Hunted (8 page)

Danny wasn’t looking for confrontation. He would have avoided the situation if he could. But it was too late. The cop – male, early twenties, square-faced, with a wide pockmarked brow – had already seen him.

He was staring out at Danny through the open doorway of a small windowless office, where he’d balled himself up into the corner beside a coat stand. The office ceiling strip light was out, but the screen of a personal radio unit glowed luminescent in the young cop’s hand.

He was staring at Danny’s tracksuit. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Danny was no giant, but up close there was an undeniable sense of solidity about him, as if a whole building might collapse around him but he’d still somehow manage to walk away.

It was enough to give the cop cause for hesitation now.

Danny’s eyes scanned the pouches on his black utility vest: CS spray, Taser. An extendable reinforced graphite baton, there at his hip.

Must have been passing by when the shooting had kicked off and had barrelled in here, unthinking, to try and help. A hero then. Bad news for Danny. Unpredictable. He needed to neutralize him fast.

Something in the cop’s eyes told Danny he’d just come to the same conclusion himself. He scrambled to his feet as Danny stepped into the room. He was taller than Danny. Three or four inches at least. His eyes flickered up and down, looking to see if Danny was armed.

‘You do not have to …’ The cop’s voice wavered and so he tried again. ‘You do not have to say anything … but it may harm your defence if …’

Danny had watched enough UK TV shows over the years – and had also taken part in a carefully orchestrated takedown here in London four years back – to recognize the start of the verbal caution that British police were obliged to give citizens they were about to arrest.

He told the cop, ‘Shut the fuck up and turn round.’ He’d flattened his accent to English again.

The cop swallowed. His hands were trembling, but defiance now flashed in his eyes. He reached for the flap on his utility vest that was holding the baton in place.

‘Don’t,’ Danny said.

But the cop did. Moved fast, too. Quicker than Danny had imagined he could.

But not quick enough. Before he had even got the baton free, Danny had stepped up close, grabbed his right lower sleeve and jerked it away from his body to prevent him deploying the baton.

The cop lost balance then. Danny spun him sideways. He slid his right arm inside the cop’s right and wrenched his elbow up behind him. As the cop brought the baton up with his left, Danny shoved his knees into the back of the cop’s.

The cop sagged, dropped two foot in height, allowing Danny’s left arm to snake down over his left shoulder. Danny closed in behind him. He twisted the baton hard to the horizontal, bringing it up sharp beneath the cop’s chin with a satisfying clunk. He jerked it tight against the cop’s thorax. He didn’t let go.

The cop struggled. Then weakened. A rattle of breath. A grunt. He tried rising, throwing Danny, but Danny just pulled back harder, redistributed his weight, then heaved some more.

The cop started shuddering then, fighting for breath. His arms flailed. He tried clawing back at Danny’s face over his shoulders. He couldn’t reach.

It would have been easy for Danny to finish him then, asphyxiate him enough to make him black out, or worse. But he wasn’t planning on hurting him any more than he had to. He slackened off the pressure as the cop sank to his knees.

A voice burst out of the radio on the floor. Danny couldn’t make out the words.

The cop gasped for air, tried turning. Danny flattened him face down. He jerked the cop’s arms behind his back. Wrist-locked him with one hand and ripped the office phone off the desk with the other. He used the phone line to bind the cop’s wrists. Then he stood.

‘Please …’ the cop wheezed. ‘I’ve got children …’

Another cough of static burst from the radio. A man’s voice hissed: ‘Patrick? Are you still there?’

Danny snatched up the radio and muffled it against his chest.

‘Tell him you’re OK,’ he said to the cop. ‘Tell him your radio battery’s nearly out of juice.’

He pressed the radio against the cop’s face.

‘I’m … I’m fine,’ Patrick said. His lips were flecked with spittle. He was finding it difficult to speak. ‘But my battery’s out … it’s out of—’

Danny switched the radio off.

‘What’s your emergency comms channel?’

Patrick stared at him in confusion, then seemed to remember. ‘Four seven three,’ he said.

Danny switched the radio back on, tuned it and listened in.

Straight away bursts of cop chatter started coming through. Different voices. Panicked, every one. Danny heard the hotel name mentioned twice. Piccadilly once. Green Park tube station too. The fact that it was being shut down.

Everything he heard only confirmed what he already knew: that the Metropolitan Police were zoning their resources in on this building.

Danny switched off the radio. No matter what useful
information
he might glean, keeping it on might end up giving him away, the same as it had done this cop.

He quickly surveyed the room.

What else have I touched?

He cleaned the phone and its cord as best he could with the last of the polish wipes he’d taken from the hotel bathroom. He slipped the cop’s radio into his trouser pocket, took the baton and hurried out.

The men’s rest room was at the end of the corridor. Danny stepped inside and listened. A tap dripped. The air smelt strongly of detergent and cologne. He checked all the stalls were empty, then stood to the side of the wide frosted window.

Plenty of daylight shone through. Patches of pale green amongst blocks of blue and grey. Meaning, he worked out, that this part of the hotel offered a view south-west across Green Park. Outside he thought he heard the sound of running footsteps. Then silence descended again.

The Phillips screwdriver was where he’d wedged it down the back of the radiator. He retrieved it and stood on top of the toilet in the first stall. Unscrewing the ceiling panel directly above, letting the screws rattle to the floor, he reached into the roof space and hauled down his black Gor-Tex rucksack.

You drop your guard and sooner or later you’ll end up getting hit
.

One of the rules the Old Man had taught him. Danny had never been more grateful for his advice than he was right now.

He took out his phone and Bluetooth earpiece from the rucksack, cursing the fact that the blonde woman had taken his suit jacket, along with its transmitter and audio bead.

Not only was the lost equipment’s tech spec superior to what he had now, but more importantly, if he’d got a recording of that meeting, he’d be able to risk handing himself in to the police. Alongside the recording, the Kid would then have been able to provide testimony on Danny’s behalf. But as it was, he had nothing.

He switched his phone on.

‘The Kid,’ he said.

The Bluetooth headset triggered the phone’s voice recognition system, tripping its autodial function.

Less than two seconds later, the Kid’s voice hissed through Danny’s ear. ‘Danny? Are you OK? What the fuck is going on?’

‘You’ve got to get me out of here. Past the cops. I’ve been set up,’ Danny said.

‘Jesus … You’re still in the hotel …’

It was a statement, not a question. Danny’s phone’s GPS signature must have already flashed up as a map blip on one of the Kid’s screens.

‘I’m in the ground floor men’s rest room.’

‘I fucking knew this was going pear-shaped the second that woman found the bug,’ said the Kid. ‘It was them behind the shooting, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, listen. You can forget exiting out front. I’m piggybacking Westminster City Council’s live CCTV feeds, as well as the Trafficmaster and Camerawatch systems. And the cops are kettling anyone they spot on foot into Berkeley Square. Quarantining them in a bunch of banks and car showrooms until they can work out who’s who.’

No surprise that the Kid was already riding the data feeds. Post GCHQ, he’d spent four years working for the European Network and Information Security Agency. During which time – ‘only out of sheer academic interest, right’ – he’d illegally acquired copies of
the master programming atlases and codes-and-procedure manuals for hundreds of police agencies, phone companies, government offices and banks.

Meaning that these days the Kid could break and enter into just about any system he pleased.

‘I’m checking the back of the hotel now …’ Danny could hear the Kid’s fingers rattling across his keyboard. ‘I’ve got squad cars showing on six of seven street corners to the east. Riot vans converging too. Busting up through Pall Mall and Marlborough Road. Uniforms on foot in the park, west and rear. Armed with MP5s, looks like. Fanning out and pegging down at three zero zero metres.’

Hardcore then, Danny thought. Most likely CO19 or SO15, the Metropolitan Police Authority’s specialist firearms and
counterterrorism
units.

The three hundred metres was standard. In case of IEDs. Which the police would be assuming that whoever had attacked that limo and strafed those civvies might also have rigged up to explode around the hotel.

‘I’m telling you, mate,’ said the Kid, ‘it’s getting hairier than a rat’s arsehole out there. Looks like they’re gearing up for a siege. Reckoning whoever did this is going to want to take a whole bunch more people out.’

‘Yeah, well they’re wrong,’ Danny said. ‘This was a hit. There’s no more casualties here inside. The people who did this have gone.’

‘OK, sit tight,’ said the Kid. ‘I’m trawling the council planning offices for the hotel floor plans.’ There was the rapid scratch and hiss of a cigarette being lit. ‘There’s gotta be another way out.’

The Kid’s voice had become garbled. Fractional delays had started punctuating his words.

‘What’s wrong with the line?’ Danny said.

‘I’m routeing us through an encryption filter. To make sure nobody’s earwigging on what we’ve got to say. We’re going to be jumping between networks from now on too. Just to keep us one step ahead.’

Danny was already moving. This rest room was a dead end. He switched the glass shard from his pocket for a telescopic mirror-
on-a
-stick from his rucksack. Convex-lensed. SWAT issue.

He guzzled from the tap. Didn’t know when he’d get a chance again. Didn’t bother washing his hands. It was going to take more than designer liquid soap to get that gunshot residue out of his pores.

He pulled a pair of neoprene SPECOPS gloves from his rucksack. As he held the rest room door ajar, the mirror gave him a fish-eye view of the corridor outside. Quiet as a church on Monday.

He slipped out through the doorway. Three metres to the right, he reached a crossroads. The corridors branching off it were deserted. He crouched down and watched and waited, as the Kid continued to type.

‘So what the hell happened up there, Danny?’ The Kid’s voice crackled down the line.

Danny ordered the events in his mind.

‘I got Tasered, then drugged. I woke up with a high-powered assault rifle strapped to my hands. Dressed in a red tracksuit, balaclava and Nikes. Next to a dead guy whose face and fingers had been hacked off. But it wasn’t until I stepped out on to the hotel balcony and saw those massacred people out there that I realized how totally fucked I was.’

‘Jesus, Danny. That was you out there? Gazing round like you’d just beamed down from Mars?’

‘Sounds like I made quite an impression.’

‘Too fucking right. And I only caught a glimpse. Had to get back to concentrating the hell on weaving my way out of that traffic, before it jammed up for good.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘An alleyway up the other side of Knightsbridge.’

Good news at last
, Danny thought. Because if the Kid had already slipped the police net, he’d be able to work uninterrupted on Danny’s behalf.

‘Did you see the shooting?’ Danny said.

‘Couldn’t exactly miss it, the way they went about it. Trust me, Danny. Covert is not their middle fucking name. There were two of them. Red tracksuits. Balaclavas. They rained down on that limo from the second it pulled up. Turned it into a sieve. Then started wasting the people on the pavements who were trying to get away. Just taking fucking potshots. Blowing them all to hell.’

Danny pictured the civilian bodies again. Their brightly coloured clothes. The sheer fucking
wrongness
of it all.

‘And that’s the last you saw of them? Out on the balcony?’

‘Me and everyone else. I’ve been listening in on the police channels and they’ve not picked up anyone they think did it yet. Word is there’s over twenty civilians who got killed, as well as whoever the fuck was in that limo.’

‘The shooters were Russians,’ Danny said. ‘Or Russian-sounding, anyway.’

‘What about your dead guy in the room? You got any idea about him?’

‘I found a data stick and swipe card on him. But the card’s pretty messed up. Covered in ink.’

‘You let me worry about that.’

‘It could have been left there on purpose. For the cops.’

‘Or not,’ said the Kid. ‘Only way to find out is to let me have a look.’

The rattle of the Kid’s keyboard stopped.

‘OK, bingo,’ he said. ‘I got the hotel’s schematics in front of me now.’ A hiss of his cigarette. ‘Roof to roof’s a no-go. The building’s a stand-alone. And you go trying any of those fire escapes and you’ll get spotted for sure.’

Spotted or shot, the Kid meant. Police marksmen would already have had plenty of time to get in position. There’d soon be helicopters deployed too. With infrared detectors.

No point in trying to hide anywhere here in the hotel either, he’d already decided. The second the police had the building secure, they’d bring in portable heat-signature detectors and dog teams that between them would soon sniff out anything bigger than a rat.

Danny felt the walls closing in on him, as the prospect of prison
swelled up in his mind. He thought about Lexie. About what something like that would do to her. Get caught and he knew she’d never speak to him again.

Again he cursed himself for not having listened to his doubts about the meeting. Again he cursed Crane for his shitty intel. Again he wondered who his US government contact had been.

‘OK, Plan B,’ said the Kid. ‘If front, back and top are out, then maybe we should try down …’

‘Down where?’

‘Basement. I got some kind of delivery bay showing at the back of the building. Alongside the restaurant terrace. Steps leading up into Arlington Street. Might be a way to slip out there. Across into an office block. Even better, looks like there’s a sewer maintenance point down there …’

Danny thought of darkness. Of cold and fear. Of a place beneath the ground he’d once been to long ago. He forced the thought away.

‘How do you know it leads anywhere?’ he asked.

‘I don’t. And I’m still looking for other options. But right now I reckon this is the best shot we’ve got.’

Danny weighed up the possibilities. The thought of trying to sneak out of some delivery bay and up into an adjoining street that was most likely already covered by snipers had to be a last resort. Even say he did then make it into some nearby building, if the police spotted him doing it, all he’d really have achieved was to swap one rat trap for another.

But the sewer … That might not yet have occurred to the police. Worth a try, then, even if the thought of it was like a punch to the gut.

Another of the Old Man’s rules surfaced in his mind:
The longer
you take to make a decision, the less time you have to act.

Danny pictured his father’s face the last time he’d heard him say it. The Old Man had been half eaten by cancer, about to board a round-the-world ship. As they’d hugged each other goodbye, they’d both known they’d not see each other again.

‘OK, let’s do it,’ Danny said, rising, ready to move, knowing that even a sliver of a chance was better than none.

‘Twenty-five feet to the right outside of the Gents, and there should be what’s marked down here as a function room. Go straight through that and on into the stairwell at the end of the next corridor.’

Danny moved fast, stop-starting outside each of the open doorways he passed. He heard a radio playing through one. Jimmy Hendrix, a part of his brain recognized. ‘All Along the Watchtower’. It was one of his favourite tunes, but it was nothing but background interference to him now.

The function room was right where the Kid had said it would be – which boded well for the accuracy of his schematics and the existence of the sewage maintenance point downstairs.

A dozen laptops and iPads glowed on a burnished mahogany boardroom table. A Regency couple stared out from a huge oil painting on the wall. Avast candelabra hung from an ornate ceiling, illuminating a meeting without people. Half-drunk glasses of water. Jackets on the backs of chairs. A coffee cup in pieces on the floor.

One of the room’s three wide bay windows overlooking Piccadilly was open, indicating that whoever had been in here could well have bolted that way. Had maybe even bolted that way and then got shot.

Danny half crawled, using the table for cover, keeping well below the windows’ line of sight. He pushed through the far door and hurried on down the corridor.

Just as he reached the stairwell, a deafening explosion ripped through the air.