The Dead Tracks (62 page)

    But I
could.

    I
brought the MP 5 up slowly to my shoulder. Stock against my body. Finger around
the trigger. I was surrounded by oily darkness, as thick as the inside of a
tomb. But as soon as I fired, I would give my position away. I had to get it
right.

    Aim.

    Concentrate.

    I
thought of my dad teaching me to fire guns. Of him running through the woods
behind our farm with me when I was a teenager. Firing a replica Beretta at
targets he'd assembled.

    
Concentrate
.

    I
squeezed the trigger.

    The
noise was immense. It crackled across the path seconds after the bullet went
through the gunman's face. One side to the other. In the periphery of the
light, I could see a flash of red. And then he was down. Slumped to his side.
Half in the woods, half on the path.

    I got
to my feet and ran.

    
Fnip.
Fnip.

    Bullets
hit the space behind me. I clipped a tree with my shoulder, unable to
distinguish it as I moved further away from the two torches on the path. Then I
hit another and almost knocked myself out. I fell back into the undergrowth.

    Quiet.

    Nothing
now. Just the gentle patter of rain against the canopy. My thoughts were
racing: would they hear the gunfire from the road? How long would it take them
to get support teams here? It had taken us thirty minutes to walk this far.
That probably meant half that at a run. I rolled over. Grass and fallen
branches cracked under me.

    On
the other side of the tree line, about thirty feet away in a diagonal to my
right, was another dead PC. His torch was pointing towards him, right up close
to his face. It turned his skin red, and the blood at his mouth even redder.
Beyond that, further up the trail, was what was left of the crate, just a vague
shape against the night. I could see a dead PC lying alongside it. Back the way
I'd come, Crane was still down on the floor. He hadn't moved. It meant the last
SFO was still alive — or the remaining assassin couldn't be sure. If he knew
for certain, Crane would just get up and walk off.

    Movement.

    Opposite
me, across the trail, on the other side of the woods. I squinted into the darkness.
Nothing now. Just the tree line and the swathes of black beyond.

    But
then it came again.

    More
movement.

    Suddenly,
gunfire erupted from the direction of the crate, and the whole area lit up. The
bodies on the trail. Jill strapped to a tree, further back in the direction I'd
come. Crane on the floor of the path. The SFO, MP 5 to his shoulder, was firing
towards the space I'd seen movement. And the source of the movement: the other
assassin, hidden behind a tree, facing in my direction.

    We
were looking at one another.

    And
his gun was aimed.

    I
ducked — late - as two bullets whipped across the trail and hit the tree behind
me. They'd missed me by an inch. Through the undergrowth, on my side, I saw him
for a second. And then he was gone. The SFO had stopped firing.

    The
Dead Tracks were black.

    No
sound but the rain.

    I
very gently sat up and shifted sideways, moving on my backside, dragging myself
through the undergrowth as quickly and as quietly as I could. After about ten
feet, my arm hit a tree. I stopped. Lifted the MP 5 to my shoulder and aimed it
back in the direction of the gunman.

    
Click
.

    The
SFO was reloading. I was closer to the crate now, could hear the gentle sound
of the magazine being fitted back into the gun. A brief moment of silence.

    Then
more gunfire.

    The
SFO's bullets hit the tree the man was using as cover. But he was protected.
His cover was good.

    Except
he'd made a mistake.

    He was
still facing the same position I'd been in before. As soon as the MP 5 lit up
the woods, he fired twice into the space I'd been. But I wasn't there. Through
the sights I could see his balaclava, eyes showing: a moment of hesitation as
he realized I was somewhere else. He scanned the woodland, moving left along
the edge of the trail. Then surprise as he picked out my position about thirty
feet across from him.

    Aim.
Concentrate.

    
Hit
the target.

    I
fired.

    His
head ruptured, blood spattering against the tree, and his body fell backwards
against the floor of the woods. No sound. Through the corner of my eye, I saw
the SFO look in my direction and nod. He'd known I was there. He'd tracked my
movement from the first time I'd fired. I nodded back. We both realized he'd
used me. He'd given me enough light and enough time to take the shot and banked
on me hitting the target. I wasn't an expert marksman. With less time to line
up the shot I might have missed. But I knew enough to hit two stationary targets,
both of which hadn't seen me first. Maybe he knew what I could do. Maybe he'd
read what the police had on file about me. Or maybe he'd just taken a chance.
Either way it had worked.

    Movement
to my left. I swivelled.

    Crane
was up and on his feet, sprinting away.

    I
headed after him, bending down to pick up the torch lying next to the dead PC's
face. The burnt, nauseating stench of gunfire drifted along the trail, and
there was the tang of blood in the air, thick and fresh. Crane looked back at
me, then veered right, into the woods. I followed. I shone the torch out in
front of me and saw him about fifteen feet ahead, my heart thumping in my ears,
my hands greased with sweat and rain. He was trying to get some distance
between us. Trying to pull away. Trying to lose me and fade into the night. But
without a torch, the woods were like a maze.

    A
second later he fell.

    Out
of the night, a huge oak tree emerged, springing from the dark like a wall of
wood. He clipped it with his shoulder as he went to avoid it. Stumbled. Shifted
to his left. As he tried to stop himself from falling, a bramble grasped at his
foot, reaching up from the forest floor. He lurched forward and toppled over,
hitting the ground hard, the wind thumped out of him, his wrists - locked
together — catching under his body. He rolled over, looking up, breath forming
in front of his face.

    For a
moment, he couldn't focus. He stared up in my direction but slightly off to the
side. Then he rocked his head from left to right, his eyelids fluttered and he
readjusted. His eyes fixed on me. I shone the torch down at him, off to the
side of his face, so he could see me as clearly as the darkness of the woods
would allow.

    'Who
were they?' I said.

    'Russians.'
He coughed then smiled, blood and saliva smeared across his teeth. They were
scared about what I might be forced to tell the cops. They can get to me in
prison. But they can't get to me in a police station. So I made a deal.'

    'A
deal?'

    'The Ghost
needs his face doing again. He's paranoid. Thinks the police are closing in on
him the whole time.' He paused, ran his tongue across his teeth. 'So I told his
people that if he got me out of this, I could delay the police - and I'd do
Gobulev's face for free.'

    'This
was about a facelift?'

    'No,
David,' he said. This was about protection. Have you any idea how valuable I am
to the police? Have you any idea how much I've seen? The Russians were taking
out an insurance policy. And anyway, how many plastic surgeons do you think
there are in this country willing to work for people like Gobulev?' He paused.
'I'm the star witness. I'm the key. I'm
God?

    A
trickle of blood escaped from his lips and ran down his face. He reached up
with his handcuffed wrists and brushed it away. It smeared across the scar on
his chin.

    'How
did they know?' I asked him.

    'Let's
just say, when I asked for a phone call, I didn't call my lawyer.'

    As I
stared at Crane, a wind whipped across us, passing through grass and bushes and
leaves, as cold as a sheet of ice. A gentle whisper followed in its wake; a
far-off noise like a voice repeating itself over and over again.

    From
the ground, Crane studied me. 'You can feel it.'

    'I
don't feel anything'

    'But
you knew what I was talking about.' In the light from the torch, his eyes
widened in delight, flicking back and forth across my face. 'It has a power,
this place. All the secrets, the lies, the death, the destruction. It leaves
its mark.'

    'You're
done,' I said quietly.

    He
shook his head. 'I'm not done yet, David.'

    I
looked at him, studied him, his eyes flashing in the subtle glow of the
torchlight. I brought the MP 5 around and placed it against his head. His eyes
crossed for a moment, focusing on the barrel above his eyes. Then he looked
back at me.

    'We're
the same,' he whispered.

    My
fingers touched the trigger. My left hand squeezed the barrel. The stock cut in
against my shoulder. All this misery. All this pain. If I pulled the trigger now,
no one would cry for him. No one would miss him. He'd be buried in a cemetery
somewhere with no one at his graveside. If I pulled the trigger, no one would
mourn him.

    'We're
the same, David.'

    But
if I pulled the trigger, he'd be right.

    I moved
the MP 5 away from his face and tossed it into the undergrowth behind me. His
expression dissolved. He thought he'd still been in control, even as he looked
down the barrel of the gun. He thought we were the same. But we'd never be the
same.

    Not
now. Not ever.

    'You
were right about me,' I said to him quietly. 'I've killed. But I did it to
survive. I did it because the alternative was dying myself. And there hasn't
been a day that's gone by - not a single day - I haven't wished I could have
done it differently, even though the people I hurt were men just like you: men
who feel nothing when they take a life. There's not been a single day when I
don't think about what I've done. So you can hunt me, and you can torture me,
and you can try to kill me. And one day, who knows, maybe one of you will
succeed.' I reached down, grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. 'But
don't
ever
say we're the same. Because you'll never understand me.
You'll never know who I am. And we'll never be the same.'

    And
then I led Aron Crane back through the darkness of the Dead Tracks.

    Three
weeks later, police were still trying to unravel the lie that was Aron Crane's
life: his wife, his child, his victims, his reasons. The six women he'd left
floating in formalin were there for reference. He could have buried them in the
ground like Milton Sykes had, but as he got closer to working on Megan, he
needed to be able to refer to the problems he'd encountered during surgery, and
the mistakes he'd made along the way.

    To
start, as had been the case when he was first arrested, he refused to talk. But
he did open up a little eventually. Police brought in the best psychologist
they could find and he worked some details out of Crane. Small details, like
how he pushed his wife Phedra off the decking on the top of his house. Whatever
his reasoning, the psychologist failed to illicit any emotion from Crane about
the moment he leaned over the railings and looked down at his dead wife,
pregnant with his child. Any sign he missed her, or regretted what he'd done.
He buried them in the woods, and in all the time people tried chipping away at
him, it proved the only chink in his armour. The only way to get him to talk.
Crane may have been a wall of silence, but Phedra was the tiny hole that would
never seal over.

    He
pleaded guilty to murdering the six women he preserved in formalin, killing
Susan Markham and kidnapping Megan, Jill and Sona, but said virtually nothing
during the trial, other than to confirm his name. After four days, the jury
found him guilty and he was given seven life sentences, to run concurrently. I
watched the news every day during that time, waiting to see an egotistical
flash, or hear how he'd smiled at jurors while recounting the horrific things
that he'd done. But reporters always described him as subdued, and after a
while I realized - without his project, without the opportunity to move from
one stage to the next — he had nothing left. When he was even incapable of
expressing any regret over what he'd done to his wife and child, it was obvious
there were no hidden depths to him. Nothing else to his make-up. With no
control and no power, there was no Aron Crane.