Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,31
and Henderson’s compliment meant a lot to him. ‘People think I’m stupid because I never say much,’ he explained. ‘But I was always the cleverest in my class.’
‘We live in a technological age,’ Henderson said, smiling. ‘Brains matter more than brawn these days.’
‘I tried to tell myself that every time some bruiser pinned me to the floor in the school toilet,’ Paul answered, smiling back cheekily before eyeing something inside the radio casing and zooming in to study it.
‘There’s your biggest problem,’ Paul said, as he pointed to one of the broken valves. ‘The valve mounting itself is fractured. But there’s that broken radio upstairs in the master bedroom. If we took a valve casing out of there it would probably do the trick.’
Henderson leaned forwards. ‘Are you sure it’s cracked?’
Paul wobbled the top of the glass tube. ‘You can’t see the crack because of all the dust and grease, but you see how much play there is when I jiggle it? It’s doing that because the insulation underneath is cracked. So it’s either got to be replaced or taken out and glued. But even if we’ve got glue, it won’t harden until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’
Henderson shook his head. ‘My transmission window for today is between nine forty-five and ten.’
‘What’s the window for?’ Paul asked.
‘I have a special coded sequence. You take my codeword, the date and run it through a special formula that gives you a radio frequency and transmission time for every day of the year. Someone back in Britain should be listening out for my transmission at that time on that frequency each day.’
‘Who?’ Paul asked.
‘It should be my assistant, Miss McAfferty. Although as I’ve been out of contact for a month she may have been reassigned, in which case her job will have been passed on to the MI5 monitoring centre.’
‘Clever,’ Paul said, nodding. ‘So we’ve got about ninety minutes to get this set powered up.’
‘How do you rate our chances?’
Paul loved the fact that Henderson was suddenly asking him for answers. ‘You’ve already wasted an hour,’ he said pointedly. ‘And I can’t work fast with this arm, but we can give it a go.’
*
Marc glanced up and down the hallway, before looking into the kitchen and whispering to Rosie. ‘Go for it.’
Rosie grabbed a plate, then rushed to the larder. She cut a chunk off the end of a garlic sausage and peeled a few leftover strips from the previous night’s roast chicken before adding an apple, a carrot and two small tomatoes.
‘He’ll want something to wash it down with,’ Marc noted.
As Rosie poured tap water into an enamel mug, Marc opened up the back door and made sure nobody was in the garden.
‘Henderson’s concentrating on the radio,’ Marc said, as they moved out on to the back lawn. ‘It’s only Maxine we have to worry about.’
Rosie gave Marc the mug to hold before she spoke. ‘Maxine hasn’t said much, but she clearly doesn’t like the way Henderson’s dealing with this.’
It was nearly eight p.m. and the sun was in their eyes as Marc led the way down the gently sloped garden towards a tatty metal shed. He turned the padlock key and the door squealed.
PT lay on his back, his head-wound caked in dry blood. His mouth was gagged, his ankles bound and his wrists hooked around a thick wooden post supporting the roof.
Marc approached warily. ‘If I take this gag off, you’ve got to keep the noise down, OK?’
PT nodded and Marc pulled the gag down until it hung around his neck. Rosie could hardly look at the dried blood and the tears welling in PT’s eyes.
‘We brought you some food,’ she said.
PT nodded. ‘What is it, my last meal?’ he asked bitterly.
Neither Marc nor Rosie could answer such a bleak question.
‘I can’t eat it unless you undo my hands.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘I’ll feed you. What do you want first?’
‘Water.’
Rosie held up the mug and a good portion dribbled down PT’s chin as he drank greedily.
He’d drunk nothing since Paul knocked him out eight hours earlier and the drink re-energised him. ‘Why won’t you untie my hands? Or do you both think I’m a traitor too?’
‘Henderson’s being cautious,’ Rosie explained softly.
Marc’s tone was more hostile. ‘Rosie talked me into coming out here, but you ripping me off like that was out of order. You’ve got more than a thousand dollars – all I’ve got is that pigskin bag and a change of clothes.’way
Rosie fed PT one of the tomatoes.
‘I’m a