Hunted (10 page)

Danny shone his torch along the ladder leading up the dark concrete shaft. No boot marks on the rusty rungs. Didn’t look like it had been used in a while. But according to his glowing phone screen, this dead end in the sewage network was exactly the exit point the Kid had described.

And sure enough, fifteen feet up at the top of the ladder there was a cast-iron manhole cover. Above which Danny hoped was fresh air.

Tempting as it was to stay put underground and try and ride out this storm, it was only a matter of time now before the police and military realized there was no one in that hotel and moved in and found the broken sewer maintenance point door.

He had no choice but to leave.

Zipping his phone and headset up in his rucksack, he gratefully started to climb. The stink down here had grown abhorrent. The kind of smell that no amount of exposure could acclimatize you to.

The spacious section of Victorian sewer he’d first entered by the Ritz had proved a false dawn. Not only in terms of air quality, but accessibility too.

After that first junction he’d gone through, all fears of being intercepted by the police had faded from his mind. Because only
someone as desperate as himself would have considered such a means of escape.

Far from being able to drive a car through the rest of the route he’d taken, he’d have been lucky to squeeze a bike. The crumbling brick maintenance walkway had soon thinned out to such an extent that for several stretches Danny had been reduced to sidling sideways, and a couple of times he’d even had to crawl. In addition, he’d found himself negotiating ladders, stairs and an automated pump station, none of which had been marked on his map.

Modern sewer pipes had been fed through the old sewer gutters. Several had raw sewage bleeding from their joints. Danny had been forced to roll down his balaclava, as well as take off his tracksuit top and tie it in a makeshift filter round his face, just to stave off the risk of hydrogen sulphide poisoning.

As a result, his bare arms and back were now smeared with excrement and covered in cuts from where he’d scuffed his upper body on the pipes and tunnel walls.

At the top of the ladder, he stopped and listened. He heard nothing above. No traffic. Or sirens. Meaning that with any luck, the Kid had done his sums right and Danny was now beneath Hyde Park.

He hoped above all that this was the case.

Because it would mean he’d already circumvented the cops’ main cordon. The one they’d be letting nothing and no one get by. And within which they’d soon be interviewing every person, and combing through every building, trash can and car.

Manage that and – so long as the police didn’t find any
fingerprints
back in that hotel room to match up to his US State Department records – Danny might finally be in the clear.

It was the slimmest of hopes, he knew. But it was all he had.

Now get to the Kid’s van. Then start looking for the scum who did this. Prove it was them and not you who killed all those people back there.

Holding on to the ladder with his left hand, Danny used his right to haul up the T-bar tool from where he’d secured it in his rucksack strap. He inserted it into the manhole cover. Turned the lock fully
round. Then, leaving the tool hanging there, he gripped the manhole cover’s handle and heaved it a half-turn anticlockwise. Until its open position arrows lined up.

Ignoring the of water rapidly dripping from its rim, he pushed up hard against the cover’s cold metal surface with the flat of his hand.

Nothing. It wouldn’t budge.

He tried again, his frustration turning to fear now, as it still wouldn’t give. He couldn’t believe it. He’d come this far and had got so close, only to now be denied. And by what? By rust? By some jerk parking their car on top of the manhole? By any one of a hundred other pieces of crap luck that Lady Fate have might just rolled his way.

Anger flared inside him. He ripped the T-bar tool free and threw it clattering down the shaft. Stepping up another two rungs, he wedged his right shoulder and the back of his neck up tight against the manhole cover. He brought his feet up another rung each, so his knees were up under his chin. He flexed his legs. Drove upwards with his shoulder, giving it everything he’d got.

A burst of surprise. The cover shifted, scraped, lurched to one side. A deafening rush of water crashed down. A flood that didn’t stop. That battered him as if he’d just stepped under a waterfall and would any second get swept away.

Danny clung to the ladder for his life.

Only instinct saved him. Some primal part of him knowing what would happen if he let go. A fifteen-foot drop. Enough to fracture an ankle easy. More likely to snap his neck.

Blinded by sunlight, Danny clawed his way out of the manhole. He sprawled across slippery stone, coughing up water. Couldn’t stop. Each heave of his chest tore at his ribs. He ripped his drenched tracksuit jacket from where he’d wrapped it round his face. Water poured from his nostrils. He vomited, gasping for air.

He tried to stand. He twisted his hip, skittered sideways on all fours, like a dog on ice. He steadied himself and finally rose. His legs were shaking. Arms too. It felt like every muscle in his body had just been stretched on a rack.

His vision swung in and out of focus. A million shimmering points of light. Then fixed.

Looking round, he saw he was standing in some kind of fountain. Some kind of
public
fountain, his brain filled in. People were staring. Ten or twenty of them. They were staring and starting to shout.

The balaclava.
Shit
. He’d rolled it down over his face to ward off the stench in the sewer. As if his rising up from the deep hadn’t already been enough to freak these people out …

But there was no way he could risk taking it off. Any one of these tourists might film him on their phone and have his image
Flickring
out across the web at the touch of a button.

Danny tore off his rucksack. He jerked his tracksuit top back on. His scars and the tattoo on his right shoulder – of an Ouroboros, a dragon devouring its own tail – they were just as idiosyncratic as any fingerprint. They too might be snapped and get him ID’d.

The water in the fountain was already less than half a foot deep, and dropping all the time, rushing gurgling down that open manhole. Pulling his rucksack back on, Danny ploughed towards the fountain’s edge.

The civilians started running then. Away from Danny as fast as they could. Who knew what had already leaked out to the public about the attack? They might have heard about the other massacred civilians. They might think that now he was coming for them. As they ran, they started shouting out.

But worse was what they were running towards.

Less than two hundred metres away, Danny saw police. Lots of them. Maybe more cops than he’d ever seen in one place in his life. That cordon he’d been hoping to slip by, he’d managed it all right.

But only just.

The police currently all had their backs to him. They were crouched down behind a stationary convoy of marked and unmarked vehicles, staring out across whatever road they were parked beside.

They must be facing Green Park, towards the Ritz, Danny thought. Due east. Which meant he had to run in the opposite direction. West into Knightsbridge.

And fast. Because the second those cops saw the civilians running at them, each and every one of those motionless black and white figures would flip like a line of dominoes and all end up facing Danny.

Hauling himself over the stone rim of the fountain, he hit solid ground and built up speed. He raced down a wood chip path.

To his left, through the trees, he caught glimpses of a wide empty road. Stretching between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner, he guessed. The lack of traffic meant it must already have been cleared and blocked off either end. Meaning there’d be more roadblocks and police to the west.

To Danny’s right and straight ahead, a vast expanse of rolling green grass dotted with sycamores and oaks stretched into the distance. Hyde Park. Meaning the Kid’s directions hadn’t been so far off after all. He’d got Danny into the park all right. He just hadn’t brought him up anywhere safe.

The park was way too open for Danny to take cover in. Dressed like this. With those cops about to be on his tail any second.

Up ahead of him, there was no one else in sight. He rolled his balaclava up into a hat once more and pulled on his shades, so at least he didn’t look like an actual terrorist anymore. More like some jogger soaked through with sweat, about to have a cardiac arrest.

Panting, he reached sparse tree cover a hundred and fifty metres further on. Some kind of bower arrangement. Concrete pathways. Raised flower beds. Park benches.

There were people. Kids on rollerblades and skateboards weaving elegant lines between rows of plastic yellow cups, beat boxes pumping. None of them giving a damn about all the distant cop sirens.

Danny thought back to college. He imagined an asphalt track stretching ahead of him. He used to be able to do the hundred metres in thirteen seconds flat. Get anywhere near that now and he might still be in with a chance.

He stumbled after less than fifty. His rucksack felt like someone had packed it with bricks. But he picked himself up and kept on.

Ten seconds later and he was deep in trees and dappled shade. He notched down his pace to catch his breath as he rounded a curve in the path. Silvery water glinted through the trees to the right.

The Serpentine, Danny guessed. He’d once spent an afternoon on it with Anna-Maria, rowing up and down in a wooden skiff, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold Cokes in the sun.

Digging inside his rucksack, he pulled out his Bluetooth headset and phone. The Gor-Tex had spared both from the deluge of water.

He upped his pace again for a final burst. He focused ahead, forcing himself to run through a thick patch of bushes and shrubs, ripping his trouser leg on a rose bush, thorns tearing into his flesh.

This is what you train for
, he told himself.
This is why you spend all those shitty hours in the gym.

Gasping for oxygen, he finally slowed, his muscles crying out, laced with lactic acid. He saw the backs of tall buildings through the trees. Hotels and foreign embassies, if his memory served him right.

Another memory got dredged up right alongside. Of the SAS storming the Iranian embassy here in London in 1980. Operation Nimrod. The Old Man had talked Danny through it like he’d wished he’d been there himself.

Danny had worked with SAS guys since. Respected them. Enough to be afraid. Their regimental barracks was in Regent’s Park. Only four miles from here.

‘The Kid,’ he said, picking up his pace again as he waited for his Bluetooth to patch him through.

‘Danny?’ the Kid hissed back at him five paces on. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you come up out of the exit I said?’

‘I screwed up. I came out through a goddamn fountain.’

‘A
what
?’

‘Don’t fucking ask.’

Dead ahead, through the bushes, Danny saw the stone pillars of an exit. ‘I’m coming up to Edinburgh Gate,’ he said, reading the pristine white sign set into the neatly mown grass.

‘OK, I got your GPS sig back on my sat map,’ said the Kid. ‘I’m six hundred metres away. In Egerton Crescent. South-south-west from you. I’m patching you a route through now.’

‘Better get the engine running,’ Danny said. ‘And Kid?’

‘What?’

‘Save me a doughnut, OK? I’m so hungry I’m about to chew through my own goddamn tongue.’

No answer from the Kid. Meaning no doughnuts left either, Danny guessed.

He pulled out his phone, saw the Acrobat file downloading. Slowing now, he opened up the map it contained and memorized the sequence of eleven turns he’d need to take to get to the Kid.

‘Any word on the limo?’ he said.

‘Yeah, but it’s not good news … Diplomatic plates for a start … I had to hack into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office just to pull them up.’

If there’d been anything solid nearby, Danny would have probably punched it. As it was, he settled for tearing a pathway through the undergrowth, down to the black park railings.

The plates being diplomatic meant the attack on the limo was almost certainly political, not just some criminal hit. Which in turn would explain how come that TV crew had already been camped out across the street from the Ritz. Not through chance. But because they’d been tipped off. By the same people who’d shot up the limo. To garner as much media coverage for the assassination as they could. It also explained why those civilians had been shot too. To guarantee blanket international media coverage of the kind generated by the suicide bomb attack on the international arrivals hall of Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport in January 2011.

‘You’re not going to like which embassy the limo’s registered to either,’ said the Kid.

Danny tore through another row of shrubs. ‘Try me.’

‘Georgia.’

Danny slowed. ‘I take it you’re not referring to the Peach State bordering on Florida,’ he said.

‘More the former Soviet republic kind …’

Which even though Danny was covered with sewage, soaked through to the bone and being hunted by what looked like the entirety of the Metropolitan Police left him in even deeper shit than he’d previously thought.

The facts of the matter queued up in his brain. Georgia had gained its independence in 1991, as part of the so-called Rose Revolution. In 2008, however, Russian troops had occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two buffer states that up until then Georgia had claimed as its own. The Russian and Russian-backed troops were still there. Georgia still wanted them out. And most of the rest of the UN agreed.

Leaving both Russia and Georgia looking for any excuse these days to put the other side down publicly.

But a hit like this could go further than that, depending of course on who had been in that car. A hit like this could mean war.

Which brought up the issue of who exactly it was who might have ordered the attack. No easy answer there. It could be anyone who’d benefit from an escalation of violence in the region. Arms dealers. Russian expansionists. South Ossetian separatists. Hell, even gas and oil companies. The hawk-faced man and his colleagues could be working for any one of these. Or he might even just be an individual with a grudge.

Once more Danny saw the man watching him from the sofa, so totally in control. No wonder. He’d been staring at the perfect fall guy, whom he’d clearly cherry-picked for the job.

An ex-CIA operative who now worked for money. Forget that Danny was choosy as hell who he worked for, the rest of the world would no doubt consider him a perfectly plausible assassin for whatever high-profile Georgian had been killed in that car. And for the mayhem that had come with it too.

You’re here because it will be easy to hang the blame on you … For what I’m about to do
…

‘Yeah, asshole, well we’ll soon see about that.’

‘What?’

Danny hadn’t even realized he’d spoken aloud.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You any idea yet who was in the limo?’

‘No. But it could have been anyone with a link to the Georgian embassy. I’ve already checked the Ritz’s records and there’s no mention of any Georgians or Georgian diplomatic meetings being booked in.’

‘What about the news feeds?

‘Reports of the civilian massacre are leaking through now. On Reuters, BBC and CNN. And Twitter, of course. That’s on fire. But no one’s got any specifics on the limousine yet.’

‘You let me know the second you find out what the fuck is going on.’

Danny reached flat ground and was grateful for it. A slick of sweat covered his skin, burning hot already in spite of his drenched
clothes. He tried to ignore the aching in his thighs as he sprinted the last twenty feet to the gate.

He reached the gate, slowed, jogged through it. He saw a blonde woman getting out of a silver VW parked up alongside a grassy bank. A young couple walked by in the opposite direction with a spaniel puppy barking excitedly on a leash.

None of them gave him a second look.

Ten metres further on and he reached a junction between two service roads. He turned south, leaving only ten turns remaining before he’d get to the Kid.

That was when he heard the first siren approaching. Shrieking in from the east. The second he looked that way, he wished he hadn’t. Because of the speed of the black car coming at him. It must have been doing ninety. Maybe more. It looked like a missile, like nothing could stop it. Two other squad cars fanned out in its wake.