Wanted (23 page)

Glancing down, he saw the patrol rounding the building and disappearing from sight. A riverboat klaxon sounded mournfully across the Thames. Guided by two London Port Authority tugs, a container ship was moving steadily upriver towards the quayside.

His nerves hit a peak, screeching discordantly through his sleep-shattered mind. How long before that ship was due to dock? How long before the day shift of dockworkers was swarming across the quayside to prepare for the great ship’s arrival, and the dull diesel grumble of the cranes started up?

There’d be too much interference then – vehicles and people moving – for Danny to be able to film any meeting that might take place from this distance. And too many potential witnesses if Glinka showed, a drop-off took place and Danny got there in time to disrupt it.

He searched the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. They remained free of surveillance. He checked his watch again.

Only two minutes remained.

For the hundredth time, Danny felt for the reassuring shapes of the Glock 30 pistol and the Taser in the dual holster strapped across his chest. The pistol, of course, was useless from here. But not if he closed in on that building in time.

If anyone showed . . .

He zoomed in on Building 17 again and wished also that he was staring instead through a rifle scope – then dismissed the fantasy of killing Glinka with a shot to the back of the head.

Instead he reminded himself that the reason he’d come was to capture video footage of the meeting and thereby establish a link between Glinka and whatever terrorist cell he’d meet, then send it to Crane to show his people, as further evidence to corroborate Danny’s story about how Glinka and the Kid had set him up.

Or, even better, to film the Kid alongside Glinka, then either follow them to where they were going next or somehow take one of them captive.

And make him talk.

Only one minute left now until the meeting was due to take place.

Activating the ‘Record’ function on the control pad of the same smart binoculars with which Spartak had furnished him in Pripyat, Danny once more swept the nearby alleys below, praying for a car, truck or unscheduled foot patrol to appear. His hopes were fading. Nothing moved, apart from the steadily approaching container ship and the promise of failure it bore.

The minute ran out.

An ache of desperation filled him. The doors remained closed. There was no meeting. And Danny knew Glinka: everything he did was on time; if he wasn’t there now, he wasn’t coming.

Maybe this was just a dead end. Perhaps Commandant Sabirzhan – Danny remembered his eyes, their fury and pain – had misheard the details of the rendezvous, or had got the time or even the place hopelessly muddled in his sickening mind.

Or – Danny’s desperation peaked once more into fear – maybe it wasn’t a dead end or a meeting. Maybe it was what he’d suspected from the start: a trap. Whereby Glinka had fed Sabirzhan that information, in case Danny had been ruthless and smart enough to track them to Chernobyl.

A beep.

Danny’s heartbeat accelerated as he checked his phone: a new text message, from the package-delivery firm DHL. Danny scrolled across the screen, hit open and smiled.

He waited until, a few minutes later, the high pitched growl of a motorbike engine confirmed this.

Threading his arms into the straps of his rucksack, Danny watched the bike cruise past the end of the building he was stationed on and followed its progress along the quayside until it pulled up in front of Building 17.

Rolling his thumb across his phone screen again, he selected the icon of an app you couldn’t buy in any store. Spartak had got hold of it for him and its instructions were in Russian.

Activating it, he watched a grid of squares balloon across the screen. Inside each square was a GPS location, each one corresponding to a position within a few hundred yards of where he was concealed. As his thumb tapped each of the squares, their colours switched from green to yellow.

He trained his binoculars on the bike and its rider and pressed record again. He’d called DHL and had them collect a brown-paper package from outside an office block on the other side of London. He had instructed them to deliver it here to Building 17, at exactly five past seven and not a minute before. He now watched the courier removing the same brown-paper parcel from his pannier.

You wanna know what’s inside something? Give it a damn good poke.

Danny remembered the Old Man telling him that. They’d been on spring-break vacation in the woods. A hornets’ nest had been hanging from the log cabin’s guttering. He and his father had been watching what appeared to be three or four hornets sporadically arriving and vanishing into the nest, then re-emerging a few seconds later, each one as big as ten-year-old Danny’s thumb.

The Old Man had told him that, come night, they’d need to bung the entrance of the nest with an industrial filler spray. The ones inside would suffocate, he said, while those outside would die of cold. There were too many of the insects already and they would become increasingly territorial, until it would be impossible for Danny and his father to approach the cabin at all.

Danny had objected, saying there didn’t seem to be enough of them to do anyone any harm. After all, he’d reasoned, they’d only seen three or four. His father had walked back and thrown a stone at the nest with a precision Danny still marvelled at.

There’d been a tock-ing sound, as the Old Man had drawn Danny back into the safety of some bushes and a slow second’s silence. Then a swarm had emerged from the nest. Maybe as many as fifty, a number Danny had thought it impossible such an outwardly small nest could contain.

The nest had been deceptive. There’d been a cavity in the wall inside which the hornets had built, they’d learned later. Where at first there’d appeared to be little to worry about, in fact there’d been great strength.

And now, as the courier removed his helmet and hung it over his bike’s handlebars, Danny felt the same sense of anticipation as he had after the Old Man had unleashed the stone and Danny’s keen young eyes had followed its perfect arc through the air.

Was this a hornets’ nest too? Was there more here than met even a trained eye like his? He was about to find out.

The courier swigged from a water bottle, took a mobile phone from his pocket and made a call.

Danny thought of Spartak Sidarov, how he’d love right now to have him at his side or, even better, stationed nearby in a position from which he’d be able to run interference and misdirect anyone who might come Danny’s way.

But Danny hadn’t let Spartak come.

He’d asked Spartak instead to find out what he could about Glinka, based on the little information they had. The torturer Danny had interrogated at the farmhouse he’d been taken to on the day of the London massacre had told him that Glinka had known about the stolen smallpox because he’d been at the Soviet Biopreparet in 1990. Spartak was now using his contacts to trawl through the records of all the soldiers who’d been stationed there that year and would filter those results by age. Spartak had never seen Glinka, but so long as he obtained a shortlist of photo IDs, Danny was certain he’d be able to pick out the man.

And then? Once they knew who Glinka was, they could set about finding out who his current contacts were and whether he was still operating under his own name. Partnered with the Kid as he was, he was more than likely already a ghost, entirely wiped from the web. But he could have family, old friends, some emotional attachment that might lead Danny to him.

Danny readjusted the cardboard and other detritus he was using for camouflage. He flexed his legs, arched his back and slowly rotated his neck. Realigning his tired, cramped muscles, he thanked God as he felt a fresh burst of adrenalin.

He trained the binoculars on the courier again, then zoomed in on Building 17. In the middle of its huge double steel doors there was a smaller access door with a glass viewing panel at its centre.

The courier approached this now, and Danny watched as he pressed the door buzzer beside it.

Then all hell broke loose.

The chugging of mechanized rotors. Birds tore into the sky. Danny watched an unmarked black Dauphin helicopter rapidly rise over the buildings at the far end of the docks and tilt its nose, then rush towards him.

He fought the dread that swelled inside him – that screamed at him to run. Moving as little as possible, desperate now not to knock the trash covering him or in any other way reveal his presence, he lowered his binoculars, fearful of sunlight bouncing off their lenses and giving him away.

The chopper raced directly at him, as though hauled on an invisible rope, but then, without warning, it slid to a halt mid-air and hovered directly above where the hapless courier was still standing.

Danny’s worst fears had been confirmed: this
was
a trap. Glinka wasn’t there. The meeting between him and a terrorist cell had been fiction, nothing but bait, a ruse designed to lure Danny there and take him down.

None of which explained who the hell was up in that chopper now, of course. But Danny could hazard a guess. Had their situations been reversed and Danny had wanted someone captured, why risk doing it yourself?

Glinka had instead simply tipped off intelligence – either UK or US – to let them know that Danny might be there and at what time.

A wail of distortion and feedback. Inside the chopper, a loudhailer barked orders. Danny could make out two silhouettes positioned in its open doors – snipers, both holding rifles.

The courier was looking desperately around him, one arm flailing, the other clutching the parcel for dear life. For a terrible moment, Danny feared that the clearly terrified civilian would do something foolish, such as try to run. If he did, he would die.

Whoever the guys hovering above him were, their assumption would be that the courier was a pro, the same as themselves, and if he did run, it wouldn’t be through panic, but through intent, because he was planning on either evading or in some way fighting back. Any sign of resistance to their will, and they’d use lethal force. That blood would be on Danny, too, for having brought the courier into this arena to begin with.

He willed the man to stay the hell where he was.

And the courier did. He controlled his panic. Instead he did what he was being ordered to do. He put the parcel on the ground, stepped away from it and lay face down, spread-eagled.

Danny didn’t move. Not only might whoever was in that chopper see him if he did, but he could now safely assume that the whole area would be under geostationary satellite surveillance. Any organization that commanded sufficient tactical resources to scramble a Dauphin helicopter into view would manage that too, no sweat. Danny just prayed that the tangle of garbage camouflaging him would be enough, and thanked God he was far enough away from the rotors for it not to be blown clean away.

But the trap had not yet been fully sprung. Several sleek black Mercs emerged from other buildings, rushing in, blocking off the roads and alleyways to the north and south.

Their doors swung open, disgorging into the alleyways a number of men and women wearing civilian clothing – T-shirts, jeans, shades and caps. Weapons already drawn, they moved swiftly into a containment pattern, closing in on and then around the hapless courier, like a net, until he was completely surrounded, by men either crouching or standing, legs planted firmly apart, all adopting a firing stance, each ready to shoot.

The courier clasped his head with both hands. The operatives around him divided into two smaller groups, one tightening the circle they formed around him, like a noose round a condemned man’s neck, the others turning their attention to the parcel he had put on the ground.

Something struck Danny hard then about one of the men now pressing a gun to the back of the courier’s head. There was something familiar about his gait as he’d moved, something about his current stance . . .

He didn’t need his binoculars to know that he’d met the bastard.

His mind lurched back to his daughter’s school. After he’d been set up for the massacre in London and publicly identified, he’d known that British intelligence would go after Lexie to use her against him. But as he’d fled with her through her school grounds in an attempt to outrun the intelligence agents who’d been in pursuit, two had caught up with them. Danny had taken one down easily, but the other had fought. He and Lexie had been lucky to escape with their lives.

And, staring down at the heavily muscled, black-haired agent now straddling the courier and pressing a pistol to the back of his head, Danny didn’t need to see his eyes to know with absolute certainty that this was the same man.

He was dead certain of something else too. Mixed with the blood lust in the agent’s eyes, there would now be a vicious, overwhelming thirst for revenge. The second he turned the prostrate courier’s head around to face him, and saw that he was not Danny Shanklin, he would rip the place apart.

He’d have the whole docks searched inch by inch, until it was Danny whose skull that pistol barrel was jammed against.

‘Well, screw you,’ Danny said, switching one of the squares on his phone’s display screen from yellow to red.

The first of the bombs he’d set when he’d first brokem into the docks exploded with a deafening roar that drowned even the noise of the chopper and the screaming agents below.

The two groups of agents on the ground broke apart, some remaining close to the courier and the parcel, others turning away, fanning out, covering the approaches, trying to work out where the new threat had come from, and whether it was just the beginning of a wider attack that would now close in and centre on them.

The chopper had reacted too, rising rapidly, attempting to gain a wider perspective from which it could assess what was happening. It turned now to face the direction the explosion had come from – a hundred metres east – where a thin plume of white smoke was now rising into the sky.