Hunted (17 page)

‘Danny? Danny … are you still there?’

The words ‘DANIEL SHANKLIN’ glared out at him from beneath every single image of his face in the TV store window.

‘Danny?’

The Kid’s voice finally pierced Danny’s mind. He tore his eyes from the screens.

He said, ‘Wait.’

Stand, don’t fall. For God’s sake, don’t fall.
He felt as if the pillar against which he was leaning was made of sponge. He felt like the whole mall was no longer real, as if everything he saw was no more substantial than a digital environment clipped straight out of Noirlight.

He fought the fear rising up inside him. He forced himself to focus on the here and now.

Lexie
.

His precious princess. The fact that he’d now been publicly ID’d meant that a link from him to her would happen next, just as sure as night followed day.

He’d done the one thing he’d sworn he never would. He’d put her life in danger again.

The first thing the police, the military, and whatever other
agencies were hunting Danny would do was to run his now known real ID through every official database available.

They’d start pulling up his entire documented history – from his birth and marriage certificates to the births of his children and the deaths of his wife and son.

Which meant they’d soon enough find out about Lexie. How old she was, and how she lived here in London, and where she went to school. Then they’d come for her. To reel him in. Of that Danny had no doubt.

He had to reach her first. And get her somewhere safe. He had to do it now.

He turned towards the fire exit leading out on to the rooftop car park, already focusing on what kind of vehicle he’d be best off stealing. But then he stopped. It was too risky. There’d be CCTV covering the lot. Plus if he hotwired a car with a transponder fitted, he’d end up getting tracked by the cops double quick.

He opted for the escalator instead. Headed down, checking out his fractured reflection in the mirrored mosaic on the wall. He adjusted his cap further down his brow, turned up his collar and set his shades square on his face.

A face the whole world now knew.

He scoured the ground floor below him as he continued his descent, counting the CCTV cameras, looking for a blind spot. He saw one. A flower bed of plastic foliage and fake tropical blooms stood unmonitored in the far right corner of the mall, near its southernmost exit.

Danny marched straight for it as soon as he hit the ground floor, the swipe card and data stick already palmed in his hand. He sat on the flower bed wall and half turned to face the fake flora behind.

It was bedded with sand, he saw. He leaned back, propping himself up with the arm holding the data stick and card, and pushed them firmly into the sand, then glanced back to check that neither item could be seen.

‘You still got me there on your nav?’ he said to the Kid.

‘Of course, but—’

‘The mall’s south exit. There’s a flower bed on the left as you
come in.’ He got up and, turning, used his phone to snap a photo of the plant he’d buried the stick and the card beside. He punched the Kid’s number and hit send. ‘The data stick and the card are buried there. Come get them as quick as you can.’

‘You mean you’re not coming to meet me?’ Confusion was rising up in the Kid’s voice.

‘Check the news feeds,’ Danny said.

He was already pushing through the mall’s glass swing doors and out on to the hot, crowded pavement.

Blaring car horns. The stink of petrol fumes. The traffic was moving, but only just. Bright sunlight burned down, glinting off windscreens and store windows. Danny turned right, walked fast. Again he had to use all his self-control, just to stop himself from breaking into a run.

The Kid’s voice came back. ‘Oh shit. Oh Christ, I can’t believe this is happening.’ He sounded more rattled than Danny had ever known him.

‘How the fuck could they have matched up my name to that footage so quick?’ Danny said.

Because there’d not been nearly enough time for him to have been ID’d from any forensics that might have been found back there in the Ritz. Meaning the link to his name could only have been made through that phone footage. Meaning also that someone must have run those images through US public records databases. But how could they possibly have got a match so fast?

‘I … I don’t know.’ The Kid was reeling, clearly just as thrown as Danny. ‘Maybe … maybe that footage broke somewhere else first … maybe even on a news channel in the States … Or, I don’t know, maybe someone recognized you and rang in … That’s the only thing I can think of, Danny … that it must have happened like that.’

It was possible, of course, Danny knew. But there was another possibility too, one he didn’t want to believe but also knew he’d be crazy right now to discard. Namely, that Crane could have given up his real ID. Either naively, or out of some misplaced sense of trust to his US government contact, who’d in turn naively – or deliberately – then passed it on to the hawk-faced man.

Leaving the possibility that the hawk-faced man had now decided to give the police a helping hand to capture their man.

Danny wanted to be wrong about Crane. But he didn’t know. What he did know was that anyone could be got to. Crane’s contact. Even Crane himself. With the right leverage – financial or emotional – everyone had their price.

All of which meant that Crane was now a risk Danny could no longer afford to take. He would not contact him again.

‘We need to get you somewhere safe,’ said the Kid. ‘Somewhere off the street. And find these fuckers quick. Forget about me coming in to pick up that data, Danny. The quickest thing is for you to bring it to me.’

But Danny was already a hundred metres from the shopping mall, and not turning back. Sweat was pouring off his brow. His clothes felt like wet paint sprayed on to his skin. Pressure, the heat, it didn’t matter which … He felt dizzy, nauseous, like he was about to throw up or pass out.

All day it had been like he’d had a snare tightening round his neck. And the harder he’d pulled, and the more he’d struggled to escape, the tighter it had become. Until now he wondered if he’d live through this at all.

The traffic on this side of the street was still crawling at a snail’s pace both ways. He considered going back to the underground car park to get the moped, but there was already the possibility that the police had by now used CCTV footage to trace his escape route there.

Instead he saw a black London taxi moving slowly towards him in a demarcated bus and taxi lane. The orange glow of its roof light meant it was for hire.

‘And Jesus, Danny,’ the Kid was saying, ‘for God’s sake keep your face covered. The rules have changed. All those CCTV networks I was piggybacking … the ones the police were tracking you on before, when you were wearing that tracksuit … well from here on in they’re going to be double trouble. Not only are the cops going to be scouring the feeds looking for you, they’re going to programme in your face and get the computers looking too …’

Danny already knew what he meant. Intelligent CCTV. As far as spying on its own population went, the Brits were world leaders. Half of London now incorporated facial recognition systems into its surveillance networks. The systems were far from flawless, but they could still trip him up.

‘Another damn good reason to get you off the street,’ said the Kid. ‘You need to get your arse over here now.’

But Danny was hardly even listening. He flagged the taxi down.

‘Danny?’ Another note of confusion from the Kid. ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you going back to pick up the swipe card and stick?’

The Kid must have just seen that Danny’s GPS signature was still nowhere near the mall.

‘Fetch them and find out what’s on them,’ said Danny. ‘I’ll call you back when I can.’

‘But Danny … Danny …’ The Kid was shouting now. ‘I’m fucking serious. I can still get you through this. But you’ve got to come in now, Danny. You’ve gotta—’

Danny cut him off. As he got into the taxi, he checked for messages from Crane. There were none. Then his phone’s screen slowly faded to black as its battery finally died.

‘Where to, mate?’ said the driver, peering at Danny through the rear-view mirror.

‘The corner of Whelan and Peters Street,’ Danny said. ‘Get me there in under ten minutes and I’ll pay you triple, OK?’

Danny stared out of the window. The cab jumped a kerb and turned into an alley. As it picked up speed and the buildings blurred past, he hunched forward in his seat, his fingers locked up in two fists.

Lexie. He had to get to her. He had to reach her in time. He’d not fail his daughter again.

Icy wind crackled like static through the brittle branches of the pine trees. The air tasted of ozone, almost crisp to the bite. The snow was falling heavily now, swirling like interference on a TV screen.

Danny was desperately trying to control his breath, to clear his mind, to calm his stuttering heart. But all his training seemed to have deserted him. This wasn’t work. This was home.

He was pressed up flat against the log cabin wall, edging sideways, pushing through the glistening cobwebs hanging from the eaves, spreading his weight carefully to avoid the giveaway snapping of twigs and the crunch of frozen leaves.

Inside the cabin was a Beretta twelve-gauge shotgun and shells, locked in a dry steel box, safe from the kids. But if he was right and someone had come here to do them harm, he’d never have the chance to get to it. He’d have to act faster than that.

He had the bowie knife in his right hand. In a fighting grip. He stopped at the corner of the cabin and listened. Nothing but the wind. He waited. Then stole a look round the corner. The porch was clear. Another look. The curtains and door were still shut.

A final look confirmed that no third set of boot prints had been added to the others leading outside. Which meant the stranger was
still in there. Danny pressed his ear up hard to the cabin wall and listened again. If whoever was inside had been talking to Sally or Jonathan, he would have been able to hear the muffled vibrations of conversation.

But there was only silence.

Danny dropped into a crouch. One of the games he’d played here as a kid had been sneaking up on the Old Man when he’d been snoozing on a rocking chair outside the front door, after drinking too many beers with Danny’s mother on a hot sunny day.

Danny had never once succeeded in goosing him. The reason was simple. The pine boards the Old Man had got cheap from the local sawmill to build the porch with were sprung. It didn’t matter how many nails he had driven into them. They still flexed a little when you trod on them. They creaked.

Which was why Danny chose speed now over stealth.

He burst round the corner and ran for the porch. The closed cabin door could be blocked or barred. He’d get no second chance to spring this surprise.

He hit the door shoulder-down with everything he’d got. It busted wide open with no resistance at all.

The cabin consisted of a large single room, with a couple of
head-height
plywood partitions to separate the two sleeping areas. Danny’s plan had been to execute a tight crash roll, protecting himself from the blade of the bowie knife, coming up in the centre of the cabin, six feet from the door, thereby giving him a combat circle with a maximum eight-foot radius.

From there he’d have been able to assess then neutralize any threat.

Instead the world lurched sideways as his legs were torn out from under him. He sprawled forward, smashed face down on to the wooden floor. He twisted up in pain, a burning sensation in his side. Straight away he realized the bowie knife had cut into him. He tightened his hold on its grip, jerking it free. Groaning, he got to his feet.

Sally was staring at him wide-eyed. Her white nightshirt was torn and stained with blood. She was strapped to one of their four
wooden dining chairs, next to the table in the small kitchenette in the right-hand corner of the room.

Her left cheek was swollen from where she’d been punched. Duct tape had been wrapped round her mouth to gag her. Her legs, waist, forearms and the backs of her hands had been taped to the chair so she now couldn’t move.

‘Drop it.’

Danny spun, his blade ready to parry or strike. But no one came at him.

At first all he saw was Jonathan. His mouth had been gagged with duct tape just like Sally’s. His eyes looked big as plates, wet with tears, red and raw around the rims. He seemed to be floating. Right there in his red pyjamas in the gloom of the unlit room.

Then Danny’s brain brought him the message that his boy was being held. And the man who’d spoken, the man who was holding Jonathan, now stepped forward out of the shadowy alcove beside the hearth where the firewood was stored.

‘Let him go,’ Danny said. ‘Now.’
Then I’ll fucking kill you
, he thought.
I’ll cut out your fucking heart.

Then he saw the pistol. A Browning M1911 semi-automatic. The man had it pressed up hard against Jonathan’s head.

Danny calculated the distance between them. Two accelerated strides was all it would take.

But the man knew Danny wouldn’t rush him. Danny could see it right there in his eyes. Grey eyes, he saw, dull eyes, flat eyes, like the eyes of a dead fish. Eyes that knew no fear.
I’ll pull the trigger before you reach me
… That was what those dead eyes told Danny. The man knew he wouldn’t rush him, because he would not risk his boy.

‘Drop the knife,’ the man told him again.

This time Danny did what he said, feeling as he did his power being sucked from him, like he’d just been put in a vacuum, deprived of air. He laid the knife on the floor. Because he had no choice.

‘Kick it away,’ said the stranger. His voice was reedy and thin. His accent Southern. Educated.

Again Danny obeyed. The cut in his side sent a sharp stab of pain piercing through his ribs as he kicked out. The knife spun across the scuffed wooden floorboards, out of reach.

The man took another step out of the shadows. Danny took in all he saw. The broad shoulders. The powerful build. The sharply defined cheekbones. He might even have been called good-looking, if it weren’t for those lifeless slate-grey eyes. Their size looked all wrong. As if they were somehow too small for his face. Like a seagull’s. As if this man were part predator, part scavenger. As if given half a chance, he’d strip the meat from your bones and leave them to bleach out in the sun.

He was wearing a black round-neck jumper and dark blue jeans. No labels. Neoprene gloves. His head had been recently shaved. Clean skin. Scrubbed. His scalp was bald and white as snow. He’d shaved his head for this, Danny instantly figured. In case anyone had seen him pass this way. This was his killing face, the one he wore only for this. His naked disguise.

Danny’s subconscious absorbed all this in seconds. But all he could think of was that the stranger was touching his boy. All he could think of was Jonathan’s heart beating. And that pistol pressed to his face.

A terrified whimper. Sally’s. Muffled by the duct tape.

‘Lie flat on your front,’ said the stranger.

Danny slowly lowered himself down. His senses reached out. For anything,
anything
he could use. But all he got was a gust of cold wind whistling through the open door. A stink of plastic melting on the open hearth. Sally’s breathing coming out in short, asthmatic gasps. A soft moan escaped from his boy.

A footstep. Another. The stranger was moving in closer now.

‘Put your hands behind your back –
NO
’ – a sudden half-shout, the first sign of nerves – ‘
DON’T
try and look at me.’

But it was too late. Danny had already seen what the stranger was planning on next. He’d seen all he’d needed for his worst fears to have been confirmed.

The man had kept the pistol jammed up against Jonathan’s temple, his elbow hooked round his throat. But he’d now also
picked up a long metal pole, with a pulley mechanism fitted to it and a rope noose hanging from its end.

It was the knot the noose was tied with that frightened Danny. He’d seen that knot before.

‘Press your palms together as for prayer,’ the man said.

The word
prayer
. He intoned it differently. Reverentially. As if he meant exactly that. As if Danny should be praying to
him
.

Another cold blast of wind rushed through the open door. Danny stared up into Sally’s frightened eyes. He watched them flash now with warning, with terror. And she was right. Any sudden movement, any attempt to evade the noose or attack, and the stranger
would
shoot their boy.

Danny knew this even better than Sally did, because he’d already worked out who this stranger was. He was the Director. Or that was the dumb name the press had given him. He’d murdered eleven families in six different states over the course of the last sixteen months.

He’d become the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit’s top priority, so much so that Danny had been seconded in from the Company to help capture him. To track him. To trap him. He’d nearly done it, too.

But he’d failed. And now the Director had come for him. To meet the only man who’d come close. To meet him and kill him, of course. Of that Danny had no doubt.

But knowledge was power. And Danny was already thanking God that he’d acted on his suspicions outside. He thanked God for the knife.

So now think
, he told himself.
Fucking think and fucking plan.

The Director’s male adult victims had all been restrained and positioned facing their families, with their ankles bound together and their hands tied behind their backs. In a downwards prayer position. To this dark god who now stood before Danny. They’d been made to act as audience – or congregation, even – to the fantasy he’d enacted before them with the people they loved.

That was why Danny had hidden that two-inch blade. In case this, his darkest fear, was confirmed. Because he’d been warned
that this man might come looking for him. He’d been warned, but he’d not believed it. Not till he’d seen those footsteps outside, and that car.

And it was because of the two-inch blade that he wasn’t yet prepared to risk Jonathan’s life in a desperate rush. Not while this man had a gun to his head. Not while Danny could still regain control. Not when he might still break free of the noose and the knot.

He prayed the tiny blade wasn’t visible now, as he felt the noose brush over the backs of his hands and close around his wrists. He fought the urge to twist over and fight. He squeezed his eyes tight and he thought of his boy. He swore to himself that they’d survive.

The noose tightened. A snapping sound. The wooden pole’s mechanism; it had just tied the noose’s knot off. When Danny tried to move his wrists apart, he could not. His fingers, though … his fingers could stretch … they could reach …

A scuffling sound. A clicking. Another snap. A second noose tightened round Danny’s ankles. Jonathan whimpered. Danny couldn’t see his little boy, but he could tell from Sally’s eyes that he’d not yet been hurt.

‘I’ve called the police,’ Danny said. ‘You can still leave. You’ve got time. If you leave now, you could still get away.’

‘Liar.’

‘You fuck! I’ve fucking called them!’

These words Danny screamed. Not because he thought it would make the stranger believe him more. But because he wanted the stranger to think he was desperate, that he was already beat.

‘Liar.’

A whisper this time. So close. Danny felt the man’s warm breath on his ear. A stink of carbolic soap, of mouthwash, of antiseptic cream.

A click of the pistol to let Danny know it was there. The stranger frisked Danny down. Efficiently. Like a cop might, Danny thought.
Is that what you are … why we couldn’t catch you? Is it because you’re police?

‘And what have we here?’

The man had found the four-inch blade in Danny’s boot. The one Danny had left for him there.

‘I’ll fucking kill you, motherfucker. I’ll fucking—’

Again Danny shouted the words. Another show of furious desperation. He struggled, screaming, bucking on the floor, twisting, trying to turn, fighting against the sudden weight of the man kneeling on his spine. Not because he thought he could tear himself free. But so the stranger would think the four-inch blade had been his last hope.

The man raised Danny up then by the scruff of the neck, and slammed him back hard on the ground. Without warning, he twisted the four-inch blade’s tip hard and fast up into the bleeding wound on Danny’s side.

Danny screamed again. No need to fake anything this time. He gritted his teeth and crushed the tears that sprang to his eyes, as the man twisted the blade in again.

The man stood and kicked Danny hard in the ribs, then stepped back and watched him writhe. He waited until he’d stopped.

‘It’s not deep,’ was all he then said, calmly, as if there’d been no altercation between them at all. ‘Your wound, I mean. And that’s good, because it means you’re not going to die on me yet.’

He yanked Danny’s head up then by his hair. A shriek of duct tape. He wound it tight round the lower half of Danny’s face, covering his mouth, trapping his tongue against his upper lip, but leaving his eyes and nostrils clear.

Digging his foot beneath Danny, he kicked out, flipping him over on to his back. In the reflection on the full-length wall mirror, Danny saw the wire the stranger had stretched across the doorway, the one that had tripped Danny up.

The stranger used the metal pole as a lever this time, flipping Danny over on to his front again, up against the cabin wall. He wedged his legs there with the Old Man’s beat-up brown leather armchair.

‘Stay,’ he told him, as if he were talking to a dog.

Danny tried slowing his breathing.
Wait. Wait. Wait for your chance.
He couldn’t risk working the two-inch blade free yet, not with his back still open to the room.

Footsteps. The sound of paper being torn and scrunched up. A glass of water being poured, then drunk, before being smashed hissing into the embers of the fire.

Jonathan started to whimper. Danny prayed he would stop, would not draw attention to himself. A scrape of furniture. More duct tape being ripped. Then a sudden thunder of hammer blows, but only for a second. Then another short burst of the same.

Danny thought the worst then. He felt himself disappearing, fading into nothing. He thought he might already have lost them both.

But then he heard Jonathan whimper again and sagged with relief. He was still alive. He told himself the same must be true of Sally. More footsteps came next, heading for the open door.

Lexie. No
… Danny prayed the snow was still falling. He prayed for it never to stop.
Please, Lexie
, he begged silently.
Please don’t have come down from that tree
…