Wanted (30 page)

She bucked in shock, then grew still, as he kept his weight bearing down on her hands and the sound suppressor lodged against her eye. He shone the flashlight into her face and stared. And this time it was his turn to be shocked. Because it wasn’t Glinka’s woman.

This woman’s complexion was much darker, Mediterranean. Her hair was raven black. The only facial similarity, in fact, with Glinka’s woman was that she had cheekbones so sharp they looked like they could cut through coal.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

She blinked blindly in the blaze of the flashlight’s beam and heaved air into her lungs. The fear in the bright blue eyes darkened into loathing, as she spat into Danny’s face.

‘Go to hell, you fucking murderer,’ she said.

Danny didn’t know if it was a reaction to the fact that she’d just spat at him or to what she’d said. But something inside him snapped. Looking at her then felt like looking into the eyes of every TV journalist, government official and cop who’d maligned and slandered him since he’d been blamed for the London hit.

‘Tell me who you’re working for. Now,’ he barked, seizing her by the jacket collar and twisting, so he cut off her air supply.

He let her choke for a second, two seconds, three – then released her.

‘No one,’ she gasped.

No one?
What did she take him for? A moron? He tightened his grip and twisted again.

‘Muuughthuugh,’ she managed, through gritted teeth.

The garbled word slowly unravelled itself in Danny’s mind.
Murderer.
The woman was choking, her face contorted in pain, yet still her hatred blazed. And there was something else. Something about her face seemed familiar. Danny sieved his memory. Had he seen her somewhere before?

‘Last chance,’ he said, flecks of blood from his mouth freckling her face. ‘Who. Are. You. Working. For?’

Once more, he slackened his grip. Her head lolled forward and thudded against the carpet.

‘You. Murdered. Her,’ she croaked.

Her?

Who?

What the hell was she talking about?

He tightened his grip on the Glock 30’s butt, making sure she felt the movement too, and would assume that he was about to pull the trigger.

‘My mother . . .’ A cobweb of saliva stretched from her lips to the floor, her face a mask of pure loathing. ‘You murdered her. You shot her outside the hotel . . . You shot her in the back,’ she spat, ‘like the fucking coward you are.’

Danny could hardly believe what he was hearing. Or seeing. Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. Danny’s thoughts raced. He pictured the bodies on the street outside the Ritz. Her mother?

‘Name,’ Danny said, again tightening his grip on the gun.

‘Ruth. My name’s Ruth Silver.’

‘Not yours. Hers.’

‘Anya Silver.’

Danny knew them all, the dead whom Glinka, the Kid and his team had massacred. He had looked them up since, every one of those who’d died or been hit. He’d followed the links. He’d skimmed across their lives, like an insect across a series of ponds. He seen – he’d
felt
– what had been lost, yet he’d been powerless to change a thing.

A thumbnail image of Anya Silver swelled inside his mind. Dark hair, like this woman’s. A dark complexion too. A retired Israeli doctor on vacation in London, she’d been on her way to meet her daughter for lunch when Glinka and his accomplice had stepped out onto that balcony and strafed the street below.

Danny slumped back on his haunches, stunned, finally releasing the pressure on her hands. The Glock suddenly felt so loose in his grip that he couldn’t have fired it even if he’d wanted to. Which he no longer did.

The flashlight slipped from his grip and rolled across the floor, its beam pointing away from them, leaving them in shadow. He listened to his attacker’s breathing. Anya Silver’s daughter?

‘Just fucking shoot me,’ Ruth said, flexing her fingers now, curling them. ‘Get it over with. Do it now.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ Danny said. ‘I didn’t kill her.’

‘
Liar. . .
’

Her voice was as dry and dead as autumn leaves, as though she were speaking for those from the grave.

She twisted then, her silhouette like that of a beast determined to break free.

He moved back from her. He couldn’t shoot her but he couldn’t afford to let her get too close. He didn’t want to hurt her again if he could avoid it. Not if she was innocent, as he now believed she might be.

In a desperate effort, she managed to raise her head off the floor enough to try spitting at him again. But she was too weak, too much in shock. She sank back down in a shuddering coughing fit.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I didn’t kill any of them.’

‘You’re Shanklin,’ she growled, from the darkness. ‘I watched you on TV. I saw everything you did. The whole world watched. The whole world saw.’

‘What you saw was me running,’ he said. ‘After I’d been set up to take the blame.’

No words, just the sound of her breathing. No acknowledgement that she’d even heard him, let alone believed he might be telling the truth.

He picked up the flashlight then. He shone it obliquely across her face, trying not to blind her this time . . . and there he saw it: a seed of doubt, of confusion, in her eyes.

He said nothing. He walked back to the window, parted the curtains and checked the street outside. Everything looked normal. He looked back at the woman. What the hell was he meant to do now?

‘I’m going to cut you free,’ he said.

Silence. Even in the gloom, he could picture the expression of disbelief on her face.

But what other choice did he have? It was already clear that she’d tell him nothing, unless he beat it out of her, and he was no longer in a position to do that. But he still needed to get her to talk. He had to find out why she was there in case he could use the information to track the Kid down, or in case she’d found a way of tracking him herself, which others might now use as well.

He needed to win her trust, persuade her to talk and get her on side.

‘But do anything stupid,’ he warned, ‘and you’re going to end up back like this or worse. And if I have to shoot you, I will.’

Keeping the pistol trained on her, and making sure to keep himself at arm’s length from her, he gripped the flashlight and her knife in one hand and cut through the cord-tie binding her ankles.

He walked round, making sure Ruth got a good look at the Glock, then sliced the cord-tie holding her wrists, and stepped smartly back.

As he’d expected, she rolled, rising in one fluid movement into a defensive stance, confirming once more that, even if she was there for reasons of personal revenge, she was a pro.

He kept his beam on her body so as not to blind her. He could still make out her features in the weak light filtering through from the kitchen. She looked from him to the door.

‘Don’t,’ Danny said. Any attempt at fight or flight, and he’d have no choice other than to subdue her. ‘I don’t want to have to hurt you again.’

‘Prove it,’ she said, not missing a beat.

‘Fine.’ Slowly he slipped the pistol back into his holster. Another gesture of good will. Another reason for her to trust him and talk.

The seed of doubt he’d seen in her eyes was flowering now into full-blown confusion.

‘If you didn’t kill my mother, then who did?’ she said.

‘How about first you answer me something?’

A hesitation.
Could she trust him?
He could almost see the question written on her face. Why would he have cut her free, unless he was telling the truth?

‘How did you find me?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I found him.’

‘Who?’

‘The man who lives here.’

‘The Kid?’

She stared at him blankly.

‘Adam Gilloway?’ he tried. ‘Adam Fitch?’

‘I only ever knew him as Martlett,’ she said.

The name meant nothing to Danny.

‘I employed him for a job three years ago.’

‘You
employed him?’

‘The organization I work for.’

An agency then, Danny deduced. But which one? From her accent, he knew she wasn’t British or American, although he reckoned she’d definitely spent time in both. She wasn’t Eastern European either. He was familiar with enough Slavic languages to have picked that up right away.

‘Mossad,’ he said.

He made it sound like a statement, even though it was a guess. But it paid off. She didn’t deny he was right. And something else, now he thought about it, made him feel he’d hit the mark. Her moves when they’d fought: a couple had felt familiar – Krav Maga, the martial-arts hybrid favoured by the Israeli Defence Forces.

And she’d said
work,
not
worked.
Meaning she was still employed by them. But could Mossad really have sanctioned her coming here? To assassinate someone without back-up on foreign soil? Danny doubted it. This was too personal. There was no way on this earth any operations commander would have let her off her leash for this.

‘The man I knew as Martlett recommended your services,’ she said. ‘That’s how I knew the two of you sometimes worked together. But the job we’d employed him for, we already had another enforcer lined up, so I never contacted you.’

‘So after I got the blame for what happened in London, you decided that the best way to find me was to find him first?’

‘Yes – in case he’d been working with you on it too.’

‘So you tried to contact him,’ he guessed.

‘Yes, but all the contact numbers I have for him are now dead.’ Her voice was still hoarse, but slowly softening with each word. ‘We still had this address, though.’

‘He’d given you this as a contact point?’ Danny failed to keep the disbelief from his voice.

‘I wouldn’t exactly say
gave
. . .’

There, in the twilight, did he detect the trace of a smile?

‘. . . it’s more like we
took,’
she said.

Ruth stared at him in silence, her eyes fixed on the pistol in his holster and her knife in his hand, no doubt weighing up once again the fact that he hadn’t killed her when he could have done, and wondering why he’d have cut her free if he really was the guilty man she’d supposed him to be.

‘A woman,’ she said. ‘One of our agents. After we first hired Martlett – the man you call “the Kid” – in London, we had her follow him and pick him up in a bar so that we could find out where he lived.’

A honey trap. A common practice. Particularly with Mossad. And one that had targeted the Kid’s predilections for drink and loose women.

Danny guessed the rest: ‘So, after the London attack, you staked this place out?’ he said. ‘In case one of us turned up.’

‘I didn’t want to risk coming in here in case it was alarmed and I ended up tipping Martlett off that I was on to him. So I staked it out front and back instead,’ she said. ‘CCTV in a blacked-out car at the back, me parked in another car across the street . . . with a few spells inside that café you walked into earlier as well.’

Jesus
. . . So that was why her face had looked familiar. Because he
had
seen her before.

‘And that was why you followed me in here. Because when you saw me there, you recognized me.’

‘That’s right. So now why don’t you answer me this?’ she said. ‘If you’re so goddamn innocent, what the fuck are you doing searching the home of your friend?’

‘Because he’s not my friend,’ Danny snapped. ‘He’s the bastard who betrayed me. He helped kill your mother and all those other poor people. He’s the one who set me up.’

The moment Danny had said it, he wished he hadn’t. It was information Ruth didn’t need to know. He stared at her, confused. Why had he told her? Because of her mother? Or did he just want one stranger in the world to believe he could never be capable of something like that?

Enough.
He levelled his pistol at her. He watched her tense, perhaps thinking about running, but deciding to stay where she was.
Better,
he thought.
Retake control.
He tossed another pair of cord-ties onto the floor at her feet. ‘Put them on,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ She’d told him everything she knew. He’d earned her trust and used it. Leaving her free was too much of a risk. What if she changed her mind about him – went to the cops? ‘I’ll cut you free once I’ve finished searching this place,’ he said. After I’ve Tasered you first, he thought. Leaving you here nice and groggy to stop you doing anything dumb like trying to follow me.

‘But—’

‘But
what?’

‘But I can still help you find him,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘I found you, didn’t I? I found out where the Kid lived?’

‘Yeah, you did good. Congratulations. Now put the fucking cord-ties on.’

‘But we’re both after the same thing.’

He glared at her. ‘No. I want justice. You’re looking for revenge.’

‘You think there’s a difference?’

He opened his mouth to rebuke her again, but no words came.

‘You trusted me enough to set me free,’ she said.

‘Only so you’d trust me enough to talk.’

And he was regretting it already. Discovering how she’d tracked down this address hadn’t brought him any nearer to finding the Kid. This was the only lead she’d had and, unless he found another here, it would have proved a dead end.

‘This is the last time I’m asking,’ he said, flicking the Glock’s safety off with another
click
just to encourage her along.

‘OK, but there’s just one problem with that plan.’ She didn’t move.

‘What?’

‘If you’re really not the cold-blooded killer the press say you are, then you’re not going to shoot me, are you?’ She left a beat for this to sink in. ‘And if you’re not prepared to kill me,’ she said, ‘you might as well let me work with you because, I promise you, the last thing you want is the alternative.’

Danny didn’t like the way this was sounding. ‘Which is?’

‘I go to the authorities here in London. I tell them you’re here. And you end up getting hunted right across London all over again.’