Hunted (2 page)

As the black London cab’s tail lights faded into the night, Danny Shanklin took Anna-Maria’s hand and squeezed it tight, before setting off with her along the pathway into the park.

He’d not seen her in over a year. But he didn’t reckon a day had passed without him wondering what she was doing, who she was with and whether she was thinking of him too.

It felt good having her this close, so close he could smell the perfume he’d sent her from Washington on her birthday, close enough to hear the soft rise and fall of her breath. But he wanted her closer still.

‘Thanks for dinner,’ she said.

‘I’m just glad you could come.’

He’d only phoned her that morning. The first call he’d made after touching down at Heathrow. He’d hoped she’d be able and willing to cancel whatever other plans she’d made. He’d got lucky; she had.

But then that was how she always made him feel, he supposed. Lucky. Lucky to know her. Lucky that she still wanted to see him, even knowing everything about him that she did. Lucky to have someone as beautiful and bewitching as her in his otherwise most times brutal and complicated life.

‘Will you be able to spend the night?’ he said.

‘Would you like me to?’

‘What do you think?’

She didn’t break stride. ‘Thinking and knowing are two different things …’

‘OK, then. Yes,’ he said, ‘I would.’

She smiled, leaning into him, slipping her arm round his waist. Whenever he was with her, he wondered how it was he ever went away. But he knew also that he would leave her again. And keep on doing it. Until one day he’d come back and she wouldn’t be there.

‘If you do stay, you won’t regret it,’ he said, stopping and pulling her in tight. ‘I can promise you that.’

She softly moaned as he kissed her. He felt her body shiver up against his.

‘Then I’ll stay,’ she whispered.

The noise of a car engine reached them. It slowed and idled nearby. Danny and Anna-Maria turned as one to stare back across the park in the direction from which they’d just come.

A lone gun-metal-grey Range Rover had drawn level with them on the dark road at the edge of the park. The bulky silhouette of a man could be seen hunched over its steering wheel, his face deep in shadow, making it impossible to tell if he was looking their way.

‘Someone you know?’ said Anna-Maria.

‘No.’ Danny was still staring.

‘You don’t sound so certain …’

He wasn’t. Here in London, on a job, he never could be. The growl of the car picked up as it accelerated away. Danny memorized its number plate as it passed.

‘I’m guessing you’re not in town for a holiday,’ said Anna-Maria.

‘No.’

Danny knew she was teasing, of course, but he saw there was worry also in her eyes. She linked her arm through his as they set off walking again.

‘Even more of a reason, then,’ she said, ‘for us to enjoy tonight as much as we can.’

He cast his mind back to when they’d met outside Covent
Garden tube station less than three hours before. How he’d thought that she never seemed to age. How each time they met after an absence, it was like he was seeing her again for the very first time. But how also always with the rush of desire came guilt, even though he no longer had a wife or steady girlfriend.

‘Remember how we smoked our last cigarette there together,’ she said, as they passed a wooden bench.

They’d turned into a series of ornate gardens, and were following a meandering gravel path between the flower beds. He nodded. It had been eighteen months ago. He felt better for quitting. No more waking up sweating in the night, trying to shake images of suppurating lungs from his mind. No more nightmares of him catching his daughter, Lexie, smoking, and her telling him she could because he did, because if her daddy did, then that meant it must be OK.

Yet still he pined for those selfish little moments, just him and a smoke, gazing out at some horizon, with the rest of his life put on hold.

‘Do you miss it?’ she said.

‘No.’

He lied for her benefit. Quitting was something she’d instigated, something they’d done together, and which had survived the many months and miles they’d spent apart since. It was a part of him, he knew, that she felt still belonged to her.

They stopped at a heavy steel gate set into a razor-wired security fence. Tall pine trees reared up either side, blocking out the bright moonlight. No matter. Danny had returned here so many times after dark – either wired with insomnia, or trying to run off some bad dream – that manipulating the gate’s heavy lock mechanism was now something he could manage by touch alone.

A row of barges waited on the other side of the gate, moored alongside the fat black stripe of Regent’s Canal. Most of the vessels were permanent residences, festooned with bicycles, deckchairs and hanging baskets. Lights glowed behind their steamed-up portholes. Snatches of TV shows and muffled conversations drifted out as Danny and Anna-Maria walked past.

Danny’s boat was the last in line. Its steel-plate hull was painted black and its name,
Pogonsi
, was stencilled in looping gilt letters on its stern. Even though it was officially registered to a Swiss holding company, the twenty-metre converted coal barge actually belonged to him.

It was one of his homes from home. He’d inherited it from Tony Strinatti, an old friend and comrade, now dead.

Danny stepped on to the small aft deck. He helped Anna-Maria aboard and unlocked the hatch. They climbed down the worn wooden steps into the main cabin. He’d put fresh linen on the bed and flowers in the tall cut-glass vase on the mahogany galley table. Not because he’d known she’d be coming back, not for sure. But because he’d seen enough bad things in his time to indulge himself whenever he could with life’s little luxuries.

He took down a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel’s from on top of the fridge. Her favourite. He no longer drank. He’d had to stop. If he hadn’t, he doubted he’d still be here now.

‘You want one?’ he said.

‘I want you …’

He smiled, feeling the skin on his cheeks prickle, seeing her smiling too, no doubt enjoying this effect she had. Shaking his head, he turned to the fridge and took out a bottle of Coke.

He fixed her a JD, with Coke, lemon and ice, in a tall glass. Then he poured a straight Coke for himself, draining half of it in a single gulp. He was still jetlagged. Needed a pick-me-up. His journey to England had been the usual cramp-inducing, twenty-three-hour nightmare via JFK from his main home on the United States Virgin Island of Saint Croix.

As he drank, he watched Anna-Maria walk slowly round the room, trailing her fingers over the shelves that covered every inch of the boat’s wall space. They were mostly crammed with old CDs and vinyls. Townes van Zandt and Dylan albums. Songs with stories to tell. The kind that took you out of yourself and into another man’s life.

‘It’s good to be back,’ she said, handing Danny a Shawn Mullins album, the same one he’d played her three years ago when he’d first brought her here.

He put the CD on the old stack system he’d never quite got round to replacing, lit an oil lamp and switched off the harsh electrics overhead. He noticed Anna-Maria studying him in the flickering golden light and wondered what was going on in her mind.

Sometimes he couldn’t work it out at all, what an urban
sophisticate
like her could see in a guy like him. She normally looked like she’d just stepped out of a Chanel advert, him from a down-at-heel West Coast bar.

Back on Saint Croix, he normally wore faded T-shirts and ripped surf shorts, and kept his jaw fuzzy with a lazy half-beard, while his shaggy dark hair hung down past the nape of his neck.

But he’d got himself smartened up for the business meeting he was here in London to attend. Leaving him standing before
Anna-Maria
now in a jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, clean-shaven, with his hair cut short and neat.

She took his hands, and slowly looked over his tanned, weathered face before gazing deep into his dark brown eyes.

‘God, I’ve missed you,’ she said.

She said it in French, her native tongue, an occasional habit of hers when they were alone, and one that Danny encouraged. He was already fluent. A sliver of luck life had thrown his way was that languages had always come easy. But he knew too that there was always room for improvement. Fresh idioms and nuances to be mastered. Little things that might one day make a difference.

He gazed back into Anna-Maria’s sharp green eyes. She was beautiful. Too interesting to be called just pretty. She combed her slim fingers back through her short, raven-black hair, and smiled as he pulled her towards him, drew her through the set of thin silk curtains and laid her down on his bed.

From where he was still trussed up on the bed, Colonel Zykov watched as the blonde girl pulled down her knickers and urinated into the toilet.

The bitch
…

He wanted to kill her. He’d been set up. Marked. He could see that now. Right from the start. This woman –
this whore
– had tricked him, and now she had him trapped.

He could still taste the blood in his mouth. From when she’d struck him. His lungs were rattling with backed-up phlegm. and only years of training were stopping him from panicking. Training and fury and thirst for revenge.

Whoever she was. Whatever she wanted. God damn it, he would tear out her throat.

But what
did
she want? He still didn’t know. For exactly fifteen minutes now – according to the antique French clock on the bedroom wall – she’d had him at her mercy. Yet she’d not even glanced at him.

He watched now as she stood and shamelessly wiped herself with a wad of tissue paper. She swigged from his mouthwash and spat in the sink. Only then, as she walked back into the bedroom and
retrieved her handbag from the bed, did she look at him. She stared at him and slowly shook her head.

What is it? What do you want, you crazy bitch?

She took a phone from her handbag and made a call. She spoke a number out loud – in Russian – and the colonel’s heart sank as he recognized it as the lift’s access code, which she’d watched him type into the security panel downstairs.

So she is not working alone
. Someone else was coming for him now. Another Russian-speaker.
Someone who knows where to find us
.

He cursed his own stupidity. No wonder her accent had reminded him of eastern Europe. That was exactly where she was from.

He thought of the tiny panic button embedded in the plaster rose on the wall beside his bed. He thought of the loaded pistol in his bedside drawer. He could reach neither.

He told himself he would survive. He had the might of his country behind him. He was a soldier. He would get through this, and then—

My God
, he thought, remembering his phone call. The phone call to the embassy she’d insisted he make. No one was expecting him at work tomorrow. No one would miss him for thirty-six hours.

She stood and dressed. Taking his wallet from his jacket, she leafed through its contents. She took nothing. She tossed it aside.

So she is not here to steal from me
, he concluded, although far from bringing him comfort, this only increased his dread.

Who’s coming? What will they do to me when they arrive?

She began rummaging through his bedside drawers.

Is there something she thinks she will find?

He heard a drawer lock snap and then the drawer being opened.

‘
Samozaryadnyj Pistolet Serdjukova
,’ the girl said, weighing his gun in her hand before expertly checking its steel double-stack magazine. ‘Twenty-one-millimetre armour piercing.’

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she jammed the pistol’s cold barrel hard into the colonel’s testicles, making him groan in pain.

‘You know, if I fired this up your arsehole,’ she said, ‘it would blow off the top of your head.’

A wave of terror swept through the colonel’s guts. Not because he thought she was about to pull the trigger. But because she knew so much about the weapon. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. She was a professional. Military or intelligence.

But who was she working for? That was the question upon which all other questions now rested, he knew. For Russia? Was that what this was all about? Was she here as the result of some counterintelligence operation? Was he suspected of somehow betraying his country?

Or was she a terrorist? Or in the employ of some foreign business multinational or intelligence agency? One of Russia’s many enemies? Was she planning on somehow attacking or undermining Russia
through
him?

Noise.

Colonel Zykov’s breath caught in his throat. From through the open bedroom doorway, he’d just heard the faint but familiar soft hum and click of the lift docking in the penthouse’s entrance hall.

A clatter and rumble of boots.

‘You’d better do what they say,’ the girl said.

The bearded thief from the café – the one who’d sprawled into Colonel Zykov three days before – was the first through the doorway. Only now he was dressed in clean, neutral running gear and his black hair was combed straight back from his brow. He looked the colonel over dispassionately before unfurling a large plastic groundsheet across the bedroom floor.

Tears swelled in the colonel’s eyes as he thought of the sheet and why it was there. To catch fluids. Urine, faeces, blood. To limit mess.

Two more men marched in. The first was mid forties, stocky and tall, with a shock of blond, almost white hair. He had tapered sideburns and was dressed like he’d just stepped out of an exclusive nightclub, in a smart dark suit with a heavy gold watch hanging at his left wrist.

His companion was older, perhaps sixty, balding, grey, unshaven, tall and extremely thin. He was wearing wire-framed spectacles and an oversized blue raincoat. He wordlessly set down a black
attaché case on the bed and started to hum tunelessly, as if he were the only person in the room.

Colonel Zykov recognized neither man. Which wasn’t true of the equipment the bespectacled man now took from his case’s moulded-foam bed. Swabs. A loaded hypodermic. When he flicked the syringe with his forefinger, tiny bubbles spiralled to the top. A vein just above the man’s left eye socket started to slowly pulse, like the throat of a lizard basking in the sun.

‘Well?’ the girl said in Russian. She was talking to the younger, blond man.

His hooked nose and gaunt face combined to give him a predatory, hawk-like look. He hadn’t taken his ice-blue eyes off Zykov from the moment he’d entered the room. He hadn’t so much as blinked.

‘It’s him all right,’ he said, also in Russian. ‘This is the one who fucked up my life.’

This man knows me?
thought the colonel. He raked desperately through his memories, trying to work out where he might have seen him before.

He came up with nothing. The man must have made a mistake. Because those eyes … that face … there was something about it … a capacity for …
violence
… that … surely, the colonel thought, once encountered would be impossible to forget …

‘Make the call,’ the man said.

The blonde girl walked into the bathroom with her phone. The man with the glasses squirted a tiny jet of clear liquid from the syringe into the air. It pattered like raindrops across the plastic sheet.

‘I’ve got a clear visual on the phone,’ the girl said.

The hawk-faced man snapped his fingers first at the bearded thief. They lifted Colonel Zykov up and slid the crackling groundsheet beneath him. They pinioned him to the mattress, while the bespectacled man crouched beside him and gripped his wrist.

Zykov’s breath hissed fast and shallow through his nostrils. Sweat prickled out across his skin. He writhed as the man injected
him in the arm.
But with what?
screamed a voice inside the colonel’s head.

He whimpered. He couldn’t help himself. Up close he saw that the whites of the bespectacled man’s watery brown eyes were yellowed and patterned with broken veins.

The colonel’s stomach convulsed. Bile rose in his throat.

The hawk-faced man gripped him firmly by the jaw and twisted his head round so he could look him in the face.

‘You’ve just been injected with an SP-17 hybrid,’ he said. His tone was clear and measured. He looked like a snake about to strike. ‘I’m sure you know what that means.’

Zykov nodded furiously, suddenly desperate to do anything to please. He knew all about SP-17, of course. It was a truth serum more powerful than regular Sodium Pentothal. It had been developed especially for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR.

But what did it mean? That this man was SVR? And the girl too? That the colonel was suspected of treachery?
Is that why they’re here?

‘It’s a notoriously reliable drug.’ The man’s pale, watchful eyes didn’t blink. ‘But you are an exceptional subject. You will have had occasion to deploy many truth serums in your career. It’s possible your knowledge may reduce the effectiveness of this one … You may attempt to fight its influence … You may even succeed … So I have decided to introduce further incentives to ensure that you cooperate to the level of exactitude I require.’

The colonel’s mind raced. When the drug kicked in, it would scramble his inhibitions and loosen his tongue. It would transport him into a nightmare state. A hell of paranoia and confusion and fear. He would start talking and he would not be able to stop. He did not believe he could fight it at all.

But what did that matter? Because if these people really were SVR – if that was how they had access to this drug – then he had nothing to fear. He was no traitor. He’d done nothing wrong.

Defiance flashed in his eyes. Let them ask what they wanted. Let them have their truth. Then they would have to set him free.

Then he would find out who had unleashed these animals. And make them pay.

The hawk-faced man clicked his fingers and the girl stepped forward and handed him the phone.

‘Go ahead,’ he said into the handset, before turning its screen round to face the colonel.

At first Zykov couldn’t work out what he was seeing. The screen image was composed of grainy greys and greens. Night vision, he realized. A thickset man was staring back at him. Expressionless. Emotionless. Eyes the colour of computer screens with the power switched off. He was standing in the shadow of a grey-brick wall.

A hollowness grew in the pit of Zykov’s stomach. There was something familiar about the brickwork. Something there filled him with dread. The man turned the camera away from his face to reveal the main entrance of the building.

Zykov twisted to break free.

His daughter.
How dare they?
Inside that building was Katarina’s Moscow home. The colonel roared through his gag. Hot tears of rage rolled down his face.

SVR or not, he would make these bastards wish that they’d never been born.