Hunted (19 page)

Lexie turned right out of the music room and raced ahead of Danny down the red-tiled corridor, the noise of the polishing machine drowning out her steps. Danny caught up with her as she burst through a set of swing doors and ran on into an echoing,
high-beamed
auditorium.

Straight ahead he could see a set of closed fire exit doors that would lead them outside. Bringing them out at the back of the main school building, he reckoned, hopefully out of sight of where the unmarked Mercs had pulled up.

To the left, at the end of the aisle that bisected the rows of empty plastic seats, was the main entrance to the auditorium, a huge set of intricately carved wooden doors with smaller doors set within them, one of which was already ajar and through which a thin vertical line of daylight could be seen.

But Lexie ran right.

‘Where are you going?’ Danny hissed. He wanted out, not in. He wanted to get away from this place as fast as he could.

‘The rafters.’

‘What?’

‘It’s where we smoke. We’ll be able to hide up there.’

She
smokes
?

‘We can’t hide,’ Danny said. ‘They’ll find us. The second they discover I’m here, they’re going to tear this place apart.’

As soon as he said it, Danny wondered,
Maybe they didn’t come here to
snatch Lexie. Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Maybe they
followed me.
But it made no difference now.

‘I know,’ Lexie called back, but she didn’t stop. Instead she raced up the wooden steps leading on to the stage. ‘But once we’re up there, I can lead you right across the school. Through the roofs. Through the two buildings alongside this. We can get out through the chapel, by the teachers’ car park at the back.’

The promise of transport … that clinched it for Danny. Plus, he was now also thinking that running straight back out of this building might mean running straight back into trouble. Those two guys back there in the quad had been equipped with comms. They could already have ordered the building surrounded.

He ran after Lexie across the empty stage, their footsteps booming out like cannon fire in their wake. Backstage, they switched right, moved into the wing, behind the runners for the heavy red velvet curtain.

A metal ladder stretched up towards the ceiling. They started to climb quickly, their footsteps ringing out on each rung like bells. Danny followed Lexie’s lead, up past the lighting rigs.

He heard the sudden silence when they were three-quarters of the way up.

The janitor had just switched off his machine.

Danny gripped Lexie’s ankle. He felt her leg flex and for a moment he thought she was about to instinctively kick him away. But then she peered back down the ladder towards him and the look he shot her through the gloom froze her as well.

The creak of a wooden floorboard. They both heard it then.

Danny slowly turned his head back towards the auditorium. Through a thin gap between the heavy stage curtain and where it pressed up against the wall, he could see the men now, twenty feet below, thirty feet away.

Three of them. They’d come in silent and fast. All of them armed with handguns. Sig Sauer P230s, they looked like from here.

Cold fury rippled through Danny. They knew he was with his sixteen-year-old daughter and yet they’d come in here ready to shoot.

The first guy in – heavily muscled, late thirties, with cropped black hair and ice-grey eyes – crouched down motionless to the right of the doorway through which Danny and Lexie had entered.

His two colleagues crept in after, listening, watching, with their Sig Sauers ready to fire. Steady hands, Danny noticed. No nerves there.

Danny counted off the seconds … three, four, five … then the heavily muscled guy waved his two colleagues forward with a series of swift hand gestures.

They moved quickly, silently, like sharks, the three of them spreading out now across the auditorium, checking the rows of plastic chairs, clearing them one by one.

Soon they’d widen their search to the stage, Danny knew. And the moment they stepped into the wings and looked up, they’d have him and Lexie right in their sights.

He squeezed her ankle again. As she glanced down, he could tell from her pale, drained face that she’d seen the three armed men as well.

Sweat dripped into his eyes as he nodded her on. He blinked the stinging sensation away. The sound of a jet flying somewhere nearby echoed through the room. When he next looked up, Lexie was already moving. She’d realized that this was their last chance.

They moved up rung by rung. Silently. Danny glanced back only once towards the auditorium. And that told him all he needed to know. The three agents were moving now towards the stage, exactly as he’d feared.

Lexie stopped.

Danny’s heart sank as he stared up. Directly above he, he saw, was a closed trapdoor. A terrible pained expression spread across her face, as if she was about to cry. She bit down hard on her lip.

‘Do it,’ Danny mouthed.

She nodded once, determinedly, then turned away from him. Danny watched as, with excruciating slowness, she pressed her palm up flat against the trapdoor and gently began to push.

A tiny hiss. It sounded like an avalanche to Danny. A dust shower fell. He took the brunt of it on his head. But the rest drifted down. He waited for a face to appear below him backstage. But none did. He could no longer see the men through the gap between the curtain and the wall.

Then the floor polishing machine droned once more into life. When Danny looked up, he saw the trapdoor quickly opening into a widening sliver of hope. Then Lexie was moving upwards, squeezing on through as she continued to open it wide.

Danny hurried after. His heart was hammering now. He couldn’t bring himself to look down for fear of seeing one of those agents looking right back up at him.

He watched Lexie’s legs slithering out of sight.
At least she’s made it
, he thought. And then he was hauling himself up through the gap.

A moment of terror. With his legs dangling below him. As if he were perched on an overhang, or sitting on the edge of a skyscraper. As if with just one slip, he’d know death.

Then silently, desperately, he raised himself fully up into the gloom of the roof space above.

Danny lowered the trapdoor behind him, cutting off the noise of the polishing machine to nothing but a faint hum. Then silence. Someone had switched it off.

Smeared skylights illuminated a swirling galaxy of dust motes. The roof space was bigger than Danny would have guessed. High enough to stand.

Lexie had stepped aside to let him through. He pressed his finger to his lips, to ensure she didn’t make the mistake of thinking that just because those men could no longer see her, they couldn’t hear her as well.

But he needn’t have bothered. She’d already worked it out. She squeezed past him without speaking and set off along a wooden walkway. Danny couldn’t help noticing her balance. She crawled like a cat. A natural. Just the same as she’d been when he’d first started teaching her judo as a kid.

After ten metres, she stopped and turned to face him. ‘We’re above the library now.’ A barely audible whisper. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Those men … they looked like they wanted to shoot you. They looked like they wanted you dead.’

She was right. Whoever those people were, Danny was their problem. They’d come here to switch him off.

‘The library roof,’ she said, ‘connects with the chapel. We can get down through there and then out. There’s a back road that leads out of the school. Those people hunting for you, they might not even know it’s there.’

It was a good idea – probably his only option. And she was right again to have used the word
hunting
. She’d recognized the scenario for what it was. Those men were the hunters, and Danny and Lexie were their prey.

‘Let’s move it,’ he said, his voice a whisper too.

Lexie set off quickly again along the walkway. Silently. He glanced around as he followed. Rotting roof felt, assorted junk and the desiccated carcasses of trapped pigeons lay scattered across the rafters and blocks of decaying insulation. Grit cut through his trousers into his knees. A stink of rot. The gurgle of a water tank somewhere nearby. Dotted across the wooden beams, Danny saw the telltale black smears of scuffed-out cigarettes.

‘This place is a fire trap,’ he said without thinking. ‘I don’t want you smoking up here again.’

I don’t want you smoking at all
…

She glanced back over her shoulder – and sneered at him in open disbelief.

‘Yeah, well maybe if you promise not to bring any more psychopaths into my school, then we can come to some kind of a deal.’

She had a point.

Another thirty feet and the roof space they were in terminated in a triangle of crumbling brick wall. The walkway branched left here, traversing the building. They followed it for five metres more.

‘Here,’ Lexie said then, crouching down beside a small closed wooden doorway.

She pulled the bolt across it and, without hesitating, crawled through into the darkness beyond.

Like the smoking, this was obviously something she’d done a hundred times before. So that was what he had on his hands, he now saw. An adventurer. A rebel. A real chip off the old block. It
was crazy how they’d had to end up running together for their lives for him to have got even an inkling of that.

He wondered what else he’d get to find out about her, if they ever had the time.

The space they now entered wasn’t nearly as dark as it had first appeared. In fact, the further along the dusty walkway they went, the more crepuscular light filtered down through the cracks in the tiled roof above.

Silence. It was all around them. As big and as wide as the sea.

‘We’re above the chapel now, aren’t we?’ he said.

‘Yes. Look.’

She stopped momentarily two metres ahead of him ahead of him to point across at a thin shaft of light rising up through a gap in the roof insulation below.

When Danny reached it, he peered down past what he guessed must be a light fitting, and on into the depths of the chapel. Bright sunlight shone through stained-glass windows, scattering rainbows of coloured dots across the rows of wooden pews and the
black-and
-white chequered floor.

There was no one in sight, Danny was relieved to see. Which meant they still had the jump on those guys.

Lexie reached the end of the roof space and stopped at the top of another ladder. She didn’t bother waiting for Danny or checking with him if it was OK to go down. She knew time was not on their side. And she’d already made her own choice, just the same as him, from looking down through that light fitting. She’d decided that the chapel was safe.

The ladder was only ten rungs deep. It terminated not at ground level, but in a raised gallery, a choir stall up beside the chapel’s
brass-piped
organ. As Danny hurried down after his daughter, he peered over the gallery balcony and saw they were still the only people here.

Again Lexie didn’t bother to wait. She raced ahead down a spiral of stone steps, and into the vestibule of the chapel below.

‘Come on.’ A loud hiss this time. She was clearly buzzing, adrenalizing. ‘This way. Through the crypt. It’s somewhere else where we—’

She stopped herself just in time before she actually said the word
smoke
. She glanced back at him, warningly, clearly expecting some authoritative remark. But Danny had learned his lesson. He didn’t try parenting her again.

Ten steps later and they were down at crypt level, racing through a dark dank passage beneath the chapel. Then the passage ran out and Lexie lifted the latch on another wooden door.

They stepped into darkness. Danny couldn’t see a thing.

His daughter shut the door behind them and switched on the light.

He’d been expecting stone coffins. Inscriptions on walls. Cases of communion wine. Maybe altar silver too. But what he got instead was synthesizers, electric guitars, basses and a full set of drums.

‘This is where we do our band practice,’ she said, breathless now.

‘It’s soundproof, you see, so—’

‘You’re in a band?’

‘I’m the drummer.’

‘Cool.’

He couldn’t believe he’d just said that. Like that. Like he approved. And clearly neither could she. There it was again, that sneer. Him giving her his view on her life. He’d clearly not yet earned the right to do that.

He struggled for something to say, something that wouldn’t put her nose out of whack. He saw the drum kit over in the corner and looked for a clue on the bass drum’s skin, but there was nothing painted there.

‘So have you guys got a name?’ he said.

‘The Mole Rodels.’

He nodded.
Cool
. He managed to just think it, not say it, this time.

Lexie started threading her way through the instruments. She said, ‘The car park’s out this way.’

And there it was.
Boom
. In an instant, whatever moment of father/daughter intimacy – of
normality
– they’d almost just shared, it vanished like a puff of smoke in a gale.

The men in the auditorium, the hawk-faced man at the Ritz, the
hell Danny had been through in between, and that he still hadn’t got away from yet … all of that now came back in a rush.

‘From here on in, make sure you keep behind me,’ he said, joining her now by the door. ‘And no matter how much it might piss you off, when I tell you to do something, you just do it, no questions, OK?’

She swallowed hard. His tone of voice had killed stone cold any sense of this being an adventure. It had brought back fear instead.
But that’s OK. That’s good
, Danny thought. Because so long as you used it, fear could keep you sharp. It could keep you alive.

He took out the cop baton from his rucksack, then strapped his rucksack tight to his back. Lifting the latch on the heavy crypt door, he pulled it ajar, then stepped out blinking into the bright light outside.