The Vanishing (12 page)

As he came round the slope and started running unsteadily down towards the road all he could think about was that he was running into somebody’s crosshairs. He tripped twice, the second time going down and rolling messily. But as he came up there was still no shot, no movement from the hill in front of him, nothing between himself and the road except a short flat stretch of long grass. He could see where the Land Rover would be. He kept going, gasping for air. He was so unfit. If he got out of this he was going to start training again. For definite. He promised it to himself.

The grass was stiff and hard, whipping against his face so that he had to flail his arms in front, like he was fighting off some invisible force. Just before the road there was a ditch that he missed. He went down again, jarring his chin on the ground. But still no shooting.

He was halfway across the road, head down, before he heard the muffled crack of her gun. Or thought he did. He froze, stupidly, skidding to a stop and staring wildly behind him to try to see. Then he saw movement up on the bigger hill, a shape running.

He started to sprint for the Land Rover again. He could see it now, not twenty paces in front, down a small dip, into bushes. He leapt over the rim of the dip, into the undergrowth, just as a crackle sounded off to his left. A machine pistol. Or something like that – something small. He saw no bullets striking anywhere, heard no whining as they passed close, so kept going. He almost ran into the back of the Land Rover. He pushed through the branches around it, going for the driver’s door. The crackle came again, somewhere behind and above him. This time he heard something snapping through the air, saw the back window of the Land Rover shatter. He hit the ground, flat out, crawled under the car and lay still.

But it took him only a split second to realise that like that he was certainly going to die. He had to move. To get the car going was their only chance. He pulled himself out and crouched by the front wheel, waiting to see if the bullets started again. Someone had been shooting at him, trying to kill him. He tried to get a proper grip on that thought. His eyes passed across a metallic cluster on top of the wheel. He came back to it and, despite everything, couldn’t stop himself smirking. He wasn’t going to have to mess around with the wiring while some fucker took potshots. He’d found the keys. There were six or seven on a big ring. He moved quickly sideways and yanked the driver’s door open. He was up to his head in long reeds, but still he heard the burst of fire. This time nothing broke. It sounded different. Were they shooting at Sara instead? He climbed quickly inside, chest tight, checked the keys, found the one that looked the best match, held his breath, put his foot on the clutch and tried it. The engine spluttered into life first time.

Sara heard the engine, but couldn’t look in that direction. She had her eye fixed to the scope and was concentrating all her attention on keeping the weapon steady. Right in the crosshairs was the man’s head. She had the cross right over his temple. She took a long slow breath and listened for her heart, as Jean-Marc had taught her. The man was tall, with long blond hair, pushed back from his face. He was white. Tanned skin, hard face. She could see him very clearly because the scope was first class and very powerful. He had a distinctive, V-shaped scar below his right temple, extending into his cheek. She had seen it yesterday too – though not as clearly – and thought then that she had seen it somewhere before, that she had seen this man before, somewhere. But if she had, then she didn’t know him. He certainly wasn’t Somali. He wasn’t a pirate from East Africa.

He was crouched behind a boulder with bushes growing near to it. Some of the bushes obscured his body. But not his head. He had run from near to the shed first, then took aim towards the Land Rover and let off a quick burst with some short, stubby weapon. It had jerked all over as he fired and she had thought then – even with her limited knowledge – that he would be lucky to hit Tom. Very lucky. The distance was over three hundred yards. What he was firing with had to be worse than a handgun, in terms of accuracy.

Nevertheless, she had panicked and her first shot at him had gone so wide she was sure he hadn’t even heard it. But now he had fired again, paused, and as he had taken aim and crouched she had fired another shot. Still clumsy, but it had hit the rock near his body and he had seen it, she thought, or felt it. Immediately he had gone low. But not low enough. He had no idea where she was. She was firing a bespoke Accuracy International Arctic Warfare sniper rifle, with integral suppressor, and she had brought three magazines with her. The magazines were custom-made – five shots instead of ten, to reduce their weight. She was on the last now, and the last two rounds. She had to make them count. She had to remember everything Jean-Marc had taught her. She had hit targets at triple this distance. But she had never been panicking like this. The man wasn’t looking for Tom now, he was looking for her. She heard the Land Rover engine revving. If she was accurate she would kill him now. She knew she could do it.

The difficulty – shooting alone – was knowing whether you had hit, and if not, how close you’d got, because you couldn’t keep the scope and your eyes motionless through the discharge, so you normally missed seeing the exact location of the hit, especially at short range. Jean-Marc had spent hours on end practising this with her, getting the blind spot down to a minimum. In the army, he’d told her, snipers always had someone else to spot for them. Sometimes he had spotted for her with a special ranged sight. But now she was alone. She settled the crosshairs over the head, about an inch from the neck.

But suddenly she felt sick with it. She didn’t want to kill this man. She didn’t want to kill anybody. She moved the crosshairs down and placed them over his gun instead. It was resting against the rock he was leaning against. She squeezed the trigger. Blinked through the recoil. Took a breath. Quick adjustment, then eyes back to the scope, as fast as she could. As her eyes refocused she saw the man was staggering backwards, the gun out of his hands, out of sight. Had she hit it? She thought she must have. Jean-Marc would have leapt up from beside her and slapped her on the back.

She could hear the Land Rover moving now, revving too high. She slipped her eyes off the scope and looked right, in time to see Tom spin it round in a cloud of dust, already on the road, then start to accelerate towards her position. She put her eye to the scope again. It took a second, but she could see the man crawling for safety. She placed the crosshairs about two foot from his head and fired a shot into the ground there. Her last round. When she got her eye back on target she could see him motionless, trying to pull his head in. He definitely knew what was going on now. There was blood on his hands – from where she had hit the gun, she assumed. Or maybe she’d hit his arm. She got to her feet, pushed the rifle away and started to run down the slope in front of her, waving towards Tom.

He was at the base of the slope ahead of her, the truck stopped. He was leaning over, opening the passenger door, the engine going full blast. She dived in and yelled something at him, then he was revving the motor and zigzagging crazily across the road. She pulled the door shut behind her and got her head down. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ she was yelling.

He drove with his head low and deliberately moved the truck from one side of the road to the other. She was waiting for something to happen, waiting for bullets to start hitting them, or the car to turn over. After a few seconds she risked putting her head up and looked back through the smashed rear window. The road behind them twisted off into the trees. There was no one there. She couldn’t see the hill any more. They’d done it. She started to laugh hysterically. He slowed down and held an unsteady hand up to her, for a high five, a big, crooked grin on his bruised face. She slapped his palm, then leaned over and hugged his arm.

But the feeling of euphoria didn’t last. When she was certain they were not being followed she made him stop. ‘I saw only one guy,’ she said. ‘It was the other white guy, the one with the scar.’

‘The scar?’

‘He has a V-shaped scar on his cheek. The other one didn’t have that.’

‘Did you get him?’

‘I hit him, I think. I’m not sure. But there was only one. That means the rest could be anywhere.’

He leaned his head on the wheel, but then snapped it up and stared out at the wall of trees. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered, automatically. ‘What was the plan again?’

The TV interview had taken place in her living room. But it hadn’t looked like her living room. That was the first thing that had thrown her. She recognised nothing. It was like passing through a door into another building, into a sea of staring faces. So many unknown faces she had barely been able to get in. To squeeze them in – she found out later – all her furniture had been moved out to the garage, except her beige sofa and a couple of chairs. Everything else was gone – the pictures on the wall, the rug from the floor, the plant pots and ornaments. The room had been stripped and filled with technicians and reporters and their electronic equipment. She was so confused by it that as she went through the door and looked at them all she stopped dead, frowning, thinking there had been some kind of absurd mistake.

Then Roger had taken over. He held her arm and walked just in front of her, pushing past them all, gently pulling her in after him. They had all been talking – she realised that was the noise she could hear coming down the stairs – but as soon as she appeared there was silence, voices trailing abruptly off, leaving an atmosphere full of body odour, heat and discomfort – not just because there must have been between twenty and thirty people filling the space in front of her sofa and around it, but also from the lights they’d put up. Too bright to look at, they were shining on to huge reflectors that were angled to point down at the sofa, making it almost white with light. Like a stage set. Not
like
it, in fact – because that’s exactly what her home had become – a theatre for a vast, ugly reality show that was only just getting into gear. Worse was to come in the following weeks and months.

She felt the sweat start pouring off her as she sat down. Roger was fussing around her, asking things in a hushed, professional voice, like she was one of his patients. She squinted at the reflectors and asked him to move them, told him they were too bright. But they wouldn’t do that. Someone from the TV company was whispering things in her ear – the same person who had spent forty minutes applying a thick, uncomfortable coating of make-up to her face, neck and hands, and had then sorted through her wardrobe for ‘something suitable’, as if
she
owned it and Rachel was merely a visitor. The police liaison officer had been there as well. Not John. She hadn’t even met John yet. At that stage someone else was in charge. The liaison woman was a hard-faced blonde who looked at her with dispassionate eyes and tried to sound concerned. Everyone was trying to ape concern, but she knew that wasn’t why all these people were there, staring at her like she was something about to explode. They were here because this was grim entertainment. For the world out there, this was better than fiction.

The man running the inquiry sat with them on the sofa. The interviewer sat on a chair in front of the sofa. There were cameras all over – hand-held, on tripods, video cameras, big TV-type cameras. And microphones on stands, sticking out above her, across the ceiling, pointing down at her from all directions. The interviewer was a young girl with short, black hair and a Scottish accent – Alison something. She had a professional manner, no room for any sympathy, though she did slot some in, perfunctorily, like saying ‘have a nice day’ to a customer. Rachel just nodded through it all as she explained the procedure, not hearing enough of it for anything to subsequently make sense.

She didn’t know how long it went on for. They were probably over two-thirds of the way through before she realised they had already started. Nearly all the questions were handled by Roger or the policeman. She just sat there, eyes on the interviewer, but in fact not seeing her at all. Because her head was still choked with her fears and scenarios, still on Lauren, one hundred per cent of the time. So much so that when she was finally asked a few questions Roger had to nudge her and the questions had to be repeated more than once.

She had seen the broadcast version a couple of times, cringing as she watched it – many years afterwards. About twenty seconds went out to the world, though someone had told her they might have been in there for twenty minutes or more, to get those trimmed and dressed moments of real-life TV drama. Ten seconds were given to the policeman, nearly all the rest to Roger. There was a single clip of her speaking. She could remember, she thought, the moment she spoke the words. She could see herself doing it. She had no idea what the question was, but what she said – and what the world heard – was:
This is all a waste of time. Lauren’s OK. She’ll come back. There’s no need for all this.
In the room there had been a moment’s stunned pause after that, the interviewer clearly wrong-footed. Then she had asked another question, something like: ‘Are you saying you think she’s safe – that she hasn’t been kidnapped?’ The question was never broadcast. Nor her reply:
Of course not. She’s fine.

From inside herself, from within her patchy memory of the day and her recollection of those words, she could see only a confused and desperate woman who didn’t really have a clue what was going on, who dearly wished that her daughter hadn’t been kidnapped. When she looked down at herself saying the words she saw big, glazed eyes and a fixed, shocked stare. Classic, clinical symptoms. But she had seen the broadcast version, seen herself as the cameras saw her, as the world saw her. And the wonder was that the woman speaking hadn’t looked confused or shocked at all, not on TV. She had looked as hard as nails. Done up so that you couldn’t even see the red eyes and blotchy face, the lank, greasy hair. Sitting there looking for all the world that she really resented the intrusion. When she spoke it wasn’t in a soft, frightened voice. She spoke clearly, almost aggressively. As if telling the interviewer to shut up.