Free Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 by Chris Ryan

thing tomorrow .
    ‘That’s his last entry,’ Zak said quietly. ‘I guess he was . . .’ He looked meaningfully upwards.
    Gabs stepped towards him and took the exercise book, her eyes lost in thought. ‘Yeah,’ she agreed with a nod. ‘I guess he was. But before someone killed him, they got him to replace three crosswords. Not one. Three .’
    ‘Three crosswords, three bombs . . .’ Zak breathed.
    ‘I think it might be time to buy a newspaper,’ Gabs said.

7
    THE SECOND BOMB
    ZAK STILL REMEMBERED the first time his mum had given him fifty pence to go to the shop by himself and buy some sweets. He’d been ten years old, and had run as fast as he could to the local newsagent, the coin gripped sweatily in his hand. But now he ran twice as fast, trying to find the nearest newsagent to the Puzzle Master’s house. There was more at stake than a bar of chocolate.
    Having turned left out of St Mary’s Crescent, he saw a little parade of shops thirty metres down the road: a laundrette, an estate agent, a greengrocer and, to his relief, a newsagent. There was a queue in the shop, four men in suits clearly buying papers for their commute into work. A fifth man was at the newspaper shelves, about to help himself to the last copy of the Daily Post . Zak grabbed it instead.
    ‘Hey, sunshine,’ the man protested. Zak ignored him. He barged to the front of the queue, threw a ten-pound note onto the counter and, without waiting for the change, sprinted back out into the street and, barely catching his breath, returned to the Puzzle Master’s house.
    Raf and Gabs were waiting for him in the front room, anxious looks on their faces. There were a few more flies in here now, but Zak paid the insects no attention as he kneeled down at the coffee table, swiped a pile of books from it onto the floor and opened up the newspaper. The crossword – luckily not a cryptic one – was on the inside of the back page.
    ‘You do it, Raf,’ Gabs said, her voice tense. She handed him a pen and after about five minutes’ concentration – and one or two Google searches for unusual words – Raf had the grid completed. Together they looked at the result:

    Immediately, Zak’s eyes fell upon the solution for one down. He felt a chill as he read the word ‘explosion’. With a steady hand, he wrote it down on a blank area of the newspaper.

    The word had nine letters. He quickly identified the next nine ‘down’ clues of the solution.

    His hand was shaking silently as he wrote down the first letter of each of these answers beneath the word ‘explosion’.

    He glanced up at Gabs. ‘Go on, sweetie,’ she whispered.
    Zak wrote out the alphabet, with a number underneath each letter.

    Then he filled the relevant numbers into his grid.

    With this done, he added the numbers together, starting back at zero for any result higher than 25, just like Gabs had taught him.

    And finally, he wrote the corresponding letter beneath each number.

    The three of them stared at the results.
    ‘St Oswald’s? That rings a bell,’ said Raf.
    Gabs, however, was standing up and pulling her phone out of her pocket. ‘I’ll Google it,’ she said. She typed the word into her phone, then waited a moment for a page to load.
    Her face turned white.
    ‘What is it, Gabs?’ Zak asked.
    She was shaking her head. ‘It can’t be . . .’
    Zak stood up, took the phone from her and looked at the screen. He read the first entry. It made his stomach twist.
    St Oswald’s Children’s Hospital .
    He tapped the link. The page took an excruciating ten seconds to load. A picture of a large glass-fronted building. Words beneath it, which Zak read out. ‘“Situated on the bank of the Thames, directly opposite the Houses of Parliament, St Oswald’s Children’s Hospital has been caring for sick children since—”’
    He broke off. ‘It’s got to be a mistake. Nobody would attack a children’s hospital. Would they?’
    But Raf clearly thought they would.