Wanted (12 page)

‘It is airborne,’ the researcher said. ‘Even standing in the same room as a carrier, even breathing their air . . . That is how it was transmitted between the three patients. We only injected the first.’ The researcher stared desperately up at Danny. ‘Please,’ he begged, ‘I swear it. Not only will we die but so will everyone we come into contact with. All of them will sicken and then . . .’

The statistics flashed through Danny’s mind of what a smallpox pandemic might do. Of how many might die. He saw Lexie with the infected soldier’s face.

Spartak screamed at the researcher: ‘Where are the fucking suits? Where is the clothing I can put on to allow me to pass through to the other side?’

‘It won’t do you any good,’ the man pleaded, cowering now in a ball on the floor. ‘He is dying.’

Danny stepped quickly between them. ‘There must be something we can give that man – something we can inject him with,’ he said.

The researcher wrung his hands.

‘A cure. A fucking antidote for you to give him.’

‘No, there is nothing. Not here. Other scientists, that was their work, but they are not here now, and I do not even know if they were successful in their goal. You cannot help him. There is nothing any of us can do.’

Us.
Danny had nothing in common with that man.

Spartak’s shadow engulfed the researcher. ‘In which case, there is no longer any reason to keep you alive.’

But Danny had already drawn his Taser. Part of him wanted to let Spartak do as he wished. God knew these men deserved it. He remembered them playing cards. He remembered their laughter. But another part of him needed them. Their existence might not prove his innocence but it was a start. And who knew what other evidence of Glinka and the Kid’s involvement he might uncover from further interrogation? Who knew what they might have forgotten or have chosen to keep secret? He might yet gather enough evidence from them and the guard upstairs to convince the authorities he’d been set up.

He steadied himself to fire. He’d need to take Spartak in the neck at least, he knew. Even then, though, he was far from convinced that the Taser would be enough to take him down and keep him there.

And then there was Vasyl. Danny could sense him moving in his peripheral vision even now. With whom did his loyalty truly rest? To himself, the man who was paying them? Or to Spartak, to the man he trusted more, the man who’d brought them in, who might even be family as he’d claimed?

Before he could find out, Spartak’s shoulders slumped.

But it wasn’t because he’d noticed Danny standing there with the Taser. It wasn’t because his temper had cooled. It was because he’d heard something. A tapping sound.

And turning now, with Spartak, to look at the glass, Danny saw that it was Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan who had stopped him. He was knocking on the glass, each time spotting it with blood from his raw knuckles. And now that he had their attention, he began repeatedly pointing at the wound of his mouth. And then at his ear, which Danny saw had been torn clean off. Then, with a sudden glimmer of determination in his eyes, he looked across at the laptop.

Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan was telling them something. And as he pointed once more at his mouth, then at his ear, Danny kicked himself.

Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan wanted to talk.

Danny wheeled on the researcher. ‘Is there an intercom?’ he snapped.

The researcher nodded rapidly.

‘Where?’

‘The computer. The laptop. The machinery down here was crackling so the hacker – the Kid – he routed it through that . . .’

‘Then switch it on,’ Danny said, slipping the Taser back into its holster. ‘Now, before my friend here makes you wish you’d never been born.’

The first thing Danny registered, as the neon strip lights flickered into ghoulish life on the far side of the glass, were the bodies of not just one but two other prisoners. They’d been laid out prostrate on two of six cast-iron beds chained to the walls.

He could not see their faces. They’d been covered by bloodstained sheets. Out of respect, it looked like. By their comrade Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan, Danny supposed.

According to the graphs on the computer, their names were Lyonya and Gregori. One had died yesterday morning, the other the night before.

Danny’s disgust only increased as he looked further round the space they’d died in. Rotting food. A leaking chemical toilet. Blood and excrement and God only knew what else across the white-tiled floor.

He sensed Spartak’s growing fury. And Vasyl now had the barrel of his weapon pressed up to the back of the fat researcher’s neck. He kept glancing across at Spartak, as if awaiting an order to fire.

Danny was tempted to give it. To unleash his team on the two researchers who’d helped commit this atrocity. Because, no matter what they said, no matter how much they pleaded that they’d been forced into it, he would never forget that they’d both accepted payment for it.

He lowered his hood so that Sabirzhan could see his face. He picked up the desk mike, switched it on and spoke.

‘Commandant Sabirzhan,’ he said in Russian. ‘We are not here to hurt you. We are here to help.’

In reply, the desk speaker crackled. At first Danny thought it was static he was hearing. Then he realized it was the commandant’s laboured breathing.

Sabirzhan said nothing. He turned from Danny to the tip of the star of the Spetsnaz tattoo still visible on Spartak’s arm.

Danny passed Spartak the mike. ‘It’s you he wants to talk to, not me.’

Spartak raised it to his lips. ‘Tell me what I must do to help,’ he said.

The commandant pointed to himself and slowly drew his finger across his throat.

‘There must be some way . . .’

Sabirzhan shook his head. With his swollen fingers and thumb, he mimed putting a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger. He stared into Spartak’s granite-black eyes. And again Danny saw that hunger. Only this time it was his own death he was begging them for.

Spartak nodded grimly. ‘I understand,’ he said.

He clicked off the mike. The anger, Danny saw, had gone from Spartak’s face. In its place was resignation. The certain knowledge that he could not save or even help the man.

‘We must allow him to do this,’ he said. ‘We must spare him more suffering and give him his dignity. He is Spetsnaz.’ Spartak said the word softly, with deep gravitas, as another man might the name of his god in prayer. ‘I must see to it myself that he is given what he needs. You understand?’

As Sabirzhan’s eyes closed heavily, what looked like a tear rolled down the swollen side of his face. But it was blood.

Spartak was still waiting for Danny’s response.
Not
for his permission. Danny knew that. He would defy Danny if he had to. He did not want to, but he would.

‘First we find out who brought him here,’ Danny said. ‘Who did this to him. Why.’

Spartak turned back to face his dying comrade. ‘The people who did this,’ he said into the mike, ‘I vow to you now: I will hunt them down and they will die in extreme pain. But first we need your help.’

Sabirzhan opened the bloody maw of his mouth and once more came that rattling of his lungs. Danny thought of his son, of the Paper, Stone, Scissors Killer and that cabin in the woods. He thought of his failure too, of how he’d struggled to free himself from the chair to which he’d been strapped but had looked away rather than watch his son die, and how, in that one act of personal cowardice, he’d condemned Jonathan to die alone . . .

Danny forced away the hacking sound of the PSS Killer wielding the shears.

Then Sabirzhan responded. Not something that could be mistaken for a buzz of static this time. Something stronger, enraged. A single word. A war cry. Then another.

London?

England?

He stared into the weeping eyes of the commandant, as he clutched at his throat. But no more words came. What had he meant? That he recognized Danny from the television reports, now that Danny had revealed his face? Or was he saying that he knew of the Kid and Glinka’s connection to the assassination?

Danny’s heartbeat stuttered as he stared at the shadow of a man behind the glass.
Talk,
he willed him.
Tell me. Every fact you know. Give them to me as you would bullets to a gun.

But the effort of talking was too much. Valentin Sabirzhan could not stop shuddering and wheezing. Flecks of blood flew from his nostrils and lips, spraying against the glass.

‘He cannot,’ Spartak said. ‘The sickness has destroyed his ability . . . It is rotting him inside as well as out—’

‘Wait,’ Danny interrupted. ‘Look . . .’

Sabirzhan was coughing, clutching at his chest, but he was now slowly moving too, pointing past the contamination doorway to a waist-high series of interlocking reinforced glass drawers, each with ventilators running upwards into the ceiling.

‘You,’ Danny snapped at the researcher. ‘What is that?’

‘A sterilization chamber,’ the researcher answered. ‘To allow us to pass objects through.’

‘And it’s safe?’

‘Yes – at least, it is meant to be,’ the researcher stuttered. ‘Infected air is evacuated before and after the drawer is opened from either side and irradiated and incinerated in an electric furnace above.’

Danny watched Spartak staring up into the funnel that led into the ceiling. He didn’t need to see his expression to know what he was thinking. The pistol. He’d pass it to Sabirzhan through the contamination drawer, to allow the commandant to blow off his head.

Locking eyes with Spartak now, clearly sensing the approach of this opportunity to end his misery, Sabirzhan began miming writing. A thumb pressed to two swollen fingers moving back and forth against a flattened, oozing palm.

‘Pen and paper,’ Danny barked at the researcher. ‘Get them to him now. And clean food and water – and this . . .’ He tore a primed morphine syringe from the medikit in his thigh pocket and thrust it into the younger researcher’s shaking, outstretched hand.

He saw Spartak taking his pistol out of its holster. ‘No,’ he mouthed at him. ‘Not yet . . .’

Vasyl kicked the other researcher into action and harried both civilians, threatening them with death, until they’d gathered up what Danny had told them and had inserted the items into the first of the sterilization chamber’s compartments.

The drawer’s mechanisms ran smoothly, silently, operated not by the Mac, but by a series of power switches set into the nearby concrete wall.

Spartak and Vasyl stared with fixed hatred at the researchers, as the ventilators hummed into life and the interlocking drawers of the mechanism began to open and close in a series of automated movements and the supplies were slowly shuttled across by the mechanism’s rolling floor.

A gobbet of blood stretched like drool from Sabirzhan’s blistered lower lip as he opened the drawer on his side. No wonder he wanted to die, Danny thought. He was falling apart in front of them.

And yet, in spite of his suffering, Sabirzhan ignored the water, the morphine and the food. He went straight for the pad and pen.

He dropped to his knees. Pressing the pad on the floor, he tried to write. But his fingers were too weak, too swollen. He resorted to gripping the pen pitifully in his fist instead.

He wrote slowly, painfully. Then he pushed the pad up against the glass divide, smearing the fine mist of blood he’d coughed onto it before.

Spartak read his words out loud: ‘The same people who set you up, they captured me and did this to me also.’ Spartak glanced back at Danny. ‘He must mean you. He knows who you are . . .’

Which also meant, Danny calculated, that Sabirzhan had been captured some time after his own face had been broadcast across the planet’s media. And that the virus had done this to him in that time.

So much for his attempts to disguise himself over the last few weeks – the beard and dyed hair. Even with his failing eyesight, Sabirzhan hadn’t been fooled.

Kneeling down, Sabirzhan scrawled on the pad again. Then pressed another page against the glass with the bleeding, peeling palm of his hand.

‘He overheard them talking,’ Spartak read, ‘soon after he was captured . . . They thought the tranquillizer they’d used on him had not worn off.’

‘What?’ Danny said. ‘What did he hear?’

Sabirzhan started writing again, weaker this time, using the pen now as if he were scratching with a rock on a wall. When he had finally finished, Spartak once more read his words aloud.

‘ “The buyer for the smallpox”,’ Spartak read, ‘“is a terrorist organization that has every intention of using it. We have to stop the exchange taking place.” ’

‘What exchange? You mean he knows where the sale’s going down?’

This time Spartak didn’t need to use the mike. The commandant was already scribbling, his limbs moving awkwardly now as he grew more exhausted. Lurching forward, he pressed a third piece of paper silently against the glass divide.

Danny stepped in smartly beside Spartak, not wanting Vasyl to be able to read the new note. Even though the man had given him no reason to distrust him and even though he’d made obvious his disgust at what had happened here, the fewer people who knew where Danny might be heading next, the better. The fact remained that this bioweapon and the whereabouts of those who controlled it were worth more than enough money to turn anyone’s head.

‘A date and an address,’ Spartak said.

Danny stood beside him and translated the address for himself. It was a warehouse on a wharf in the Port of London.

‘It’s where Glinka’s heading next,’ Spartak said.

‘And soon,’ Danny said.

Sabirzhan lurched back towards the contamination drawer on his side of the sterilization chamber. He fumbled with the syringe, gripping his neck, searching for the right place to inject, before plunging the needle in.

Danny watched the agony subside from his face as the morphine did its work. He knew the feeling – of surrender, of bliss, of forgetting – from the three times when he’d treated himself or had been treated by others, once in a hospital for at least two weeks. He hoped it would be strong enough to relieve the man of his pain.