Hunted (25 page)

The front of the Russian embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens was besieged by TV crews, as well as the furious relatives of dead British civilians, and placard-bearing pro-Georgian protesters, accusing the Russians of state-sanctioned mass murder.

But the back of the building was quieter. No press. Just police. They’d set up two temporary manually operated road barriers either side of the back of the row of diplomatic buildings, to control access and curtail media intrusion.

The light was fading. In an hour or so it would be dark.

As the deceased colonel’s black Mercedes carried Danny relentlessly forward towards the westernmost barrier, he felt like he was in a submarine drifting down helplessly into the depths.

The Kid
…
Lexie
…
They’ve got Lexie
…
Fail, and Lexie will die
…

Thirty metres to the barrier. Twenty. One car in front of him – a silver SUV – waiting to be let through. A cop was talking to the driver through the window of the vehicle. Danny slowed to a halt behind.

Right from the start. There in the back of the VT Media van. The Kid had already known what Danny had been walking into. Throughout the chase. All that time Danny had thought he had been his only hope.

The son-of-a-bitch. Danny had worked with him on more than ten previous assignments. But none of that meant anything now. If he got through this in one piece, he wouldn’t quit until he brought that bastard down.

If
…

There was still so much to do. And so much Danny still didn’t understand. Who were these people? How did the hawk-faced man know the Kid? What could he have possibly offered the Kid to betray Danny? What was the data they now wanted Danny to steal from the dead colonel’s computer? And what, if any, had Crane’s part been in all this?

Danny had a few answers only – as the Kid had explained what he’d wanted Danny to do, he’d been unable to stop himself gloating about just how well he’d played Danny already today.

What it came down to was this. The hawk-faced man had wanted as much publicity as possible for the assassination. He’d wanted to stir up as much hell between the Russians and the Georgians as he could.

And he’d wanted the Russians to get the blame. So he’d chosen to set up a member of the Russian embassy staff at the scene of the crime. He’d picked Colonel Zykov. But to get the media attention he wanted, he’d needed to make London panic. Meaning he’d also needed to murder those civilians. And he’d needed a fall guy to run.

The Kid had volunteered Danny. Because he knew he’d be able to manipulate him. And because he knew Danny was good enough to lead the police on one hell of a chase. But also because he knew Danny had worked for the Russian government before – on a hushed-up retrieval of the daughter of a minor Russian diplomat who’d gone missing in Chechnya – something the Kid was now planning to publicize, to make Danny’s involvement in the hit all the more plausible.

And so today they’d woken him up with a shot of Adrenalin, and then the Kid had gone zealously about his job, running Danny away from the police and out across the city. Like a fox before a pack of baying hounds. Like he’d turned Danny into a one-man blood sport. Witnessed by as many TV news camera crews as the Kid had been able to tip off anonymously in time.

The hawk-faced man had wanted the hunt to become a global media event. With Danny Shanklin as its star.

And so the Kid had obliged. He’d become Danny’s puppeteer, jerking him this way and that.

First out through that sewer. Danny now couldn’t believe he’d been so dumb as to accept the fact that the Kid had simply got lucky and discovered that route out. Weeks of careful planning had gone into this. And those boot prints he had seen down there ahead of him … they hadn’t belonged to sewer workers. That was the way the hawk-faced man and his crew had got out of that hotel too.

It had been Danny’s own fault he’d come up through that Hyde Park fountain’s maintenance drain. If he’d listened to the Kid’s instructions, he’d have emerged in a quiet alley, from which they could then have run him again. With the aim of always keeping him one step ahead of the police. To make the chase last longer. And drive the media coverage up to the max.

In fact the Kid had been keen to point out – on a note of professional pride, it seemed – that the only times Danny had nearly got caught had been when he’d ignored the Kid’s directions and gone it alone.

Such as when he’d run into Harrods. Or when he’d cut the Kid off and gone to fetch Lexie. The fact that Danny had been ID’d had been his own fault too. Something else that had nearly got him snagged.

The hawk-faced man’s original plan had been to let Danny get caught once the desired media storm had been generated – preferably in some violent confrontation with the police, thereby garnering yet more publicity.

But then the plan had changed. Last night, under torture, Colonel Zykov had revealed the whereabouts of valuable data – the Kid had refused to tell Danny what. And that was when the
hawk-faced
man had decided not only to use Danny as his runner, but if he survived the chase, to then also deploy him as his thief.

The SUV at the barrier slowly performed a three-point turn, having clearly been turned away. Danny drove forward into the space it had vacated and pulled the colonel’s Mercedes up at
the barrier. Taking off his gloves, he buzzed the tinted driver side window down a third of the way, as a uniformed male cop – early thirties, clean-shaven, exhausted – leaned down to talk to him.

‘I need to get through,’ Danny said. In Russian. Then, in heavily accented English: ‘I work at the embassy. Here is my identification.’

The young cop looked him over. Danny didn’t remove his tinted Aviator shades or black cap. He kept his face in profile to the cop, his bruised cheek hidden. He handed the cop the dead colonel’s laminated plastic ID card, the photo of which the Kid had already switched for a photo of Danny that he’d Photoshopped to no longer look like the Danny the police had pictures of, but to have enough feature collisions in common with the dead colonel to get past someone like this cop.

The cop studied the card slowly, then peered in at Danny.

‘One moment, please, sir,’ he said.

Danny felt his heartbeat rising as the cop walked over to his superior officer at the barrier and handed the ID card across.

Danny felt powerless. Numb with it. The Kid had already explained how he and the hawk-faced man had come up with a plan to get him safely into the colonel’s office. But how that plan would come to nothing if the colonel’s body had already been ID’d.

Because then Danny would get caught. And the hawk-faced man would have no further use for him. They’d leave him to take the blame with the dead colonel for the assassination.

The hawk-faced man would no longer have any use for Lexie either. She’d be a liability. Nothing but a loose end that needed to be tied up.

The sense of sickness, of falling, it intensified now, as Danny watched the cop’s superior slowly turn the fake ID over in his hand.

After what seemed like an age, he finally returned it. And in the very instant the young cop began to march back over to the barrier alone – Danny knew it … he’d passed the test. The colonel’s body had not yet been ID’d. They were going to let him through.

For now, at least, he and Lexie were safe.

He watched as the weighted barrier rose up.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the young cop as he reached the Mercedes. ‘Have a good evening.’ He passed Danny back his ID.

Danny buzzed the window up and put his gloves back on. Wiping down the window button, he drove on.

‘Five more metres, then turn right,’ said the Kid. ‘And keep cool, Danny. Remember, your daughter’s life depends on it.’

Danny was wearing a transmitter in the breast pocket of the colonel’s grey linen suit. A Bluetooth audio bead was tucked inside his left ear.

He forced himself not to react to the sound of the Kid’s voice. But even so, he couldn’t help himself picturing Lexie in the back of that van. Just like he couldn’t prevent himself picturing his foot stamping down on the Kid’s exposed neck.

Focus
…

Work
, he reminded himself.
This is work.

That was what he’d repeatedly tried telling himself from the moment he’d been taken away from that warehouse in Streatham in the back of the transit van. And as the blonde woman and the bearded man had driven him out of central London and looped round to the north. And as they’d dropped back into central London again and Danny had been transferred to the colonel’s stolen car. And as they’d given him one final glance of the laptop screen showing Lexie sitting alongside the torturer, to remind him of what they’d do if he in any way deviated from their plan.

He wouldn’t screw this up. He was going to see it through. He’d get through this, and then somehow get Lexie back.

He turned right. Down a concrete ramp leading beneath the back of the embassy.

The Mercedes’ radio-frequency ID tag automatically triggered the security barrier at the bottom of the ramp.

During Colonel Zykov’s torture, and under the influence of an SP-17 truth drug, convinced that his own daughter had been about to be butchered, the colonel had been kind enough to furnish the
hawk-faced man with a foolproof guide to getting in and out of the Russian embassy undetected.

Danny set about putting that plan into action now.

Thanks to the police guarding the back of the embassy and the protesters besieging the front, with any luck no one inside would be monitoring the underground car park CCTV too closely.

But even if they were watching Danny as he parked the Mercedes in the colonel’s space now and exited the vehicle … the shades, cap and the suit he was wearing had all been taken from Zykov’s apartment. And Danny now also made sure to run further visual interference, keeping the new phone the Kid had given him pressed up to his face as if making a call, thereby concealing his features.

There were two elevators at the far side of the car park. Precisely where the colonel had said. One was accessed via a standard numeric code pad and would get Danny as far as the staffed security point up on the embassy’s ground floor.

The other was reserved solely for the use of diplomatic VIPs and accessed all floors, including the top floor where only the ambassador, the colonel and the deputy ambassador worked.

The elevator was operated via a fingerprint recognition pad, which only these three men were able to use.

Danny popped the lid of the Petri dish in his pocket and removed the colonel’s severed right forefinger. He ignored its odd weight, telling himself it was just a cold piece of meat. He pressed it up against the fingerprint recognition pad on the wall beside the elevator’s brushed-steel doors.

A beep.

The doors silently parted. The elevator was empty. Danny stepped inside.

He hit the button for the seventh floor. The doors shut and the elevator rose. Danny stepped out of sight to the side of the doors as it slowed to a halt. He pressed the door open button. The doors slid apart. He pressed the hold button to keep them that way. He listened. He heard nothing. He used a mirror to check outside. He saw no one in the empty corridor. He stepped out.

Plush red carpet. Paintings on the wall. He already had the floor plan memorized. Ten paces later and he was at Zykov’s office door. The ink-stained swipe card really had been the colonel’s. He slid it now through the door’s locking mechanism.

He opened the door and slipped in.

Danny silently closed the door behind him.

The colonel’s office was three metres square. A lingering odour of coffee and cigars. Embossed invitations on a cork pinboard: diplomat parties the colonel would never now get to attend. The rattle and hum of an air ventilator. An antique mahogany armchair and a green velvet-covered sofa. Nice artwork too on the plain white walls, Danny saw. One of the Matisse cut-outs looked real.

Two windows. A view out of the back of the building. Danny stepped up and peered out into the thin evening light. He could see the police below. No other vehicles approaching. Everything looked fine.

He pulled the curtains closed and went over to the desk. Another antique. Expensive. Polished crystal glasses in a holder. An ashtray. An empty silver ice bucket and an unopened bottle – of Diaka vodka, Danny noted, the most expensive damned vodka in the world, distilled through diamonds, no less. A computer. A nice one too. Twenty-four-inch LED screen. State-of-the-art. The colonel had obviously appreciated the finer things in life.

‘OK, we’re inside,’ Danny said.

‘How many terminals?’

‘Just the one. Like the colonel told you.’

The colonel that you and your friends murdered in cold blood, Danny thought. The colonel whose daughter you threatened just like you’re now threatening mine.

The Kid said, ‘Switch it on.’

Danny did as he was told. The computer chimed and hummed into life. Its log-in screen appeared along with a request for a password.

The Kid read out a nonsensical series of ten letters and numbers. Danny typed them into the keyboard and hit return. The log-in screen vanished.

A few seconds later, the computer’s desktop blossomed across the screen. Its background was a photograph of the colonel. He was standing with a stern-faced grey-haired woman, who Danny assumed was his wife. Between them was a plain-looking teenage girl. Their daughter, Danny guessed.

Icons for various applications and a number of yellow and blue Stickies popped up across the screen.

‘Now put my phone down facing the screen like I showed you,’ said the Kid.

Again Danny obeyed. He sat down on the ergonomic wheeled desk chair. He propped the Kid’s phone up against the colonel’s crystal tumblers, so its camera could now film the screen live and transmit everything it saw back to the Kid. The sound of the Kid’s keyboard rattling.

‘OK, I’m in,’ he said a few minutes later.

A white rectangular icon appeared on the screen, indicating that a remote device had been plugged in. The icon was labelled ‘APHEX’. Danny remembered the Kid’s T-shirt. As in Aphex Twin. His favourite musician. Meaning the Kid had just jacked into the colonel’s computer via his phone’s Bluetooth.

Without Danny touching the keyboard, the computer’s system preferences began booting up from the dock at the bottom of the screen. Danny guessed this meant the Kid had taken full remote control of Zykov’s computer now.

The screen turned white, as its operating system flashed open. Through his audio bead Danny heard the Kid’s keyboard begin
to rattle again. Lines of code raced first across then down the screen. Alien poetry. Danny wouldn’t even know how to begin to decipher it.

The speed of the Kid’s typing grew steadily faster. Was he still back there at the warehouse? Danny wondered. He had no way of knowing. And what about Lexie? The last time Danny had seen her was in the Kid’s van. But going where? To meet the Kid back at the warehouse? Or was the hawk-faced man taking her
somewhere
else?

My princess
…
with those scum
…

And what about Alice? What had happened to her? Christ, Danny hoped she was OK.

The Kid had told Danny when he’d said goodbye that the
hawk-faced
man would release both Danny and Lexie so long as Danny got them what they wanted. He argued that they’d have no need to keep them afterwards, since Lexie knew nothing at all, and what little Danny did know he could not prove. Plus if Danny went anywhere near the police, the Kid had reminded him, he’d get arrested. If he wanted to stay free, he’d have to go to ground for the rest of his life.

A nice enough argument. But Danny didn’t believe a word of it. Once he no longer needed them, the hawk-faced man would kill them both.

Which was why Danny had to find a way to
stay
needed. Until he could get to Lexie. In order to be able to save her, he first needed to discover where she was. And so he watched. He listened. He waited for his chance.

‘Got it,’ said the Kid.

The code stopped moving. A small rectangular graphic icon flashed up in the centre of the screen.

It was labelled ‘C332’.

Above it was a tiny flashing red padlock symbol:
.

Danny heard another muffled voice coming at him through the audio bead. It didn’t sound much like the Kid. Meaning the Kid was no longer alone.

Then the Kid’s voice came back: ‘OK, so now let’s see if the
colonel was telling us the truth about how to decrypt the file so we can read what’s inside …’

As the lines of code continued to sputter across the screen, the sound of the Kid’s rapid typing seemed to blur into one continuous whirring sound in Danny’s mind.

Beside the onscreen padlock appeared a timer symbol:
. It began to slowly rotate.

‘This might take a couple of minutes,’ said the Kid.

Danny assumed the Kid wasn’t speaking to him. But the fact that he was talking out loud at all gave Danny an idea.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

He needed to get the Kid talking. Just like old times. So that maybe he’d drop his guard. Give Danny more information about what was going on than he should. Give him something he could use.

‘Don’t go breaking the habit of a lifetime,’ said the Kid.

‘Very funny.’

The Kid laughed.

‘I’m serious. There’s something that’s been bothering me.’

‘What?’

‘How did you set up the meeting in the first place?’
What was Crane’s involvement?
in other words.

Another snort of laughter at the other end of the line. The now unmistakable sound of the Kid’s ego swelling up.

‘Oh come on, Danny. I’d have thought even you would have worked that out for yourself by now.’

Danny’s eyes stayed glued to the screen. The timer continued to turn.

‘Nope,’ he said.

‘Well I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now,’ the Kid said. ‘You see, the funny thing about virtual meetings, Danny … is you never really know who you’re talking to.’

Danny once more pictured the Kid in the warehouse, sitting in the shadows behind his desk. He pictured Crane’s avatar in Noirlight, the same.

No
…

‘But that’s not possible,’ he said. ‘I was working for Crane before I met you. You can’t be the same person.’

‘No, Danny. You’re right. Not the same. Not for all that time. Not for that long at all, as it turns out. Just the last five days, in fact. Just for long enough to get you over here to the UK for that meet.’

Five days ago. That was when Crane had first contacted Danny about coming here. Only it hadn’t been Crane at all.

‘But what about Crane’s security protocols?’Danny said. He still couldn’t believe this was how he’d been duped. ‘My link to him has always been encrypted. Completely secure.’

‘Yeah, and it would have remained that way too, if you hadn’t been stupid enough to let me borrow your damn phone. Everything I needed, I hacked it from there.’

Danny cast his mind back two months, to the last time he and the Kid had met up. It had been at Hong Kong Kai Tak International. They’d both been heading home from a job. The Kid had borrowed Danny’s phone for a couple of hours after he’d claimed his own had run out of juice.

Like that would ever happen, Danny now saw. As if.

‘It was pretty easy from there,’ said the Kid, ‘to get into that virtual office of Crane’s and clone it as well as his avatar, and then re-route your pathway through Noirlight so that every time in the last five days when you went there looking for Crane, you actually found me.’

No wonder ‘Crane’ had been unable to track down his US government contact, Danny thought. There’d never been one.

‘And when you spoke to Crane today in that shopping centre,’ the Kid said, ‘of course you were really speaking to me. You see, as well as jacking Crane’s avatar to set up the meet, we then decided last night to use it to stoke you up about the importance of the data stick and the card … you know, to stop you being so suspicious about them having just been left there on purpose … to help steer you here into the embassy.’

And that was exactly what would have happened too, Danny now saw. If they hadn’t decided to use Lexie to lever him instead, he’d probably have ended up here anyway, just like the Kid had planned.

But even in this darkness, Danny glimpsed a spark of hope. The real Crane had never betrayed him at all. Meaning that if Danny ever got out of here, he would still be there to help.

Danny felt air on the back of his neck. He froze. Behind him, the door to Colonel Zykov’s office had just swung open.

‘Wow, Danny, that’s some silence,’ said the Kid through Danny’s audio bead, clearly not having heard the door opening. ‘I mean, I’ve heard of the penny dropping, but that sounds more like Fort Knox.’

Danny ignored him, his whole being tensing now as he heard the creak of a footstep behind him.

He’d assumed the door to Zykov’s office would have locked itself automatically as it had shut. He should have checked.

‘Nikolai?’ a man said in Russian. ‘I thought I saw your car downstairs. But aren’t you meant to be sick?’

Thank God Danny had his back to the man. And thank God he was still wearing the colonel’s cap and sombre suit.

But if the intruder took another step forward, the illusion would be destroyed.

Danny pushed up fast from the chair. He stepped sideways, turning as he did. Fast enough to take the man standing in the doorway completely by surprise. One stride and Danny was on him. He struck him hard in the throat, silencing his vocal cords. He spear-handed his solar plexus next, depriving him of breath.

The man was older than Danny had anticipated. Mid to late sixties. Untrained. A diplomat, not a soldier, thank God. Danny grabbed him round the throat as his knees sagged. He turned him and hauled him inside the office, then turned them both round so he could push the door shut behind them with a flick of his heel.

The man didn’t struggle. Partly because he was still gasping for breath, but also because he’d already worked out that he was completely outmatched.

So what to do with him now? Cut off his oxygen until he fell unconscious. But with a guy this age, that might just finish him off. Danny saw the gold ring on the man’s wedding finger. He could have kids, grandkids.

Stepping back to lock the door, Danny tore a scarf off the hat
stand beside it and used that to gag the man. He pinned him to the floor and hog-tied him with his own shoelaces, then dragged him over behind the colonel’s desk and used it to pin him up tight against the wall.

‘Any noise and you’re dead,’ he told him in Russian, before taping over his gagged mouth and ears.

Danny sat back down on the chair. The timer, he saw, was still slowly turning over.

‘Danny? What the hell
was
that?’ hissed the Kid. He must have heard the struggle and had now glimpsed Danny’s reflection in his view of the screen.

‘Someone came in. It’s dealt with,’ Danny said.

‘Jesus, Danny. You’d better not fuck this up now.’ The Kid sounded panicked. Terrified even. Making Danny wonder once again how the hawk-faced man had turned him. ‘OK,’ he then said. ‘The decryption’s complete.’

Onscreen Danny saw that the 
symbol had vanished and the red 
icon had become a green
.