Endgame (Agent 21) by Chris Ryan Read Free Book Online

head. It was urgent and waspish.
Run, Agent 21
, it said.
Run!
    Zak ran.

6
GREASY SPOON
    ‘Listen up, Coco. I’m going under the radar for a while. It means I won’t be around. Don’t bother trying to call.’
    Felix always called Ricky ‘Coco’. Ricky didn’t like it at all. But when Felix had called at 5 a.m. that morning, his voice was taut and he’d sounded stressed, so Ricky hadn’t made a thing of it.
    ‘How long for?’ Ricky had asked – rather groggily, as the phone call had woken him up.
    ‘Could be a few days, could be a few weeks. Could even be a few months. Just try not to get into trouble, OK? Remember, you’re not a petty thief any more, but you’re not a fully-fledged agent yet either. I know you think you’re quite the big shot, but your training is only half complete and you’ve got a lot to learn. Got it?’
    ‘Got it,’ Ricky had replied in a mock-tired voice. ‘Holiday . . . no trouble . . . not a petty thief . . . lots to learn.’ He considered concluding with ‘blah blah blah’, but Felix had already hung up.
    After a call like that, further sleep was impossible. Ricky had hauled himself out of bed, pulled on his jeans and the hooded top Felix had given him as a present (‘reversible, in case you need to change appearance quickly’) and padded out into the main room of his flat, where he dumped his mobile phone on the glass-topped coffee table. He looked around. He’d come to the conclusion that his flat was flash, but bland. He’d wanted to put up a few photos of his dead sister on the wall, but Felix had put his foot down about that – he said it made him too easy to identify. And there simply hadn’t been time to go shopping for pictures to hang. The only thing approaching decoration was a line of ten different coloured baseball caps hanging on the wall. Ricky liked baseball caps. Stick a new one on, or turn it backwards, and you could change your appearance in an instant. A useful trick, in his line of work.
    He still sometimes couldn’t quite believe he lived here, in the penthouse suite of this flash tower block overlooking London. The apartment came with the job. A lot of people would think that Ricky was too young to be in a job that came with its own flat – or indeed in any job at all. But this wasn’t an ordinary job, and Ricky wasn’t an ordinary kid. Felix had plucked him from the streets and persuaded him to stop pickpocketing and do something more worthwhile. He’d certainly done that. His first mission had been completed over Christmas. Thanks to Ricky, a young girl had escaped an abusive father; a traitor had been brought to justice; and everyone in the UK was just a little bit safer.
    The bottom line was that Ricky owed Felix. Big time.
    He watched dawn creep over the London skyline as cold air blew in from the open window, giving him goose bumps. He always kept this window open, even when it was very cold out. It made him feel like he had a way out. He felt strangely uneasy as he stood there. His days were normally so filled with training exercises that he barely ever had time to himself. Now that the day stretched emptily ahead of him, he didn’t quite know what to do. At 7 a.m. he glanced over at the free weights sitting on the floor in the corner of the room.
    – You could do a workout.
    There existed in Ricky’s mind a little voice, which was always questioning and – more often than not – arguing with him. Ricky had even given the voice a name: Ziggy. And Ziggy was about to be overruled, because Ricky’s stomach was rumbling.
    – Yeah, I
could
do a workout. Or I could eat a big breakfast and go back to bed. I’m on holiday, remember?
    He walked to the fridge. It was crammed full of food, as always. But after a few seconds he swung the door shut.
    – I thought you were hungry.
    – I am hungry. But maybe I’ll go out for breakfast. That’s what people do on vacation, right?
    Ricky was just grabbing his coat when his mobile –