Hunted (7 page)

Danny backed inside and jerked the curtains shut.

He stared at the rifle in his hands. The one he’d just been holding out there in broad daylight. In full view of the world.

This was no dream. No hallucination.

So what the hell is going on? Why can’t I remember why I’m
here?

A flash of light. To the right. Another door. Ajar. Through it Danny glimpsed a sliver of brightly lit white-tiled wall. Another memory hit him. Someone had come out of there, someone who’d meant him harm.

Five soft strides across the deep cream carpet and Danny was there. He kicked the door hard, busted it open, his rifle already up.

A man in a black balaclava and Ray-Ban Aviator shades stared back at him.

Danny fired. A killing burst. The report was deafening. The man disintegrated into a hundred shards.

It’s your own reflection
…

Danny tore the balaclava from his head and stared at his face in the one jagged splinter of mirror left hanging on the wall. His eyes looked wired, insanely alert.

He was dressed in a red and white-striped tracksuit. The same as the corpse. He looked down at his feet. Nikes. Again the same. Box fresh.

He backed out of the bathroom. Checked the other rooms. A study. Untouched. A double bedroom with the bed still made. A dark stain on the carpet by the radiator. Looked like blood.

A diamond of sunlight sparked off the glass table as he went back into the sitting room. Coffee. Now he remembered. He’d watched it being poured. Another man’s features flashed into his mind. Thinning hair. Wire glasses.

A Taser.

Shock and pain.

But then?

Lexie. The thought of his daughter swept through his mind like a flaming torch driving back the dark. A total dread that something so bad was happening to him that he might never see her again – it swept the last of his waking delirium from his mind.

Everything came back then. A deluge of memories that momentarily left him swamped.

Russians. They’d sounded like Russians. Or Serbians.

He remembered why he’d come here. For a meeting. One set up by Crane. He remembered the blonde woman at the door. The bearded man who’d searched him. The blonde woman had used a comms scanner. She’d taken his jacket. She’d taken his jacket to prevent the meeting being wired.

The Kid
…

Danny ran to the entrance hallway and jerked the wardrobe open. The Faraday case was gone. Along with, he realized, his jacket, hat, credit cards, driving licence and passport.

He clamped his hand to the back of his neck, feeling the throbbing again. Another memory … he’d been injected with something. After the balding man had taken him down with the Taser, he’d used a hypodermic to knock him out.

Danny checked his watch. It was gone. He checked the clock on the wall. Eleven fifty. The blonde woman had opened the suite door at exactly eleven thirty. His conversation with the hawk-faced
man had been violently interrupted just minutes after that. Which meant he couldn’t have been unconscious for more than fifteen minutes.

During which time the limo had been ambushed, he’d been stripped and changed, and this rifle had been placed in his hands.

A rifle that had been used on the limo and those poor people, of that Danny had no doubt. Meaning that even prior to him shooting his own reflection, his hands would most likely already have been contaminated with gunshot residue. Something a counterterrorism trace-detection portal machine would sniff out no sweat, providing enough evidence to incarcerate Danny for life.

That’s when Danny knew it for certain. What he’d already begun to suspect. Not only had he been set up, he’d been set up good.

And already he knew he would have to run.

But not yet
, he told himself.
First take whatever you can from here that might help
…

He raced through the hotel suite rooms, jacket sleeves stretched over his fingertips, jerking open empty wardrobes and drawers, looking in bins and under chairs and beds.

But they’d left the place clean. Even the coffee pot and cups, which should have been here on the glass table, were now nowhere to be found. Because taking them would have been quicker and safer than wiping them free of prints.

All they’d left for the police to find were the rifles, the corpse, the carnage outside – and him.

Danny ran to the dead man. Wrong colour hair to have been the hawk-faced guy, or the man who’d searched him, or the one who’d taken him down with the Taser. Wrong build too for the man in the balaclava who’d come at him from the bathroom.

He quickly checked the corpse front and back for exit wounds. Nothing. No blood-spray patterns nearby either. Nothing to indicate he’d been shot.

So how the hell
had
he died?

The man’s facial wounds hadn’t killed him. That was for sure. The limited bleeding there and on the stumps of his fingers meant he’d already been dead by the time these mutilations had occurred.

Meaning he’d been disfigured to conceal his ID. Suggesting that maybe this was another member of the hawk-faced man’s unit who Danny had never even seen. Implying that the others must have feared that they could be tracked down through him.

ID this guy and he might lead you to them
…

Taking prints wasn’t an option. Instead Danny hastily rummaged through the dead man’s pockets. Chances were they’d already been emptied. But if the others had been forced into hurriedly mutilating him like this, it meant they’d been in a rush. And people in a rush made mistakes.

No wallet. Some loose change. All sterling. A broken gold pen, initialled ‘NZ’, sticky with black ink. Then something else in the man’s jacket breast pocket. Something thin and rectangular. A credit card, he hoped at first. But what he found instead was an ink-drenched plastic swipe card.

He smeared the ink off. The card was white underneath. Unmarked. Could have been for anything. A gym or a launderette. But Danny hoped it might still have the dead man’s name encoded in it.

He checked the man’s wrists. No watch. Then something else caught his eye. Just there, where the bloodstained shirt had been torn open, in what Danny could only assume had been some attempt to revive him.

Danny jerked the shirt wider. A USB data stick hung from a cord around the dead man’s neck.

Something for the Kid
…

But even in the act of reaching out to grab it, Danny’s fingers froze. First the swipe card and now this … Not one mistake, but two. Both items might have been left here deliberately for the police to find, he realized. To send them off on a false trail.

He took them anyway. What choice did he have? Any information was better than none. Yanking the stick free, he slipped it into his trouser pocket, along with the card, pen and cash.

He was up then. Running. Into the bathroom. Snatching up the balaclava and shades he’d been wearing. Rolling the balaclava up
into a beanie hat on the top of his head. He put the shades on too. Turned up his collar. Hid as much of his face as he could.

He didn’t know who might be waiting for him in the corridor outside the hotel suite. But he ditched the rifle anyway. Whoever had set him up must surely have fled by now. Because why bother going to the trouble of framing him at all, if they were planning on hanging around?

These were no martyrs, he was sure of it. This was no Mumbai. No hotel siege. This was an assassination. A hit. On whoever had been in that limo.

And this rifle they’d left him, it would only slow him down and further incriminate him. Or he’d be tempted to use it in self-defence against whatever British military or police got in his way. Which wouldn’t end well for anyone.

He grabbed a shard of broken mirror from the bathroom floor, then used the alcohol-based boot-polish wipes from the room’s welcome pack to clean his prints off the rifle and everything else he’d touched, including the dead man’s wrist where he’d checked for a pulse.

It was the least he could do. But most likely not enough. If he’d contaminated the dead man’s clothes with his DNA, then there was nothing he could do about it now. Plus for all he knew, the people who’d set him up could have put his prints and DNA – sweat, mucus, hair – in a whole bunch of other places. Leaving him circumstantially and forensically fucked if he got captured by the police, or tried turning himself in and claiming he’d been somewhere else in the hotel when the hit and the massacre had gone down.

He pushed down slowly on the suite’s door handle with his elbow. Nudging the door ajar, he listened: heard nothing. He used the shard of broken mirror to peer outside. The corridor was clear.

Danny stepped out into it and started to run.

You’re lucky you’re not still back there slumped unconscious in that chair
, Danny thought, already halfway along the corridor, not looking back.

That was just about the only comfort he had right now. He’d got out of that room where they’d left him to rot, before the police had showed up to collect.

Or – another sickening thought occurred to him – maybe they’d wanted him to wake as disoriented as he had. And stumble out on to that balcony with that gun. Or even try to fight his way out. So the police focused their attention right here on him, while the people who’d caused all that mayhem escaped.

Either way, they’d messed up on whatever drugs they’d knocked him out with. They’d not dosed him right. Because he was thinking clearly now. Clear enough to be getting away. Which meant they weren’t as smart as they thought.

All of which gave him a chance. Because they wouldn’t be expecting him to now come hunting for them.

Danny reckoned there was still a possibility of him slipping out of the hotel, before specialist police firearms and counterterrorism units arrived and zipped up the net for good.

The smiling hawk-faced man with the shock of blond hair … he
was the one who was behind all this, of that Danny was convinced. He was the one Danny would find and make pay.

But the others … he’d find them too …

Glimpsing his blurred red and white-striped reflection in a wall mirror as he rushed by, Danny slowed and selected a door at random near the end of the corridor. He kicked it just below its handle as hard as he could.

He needed a change of clothes. That TV crew had got him good. He’d been lucky he’d still had the balaclava pulled down over his face and the shades on. But chances were this tracksuit would be plastered all over the networks in the next ten minutes. Meaning that dressed like this, he might as well have a target on his chest for armed cops to shoot at.

The door’s lock shattered at the second kick. Danny burst inside. A single room, much smaller than the suite he’d left. A bed, desk and chair. The curtains were drawn shut. An open doorway led into a blacked-out en suite.

An unpacked suitcase stood open on the unruffled bed. Again covering his fingers with his tracksuit sleeves, Danny flipped through the case’s contents. All useless. Female. Dresses, knickers, bras and heels. The only item that might have sufficed was a plain black shirt, but even that was way too small.

He saw her when he turned to go. Half hidden behind the chair. A woman in her late fifties. Curled up under a writing bureau. Wrapped in a white bath towel. Her make-up was smudged and her cheeks smeared with tears. She had ash-blonde hair, the same colour Danny’s mother’s had turned that last month in the hospital.

‘Please …’

The woman stretched out her trembling right arm towards him, fingers splayed, like she was trying to block him from view. It was a gesture Danny had seen before. Dozens of times in dozens of countries. From old and young alike. She must have heard the gunfire. Or seen the devastation outside. She was trying to shield herself. She thought she was next.

Danny hated to see anyone cowering like that.

‘It’s OK, I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said. He kept his accent
neutral, clipped, as English as he could. Didn’t want to mark himself out as an American, in case she told the police. ‘And don’t worry … the people who did that out there … I think they’ve already gone.’

‘You … you’re police?’

A flicker of hope in her eyes.

Dashed.

‘No. But they’ll be here soon. And until they get here, I want you to go into that bathroom and lock the door. You’ll be safe there. Do you understand?’

Her mouth opened as if she were about to speak, but no words came out.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ Danny said. ‘I promise you. Everything’s going to be fine.’

She nodded and started to rise.

Back out in the corridor, Danny felt his chest tightening. How could this have happened? How could he have ended up bushwhacked?
Crane
… Who the hell was his US government contact? Why had they led Danny into this?

No time left now to kick in any other hotel doors in search of clothes. Instead he ran to the end of the corridor and out in to the stairwell. He thought about busting out through the emergency exit onto whatever fire escape lay beyond, maybe trying to slip away down the back of the building. But just as quickly he dismissed the idea.

Before he made any decisions, what he needed was information. What he needed was the Kid.

He took the stairs two at a time. Round and down. Seemed like only minutes ago he’d been going the other way. He wished he’d listened harder to his instincts and the warning bells in the back of his mind that had told him not to come. He should have called the whole meeting off.

He remembered Anna-Maria last night. The peace and the warmth. She’d be opening up her husband’s restaurant in Borough Market now. Less than two miles from here. Might as well be on another planet, though, Danny thought, for all their lives had diverged since they’d kissed each other goodbye.

Everything had changed in the blink of an eye. In the nothing time it had taken for the Taser’s trigger to be pulled and its neuromuscular incapacitation pulse to slam into Danny’s flesh.

He reached the ground floor in less than thirty seconds. He stared at the stairwell door.
What’s on the other side?
A wall of police? Staff and guests cowering? Or a whole bunch of dead people? Frozen in horizontal cartwheels, blitzed by the same people who’d set Danny up as they made their way out?

Danny pressed the handle down with his sleeve and used the mirror shard to perform a quick visual sweep. No bodies. No police. Part of the hotel’s main reception was visible at the end of the corridor to the left. Warm lighting. The only sign of a struggle was a single knocked-down chair.

Danny remembered the maids he’d seen running towards the waiting cop. Someone here must have done their job well. Got people out fast. After Mumbai, most of the big international hotels – particularly famous potential targets like this – had taken part in exercises arranged by security forums to brush up on their evacuation procedures.

Good for them. But bad for Danny. Because getting out was now going to be even tougher, if he was already one of the last people left.

He moved fast. Through the doorway. Away from the reception. Deeper into the hotel. His Nikes squeaked deafeningly with each step. He passed a doorway leading into the hotel kitchens. He caught a whiff of grilled bacon and freshly baked bread.

A short burst of radio chatter gave the cop’s position away.