Hunted (16 page)

F8: So what is your contact’s take on what happened?

On how badly they screwed this up … on how they ended up hanging me out to dry, whether deliberately or not.

CRANE: I’m still trying to speak to them.

Trying
… Danny could hardly believe what he was reading. Anger flushed through him. Crane
still
hadn’t managed to get this jerk of a contact of his on the phone? Danny’s fist clenched so tightly around his phone, he nearly cracked its screen.

F8: You’re gonna need to do better than that.

CRANE: I’ve got other news. British special forces have recovered the body of one of the terrorists from the hotel room …

Danny felt his whole body tense. He’d not yet mentioned the dead man to Crane. There’d been nothing on the news feeds he had seen either. Nothing even about any special forces insertion. Meaning Crane must have mined this intel from some other source. Meaning he had an in. Most likely through British intelligence.

CRANE: Word is the guy died of natural causes, a heart attack in the wake of the shooting.

Giving more credence to Danny’s theory that the guy’s body had been mutilated by his accomplices in an effort to conceal his identity, because they’d not had time to dispose of it properly.

Meaning the card and data stick really might have been overlooked and could provide some solid leads. A frantic exit by the dead terrorist’s associates would also account for how they might have screwed up on the sedative dose they’d given Danny.

And yet
…

And yet something about it all still seemed too good to be true. A nagging doubt remained at the back of Danny’s mind … because could someone as calculating and calm as the hawk-faced man really have made such mistakes?

There was still only one way to find out. And that was to get the stick and the card to the Kid.

F8: You let me know if they manage to ID him.

CRANE: We find that out, and we’ll be a whole lot closer to discovering who set you up.

Danny thought about the swipe card and stick in his bag. Only now he thought of them like playing cards lying face down in a game of seven-card stud. Until he’d decided how to play them, he didn’t need to reveal them to anyone. Including Crane.

A final pause. Crane’s speech bubble faded. Another expanded in its place.

CRANE: Good luck.

Danny watched Crane’s avatar dissolve into nothing behind the virtual mahogany desk, leaving F8 standing alone. He glanced down at the ‘Buddies’ list at the bottom of his screen and watched Crane’s name fade from sight.

The real world – the stained tablecloth, the people out shopping, and the bright mall lighting – all that swung nauseatingly back into focus then.

He took the unmarked swipe card and the data stick from where he’d earlier secured them in his rucksack and turned them slowly over in his hand. The black ink smeared across the card had now dried.

His conversation with Crane might not have given him the answers he’d wanted, but it had confirmed one thing in his mind: these two items were now his greatest hopes.

Crane was right. The dead body. That was the key. Finding out who might also tell Danny why.

Danny paid for his food and drink. The Argentinian waitress told him to ‘Have a nice day,’ and gave him a cracked smile as he picked up his rucksack.

Walking away, Danny glanced back to see her holding the twenty-pound note up to the light just to check that it was real. Meaning he still looked kind of dodgy, he guessed. Exhausted. Stressed out. Even so, she seemed satisfied and slipped the cash into her jeans back pocket. He paid her no attention after that.

‘The Kid,’ he said into his phone, leaning up against a pillar near the TV store, out of sight of most of the passers-by, still conscious that he didn’t want to make a big issue about publicly using his phone.

He could already see from his phone’s call register that the Kid had tried calling him a whole bunch of times since he’d messaged him.

‘Jesus, Danny,’ the Kid said now, with clear relief in his voice, ‘it’s harder getting through to you than to my teenage niece.’

So the Kid had a niece. A brother or a sister too, that meant, Danny supposed. The thought of the Kid at a family function, outside of work, barely made sense. But if Danny made it through this, he really would take him up on that offer to go and hang out.

‘I’m guessing from the fact that you’re in a shopping centre that you pulled off the practically impossible and got away,’ the Kid said. ‘Unless of course the cops did snag you and they’ve taken you there for lunch.’ He clearly had Danny’s phone’s GPS signature right back there blinking on one of his screens.

‘I ate alone.’

‘Yeah, well you’re fucking lucky.’ The Kid’s voice was brittle. Danny knew he was still angry that he hadn’t taken his advice about cutting down that alley back by the school. He obviously thought he’d have got him safe by now. ‘So who the hell
have
you been talking to all this time? If you were calling your lawyer, I hope you remembered to put me in your will.’

Danny smiled at the morgue humour. All ex-soldiers were the same. The worse shit got, the lighter you made of it. Sometimes it was the only way to get by.

He filled the Kid in on his conversation with Crane. The pertinent bits anyway. Not about how it had taken place in Noirlight. Or about how he still didn’t trust Crane’s contact. But about how the terrorist in the room had died of natural causes.

The Kid got the point straight away.

‘You need to get me that swipe card and stick,’ he said.

‘What’s your location?’

‘South of you. Sleaford industrial estate. The other side of the Thames. Behind Battersea power station. Less than two miles from where you are now.’

Assuming the police were still concentrating their efforts to the north and north-west of him, and hadn’t yet widened their net or roadblocked the Thames bridges, Danny estimated that he could probably reach the Kid within twenty minutes.

‘You got the equipment there to read the card?’

‘To scan it, sure,’ said the Kid. ‘But to read it … well, that kind of depends on what’s on there.’

Which could still be nothing
, Danny thought. Or something totally unimportant, like credits for a library photocopying machine. With no name attached. No paper trail. Nothing.

He just had to pray it was more.

‘Jesus, Danny,’ said the Kid, ‘I can’t believe how big this has gone already. “The Running Man”, that’s what they’re calling you. After that Stephen King book and Schwarzenegger film. You’re everywhere. CNN, Fox, China Central, Russia Channel One, Al Jazeera, you name it. You’ve gone global, mate. This is the biggest fucking manhunt in history. People are even betting on the result.’

‘The result?’ At first Danny thought he’d misheard.

‘You know, on whether the Running Man is going to get away.’

Danny peered round the pillar over at the TV store. The Kid wasn’t exaggerating. Over half the screens now showed images of him. Filmed from the chopper. Or blurred on foot exiting Hyde Park, caught on camera by some passer-by. Or on Harrods’ CCTV, assaulting security guards, racing through the store, knocking down displays. Even him taking out the CCTV camera itself in the staff exit, before he’d ended up going through that round of sheer hell with Alan Offiniah.

Other screens focused on the wider story. On the fact that terrorists were still believed to be at large in central London. On whether suicide bombs would be next. On the mass murder outside the Ritz. On growing rumours that a gunman had gone on the rampage in Harrods. News reporters stood in flak jackets in Knightsbridge and Green Park.

Other channels were concentrating on the actual hit on the limo. On international reactions to the way it had been targeted. The White House lawn. Ten Downing Street. Tbilisi in Georgia. Moscow in the rain.

Even as he watched, Danny saw a hastily constructed animated sequence of a man in a tracksuit with a backpack on, running into a store, only for the store to then explode in a cartoon fireball.

‘IS TERRORIST STILL INSIDE? IS HE WIRED TO EXPLODE?’ the accompanying headline read.

And people are placing bets?

‘But the scumbags that did this, they’re all still at large,’ Danny said. The thought made him sick to his core.

‘I know that, Danny. But most people don’t care. To them you’re just another chunk of reality TV. Something for them to chew their
popcorn to. Thirty-three thousand police, mate. That’s how many are looking for you in London right now. Plus God only knows how many government operatives. At least nine intelligence agencies I can think of. Both here and abroad.’

Agency spooks. Danny had been spared them so far at least. And the military. He’d been lucky in that, he knew. Because it wasn’t like the British weren’t prepared to deploy soldiers into civilian areas. He remembered how just a few years back they’d sent tanks to Heathrow airport, following fears that a terrorist organization was planning on using a rocket launcher to shoot down a jet.

They’d no doubt use the same level of force on him too, if they could only work out where he was.

‘Danny?’ said the Kid.

‘What?’

‘Dome a favour and don’t switch off your phone again. It makes my life a whole lot bloody simpler if I can contact you and track where you are.’

‘Sure.’

Danny noticed that his phone’s low power indicator was still flashing. There was a telecoms store across the mall. As soon as he’d finished talking to the Kid, he’d get in there and buy a new battery.

‘Oh, and Danny?’ said the Kid. ‘You know those bets I was talking about …’

‘On whether I get away?’

‘Yeah. Well the odds on you making it are sky high … So you know what?’ Danny heard the telltale crinkling sound of the Kid starting to smile.

‘Let me guess: you’re thinking of placing a bet.’

‘Exactly right. But you know why?’

‘Nope.’

‘Because I got inside information.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That the Running Man’s even faster than he looks.’

Danny smiled. Because even though it was only a joke, he knew there was some truth in it too. The Kid still believed in him. He still believed they could make this come good. And so long as
Danny could stay focused, then maybe he could prove the Kid right. Forget the nine intelligence agencies and the thirty-three thousand police. Those were just numbers, just stats.

Remember
, he told himself.
This is what you and the Kid are good at.
Staying invisible. Outwitting predators. Keeping alive
.

But then his whole expression froze.

A new piece of breaking news footage had just joined the others being shown in the TV store. But rather than having been filmed from afar, this latest one showed Danny up close, snatching up a piece of card from the ground.

A high-resolution image of Danny Shanklin’s face filled the screen.

Danny’s mind raced along with his heart. The guy in the pinstripe suit outside Harrods … the man he had run into, who’d been making that phone call … He’d somehow snatched footage of Danny right at the moment his face had been exposed … right after his sunglasses had fallen off.

Danny felt his throat constricting. His chest began to cramp. Because surely it was now only a matter of time before he’d be ID’d.

But then even that stay of execution was snatched from him. Because the photo was only a precursor to what else the media had. Now – as one by one the close-up image of Danny’s face filled the other screens in the store – words flashed up beneath those images too.

And the Running Man now had a name.