Hunted (27 page)

It was nearly two hours before the Transit doors opened up again. Danny blinked in the moonlight. His muscles ached. His eyes stung. He’d kill for something to drink.

He’d
kill
…

‘Get out,’ a tall, burly skinhead said. A pale, deep-lined face. Jeans, a white shirt.

The bearded man stood beside him, watching, his machine pistol steadily trained on Danny as he crawled forwards across the clanking van floor.

The skinhead was carrying a Glock 30, also known as a ‘pocket freight train’ on account of its awesome stopping power. It was fitted with a state-of-the-art sound suppressor.

Not that he’ll need that out here
, Danny thought. Because they were now in the countryside. He could sense that even before he climbed fully out. The smell of the hot city streets – the drains, the rotting food – had been replaced by the scent of hedgerows and cut grass. The city noises were absent too. No more engines, car horns and bass. Instead Danny heard only the trickle of a nearby stream.

Grit crunched beneath his shoes as he got out. Looking up, he saw that the sky was starry, with a full moon on the rise above a cobweb of trees.

The Transit was parked in front of an old stone farmhouse. In a large, flat twilit field alongside it, Danny saw the unmistakable silhouette of a Cessna light aircraft, standing at the end of a makeshift runway lined with battery-powered flares.

A block of light appeared in the centre of the farmhouse. The front door had just opened. A figure walked towards them through the gloom. Danny felt a jolt of hatred burn through him as he picked out the features of the hawk-faced man.

He was dressed in a dark, well-tailored suit. A primrose-yellow shirt. He looked totally legit, like someone who’d just stepped out of a business brochure, a captain of industry.

He walked up to Danny and struck him hard and without warning across the side of the head with the aluminium grip of his PSM pistol.

A burst of red pain behind Danny’s eyes. A ringing noise in his ears. He staggered sideways and fell to his hands and knees in the dirt. A boot stamped him down flat.

‘Search him. Find the phone,’ the hawk-faced man said in Russian.

The click of a machine pistol’s selector switch. Danny braced himself. He thought for a moment they were just going to waste him there and then.

But instead he felt himself being pinioned to the dirt, then frisked. They found the Kid’s phone in his suit jacket pocket. They took it.

They didn’t bother to check his shoes.

‘Take him inside to the girl,’ the hawk-faced man said.

Lexie
…

Danny’s dread dissolved into relief. So she
was
here.

Meaning this wasn’t over yet.

He swallowed down the hope that flared inside him as he was jerked upright. He sagged, feigning semi-consciousness. The less strength they thought he had now, the better chance he’d have.

The huge skinhead hauled Danny up towards the farmhouse. The hawk-faced man and his bearded foot soldier followed, their weapons locked on Danny.

A flagstoned hallway. Cold. A smell of burnt food. A lamp on a plain wooden table beside a plain wooden chair. Two bodies on the floor. A man and a woman. Early fifties. Civilians. Probably the owners of the farm, Danny guessed, sickened by the way they’d been dumped there like so much trash to be put out. They’d both been executed, he saw. Shot through the back of the head.

Danny was dragged stumbling down a corridor into a much bigger room. Where someone smacked him again round the side of the head. His vision strobed. A deep voice laughed.

Low-wattage bulbs glowed in opaque ceiling lights. No Lexie. A bunch of cardboard boxes stood stacked in the corner. A dining table and several chairs had been pushed up against a whitewashed stone wall. Two dining chairs had been positioned side by side, facing a sideboard above which ran a long rectangular mirror. Smashed china littered the floor.

‘Sit him down,’ the hawk-faced man said, in Serbian this time. ‘Shoot him if he moves.’

The skinhead shoved Danny down on to one of the two isolated chairs. Danny watched in the mirror’s reflection as the skinhead and the bearded man positioned themselves behind him. A wink of metal on the skinhead’s left wrist. He was wearing Danny’s watch.

The bearded man returned the Glock to the skinhead, along with a Taser X3. Then he aimed his machine pistol at the centre of Danny’s spine.

The door burst open.

‘Dad …’

Danny’s heart leapt as Lexie stumbled through. He scanned her face and body. No bruises on her face. No blood. No torn clothing. Relief surged through him. So they’d not harmed her yet.

The blonde woman marched in behind her, armed with the Russian pistol. Lexie tried to rush to Danny. The blonde woman wrenched her back by her hair. Danny’s fists closed. He nearly went for her then. But if he did that, he knew they’d both be dead. He forced his body to become still as a rock.

The blonde woman pushed Lexie down on the chair to his right.

‘Don’t look at each other. Don’t speak,’ she said.

Lexie’s chair creaked. Danny felt her there, shaking with fear. The hawk-faced man was blocking his view of the mirror. But he guessed she must have already seen the two men standing behind them, as well as the weapons they held.

The Kid sauntered in. He nodded at Danny, nonchalantly and smiled. Like they were just two old buddies who’d bumped into each other in a bar.

Danny wanted him dead. Wanted it bad.

‘Check it’s all there,’ said the hawk-faced man in English, handing the Kid the phone.

While the Kid set to work on it, the blonde woman started packing up various pieces of hardware – machine pistols, cell phones, laptops and the Kid’s Glock 18 – into a brown leather holdall.

She reached out to take the Russian pistol from the hawk-faced man. He let her, but when she tried the same with his PSM, he waved her rudely away.

The hawk-faced man watched the Kid working the phone. Danny checked the mirror’s reflection. The two men behind him were still watching. Their weapons were still locked on.

Time … Danny felt it slipping through his fingers then, fast running out …

Patience
, he told himself.
Watch and wait.

Another pulse of adrenalin – of hatred – rushed through him, as the tall bespectacled man in the ill-fitting suit walked in. He stopped and stared at Lexie and Danny in turn through his watery brown eyes.

He put his black leather attaché case down on the dresser and opened it. Danny glimpsed its contents reflected in the mirror. Scalpels. Syringes. Needles. His tools of the trade.

But what does he need those for?
Neither Danny nor Lexie had any information that could possibly be of any use to these people.

Sweat broke across Danny’s brow. He prayed Lexie wasn’t looking at the case.

‘It’s all here,’ the Kid finally said.

The hawk-faced man took the phone from him. He slipped it inside his suit jacket pocket.

‘I’ll see you at the plane,’ he said to the Kid in English. ‘Come,’ he said in Russian to the blonde woman.

She followed him out without another word. Neither of them even glanced back at Danny.

Right then, Danny didn’t know what he hated them for more. For having set him up. Or for having written him off, dismissed him as an irrelevance, as already dead.

They’d left the leather holdall containing most of their weapons behind, he now saw. So that wherever they were heading, when they got there they’d be able to pass legitimately through customs and security.

Judging by the length of Danny’s journey in the Transit and the fact that there’d been no nearby city glow in the sky when he’d arrived, he reckoned this farm must be somewhere on the south coast.

The Cessna had the range to get them from here to France, Belgium or the Netherlands in a single hop. From where they could then simply disappear.

Danny guessed that the hawk-faced man would probably toss the PSM pistol out into the English Channel once they were safely on their way. But until that moment arrived – like Danny would have done if their situations had been reversed – he was keeping it just in case.

Danny saw the Kid staring at him, smiling, slowly shaking his head, like he couldn’t quite believe Danny was actually here.

‘So how does it feel to be famous?’ he finally said. ‘To be the most wanted man in the world?’ He wasn’t looking for an answer. Knew he wouldn’t get one. Instead he carried on. ‘You were right, of course,’ he said.

‘About what?’

‘Cutting me off back there in the embassy. A clever move. Because if you hadn’t, I would have mailed that file right out from under your nose. And then we’d have put in a call to the cops to let them know where you were.’

Danny watched as the Kid swapped his leather jacket for a designer linen number from the brown holdall. He slipped it on
and adjusted its baggy fit over his broad-shoulders and T-shirted belly. He looked like a wedding guest, as if he was planning on doing nothing more sinister than drunkenly hitting on bridesmaids all night.

‘You said you’d let me go. That I couldn’t prove any of this anyway. That I’d have to go to ground …’

The Kid grimaced. ‘Oh, come on, Danny. I know I
said
that. But you never really believed me, did you? I mean, I know you’d never quit. You’d come looking for me and – you know what? – I think you might even find me too. That’s your problem, you see, bruv. You’re just too dangerous to leave hanging around.’

Bruv
…
How can we have gone from that to this?
Danny thought. How long had the Kid been planning on betraying him? How much had Danny ever really known about who he really was?

‘Who are they?’ Danny said. ‘These people you’re working for?’ It had to be worth a shot. He and the Kid must still have some kind of connection. Maybe there was still a chance he could talk him round.

‘Who says I’m working for anyone?’ the Kid said, leaning back against the dresser, folding his arms and staring down at Danny. ‘Who says they’re not working for me?’

Danny remembered the terror in the Kid’s voice when that man had stumbled in on him in Colonel Zykov’s office and the op had nearly been blown. Oh, the Kid was working for the hawk-faced man all right, and not the other way around.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Danny said. ‘For money?’

The Kid smiled. That old smile. The same one that used to make Danny want to smile too.

‘I’m not even going to try justifying myself to you, Danny,’ he said. ‘Because you’d never understand. And besides, none of that’s important anymore. All that really matters now is that you’ve lost.’

GOD IS A PROGRAMMER.

It had been written right there on the Kid’s arm all along. Power. A bunch of code to manipulate. A game played with real flesh and blood. Was that all this really was to him? Just the same as killing had been for the stranger who’d come that day for Sally and
Jonathan? Was there really so little difference between these two men?

Danny still couldn’t bring himself to believe that in his heart.

‘What was the data I stole?’

‘Forget it, Danny. I’m not going to tell you.’ The Kid checked his watch. ‘In fact, I’m not going to talk to you any more at all. Because you’re only asking me this shit to buy time. In the hope that you’ll figure a way out of here. Which you won’t.’

He buttoned up his jacket and smiled down at the fit, pleased.

‘Anyway, I gotta go now,’ he said. ‘Got a plane to catch. But my friend here’ – he nodded towards the torturer, who was staring studiously into his briefcase – ‘and his companions, they’re getting out of the UK by another means.’

‘It’s not too late to change your mind,’ Danny said.

The Kid laughed. ‘Oh, trust me, Danny, it really is. But Mr … Smith …’ he said, clearly using the first arbitrary name that came into his head as he glanced across again at the bespectacled man, ‘he’ll take care of you. Tidying up is kind of one of his perks … you know, a bonus, if you like.’

Danny stared into the Kid’s dark, glittering eyes. He wished them lifeless and cold.

But not yet
. Wait, he told himself.
Wait till the Kid’s gone. Then it’ll just be you up against the three of them. With possibly only two of them armed.

As the Kid turned his back on him and walked out of the room, Danny swung round and stared deep into the torturer’s eyes. Dead eyes. Loveless eyes. Eyes that sparkled now with excitement at the thought of causing pain.

Danny had stared into eyes like those before.

The torturer blinked first. He looked down into his attaché case at the metal inside and started to hum.

Danny started shaking. The chair he was sitting on creaked.

The torturer looked up sharply. A thin smile played across his lips. He thought he could see fear and surrender flashing in Danny’s eyes.

The second the torturer looked back to his case, Danny’s eyes switched back to the reflection. To the bearded man. He was still standing two feet behind Danny’s right shoulder. With the machine pistol gripped in both hands.

But the skinhead had moved. Further left. So he could
watch
… so he could see what the torturer was doing.

He was no longer covering either Danny or Lexie with the Glock. Only the Taser was raised and ready to use. Danny guessed what he was planning. To first Taser Danny. Then Lexie. Then tie them both up so the torturer could begin.

‘Shut your eyes,’ Danny said.

‘Wh …’ A noise, not a word, hissed out through Lexie’s lips.

‘Just do it,’ Danny said, his hands closing in on his belt.

Even though they’d made him change into the dead colonel’s suit before setting out for the embassy, they’d not stopped him from threading his own belt through its trouser loops.

‘And keep them shut,’ he said. ‘No matter what you hear.’

The torturer looked up again, cocking his balding pale head like a dog that had just had its interest snagged by some low-frequency sound.

He stared at Danny, trying to read him. Danny locked eyes with him, holding his gaze, so the torturer wouldn’t look down and see his hands move.

But it wasn’t only the torturer’s watery brown eyes Danny was seeing now. It was the eyes of the hawk-faced man. And the eyes of the man he had fought and defeated outside the school chapel. It was the eyes of the man who’d come hunting for him and his family in the woods.

Danny was staring now into the eyes of everyone who’d ever come to hurt him and his.

He saw the comprehension dawning on the torturer’s face then. When he’d watched Danny shaking earlier, he’d been mistaken, he was now realizing. It wasn’t fear and surrender he’d seen in Danny’s eyes.

It was retribution.

It was death.

Danny rose, spinning clockwise out of his chair. As he pirouetted on his right foot, he tore the six-inch stiletto knife free from his belt.

The buckle-hilted knife was double-edged, designed for stabbing as well as cutting. It was made of tamahagane steel, a combination of high and low carbon, flexible enough to bend inside a belt, but vicious hard when straight.

The bearded man never saw it coming. Danny completed his turn – a move he’d practised a thousand times before – in less than half a second. He slashed the blade backhanded across the bearded man’s throat.

It cut clean through his windpipe and carotid. A red jet of arterial spray burst out, hitting Danny in the face.

Danny’s turn had brought him round in between the bearded man and Lexie, his intention being to shield her with his body in case the man fired. But this now put him in a position to seize
the bearded man’s right wrist and drive it into a lock, to ensure the machine pistol was also now pointing down.

The skinhead had meanwhile had a chance to react. He was raising both the Glock and the Taser up to fire. But he was overadrenalizing. His finer motor movements were fractionally out of whack. Enough to leave him momentarily off balance and totally exposed.

Danny stabbed him fast in the face. Through the mouth. To the back of the throat. The blade skittered and glanced off his teeth. Danny brought it back in a piston movement and stabbed him again. This time through his right eye socket, into his brain. He felt the blade tip catch and scrape on bone.

The skinhead slumped sideways to the ground as Danny withdrew his blade. He was still locking the bearded man’s right fist, keeping the machine pistol pointed down. He hacked deep into his spurting throat again, then threw him, dead, aside.

A flash of movement to Danny’s right. The torturer was breaking for the door. To warn the others.

‘Keep them shut,’ Danny shouted at Lexie, heart thundering now as he snatched up the fallen Glock. He grabbed her and carried her over his shoulder across to the open doorway through the which the torturer had run.

By the time Danny spotted him, the torturer was already halfway down the corridor that led straight on into the front hall.

Danny twisted Lexie to face the wall and pushed her down. Then he turned, slipping the blade into his jacket pocket.

He brought the Glock up in a double-fisted grip, locking his entire body as he aimed. He caught his breath, making sure to compensate for the added weight of the sound suppressor, as the torturer reached the front door.

Exhale
…

He double-tapped the trigger. A
tock-tock
noise. Heavy recoil.

He’d been aiming for the torturer’s thigh – he wanted him alive – but the first round missed him entirely, slamming into the door frame just past his right knee.

The second round thumped straight into his lower back. The torturer was slammed forward into the farmhouse door – like he’d been hit by … a freight train, just like the Glock ads said.

Danny ran to him, keeping the Glock trained on him. No need. The torturer’s spectacles were smashed, lying in a widening pool of blood already seeping out across the flagstones. He was still alive, but only just. He was crying out in Russian and German. Danny checked the entry wound on his back. It had smashed right through his spine.

Danny searched him for weapons. Found nothing. Then he heard the low growl of the Cessna starting up outside. His instinct told him to run back and get the machine pistol off the dead bearded man. He’d have a better chance with that of shooting out the plane’s engines before it got into the air.

He ran to Lexie instead. He couldn’t leave her here among the dead. He lifted her up in his arms. Her hair was spattered with blood. But even now she kept on doing what he’d asked. Her eyes were still clamped tight shut.

‘It’s OK, princess. I’m getting you out.’

He raised her on to his shoulder and carried her away, out through a kitchen and on through an unlocked back door. He staggered with her into the warm night air.

The plane’s engine was rising in pitch, preparing for take-off. The runway was on the opposite side of the building from where Danny now crouched beside Lexie in the inky blackness of a bramble patch.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

He could hear the aircraft engine reaching its climax. It had to be starting its run.

He cornered the building at a sprint, just in time to see the Cessna building up speed across the uneven ground. He targeted a point two-thirds of the way along the runway and ran towards it.

He slowed as the plane drew level, and raised the Glock with both hands. He took aim, the front sight wavering. Sweat – or blood – trickled down his brow.

It was too far away, he knew it, but he still squeezed off a shot. Then another. And another after that.

With zero wind, totally relaxed, out on a range … it was possible he might have made it.

But he missed.

As he watched the plane rising into the air, he saw the
hawk-faced
man look out from the cockpit window. Maybe he’d glimpsed Danny there. Or had even caught a trace of some residual muzzle flash that the sound suppressor had failed to conceal.

Danny would never know for sure. But for an instant he thought their eyes met.

And in that instant he made the hawk-faced man a promise. He’d come find him. He’d not rest until he had.

Then the plane was gone, into the night.

Danny turned and ran, not towards Lexie, but to the front door of the farmhouse, behind which the torturer lay dying. He squeezed the Glock tight in his right hand. In his left he gripped the belt buckle knife.

It was time to find out exactly who ‘Mr Smith’ was, and what it was that he knew.