Wanted (15 page)

He hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders and set off in the opposite direction, following the same silent, unlit road the lorry had disappeared down.

He scratched irritably at his face. He hadn’t shaved since he’d been forced to go on the run in London. His beard was unkempt and stiff with dried sweat. His dyed hair was tangled and matted – he looked like he’d spent the last few weeks sitting on a beach somewhere smoking grass, rather than running for his life and tracking a pack of psychopaths across Europe.

He’d rounded off his current look with cheap, generic service-station shades, scruffy jeans, scuffed Dr Marten’s boots, a shapeless waterproof jacket and a faded Ramones T-shirt. Hardly his usual taste in clothes or music, it had to be said. He was more a surf shorts, flip-flops, Hank Williams and Van Zandt kind of a guy. But this was all he’d been able to find in the second-hand Rosslare store he’d switched clothes in yesterday.

No matter. His get-up made him look exactly how he wanted to be perceived: forgettable. On the ferry that had brought him over from Ireland to west Wales earlier that evening, there’d been plenty of other foot passengers just like him, migrating to the UK for the summer music-festivals, most of them with backpacks and rolled-up tent mats just like his. No one had given him a second glance.

It had been the same at Customs. A cursory exercise, less thorough than anything you’d find at an airport. They’d scanned and then leafed through his seemingly above-board British biometric passport. Danny had looked both the Customs official and the camera staring over his shoulder dead in the eye, relying on his changed hair and beard, and the fissured contact lenses with which Spartak had supplied him to trick any biometric and retinal databases his image might be fed into, assuming the cameras were indeed linked to a wider system, which was by no means necessarily the case.

The passport was in the name of Mark Rawlings, a nobody, an invention. It was one of several flawless fakes Danny possessed and trusted to withstand any level of scrutiny. Spartak had fetched it for him before their trip to Ukraine. He’d picked it up from where it had remained secured for the past twelve months in a left-luggage locker in London’s St Pancras station, along with a functioning set of credit cards, linked to cash-rich ghost accounts, and a valid driving licence. It had needed some Photoshop work to match it to Danny’s current appearance, which Spartak had arranged through his own London contacts.

Danny’s other counterfeit IDs were currently out of reach. One was stashed in a steel box buried in the garden of his main home on the United States Virgin Island of St Croix, a second in a locker at JFK airport, New York, while the last was in Switzerland, in a safe-deposit box near the apartment he kept there.

His passport in St Croix, he suspected, had already been compromised. He’d heard, in horror and revulsion, on the news that the FBI had raided his home there on the old tobacco plantation out at Grassy Point, which he’d been renovating and clearing these last several years. Maybe their dogs had sniffed out his hidden IDs and his stashes of weaponry. No doubt the property would be under surveillance now too.

On top of all the other grief that Danny was being forced to deal with, he hated that his privacy had been wrecked. His London houseboat and his Caribbean home had been registered in his own name. Once the Kid had leaked that to the press, God only knew what Sunshine Day, Danny’s elderly, kind and caring St Croix housekeeper would have thought after everything she’d must have read. The same went for his St Croix neighbours and the flotsam and jetsam of surfers and travellers he hung out with during his down time at the beach.

Danny had never given any of them so much as an inkling of the fact that he’d once been CIA and now worked private sector as a gun for good people to hire. Instead he’d always told them he was a yacht broker with offices in Miami and St Tropez. Anything for a quiet life. Anything to stop people prying and thereby keep his home life partitioned from the otherwise sometimes dirty and difficult work he did.

But Glinka and the Kid had now stolen that sanctuary too. They’d detonated Danny’s safe haven sky high.

Danny shook them from his mind. He didn’t want to think about them now. Didn’t want to think about his own frustration either. The last thing he wanted where he was going was anger etched all over his face.

He picked up his pace and marched faster down the road. He could now smell the sea. He could sense it too, over to the west, a roiling black mass. He turned left off the main road onto a dark muddy track that headed towards the sea. The further along it he walked, the safer he felt. No engines, no footsteps, no signs that anyone had tailed him from the port.

He should have felt a corresponding sense of relaxation, he knew. But instead he felt increasingly wired and apprehensive and – even though every muscle in his body was aching for sleep – he knew he could not stand down until he’d reached his destination and had determined it had not been compromised.

The track steepened. The air became heavy with the scent of heather. The land round here was too inhospitable for houses, but he still found himself thinking back to the people he’d overheard in the village. He imagined them safe now inside their homes, doing all the things that normal people took for granted: watching TV, fixing snacks, going to bed. And suddenly it swept over him: a craving for that normality, so powerful that it hurt. Right now it felt like the most unattainable thing in the world.

A campsite sign jutted out into the lane ahead, ghoulishly reflecting the moonlight, like a disembodied arm. Danny turned into the gateway just beyond. The shapes of ten dilapidated static caravans stood as silent as sleeping cows in rows, one above the other, on a sloping hill facing the sea.

He walked past the cracked concrete shower block and mud-spattered washing-up area, and headed for the furthest caravan, the one up in the top left-hand corner of the small field. A couple of the others were occupied and, as he passed by, he saw TVs flickering behind their closed curtains.

But any sense of exclusion he might have felt was now instantly wiped away. Because there she was: Lexie, his seventeen-year-old daughter. And right now, she was the closest thing to home he had left.

Danny had been carrying a picture of his daughter in his head ever since he’d said goodbye to her when he’d headed for Pripyat. She was the point of all this. Her, and the freedom he wanted to give her back.

She flinched, noticing his approach, and stood – looking suddenly older than the schoolgirl she still was – wrapping her arms protectively around herself. She didn’t smile. It was his fault she was there. He’d had to hide her from the government agencies who’d come looking for her. They’d have used her to get to him. They’d have hurt her. And she knew it. But she still blamed him. It was his work that had led to the PSS Killer murdering her mother and brother. And his work that had led to her then living apart from him, with her grandmother, in London. And now his work had destroyed the new life she’d built for herself in the UK.

I love you,
he wanted to tell her. But he knew the words would only make her angrier. Instead he hugged her as he reached her, but she pushed him away.

‘I thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

‘It took longer than I thought.’

‘Did you find them?’

Them.
The people who’d set him up, the same people who’d tried to kill her.

‘Did you?’

Did you kill them?
her eyes said. Because – oh, yes – she’d seen what he was capable of. She now knew her father could do that.

He said, ‘No.’

‘So it’s not over, is it?’ she said, her eyes full of scorn.

‘No.’

‘You didn’t find any of them, did you?’

She knew that was why he’d gone away with Spartak, but she’d had no idea where. He’d told her that by the time he returned he hoped to have captured the people who’d set him up. He wasn’t going to tell her about the horrors he’d encountered in the Zone, but he would not lie to her about the outcome. And the outcome was this: he had failed.

‘No.’

‘Then we’re fucked.’

‘No, we’re not. I’m not going to give up.’

‘Just don’t, OK? Just fucking save it.’

For a second, she looked as if she was about to cry. Instead, she lit a cigarette. He hated to watch her do it, just like he hated to hear her swear. But what right did he have to play the guiding father when all he had brought her was grief? He stared at the tiny freckles on her cheeks, the ones that never left her, even in the coldest and darkest of winters, the ones that had patterned her little brother’s skin too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I’d hoped . . .’ But whatever she’d been about to say dwindled away. She blew out a long, miserable breath. Then looked around her. At the weather-beaten caravan, the ripped camping chair and the near-dead fire. Her meaning was obvious:
What now?

‘I did everything I could,’ he said. ‘For now . . .’

But she was already one step ahead of him. ‘We’re going to have to move again, aren’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight.’

They’d taken every precaution they could since they’d fled together. The chances of anyone tracking them down were pretty much zero, but Danny also knew that the longer you stayed anywhere, the more likely it was that someone was going to start asking what you were doing there and why.

Or to put it another way:
A moving target’s much harder to hit.
That was how Danny’s Old Man would have put it.

‘Where?’ she said.

He wished he could tell her somewhere beautiful, somewhere there were people they could trust, somewhere she could tell people her real name and they’d know what she was going through. But no such place existed.

‘I don’t know yet. Somewhere else like here.’

‘And what about you? Are you going away again?’

He thought back to the lead he’d got from Commandant Sabirzhan.

‘Yes,’ he said. Then, seeing her face, he realized how keen he’d sounded and how wrong that must have seemed. He added, ‘I don’t mean that I want to. I don’t. Leaving you at all, especially on your own, is the last thing I want to do in the world.’

She stared into his eyes, but he saw no love there. Only resignation.

‘The fire’s nearly dead,’ she said, gazing past Danny now as she’d used to when he’d visited her at her school, as if he wasn’t really there.

Turning her back on him, she picked up a pan of water that was sitting in the dirt by the barbecue and tipped it over the coals, leaving them hissing and spitting, sending clouds of steam into the cold night air. ‘I’ll go and pack,’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m putting my gear in the car now. I’ll put yours in too.’

‘How long until we have to leave?’

‘An hour. Maybe two.’

‘Then I’ll sleep in the car,’ she said.

He marvelled at her toughness, this toughness she’d had to develop so fast to survive. It was all his fault.

He followed her into the worn-out half-wreck of a vehicle. The supplies he’d bought before he’d left her – clothing, packets, tins and bottles – remained methodically laid out and stacked just as he’d left them. Hardly touched. The same went for the selection of second-hand paperbacks he’d bought and lined up on the caravan’s crooked shelf. None had been moved.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Maybe Coke cans and crisp packets strewn all over the place. Or some other sign that a normal teenage kid had been living there. But not this. It didn’t look like she’d really been living at all. Just waiting for him to return. Waiting for the rest of her life – her real life, the one without him – to continue.

They packed in silence, leaving nothing personal behind. He boiled a kettle and made them tea.

As she squeezed herself behind the small table in the dining area, the blanket she’d had round her slipped and he saw she was clutching a mobile phone, one of the cheap ones he’d left with her that wasn’t capable of accessing the internet.

Since he’d been gone with Spartak, he’d messaged her each day on one of ten such basic disposable phones he’d left her with to let her know he was safe. And each day he’d instructed her to remove the battery and SIM card from whichever phone he’d contacted her on and destroy it.

He wondered now if she’d called anyone else – her friends. But he couldn’t ask: she’d interpret it as him saying she couldn’t be trusted.

‘You look terrible,’ she said.

‘I’m guessing I don’t smell too good either,’ he said. ‘I should grab a shower.’

‘There won’t be any hot water,’ she said. ‘The old guy who runs the field only switches it on for an hour at six in the morning and the same at night.’

Danny remembered him – he had to have been around eighty, with thick glasses and a shock of nicotine-stained white hair. The evening they’d got there, Danny had watched, from behind the tinted windows of the busted-up old car he’d bought for cash and had switched the plates on, as Lexie had paid him a month’s rent up front for the caravan.

He went into the short corridor that led to the two bed-rooms. He glanced in at Lexie’s room as he passed. A sleeping-bag and pillow. He felt another shiver of worry. What had she been doing since he’d gone to Pripyat? Just staring at the wall? Again, he found himself gazing at her phone.

He took a brand-new towel off the shelf in in the next room, where his own brand-new sleeping-bag lay on the bare mattress, not yet unfurled. Back in the kitchen, he took a block of soap from the sink, flinching at the sound of Lexie popping a can of Dr Pepper.

‘You got a better phone?’ she said. ‘One I can go online with?’

‘What for?’

Her face flushed with anger. His fault. Wrong tone.

‘Just to see what’s happening.’

‘Where?’

‘Out there. Outside that damned field.’

Say no and he’d make matters intolerable between them. Just trust her, he told himself. Trust her and she won’t let you down.

He put the iPhone Spartak had secured for him on the table. She stared.