’t waking up any time soon.

The rest of the shack was a total dump. Clothes, empty food tins – all sorts of junk was littered around. Zak wasn’t interested in any of that. He was just interested in the object that was propped up against Ntole’s seat: his AK-47.

He lowered the night sight, but didn’t switch it off in case the noise woke the slumbering thug. Instead, he stood there, waiting for his own vision to become accustomed to the darkness, listening to the sound of Ntole’s snoring. Within two minutes he could see the outline of the sleeping man.

He took a step forward.

And another.

Ntole stirred. He shouted out in his sleep.
He’s waking up
, Zak thought. What should he do? Stay still or run? But then the outline of the slumbering man fell still.

Zak could feel his blood pumping. He stepped forward again and five seconds later he had his fingers round the cold metal of Ntole’s AK-47.

It felt comfortable in his grip. Zak was well trained and he knew how to handle these weapons, better even than Ntole himself.

He took a deep breath and started his evening’s work.

9

A SHOT IN THE DARK

Thursday, 03.00 hrs GMT

THOUSANDS OF MILES
away, in the darkness of 63 Acacia Drive, a mechanical cuckoo burst from the clock in the dining room. It cheeped twice.

Two a.m.

The figure at the bottom of the stairs didn’t move.

To look at him, you wouldn’t know he was an intruder. He wasn’t dressed in black. He didn’t wear a balaclava. In order to hide the missing eye that made him so distinctive, he wore a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles with a white swab covering the right-hand lens. It made him look like he’d had medical attention. Other than that, he wore a pair of jeans – a little baggy, because his body was very thin – and a navy jumper that he’d bought earlier that day from Marks & Spencer, along with the rucksack that was now slung over his shoulder. When it was time for him to
leave the house, nobody would see anything other than an ordinary man walking down an ordinary street.

They certainly wouldn’t know that he’d just carried out a less than ordinary crime.

The weapon in his hand was a Browning semiautomatic. It fired 9mm rounds, enough to kill a man at ten to twenty metres. Or a woman, of course. Or a girl. The barrel of the handgun was longer than normal, because he had fitted a suppresser to the weapon. This would silence the shot. Not completely, but instead of giving a loud retort that would wake up the whole street, the shot would sound like somebody knocking on a door. There was a small risk that it would wake the other occupants of the house. If that happened, the intruder would deal with it. But if everything went according to plan, there would only be one murder tonight. He was experienced enough to realize that leaving more dead bodies behind than necessary was generally a bad idea.

The cuckoo returned to its cubbyhole and the intruder started to climb the stairs. A floorboard creaked underneath his feet. He stopped and listened.

Nothing. The house was still asleep. He continued to creep slowly upstairs, gripping the Browning in his right hand.

The first bedroom he checked was very small. It contained a single bed, but there were no bedclothes
on it. The intruder sensed this room hadn’t been used for many months. He closed the door and walked past the bathroom to the other end of the landing where there were two more doors. The intruder felt for the door knob of the left-hand door and quietly –
very
quietly – opened it. He peered inside. A double bed. The dark outlines of two people. The sound of gentle snoring.

He closed the door again. There was just one more room to try now.

The door of this final room was slightly ajar. When the intruder pushed it open, it didn’t make a sound. He stepped inside. This room was bigger than the first and smaller than the second. The lights were off – he knew that already from staking the house out – but the yellow glow of a street lamp flooded in through the open curtains. There was a dressing table, a mirror on the wall, a cupboard, a chest of drawers and a small pile of clothes that had been dumped on the floor.

And a bed, of course.

And in the bed, huddled under the duvet, the outline of a figure. Not small enough for a child, not big enough for an adult.

The intruder had found his target.

He raised his gun.

He was pleased that the girl was covered by her duvet. It gave him two advantages. The thick padding
would absorb a bit more of the sound of his gun. It would, in a way, be doubly silenced. But perhaps more importantly it meant that when he shot her, the blood from the wound would be soaked up. Blood, he knew, was the very devil to get off your skin and out of your clothes. He was glad he’d be able to avoid the spatter.

He pressed the barrel of his Browning against the soft, squashy material.

He fired.

The sound of the shot was quiet, but the impact made the whole bed judder. The figure underneath the duvet shook once and was still. At that range – point blank – the intruder knew it would only take a single shot, so he removed the gun from the duvet, bent over and gently peeled back the covers to check his handiwork.

He took a sharp breath.

There was no blood. There was no blood because there was no wound. And there was no wound because there was no body. All the intruder saw was a pile of pillows. One of them had a bullet hole. In the dim light he could just see the scorch marks around it, and the stuffing that had come loose from inside.

He felt his skin prickle with anger. He’d been outsmarted. By a
girl
. How had she known he was coming for her?
Had
she known it? Perhaps her
absence tonight was nothing to do with him. Perhaps she was missing from her bedroom for some other reason …

There was no point giving in to his anger. He took his rucksack from his shoulder and hid the Browning away. He removed something else from the bag. It was very small. No different in size from the little chocolate drops he used to give his Alsatian dog when he was a boy. But it wasn’t a chocolate drop. He looked around the room again. On the bedside table was a reading lamp. He unscrewed the bulb from the lamp and felt inside the metal shade. The object attached itself to the interior. The intruder screwed the bulb back in. Then he gently drew the duvet back over the pillows, like he was tucking someone in.

As he went downstairs, the same floorboard creaked. He didn’t stop this time. He headed straight for the back door, exited the house and locked it again with the picks he had used to let himself in.

And then he walked back up Acacia Drive. There was nobody around to see him go.

‘Are you sure there’s nobody here?’

Ellie was on edge. Not that this was a surprise. She’d been on edge for days. But watching a serious-faced, fair-haired man breaking into number 62 –
the house directly opposite hers – certainly hadn’t been a good way to calm her nerves. ‘We come as a pair, sweetie,’ Gabs had said. ‘Love and marriage, horse and carriage …’ Apart from telling her that his name was Raf – and what kind of name was that, anyway? – he’d said nothing to her. But it had only taken him a matter of seconds to break into Mr and Mrs Carmichael’s house, and only a few seconds more to disable the burglar alarm.

‘How does he know the code?’ Ellie asked the woman who called herself Gabs.

‘It’s on file,’ Gabs said, ‘if you know where to look.’

Ellie could sense that this was the only answer she was likely to receive. ‘Are you
sure
there’s nobody here?’ she repeated.

‘Relax, sweetie. I’m sure. Mr and Mrs Carmichael were on a British Airways flight to Lanzarote three days ago. Their return ticket isn’t booked for another ten days and Mr Carmichael used his Visa card five hours ago to buy dinner out there. They really aren’t going to be walking in on us.’

Ellie stared at Gabs. ‘How do you
know
all that stuff?’

‘Ways and means, sweetie. Ways and means. You should remember that if you ever need to disappear. If you’re not careful, people can track your location very precisely.’

‘Why would I want to disappear?’ Ellie said quickly. She didn’t know why, but the thought of it touched a nerve. Hadn’t
everyone
thought of disappearing, even if they didn’t mean it?

Gabs appeared to sense her nervousness. ‘I don’t know, sweetie,’ she said. ‘Why would you?’

Raf led the way – through the kitchen, up the thickly carpeted stairs and into the front bedroom. The curtains were closed, but Gabs had a torch with a pencil-thin beam which she shone briefly around the room. This was clearly where Mr and Mrs Carmichael slept. There was a double bed and, on the bedside tables, pictures of their three children. They’d all left home now, but Ellie saw them around sometimes and recognized their faces.

‘Don’t switch the lights on,’ Gabs warned as she turned off the torch. Ellie caught herself giving her a cross look in the darkness. Like she was going to do
that
. She lingered by the bed. Raf was carrying a metal case – bigger than the briefcase her dad took to work, but smaller than a suitcase. He laid this on the bed and opened it up. He removed a tripod and set it up just in front of the curtains. Then he removed something that looked like a small telescope with a flat screen, about fifteen centimetres square, at the viewing end. He fixed this to the tripod. With his right hand he drew one of the curtains back just a couple of
inches, and with his left he nudged the apparatus towards the window.

‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t need to whisper, sweetie,’ Gabs said. ‘Nobody can hear us. It’s a night sight. It means we can zoom in on things in the dark. Things like your bedroom.’

Gabs nodded towards the screen and Ellie approached. Raf had finished fiddling with the sight. It was directed towards Ellie’s window. Shrouded in a green haze, she could make out almost every detail of her bedroom. The door. The chest of drawers. And the bed, of course, which on Gabs’s instruction she had set up with dummy pillows the moment she knew her mum and dad were asleep, and just before she’d opened her bedroom curtains and sneaked out of the house to meet her and this strange, silent man called Raf.