Hunted (3 page)

Danny and Anna-Maria took turns to shower. Then she sat on the arm of his worn leather chair, drying her hair with a towel, while he fixed her coffee, black and sweet, just the way she liked it.

Back on the bed, she rolled him on to his back and kissed her way down his body, the way she always did whenever she’d not seen him for a while. He sighed as her soft lips undertook their familiar, lingering journey along the pathway of his scars. Her touch was like a soothing balm.

The worst of his wounds – the missing tips of two of his fingers and the wide cicatricial scar on his right thigh – she steered clear of, knowing how he hated them being touched.

He’d told her he’d damaged his hand falling though a plate-glass doorway as a child. He’d lied about the injury to his thigh as well, claiming it was the result of a surfing accident, saying he’d snagged it on a reef off Saint Croix.

‘I still don’t understand why you won’t get rid of it,’ she said, gazing down at it now. ‘Only last week, I met a Harley Street plastic surgeon who—’

‘No.’

His answer came out harsher than he’d meant. But he’d heard it
all before. From her and others too. He didn’t care if the scar was ugly, or if it sometimes gave him pain.

Don’t die
, the man who’d given it to him seven years before had said.
Don’t die. I need you.

He’d needed Danny –
to watch.

Danny felt the darkness rising up inside him. He turned his back on Anna-Maria. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want her to see him. He buried his face in the crumpled-up sheets. He breathed in her scent as hard as he could.

Be here
, he told himself.
Just think of her, think of her, think of now.
Just
try to think of her and think of now.

Anna-Maria said nothing. She waited for his breathing to slow. She weaved her fingers gently back and forth across his neck. Over and over. Before pressing deeper between the mass of knotted muscles leading down into his shoulders. Until finally he began to relax.

‘So where is it you’ve been this time?’ she said.

She was talking about how come he hadn’t called her in so long, he realized. ‘Africa,’ he said.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, to be precise. He’d spent two months out of the last three as a consultant for a corporate security agency there.

She continued to work his shoulders. ‘I wish I’d met her, you know,’ she said.

Shifting on to his side, Danny looked up and saw she was staring at the photograph of Sally on the wall. Sally looking beautiful. Sally smiling in the sun. Sally who Danny had lied to Anna-Maria about, saying she’d died in a car crash. Sally who’d had the beginnings of a child growing inside her on the day this photo was taken. A son called Jonathan, who was now also dead.

Danny’s wife Sally was the only woman he’d ever truly fallen in love with, the only woman he thought he ever
could
love too. Sometimes he felt that the year she and Jonathan had died was the last time he’d ever truly felt alive. Alive in the sense of wanting to move forwards, and not just keep dreaming back.

‘Do you think you’ll ever settle down with someone again?’ Anna-Maria said.

It was a question she’d asked him soon after they’d first met. His answer remained the same.

‘No, not with what I do.’

He’d told her some of how he made a living. Enough to sate her curiosity, without compromising either of them in any way. He’d told her that he used to work for the US government, but that he didn’t any more. He’d told her that he worked for himself these days. That he helped people. That he got them out of bad situations. That he tried to stop them getting hurt.

‘What about you?’ he said. ‘You’re still with him, I suppose? You still haven’t left?’

Her husband. He was talking about her husband of the last fourteen years.

‘He still loves me,’ she said. ‘Not physically, I know. But with his heart. And in that way, I suppose I still care about him too.’

And yet here we both are
, Danny thought. He felt a twinge of jealousy. No point in denying it. But no point in pretending either that he had any right.

They talked a while longer. About how they should meet up again some time soon. About how they should make a weekend of it. Go to the same quiet country hotel they’d visited the year before last. They’d made so many plans, so many times. But so few of them ever happened. Always, he knew, because of him.

Her words grew softer and the silences between her sentences longer. Until finally she slept.

He stared again then at the photograph of Sally. Again he felt it all – everything he’d ever loved – being torn and shredded and ripped away. He reached out for his jacket and slipped another photo from its inside breast pocket.

It showed a little girl riding high on a playground swing. She was laughing. Her long blonde hair was fanned out, fluttering in the breeze. In the corner of the photo you could just about make out Danny. He’d been pushing her higher and higher that day, but always he’d been ready to catch her if she fell.

Lexie. His daughter. Alexandra. His little princess. He still thought of her that way, even though he knew she now hated his
guts. Lexie. His only living relative, his precious little girl who was nearly a woman now.

He put the photograph away. Anna-Maria knew nothing about his daughter. He had long ago decided that he’d never allow the complications of his own life to impact on Lexie’s again.

He pulled back the curtain and gazed out through the wide oval porthole. A full moon shone in a clear starry sky, scattering diamonds of light across the glassy canal.

Next year would be the eighth anniversary of Sally and Jonathan’s deaths. There’d been a time when all he’d wanted was to join them. A time of rage and confusion, before he’d found a reason to live again.

He tried to focus on Lexie and to think how one day things might be better between them. He’d never forgive himself for the way he’d let her down.

Images of how Sally and Jonathan had been at the end leapt into his mind. He fought the sense of panic rising in his chest. He tried not to think about what had happened. Or how much had been taken away.

But soon, he knew, the nightmare would come for him. The same nightmare he had every night. A nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare at all. A nightmare that was a memory. One that began with a walk in the woods and ended with blood on the snow.

He stared into the night. Through dark, determined eyes. Old eyes in a young face. Watchful eyes that missed nothing.

The world was full of wolves, he knew. Good shepherds were few and far between.

Colonel Zykov puked over the plastic sheet again. The girl wrenched his jaw open and cleared out his mouth with a sweep of her now plastic-gloved fingers. He tried to bite her and twist free. Someone punched him hard in the side of the head.

Thoughts chased through the colonel’s mind. So fast, too fast to grip, spiralling like leaves tossed up by a storm.
What’s going on? Why are they here? Who are these bastards? Why won’t they let me go?

He had lost all track of time. His spine and legs were locked with cramp. The ceiling and walls were shrinking and swelling and lurching left and right. Hot urine trickled down the inside of his thighs.

‘Adrenalin,’ a man’s voice said, booming, reverberating, like he was yelling in a cave.

Someone seized Zykov’s hair. A hard plastic gag was rammed into his mouth, pinning his tongue back to stop him from biting it off. Pain stabbed into his neck. A rush of clarity. Freezing water cascaded down on his face.

The man with the unblinking eyes and the hawk nose swung into focus. As he leant in close, Zykov again tried to tear himself free. The plastic beneath him crackled as his captors pressed down harder on him. A powerful fist seized hold of his throat.

Stop fighting it
, a voice inside him screamed.
Remember: you have
nothing to hide.

‘So now I’m going to try asking again,’ the hawk-faced man said. ‘But if you try lying again … if your answers become inconsistent in any way … your daughter will first be raped, then mutilated, then killed. You will watch … I will personally staple back your eyelids to ensure that you do.’

This psychopath bastard madman … he was telling the truth. Of this, the colonel had no doubt.
I’ll give you anything you want
. He tried screaming the words, but all that made it past his blood-soaked gag was a gurgling sound.

‘We originally only planned to kidnap you, Colonel,’ the
hawk-faced
man said. ‘What you knew was not important. Your rank and your position working here at the Russian embassy were sufficient for our needs.’

The man smiled, actually smiled. It was a smile of greed, of an appetite about to be indulged.

‘But when I reviewed the dossier my people had gathered on you,’ he continued, ‘I saw your photograph and I saw this …’ The colonel’s whole body froze as, almost tenderly, the man traced the deep scar on his face with the tip of his forefinger. ‘And that’s when I realized I had met you before …’

Again, the colonel desperately tried to remember this man. Again, he failed. Other memories instead rose up inside his mind. The long-dead boy who’d given him this scar … his daughter in his arms, laughing giddily as a child … that man outside her apartment now, waiting for his orders to—

More freezing water sluiced down on his face. The hawk-faced man leered in.

‘You will remember me,’ he said. ‘My colleague here will make certain of that.’

A tinkling of metal.

Zykov strained to look to his left. The bespectacled man was removing several stainless-steel surgical instruments from his medical bag. He laid them out neatly on the mattress beside the colonel’s head.

The colonel fought again to break free, but the men holding him simply tightened their grip. The room’s dimensions started shifting again. The bed canopy began melting like wax. A hissing of breath filled his ears.

The Adrenalin, he realized, it was wearing off. The SP hybrid was once more taking control. Zykov squeezed his eyes tight shut, as kaleidoscopic images burst like flak across his mind. He prayed that he’d black out.

He did not.

‘I want you to think back to nineteen ninety …’ The hawk-faced man’s voice clawed deep into the colonel’s skull. ‘To the Biopreparat weapons facility you illegally raided with an anonymous armed group on the twenty-ninth of April …’

A bolt of clarity. The colonel’s eyes flashed wide open in disbelief. What?
But how can this man know about
—

The hawk-faced man grinned down.

‘You cost me my career that night,’ he said. ‘It’s because of that humiliation that I’m here with you now. But more important is what you stole. That’s what you’re going to tell me about now, Colonel. What you stole. And where you took it next.’

No, thought the Colonel.
Not that
…

Because how could this be? What Zykov had gone to the Biopreparat for … what he had taken … its very existence had been classified … a state secret. Not even the SVR could have got access to
that
. And no one –
no one
apart from Zykov’s six brother officers, whose loyalty was beyond reproach – knew that he had ever been involved in any kind of theft at all.

Suddenly Zykov knew in his gut: these people were not SVR. They had nothing to do with his government. They were not working for Russia at all. So who the hell were they? What were they planning to do?

He gasped. The drug had just dredged up another memory. From over twenty years ago. Of where he’d seen the hawk-faced man before.

The image of a zealous young officer rose up inside his mind with photograph-like clarity. A disarmed, humiliated young officer,
kneeling on the cold wet concrete outside the Biopreparat facility, cuffed alongside the rest of the guards, turning and watching the colonel as he climbed back into his unmarked truck and … and pushed his balaclava up from his face to sneeze.

My God
, he thought.
Can it be possible? Could this man truly have glimpsed my face? My scar? So very long ago?

The colonel felt the hands holding him tighten, pinning him hard to the mattress. The man in the spectacles closed in and stared deep into his eyes. His pinched-up mouth left him looking hungry as a rat. A tooth of metal glinted in his hand.

When the colonel started to scream through his gag, it made a noise like rubber screeching on tarmac. It was the sound of death on the move.

The VT Media van parked at the end of the small junction off Piccadilly had false plates that matched phantom records inserted into the two supposedly impregnable databases of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and VT Media Inc.

This was all thanks to ‘the Kid’, Danny Shanklin’s regular tech support, who’d last night hacked both systems to ensure that his white Ford Transit appeared to be part of VT’s engineering fleet, here on legitimate business. In case anyone cared to check.

Danny and the Kid were now sweating side by side in the windowless back of the van, wedged in a nest of comms kit and wires.

London was in the grip of a heatwave. According to the Kid’s copy of the
Sun
newspaper, this was set to be the hottest day of the year.

But the van’s air-con was broken. In spite of the fact that the same off-grid chop shop where the Kid had paid an extortionate sum to get its stencils sprayed and plates switched would most likely have fixed it for free.

The Kid’s IQ was off the scale. But when it came to the mundane facets of day-to-day living, he had a tendency to let things slide. Meaning he’d not got the air-con fixed, because – quite simply – it
had just seemed like too much hassle at the time. Or to use his own south London vernacular, because he ‘couldn’t be bloody arsed’.

Danny peeled the lid off the Starbucks cup the Kid had just handed him and took a swig. Then winced. The coffee was lukewarm, oversweet and stale. Something that clearly wasn’t an issue for the Kid, who now drained his own cup in one before belching loudly. Twice.

The Kid was thirty-five years old, six two and sixteen stone, but baby-faced with it, and pretty much wrinkle- and stubble-free. Hence his nickname.

He was British army and GCHQ trained, and smart enough to have lectured in encryption or coding at either MIT or Imperial College, if he’d so desired. Lucky for Danny, he preferred being out in the field, running his own show, for a few select, well-paying contacts.

Right now he stank of smokes and last night’s booze, and was wearing a pair of blue VT Media engineering overalls with the sleeves rolled up, revealing the legend
GOD IS A PROGRAMMER
in fancy Gothic tattoo lettering across his ham-sized right forearm.

‘You want one?’ he said, offering Danny a brown paper bag stuffed full of doughnuts.

‘Thanks, Kid, but I already ate.’

Anna-Maria had fixed Danny an omelette up on deck before he’d left the barge. Catching a trace of her perfume on his shirt collar now, he felt a pang of regret, and wished himself still there.

But just as quickly, the feeling faded. Like a beautiful dream he’d just woken from, which here in the daylight no longer made sense.

The Kid rummaged through his paper bag before selecting a doughnut covered in chocolate icing and multicoloured sugar flecks, from which he now took an enormous bite.

‘You don’t know what you’re missing, mate,’ he said, sugar snowing down from his lips. ‘This here’s manna from junk-food heaven. I’d have thought a Yank like you would have appreciated as much.’

This Kid’s voice was gravelly, like he had a perpetual cold. Danny had always joked that he could have been a late-night radio DJ, if he hadn’t been so busy going out and getting wrecked.

Danny had first met him in Basra five years ago, where they’d both been involved in training Executive Protection Units. Back then, the Kid had been able to run a mile in under five minutes and could bench-press twice his own weight – the same as Danny still could now.

But these last few years, working the private sector in Europe, mainly out of the back of surveillance vans like this, much of the Kid’s muscle had turned to fat. It was a metamorphosis he embraced, rather than resented, though. His appearance didn’t bother him one bit.

Most of the work I do could either get me killed or land me in prison,
he’d once told Danny.
Which of course is part of the buzz, I admit. But meanwhile, right, I might as well just live life to the full. Eat, drink, gamble and screw myself senseless. Because none of us know when this ride’s going to stop.

‘You know, nine times out of ten,’ he told Danny now, ‘I reckon I’d choose a good doughnut over a good woman.’

Danny couldn’t help smiling. ‘And that’s a dilemma you find yourself faced with on a regular basis, I suppose?’

‘Chance would be a fine thing, mate.’ The Kid took another ruminative mouthful. ‘But maybe that just means I’m hanging out at the wrong sort of clubs.’

‘I can’t even remember the last time I went to a nightclub,’ Danny said.

It was true. Ever since he’d quit drinking, clubs had made less and less sense.

‘Yeah, well, when this gig’s over, maybe I should take you out for a proper session,’ said the Kid. ‘Show you the real London, eh?’

‘Maybe.’

The Kid’s offer was well meant, of course, but Danny doubted anything would come of it. He didn’t even know where the Kid lived. The same as the Kid knew nothing about Danny’s homes, or Anna-Maria, or even the fact that Danny had once been a married father. The work itself was to blame, Danny reckoned. The fact that it was messy. Most people he knew kept their private lives quarantined from it, uncontaminated, clean.

The Kid lowered his rectangular black reading glasses from where they’d been perched on top of his unruly mop of dreadlocked hair. His fingers absent-mindedly stroked the keyboard on his lap, like it was some kind of exotic pet, as his eyes flickered briefly across the row of monitors opposite.

‘So who’s the job?’ he then said, killing the screens. He looked Danny dead in the eyes.

Who
. Whoever it was Danny had travelled here to London to protect. Or get back. Because it was pretty much always one of the two.

‘They haven’t yet said.’

‘Who’s they?’

They
. The client. The individual or organization who’d be paying for Danny’s services, along with those of whatever team he saw fit to employ.

‘I’m still waiting for confirmation on that too.’

The Kid grimaced, surprised. On account of the fact that he already knew that the client had first requested Danny’s services five days ago. Because that was when Danny had contacted him here in London and put him on standby.

That the client still hadn’t identified themselves, or briefed Danny any further as to the nature of the job, was unusual, to say the least. Danny would normally have been knee-deep in dossiers by now. Ensuring he could best engineer whatever outcome it was that the client required.

‘What about Crane?’ the Kid said.

Crane was Danny’s ops provider. In the old days, he’d have been referred to as his handler, but the phrase had long since gone out of vogue. Crane was the guy who got Danny his assignments. And as per normal, the request for Danny’s services on this particular job had come through him.

‘All he knows is that the client’s been forwarded to him from a US government source.’

The Kid openly sneered. Even before the Wikileaks fallout, he’d dipped into enough highly classified data files over the years to have developed a healthy cynicism towards governments of any sort.

‘That’s no guarantee of anything,’ he said.

‘Crane says it’s someone he trusts.’

The Kid didn’t answer, but it was clear from his expression that he didn’t appreciate the lack of information any more than Danny did.

‘I’m hooking up with him in a minute,’ Danny said, checking his watch. ‘To see if he’s managed to dig up any more intel before I go in.’

In
… into the meeting. The one Danny had asked the Kid to provide him with surveillance backup for. The one he was due to attend in just over thirty minutes. In Room112 of the Ritz Hotel.

‘I’m going for a smoke,’ the Kid said, buttoning up his VT overalls to cover up the Aphex Twin T-shirt beneath.

Pushing himself off the bench, the big guy picked up a packet of Marlboro reds, and climbed out through the van’s double back doors into the blazing sunshine, before slamming them shut.

Alone in the sweltering neon twilight, Danny checked his watch: 10.59 a.m. Better get a move on. He was due to rendezvous with Crane in Harry’s Bar in less than sixty seconds’ time.