Deadfall: Agent 21 (2 page)

‘Understood,’ Zak said.

Even though he’d just downed his Coke, his mouth felt dry. It was always like this in the moments before an op. A mixture of excitement and fear. You could get addicted to it. Zak already had.

He reached out to grab his phone. An important device. If he was in trouble, all he needed to do was type a code – 6482 – and Raf and Gabs would receive the distress call and be there in seconds.

As he picked up the phone, it vibrated. A single buzz. The screen lit up and Zak and Gabs exchanged a glance. Only four people knew this number: Zak himself, Gabs, Raf and Michael back in London.

He picked it up and swiped the screen.

His eyes widened. It was a picture message. The black and white image was grainy – it looked like a still from a CCTV image. But there was no doubt of what it showed: Zak, a bag slung over his shoulder, walking through customs at Johannesburg O.R. Tambo airport. That had been two hours ago.

Beneath the picture were the words:
Welcome to South Africa. Malcolm
.

Zak’s eyes narrowed. He showed the screen to Gabs.

‘
Malcolm?
How on earth did
he
know we were here?’ she said.

The cogs in Zak’s brain were already working
overtime. Malcolm was a highly intelligent computer hacker who had helped Zak during his last mission in London. A weird guy, but brilliant. The authorities wanted to keep him under lock and key, but Malcolm had escaped their clutches with Zak’s help. Zak and his Guardian Angels were the only people who knew the hacker was living off the grid in South Africa, and they’d kept quiet about it. The guy deserved a break.

Zak was quite convinced that there wasn’t a computer system Malcolm couldn’t break into. That included airport security, and here was the proof.

‘Stands to reason,’ he muttered.

‘What does?’ Gabs said.

‘If I know Malcolm, he’ll have hacked into the airport’s systems and will be running facial recognition software on anyone who comes through. A kind of early-warning system, in case anybody’s coming to get him.’

Gabs thought about that for a moment. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said.

‘Me neither.’

‘We should abort.’ She raised one sleeve to her mouth, ready to speak into the hidden comms microphone wirelessly linked to Raf’s hidden earpiece.

Like lightning, Zak grabbed Gabs’s wrist and lowered it back to the table. He understood her
panic. They were supposed to be off the radar and it looked like they’d been compromised. But Zak didn’t see it that way. Malcolm was an odd-bod, no question. Not the kind of guy you’d want to be stuck in a lift with. But he was OK with Zak. This was just his strange way of saying hi.

‘I trust Malcolm,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fine. And anyway, maybe we could turn this to our advantage.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If Malcolm can hack airport security, he can hack the CCTV in a toy shop. I know Michael said he’d put his best people on it, but I bet none of them are as good as Malcolm. We know where he lives.’ Zak tapped his phone to bring up an address. ‘Number sixty-seven Mandela Drive. It’s nearby. Why don’t we just ask him?’ He looked over at Fun World. ‘It’s safer than walking straight into the lion’s den.’

A moment’s pause. Then Gabs shook her head. ‘We have our orders,’ she said. ‘Let’s get this over and done with.’

She left a bank note on the table – both Zak and Gabs had a pocketful of cash, just in case – then they both stood up and left the café.

The brutal African heat hit Zak like a hammer as he stepped out into the street. So did the noise of the busy road. Car engines, horns, people shouting at each other. They waited for a gap in the traffic, then
crossed. Neither of them spoke to or even acknowledged Raf. And Zak didn’t give Gabs any word of farewell. He simply peeled off and entered Fun World, leaving her to take up her position outside.

Time check: 11.13hrs.

The first thing Zak heard was the music being piped round the shop. It was soft but frenetic – the sort of thing you’d hear in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Music that begged you to have fun. He zoned it out and concentrated on his surroundings.

He estimated that there were fifty customers on the ground floor. Half of them adults, half children. And there were ten shop assistants, each wearing a smart red blazer. One of them was juggling with four balls. Another was demonstrating a small, remote-controlled helicopter.

One side of Fun World’s ground floor was devoted to teddy bears. Tiny ones, huge ones, and every size in between. There was nothing menacing about them, but like the clown pictures, they chilled Zak. For a moment he stood statue-still, and thought back to his briefing session . . .

‘Watch this,’ Michael had said, handing him an iPad. Zak had tapped the screen and a video clip had started playing. There was no sound, and the camerawork was juddering. It appeared to have been taken in an area of
jungle – Zak could see thick, lush vegetation in the background. But the focus of the picture was a flight case on the ground, wide open, containing perhaps 200 cuddly elephants.

A hand appeared on screen. It held a scalpel, which it used to cut open one of these elephants, up to its breast, under the head and along its trunk. The hand folded the soft toy inside out, to reveal a plastic bag filled with a white powder.

‘Cocaine,’ Michael had said. ‘Very high quality. Stashes of drugs like this have been popping up all over Asia, and a fair few in Europe too. It’s not a bad hiding place, the guts of a soft toy . . .’

‘Not a bad hiding place,’ Zak muttered to himself. Then he shook his head. Surely none of the toys on display would be hiding any cocaine. He watched a little South African girl holding a Hello Kitty up to her mum, who shook her head and firmly put it back.

‘May I help you, sir?’

Zak blinked. A shop assistant was standing in front of him. He was young, probably no older than sixteen, and had a name badge on his red jacket: ‘Junior’. His skin was black, and his hair twisted into scalp-tight dreadlocks. Each of his cheeks had a thin, pale scar rising from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

Like a smile.

Zak didn’t recognize the face. He relaxed slightly. ‘Harry Potter wands,’ he said. ‘Do you sell them?’

‘Of course, sir. Third floor. Shall I show you?’

‘Don’t worry, mate. I’ll find them. Told my sister I’d get her a Hermione one.’

Zak cursed inwardly.
Keep a lie simple. The less information you give someone, the fewer holes they can pick in it . . .

Junior looked puzzled. ‘Who is Hermione?’ he asked.

‘She’s . . . Never mind. Thanks for your help, mate.’ Zak nodded at the shop assistant and headed towards the escalators at the centre of the shop. As the moving stairs carried him towards the first floor, he looked back down over the ground floor. The shop assistant with the weird scar was now nowhere to be seen.

He circled the first floor. There were fewer customers here, Zak realized, as he stepped past Xboxes and PlayStations and through a section of video-game cartridges. Every time he saw one of the shop assistants in their smart red blazers, he took a mental snapshot of their face. None of them rang any bells.

Second floor. Jigsaw puzzles and board games. He saw one kid drawing a house using an Etch A Sketch
and felt a sudden pang as he remembered doing the same thing with his dad.

Keep your mind on the job
, he told himself.

To his ten o’clock, in the far corner of the store, he saw a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera. A red light was flashing next to it. Was it Zak’s imagination, or had he just noticed a tiny movement of the lens?

CCTV cameras move all the time, he told himself. Relax. You’re nearly done. Another couple of hours, you’ll be on a plane out of here.

Third floor. It was practically deserted. He walked past
Lord of the Rings
figurines, and models of characters he didn’t even recognize.

‘Harry Potter this way, sir!’

Zak flinched and turned suddenly. Junior had appeared from nowhere and was now standing right next to him. He grinned and nodded. ‘This way, sir. This way.’

He pointed towards the far side of the toy store. There was a small replica of a castle, surrounded by wands and cloaks for sale. Zak shook his head. ‘It’s all right, mate. I’m—’

‘This way, sir. You must come!’ Junior lightly touched Zak’s right arm and led him towards the miniature castle.

Zak’s senses moved into high alert. Suddenly he wasn’t in control. He yanked his elbow away from
Junior, but he was now aware of a second red jacket to his left-hand side.

Another young man. He had the same scars as Junior on his face.

Zak felt a chill in his guts and his eyes flicked around the toy store, looking for an exit, while his hands felt for the phone in his pockets. He needed to make the distress call.

Too late.

At exactly the same time, the boys grabbed an arm each. Their grip was strong enough to hurt as they dragged Zak towards Hogwarts, where he could just make out the sight of more red jackets lurking behind the castle entrance.

He gathered all his strength and suddenly released it in a frenzy of struggling. But the boys were powerful. They continued to drag him towards the far side of the store.

Through the entrance into the toy castle.

It was cramped in here. Maybe four metres by four. But three more boys in red jackets were waiting for him.

That made it five against one. Bad odds.

The walls were lined with shelves full of toys. Two of the boys were holding Harry Potter wands, the thin ends in their fists, the thick ends ready to strike.

Crack!
One of the wands slammed against his
head. Then a second. Zak felt his knees wobble.

One of the guys punched him in the pit of the stomach. Air whooshed from his lungs and he bent double. A knee came up and cracked against the underside of his chin.

He was on the the floor, looking up. Five boys in red jackets were kicking him brutally, as hard as they could, in the stomach and the face. Blood spurted from his nose, hot and wet. He tried to cry out in pain, but without air in his lungs he couldn’t.

Suddenly, one of the boys dropped to the floor. He was kneeling by Zak’s side, and now his face was inches from Zak’s. He too had scars on his cheeks. And he was holding something in his fist. It looked like a yellow golf ball, but was covered in black packaging. Zak saw the words
Golden Snitch
printed on the box.

The boy sneered and Zak saw yellow teeth like tombstones. He was bizarrely aware of the piped music still playing in the background.

The boy spoke. He had a whispering, rasping voice. ‘Welcome to Fun World,’ he said. Then with a grunt that suggested he was using all his strength, he whacked the snitch down on Zak’s forehead.

A moment of blinding pain. A searing white light.

Then everything went dark.

‘You need to keep calm, Gabs,’ Raf said. ‘He’s probably fine, and even if he isn’t, we’ll never find him if we’re panicking. You know that.’

‘
Don’t
tell
me
to keep calm,’ Gabs spat. ‘Just
don’t
, OK?’

And even Raf would have to admit that his voice had an edge of panic as he looked this way and that across the toy shop, desperately trying to spot their young protégé.

It was 11.45 a.m. Thirty-two minutes since Zak had entered Fun World. He should have exited the store by now.

Raf and Gabs had made the call to enter Fun World at 11.43hrs precisely. Now they were standing side by side on the escalator. Gabs had her phone in her right hand and was examining it carefully. A
flashing green dot on the screen indicated how close they were to Zak’s own handset.

They were getting closer.

‘I had a bad feeling about all this from the beginning,’ Gabs said. ‘We should have aborted as soon as he got a message from that weirdo Malcolm. Nobody should know we’re here.
Nobody
.’

Heads were turning in their direction. Gabs didn’t care. A strange kind of numbness fell over her every time Zak was in trouble – which seemed to happen more and more recently. It was part of the job, of course, but that didn’t mean Gabs had to like it. Sometimes it sent all her good sense and training out of the window. But she didn’t care. Zak was like her kid brother, and she’d do anything to get him back.

And she knew that, beneath his wordless, grim exterior, Raf felt the same. Not to mention the fact that Zak had saved their lives several times now. They were soldiers, the three of them. OK, so they didn’t wear camouflage gear or have a shouty sergeant major to deal with. They were a very special kind of soldier, and the wars they fought weren’t reported on the six o’clock news. But what was true for every other soldier in the world was true for them: on the field of battle, you always look after your buddies.

Third floor. The green dot was flashing faster.

Faster.

They were walking to the far side of the store. Towards an area done up as a mock castle, full of Harry Potter toys.

Now they were inside the castle, and the green dot had stopped flashing.

Gabs looked around.

Then down.

She gasped. Then she bent down. On the floor was a smartphone, almost identical to Gabs’s own. Just one difference: the screen was smashed. It looked like someone had dug a heel into it.

‘It’s his,’ she breathed.

But Raf was already looking around. ‘We need to access the CCTV,’ he said. Then he swore. It was impossible. They’d already established that. All the camera images from the store were encrypted and beamed out to an unknown server. That was the whole reason they were here . . .

‘What other exits are there?’ Gabs said, pushing past Raf out onto the shop floor again. There were only five or six customers up here. With a sick feeling in her stomach, she realized Zak could have easily been abducted with nobody noticing.

Raf pointed to the right. There was a fire exit about fifteen metres away. They strode towards
it and Gabs pressed down on the opening lever.