Wanted (29 page)

Five minutes passed – long enough for him to be sick of talking to someone on the phone who wasn’t there, and to be considering some other ruse to justify his lurking around – but then he saw the front door to the mansion block opening. He moved in quickly, almost walking slap-bang into the pretty young woman who was stepping out.

‘Yeah, I’m here right now,’ he said into his phone, plenty loud enough for her to hear, slipping her a friendly smile as he did. ‘No, no need, Matt. One of your neighbours is just coming out. I’ll see you in two secs.’ He switched off his phone and stepped aside, holding the door open for the woman. ‘Hi, I’m a friend of Matt’s,’ he said. ‘Matt Banks, your neighbour.’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’

She headed off into the night without a backwards glance. Danny moved inside. The door shut behind him and clicked as its lock sank home. Pulling on his gloves, he hurried up the stairs.

Flat four, he quickly discovered, was on the second floor. There was a dull throb of bass coming from the doorway to flat three on the opposite side of the landing. That would be the street-side window where he had seen the couple smoking.

He slipped off his glasses and tucked them inside his bag. He checked a third doorway at the end of the corridor, next to more stairs leading up. He ran a palm-sized metal detector round its door frame, checking for sensors, but it wasn’t alarmed. He pushed the door’s bar open to check it wasn’t locked and stepped outside. Outside was a fire exit, a zigzag of metal steps leading up and down. At the back of the building there was a communal bin area, and a high wooden fence with a small door set into it. Beyond was an alleyway, an easy exit.

He shut the door and hurried to flat four. Again, he scanned for sensors, and again nothing showed, which surprised him. If there wasn’t an alarm on, did that mean someone was in?

He pressed the same small plastic amplifier he’d used in Pripyat against the door. Its needle picked up nothing, not so much as the squeak of a mouse. Which indicated that the flat was empty, but in no way proved it.

It was possible, of course, that his metal detector had missed any alarm sensors on the other side of the door because they’d been positioned too far back or fixed on the other side of the thick walls.

If it turned out the place was alarmed, then he’d need to act fast. Good news on the bass-heavy party next door, then. It might buy him a little extra time to shut the alarm off if it had a siren. It might be wired direct to the cops too, but somehow he doubted it. The last thing the Kid would want was law-enforcement turning up here and snooping around, if the alarm was triggered accidentally.

Danny took out his lock-buster, waited for a fresh tune to start up in the apartment next door, then made his move. A twist. Then another. A familiar kick, bark and whirr.

He was in.

Inside it was twilight, the kind of twilight that exists in every home in every city, where the light pollution of your fellow citizens and the sense of being a tiny part of something far greater is never far away. Danny eased the door shut behind him.

He was in a small, tiled entrance hall. Straight ahead an open doorway led to a kitchen. The pale orange light of a streetlamp outside glowed through the plain white curtains there, while in the hallway, two other open doorways led off to the left and the right.

Danny took out a long-handled South African police flashlight that doubled in terms of weight and size as a cosh. He turned and checked the front door behind him and the surrounding area for alarms.

And found one on the wall to the left of the front door. Its illuminated indicator buttons clearly showed that it had not been triggered or even set. Which meant
what?
Had the Kid forgotten to set it? Or just left in a rush?

The stink in the kitchen, as Danny crossed the hallway and entered, indicated the latter. He swept his flashlight beam round the room. An open cardboard pizza box stood on the sideboard, a half-eaten pizza inside, looking like a mouldy jigsaw. There was a half-empty bottle of chocolate milk too. And, of course, a doughnut box. Empty. The whole flat smelt of cigarettes. Marlboros. The Kid’s.

OK, let’s get on with it.

He searched all the normal places first – the writing desk in the living room, the bedside drawers: places where normal people left important stuff. But there was nothing in any of them except dust. No big surprise there. The Kid wasn’t exactly normal. So he tried the obvious places – obvious, that was, in terms of places someone with training like the Kid might choose to conceal items he did not want to be found.

First the kitchen. A refrigerator hummed. He checked the freezer compartment, slashing through the frozen vegetable packets he found there and upending them into the sink. There was a big chest freezer too, up against the wall by the long dining-room table. Danny peered inside, but it was empty, apart from a couple of frozen ready meals. Trust the Kid to have two freezers, he thought. Food, even more than money and women, had always been his obsession.

He checked under the sink, in the overflow, then searched in and beneath every drawer. Down on his knees, he crabbed across the wooden floor, expertly feeling for loose boards. He checked the tops of the units next, then behind, beneath and inside the appliances.

Nothing.

Half the problem, of course, was that he didn’t know precisely what he was looking for – just something,
anything,
that might help him hunt the Kid down. It might be paperwork connecting the Kid to an alias he might now be operating under, or bills for a property he owned abroad. Or a mobile-phone bill, or a USB, or anything else that might contain data Danny could get one of Spartak’s contacts to unravel.

He moved to the bathroom next. It was all but bare. He checked inside the cistern, but got nothing. He tried the back of the boiler too, but pulled up zip.

Next was the living room. A lamp had been left on in there. He switched it off, wary of shadows being thrown up against the curtains, betraying his presence to anyone who might be observing from outside on the street.

The room was carpeted so he set about working its borders first, seeing if any of the carpet was loose or not tacked down properly, where it might have been prised open to conceal documents.

As he knelt there with his back to the doorway, methodically working, he didn’t see or hear his attacker. He
felt
them. A tiny shift in the air pressure to his right. Enough to alert him that he was no longer alone.

Enough to make him react.

Someone tried to grab Danny, but he moved too fast. A knife blade slashed past, glinting in the twilight, barely inches from his face.

He crash-rolled left, glimpsing a blackened figure. Whoever had tried to slit his throat had clearly planned on grabbing him and keeping hold of him too, maybe breaking his neck or, at the very least, throttling him as he weakened and bled out.

Danny was already rising, turning, flexing, loading muscle tension into his legs. No time for defence. No time to pull out his Glock 30 either. This man wanted him dead. He had to neutralize him.

He struck out hard. A left hammer-fist. A body blow. Enough to drive the attacker back and maybe, he hoped, even smash the air clean out of his lungs.

Only Danny didn’t just drive him back, he knocked him clean over. Whoever he was, he was lighter than Danny had expected for an opponent of such height.

It threw his whole attack sequence out of whack. He’d stepped forward, expecting his attacker to be upright and within easy reach. He’d brought his heavy torch arcing round like a bull whip, intending to crack the other’s skull. His arm tore instead through the empty space left by his fallen opponent. His momentum dragged his whole body pivoting round, throwing him temporarily off-balance and tossing a lifeline to the assailant.

Danny felt his legs swept from beneath him. The flashlight slipped from his grip and thudded onto the floor. As he fell, an elbow smashed hard and fast into his face. A flash of red pain. A cracking sound. His nose?

Blood cascaded into Danny’s mouth, as he twisted out from beneath his attacker’s outstretched leg, desperate to avoid getting trapped in a foot or body lock.

He searched frantically through the gloom. Did the guy still have the knife? Or had he dropped it?

Movement in his peripheral vision. Enough for him to locate the man: back and to his right. Face down, he pressed his palms flat against the floor, his whole body flexing as he kicked out. He got lucky. His right heel slammed full force into his opponent, throwing the other backwards with a cry of pain.

Stumbling. A gasp. A retching sound. Had Danny’s foot somehow hit the solar plexus, the target his fist had earlier failed to find? It sure as hell sounded that way.

Danny grimaced, rising, wheeling round, left arm up to parry a second thrust from the knife.

There, in the twilight, he saw his opponent, already half upright, but unsteady, not poised. And with nothing in his hands. No knife. Danny stepped in, intent on grappling the man, or throwing him hard to the floor. But instead of them closing, as Danny had expected, the other lurched sideways, deliberately throwing himself to the floor, stretching out an arm as he did so.

Danny saw why. The knife was illuminated in the shaft of white light stamped across the carpet by Danny’s flashlight. But his attacker’s reach came up short by nearly two feet. Wheezing, the man rolled left then right once more on his back, to gather momentum, and stretched out in a desperate attempt to snatch up the blade.

The delay was all Danny had needed. He stepped back, planted his feet apart in a shooting stance, slipped his Glock 30 from its holster and brought it round in a double-fisted grip.

Click.

Just as his attacker’s fingers brushed against the glinting blade, Danny flicked the safety off his pistol and locked his aim. A single tap of the trigger. That was all it would take. A head shot. A double tap. He would not miss. But the click of the safety had been warning enough. His attacker had frozen.

A pro, then.

‘Move your hand back. Do it slowly,’ Danny said. His voice sounded all wrong, not just because he was panting but because of the blood still pouring from his nose into his mouth.

A moment’s hesitation from the other. A wheeze of pain and frustration. Then his attacker obeyed, withdrawing his hand from the blade and slowly turning his balaclava-covered face towards Danny, his entire body quivering now. From adrenalin? Fear? With resignation? Probably all three.

Danny sucked air into his lungs, swallowing blood. ‘Roll slowly onto your front. Hands behind your back,’ he said, stepping away, his flashlight beam illuminating his attacker.

Black jeans. A tight black leather jacket. Black running shoes. Whoever this was, they clearly weren’t working for Benetton.

Whoever this was also knew the drill. As he turned face down onto the floor, he clasped his leather-gloved hands behind his neck.

‘Are you wired?’ Danny said.

‘No.’ The word came out as a rasp.

‘If I find out you’re lying, I’m going to shoot you in the back of the head.’ He had the Taser holstered across his chest, but elected not to use it. He needed the man alert, not groggy, so that he could question him fast. Keeping his pistol trained, he took an industrial cord-tie from his jacket pocket and dropped it on the carpet two feet in front of his captive’s head.

‘Slowly bring your hands forward. Locate the cord-tie on the floor. Put your hands through it. Then use your teeth to pull it tight.’

He did as he was told, his breathing finally slowing. Maybe because he’d realized that what had seemed impossible only seconds before was now about to happen: Danny might not be about to execute him.
Not yet.

Making sure to keep out of reach of those legs, and knowing it was just as easy to strangle someone with your hands tied together as it was with a rope, Danny edged carefully around his fallen attacker’s body. He took another cord-tie from his pocket, knelt and noosed the ankles together.

Pressing the pistol to the back of the man’s head, he quickly frisked him for weapons, comms and ID, paranoia making him picture scores of intelligence agents surrounding the building, and even now creeping stealthily up the stairs.

He found nothing. Nothing that indicated the guy was working as part of a team. Nothing that told him who he was or why he was there. His body shape, though . . . that came as a shock. Sleek, lithe and curved. Not what Danny had expected at all.

Rising, he circled round in to the man’s head, again keeping well out of reach, and picked up the flashlight. Bright blue eyes shone back at him from the balaclava’s eye holes. A curl of long eyelashes showed at a blink.

The truth hit Danny, like a brick to the back of the skull: the person who’d come here to kill him was a woman.

He thought of
her
straight away: the
blonde.
Glinka’s woman. He remembered the first time he’d met her, when she’d searched him for hidden comms before the meeting at the Ritz Hotel.

She was late twenties with short blonde hair, tall and athletic-looking. And pretty. In spite of the loathing he felt for her now, he remembered that. He recalled other details too. That she’d had a tiny green rose tattooed on her wrist. That she’d worn no make-up, and that her skin had been as pale as a corpse’s.

The blue eyes Danny was staring at now had no make-up around them. This woman’s height and build looked perfect too. Was it Glinka’s woman?
Had
the Kid’s sister tipped him off about his visit? Had the Kid then chosen the blonde as the instrument of Danny’s doom?

She cried out and grimaced in pain as, without warning, he stepped on her tied hands and trod down as hard as he could.

Crouching, keeping his weight pressed on her, his skin prickled electrically with the buzz of adrenalin, as he watched her squirm. Leaning in, he tore the balaclava from her head, and jammed the pistol’s sound suppressor directly into her right eye socket.