Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (19 page)

But at least he was still alive. After everything he’d endured since boarding the
Mercantile
, that was something. How long he’d
stay
alive was a different matter. He needed to get help. The volunteer group would surely have declared him and Bea missing by now, but that was scant comfort. As Michael had said, the sea is big and ships are small. Moreover, due to his own actions, the finger of suspicion would be on Ntole, not the
Mercantile
. No, now that the sea had settled and the ship was no longer yawing and lurching, he could try and return to his original plan: to force the skipper to raise a Mayday call.

He winced as he pushed himself to his feet, and he had to stumble against a wall in the darkness just to keep his balance. Breathing deeply, he waited for his nausea to pass. Then he staggered in the direction of the light switch and turned it on. The glow of the bulb burned his retinas. He had to keep his eyes clenched shut for thirty seconds before he could even think of opening them fully.

Sitting on the table was a plate of food. There was also a bottle of water, though this had tumbled onto the floor and rolled to the far end. Zak rushed towards it, unscrewed the top and gulped down half the precious liquid in one. He turned his attention to the food. It was nothing but a few scraps of greasy,
fatty, gristly meat and it tasted disgusting, but he knew he had to get some energy from somewhere and he forced the filthy stuff down his throat before finishing the rest of the water.

The room was just as he’d left it. The folded and torn safety poster was still in pieces on the floor. Clearly none of the crew had bothered to look around the room – or if they had, they hadn’t worked out why he had cut up this laminated plastic. Zak rooted around under his mattress for the credit-card-sized cut-out and approached the door.

With the fingertips of his left hand, he felt around the frame. The gap between it and the door was very narrow. He gently slipped the short edge of his plastic card into the crevice and slid it down until he could feel the catch. When the plastic was pressed against it, he worked deftly, easing his makeshift key-card against the curved edge of the catch. Within seconds he could feel the catch working away from the frame.

And then, suddenly, the door opened inwards, creaking slightly as it did so.

Zak took a deep breath, then stepped out into the corridor. He examined the door. There was a latch that could be operated from the outside. It meant he could close the door now and be able to return.

It was deserted. Deserted and dark. He realized he had no idea what time it was – or even what
day
it was.
It was impossible to say how long he’d been unconscious for. He shut the door behind him and stood quietly for a moment, listening carefully. All he could hear was the low buzz of the engine room, down the corridor to his right. Other than that, nothing.

He turned towards the room next to his. Bea’s room. He pressed his ear against the door. No sound. Her room had a similar latch on the outside. It would have been easy for Zak to enter, but several things stopped him.

He remembered seeing Bea through the night sight from the end of the pier.

Bea had alerted Black Wolf to his presence on the ship.

And then there was the strange Morse code message she had tapped on the wall between their two rooms.

Something wasn’t right about her. If she knew he had escaped, could he trust her not to alert his captors? But if she wasn’t the enemy, how could he fail to help her, annoying as she was? He decided to creep silently past her door. If he was to go through with his plan to force the skipper to raise a Mayday call, he needed to stay unnoticed; and if it worked, and Bea was innocent, the Mayday would help her too.

A minute later he was out on deck, having moved through the ship without encountering anybody. It was dark again. Zak realized he must have been
unconscious for the whole day. There was a wind. It made him shiver and his hair blow around, but he realized it was only caused by the forward motion of the ship. From the hull of the boat, Zak saw powerful jets of water spurting out to sea. He remembered first seeing the
Mercantile
make its way towards Lobambo. It had been shooting out these jets of water then too. Zak still didn’t know what they were for.

The moon was out. It was very bright and, beyond where the jets hit the water, it reflected off an almost still ocean. Zak felt like he was a million miles from the storms and terror he had endured the previous night. But he also felt a million miles from safety. He wished he at least had his iPhone, but no: he had no means of communication. He was alone. The sound of the
Mercantile
ploughing through the water was enough to make him shiver. In a corner of his mind he wondered if he’d ever be able to think about the sea again without remembering his horrible ordeal.

For now, though, he had to put the memory out of his head. He had work to do.

Zak kept his back pressed against the body of the ship as he moved towards its stern. Every five metres he stopped and listened. He heard nothing except the ploughing of the ship through the water. He’d been on deck for approximately thirty seconds, however, when something blocked his view of the moon.

He froze and looked up into the sky. The moon reappeared, but Zak was aware of something floating nearby. Something big. He squinted into the darkness and saw a great shadow floating alongside the ship. It was an enormous bird, with wings the size of a dinosaur’s. And as it hovered in the air, it emitted a loud, lonely cry that seemed to fill the empty skies all around.

‘Albatross,’ Zak muttered to himself. He’d never before seen one of these enormous rare birds, of course. But he’d read about them at school. Legend said that it was bad luck to encounter them at sea. Surely his luck couldn’t get any worse …

He left the albatross to its flight and continued his journey to the stern of the ship. Ten metres along he passed a lifeboat. It was sitting on the deck itself, attached to the main body of the
Mercantile
by an enormous crane-like arm. The arm appeared to be operated by a control panel on deck consisting of a keyhole and a large red button, though Zak assumed that it could also be operated from inside the lifeboat in case of an emergency. At the back of the boat there was a huge outboard motor – much bigger than the one Gabs had operated on the RIB back at Scapa Flow. The boat was covered by a sheet of thick canvas, and there was still a pool of salt water on top of this, which Zak assumed was left over from last night’s
storm. It crossed Zak’s mind that this would be a good escape vessel, but he also knew that to launch himself into the middle of the ocean without any means of navigating back to land would be suicide. Better to trust his luck here in the clutches of Black Wolf than to perish slowly of dehydration, exposure or drowning.

Voices.

Zak spun round. He could vaguely make out two figures at the bow end of the deck. He didn’t hesitate. The canvas on top of the lifeboat was tied on by a thin cord, woven through eyeholes about thirty centimetres apart. He headed round to the far side of the boat where anyone passing would be less likely to see that he had loosened the cord, peeled back the canvas and climbed inside the lifeboat, returning the cover to its position from inside the vessel. He heard the puddle of water sloshing above him and waited several excruciating seconds for it to fall still.

It was dark and rather damp inside the lifeboat, despite the canvas. Zak ignored the water seeping into his salt-encrusted clothes again. Another cry from the albatross pierced the air. Five seconds after that, he could hear the voices again.

‘I’d like to shoot that stupid bird.’ Zak recognized the voice of Barker’s friend. He sounded sour and discontented.

‘If you do that, you’re the stupid one.’ The second man was Eduardo, who had taken Zak to the engine room to retrieve the bomb. ‘
El capitán
is superstitious about things like that. Shoot an albatross, he’ll do the same to you.’

‘It’s only a bird,’ the first man muttered. ‘I’d like to shoot it down and kill that kid while we’re at it. I don’t understand why the skipper’s keeping him alive.’

‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ Eduardo replied. ‘The rendezvous is less than twenty-four hours away now. All we’ll have to do then is sit back and watch.’

‘Since when did
el capitán
ever sit back and let us do anything? He’s got the water cannons on to stop pirates from boarding the ship. Why do we have to keep patrolling the deck? Nobody can board us with those things going …’

And with that, the voices faded away.

The rendezvous is tomorrow
… What rendezvous? Zak had almost forgotten about the diamonds. Was there to be some kind of handover? Perhaps he still had a chance to scupper Black Wolf’s plans.

Or perhaps he should just be thinking about his own safety …

He waited silently in the darkness of the lifeboat and only emerged after another thirty seconds when his acute sense of hearing told him the coast was clear.
Outside the lifeboat he looked along the deck. Nobody there. Eduardo and company were probably circling the ship. He reckoned that gave him about five minutes before they reappeared at his location again. He continued towards the stern.

Five metres past the lifeboat he saw a white metal chest on the left-hand side. He stopped, checked for crew members again, and opened it up.

Zak couldn’t see the contents of this chest very well, so it was up to his fingertips to work out what was inside. It was stuffed full of something soft and dry. Zak felt thin lines of twine attached to each other in a criss-cross pattern. Netting, he realized. A whole bundle of it. Its purpose? Fishing, maybe? Though this was hardly a fisherman’s boat. It didn’t matter. This tangled mess of twine gave him an idea.

The netting was much heavier than it looked, Zak realized as he plunged his hands into the chest and struggled to pull it out. It spilled out onto the deck – a bundle of about a cubic metre. He had to drag it along behind him. It made a hissing sound on the metal deck that seemed horribly loud to Zak, even though it was in reality little more than a whisper. He kept vigilant as he continued towards the stern, stopping every few metres to check everything was clear before carrying on.

The stern deck of the
Mercantile
was an open area
about fifteen metres wide and ten deep. The churning sound of the vessel moving through the water was louder here. Zak realized this was because the mechanisms that propelled the ship were located at the rear. He stood at the corner of the stern deck, checking for danger, before dragging the netting towards the railings at the very back of the ship.

Zak looked down into the water. He could see the bubbling foam of the ocean as the ship’s engines churned it up violently. Then he looked back down at his netting. If he could get this tangled up in the rudder down there, the ship’s engines would be disabled. The skipper would have no option but to call for help.

He couldn’t just hurl the bundle of netting overboard. The forward momentum of the ship meant that it would fall harmlessly into the ocean behind. No, if his plan was going to work, he needed to keep hold of one edge of the net while the remainder tumbled downwards. It would need all his strength. And after the couple of days he’d had, strength was in pretty short supply. No matter. He gritted his teeth, bent down and rummaged around the bundle of netting looking for a loose edge. It only took him ten seconds to find one. He looped it around the fingers of both hands and grabbed the bulk of the bundle.

He strained to lift it.

And then he felt a tap on his shoulder.

Zak closed his eyes. He felt sick. Cold. He hadn’t heard anybody approach, and now his best chance of stopping the ship was gone. Surely they would kill him …

He let the netting fall from his hands before standing up straight and turning round to face his captors once more.

But he didn’t see
el capitán
. He didn’t see Karlovic, or Eduardo or any of the others. He saw a pale-faced girl, just a couple of years older than him, with short red-ginger hair, small eyes that were no longer blinking but keen and alert, and a serious, intense look on her pinched face.

She looked over her shoulder and back to Zak. ‘You need to put that netting back where you found it, Agent 21,’ she said. ‘Otherwise you’re going to mess up this whole mission.’

17

SWEETIE

ZAK STOOD VERY
still and stared at Bea.

‘Who’s Agent 21?’ he demanded. ‘What are you talking about?’

But Bea barely seemed to be listening. She headed over to the end of the starboard deck, checked it was empty, then did the same for the port deck, which Zak had just crept along. ‘It’s all clear. We need to return this netting now. If any of them find it here, they’ll know we’ve left our cabins. Come on, I’ll help you.’

‘What’s going on, Bea? Who are you?’

‘There’s no time to explain. You get one side of the net, I’ll get the other—’

‘No way,’ Zak interrupted. ‘I’m stopping this ship now.’

Bea’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. She was a lot stronger than she looked. ‘You need to get back to your cabin,’ she hissed. ‘We both do. Otherwise the whole thing’s going to go wrong.’

If he hadn’t been in such a dangerous situation, Zak would have laughed. ‘Go wrong? Things started to go wrong when you boarded this ship and told everyone what I was doing. And they
definitely
took a turn for the worse when they tied me to the railings in the middle of that storm …’

‘What do you want, Agent 21? Sympathy? An easy life?’ Bea was looking around again.

‘What I want,’ Zak replied, turning back round to haul the netting overboard again, ‘is to disable this ship and force a Mayday call.’

A pause.

‘It’s a good idea,’ Bea said. ‘Well done. Very clever. Now forget about it.’

‘No way.’

‘In that case, I’ll have to tell Mr Bartholomew it was your fault the operation failed.’