Endgame (Agent 21) (11 page)

He was halfway over to them when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He froze. His eyes quickly picked out the nearest exit – fifty metres away below a yellow sign saying ‘Taxis’. He drew a deep breath, then turned.

A young woman with brown hair pulled tightly back into a bun was standing there, carrying a clipboard. ‘Excuse me, sir, I’m doing a short survey about airport facilities. I wonder if—’

‘Sorry,’ Ricky said, relief crashing over him, ‘I’m going to miss my flight . . .’

His tension mounted as they passed through the security checkpoint and then passport control. At any moment he expected to feel a hand on his shoulder, or a line of armed guards approaching. But it seemed that they were just three faces in the crowd. Whatever Malcolm had done to keep them anonymous, he had done it well.

At 12:30 precisely, Ricky was sitting in a comfortable first-class seat in the nose of an Airbus, waiting for takeoff, his seat belt clipped round his waist. He knew he should be alert. He knew he should be keeping an eye out for threats. But now the plane was moving, and for the next nine and a half hours he wasn’t going anywhere. He hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. He was physically and emotionally drained. And the seat was, after all, very comfortable . . .

He was asleep before the wheels left the ground.

Ricky was awoken by Zak shaking his shoulder. He sat up with a start, and for a moment he couldn’t work out where he was. Then he felt the hum of the aircraft’s engines, and the horror of the past twenty-four hours hit him – Felix dead, Cruz Martinez’s diabolical videos.

‘We need to talk,’ Zak said.

Ricky unclipped himself from his seat and followed Zak along the aisle. At the head of the plane there was a lounge bar. A few passengers were sitting around with drinks, but there was one table, close to a window, that was free. They took a seat there, and Zak ordered a Coke for each of them. Ricky looked through the window. Below, there was icy terrain as far as he could see.

‘Greenland,’ Zak said, speaking quietly so only Ricky could hear him. ‘We’re over the northern Atlantic. Harsh terrain down there. But not as harsh as what we can expect when we hit Alaska. Did Felix ever give you any instruction in cold weather survival?’

Ricky shook his head. All his training had been done on the streets of London. The idea of being activated on terrain that wasn’t covered with tarmac was anathema to him. ‘None,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘A little. If we find ourselves out in the open, we’ll need to be vigilant about hypothermia, frostbite and snow blindness. If we sweat too much, the moisture can freeze on our skin. And it’ll be hard to find food it we don’t take sufficient supplies with us.’ Zak glanced across the cabin. They could just make out Malcolm, fast asleep, his glasses halfway down his nose. ‘He’ll find it difficult,’ he said.

‘I think you made a mistake, letting him come.’

Zak’s face was expressionless. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not. I have a feeling Malcolm will have more of a part to play by the end of this.’

There was a short silence before Ricky brought up something that had been bothering him. ‘If we find this Cruz guy, and if everything you’ve told me about him is true, he won’t let Raf and Gabs go once you’ve handed yourself over. You know that, right?’

‘Of course,’ Zak said. ‘But what else can I do? I’m not going to leave my Guardian Angels to rot. I owe them too much for that.’

‘Your only chance of finding them will be to force their location out of Cruz.’

‘You mean, torture him?’

‘It’s as good a word as any. Do you think you’d be up to it? Would you have the stomach?’

Zak turned and stared out of the window, an unreadable look on his face. ‘I know
how
to kill,’ he said quietly, ‘but I’ve never done it. I’ve undergone resistance to interrogation training, but I’ve never put anyone else through the same horrors. If my Guardian Angels were here, they’d do everything they could to stop me from crossing either of those lines. But they’re not here.’ He turned back to Ricky, and his face suddenly looked older. ‘The Agency recruited us because we were kids,’ he said. ‘But we can’t stay kids for ever. Most children have – what do they call it, a rite of passage? A life-changing moment that marks the point when they become adults. Maybe this is ours.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘Or mine, at least. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. All I know is that this isn’t the first time Cruz Martinez has tried to get to me by endangering Raf and Gabs. But it
is
going to be the last.’

Ricky didn’t reply. There was something in Zak’s voice that chilled him. He’d only met the guy once before yesterday, but he could tell that Zak had changed. He didn’t know if it was for the better or for the worse. All he knew was this: next time Zak Darke and Cruz Martinez met face to face, only one of them was walking away.

Zak looked at his watch. ‘We land in three hours,’ he said. ‘We should follow Malcolm’s lead and get some more sleep. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need it.’ He frowned. ‘This is all going too smoothly,’ he muttered, almost to himself. ‘It can’t last.’

He stood up and walked back to his seat, leaving Ricky to stare out over the frozen wastes of the north.

It was a cavernous space. Metal walls. Metal roof. Concrete floor. Harsh strip lighting flickering high overhead.

And cold. The kind of cold that saps everything from you. That makes your joints feel so solid you can barely move them. The kind of cold that hurts. There was frost on the walls and icicles hanging, in places, from the ceiling. The only blessing was that the interior was protected from the harsh wind outside.

There were four figures in this space. Two of them – both men – were standing. The other two – a man and a woman – were sprawled on the floor with their hands tied between their backs.

The two men standing spoke in Spanish. Clouds of frosty condensation billowed around them with each word. One of them had only a single eye. The missing one was covered over by a pale layer of skin. ‘The Russians want them dead,’ he said.

‘The Russians, Calaca, can wait,’ said the second figure. He was much younger than Calaca, but his eyes were even colder than the icy air. ‘They are still useful to us.’ He looked down at their two prisoners. They were a pitiful sight, shivering almost uncontrollably. The bleeding wounds on their faces had frosted over in the cold, and it was all they could do to keep their eyes open – as if their bodies were trying to shut down, but they were forcing themselves to stay awake, just a minute at a time. A helicopter had put them down on the water’s edge, and they had been forced to follow a difficult path to get here. It had been hard enough for the two able-bodied men. For their prisoners, it had been torture – only their high level of fitness had made it possible for them to get through the journey at all.

The young man crouched down to look at them. ‘You think,’ he said in English, ‘that your boy wonder is coming to rescue you?’

The prisoners stared at him, but they seemed incapable of responding.

The young man suddenly lashed out, swiping the woman harshly round the side of her face. ‘When I speak to you,’ he hissed, ‘you answer.’

The woman’s glazed eyes rolled as a fresh trickle of blood dripped from her nostril. ‘Whatever . . . you . . . say . . . sweetie,’ she whispered.

‘If I was in his shoes,’ the young man spat, ‘I would leave you here to rot, or freeze.’

‘If you were in his shoes, sweetie,’ whispered the woman, wincing with every word, ‘you’d find they wouldn’t fit.’

Calaca bent down now. ‘If I cut out her tongue,’ he said, ‘it would put an end to her smart remarks.’

The young man shook his head. ‘No, my friend,’ he said. ‘She’ll be needing her tongue. They both will. It’s time for them to send our precious Agent 21 another video. Maybe this time I’ll let them talk to him. It would be a shame for him to lose interest.’ He grinned nastily at his prisoners. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘After my Russian friends have extracted everything they need from Zak, and they’ve handed him back to me to dispose of in whatever way I see fit, what will your people do? Employ number 22? Or can’t your kids count that high?’

He laughed at his own joke, but only for a few seconds. There was something in the cool gaze the woman gave him that he didn’t find funny. He looked at Calaca. ‘You have the camera?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Start filming. And hand me your knife.’

The blade which Calaca handed him was long, narrow and very sharp. The flickering strip light reflected off the metal, which made it look like a shard of ice. The young man’s thin, cold face had a greedy expression as he held it up, with Calaca filming him on a handheld GoPro camera. He approached his female prisoner first, held the blade lightly against her bruised, swollen right cheek, then gently sliced the skin. Her eyes widened slightly, but she gave no other indication that she was in pain. The young man pulled his hand away to reveal a knife wound, no wider than a paper cut but at least ten centimetres long. Blood streaked down the woman’s pale skin as the young man moved over to his male prisoner, whose cheek he sliced in exactly the same way.

He stepped back to admire his handiwork. Both faces looked suitably gruesome: bruised, exhausted and smeared with blood, new and old.

‘Go ahead,’ the young man said. ‘Give your boy wonder a message. Make it count. It might be the last time you ever speak to him.’

‘Would you like some headphones?’

Zak blinked at the heavily made-up stewardess who was holding out a set of inflight headphones in a clear plastic bag. ‘Thanks,’ he said quietly. ‘Whatever.’

Their landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport had been choppy, but not nearly as choppy as their takeoff two hours later. The aircraft taking them north-west to the Alaskan town of Anchorage was an elderly twin-prop, easily buffeted by the high winds that screamed across the runway. It was almost as if someone was warning them not to travel north, but Zak put that thought from his mind. They needed to rely on logic, facts and skill. Not superstition.

It was a very bumpy flight. As the light started to fail, Zak just had time to see that the terrain below was turning white again, before his view was obscured by thick, grey, swirling cloud. And as the aircraft descended through that cloud bank, the lights flashing at the end of the wings illuminated thick sheets of heavy snow, which was falling almost sideways thanks to the howling winds. This wasn’t picturesque, Christmas-card snow. It was harsh, violent and strangely alien. Zak closed his eyes, trying to ignore the fact that even the cabin crew looked scared, and attempting to put the violent shaking of the aircraft from his mind. He’d flown a light aircraft before, and even been involved in a dramatic crash landing. But that didn’t make it any easier.

The tyres screamed as they touched down. Zak realized he was sweating. Through the aircraft windows he could see snow-shifting vehicles along the side of the runway, their neon lights flashing in the frosty night. As they queued up to leave the aircraft, he saw that both Ricky and Malcolm had faces that were as white as the snow drifting outside. They were obviously as glad as he was to be back down on solid ground.

‘You OK?’ Zak asked Malcolm quietly. Malcolm nodded a bit unconvincingly. ‘Cousins, remember,’ Zak breathed. He wasn’t sure Malcolm was listening.

As they stepped out of the aircraft onto the landing steps, the cold air made Zak gasp as it hit his chest. The swirling snow bit into his face. From the top of the landing steps, he surveyed the surrounding airfield. There were a lot of flashing lights, but he couldn’t tell what kind of vehicles they were coming from because visibility through the snow was so poor. Somehow that made him even more anxious than the bumpy flight had.

Ricky drew up behind him as they walked down the steps. He was shivering. ‘What next?’ he asked.

‘We clear passport control, then we find out about flights to Nome, and then on to Little Diomede. And we get online. We need to see if there’s anything else from Cruz.’

Having successfully cleared immigration at Seattle, getting through passport control at this smaller, more out-of-the-way airport was somehow less nerve-racking. They encountered no difficulties. In the immigration hall, Ricky’s eyes picked out a couple of US army personnel. He saw that they each had a badge on their sleeve showing a picture of a ferocious polar bear, and figured that had to be the insignia of the Alaskan branch of the army. He kept his head down, and didn’t catch their eye.

It was just past 11 p.m. as Zak, Ricky and Malcolm walked out onto the airport concourse. At this time of night, very few of the airport shops were open. Just a café, and a stall selling postcards and cheap Alaskan souvenirs. They used a few of their dollars to buy hot coffee and chocolate bars. Zak left Ricky and Malcolm to refuel, then approached the one ticketing booth that seemed to be open.

It was manned by a broad-shouldered guy in his late sixties. He wore a baseball cap with a picture of a brown bear embroidered on it, and a scowl that was about as welcoming as the weather outside. He was reading a slim paperback book, and pretended not to see Zak at first. When he did finally – and reluctantly – lower his book, Zak gave him what he hoped was a winning smile. ‘I need to know about flights to Nome,’ he said.

The guy raised his book again. ‘You’re not from around here,’ he said in a lazy American drawl.

A hint of steel entered Zak’s eyes. ‘That’s why I’m asking you,’ he said.

‘You can forget about flying north, son. Ain’t been no flights out of here for the past two days with these blizzards. Ain’t going to be none for two days coming, neither. Probably longer.’ He licked one finger, and made a point of carefully turning the page of his book.

Zak narrowed his eyes, but he could tell there was no point arguing. He turned and strode back to the café where Ricky and Malcolm were sitting. Ricky had both hands wrapped round his hot cup of coffee. Malcolm had his laptop out. ‘Weak wireless,’ he said. ‘But I’m on it.’