Bionic Agent (9 page)

The vessels moored in Chalkwell Marina varied from expensive yachts to small scruffy motorboats that were taking on water. Any of them would be easy to steal, Jordan realized
as he walked slowly along the wooden platform, checking out each one.

Before long, a man chased after Jordan. As solid as a rugby player, he had a short and precisely sculptured beard. He also had the whiff of cigars and alcohol about him. “Can I help you,
young man?” he called out.

“Are you in charge?” Jordan asked.

“Yes.”

Jordan had already decided what to say. “Oh, good. Have you got any part-time jobs? You know. After school and weekends.”

The boatyard manager looked him up and down with a curious expression. “Why would you want to work here? No one else does.”

“Why not?”

“Ever since the explosion.” He inclined his head towards the estuary. “They think it’s not safe. But now the
Richard Montgomery
’s gone, it can’t happen
again.”

Jordan nodded. “The boat came from here, didn’t it?”

“Which boat?”

“The one the terrorist used.”

The manager seemed suspicious that a teenager should bring up the subject. He asked, “Who are you?”

“Jordan Stryker. I live up the road.” He paused before adding, “And I’m short of cash.”

“Ah. A job. Yes. Well...” He stroked his neatly trimmed beard. “What do you know about boats?”

“I’m a quick learner.”

“Mmm. Nothing, then. I could use some help with admin, though. How are you on maths, organization and computers?”

Jordan smiled. “The best.”

“Would your teachers agree with that? Can you get them to send me a reference?”

Jordan imagined that Angel would write a glowing recommendation if he needed it. “No problem. I’ll get it emailed. What’s your address?”

The man took a business card from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it over. Jordan glanced at it and said, “Norman Lightfoot.”

With a smile, Norman said, “At least that proves you can read.”

“If you show me your computer, I’ll prove I’m good with that as well.”

Norman hesitated for a while and then replied, “Why not? A quick test. Come this way.” He walked stiffly, shoulders back like an army officer, to the shack at the edge of the marina.
His manner was more pompous than Jordan would have expected for a boatyard manager.

Inside, the walls were plastered with pictures of boats and ships, and the air carried the smell of whisky and cigar smoke. The main room had several filing cabinets, a couple of chairs, a desk
and a computer. On the monitor was a spreadsheet. Each entry named a boat and its owner, a mooring reference, payment details, and other particulars.

“Yes,” Jordan said at once, “I know this program. I’ve used it before.” Taking hold of the mouse, he scrolled down the document. There was only one owner under the
letter Q. “Look. The Quickfall boat. I know Cara Quickfall. Her sons are mates of mine.” He peered at the monitor a little too eagerly. “The boat was last used a year ago. By
Cara’s brother, just before...”

Norman leaned across him and logged out of the program. “You don’t want a job, do you? You’re just... prying. I don’t know what your game is, but I want you to
leave.”

Jordan shrugged as if he didn’t understand Mr. Lightfoot’s uneasiness. “Okay. But I was just showing you I could operate the system – using a family I know.”

The manager stood beside the computer protectively and kept his eye on Jordan until he was out of the door.

Jordan hadn’t learned much from the marina. He imagined that experienced Unit Red agents developed clever plans that took them straight to the answer. He imagined them wrapping up their
missions quickly and efficiently. He imagined they’d never be shouldered off the ball as easily as Norman Lightfoot had just done to him.

Fun was returning to Southend’s funfair. Not all of the rides had been replaced or repaired but people had begun to enjoy the fairground again. With his back to the park,
Jordan leaned on the rail and looked out at the wounded pier and the wide estuary. He turned down his hearing because the mechanical noises, excited cries and terrified screams coming from the
rides threatened to overwhelm him.

Jordan was online, thinking his way around Unit Red’s documents with Angel instructing him via mobile phone. “Yes,” Angel said. “Open the one called
Quickfall
17/04/2012
. It’s a transcript of the Quickfalls’ telephone conversation.” He hesitated before adding, “I’ll give you a minute to read it.”

Using the brain/computer interface in his head, Jordan found it easier to read with his eyes closed.

“Nice work,” Angel said.

“Really?”

“You’ve probably eliminated two suspects. It was Cara Quickfall’s boat but not her fault, and Henry Quickfall isn’t mad enough. Unless he’s keeping it from his
sister – which I doubt.”

“Who’s Max?”

“Ah. Mad Max,” Angel replied. “I checked police files. He’s an animal rights campaigner and he’s not a suspect. The night the
Richard Montgomery
went up,
he’d broken into Sheerness Animal Breeding Station with a firebomb. That’s irony for you. He was freeing the animals when the building collapsed and killed him.”

“What now?” Jordan asked.

“Get on a train back to Kent. I’m intrigued by the missing science teacher, Salam Bool. He bought a new mobile after school on the day of the explosion. I’ve checked phone
records. He called his previous number over and over again that evening from a few locations near Strood.”

“So,” Jordan guessed, “he went around phoning his old mobile, hoping he’d hear it ring. Then he could get it back.”

“That would be my interpretation as well. But how did he know where to go? I think it must have had GPS Tracker technology, so he knew which postcode it was in.”

“There must have been something really important on it,” said Jordan, almost to himself. Then he added, “And whoever nicked it didn’t turn it off. It must have been
ringing. Mr. Bool wouldn’t wander around calling it if the phone was dead. There wouldn’t be any point.”

“Absolutely,” Angel replied. “Which almost certainly rules out organized crime. A gang dealing in black-market phones would whip the SIM card out and replace it in no
time.”

“What happens if you ring it now?”

“Nothing. It’s out of commission.”

“Shame. But why would anyone pinch his phone and leave it on for hours?” Jordan asked.

“Over to you. But it’s interesting to speculate what would have happened if he’d come face-to-face with whoever took it.”

“So, do you know where he was when he made the last call with his new phone?”

Angel laughed. “Thought you’d never ask. Network operators can track the location of mobiles these days. He was at Hoo Marina.”

“I know it. Some of the kids from school hung out there. On the headland.”

“Look into it,” Angel said. “And Jordan...”

“What?”

“Don’t get yourself shot this time.”

Jordan had tricked his way into the Quickfall family, but the same sly tactic was useless for Mr. Bool. The police had not traced any living relatives. They discovered only
that he had been engaged years earlier, but his fiancée had run off with another man. The rejection seemed to have hit him hard because, from that point, he’d sunk into an addiction to
gambling. He owed a lot of money to a seedy loan company called
EasyCash OnLine
. Really, it was more a one-man loan shark than a company. The police had no evidence that
EasyCash
OnLine
was behind Mr. Bool’s disappearance, even though other clients who got into arrears with their payments sometimes ended up in hospital casualty wards.

The official investigation of Salam Bool had not got much further than that. In the days that followed the disaster, when the police combed the missing man’s house, forensic specialists
examined the hard disk of his home computer. They found that Mr. Bool had used thorough disk deletion software. None of his documents and programs remained.

This was a man who wanted to remain a mystery, or who had planned to disappear, Jordan reckoned. A man with secrets to keep hidden. A man anxious about the information on his computer. Jordan
also knew that he’d been anxious about the information on his missing mobile. The police report made no mention of it. Clearly, the investigators hadn’t known about the stolen
phone.

The police had turned up only one tasty fact. There was a short message on his landline phone. It had been recorded a few minutes after the
Richard Montgomery
explosion. An unidentified
male voice on a withheld number said simply, “I hear you’ve done the job. I’ll be in touch.” Immediately suspicious, the police had doubled the number of officers assigned
to the search for Mr. Bool, but without success.

Jordan had three possible starting points: Mr. Bool’s empty house, his last known whereabouts in Hoo, and the kids who were his students at the time of his disappearance. Like Amy.

Jordan wasn’t convinced that breaking into Mr. Bool’s deserted house would help. He didn’t know what he could do there that the police hadn’t already done. So he decided
to use one advantage he had over the police. His youth. He could mix with the school kids at Hoo Marina. If the police attempted to talk to them, they’d scatter and the ones who didn’t
scatter quickly enough would clam up. Getting them to talk about Mr. Bool was Jordan’s plan. Where it would take him, he didn’t know. But he was willing to try anything to unmask Red
Devil.

He wanted to look around the marina before they arrived so he went during school time. And that was a mistake. Near the entrance, a uniformed policeman shouted at him. “Hey, you!
Stop!”

The officer strolled towards Jordan deliberately slowly, presumably to give him plenty of time to get nervous.

“What’s your name?” the policeman asked.

“Jordan Stryker.”

“How old are you?”

Jordan was about to answer truthfully, but changed his mind. “Seventeen.”

The officer smirked at him. “Why the hesitation?”

“Did I?”

“You could be seventeen, but I’m guessing younger. And I’m asking myself why you aren’t in school.”

Jordan sighed. “All right.” He reached into his pocket.

The policeman took a step back. “Don’t do anything silly!”

Realizing that the officer thought he was about to produce a weapon, he said, “Nothing silly about my ID.” He held it out, hoping that this particular policeman knew the secret code
in the first four digits.

The officer took one look at it and then gazed at Jordan. “Is this some sort of joke?”

“No.”

Red-faced, he returned Jordan’s ID. “I thought that code was a myth, but apparently not. You really exist.”

Jordan smiled. “Yes, I exist. Just.”

He walked away with the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in his pocket.

He went through the boatyard and took the track onto the grassy headland. There he stopped and scanned the harbour. Ben Smith had not taken an interest in boats, but they seemed to be dominating
Jordan Stryker’s life. First, there was the SS
Richard Montgomery
. Then there was Cara Quickfall’s tiny motorboat that catalysed the explosion. An oil supertanker and
Ocean
Courage
made everything so much worse. And now there was Hoo Marina.

Somewhere near these moorings, Mr. Bool had made his final phone call and then disappeared. What had happened to him? Had he simply sailed away? There was no point asking if one of the
marina’s boats had gone missing. The estuary explosion had caused a surge of water down the Medway and one of the bombs from the
Richard Montgomery
had landed here. Quite a few boats
had been lost.

Beyond some workshops, an impact crater marked the position where the WW2 bomb had hit, seventy years late. On either side of the muddy footpath, small boats were lolling on the ground as if the
area was a boats’ graveyard. Some were covered in tarpaulins, many were bare and rotting, others were burned out. The ones that had been reduced to wooden frames looked like discarded
skeletons.

In the river, on the side that led to the Thames Estuary, three rusting wrecks rested on the bottom.

Experts, like detectives and forensic scientists, would probably examine the scene and read the signs of what had happened here. A disturbance of the earth might suggest a scuffle had taken
place. Stains in a particular pattern could reveal a certain type of attack. But Jordan couldn’t do any of that clever stuff. Sitting down on the mud, he hoped he had other strengths to
offer. Within minutes, he heard a group of boys in the distance.