Agent 21: Codebreaker: Book 3 by Chris Ryan Page A

Gabs said. Her tone of voice indicated that this was her last word on the matter.
    Having reached Lambeth Palace Road, they’d slowed down. ‘What’s wrong?’ Zak had breathed.
    ‘If they’ve got any sense,’ Raf said, ‘they’ll be performing the first part of the evacuation covertly, gathering as many patients as they can near to the exit before extracting them. Just in case someone’s watching.’
    The building that Zak had seen on Gabs’s phone came into view. It was about five storeys high, and encased in tinted glass that reflected the June sun. It was as if their arrival had triggered something. There was a sudden burst of activity at the front of the hospital. The doors opened, and the small crowd that had gathered parted as harassed-looking hospital staff wheeled out a hospital bed and a drip stand. Suddenly five emergency vehicles – three ambulances and two fire appliances – appeared from nowhere and pulled in front of the hospital. Their sirens were off, no lights were flashing. But in the distance Zak could hear the sound of more emergency vehicles approaching.
    As the three of them jumped out and took a moment to check what was happening, he heard something else too: the now-familiar low chug of a chopper nearby. At first he couldn’t see it; seconds later, it rose ominously from behind the hospital. The chopper skimmed over the top of the building, then started to descend nosily until it settled on the ground twenty metres from the entrance of the hospital. The downdraught was immensely strong, and everyone in the vicinity bowed their heads and covered their eyes. Zak watched breathlessly as the side door of the chopper opened, and two figures stepped out. Even above the noise of the rotor blades, he thought he heard someone scream at the sight of them.
    They were indeed a scary vision, these two men in their green-brown blast suits and protective helmets, not a single inch of them exposed. They walked awkwardly in their heavy boots, like space-men on the moon, each carrying metal flight cases. Behind them, another man and a woman emerged from the helicopter, dressed in plainclothes and each holding two dogs on leads. German Shepherds, by the look of them. ‘Bomb disposal unit!’ Raf shouted above the noise. ‘And sniffer dogs. Flown in from Wellington Barracks. The dogs are trained to sniff out explosives.’
    More movement at the main entrance to the hospital. Soldiers in DPMs had appeared. They were carrying standard-issue SA80s and were barking at the onlookers to get away from the building. Two of them started erecting a cordon twenty metres from the hospital exit; others were shouting at the hospital workers not to loiter near the door but to get past the cordon. Zak’s eyes were drawn to the children in the beds. They looked very young, very thin and very scared. One of them, a little girl with red hair and freckles, was sitting up and crying. Wailing for her mother.
    ‘What kept you?’
    Michael didn’t even turn his head as he strode past them. His face was grim, his eyes tired, but he walked with the purpose of a man half his age. Without a word, they followed him to a white van, the rear doors of which were open and the inside filled with a bank of screens. Each screen showed an interior of the hospital in grainy black and white. Sitting in front of them, wearing a microphone, a headset and a furrowed brow, was a plainclothes surveillance operative. There were no introductions, but Zak wasn’t expecting any. He turned his attention back to the screens. In one of them there were twenty or thirty occupied beds. Another looked down onto a corridor, where a hospital porter was pushing another bed in the direction of the lift. A third screen showed an empty ward where the curtains that once surrounded the beds flapped ominously.
    ‘We have a feed into the hospital CCTV,’ Michael said. ‘Bomb-disposal personnel are going in now. They’ll have robotic cameras, we’ll have a feed