Blood Hunt (18 page)

Reeve felt the blood rush to his head and closed his eyes for a moment, clearing them of the fog. He checked his watch and found he’d been resting longer than he’d meant to. His legs had stiffened. It was time to start back down the hill and across the wide gully. It was time to go home.

“Jackie’s got this really good new game,” Allan said.

Reeve looked to Joan. “Jackie?”

“A girl in his class.”

He turned to his son. “Playing with the girls, eh? Not in her bedroom, I hope.”

Allan screwed up his face. “She’s not like a girl, Dad. She has all these games…”

“On her computer.”

“Yes.”

“And her computer is where in the house?”

“In her room.”

“Her bedroom?”

Allan’s ears had reddened. Reeve tried winking at Joan, but she wasn’t watching.

“It’s like Doom,” Allan said, ignoring his father, “but with more secret passages, and you don’t just pick up ammo and stuff, you can warp yourself into these amazing creatures with loads of new weapons and stuff. You can fry the bad guys’ eyeballs so they’re blind and then you—”

“Allan, enough,” his mother said.

“But I’m just telling Dad—”

“Enough.”

“But, Dad—”

“Enough!”

Allan looked down at his plate. He’d eaten all the fries and only had the cold ham and baked beans left. “But Dad wanted to know,” he said under his breath. Joan looked at her husband.

“Tell me later, pal, okay? Some things aren’t for the dinner table.” He watched Joan lift a sliver of ham to her mouth. “Especially fried alien eyeballs.”

Joan glared at him, but Allan and Gordon were laughing. The rest of the meal was carried off in peace.

Afterwards, Allan made instant coffee for his parents—one of his latest jobs around the house. Reeve wasn’t so sure of letting an eleven-year-old near a boiling kettle.

“But you don’t mind fried aliens, right?” Joan said.

“Aliens never hurt anyone,” Reeve said. “I’ve seen what scalding can do.”

“He’s got to learn.”

“Okay, okay.” They were in the living room. Reeve kept an ear attuned to sounds from the kitchen. The first clatter or shriek and he’d be in there. But Allan appeared with the two mugs. The coffee was strong.

“Is milk back on the ration books?” Reeve queried.

“What’s ration books?” Allan asked.

“Pray you never have to know.”

Allan wanted to watch TV, so the three of them sat on the long sofa, Reeve with his arm along the back, behind his wife’s neck but not touching her. She’d taken off her slippers and had tucked her feet up. Allan sat on the floor in front of her. Bakunin the cat was on Joan’s lap, glaring at Reeve like he was a complete stranger, which, considering he hadn’t fed her this past week, he was. Reeve thought of the real Bakunin, fighting on the Dresden barricades shoulder to shoulder with Nietzsche’s friend Wagner…

“A penny for them,” Joan asked.

“I was just thinking how nice it was to be back.”

Joan smiled thinly at the lie. She hadn’t asked much about the cremation, but she’d been interested to hear about the flat in London and the woman living there. Allan turned from the sitcom.

“So what’s it like in the USA, Dad?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” Reeve had spent some time deciding on the story he’d tell Allan. He painted a picture of San Diego as a frontier town, exciting enough and strange enough to keep Allan listening.

“Did you see any shootings?” Allan asked.

“No, but I heard some police sirens.”

“Did you see a policeman?”

Reeve nodded.

“With a gun?”

Reeve nodded again.

Joan rubbed at her son’s hair, though she knew he hated it when she did that. “He’s growing up gun-crazy.”

“No, I’m not,” Allan stated.

“It’s all those computer games.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What are you playing just now?”

“That game I told you about. Jackie copied it for me.”

“I hope it hasn’t got a virus.”

“I’ve got a new virus checker.”

“Good.” At that time, Allan knew only a little more about computing than Reeve and Joan put together, but he was steadily pulling away from them.

“The game’s called Militia, and what you do is—”

“No fried eyeballs,” Joan demanded.

“What happened to the game Uncle Jim sent you?” Reeve asked.

Allan looked embarrassed. “I was stuck on screen five…”

“You’ve given it away?”

Allan shook his head vigorously. “No, it’s upstairs.”

“But you don’t play it anymore?”

“No,” he said quietly. Then: “Mum said Uncle Jim died.”

Reeve nodded. Joan said she’d had a couple of talks with Allan already. “People grow old and tired, Allan, and then they die. They make room for other younger people to come along…” Reeve felt awkward as he spoke.

“But Uncle Jim wasn’t old.”

“No, well some people just—”

“He wasn’t much older than you.”

“I’m not going to die,” Reeve told his son.

“How do you know?”

“Sometimes people get feelings. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to live to be a hundred.”

“And Mum?” Allan asked.

Reeve looked at her. She was staring at him, interested in the answer. “Same feeling,” he said.

Allan went back to watching television. A little later, Joan murmured, “Thanks,” put her slippers back on, and went through to the kitchen, followed closely by Bakunin, scouting for pro-visions. Reeve wasn’t sure what to read into her final utterance.

The telephone rang while he was watching the news. Allan had retreated to his room, having given his parents over an hour and a half of his precious time. Reeve let Joan get the phone. She was still in the kitchen, making a batch of bread. Later, when he went through to make the last cup of coffee of the night, he asked who had called.

“They didn’t say,” she offered, too nonchalantly.

Reeve looked at her. “You’ve had more than one?”

She shrugged. “A couple.”

“How many?”

“I think this was the third.”

“In how long?”

She shrugged again. There was a smudge of flour on her nose, and some wisps in her hair, making her look older. “Five or six days. There’s no one on the other end, no noise at all. Maybe it’s British Telecom testing the line or something. That happens sometimes.”

“Yes, it does.”

But not more than once in a very blue moon, he thought.

They’d been in bed for a silent hour and were lying side by side staring at the ceiling when he asked, “What about those callers?”

“The phone calls?” She turned her head towards him.

“No, you said some customers had turned up.”

“Oh, yes, just asking about courses.”

“Two of them?”

“Yes, one one day, one the next. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. It’s just we don’t often get people turning up like that.”

“Well, I gave them the brochure and they went away quite happy.”

“Did they come in the house?”

She sat up. “Only as far as the hall. It’s all right, Gordon, I can look after myself.”

“What were they like? Describe them.”

“I’m not sure I can. I hardly paid them any attention.” She leaned over him, her hand on his chest. She was feeling his heart rate. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. But he swung his legs out of bed and started to get dressed. “I don’t feel tired; I’ll go down to the kitchen.” He stopped at the door. “Anybody else come while I was away?”

“No.”

“Think about it.”

She thought about it. “A man came to read the meter. And the freezer lorry turned up.”

“What freezer lorry?”

“Frozen foods.” She sounded irritated. If he kept pushing, the end result would be an argument. “I usually buy chips and ice cream from him.”

“Was it the regular driver?”

She slumped back on the bed. “No, he was new. Gordon, what the hell is this about?”

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

“What happened in the States?”

He came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think Jim was murdered.”

She sat up again. “What?”

“I think he was getting too deep into something, some story he was working on. Maybe they’d tried scaring him off and it hadn’t worked. I know Jim, he’s like me—try that tactic and he’d just be more curious than ever, and more stubborn. So then they had to kill him.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

“And?”

“And, because I’ve been doing just what Jim was doing, maybe they’re targeting me. The thing is, I didn’t think they’d come here. Not so soon.”

“Two potential clients, a meter-reader, and a man with a van full of spuds and sprouts.”

“That’s four callers more than we usually get. Four callers while I was out of the country.” He got to his feet again.

“Is that it?” Joan asked. “Aren’t you going to tell me the rest?”

He started towards her, just able to make out her shape in the shadows of the curtained room—curtained despite the blackness outside and the isolation of the house. “I don’t want to make you a target.”

Then he padded downstairs as quietly as he could. He looked around, turning on lights, not touching anything, then stood in the living room thinking things over. He walked over to the TV and switched it on, using the remote to flick channels.

“Usual rubbish,” he said, yawning noisily for the benefit of anyone listening. He knew how sophisticated surveillance equipment had become. He’d heard of devices that could read computer screens from a distance of yards, without there being any physical connector linking them to the computer. He probably hadn’t heard half of it. The technology changed so quickly it was damn near impossible to keep up. He did his best, so he could pass what he knew on to his weekend soldiers. The trainee bodyguards in particular liked to know about that stuff.

He first checked that there were no watcher devices in the house. These were not so easy to hide: after all, if they were going to view a subject, they couldn’t be tucked away under a chair or a sofa. They also took a lot longer to fit. Someone would have had to access the house while Joan was out or asleep. He didn’t find anything. Next he put his jacket on and went outside, circling the house at a good radius. He spotted no one, certainly no vehicles. In the garage, he slid beneath both Land Rovers and found them clean—well, not clean, but lacking bugs. Before going back indoors he unscrewed the front panel from the burglar alarm. The screws were hard to shift, and showed no signs of recent tampering—no missing paint or fresh-looking scratches. The alarm itself was functioning.

Joan had said she’d let the new clients in as far as the hall. And he would guess she’d probably let the van driver in as far as the kitchen. He took a lot of time over both areas, feeling beneath carpets and behind curtains, taking the cookbooks off the bookshelf in the kitchen.

He found the first bug in the hall.

It was attached to the inside of the telephone.

He went into the kitchen and switched on the radio, placing it close to the phone extension. Then he unscrewed the apparatus and found another bug identical to the first one. Both had the letters USA stamped into their thin metal casing. He wiped sweat from his face, and went through to the living room. Despite an hour-long search, he found nothing, which didn’t mean the room was clean. He knew he could save a lot of effort by getting hold of a locating device, but he didn’t have the time. And at least now he knew—knew his family wasn’t safe, knew his home wasn’t secure.

Knew they had to get out.

He sat on the chair beside the dressing table in their bedroom. A morning ray of sun had found a chink in the curtains and was hitting Joan’s face, moving from her eyes to her forehead as she twisted in her sleep. Like a laser sight, Reeve thought, like an assassin taking aim. He felt tired but electric; he’d spent half the night writing. He had the sheets of printer paper with him on the chair. Joan rolled over, her arm flopping down on the space where he should have been. She used the arm to push herself up, blinking a few times. Then she rolled onto her back and craned her neck.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” he answered, coming towards her.

“How long have you been up?” She was blinking her eyes again in an attempt to read the sheet of paper Reeve was holding in front of her.

“Hours,” he said with a lightness he did not feel.

DON’T SAY A WORD. JUST READ. NOD WHEN YOU’RE READY. REMEMBER: SAY NOTHING.

His look told her he was serious. She nodded, sitting up farther in bed, pushing the hair out of her eyes. He turned to the next sheet.

THE HOUSE IS BUGGED: WE CAN’T SAY ANYTHING IN SAFETY. WE’VE GOT TO PRETEND THIS IS JUST ANOTHER DAY. NOD WHEN YOU’RE READY.

She took a moment to nod. When she did so, she was staring into his eyes.

“So are you going to lie there all day?” he chided, turning the page.

“Why not?” she said. She looked frightened.

YOU’VE GOT TO GO STAY WITH YOUR SISTER. TAKE ALLAN. BUT DON’T TELL HIM. JUST PACK SOME THINGS INTO THE CAR AND GO. PRETEND YOU’RE TAKING HIM TO SCHOOL AS USUAL.

“Come on, get up and I’ll make the breakfast.”

“I’ll take a shower.”

“Okay.”

WE CAN’T SAY WHERE YOU’RE GOING. WE CAN’T LET ANYONE KNOW. THIS IS JUST AN ORDINARY MORNING.

Joan nodded her head.

“Will toast do you?” he asked.

I DON’T THINK WE’RE BEING WATCHED, JUST LISTENED TO.

He smiled to reassure her.

“Toast’s fine,” she said, only the slightest tremble evident in her voice. She cleared her throat and pointed at him. He had foreseen this, and found the sheet.

I’LL BE FINE. I JUST NEED TO TALK TO A FEW PEOPLE.

She looked doubtful, so he smiled again and bent forward to kiss her.

“That better?” he asked.

“Better,” she said.

I’LL PHONE YOU AT YOUR SISTER’S. YOU CAN CALL HER ON YOUR WAY THERE, LET HER KNOW YOU’RE COMING. DON’T COME BACK HERE UNTIL I TELL YOU IT’S ALL RIGHT. I LOVE YOU.

She jumped to her feet and hugged him. They stayed that way for a full minute. Her eyes were wet when he broke away.

“Toast and tea it is,” Reeve said.