Deadfall: Agent 21 (3 page)

The door opened. But Gabs felt something as she touched the lever. Wetness. She looked at her fingertips.

‘Blood,’ she breathed.

They stepped through the fire exit and found themselves at the top of a metal staircase fitted to the back of the building. They looked down to the ground. They could see steel bins and a couple of parked cars. But no people. And certainly no Zak.

‘Sir, madam, may I help you?’

A young African lad with tight dreadlocks and a red blazer had approached. Now he stood in the doorframe of the fire exit. His name tag said ‘Junior’ and he had a scar on each cheek.

‘Did you see anybody leaving this way?’ Raf demanded.

Junior smiled blandly. ‘I must please ask you to step back inside the store. The fire exit is for emergencies only.’

‘This
is
an emergency,’ Gabs snapped.

‘Madam, I
will
be forced to call security.’

Gabs felt Raf’s hand on her wrist. ‘It’s OK, pal,’ she said. ‘Keep your hair on. We’re coming back in.’ The two of them re-entered the store.

‘You seen a kid about your age looking like he was
in trouble?’ Gabs asked. She was struggling to keep her voice calm.

Junior gave an apologetic look. ‘We see
many
young people in Fun World, madam. They come from all over Johannesburg.’ He made a point of pulling the fire exit closed. Clearly feeling the wetness on the handle, he looked at his fingertips just as Gabs had done. His eyes showed no emotion. ‘Paint,’ he said under his breath.

‘You might recognize this one,’ Gabs insisted. ‘Blond hair, baseball cap.’

Junior shook his head. ‘I have seen nobody like that,’ he said. ‘I am sorry.’ He inclined his head pleasantly, flashed them a smile, then walked away.

‘
Wait!
’ Gabs called. Junior stopped and looked back. ‘Those scars . . .’ she said.

Junior smiled. ‘A tribal tradition,’ he explained.

Gabs narrowed her eyes. Something about the scar worried her. She’d seen it before, but couldn’t place it.

Junior walked away.

‘I don’t trust that guy,’ Gabs said under her breath. ‘I want to question him. Properly.’

But Raf’s hand was still on her wrist. ‘Look,’ he said sharply.

She looked up. Junior had walked all the way to
the opposite side of the store. He was staring at them, his arms folded and a menacing glint in his eye. On either side were two other store assistants. They both had red jackets. And they both had scarred faces.

‘There’ll be others,’ Raf said very calmly. ‘We’re unarmed and we’ve no backup. We need to get out of here. Even if we take them on ourselves, we’ll waste time. And I’ve got a feeling time is something Zak doesn’t have much of. Agreed?’

Gabs’s jaw was clenched. But she nodded, and the two of them headed towards the escalator and descended back down to the ground floor in big strides.

‘We still need to access the security-camera footage,’ Gabs said as they stepped out onto the pavement. ‘We
have
to know what happened.’

‘It’s impossible. Michael put his best people on it, remember?’

‘Nothing’s impossible. We just need to find the right guy.’

Raf pinched his forehead in exhaustion. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I said. Somebody knows how to view the footage of these cameras. We just have to go find him.’

A silence.

‘Sounds to me like you already have someone in mind,’ Raf said.

‘Yeah,’ Gabs replied, striding north towards the underground car park where they’d left their vehicle. ‘As a matter of fact I have.’

Pain.

Firstly in Zak’s head. It throbbed where the toy had smashed against his skull. His whole head ached and he felt sick.

Secondly around his wrists. They were tightly tied together behind his back and they throbbed as much as his head. The blood flow was clearly restricted.

He was face down on a hard, concrete floor. The concrete had pulled all the warmth from him, and he was shivering. With a groan, he rolled onto his back, then squinted. Directly above him, in line with his body, was a strip light. It hurt his eyes.

What time was it? He didn’t know. He still had his watch on, but couldn’t see it. He didn’t even know what day it was.

Zak forced himself into a sitting position and looked around. He was in a narrow aisle between two lines of metal shelving. They were about three metres high, and were filled with toys. This looked like a warehouse of some sort. He pushed himself up
to his feet, his hands still tied behind his back, and took a deep breath as a wave of nausea and dizziness hit him.

The aisle was about forty metres long. He staggered to one end where he found an iron fire door with a metal bar across it. The metal around the base of the door had gone rusty. If moisture had got in through the bottom of the door to rust it like this, it probably meant it led outside. The sound of heavy traffic on the other side confirmed this.

Zak turned his back towards the door, then used his tied hands to push down on the bar. It didn’t move. The door was locked.

He put his hand in his pocket. Nobody had stolen his cash – proof, if proof were needed, that this was not an ordinary abduction.

He prowled along the wall, counting the remaining aisles in this warehouse. Sixteen. All of them full of the same kinds of toys he’d seen at Fun World. Dolls. Colouring books. Even a stash of Harry Potter merchandise. Zak could do with a bit of wizardry now.

He felt panic rising in his chest, so he stopped to breathe deeply. He could see that his phone had been removed from his jeans pocket, so there was no hope of making a distress call. By twisting his head to look over his shoulder, he could see that his wrists
had been bound with a plastic cable tie. Easy to apply. Impossible to remove without cutting through the plastic. And Zak had no knife.

He took a deep breath to steady his sickness, then ran to the end of the aisle he was in, keeping his feet light so they didn’t echo round the warehouse. He had no way of knowing, after all, if he was alone in here. At the end of the aisle, he turned right and followed the wall again. There was another door here. Identical to the first.

He was about to try the bar again when he heard voices on the other side. He froze.

They were speaking French. ‘
Tu es sûr qu’il est au sécurisé?
’

Zak’s fluent French kicked in; languages had been a big part of his training.
Are you sure he’s safe
?

‘
Of course. The other door’s locked. And if he tries to get past us, we’ll deal with him. Anyway, he probably won’t wake up. You hit him pretty hard.
’

‘
Thought I’d killed him for a minute
.’

‘
Good job you didn’t. He told us to keep him alive, remember
.’

‘
Who?
’

‘
What do you mean, who? Señor Martinez, of course.
’

Zak’s blood turned to ice.

‘
That guy gives me the creeps
,’ said the first voice.

‘
Me too. I heard from one of the others that he’s got big plans somewhere else in Africa. When he has big plans, it usually ends up being painful for someone. My guess is he wants to kill the prisoner himself. So, seriously, let’s just leave him on the floor of the warehouse where he can’t come to any harm. Martinez will be here in twenty minutes anyway. He was on his way to the airport, but he diverted when he found out we’d captured this kid. Don’t know why he hates him so much, but he really does
.
If we’re lucky, maybe he’ll let us watch what he does to him . . .
’

A short, ugly laugh.

Zak stepped away from the door.

His bones ached with fear.

He checked his watch. 12.20hrs.

He’d known Cruz, his archenemy, wasn’t dead. And now he was on his way. By 12.40 he’d be here. Zak was trapped, unable to get out of this toy warehouse and unable to raise the alarm.

The panic grew stronger. Stronger than his fading dizziness and nausea.

He had twenty minutes.

Think, he told himself.

Think!

He was back on St Peter’s Crag, walking with Raf along a rocky headland. Raf had stopped suddenly and
bent down. When he stood up straight again, he was carrying a worm between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Breakfast?’ he offered, without even the hint of a smile on his serious face.

‘Don’t be gross,’ Zak had said.

‘I’m not. Seriously, Zak. Sometimes you have to make use of whatever you can find. There will be times when you’ll think you’re done for. Chances are you’re not, if you can improvise with what’s around you.’ He bent down again to pick up a jagged piece of flint. He held it up with the worm. ‘Most people would see a worm and a stone,’ he said. ‘You need to see a meal and a weapon. Humans have always improvised with what comes to hand, Zak. Most of them have forgotten how. You don’t have that luxury.’

Improvise.

Zak had to do it quickly. Two minutes had already passed. He had eighteen minutes before Cruz got here.

First things first: he needed to get these plasticuffs off. He couldn’t do anything with his hands tied. But he was surrounded by toys. Surely nothing in here would contain a sharp blade. He headed back down one of the aisles, his eyes darting left and right, looking for something that might help him.

Cuddly toys.

Cheap, brightly coloured laptops.

Chemistry sets.

Painting kits.

A pile of children’s night lights.

Jigsaw puzzles.

He stopped, turned round and stepped back to the night lights.

Improvise.

There were two types of night light – one covered with a crescent-moon shade, the other with a pale blue star. Zak awkwardly backed up towards the shelf and grabbed a crescent moon. He held it blindly behind his back and, after thirty seconds of fiddling, managed to unclip the shade.

Leaving a bare bulb connected to a piece of flex, with an electric plug at one end.

Zak felt a moment of excitement. He’d found his worm.

Now he needed a plug socket. He ran to the end of the aisle and looked along the length of the wall. He spotted a socket about three metres beyond the locked door and ran towards it, then crouched on the ground by its side.

The bulb of the night light was small – about the length of Zak’s thumb and twice the thickness. Manoeuvring it carefully behind his back, he
wrapped the hem of his T-shirt around the glass. Now that it was protected by the fabric, he cupped the bulb in his right hand and gently squeezed.

There was a muffled crack as the glass broke. Gingerly, so that he didn’t damage the filament, Zak unfurled his fingers and let the shattered glass fall to the floor. He laid the broken bulb on the floor, then plugged the night light into the socket. It lit up. There was a glow behind him, and he could feel the warmth of the filament.

Carefully, he shuffled back towards the broken bulb. He shifted his wrist so the plastic cable tie was as close to the burning filament as he could make it. Not too close, though. An electric shock might knock him out again. He estimated that he was a couple of centimetres from the filament when he stopped and waited for the heat to do its work.

Flesh scorches quicker than plastic melts. So Zak knew the pain was coming. After only five seconds, his skin started burning. He gritted his teeth but didn’t move his wrists away from the heat source.

Ten seconds passed.

Fifteen.

He pulled his wrists apart with all his strength. There was a little give in the warm plastic. But he reckoned it needed another ten seconds. His
burning skin was agony. He thought perhaps he could smell it.

Twenty seconds.

Twenty-five.

He couldn’t take it any more. With a gasp of pain he yanked himself away from the filament. But he couldn’t give the plastic time to cool down again. Once more he strained against the cable tie, and this time he felt it stretch a little more.

And a little more. Like a piece of chewing gum being pulled from both sides.

A gap of five centimetres opened up between his wrists. He wriggled his hands out of the cuffs and immediately sucked at the burned flesh on his right wrist.

Ignore the pain
, he told himself.
You’re not out of here yet . . .

A white Range Rover pulled up outside a two-storey house in Mandela Drive, part of a well-off residential suburb to the south of Jo’burg. This was not the house Raf and Gabs actually wanted – they wanted number 67, which was fifty metres further down the street, but they would cover the final distance by foot.

First, though, Gabs needed something. She walked round to the back of the Range Rover and opened up the boot. Then she lifted the floor panel to reveal a spare tyre and a bag of tools. She helped herself to a black iron crowbar.

‘Go easy on the kid,’ Raf said. ‘Remember, he
doesn’t respond to adults. He’s not quite all there in the head.’

Gabs ignored that. Her jaw was set and her eyes flashed. ‘Ready?’ she asked Raf.

‘Ready.’

Number 67 was at the corner of two streets. There were two entrances to the house – the main one facing onto Mandela Drive, and a side entrance facing onto Cape Road. As soon as they hit the junction, Gabs and Raf peeled away from each other. Raf took the main entrance while Gabs headed for the side.

The wooden door had a spy hole in it and Gabs wondered if she should step away and hide round the side of the porch. But she decided not to. She reckoned that, when the occupant of this house saw someone he didn’t recognize at the front door, he’d be in a hurry to leave by the side entrance. He wouldn’t be stopping to check if there was somebody else here.

Gabs gripped the crowbar firmly and listened carefully. A few seconds later, she heard the doorbell ringing.

Footsteps inside, heading to the front door.

Then faster footsteps, heading back into the house.