Read Under Cover (Agent 21) for Free Online Page A

overlooking the Thames. It was late afternoon, and he couldn’t help thinking about how his life had changed in the past twenty-four hours. He had everything he didn’t have yesterday – a place to stay, and food to eat.
    But he still felt very uneasy.
    Who was this Felix character? Why was he going out of his way to help him? Ricky knew enough about the world to realize that nobody helped anyone unless there was something in it for them.
    The sun started to set and the air grew chill. Ricky headed back inside and made himself an enormous chicken and mayonnaise sandwich from the plentiful stores in the kitchen. He walked around the flat as he ate it. He stared at the front door and it occurred to him that, without a key, he was as good as imprisoned in here.
    But the key was nowhere.
    Ricky felt a little surge of anger towards Felix for setting him an impossible task.
    – I’m trapped. If I leave this flat I’ll never get back in again.
    – But you can leave if you want to. Let’s face it though, being stuck here is better than being stuck in Bloomsbury Square.
    He took his holdall into the bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he pulled out the framed picture of his mum, dad and Madeleine. He stared at it. As often happened, he found himself remembering the moment he heard the news that they had died: the two policemen at the door, Madeleine burying her face in her hands, the way he had sat on the sofa, staring into space, unable to take it all in . . .
    Then he snapped out of it and placed the picture on the bedside table. He turned on the TV, lay on the bed and started channel hopping.
    There was nothing much on. He spent a couple of minutes watching two kids his own age rapping on
Britain’s Got Talent
. He caught the last five minutes of
The Simpsons
. Then he found himself on a news channel. A journalist was standing outside the Russian Embassy in London. He had a serious face and a serious tone. ‘Tensions between Russia and the West are mounting over the situation in the Middle East. Talks between the British Foreign Secretary and his Russian counterpart have been described as . . .’
    But Ricky never found out how these talks were described. The bed was soft. The room was warm. He had already drifted off into a deep sleep . . .
    It was five miles, as the crow flies, from the elegant apartment in which Ricky now slept to an even more elegant mansion, grandly named the White House, in the heart of Mayfair. A human, however, would have to struggle for a couple of hours through the rush-hour crowds to get there.
    If they did this – and if they managed to get over the high railings that surrounded the White House and past the security cameras that covered the entrance, they might find themselves climbing an impressive, winding marble staircase and entering a bedroom at the top of the stairs. Here they would find a fifteen-year-old girl called Izzy Cole sitting on the edge of her bed, crying.
    The palms of her hands, which covered her face, were soaked in tears. Her shoulders shook. She was
trying
not to cry, she really was. But even when she managed to stop for fifteen or twenty seconds, the tears always returned when she remembered what had just happened.
    She had argued with her father about an earring. Such a small thing – a tiny gold stud that lay on Izzy’s bedside table. When he had returned home just half an hour ago – looking unusually windswept – he had seemed to be in a rare good mood. So good that Izzy had dared to appear in front of him wearing the earring.
    Bad move.
    When her father saw it, his mood had changed immediately. He knew that Izzy had defied his instruction that she would never –
never
– have her ears pierced while she lived under his roof. She was the only one of her friends who didn’t have pierced ears, of course, but even so. It had seemed like such a small thing to ask the lady in the tattoo parlour to do, especially as her two friends Becky and Caitlin had