Under Cover (Agent 21) (7 page)

His voice trailed away for a moment as Ricky sat in stunned silence.

‘Anyway,’ Felix said suddenly, ‘an enemy sympathizer saw me leaving from a distance. He waited until he thought I was clear of the village, then he took a pot shot and got lucky.’

‘What sort of gun was it?’

‘Does it matter?’ Felix said. His voice was unusually forceful.

‘Sorry,’ Ricky said quickly. He felt he’d overstepped the mark. This wasn’t something Felix liked to discuss.

They stood in awkward silence for a moment, before Felix said: ‘A 7.62 Nato round from a bolt-action M24 sniper rifle.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ricky said again.

‘Don’t be. I was one of the lucky ones. A few centimetres higher and I’d have been killed.’

Ricky absorbed that information for a moment. ‘Is that what you are, then?’ he said. ‘An intelligence officer?’

‘What I am,’ said Felix, ‘is very tired. It’s nearly ten o’clock. I need to get some sleep, and so do you. I’ll see you first thing in the morning.’

And without another word he left the flat.

As Felix walked out of that luxury apartment in the Docklands, a much younger man sprinted down a flight of stone steps into the basement of a derelict building in a dark, forgotten side street of Soho. He was sweating, out of breath and frightened.

The building was called Keeper’s House. It had been condemned for years. Its windows were boarded up, its walls covered in graffiti, and lengths of guttering hung limply from the roof. Inside, it smelled of wet rot and neglect. The rooms on the ground floor were littered with old furniture – mouldy, ripped sofas, tables riddled with woodworm. Anything remotely usable had been moved down to the basement.

The young man’s name was Tommy. He was sixteen years old, with scruffy black hair and a pronounced Adam’s apple. He wore a permanent scowl and always seemed to have cuts on his knuckles or face – the result of some fight or other. He had a lot of fights on the street.

He burst into the main basement room.

‘Thought you’d forgotten about us,’ rasped a voice. Tommy looked over to see a figure, slightly smaller than him, hunched over in the corner of the room. It was too gloomy to make out his features very clearly, but Tommy recognized Hunter’s voice well enough.

‘Would I do that?’ Tommy replied sarcastically.

He peered around the large basement room. It was lit by an old standard lamp in the corner – somehow, Hunter had managed to rig up some electricity – and contained a mismatched collection of furniture and people.

The furniture was old. The people were all young. Tommy was easily the eldest, and one of the kids, who was sitting in the corner hugging his knees, couldn’t be more than twelve, though he swore blind he was fifteen. There were eight of them in the room, including Tommy and Hunter. The others were either still out on the street or in one of the other basement rooms that adjoined this one.

Tommy looked anxiously over his shoulder, then back towards Hunter.

There was a moment of silence. Then Hunter moved from the shadows into the centre of the room. His features became visible. Hunter was in his sixties, with a square jaw and a nose that had been broken several times. He had a sharp, violent face and watery, greedy eyes.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded.

Tommy closed his eyes. ‘Police,’ he breathed.

A nasty pause as Hunter stared at him. ‘Did they follow you?’

‘I think I lost them.’

Another silence. Tommy felt the eyes of all the other kids in the room burning into him.

‘You
think
you lost them?’

‘Y . . . yeah . . .’

‘Well,’ Hunter said in a dangerous half-whisper, ‘that’s all right then, isn’t it? He
thinks
he lost them. You got anything for me?’

Tommy swallowed hard, then nodded. He stepped further into the room and held out a fat black wallet. Hunter snatched it and started rifling through its contents. He clearly wasn’t interested in the credit cards – they were too easy to trace. But he fished out several notes and a handful of change which he shoved in his pocket before discarding the wallet. ‘That the best you can do?’ he said. ‘On a Saturday night?’

Tommy nodded.

‘And I suppose you want something to eat? Go on then, son. It’s over there.’

Tommy had already noticed the pizza boxes on a table against the right-hand wall. There were five, all open. He walked up to the table to see that only one of the boxes had any food left in it – two slices of cold, congealed pizza. He knew not to complain. Instead, he grabbed a slice and started cramming it hungrily into his mouth.

The blow, when it came, knocked all the wind from his lungs and half the food from his mouth. He collapsed, barely able to breathe, and saw Hunter standing over him, still carrying the short, stout cudgel he’d just used to whack him in the stomach.

As Tommy struggled for air, Hunter bent down over him.

‘Listen to me, you idiot,’ he hissed, waving the cudgel in front of Tommy’s face. ‘If you ever,
ever
lead the police anywhere near here, you’ll get something a lot sharper than this in your guts. You got that?’

Tommy tried to nod, but a lump of semi-chewed pizza had become stuck in his throat and all he could do was make a harsh, choking sound. He was aware of Hunter standing up and addressing the rest of the kids in the room.

‘The same goes for the rest of you,’ the man shouted. ‘Anybody got a problem with that?’

Nobody replied. They wouldn’t dare. Like Tommy, they all hated Hunter. But in return for a daily stream of stolen cash, he gave them something they needed. A roof over their heads. Food. And something more important than both of these: safety in numbers. Because when you worked the streets, there was nothing more important than that.

It was 9 a.m. exactly when Felix returned. Ricky’s bed was untouched. He hadn’t moved from the sofa. Thirty playing cards were spread out in front of him. He stared at them for fifteen seconds. Then he closed his eyes. ‘Queen of hearts,’ he said. ‘Two of spades, five of diamonds, nine of clubs . . .’

Thirty seconds later, he had recited the name of every card in order. He opened his eyes again. Felix was leaning on his walking stick and staring at him carefully.

‘Very good, Coco,’ he murmured. ‘Really very good. Perhaps we’ll make something of you yet.’

Ricky smiled. ‘It’s just a party game, though. That’s all.’

‘We’ll see,’ Felix said slyly. ‘We’ll see.’

But inside Ricky’s head, another conversation was taking place, this one with Ziggy.

– You’ve won him over. That’s good. Let’s keep it that way. The things he’s teaching you will be useful on the street. Learn what you can from him. Improve yourself.

– And when the time comes to leave?

– Then you leave.

The weeks that followed passed quickly. Ricky’s days were full and there was no time at all for him to spend the £100 living allowance that Felix handed over every Saturday morning. Not that he needed the money. Every time he left the flat, he returned to find the fridge full, his clothes cleaned and the flat tidy. He never saw the person – or people – responsible. When he mentioned it, Felix had simply said, ‘You haven’t got time for housework,’ and refused to discuss it any more.

So each week, Ricky squirrelled his money away, inside a sock which he kept under the mattress. It would come in useful, he told himself, for when he finally walked out of there.

But Felix wasn’t wrong. There
was
no time for anything else other than his lessons. He turned up every morning at 9 a.m. exactly, peering across the threshold and politely asking if he could come in. Once inside, he worked Ricky hard.

A couple of hours of every morning were spent in the gym, which was housed in one of the spare rooms of the flat. There were several weight machines, an exercise bike and even a treadmill. Ricky grew to hate that treadmill. He’d have been happy to bulk up with some bicep curls or shoulder presses, but Felix soon stamped on that idea. ‘You’re not fully-grown yet, so you could damage your body with too many weights. You need aerobic fitness, so get running on the treadmill.’

‘Don’t see you doing it,’ Ricky had replied grumpily.

‘Count the legs, Coco. Besides, I’ve done my stint of vomiting my guts out through exercise. Now it’s your turn.’ He’d picked a chunk of peanut brittle out of his sweet bag And Ricky
was
sick, several times. It didn’t seem to worry Felix, who watched without expression as he doubled over, retching. But as the weeks flew past, he found he could run for longer and longer, at higher speeds. He even found himself looking forward to those daily training sessions, though he’d never have admitted that to Felix. He had also had his hair cut – his long hair had kept sticking to his neck and it was far cooler to run with a shorter, if still scruffy, style. And that haircut was just about the only thing he’d had time to spend any money on.

His brain had as much exercise as his body. After two weeks he could memorize half a pack of cards in fifteen seconds. After four weeks he could do a whole pack in thirty. ‘Not bad, huh?’ he said to Felix the first time he managed that feat. Somehow, a word of approval from Felix was beginning to
matter
.

Felix had shrugged. ‘It’s a start,’ he said.

But from then on, Ricky’s lessons in observation became even trickier. The following day, Felix led him out of the apartment and down a nearby main road. As they walked side by side, he said, suddenly, ‘What was the registration plate of the red Mini that just passed?’

Ricky blinked at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘How do you think this works, Coco? You think that in real life someone’s going to spread out a pack of cards and ask you where the nine of clubs is? You need your eyes open and your brain in record mode
all the time
. You need to see everything. Remember everything. You were right when you said counting cards is just a party game. This’ – he stopped for a moment and rapped his walking stick on the pavement – ‘is real life.’

They walked on in silence for another thirty seconds.

‘Blue Peugeot,’ Felix said suddenly. ‘What’s the—’

‘RE75 UHF.’

If Felix was impressed, he didn’t show it. ‘We passed a betting shop thirty seconds ago,’ he replied immediately. ‘There was a man standing outside smoking a cigarette. What colour was his hair?’

Ricky blinked again. ‘I thought we were doing number plates.’

Felix raised an eyebrow. ‘You need to see
everything
,’ he repeated.

And from that moment onwards, whenever they were out, Felix would fire impossible questions at Ricky. He would ask him the colour of someone’s tie a minute after they’d walked past. How many people were sitting outside a café 100 metres behind them? What had been advertised on the side of a London bus that had now driven out of sight?

At first Felix’s constant questions were infuriating. After two weeks they were simply annoying. But gradually, Ricky found he was getting used not only to the questions, but also to remembering the smallest details of everything he saw. As he grew more accomplished at it, the world seemed like a different place, full of activity that he’d never have noticed beforehand. He counted pigeons sitting on telegraph wires, noticed the facial expressions of everyone who came into his field of view, even subconsciously catalogued the litter that they passed on the pavement. ‘You’ll be amazed,’ Felix told him one day, as his ability to observe grew, ‘how often the ability to notice and recall something very small can make the difference between life and death.’

Life and death?

Ricky didn’t like it when Felix used words like that. He wasn’t here to worry about life and death. Didn’t really want even to know what Felix was all about. Whenever his mind drifted towards that subject, he’d stopped himself thinking about it too hard. He was here to learn what he could, and then apply it to become a better thief. Simple. And seeing and remembering what other people missed would certainly help him do that.

‘I bet you’re not much of a fighter,’ Felix said one day as Ricky stepped off the treadmill, sweat trickling down his forehead, his T-shirt soaked. It was raining hard outside. Great clouds of rain were visible over the river from the window of the penthouse flat. Felix had arrived with a soaked rucksack over his shoulder and an umbrella which he had propped up by the door. But he didn’t look like he’d been using the umbrella – his clothes and balding head were soaked.

Ricky eyed him suspiciously. Yesterday, Felix had rocked up with a dirty black bin liner full of rotting rubbish and a pair of thick rubber gloves. ‘Trash!’ he had announced with a smile. ‘You’ll be amazed what sort of information you can find by rummaging through people’s bins.’ Ricky had spent the next hour sorting through the stinking debris inside the bag, trying to work out what might be useful, and what might not. He found a stained old telephone bill and a bank statement, which Felix agreed would be priceless if you were trying to find out about the person who’d discarded them. As for the old baked bean cans and dirty nappies: not so much.

‘I said,’ Felix repeated, ‘that I bet you’re not much of a fighter.’

‘Well, I’m a brilliant bin man,’ Ricky replied sourly.

‘Don’t get touchy.’ Felix was in a strange mood today – probably because his clothes were still damp.

‘It’s better to run than fight, anyway,’ Ricky said.

‘Much better,’ Felix agreed. ‘But sometimes we don’t have a choice. Sometimes we have to defend ourselves.’

‘You’re the one that doesn’t want me doing weights.’

‘Correct,’ said Felix. ‘But good fighting isn’t always about strength. Sometimes it’s about technique.’

‘I had karate lessons once,’ Ricky said. ‘I was rubbish at them.’

‘I’m not talking about karate,’ said Felix. ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s all very well, but the best advice I can give you is this: if you find yourself in a fight with someone, forget all the fancy stuff. Get your hands on something very heavy and hit them over the head with it.’