Hunted (14 page)

‘Hi there. Welcome to Pasta Pronto. Can I interest you in any of today’s specials?’

‘No. Get me two litres of still water. Two strong black coffees. Spaghetti. Fries. Bread.’ Danny spoke in English, but his accent was now French.

The waitress – Argentinian, dyed red hair piled high and knotted on top of her head – glanced from Danny to the three empty chairs at the table he was sitting at, clearly wondering how many other people would be joining him. Flushed cheeks and a bright smile, she couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

Danny had already taken a brand-new black leather wallet from his brand-new rucksack. It contained a full set of credit cards and a photo ID matching his face but in the name of Louis Barthes, a Parisian businessman, whose crumpled expense receipts clearly demonstrated that he regularly spent time in London for work.

Danny opened the wallet now for the waitress to see and smoothly removed a twenty-pound note, before sliding it beneath an upturned wine glass.

‘That’s for you,’ he said, ‘so long as you persuade the chef to get my order here in the next five minutes. I’ve got a meeting I need to be at and I can’t be late.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The waitress was already punching Danny’s order into an electronic pad.

Danny watched her scurrying away. Then he started a quick three-sixty visual sweep around the concourse again.

He’d chosen this Italian franchise in the middle of a busy shopping mall in Chelsea because it was out in the open, easy to see people approaching, and near to the escalators, the fire exits and the doors leading out on to the rooftop car park, should he need to make a hasty escape.

He was barely a few miles from the chaos of that penned-in crowd, but looking round now, he could have been on another planet. There were some apprehensive-looking people, sure. But others were laughing, drinking coffee, shopping, just getting on with their lives. London was a network of separate villages, his wife Sally had always told him. More like separate continents, he thought.

Danny had ditched the stolen moped in an underground car park half a mile away. He’d washed in a public convenience, scrubbing his face and hands with caustic liquid soap. He’d used the medical kit in his rucksack to tend to the multiple cuts he’d sustained after entering the sewers, and had patched up his blistered, torn feet as best he could with bandages and antiseptic cream. Then he’d carefully cut out the security tags from the suit he’d stolen from Harrods, in case they set off an alarm in some other store.

In a high-street menswear store, he had then bought himself a fresh set of clothes. Blue jeans, grey socks, a white T-shirt and a hooded khaki jacket. New running shoes. Black Nikes. Exactly what the mannequin in the store’s display window had been wearing.

He’d also bought a black baseball cap, rucksack and new shades. The only time his face had been uncovered throughout the whole process had been when he’d switched outfits in the store’s changing booth, after first having checked that there’d been no prying CCTV cameras there to record the event.

Exiting the menswear store, he’d ditched the stolen suit, along with his soiled tracksuit, rucksack, gloves, trainers, cap and the
guard’s spectacles – all of which he’d earlier transferred into one of the menswear store bags – in the first bin he’d passed on the high street.

He’d spotted this shopping mall from two hundred metres away and had entered it via a street-level cinema foyer, before walking straight through into the shopping concourse beyond.

He reckoned he’d done enough to buy himself some time.

He peered back into the restaurant. The waitress was now busy working the coffee machine, transient plumes of steam hissing up past her face. Noticing Danny watching, she flashed him a perfunctory smile. Meaning, he hoped, that she’d already
incentivized
the chef to get his ass into gear.

Danny grimaced, his stomach cramping. He was ravenous. As in sweating, starting to shake ravenous. Two guys at the table next to him were digging into a couple of steaks. The smell of Dijon mustard and meat was making Danny’s stomach growl. It was all he could do not to snatch their plates right out from under them.

Both guys were in their mid twenties. Well groomed. Suited and booted. Bankers, Danny was guessing, or hedgies, or City-boy slickers – or whatever the hell else the media was calling them now.

Guys like that no longer had any impact on Danny’s world. He didn’t invest in anything he couldn’t manage himself. The majority of his wealth was tied up in a bunch of properties, with the rest carefully distributed through a web of cash accounts, and safety deposit boxes, accessed via a correspondingly complicated web of fake IDs. The whole financial system could implode again tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference to him.

Not that he’d gone into this business for money. He’d started out working for Uncle Sam for kicks and because of the Old Man. Then once he’d switched from the military to the Company, he’d done it out of addiction. Arrogance and competitiveness too, he now recognized – because he’d thought he could one day be the best.

But all that had changed after Sally and Jonathan’s deaths. When he’d gone freelance after that, he’d done it to protect people like them, to stop those who would do them harm. He’d done it to correct the failures of his past.

But the money was unavoidable. Crane had taught Danny that. If you didn’t charge the market rate, private clients wouldn’t consider you worth paying for. Then they’d end up employing someone not as good. Someone who might let them down. Which Danny never would.

Crane
…

Danny snatched up his phone again. After he’d finally given the police the slip, he’d discovered that Crane had left him four coded messages during the course of the morning.

The first was logged on his phone as having arrived a half-hour after the shooting – by which time, Danny assumed, the news of what had happened must have broken in the States, or wherever the hell else Crane might be. The other three messages had come through at roughly thirty-minute intervals since.

Danny had unscrambled all four the moment he’d sat down in the restaurant, using an encryption key on his phone. Each of them had read, simply, ‘CONTACT ME.’

Which Danny had done the second he’d read them, replying: ‘DRINK. NOW.’

As soon as he’d pressed ‘SEND’, the software on his phone would have automatically encrypted the message, before firing it off to Crane. Crane would then have used a twin encryption key on his own computer to unscramble the message his end.

Since Crane and Danny were the only two people in possession of the twin keys necessary to unscramble these coded messages, Crane would know that the reply to his own messages was genuine. Leaving them free to arrange a meeting where no one else could hear.

Plenty enough time had now passed for all this to take place.
So why the hell hasn’t Crane even got back in touch?
He’d clearly already have worked out that Danny must have been in the hotel at the time of the attack, which was why he’d been repeatedly trying to get hold of him since. So what was he doing now that was more important than talking to Danny? Did he already suspect that the people Danny had gone to meet had been involved with the hit? Was he even now talking to his US government contact to find out what the hell was going on?

Never trust in anyone fully but yourself.
Another of the Old Man’s aphorisms sprang to mind. Because could Danny really trust anyone else now? He’d never met Crane, or Crane’s US government contact. So how could he know for certain that they weren’t somehow involved in this too?

The waitress returned, balancing a tray loaded with Danny’s coffees and water. Danny’s nostrils flared as she put the steaming coffee cups down. She unscrewed the lid of one of the water bottles and started pouring it into a glass of crackling ice. Too slowly.

‘I’ll do that,’ Danny said, gripping the bottle.

‘Sure.’ The waitress let the bottle go. ‘Your food won’t be long,’ she said.

As Danny lifted the bottle to his lips and started to drink, his stomach twisted with fresh discomfort, the icy-cold liquid burning like whisky as it poured down his throat.

He noticed the waitress staring. Probably at the bruise forming on his cheek below his left eye, he guessed. A reminder of his encounter with Alan Offiniah, which would stay with him now for a week, and which even his new tinted Aviator shades didn’t fully conceal.

He glared hard at the waitress. She hurried away.

He did another three-sixty security sweep as he drained the bottle. The electronics store on the other side of the concourse had several TVs in its window, which were still showing footage of the ‘Mayfair Massacre’, as they’d now tagged it. Always from the same angle. From across the street where that TV crew had been. Only now the TV people had added computer graphics, showing the angles of fire. They’d made it look like a video game, Danny thought. As if no one had really been hurt at all.

The hawk-faced man. He’d been dressed in a tracksuit when Danny had met him, and Danny now knew for sure that he’d been one of those two shooters out there on the balcony.

Danny had watched the whole sequence up close outside that store only a few minutes ago. After they’d wasted the limo, one of the masked men had started shooting in a spray-and-pray pattern, missing some groups of civilians entirely, ripping others apart.

But the second man – the shorter, stockier of the two – had remained completely focused throughout, drilling controlled burst after burst first into the vehicle’s occupants as they’d tried to escape, and then into the crowd of panicked civilians, taking them down in ones and twos, hardly wasting a single round.

He’d looked as casual, in fact, as if he’d been standing on a boat deck with nothing more incriminating than a fishing rod in his hands.

And there at his wrist – between the end of his sleeve and the beginning of the black glove on his right hand – Danny had seen something flash in the bright morning sun. A gold chain. The same one the hawk-faced man had been wearing.

Oh yeah, that sicko had been having the time of his life.

Danny checked his phone as he snatched up the nearest coffee and burned his lips at the very first sip. Still no word from Crane.

He felt his vision darken, like someone had just turned down a dimmer switch on the world. His temple throbbed. Dehydration, he hoped. Not the start of a migraine, because sometimes those could get him too.

He grabbed a packet of sugar from the dull metal bowl on the table, tore off its top and tipped its contents into the coffee. He splashed in water from the second bottle and drank greedily, wincing at the heat, shocked by the sudden influx of taste. For a second he thought he was about to spew it all back up.

He stared down at his hands. They were shaking. Clenching his fists, he tried to make them be still. But he could not. He checked the phone again. Still no answer. He felt exposed, completely alone.

This is the worst day of my life
…

But even as this thought entered his head, anger rose up through him. Hatred at himself for having thought it. Hatred and shame.

This wasn’t the worst day of his life. Nor would tomorrow be. Nor any other day yet unlived. The worst day of his life had already happened. A nightmare that was a memory. One that began with a walk in the woods and ended with blood on the snow.

Danny was sweating, trembling. From where he and Lexie were crouched down behind the thorn bush, through the falling snow, he could see there was snow right there on the doormat beneath the cabin’s eaves, snow that must have dropped from the boots of whatever uninvited stranger had come to call.

No third set of boot prints led away from the cabin and there was no other door. Meaning that whoever had walked this way had to still be inside.

The cabin’s curtains remained drawn. It was dark as a cave in there this time of year. Danny knew Sally wouldn’t have let anyone in without afterwards opening them wide.

‘Daddy, you’re hurting me.’

Beside him, Lexie shifted her weight. The crunch of her boots in the snow rang out like a cymbal crash in Danny’s mind.

He looked down at her hand gripped in his. He saw the
blood-red
puckering of his skin and forced his fingers to relax. She grimaced, jerking her hand back like she’d just been stung. She clenched and unclenched her little fist.

‘What is it, Daddy?’ She spoke in a whisper. She’d not yet seen the boot prints, but he could tell just from the way she now glanced across at the cabin that she too knew something was wrong.

‘We’re going to play a game, princess,’ he whispered back.

‘But I thought you wanted to get back …’

‘I know. But it’s just for a minute.’

Danny started stepping slowly backwards, taking Lexie’s hand, gently this time, so that she had no choice but to do the same. He didn’t take his eyes off the cabin. He watched the curtains. He didn’t blink.

‘What kind of game is it, Daddy?’

‘A hiding game.’

‘Who are we hiding from?’ A note of excitement in her voice. But apprehension too.

‘Just your mother and your brother.’ He kept walking backwards, holding her firmly by the elbow, preventing her from turning. ‘See if you can’t step into your old boot prints,’ he said.

‘You mean so Mom and Jonathan will think we’ve just disappeared into thin air?’

‘That’s right.’

Danny did the same, keeping them moving backwards, both of them glancing back over their shoulders to make sure they hit the mark. Ten paces, twenty.

Better to look a fool than be one
, his father would say.

The snow had started falling even harder now. Danny felt his chest tightening as they finally reached the hawthorn clump and the cabin dropped out of view.

‘OK,’ he said, stopping ten paces later, ‘this is far enough.’

The Old Man had helped Danny build the tree house. Originally it had been meant as a hide from which he would be able to shoot wood pigeons. But Danny had ended up making it more than that, building it into somewhere he could hang on his own, and even sleep out in on hot summer nights.

He lifted Lexie up into it now, to save her climbing up the
cut-off
branches – to keep the snow on them so it looked like no one had.

A small, dark opening led into the interior of the tree house. Danny had done a good job of camouflaging it when he’d been a kid. And now ivy had grown over its windows and floor and walls.
So much so that now you had to know it was there to see it. Even here below it, it just looked like another gnarled oak.

Lexie scrambled through, then twisted round to face him. He smiled up at her. But she didn’t smile back.

‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘You stay inside. And don’t you come out now. Not until I say.’

‘Something’s wrong, Daddy. You look … afraid.’ It was clear from her face that she’d never thought of the word in connection with him before.

But she was right. Danny was afraid. Of something,
someone
he wasn’t even yet prepared to name in his mind, because so terrifying – and,
please God
, absurd and unlikely – was the prospect of them having come here. Of this person being in there with Sally and Jonathan. His wife and his boy.

The two paths – one facing forwards, one back – of his and Lexie’s boot prints led off towards the pastures, as if the two of them had walked this way and back to the house together and neither of them had stopped.

It wouldn’t fool anyone for long, Danny understood. But it was the best he could do in the time. And he certainly couldn’t send his daughter out into what now looked set to be turning into a snowstorm. Not when the nearest inhabited farm was nearly four kilometres away. Particularly not when he still prayed that what he was fearing was wrong.

But he wasn’t taking any chances either. He set off as quick as he could, tracing his own boot prints again. Forwards this time. On to the hawthorn patch.

When he got there, he stopped. He crouched and parted the tangle of icy branches.

Through the thickening blur of snow, he could see that the cabin door remained shut, the curtains closed. Black smoke trailed up from the chimney and vanished in the white sky.

If Danny’s cell phone hadn’t been in the cabin, if he’d even had one in his car, he’d have called the police then. He’d have been happy to be proved to be just paranoid.

But there was no one to turn to for help.

He slung the drawstring bag, then unclipped his bowie knife from its scabbard. Inside were two smaller knives of identical design, one with a four-inch blade, one with a two.

He slid the four inch down the inside of his boot, where it might be easily found. With the two-inch, he nicked his trouser lining at the back behind his belt, and slid the tiny knife inside, where it could not be seen or felt.

He threw away the scabbard. The three empty pockets there would betray the missing blades. Then he ran right, using the hawthorn as cover. He moved parallel to the line of the stranger’s boot prints, which had stopped at his front door, shadowing them back in the direction from which they’d come.

Thirty metres on and he passed his own car. A Chevrolet Sedan. Nothing but a blurred white lump in the snow.

Fifty metres further on and his stomach lurched as he saw the second vehicle. It was parked up in a small clearing in the woods behind a thicket of spruce, where it could not be seen from the cabin or the dirt track leading up from the valley.

The tree branches shivered in the wind as the snow continued to fall. But apart from that, all was still.

Danny circled round, then moved in closer to the vehicle, his bowie knife already in his hand, his breath rushing out fast in little white clouds. A cold clamminess had settled on the back of his neck. He’d become acutely aware of the passing of time.

There were no tyre tracks ahead of the car, he now saw. None behind either. Not enough snow had yet fallen this morning to account for that. And last night it had stopped falling at just gone midnight. Which meant this vehicle must have been parked up here all night.

Like Danny’s own car, the horizontal surfaces of this vehicle were covered in snow. But unlike his car, as he closed right in, the lurid red of the driver’s door of the vehicle was clearly visible. Because that was where whoever had been in this car all night had exited this morning, dislodging the snow from the door as they did.

Danny was close enough now to see in through the window.
There was no one inside. But the footprints he’d tracked back from the cabin, they’d started from here.

Meaning that whoever’s car this was, they were now inside the log cabin with Sally and Jonathan.

A silent wail of desperation rose up inside Danny’s throat, as again his worst fear leapt to the front of his mind.

He arrowed through the swirling snow and the white woods towards the cabin, as silent and swift as a bird of prey.

He prayed –
God
, he prayed he was wrong.