Wanted (14 page)

Both twins were now staring at Danny, wide-eyed with surprise. They, too, knew that by calling in the Russian authorities to help the commandant, Danny was burning his only lead.

‘The other choice we have,’ Danny said, ‘is to give the commandant what he wants, a weapon to kill himself.’ But choosing not to help . . . That would make me no better than Glinka, he thought. No better than the others who’d helped him murder the people in London.

Spartak opened his mouth to speak, but the conversation was over. Danny had made his decision. He would not trade the commandant’s life for his own freedom. He’d find another way to track Glinka down. Yes, it would be harder, but he still believed he might be able to find a way to get to him through the Kid. And in the meantime, he would pray. He’d pray that any agents sent by the Russian authorities to London after Glinka and the smallpox would simultaneously uncover the truth of Danny’s involvement in the affair.

But as Danny turned to go, he heard Spartak clear his throat.

‘You’re wrong,’ the giant Ukrainian said.

The certainty in his voice made him stop and turn. ‘About what?’ he said.

‘You think that because you’ve chosen to help the commandant, you will now no longer be able to go to England to try and capture Glinka yourself.’

‘Yes,’ Danny said.

‘No. Because no one is coming to help the commandant. Because I will not be calling anyone. Because the commandant is already dead.’

Spartak lowered his eyes. And only then did Danny see it: there at his waist: an empty holster where his pistol should have been.

‘It was what I promised him,’ Spartak said, ‘and what he begged for. I looked into his eyes. He was dying. Trust me, even if I had managed to contact someone who could have helped, they could never have got here in time . . . Only I could help him . . .’

Danny remembered then the gesture, the way Sabirzhan had mimed a gun with his fingers and had then pressed it to the side of his head. ‘You passed your pistol through the contamination drawer,’ he said.

‘It’s what he wanted. It’s what I would have wanted him to do for me.’

The twins were both staring at Spartak, not shocked, Danny thought, just accepting. It was a look he’d witnessed a thousand times in the eyes of men at war. Death was death. Once it had happened, there was no use in discussing it. It was already done.

‘And so you see,’ Spartak said, ‘now we can go to find out if the information he gave us is true or not. And then if you capture Glinka, at least the commandant’s death will not have been in vain.’

The huge man forced a smile when he said this. But behind it Danny saw deep regret, even horror, at what he had just been forced to do. And a thirst for something else. Revenge. ‘So you think I should do it?’ he said.

Spartak nodded. ‘We go where he told us. And we hope we really do find Glinka, that fat fucking pig the Kid, and whatever motherfucking terrorist cell they are planning on dealing with there.’

‘To England, then,’ Danny said.

But even as he spoke, the words sounded remote. And not just because of the distance between here and there, but because London was just about his last lead and not one he trusted.

Crane.
The word leaped into the forefront of his mind, as it had done on so many occasions in the last few days. Crane was Danny’s agent, his handler, the person who’d always found him work. Crane had resources and plenty, was quasi-governmental. But could Crane be trusted to help Danny once Danny’s own leads ran dry? And would Crane even want to help, or believe that Danny was innocent of the crimes he’d been accused of? Crane had always been able to help find people. Perhaps he could help Danny find Glinka and the Kid. Perhaps contacting Crane was a chance he would soon have no other choice but to take.

‘To England.’ Spartak agreed. ‘Land of warm beer, fog and fish and chips.’

‘Not you,’ Danny said.

Spartak’s wide brow creased into a frown. His dark eyes glowed like coals.

‘I’m sorry,’ Danny said, ‘but I can’t risk us both. Not on what might be a trap.’

‘But I like risk.’ Spartak smiled.

‘I know, but there’s something else I need you to do.’

Ray Kincade gazed out of the hire-car window into the night, inhaling appreciatively on cigarette nineteen of pack five of the ten soft packs of Lucky Strikes he’d brought with him from the States two days ago.

Thirty years of experience in the game had taught him that there were plenty of downsides to stake-outs, but getting to smoke as many cigarettes as he wanted without getting nagged by his wife, Suzie, sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

Ray was parked on a deserted farm track in a patch of Scottish woodland. He’d been there two hours already and pretty much nothing had moved, other than leaves shifting in the breeze, and dark clouds slowly scudding across the waning moon.

He wriggled his toes in his stiff new hiking boots, glad of the thermal socks he’d picked up that afternoon in the nearest town’s outdoor-activity store. It was summer in the UK, but no one seemed to have told the Scottish Highlands that. He wished to heck he’d picked up more than just one Thermos flask. Another shot of hot sugary black coffee would have warmed him and given him just the jolt he needed, but he was out.

He adjusted the upturned collar of his jacket tighter round his neck, wanting to shut the car window but knowing he couldn’t. It wasn’t the smoke that bothered him – hell, the more the merrier, was the way he saw that, kind of like the good old days when you could still get your nicotine fix in a bar without even needing to light your own cigarette. No, the windows were open to stop the windscreen steaming up so that Ray could see out.

He’d been staring at the view for so long now that it had become almost like a screensaver, and every few minutes he’d taken to pinching himself hard on the back of the hand – a childhood habit he’d picked up in church as a kid – just to keep himself from falling asleep.

The stone farmhouse stood half a mile away on the brow of a forlorn hill against a star-studded sky. It still had just the one light on in an upstairs window, with its curtain not properly closed.

The binoculars Ray had purchased at the store could hardly be described as professional quality, and they’d proved practically no use after dark. Even so, he was ninety-nine per cent certain that the farmhouse was empty and that the light had been left on for show.

He peered down at his lap, pushing his grey fringe back from his brow. He’d got his iPad’s backlight turned down low so as not to signal his whereabouts to anyone who might be passing, or watching the farmhouse, like him, or even waiting patiently inside it looking out. He surfed the news again. Plenty of headlines about Danny Shanklin, but no real updates to speak of, no one yet trumpeting that they’d finally caught him or run him to ground.

Ray checked his email, hitting the ‘fetch mail’ icon even though he knew full well that this was something the device did automatically. Nothing new there either. Nothing to prove that Danny Shanklin had got the email Ray had sent him four days ago.

None of which surprised him one bit. Because, even though he was now six years retired, he was still ex-FBI, and would always think FBI. He’d once hunted fugitives like Danny Shanklin for a living and knew exactly what Danny would be currently up against in terms of hostile government resources.

All of which meant that Ray fully expected Danny to have been either captured or killed.

He hoped he was wrong on both scores. He didn’t believe what the news media said about Danny being a terrorist and a murderer. He’d known him too long. Danny wasn’t the type, was how Ray saw it. In fact, if anything, he was the exact opposite to the way he’d been portrayed in the press.

Ray considered Danny a family man at heart. A protector of those weaker than himself. In his professional opinion, the only time a personality type like Danny Shanklin would attack a complete stranger was in defence of someone weaker than himself. And he would never shoot an unarmed civilian. That would go against everything he believed.

Which was why Ray had ended up in this ass-freezing, wind-whipped, remote Scottish village tonight. He’d refused to believe that Danny Shanklin had had anything to do with the recent London assassination and massacre. He’d sided with Danny and had therefore felt no conflict whatsoever in coming here to continue the work that Danny had first tasked him with such a long time ago.

In fact, even if any of Ray’s well-placed sources were now to inform him that Danny Shanklin had already been neutralized by one of the several intelligence agencies currently attempting to nail him, Ray would still see the assignment through.

In part, he’d do this because he liked Danny but also because he felt he owed him: Danny had paid him a generous annual retainer these past five years to pursue the case. But mainly he would do it out of plain old curiosity because, like every good investigator he’d ever known, Ray Kincade had a pathological inability to let a good lead slide.

The first article about the recent multiple Scottish murder, already dubbed the ‘Clan Killings’ by the sensationalist UK press, had found Ray, rather than the other way round. He wasn’t as hot on computers as he’d once been, but luckily his kid, Sam, who worked for the military, was.

Five years ago, when he had first begun working for Danny, Sam had fixed him up with a web filter, which would continually and automatically trawl through the world’s media sites in search of articles within which certain key words had been grouped.

Key words such as:

Paper . . .

Asphyxiation . . .

Stone . . .

Bludgeoning . . .

Scissors . . .

Throat cuts . . .

Ray had worked on the original Paper, Stone, Scissors killings in the US, back when the serial killer had still been known in the American press as the ‘Director’, and had become the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit’s top priority.

The Director had murdered eleven families in six different states in a North American killing spree that had lasted sixteen months before Danny Shanklin had been seconded from the CIA to the FBI to help hunt him down.

The way things had turned out, though, it had been the Director who’d got hold of Danny and his family first.

Danny’s wife and six-year-old son had been the last murders chalked up to the Director in the US. And it was only thanks to Danny and his daughter’s survival that the Director’s signature – forcing families to act as an audience, while each member was choked, stabbed and bludgeoned to death – had been finally explained.

It was a game. The killer had been making his victims play Paper, Stone, Scissors for their lives, as he’d watched and played God, deciding when and how they’d die.

But before he’d had a chance to finish off Danny Shanklin, Danny had freed himself. It had already been too late for his wife and son, but at least he’d saved his daughter, and badly wounded as he’d been, out in those frozen woods, he’d not only knifed the killer in the shoulder, he’d also got a shot off at him as he’d fled.

No one knew if Danny had hit his target. The Director had faded like a ghost into the snowstorm that had been raging around the log cabin where Danny and his family had been holidaying. He’d vanished off the face of the earth. There’d been no more Paper, Stone and Scissors. No more tortured mothers and children. No executed fathers, who’d first been made to watch.

Two years after Danny’s wife and son had been murdered, the FBI had begun to theorize that the ‘PSS Killer’ – as the press had now taken to calling him – was dead.

Only Danny had refused to believe this. Instead he’d hired Ray Kincade, who’d just retired from his position as an FBI investigative profiler. He’d asked him to keep hunting. To keep trying to fit the pieces together. To cross-reference any and all convictions that might tally with the PSS Killer. In case the only reason the killer was no longer attacking was because he was already doing time. And Danny had also asked Ray to keep searching for similar assaults or homicides, in the US and abroad, to see if the PSS Killer was still active. He’d told Ray he didn’t care how much money it cost. All he’d asked was that Ray never stop looking.

And Ray never had.

The perennial grim joke between Ray and his son during the last five years had been whether the media filter Sam had designed was truly effective. Because the fact was that during the entire time it had been up and running, in spite of all its clever algorithms, it hadn’t flagged up a single result.

Until now.

Two days ago, as Ray had stood at the bottom of his front yard, dragging deep on another of those Lucky Strikes he’d sworn blind to his wife he’d already quit, his iPad had pinged him a new mail, an automated one from Sam’s filter program.

A match.

The key words and phrases flagged up had included: ‘murder’; ‘family’; ‘bludgeoned’; ‘throat’; ‘missing body parts’ and on – right the way up to a total of sixteen.

Of course, the way the victims’ bodies had been found – stripped naked, outside, with petrol poured over them and burned – in no way looked like the work of the PSS Killer. And the British cops, so far as the copy of the confidential reports a contact of Ray’s had snagged him suggested, hadn’t yet made any connection between the murders and the PSS Killer.

But the key words Sam’s filter had flagged up had been too much to ignore. They’d suggested only one thing to Ray: that the PSS Killer might be back. Which was why he’d come here: to see if he was right.

He continued to gaze out into the night at the stone farmhouse with the solitary light burning at the upstairs window, where the Scottish family had been murdered. It sure as hell looked like no one was home. But he’d give it another hour, just to be sure.

And then he’d break in.

The lorry’s diesel engine idled as it pulled up at the edge of the small Pembrokeshire village. Danny Shanklin thanked its driver and got out.

It was a warm, starry night and he stretched, exhausted after the long journey, as he watched the lorry accelerate away, its red tail-lights fading into the dark. Further back in the village they’d just driven through, he had caught snatches of laughter and conversation from people heading home after an evening in the pub.