Hunted (28 page)

Five days had gone by since Danny had loosed off those shots at the Cessna and missed. He and Lexie were now three hundred miles away, on the west coast of Wales.

Danny looked up from the contents of the torturer’s wallet he’d been sifting through at the kitchen table, and gazed out at Lexie through the holiday cottage window.

She was sitting cross-legged in khaki slacks and a red hooded top in the overgrown front garden, using a sharp stone to draw on a broken roof slate. Beyond the garden wall, a deserted dirt track meandered up through a rocky valley towards the rugged hills and grey sky.

After Danny had finished with the torturer at the Sussex farmhouse, he’d fetched Lexie from where he’d hidden her behind the bramble patch and taken her to the Transit. He had then returned to the house and removed the bodies of the murdered owners and put them outside, so that their relatives would be able to give them a decent burial.

He’d then searched the dead Russian and Serbian mercenaries, as he now knew them to be. He’d got his watch back off the skinhead. Luckily it hadn’t been broken in the fight.

He’d collected up their bags and possessions, stowing these items in the back of the Transit. He’d left their bodies inside.

After cleaning himself up and changing his clothes, he’d burned the farmhouse down, knowing that otherwise his DNA would be found and he’d be blamed for what had happened there too.

In addition to the weapons, documentation, computers and phones he’d found inside the mercenaries’ brown leather holdall, Danny had recovered his own stolen wallet and jacket from the Ritz, along with its set of fake ID and credit cards in the name of Samuel Wilson Jones.

He and Lexie had driven through the night. They’d ditched the Transit in Bristol city centre the following morning and had bought an SUV from a used car dealership with an Amex. They’d then sold that vehicle at another dealership for cash. In a third dealership Danny had paid cash for an old VW camper van, which was now parked at the side of the cottage out of sight.

Lexie had handed over a month’s rent up front for the use of this property, along with a large cash deposit. She’d given one of Danny’s new disposable cell phone numbers as an employer reference to the small-town agent she’d rented the property through, but they’d not even bothered calling Danny to check.

Lexie looked different now from the girl whose face had been plastered across the media for the last five days. Her hair was cut short. She’d done it herself, at Danny’s request, along with
home-dyeing
it black in a motorway service station bathroom the morning after they’d fled from the farm.

The media had, of course, by now matched the Danny and Alexandra Shanklin on the run here in England to the Danny and Alexandra Shanklin who’d been attacked by the Paper Stone Scissors killer in the States. None of Lexie’s school friends had known a thing about that before. Yet another part of her life he’d screwed up. And yet another reason he was determined to see this through so she could once more hold her head up high.

He’d altered his own appearance too in the last few days. Fair hair. New clothes from a store in Bristol. Glasses. His jaw was thick with stubble. His plan was to let it run to a full beard, and grow his hair longer too.

It was a start, but he already knew he’d have to do a whole lot better. Every airport and cross-border facial recognition system across the world would have been programmed with his features.

The London manhunt might have ended, but the global search for Danny Shanklin had only just begun.

Colonel Nikolai Zykov’s mutilated body had eventually been ID’d through dental records two days after the assassination and massacre had taken place. Danny’s work in Chechnya for the Russian government had now been leaked to the press by the Kid.

It was still assumed that Danny had been hired by the colonel. Meaning that – again, just like the UK spook Danny had fought outside the school chapel had claimed – he was the only person still being hunted in connection with the Mayfair atrocities.

The Russian government continued to deny all involvement. They had issued a statement that Colonel Zykov had recently been seeing a psychiatrist for chronic depression, and that an internal investigation had also now revealed connections between him and certain illegal clandestine nationalist organizations, and certain already imprisoned Russian billionaires.

Zykov, in other words, had been officially disowned.

They’d denied any knowledge of Danny too.

Meanwhile the diplomatic storm triggered by the assassination was whipping up into a hurricane. Russian and Georgian troop reinforcements were mobilizing around South Ossetia and Abkhazia. European stocks and currencies were sliding on the fear of regional destabilization, as well as the renewal of terrorist attacks in the West. The hawk-faced man could not have scripted it better if he’d tried.

Except for one thing. Danny Shanklin was still alive.

He looked back at Lexie. She’d finished the slate she’d been drawing on and now placed it on the grass at the end of a row of other slates. Each had different designs on them. Some were patterns made up from combinations of Celtic symbols, taken from a book of Welsh history the cottage’s landlord had left along with a stack of well-thumbed paperbacks in its living room. Others were views of the isolated hillsides surrounding the cottage. Or of
wildlife, of buzzards circling high up on thermals, of rabbits and foxes and deer.

It was good to see her doing something normal, something that she liked. And her grandmother, Jean, had been right, Danny thought. Lexie really was talented. He felt humbled watching her work, both startled and amazed by his own flesh and blood.

Lexie said she was planning on taking the slates back to school to use as part of her coursework. He’d like that. If something good were to come out of all this.

It still astonished him how quickly she’d adapted. She hadn’t complained. About the fact that she couldn’t yet return to school, or contact her friends. About how the only way for him to protect her was to keep her hidden until he’d cleared his name.

Danny wasn’t only worried about intelligence agencies wanting to get their hands on her to use against him. She was still a loose end that the hawk-faced man had failed to tie up.

Danny wasn’t kidding himself either, though, about how well she’d coped. He worried about the psychological impact the events of the last week would have on her. He feared she could still end up suffering from some kind of post-traumatic anxiety. He needed to get her somewhere secure as soon as he could. And get her help, someone neutral she could talk to. A professional. Someone who could do a much better job than him.

Once all this was all over, he needed to take proper care of her. To make up for all that lost time. To become a real father again.

He still couldn’t forgive himself for having fired up his phone while he’d still been at Alice’s home. If he’d not committed that one careless, unthinking act through which he’d been traced, then Lexie would still be safe, and Alice De Luca would still be alive.

According to Lexie, the hawk-faced man had shot Alice in the face as soon as she’d opened her front door. According to the newspaper article Danny had read, she’d died instantly. The machine pistol she’d been killed with had been fitted with a sound suppressor. No one outside Alice’s house had heard a thing. No one had come to help. The hawk-faced man had left her face down in the hallway and had caught up with Lexie on the stairs.

Last night Danny had dreamt of Alice, as though she’d still been alive and they’d still been together. They’d been walking through Green Park hand in hand towards a setting sun. They’d been busy making plans.

The police hadn’t yet identified Danny’s fingerprints at Alice’s home. But they would. He’d be blamed for that too. Of course Lexie would be able to act as a witness to what really happened. But would the police believe her? Not if they still believed Danny was responsible for the hit and the Mayfair massacre. They’d assume she was covering for him, or had somehow been involved as well.

Danny had dreamt last night of Sally also, but in his dream she’d still been dead, strapped to that chair in the cabin with her mouth gaping wide and her eyes as deep and dark as burrows.

Watching now as Lexie lay down on the grass and stared up at the swirling grey sky, Danny scratched at the scar where the Paper Stone Scissors killer had driven the shears deep into his thigh.

The Paper Stone Scissors Killer. That was what the media had taken to calling the Director after the details of Danny’s family’s ordeal had been leaked. Danny and Lexie had been the first to survive one of his attacks.

After he’d faded like a ghost into that snowstorm, Danny had collapsed. It was Lexie who’d saved him. His nine-year-old daughter. If he’d been on his own, he would have died.

She’d gone back into the cabin. She gone back in
there
, where Sally and Jonathan had been. She’d gone back in on her own and she’d found Sally’s cell phone and had dialled 911.

The police had combed the valley for the stranger’s body, in case Danny really had clipped him with that Browning as he’d thought. But they’d found nothing. Forensics had gone over the cabin and the stranger’s abandoned car. But they’d turned up nothing.

Danny and Lexie had been offered protection after that. A new beginning. But Danny had taken his daughter away to California instead. To a rented apartment in Santa Monica. He hadn’t wanted anybody’s protection. He hadn’t wanted anyone near them. He’d gone there to look after his little girl. But what he’d done instead was collapse into drinking and pills.

Time had passed. One day Sally’s mother, Jean, had come to stay. Then one day soon after that she was gone, and Lexie with her. Danny had been too doped up on drink and pills to remember the how and the why.

One night months later, he’d thought about killing himself, but had instead made a phone call asking for help. It had been the first step on the long road to getting himself well again, a road he knew he’d one way or another continue to walk most likely for the rest of his life.

Two years after Sally and Jonathan had been murdered, the FBI began to theorize that their killer must already be dead. The Director had never surfaced again. Or at least not in the way he’d done before. No more paper, stone, scissors. No more tortured mothers and children. No more executed fathers who’d first been made to watch.

Danny did not believe the FBI were right. Not in his heart. Not for a second.

He’d hired one of Karl Bain’s best men – an FBI investigative profiler who’d recently retired. He put him on a retainer. To keep trying to fit the pieces together. To cross-reference any and all convictions that had occurred since the time of the attack on the cabin. In case the stranger was not attacking because he was already doing time. To search for similar murders abroad and at home. To never stop looking.

So far there’d been nothing. But one day Danny believed that would change.

A movement caught his eye. There in the distance on the dirt track road. A vehicle was coming their way.

Danny quickly got up. He took the Glock 30 from the locked drawer of the desk in the corner of the room. He’d disassembled the other weapons he’d brought from the farmhouse and had buried them up in the hills, so that they could never be used to link him to the murders at the farm or at Alice’s. He’d destroy this weapon too before he left here. But not until he knew he was safe.

He checked the window again. The vehicle – a black Land Rover, it looked like – was coming closer. It would have passed the ‘No Through Road – Private Property’ sign by now.

It was not slowing down.

As Danny hurried for the side door of the cottage, he watched Lexie waking from her daydream with a start. She must have heard the Land Rover pulling up on the rough dirt turning circle just beyond the garden wall.

By the time the vehicle’s door slammed shut, Lexie was already on her feet, staring at the giant of a man coming towards her.

He had shoulders not quite as wide as a truck, thick dark hair scraped back in a ponytail, and a long shovel of a face, which tapered down into an unkempt and prematurely silvered beard, making him look a little like a werewolf, and a lot like someone you’d cross any road to avoid.

He was dressed in a bespoke black suit, black leather shoes, pale blue shirt, no tie. All of it Armani. The curling tip of a green flame tattoo showed just above the collar line of his tree trunk of a neck. A large platinum and diamond-encrusted ring glistened on his left index finger, big enough to make a street thief’s eyes bulge with desire – not that even a crackhead would be dumb enough to think they could steal it from this particular man and live to tell the tale.

His dark eyes sparkled like wet pebbles in the sun, locking on Lexie as he marched up to her and stopped.

‘You must be Alexandra,’ he said.

His accent was Russian. Lexie’s eyes widened with fear. Her knees began to sag.

‘It’s OK.’ Danny stepped up beside her and put his arm around her. He’d left the Glock inside when he’d seen who’d got out of the car. ‘He’s a friend. He’s here to help.’

‘My name is Spartak Sidarvov,’ the man said, not taking his hooded eyes off Lexie. He leant towards her, deliberately lowering his height. ‘I met you once before. When you were much younger. When your mother was still alive. You look like her.’ He gave Lexie a lopsided smile and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘Apart from your hair, I think,’ he said, ‘which I imagine was your father’s idea.’

Lexie exhaled, smiling as she did – largely, Danny guessed, from relief.

Spartak turned to Danny. ‘And so, by the devil’s poisonous shit. This is what a man with a million-dollar price tag on his head looks like …’

‘It’s good to see you too,’ Danny said.

Spartak’s face split into a grin. ‘Come here.’ He bear-hugged Danny so hard the air hissed from his lungs.

Danny forced a smile as the big man released him, but at the same time he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the Kid. About how he’d betrayed him. About how he’d never even seen it coming. He thought about the Old Man too. About his advice:
Never trust in anyone fully but yourself.

And yet here he was already doing the opposite. Because he had no choice. Because he’d known Spartak longer than anyone. And because he needed backup for what he was planning to do next.

And not just Spartak either. He’d need to find a new techie to replace the Kid. And, of course, he somehow needed to re-establish safe contact with Crane.

‘I guess you two need to talk,’ Lexie said.

Danny nodded.

‘I’m going to finish my slates,’ she said. ‘Call me when you’ve got lunch ready,’ she added, with a sly smile that made Spartak grin.

‘Just like her mother,’ he said, as he set off with Danny towards the cottage.

They went inside. Spartak weighed nearly eighteen stone. As the two men sat down opposite each other at the kitchen table, his wooden chair creaked like it was about to splinter.

Danny cut straight to the chase. He told Spartak everything that had happened to him from the moment he’d met the Kid five days ago outside the Ritz. Right up to when he’d fired those shots at the Cessna.

He then told Spartak abut his little conversation with the dying torturer. About everything he’d revealed.

He’d given Danny his real name. But he’d not known the identities of any of the others, in spite of having worked with them before. The hawk-faced man – Glinka was the only name the torturer had ever known him by – was a Russian mercenary, who the torturer claimed had been approached three months before by certain elements within the Georgian secret service.

They’d hatched a plan to assassinate their own supporter, the writer due to address the UN – Madina Tskhovrebova – and blame it on the Russians. To reinvigorate international political pressure demanding Georgia’s reunification with her former territories. To help them get back what they thought of as theirs by right.

Glinka had decided to pin the assassination on a member of the Russian embassy staff. Its military attaché had been the obvious choice. But as his team had set about researching Zykov prior to his abduction and the hit, Glinka had realized he might have met the colonel before.

When he had come face to face with Zykov on the night before the assassination, his suspicions had been confirmed. In 1990, Zykov had illegally raided the Biopreparat chemical weapons facility at which Glinka had been stationed.

Fearing the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent neutering of Russia’s security and power, Zykov and his fellow nationalist hardliners had taken it upon themselves to preserve certain secret chemical weapons for the potential future exclusive use of the Russian state. It was these which they’d gone to the Biopreparat facility to steal.

Five nights ago, Glinka had tortured Colonel Zykov in his apartment to discover where those stolen chemical weapons were being kept now.

The colonel didn’t know, since the weapons had been regularly moved since their original theft. What he did know, however, was the name of the hidden and encrypted file on his government intranet computer that was regularly updated by his co-conspirators with the weapons’ current locations.

The discovery of the existence and proximity of this file was what had led Glinka to change his plan. As well as carrying out the assassination he’d been paid to do, he would now steal the stolen weapons data too. For his own personal gain.

‘And so they mutilated the colonel’s body,’ Spartak said, quickly guessing ahead. ‘To buy themselves more time. Because the second Zykov was discovered missing, the embassy would be locked down and the opportunity to steal that data would disappear.’

‘And the colonel’s co-conspirators, as part of the protocols of their own web of trust, would have remotely destroyed his copy of the file.’

‘All of which leaves us with one big problem,’ Spartak said. ‘They have the data and we do not. We don’t even know what these chemical weapons are they are planning to steal.’

‘Smallpox,’ Danny said.

Spartak looked up sharply.

‘Six different formulations,’ Danny continued. ‘Against which current vaccine stockpiles are completely ineffective.’

Spartak’s expression darkened as he did the maths.

Danny must have looked the same when he’d first researched the ramifications himself, about the kind of cataclysmic damage a chemical weapon like this could wreak.

In the event of a hybrid smallpox outbreak, current ring vaccination and quarantine containment measures would only slow, not stop, the development of a pandemic. The death toll could reach not just into the hundreds of thousands, but into the millions. Economically it would cost governments billions. Only one in three people exposed to the disease would survive.

‘My God,’ Spartak said, ‘but this is terrible …’

God had nothing to do with it. The Biopreparat Zykov and his co-conspirators had tricked their way into back in 1990 had been an unofficial repository for dozens of smallpox formulations developed as part of the Soviet biological warfare programme. The effectiveness of these weapons had increased exponentially over time, due to the fact that the otherwise globally eradicated smallpox virus was no longer vaccinated against.

‘And I don’t suppose there’s any way to prove any of this?’ Spartak said.

Danny had thought about that himself, about tipping off the current Russian government, the Americans, Chinese, Indians and British too. But why would any of them believe him?

‘Not even if anyone was listening to us,’ he said. ‘Which they’re not.’

‘And there’s no way to tip off Zykov’s friends either that Glinka is coming for them … and what’s theirs.’

‘We don’t even know who they are.’

Spartak threw up his hands, exasperated. ‘Then we’re completely and utterly fucked, my friend.’

‘Were
…’Danny dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a black data stick, the same one that had been left there for him five days ago, hanging round the dead colonel’s neck.

Spartak’s hooded eyes narrowed to slits. ‘What’s that?’

Danny handed the stick across. It looked as insubstantial as a twig in Spartak’s huge hand as he slowly turned it over.

‘It’s the stick the Kid gave me,’ Danny said. ‘The one he was going to use to lure me into raiding the embassy before they kidnapped Lexie. The one he said didn’t have anything useful on it.’ He paused. ‘Well, now it does.’

Spartak smiled slowly. ‘You stole the data …’

‘Copied it,’ Danny said. ‘I knew they’d check on the phone to see if it was all there. But while I was still in the colonel’s office, just before that worm took effect, I copied the file directly from the colonel’s computer and onto the stick. Then hid the data stick in my shoe.’

Spartak kissed the stick. He clenched it tightly in his fist. ‘So we now know what they know …’

‘What they’re going to try and steal …’

‘And where they’re going to try and steal it from …’

‘And let me guess,’ Spartak said, unfurling his fist again before returning the data stick to Danny, ‘some of these seriously deadly and priceless biological weapons are in Russia … which is why you’ve called me in.’

‘And because I was missing you.’

‘But of course … because you are only human,’ Spartak said with a shrug.

Danny smiled. But he felt no true happiness then. Only nerves. Spartak had a family of his own. He had every right to walk away from this now. Danny watched and waited as the Russian stared out of the window, processing and assessing all that he’d heard.

‘I never did like the Kid,’ he said finally. ‘He was a slob. He had no sense of style. It will be a privilege and a pleasure to track him down.’

Danny looked up sharply. ‘Then you’re in?’

‘Oh yes. We will go together and we will find them. Trust me, Danny boy,’ he said, ‘we will make these bad-boy fucking bastards pay.’ He clapped his hands together then, as if sealing his decision in his mind. ‘And meanwhile,’ he said, ‘we must also stop you falling into the hands of MI5, the CIA, the FSB and every other goddamn dickhead security agency who will be trying to nail your head to the wall.’ Again that wide, wolfish smile. ‘It should be a piece of piss for men like us, don’t you think? To clear your name once and for all.’

‘Thank you.’ Danny felt his throat tightening. Spartak being here, agreeing to help him … He knew the fightback could now begin. ‘You must be thirsty after your journey,’ he said. ‘I put a bottle of vodka in the freezer for you.’

Spartak raised his thick dark eyebrows at Danny inquisitively.

‘Sorry, not Diaka,’ Danny said. The world-famous vodka he’d last seen on Colonel Zykov’s office desk. ‘Funnily enough, they didn’t have that in stock at the local village store.’ He ignored Spartak’s exaggerated look of disappointment. ‘But I did manage to procure you a bottle of Stolichnaya, so don’t feel too hard done by, eh?’

Spartak grinned, ‘An excellent choice.’

Danny heard music. He turned and looked out through the open window at Lexie. She was whistling as she drew. An ache filled his chest. A pang of regret. He’d recognized the old tune. It was called ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Sally’s favourite. She’d taught it to Lexie and Jonathan. The four of them had used to sing it together on long journeys in the old Chevy Sedan.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Danny said.

Outside the weather was turning. A cold wind had started to blow. Dark clouds scudded across the sky. A storm was gathering in the east.

Danny listened to Lexie whistling. He watched her as she drew. He thought of what was gone and what was yet to come.

I’ll be there. Nothing can stop me.

‘Dad,’ she said, noticing him there. ‘I’ve finished. Come and see.’