Hunted (21 page)

‘Hold tight,’ Danny said through gritted teeth.

The BMW was still hurtling towards them down the long, straight residential street. Accelerating. Sixty metres and closing. It shifted on to Danny’s side of the road. Didn’t look much like it was planning on stopping, either.

With their combined velocities, a collision would leave the occupants of both vehicles dead. But Danny doubted that whoever these people were, they were intent on an actual kamikaze mission. More likely whoever was driving that car was assuming Danny was going to chicken out of the collision first.

He reckoned they’d already worked out his weakness – his daughter was with him, and he wouldn’t risk her life. They thought he’d just slam on his brakes. Or would maybe even panic and lose control and plough into the line of parked cars that he was
whipping
past now.

They’d have been better off watching their sat nav screen. Because then what Danny did next wouldn’t have come as quite such a shock to them.

He slammed the gearstick up into third and floored the accelerator. The car bucked a little, then surged forward. Right at the BMW. Thirty metres. Twenty. Danny watched until he could see their faces.

‘Dad.’ Lexie started to shout. ‘Dad. Stop.’

He hung a hard right. The car slewed screeching across the street, right across the path of the oncoming BMW.

For a split second, Danny thought he’d misjudged it. But then the side street the sat nav map had predicted opened up right there in front of him. Silver flashed in the rear-view mirror as the BMW sailed past.

Miss Heap’s Saab shot forward, jumping the kerb momentarily before Danny hauled it back round and down on to the road.

‘Are you OK?’

Nothing.

‘Lexie. Answer me.’ He needed her to respond. He couldn’t have her going into shock.

‘Yes,’ she finally said.

Looking across, he saw both hands gripping the top of her seat belt where it disappeared into the car’s roof.

The cobbled mews they’d entered was deserted apart from one or two parked cars. Danny floored the accelerator and they raced past a row of craft shops and art studios. Hot summer air rushed in at him through the broken car window.

Nothing in the rear-view mirror. The BMW might have crashed, he hoped, but without much faith. More likely it would either be screaming in reverse back up that street they’d left it in. Or it would already be cutting through another series of turns to intercept him somewhere else.

As they reached the end of the cobbled road and shot out into the street beyond, Danny heaved the car hard round to the left.

A flash of red this time in the rear-view. A bus. A double-decker. He had missed ploughing into it by less than ten feet. Its driver angrily flashed its lights, blasting its horn.

Another movement. The silver BMW was back.

It dipped out to the right just to the rear of the bus, then straight back in, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a truck at the head of a column of traffic coming the other way.

Danny gunned the Saab up behind a small green Nissan driving in front of him. He searched the oncoming traffic for a gap so he
could pass. He spotted one coming. In three cars’ time. A space of maybe forty metres.

The second the gap reached him, he slung the car out wide, tyres squealing, across on to the other side of the street.

He floored the accelerator in third. The engine shrieked. The forty-metre gap shrank almost to nothing in less than two seconds. An oncoming Land Rover rushed towards him. Its driver stared out at Danny in horror as she slammed on her brakes.

But whatever impact she’d been expecting never came. The exact instant the rear of Miss Heap’s car drew level with the front of the little green Nissan, Danny twisted the steering wheel hard left, bringing him sweeping back across on to his own side of the road.

Looking back, he saw the BMW, with its vastly superior
acceleration
, had already successfully managed a similar manoeuvre, and had already cut past the bus.

Only the Nissan was now keeping them and Danny apart.

‘Get down,’ he said.

Lexie didn’t react. She was too freaked out. He grabbed the back of her neck and pushed her head down roughly between her knees.

‘And stay down.’

Any second now, he was expecting the BMW to be right on his tail. And then what? An explosion of glass behind his head? A bullet slamming into the dash? Or something infinitely worse?

He tried not to think of the dangers. He focused on working out how the hell he was going to lose the BMW instead.

He was stuck behind another car already. A Citroën. Doing less than thirty miles an hour.

But worse was what was happening up ahead. Fifty metres on, the traffic in front of Danny was already slowing, brake lights glowing as they backed up in a column at a set of red lights.

The last of the oncoming traffic on the other side of the street would be passing Danny any second. Then the BMW would pull into the gap. It was less than ten metres behind them now. Within seconds it would be past them. It would box them in. And then they’d be toast.

Danny moved first, crossing on to the other side of the street the first chance he got. He floored the accelerator. The car hit forty
m.p.h. Then fifty. He was doing sixty by the time he sailed through the set of red lights on the wrong side of the road, and out into the major intersection beyond.

Headlights flashed, horns blared, vehicles swerved and shunted into one another to get out of his way. The wind rushed past his face through the open car window. He twisted the steering wheel sideways and missed flattening a motorcycle by inches, before sliding, skidding, towards a jackknifing truck.

He missed that too. Or it swerved to miss him. The speed he was going at now, it was impossible to tell.

A gap opened up ahead, and suddenly he was clear of the tangle of colliding traffic, and barrelling along an empty stretch of road.

But he wasn’t the only one. Whatever miraculous guiding hand had steered Danny through that intersection, it had steered his pursuers through too.

The BMW was rushing up behind. Twenty metres. Now ten. It pulled out alongside him. Then powered forward. Drew level. He could hear its engine scream.

Lexie was staring terrified out through Danny’s busted window. She let out a whimper of fear.

Danny looked across. The gap between the two cars was less than three feet. The guy in the BMW’s passenger seat, a ginger-haired man in a violent red shirt, was pointing a Browning high-power 9mm handgun at his face.

‘I said down,’ Danny shouted at Lexie.

The best way to lose a tail if it was faster than you, Danny had learned a long time ago, was not to try and outrun it, but to run it off the road.

He gave no warning. He looked straight ahead, and focused everything he’d got now on how he’d pull out of this spin. Then he slammed on the brakes and simultaneously twisted the steering wheel right.

He couldn’t have timed it better. He clipped the back of the BMW hard. A screech of burning tyres. An explosion of rending metal. The BMW was easily the heavier of the two vehicles. But that didn’t save it now.

The collision sent it spinning anticlockwise across the front of Miss Heap’s car, so that the Saab’s left wing clipped it hard again, this time on the passenger door.

Another agonized shriek of buckling metal. The Saab’s front crumpled and tore. The BMW catapulted off to the left.

Danny and Lexie span anticlockwise too. The world lurched sickeningly round. But Danny had had one big advantage over the BMW’s driver. He’d known what was coming. He’d turned into the spin, and now he set about controlling the skid.

He fought the steering wheel as they hurtled towards a crash barrier. At the last second, he managed to right the Saab once more and arrowed it back along the street.

‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’

Danny glanced across, surprised. It seemed like Lexie had rediscovered her voice.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Oh Jesus, Dad. Please don’t do that again.’

A pneumatic hissing noise. Something wrong with the engine. Danny slowly applied the brakes as they pulled up towards another queue of traffic at another set of lights.

His heart was racing. His fingers were aching from gripping the wheel. A slick of sweat trickled down his brow.

In the rear-view mirror he spotted a glint of silver metal in the sun a hundred metres behind. The BMW was on its side, its wheels spinning, smoke pouring from its engine.

A door burst open and a man crawled out.

The lights turned green. Danny cut quickly through the line of traffic crossing the next intersection and headed north-west.

‘Are we safe yet?’ Lexie said.

‘No.’

They’d already been a mile from her school by the time the BMW had intercepted them. It had been driving in the opposite direction. Which meant it couldn’t have tailed them. It must have been sent there instead.

And whatever electronic eyes had guided it, they were probably still watching Danny and Lexie now.

With intelligence agencies leading the chase, it was possible they’d deployed a surveillance satellite. Danny knew for a fact that there were several in geosynchronous orbits over western Europe, all of them capable of conducting square-metre-by-metre search patterns, and able not only to photograph a postcard from space, but also to track it blowing across someone’s backyard.

They’d certainly have no trouble following a car like this through the streets of London, once they’d locked on.

Even if the people hunting him were only using CCTV, they now knew what he was driving, so it would just be matter of time till they located him again.

Meaning he still needed to make like Houdini. And vanish. And quick.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Lexie said. ‘Miss Heap smokes …’

Glancing across, Danny saw that sometime during the chase, the passenger glove compartment had burst open and disgorged a bunch of the headmistress’s belongings on to Lexie’s lap. She was holding up a silver packet of cigarettes.

‘Wait,’ Danny said. ‘What’s that?’

He snatched a metal canister from her hand. Lighter fuel. It was full.

‘What about matches?’ he said.

She held up a small brass object. ‘Just a Zippo.’

He took that too. Another glance at the sat nav. They could make it to the safe house on foot from here.

Up ahead he saw a sign for an industrial estate. He took the turn. It was exactly what he’d wanted. A confused road layout, heavy on warehouses and light on traffic. Plenty of buildings and alleyways. The perfect place to ditch the car.

As he drove beneath a bridge running under a raised train track, he spotted a spiral of railings leading down into an underpass. Again he checked the rear-view mirror. Again the road was clear.

‘Get out,’ he said, screeching the car to a halt.

‘But Dad …’

‘Now.’ She was shaking; he reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘We’ve got to lose the car,’ he said. ‘To buy ourselves some time. Go down into the underpass and wait.’

She nodded, steeling herself, then got out and ran. He watched her as far as the underpass railings, then jerked the door shut. The car screeched away from the kerb.

He caned it out from under the bridge in second gear, then shifted into third. To the left up ahead was a row of five faded roadside advertising hoardings. A wasteland of rubble and
half-demolished
warehouses stretched out behind.

Bracing himself against the wheel, Danny jumped the kerb and took his foot off the accelerator. He ploughed the Saab’s left wing
hard but laterally into the hoarding, tearing a gash through the
half-rotten
boards, further crumpling the front of the car.

As the Saab shuddered hissing to a halt, he snatched up Miss Heap’s can of lighter fluid and her Zippo. Grabbing his rucksack, he got out and set about squirting lighter fluid all over the the dash, carpets and seats.

He flicked the Zippo into life, tossed it on to the passenger seat and –
WHOOMPH
– the lighter fluid caught, sending flames licking hungrily out across the upholstery.

Danny ducked through the gap the car had ripped in the advertising hoarding, so that he could no longer be seen from the road. He heard a pursuit car coming then, gunning along the street from the east. He pressed himself flat against the hoarding as the vehicle – a black Mercedes – overshot him.

He kept the row of hoardings between himself and the Merc and edged his way along, arriving back at the entrance to the underpass less than thirty seconds later.

Checking up the road to where the burning car was, he saw two suited men standing with their backs to him, edging closer to the car and trying – daring each other it looked like – to get near enough to peer through the billowing black smoke to see if anyone was inside.

He slipped into the dark mouth of the underpass. It was time to collect Lexie and finally get them somewhere safe.

They’d headed south from the road where Danny had torched the car.

‘You’re pretty fast,’ he said, catching his breath.

‘You’re not so bad yourself.’

They were resting up in the scented shade of a magnolia tree in full blossom, in the large walled front garden of a multi-
million-pound
house that backed on to the Thames.

Sunlight filtered down through the thick web of branches, sending shade patterns shimmering across Lexie’s flushed face. Both she and Danny were panting, sweating, exhausted. Danny reckoned they’d just run just over three miles.

He’d done his best to make their journey here complex to track – sticking to densely populated areas. He’d taken Lexie into two shopping malls. Safe beneath the cover of metres of concrete.

In each mall they’d bought new clothes – with Danny accounting for his filthy condition following his fight by telling the first perplexed-looking sales assistant he’d encountered that he’d slipped during a visit to a nearby construction site. They’d switched their route and had doubled back on themselves more times than he could count.

But now they were here, and he hoped no one else knew.

Danny was wearing running clothes, a black baseball cap and shades. Lexie had kitted herself out in an outfit she’d got from a store called Topshop, the style of which was alien to Danny.

Out of her school running kit, he thought she looked more like twenty than sixteen. It made him feel even older, like he’d missed out on more of her life than he actually had.

His phone was still dead. He cursed himself for not having remembered to pick up a battery. The Kid would be frantic by now. But with any luck, he’d already have picked up the data stick and card by the time Danny did get to speak to him. And then, depending what he’d mined off them, they could plan their next move.

‘I was meant to be running the fifteen hundred metres today,’ Lexie said.

‘I reckon you would have won.’

The first mile they’d run, they’d done almost flat out. He’d assumed he’d have to help her, or adjust his pace, just to stop her from falling behind. Especially considering she smoked. But she hadn’t complained once. All through the industrial estate. Along the canal towpath. Into the first shopping mall.

She’d not freaked out either. Not at the dull
thwack-thwack
of the unmarked grey chopper that had lurched into the skies above Miss Heap’s burning car as they’d run on beneath tree cover in a park less than half a mile away. And not just now when he’d walked her into a stranger’s garden and told her to hide behind the front wall.

‘You did good, you know,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

She smiled then. From relief, he supposed. And for a fleeting moment she looked just like her mother, like Sally had on that subway carriage as she’d been filling out that crossword clue the first time they’d met.

But just as quick, the smile vanished. Zipped. Withdrawn. Taken from him again.

He wanted to tell her that no matter how horrific today had been, in some crazy way, sitting here with her now in this beautiful place
somehow made it all worthwhile. He wanted to tell her how much he’d missed her. How he wished he’d never let her go. But he feared what she’d say if he did.

‘You know, this has got to be the longest time we’ve spent together, just the two of us, for quite a while,’ he said.

‘It’s certainly the most memorable.’

He couldn’t believe it. She was making a joke.

But as she blew her black-streaked fringe from her face, he again felt the fading of her smile, like the sun going in behind a cloud.

‘That lunch after grandma’s funeral was longer,’ she said, a deep frown now creasing her brow.

When you hardly spoke a word to me
…
when you barely acknowledged I was there
…

He’d wondered then if that was the end for them, if she’d ever want to see him again.

‘You must still miss her. Your grandmother,’ he said. He pulled a bottle of water from his rucksack and handed it over.

‘Yes.’

He watched her as she drank. ‘She was a good woman,’ he said.

Lexie handed back the bottle and pulled her knees up to her chest. Wrapping her arms tightly round herself, she stared down at her new trainers.

‘Grandma once told me that she thought you were
self-destructive
,’ she said. ‘She told me when she first took me away to live with her that you were a danger to yourself …’

She turned to him then. Danny couldn’t hold her stare. He looked away. All that shame he’d felt after she’d left, after he’d got himself off the pills and had quit drinking, when he’d finally realized he’d lost her, he now felt that terrible weight bearing down on him again.

‘She was right,’ he said. ‘But I’ve changed.’

‘But that’s just it.’ Lexie’s voice flared. ‘Have you? Because what happened then … in the woods … when that man …’

Even after all this time, neither of them had a name for him, any more than they would ever be able to name between them the terrible things he had done.

‘… when that man came looking for you then …’ Lexie said, her voice cracking, ‘he came looking for you because of what you do … because he wanted you dead … and these government people today ….don’t they want just the same thing?’

‘This isn’t my fault.’

‘Neither was what happened to Mum and Jonathan, Dad. I know that. But it still happened, didn’t it? It happened all the same.’

Danny saw it then in her eyes. The tears shining that she wouldn’t let fall, that she hated him seeing, that she even now started wiping roughly away. He saw there reflected in them just how much she still hurt. How she would always hurt.

And maybe she was right to blame Sally and Jonathan’s deaths on his work. Because that job he’d been seconded to do for the FBI, it had brought the stranger right to their cabin door. And maybe she was right about now, too. Maybe nothing had changed. Because here his work was again, ripping her world apart.

He understood then. As she tore her eyes bitterly from his. Everything he’d tried to do, every way he’d tried to protect her, he’d failed. His work might have saved him, might have given him purpose again. But it had kept him and Lexie apart.

For a moment, as she sat there hunched up, staring across the small neat lawn, he thought she was about to just get up and go. But then she bit down on her lip and shook her head. As if reminding herself that that was no longer a choice.

‘So whose place is this?’ she said, staring up at the tall, whitewashed Georgian house.

‘Someone you can trust,’ Danny said. He stood and reached out to take her hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go see if she’s in.’

There was a moment’s hesitation, as Lexie stared into his eyes. Then she pushed herself up, not accepting his help, hooking her thumbs into her pockets instead.

They set off together up the short pathway that led to the front door. Lexie didn’t take his hand, but she did walk by his side.