Hunted (20 page)

To the young blond man in the grey suit who came racing round the corner of the school chapel, it must have looked as though Danny were miraculously rising up out of a grave.

Danny had already been three quarters of the way up the stone crypt steps by the time he’d spotted him. But at least he’d got the advantage of seeing him first.

A split second’s advantage. That was all he’d needed. He’d already got the cop baton gripped in his right fist. His brain did the maths, calculating that the blond man’s current trajectory would mean he’d cross Danny’s path less than three feet away.

He brought the baton round hard, whip-cracking its extension mechanism as he did. The blond man had no time to check his speed. Or dodge. Or pull whatever weapon he even now began reaching for from beneath his jacket.

He was way too late to avoid the baton, which Danny brought round fully now, pivoting his hips as he did to maximize its impact.

The baton’s weighted end slammed into the blond man’s right kneecap with a sickening crack. The man stumbled – almost
cartwheeled
, he’d been moving so fast when his kneecap had popped.

Danny didn’t wait to see him hit the ground. He was up the steps and on him in less than two seconds.

He thought the man was faking at first, just lying there like that, flat out on his front. Danny dropped down on to him, twisting his arm round and heaving back his head back.

That was when he noticed the blood trickling down the man’s face into his closed eyes. A deep gash had split his forehead. Looking across, Danny saw a flower of blood on the stone chapel buttress beside him, where the man’s skull had sledgehammered into it.

He rolled the man on to his side and knelt beside him. He recognized his face. One of the three sharks from the auditorium. His suit jacket was open. Beneath was his Sig Sauer, still in its sidearm holster. Danny couldn’t hear him breathing. Was he dead or just knocked out?

He got no chance to find out. A footstep.

‘Don’t move, or I’ll shoot.’

Idiot
. Danny cursed himself. Why hadn’t he looked?

A male English accent. Crisp and confident. Whoever this was, they’d done it before. And they were close. Two metres behind him, Danny estimated, not turning round. Close and confident. Not a good combination to be up against. If this guy pulled the trigger of whatever weapon he was holding, Danny did not believe he would miss.

‘You’ll do exactly what I say. Now crawl away from the body.’

The
body
. This guy thought his colleague was dead – that Danny had killed him.

Danny did what he was told, a sudden fatigue washing heavily over him. He remembered what the Kid had told him back in the mall. Thirty-three thousand cops. One innocent man. He knew he’d done well to survive as long as he had. But had it all come to this? Jumped from behind? Without even a chance to fight back? His mind whirred. Could it really just be over like that?

‘Face down and spread them.’

Danny assumed the position. He lowered himself on to his belly. Then stretched out his legs. His arms, too. He pressed his left cheek to the concrete, trying to catch a glimpse of his captor, but the guy kept out of sight. Danny heard the scuff of a shoe in the dirt. Closer than the man’s voice had sounded before.

But why wasn’t he calling for backup? That was what Danny wanted to know. What was he dealing with here? Some kind of glory boy who wanted all the credit for the collar himself? It made no sense.

Then something else Danny would never have expected. Another scuff. Even nearer than the first. This man was actually closing in on him, unnecessarily exposing himself to the possibility of a counterattack.

Which Danny would be only too pleased to deliver.

But he’d have to be fast. If he didn’t get it exactly right first time, he’d be dead.

He hesitated.
Lexie
… If he screwed this up, the guy would shoot and Danny would never see her again.

Another second passed. And still he didn’t move.

Then even his breath froze. He felt the cold, hard barrel of the man’s pistol press up hard against the back of his head, pinning his face to the ground.

Danny still couldn’t see the man in his peripheral vision. But he must have been aiming at Danny all along. Waiting …
tempting
him to make a move.

If Danny hadn’t thought of Lexie, he would have. And then he’d already be dead.

The man jerked Danny’s left arm up behind his back, using his own left arm to lock it there.

Danny got his first blurred glimpse of his captor’s face then, as he leaned in closer to Danny’s ear. Cropped black hair. Heavily muscled. The leader from the auditorium. In total control again now.

Danny stared into his burning dark eyes. No fear. Only blood lust. Any doubts Danny had had, they vanished then. This man had wanted him to struggle. He’d wanted to blow him away.

‘Not so fucking tough, are you?’ he hissed in Danny’s ear. ‘Or so fucking clever.’ A smile, then. A promise. ‘Oh, I can’t wait to have a little chat with you …’

Danny had seen that exact same look in another man’s eyes before. A look of absolute power. The look of someone who
believed themselves invulnerable. A man who thought he was a god. And all Danny wanted now was what he’d wanted then. He wanted his family to live. He wanted to keep Lexie safe.

‘Now you’re going to tell me where that little bitch of yours has gone.’

Bitch
…

For now he just hoped Lexie had had the common sense to run. Because this man still wanted her. To help him make Danny talk. To help him make Danny confess to something he had not done. By hurting her, he could open Danny wide.

Lexie had other ideas.

Sunlight flashed off the electric guitar as she brought it swinging down hard in a glinting arc towards the back of Danny’s captor’s head.

The man had seen the guitar coming too. He threw himself out of the way. But not far or fast enough. The guitar missed his skull, but it slammed into his neck instead.

He keeled over with a groan. Then managed to roll sideways, out of reach, just preventing Danny from snagging his neck.

‘Get back,’ Danny barked.

Already rising, he glared over at Lexie. She was standing with the guitar still gripped in her hands, raised above her head as if she were about to take another swing. Defiance flashed in her dark brown eyes. But Danny wanted her out of reach.

‘I said move,’ he told her, turning now to face the other man, who was already staggering to his feet, clutching at his head.

The man looked even tougher up close. Dense. Muscular. His eyes hardened as he stared at Danny. He’d adrenalized, had switched into fight mode. He was a killing machine who’d just acquired a target.

He wasn’t the only one.

He and Danny were now five feet apart. Both unarmed. The impact with the fallen blond man had been so great that it had torn the cop baton from Danny’s hand and sent it skittering away into a nearby flower bed. But this other man had lost his grip on his
P230 too when Lexie had struck him. It now lay in the guttering several feet away, equidistant from them both.

Whoever broke first would reach it. But to do that they’d need to first turn their back on the other. And it was a risk neither of them was prepared to take.

Danny was still conscious of Lexie being somewhere close behind him.
But where?
He couldn’t see her. He couldn’t risk her getting hurt.

The other man must have seen these flashes of concern in Danny’s eyes. He tried to take verbal control.

‘We don’t have to do this,’ he said, rocking gently on his heels, shifting between a defensive and aggressive stance, deliberately keeping Danny guessing as to his real intent.

The man’s palms were upturned in a gesture of conciliation. But his eyes betrayed him. They moved fractionally to the left, in the direction of the pistol, to map its position. He began edging that way.

That was when Danny knew he had no choice. His opponent would go for the weapon.

He shrugged off his rucksack and let it fall to the ground, knowing he’d impede his balance and movement by keeping it on.

The man understood Danny was coming for him then. He had one eye on Lexie. He knew he’d have to fight. He closed in fast, without warning, savagely grabbing the back of Danny’s neck. With his right hand he seized Danny’s left sleeve, intending to throw him off balance.

But Danny had anticipated the move and grabbed the other man’s head as he closed, jerking it down, aiming to smash his own forehead up into his opponent’s face.

The man tilted his head just in time. He took the worst of the blow on the top of his skull. A sound like a piano being hit with a hammer rang out through Danny’s mind. The two of them staggered apart.

Danny was the first to recover. He caught the man’s fist in his hand and used his foot to sweep the man’s legs sideways from under him. He followed him down, adding his own weight to that of the
heavily muscled man as they fell, ramming his elbow deep into the other man’s diaphragm just as they crashed to the ground.

The man twisted sideways, gasping, just managing to avoid Danny’s attempt at a cross-body armlock.

Swiftly regaining his breath and his balance, once more revealing his training, the man then reached out for a foot lock. He wrapped his arm round Danny’s ankle as they grappled on the ground.

Danny slammed his free left foot hard into the man’s exposed neck and succeeded in driving him away.

They scuffled then, with the dark-haired man trying and failing to pin his leg down across Danny’s body. Until finally he overreached himself, and overbalanced, exposing his back to Danny for a fraction of a second.

That was all it took.

Danny tore the other man’s left arm up behind him into a chicken-wing position, then hooked his free arm round his head. Keeping the chicken wing in place, he then locked his own hands behind the other man’s shoulder blade.

He arched backwards, pulling sharply back on the man’s forehead as he did, bending the stunned man’s neck swiftly back to a point where another couple of millimetres and it would snap.

The man’s breathing stuttered and slowed. He knew Danny had him in a neck crank and could kill him whenever he chose.

Danny’s own heart was beating as fast as a bird’s. He could taste blood in his mouth. Pain resounded through his skull.

‘Tell me who you work for,’ he said.

He marginally slackened the pressure on his neck to allow the heavily muscled man to respond.

He made a gargling sound. Two letters. A number.

‘M … I … 5 …’

‘What do you know about the people who carried out the massacre?’

‘It …’ the man said, ‘it was you …’

‘Wrong.’ Danny gave him a fraction more squeeze. ‘I’ve been set up. Who else are you hunting apart from me?’

‘No one …’

Considering the amount of pain this guy must now be in, considering the fact that he knew that all Danny would need to do to snap his neck like it was made of balsa was to arch swiftly back and squeeze with both hands – taking into consideration all that, Danny decided he was probably telling the truth.

So there it was. Danny and the dead guy back in that hotel room – if they ever managed to ID his disfigured corpse at all – they were the only ones now who were going to take the blame.

Which meant that, dead or alive, Danny was going to have to bring the hawk-faced man in. He was going to have to prove who he was and what he had done.

‘Tell your bosses there were at least five people in that hotel room who were involved in that hit,’ Danny said. ‘Tell them they’re probably hiding amongst all those people who got out. And tell them that I told you that I’m innocent, and I will bring you proof.’

The heavily muscled man grunted something. It could have been a
yes
, or a
no
, or
fuck
you
. It didn’t matter which. This conversation was now at an end.

Danny switched his grip to a stranglehold. He squeezed down tight, bringing sharp and sudden pressure to bear on the MI5 operative’s carotids, rendering him unconscious within seconds.

Death would have followed if he had held the grip, but as it was, he just pushed the man’s limp body away.

A tortured twang of broken, twisted strings. As Danny got up, he turned to see Lexie standing there shaking. She’d just dropped the guitar.

‘Is … is he …’

She couldn’t get the words out. Her eyes were locked on the motionless body of the heavily muscled man.

‘He’ll be fine.’

Danny took her hands in his and stared deep into her eyes. Her breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. She was shaking. She couldn’t stop.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s all going to be OK.’

Tears started streaking down her face. She didn’t seem to be aware of them at first. Her eyes just glazed over. But then she jerked her hands free and wiped the tears away.

‘We should go,’ he said. ‘The others … they’ll be coming.’

He grabbed the baton from the flower bed, snapped it shut inside his rucksack. He decided against taking the pistol. Again he didn’t know who he might end up instinctively using it against. Maybe an innocent cop. Something he just couldn’t chance.

‘What about him?’

Lexie was staring at the fallen blond guy. But then the man
answered her himself. He groaned and rolled over on to his side, facing away from them. Not dead. Coming round. The second his mind cleared, he’d reach for his radio and weapon.

Danny grabbed Lexie’s hand. ‘Quick. The teachers’ car park,’ he said.

She led him fast past the flower beds, and on through a clapboard-sided alleyway that ran between two single-storey maintenance buildings. A stink of fresh creosote. A bird shrilled startled up into the sky.

As they branched right at the end of the alley and broke through a line of tall poplar trees, Danny saw forty or so cars were spread out across a gravel car park. A badly surfaced private road ran due north away from the school buildings, into the suburban streets beyond. No cop cars anywhere, as far as he could see. No reason why his daughter’s plan might not work.

‘That one,’ he said.

He’d already selected their ride. A powder-blue Saab. Fast, but old enough not to have been factory-equipped with a transponder linked up to a stolen-car tracking service.

‘But you can’t. That’s Miss Heap’s,’ Lexie said.

‘Who?’

‘The headmistress.’

‘Tough.’

He smashed the driver’s window with the baton, snapping off the remaining jagged shards of glass before reaching in and manually popping the lock. The car might not have been modern enough to come fitted with a transponder, but he had just made the unfortunate discovery that it was definitely fitted with an alarm.

A high-pitched whooping rose up from somewhere deep within its bonnet as Danny climbed into the driver’s seat. A whiff of fresh mountain pine from the little deodorizer tree hanging from the rear-view mirror. A packet of biscuits beside the gearstick. He reached across and opened the passenger door.

‘Buckle up,’ he told Lexie, as she clambered in.

He shoved his rucksack into her arms as she pulled the door shut after her.

‘Inside’s a small grey box,’ he said.

‘A what?’

‘Just find it.’

She looked up sharply at his tone of voice, her expression flaring, reminding him of the rebellious teenager he’d met in the school quad. But then she glanced away, must have remembered their pact. She set about rifling through his rucksack.

Danny got busy himself, ripping out the panel under the steering wheel, tracing back the wires. Less than ten seconds later, the engine rumbled into life.

Sitting up, he checked the rear-view mirror, the side mirrors too, searching for any signs of pursuit. Nothing. Looking across at Lexie, he saw she’d done what he’d asked. She had the grey box in the palm of her outstretched hand.

‘Switch it on and stick it on the dash,’ he said.

As she did, he reversed the car out of its parking space. He checked the mirrors again. But the staff car park was empty. A circle of red LEDs began spinning round the display on the top of the grey box, then switched to amber, then turned to green. And the car alarm switched off.

Lexie stared at the little grey box like she’d just discovered fire. ‘Did that just—’

‘Yeah, now put it back in the bag.’

‘What is all this other stuff?’

‘Stuff you don’t need to know anything about.’

Danny steadily built up speed as they drew out of the car park. He stopped accelerating when he reached thirty m.p.h. and kept it steady there. No point in drawing attention to themselves by squealing off in a cloud of dust. He looked out across the playing fields and saw why the car alarm hadn’t brought anyone running.

A brass band was marching across the athletics track. St Peter’s Girls’ School sports day had finally begun.

‘What now?’ Lexie said.

‘We get you out of here. Somewhere safe.’

Danny already had somewhere in mind. He initiated the sat nav
and punched in an address, at the same time switching the machine’s audio off, so the route just showed on its map.

The machine did the maths and flashed up the distance
south-west
to their destination. Get away from the school fast, without picking up a tail, and they might just be in with a chance.

‘Where?’ Lexie said.

‘A friend’s place. Just until I’ve fixed all this.’ He tried to sound reassuring. Normal. But his mind was whirring. What the hell was he meant to say to her to help her deal with what she’d just seen? She’d just watched him nearly kill two men. For Christ’s sake, she was only sixteen.

They reached the end of the private road. Another mirror check. No one in pursuit. Danny turned right into a tree-lined residential street, again checking his mirrors, and the sky for choppers too.

He checked the sat nav route and memorized the next ten turns he’d need to take, and then they set off on their run.

‘That man I hit with the guitar …’ Lexie said, her voice small, like she was suddenly much further away than she really was.

‘What about him?’

‘He said he worked for MI5 … and they’re the government, right?’

‘Yeah.’ And he was an asshole, Danny thought.

‘Does that mean I’m going to be in trouble for hitting him?’

‘He didn’t identify himself. You did what you had to do.’ However all this turned out, Danny was determined she shouldn’t feel guilty or bad about what she’d done. ‘You know, you really should think about taking up baseball,’ he said, again aiming for normal, trying to leave behind what had just happened. ‘Because you’ve really got one hell of a swing.’

He glanced across at her, and though he couldn’t be certain, he thought – he hoped – he detected the trace of a flummoxed smile breaking through that serious expression of hers. Morgue humour. There it was again. In times of strife, sometimes your only friend.

‘Over here they call it rounders.’

This time it was Danny who smiled. ‘Yeah, well you still gave him one hell of a shock.’

Lexie fell silent then. She stared out of the window, her face turned away from his. Danny wished he could magic them both away. To somewhere safe. A beach in Thailand. Somewhere nobody knew their names. The only trouble was, he doubted there was anywhere left in the world where that was possible now.

A car turned into the street up ahead of them and drove towards them. Fast. Danny’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. But the car shot past without incident, loud music blaring, a couple of young guys laughing up front, just out for a ride.

He checked the sat nav again. He was seven turns into his initial sequence already. A third of the way. He memorized the next ten turns.

‘I can’t believe what you just did,’ Lexie said. ‘To them …’

The two men, she meant. The ones they’d left sprawled out like wind-tossed laundry on the ground.

‘They’ll be OK.’

‘I mean, I know that what you do for a living is dangerous … and that’s why Mum wanted you to stop …’

Danny couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone speaking out loud about Sally. Jean hadn’t thought it was good for him to talk about Sally and Jonathan in front of Lexie, in case it upset her. And the old lady had flatly refused to talk to him about them at all. Not because she’d hated Danny. Or had even blamed him, he reckoned. But maybe because by not talking about it, she hadn’t had to deal with it herself.

‘What you saw today,’ Danny said. ‘It’s not what I normally do. I don’t hurt people for a living, Lexie. I do the opposite. I try to make people safe.’

In truth, he felt sick, having had her witness that fight. Even if he’d had no choice. But there was no point in bullshitting her now.

‘Sometimes when people come for you, you’ve got to defend yourself,’ he said. ‘And sometimes that means you’ve got to fight.’

She didn’t answer. When he looked across, he saw she was staring outside. He could see her reflection there in the car window, as the blur of the houses washed by. She wasn’t crying. But there
was an emptiness, a hollowness to her young face that he’d give anything to wipe away.

He didn’t need to ask to know what she was thinking. She was thinking about back then in the cabin. She was thinking of blood on the snow.

The second his eyes switched front again, he saw the silver BMW swerve into the street a hundred metres ahead of them. It shot towards them like an arrow that had just been unleashed from a bow.

He knew it was coming for them.