Agent 21 (2 page)

The sun set about 7 p.m. – a blood-red ball that drenched Lagos with its glow before it plunged into darkness. Al and Janet dressed for dinner and prepared to meet the other conference delegates who’d come from all over the world. They wouldn’t know anyone – not even any of the eleven other British guests – and they were glad to have each other.

The dining hall was splendidly set. To look at it, you wouldn’t know that barely a mile from this hotel there existed one of the seediest slums in the world, so poor that the people who lived there had to use the streets as a toilet. Here were crisp, white tablecloths, fizzy water in bottles and appetizing baskets of freshly baked bread rolls. There were five large round tables, each with ten place settings, and a table plan pinned to a board by the entrance. When Janet and Al checked it they saw, to their relief, that they were sitting next to each other. To Janet’s right there was a professor from Helsinki in Finland; to Al’s left an American journalist. The couple accepted a glass of wine from a smartly dressed waiter with a tray of drinks, then went to find their seats.

The Finnish professor was an eccentric-looking man with a bald head but a bushy white beard. He was already sitting down when they approached, but stood up when he saw Janet. ‘Allow me,’ he said, and he pulled out her seat for her. ‘My name is Jenssen. It is very nice to meet you . . .’ He glanced at the name tag on Janet’s place setting. ‘Dr Darke.’

Janet smiled. ‘And you, Professor Jenssen.’

The American journalist didn’t arrive until everyone else was sitting and the waiters were serving the starter. He was hugely fat, and had sweat pouring down his face. ‘Africa,’ he said with a huff as he plonked himself
down on his seat. ‘Every time I come here, I promise myself I’ll never come back. Perhaps I should listen to myself a bit more.’

Perhaps you should
, thought Al Darke, but he didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he thanked the waiter who had just placed a plate of food in front of him. Slices of colourful fruit were laid out on the plate like a fan, with some kind of dressing drizzled over the top.

‘This looks delicious,’ Al said.

‘Give it three days,’ the journalist replied. ‘You’ll be begging for a cheeseburger.’ Al saw, though, that he tucked into his food with gusto.

Al was halfway through his starter when he noticed that his nose was running. Embarrassed, he grabbed his napkin and held it to his face. By the time he had covered his face, though, he felt moisture seeping from his eyes and his vision was blurred. He turned to look at Janet. Her eyes were wet too, the pupils as small as pinpricks.

‘What’s happening?’ Al started to say. But as he spoke, his chest collapsed into a fit of coughing and he found himself struggling for breath.

‘
Al
. . .’ Janet was looking at him with fear on her face.

The pain came next – a horrible, sharp needling behind the eyes and in the throat. Al felt dizzy. He
looked around the room. About half of the guests had stood up, and from the way they clutched their heads and throats, it was clear they were suffering the same symptoms. At the far end of the room, one man collapsed. Al was half aware of the waiters, buzzing around them like panicked bees. They didn’t know what was happening any more than the diners.

Al felt himself slump in his seat. He couldn’t help it – it was as though his muscles had turned to jelly and he had lost the power to control them, even in order to breathe. His eyes fell on the half-eaten fruit. The bright colours of the mango and papaya looked ten times brighter, and they burned into his retinas. He turned to his wife.

‘The food,’ he said.

Janet Darke didn’t hear him. For her the room was spinning more violently. People were shouting around her, but all she could really concentrate on was the nausea. She wanted to be sick, but was too weak to do even that.

Al and Janet weren’t the first to die. The professor from Helsinki was already slumped on the table, his face in his half-eaten plate of fruit; and the American journalist was twitching on the ground. They knew it was coming, though. With what little strength they had left, they reached out with their hands and clasped their fingers together.

When the Nigerian police arrived half an hour later, they needed to prize Al and Janet Darke’s hands away from each other before they could remove the bodies.

Six months later

‘Darke!’

Giggling in the classroom.

‘
Darke!
’

Zak looked up. He’d been staring out of the window, where the late afternoon sun was glowing over the school football pitch. He had a pencil in his hand, which he twirled through his fingers. On his table there was a circuit board. It was covered with transistors and diodes and connected to a small loudspeaker.

‘Zachary Darke,’ his physics teacher, Mr Peters, said in a nasal voice. Peters had bad skin, square glasses and a tragic dress sense. He’d only been teaching at the Camden High School in North London for six weeks, but in that time he’d managed to make himself unpopular with pretty much everyone. ‘You’ve got ten
minutes left to complete your assignment. I don’t think staring out of the window is a very good way to—’

He was interrupted by a noise. Zak had flicked a switch and the sound of Lady Gaga singing ‘Just Dance’ filled the room. The physics teacher
had
told them to construct a transistor radio, after all.

Peters was a total nightmare. He loved to set his classes almost impossible tasks and watch them squirm as they failed to complete them. All of them except Zak. He was good at stuff like this, but even that didn’t seem to impress Peters. The jokers at the back singing along to the music didn’t impress him either. His pockmarked neck turned red. ‘Turn it off, boy.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Zak replied. He stared back out of the window.

Mr Peters walked up to Zak’s table. Zak had grown tall in the last year – taller than a few of the teachers, even. It meant that some of them, like Peters, puffed themselves up when talking to him. ‘Showing off isn’t a very attractive habit, Darke,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t, sir. I was just—’

‘Quiet. I don’t want to hear another word from you.’

‘No, sir,’ Zak said, and went back to his daydreaming.

He had plenty to daydream about.

When the police had showed up six months ago on the doorstep of his uncle and aunt’s house to tell him what had happened to his parents, they had said it was food poisoning. An acute case, a terrible accident. It had affected everyone in the hotel dining hall that night. Fifty of them. And for a while Zak had believed them. Why wouldn’t he? The story had made it onto the news, and he was too shocked and upset anyway to think about it much.

But as time passed and the Nigerian police had refused to release his parents’ bodies for burial, Zak had grown suspicious. If it had been just food poisoning, then why the delay? Why couldn’t they just send his mum and dad back so they could have a proper funeral? And what was so virulent that it could kill fifty people at a single sitting? Zak had hit the Internet, done his research. There was botulism;
e. coli
, maybe. But Mum and Dad had been in good health. Those kind of bacteria might have made them feel very unwell, but kill them? And everyone else they were dining with? Not likely.

When school finished, he walked home with his cousin Ellie. She was in the year above, but they were good friends. This walking home together thing was a new one, though. Zak used to skateboard everywhere on the board his mum and dad had got him for his
thirteenth birthday. However, he didn’t have the heart to use it now, which was why he preferred to walk.

Ellie chattered away like she always did. Zak’s cousin was a tall, pretty girl with long, honey-coloured hair and one of those friendly, open faces that people quickly take a shine to. Zak heard her, but didn’t listen. Something else had caught his attention.

For two weeks now, maybe three, Zak had had the strangest feeling. More than once, he’d thought he was going mad. He knew that nobody could
really
be following him, but it happened almost every day – twice a day, sometimes – that he was walking down the street, or buying something in a shop, or doing whatever he was doing, and he’d get that familiar, unpleasant feeling. A hotness on the back of his neck. A tingling.

At first, he would turn and look around. But he never saw anybody. Or he saw lots of people, just walking past or milling about. After a bit, he didn’t bother to turn. Instead, he would keep walking and try to look out of the corner of his eye. That was more successful. He’d sometimes be able to sense somebody walking along the opposite side of the road, or standing by the school gates. Whenever he turned to look, however, the person was gone. It was like they had a sixth sense – although Zak’s sensible side told him that was impossible . . .

He had the feeling now. They were walking along Camden Road. It was busy with the early rush-hour traffic, and the pavements were full of school kids. But there was something else – like a dark shadow on the edge of his vision, walking in the same direction on the opposite pavement.

Zak looked firmly ahead and tuned his ears in to Ellie’s conversation.

‘. . . so
I
told her that there was no way I was going if—’

‘Ellie, shh.’

She looked at him. ‘Don’t be so rude,’ she said.

‘Sorry. But listen, you see that turning up ahead to the right?’

Ellie looked ahead to see what he meant. It was a small turning about fifteen metres away that led into a little cobbled mews road. ‘Jasmine Mews?’

‘When we get there, turn into it, then run like hell to the end and hide.’

‘Why?’ Ellie asked. ‘What’s going on, Zak?’

‘It’s just a game,’ Zak said. ‘I want to play a trick on someone. You up for it?’

Ellie shrugged. ‘Suppose so,’ she said.

They continued to walk. Just as they reached the side street, Zak and Ellie turned sharply; and the moment they were out of sight of the main road, they ran down the cobbled mews.

There were only a few cars parked here, outside the small, cottage-like houses. At the end of the street was an alley running at right angles. They turned left into it, then stopped, out of breath. Zak pressed his back against the wall and peered round the corner.

He saw a man. From a distance it was difficult to make out his features, but he was quite tall, maybe in his sixties with a tanned face and scruffy, shoulder-length hair. The man stood at the end of the mews for just long enough to see that it was deserted. Then he quickly turned and walked away.

Zak felt Ellie tapping his shoulder. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ said Zak, his voice a million miles away. ‘I just don’t know.’

The next day was Saturday. Zak woke early. He always did these days. Since his parents’ death, sleep was hard to come by. He got dressed and went downstairs.

To his surprise, his aunt was already up. She was standing in the small kitchen, her hair in a net and a cigarette in her hand, boiling the kettle. She looked over her shoulder, saw Zak then turned her attention back to her tea-making. No ‘good morning’. No nothing. He shrugged and headed back towards the stairs.

His uncle and aunt – Vivian and Godfrey Lewis –
didn’t want him there, and they weren’t afraid to show it. After Mum and Dad had died in Nigeria, they’d agreed to take him in. It had been a choice between them or moving up to Macclesfield where his other cousin, Ben, lived. But Zak hadn’t really wanted to relocate north, and Ben had a habit of ending up in crazy situations. So Vivian and Godfrey it was, and they didn’t let a day go by without reminding Zak in some small way that he wasn’t really welcome in the small terraced house of 63 Acacia Drive.

‘Zak!’

His aunt was at the bottom of the stairs. He turned round to look at her.

‘We’re taking Ellie out for the day. Lunch and then a movie. You’ll be all right here, won’t you?’

Zak tried not to look disappointed. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be fine, Aunt Vivian.’

He continued walking up the stairs.

Ellie was in the doorway of her bedroom, still in her pyjamas. She had obviously heard her mum, and as Zak walked past, she mouthed the words ‘I’m sorry’ at him. He gave her a smile – it wasn’t her fault, after all – then continued towards his room.

A tap on his shoulder. Ellie had followed him and as he turned round she gave him a hug. ‘I wish you could come with us,’ she said.

Zak smiled. There was something about Ellie that
always made him feel better. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Have a nice day, yeah?’

Ellie and her parents left at half past nine. The house was quiet. Zak spent some time on the family computer – he’d installed some plug-ins that kept his browsing history private, just in case he got in trouble for using it. But it was sunny outside and he felt cooped up. He decided to go for a walk.

There was a garage at the end of the road. Zak stopped off there and bought himself a can of Coke with the last of his change. He’d inherited what little money his mum and dad had, but it was in trust and his uncle and aunt weren’t exactly the generous types – at least, not when it came to Zak.