Blood Hunt (24 page)

“Drop the gun!”

A shouted command, the first words he’d heard for a while. It came from the trees. Reeve, standing next to the cottage window, knew he hadn’t a chance. He pitched the automatic pistol in front of him. It landed maybe six feet away. Near enough for him to make a dive to retrieve it… if there was anything to shoot at. But all he could see were the trees, and the halogen lamps pointing at him from high up in the oaks. Great security, he thought—works a treat. And then a man walked out from the line of trees and came towards him. The man was carrying a pistol identical to the one on the ground. He carried it very steadily. Reeve tried to place the accent. American, he thought. The man wasn’t saying anything more though. He wanted to get close to Reeve, close to the man who had slaughtered his comrade. Reeve could feel the blood drying on his hands and wrists, dripping off his forearms. I must look like a butcher, he thought.

The man kept looking at those hands, too, fascinated by the blood. He gestured with the pistol, and Reeve raised his hands. The man stooped to retrieve the other automatic, and Reeve swung an elbow back into the window, smashing the glass. The man stood up quickly, but Reeve stood stock-still. The man grinned.

“You were going to jump through the window?” he said. Definitely American. “What, you think I couldn’t‘ve hit you? You think maybe the telephone’s working? You were going to call for help?” He seemed very amused by all these suggestions. He was still advancing on Reeve, no more than three feet from him. Reeve had his hands held up high now. He’d cut his elbow on the glass. His own blood was trickling down one arm and into his armpit.

The man held his gun arm out straight, execution-style, the way he’d maybe seen it done on the Vietnam newsreels. Then he heard the noise. He couldn’t place it at first. It sounded motor-ized, definitely getting closer.

Reeve dived to his right as Foucault flew out through the window, sinking his jaws into the man’s face. The force of the dog knocked him flat on his back, the dog covering his whole upper body. Reeve didn’t hang around to watch. He snatched up the pistol and ran back towards the track. A few hundred yards would take him to the cars. He heard another vehicle in the distance, something bigger than a car. Maybe it’s the cavalry, he thought, someone from the farm.

But now there was another whistled command. Three low and long, two higher and shorter. Repeated five or six times. Reeve kept on moving forwards. Van doors closing. Engine revving. As he turned a bend he saw the car he’d smashed into and his own vehicle. He couldn’t see anybody lying under the Land Rover, and there was nobody in the smashed car.

There was a sudden explosion. It threw him backwards off his feet. He landed heavily but got up quickly, winded but still aiming his pistol at whatever the hell had happened. His Land Rover was in flames. Had they booby-trapped it maybe? Then he saw what they’d done. They were disabling it—that was all—so it would be here when the police arrived. The police would find evidence of a firefight, maybe bodies, certainly blood, and a missing journalist. They would also find a British car… a car belonging to Gordon Reeve.

“Sons of bitches,” Reeve whispered. He moved past the burning wreckage and saw that the front car had gone, along with whatever vehicle had turned up towards the end. He kept hearing that whistled command. It sounded like the opening of a tune he recognized… a tune he didn’t want to recognize. Five beats. Dahh, dahh, dahh, da-da. It was the opening to “Row, row, row your boat.” No, he was imagining it; it could have been another song, could have been random.

He wondered about checking the woods for Marie Villambard’s body. Maybe she was alive, maybe they’d taken her with them. Or she was lying somewhere in the woods, and very dead. Either way, he couldn’t hope to help. So he set off the other way until he recovered his bag. He had a landmark this time though. The corpse with the cut throat was still lying slumped on the ground.

Row, row, row your boat. He detested that song, with good reason.

Then he froze, remembering the scene outside the crematorium in San Diego: the cars turning up for the next service, and a face turning away from him, a face he’d thought was a ghost’s.

Jay.

It couldn’t be Jay. It couldn’t be. Jay was dead. Jay wasn’t alive and breathing anywhere on this planet…

It was Jay. That was the only thing, crazy as it seemed, that made sense.

It was Jay.

Reeve was shaking again as he headed back to the cottage. There was a body cooling on the ground next to the window, but no sign of Foucault. Reeve looked into Marie Villambard’s Xantia and saw that the keys were in the ignition. Car theft probably hadn’t been a problem around here. Nor had warfare and murder, until tonight. He got in and shut the door. He was turning the key when a vast bloodied figure pounced onto the hood, its face framed by pink froth, growling and snarling.

“Got a taste for it, huh?” Reeve said, starting the engine, ignoring the dog. He revved up hard and started off, throwing Foucault to the ground. He watched in the rearview, but the dog didn’t follow. It just shook itself off and headed back towards the cottage and what was left of its supper.

Reeve edged the Citroën past the two wrecked, smoldering cars. There was black smoke in the night sky. Surely somebody would see that. He scraped the Xantia against tree bark and blistered metal, but managed to squeeze past and back onto the road. He allowed himself a cold glint of a smile. His SAS training told him never to leave traces. When you were on a deep infiltration mission, you’d even shit into plastic bags and carry them with you. You left nothing behind. Well, he was leaving plenty this mission: at least two corpses, and a burned-out Land Rover with British plates. He was going to be leaving a stolen car somewhere, too, with blood on its steering wheel. And these, it seemed to him, were the very least of his problems.

The very, very least.

He drove north, heading away from a horror he knew would surely follow.

His arms and shoulders began to ache, and he realized how tense he was, leaning into the steering wheel as if the devil himself were behind him. He stopped only for gas and to buy cans of caffeinated soft drinks, using them to wash down more caffeine tablets. He tried to act normally. In no way could he be said to resemble a tourist, so he decided he was a businessman, fatigued and stressed-out after a long sales trip, going home thankfully. He even got a tie out of his bag, letting it hang loosely knotted around his throat. He examined himself in the mirror. It would have to do. Of course, the driver of a French car should be French, too, so he tried not to say anything to anyone. At the gas stations he kept to bonsoir and merci; ditto at the various péage booths.

Heading for Paris, he caught sight of signs for Orly. He knew either airport, Orly or Charles de Gaulle, would do. He was going to ditch the car. He figured the ports might be on the lookout for a stolen Xantia. And if the authorities weren’t checking the ports, he reckoned his attackers almost certainly were. In which case they’d be checking the airports, too. But he had a better chance of going undetected on foot.

He drove into an all-night parking garage at Orly. It was a multistory, and he took the Xantia to the top deck. There were only two other cars up here, both looking like long-stayers or cars which had been ditched. The Xantia would be company for them. But first of all he knew he needed sleep—his brain and body needed rest. He could sleep in the terminal maybe, but would be easy meat there. He reckoned there’d be no planes out till morning, and it wasn’t nearly light yet. He wound the car windows open a couple of inches to help him hear approaching vehicles or footsteps. Then he laid his head back and closed his eyes…

He had a dream he’d had before. Argentina. Grassland and mountain slopes. Insects and a constant sea breeze. Two canoes paddling for shore. In the dream, they paddled in daylight, but really they’d come ashore in the middle of the night, faces painted. Supposedly in silence, until Jay had started singing…

The same song he’d sung when they landed on the Falklands only a week before, taken ashore by boat on that occasion. Splash-ing onto the beach, meeting no resistance. And Jay humming the tune he’d been ordered to stop singing.

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

A dream? More like a nightmare when Jay was around. He was supposed to be a good soldier, but he was a firing pin short of a grenade, and just as temperamental.

Just as lethal.

They’d sent for them after that firefight in the Falklands. They wanted to mount a two-man mission, deep surveillance. They were briefed onboard HMS Hermes. Their mission would be to keep watch on Argentinian aircraft flying out of Rio Grande. (Reeve was told only afterwards that another two-man unit was given the same brief with a different location: Rio Gallegos.) Nobody mentioned the words suicide mission, but the odds on coming back alive weren’t great. For a start, the Argentinians on the Falklands had been equipped with direction-finding equipment and thermal imagers; there was little to show that the same equipment wouldn’t be available on the mainland.

Therefore, their radio signals out would be monitored and traced. Meaning they would have to stay mobile. But mobility itself was hazardous, and the possibility of thermal imagers meant they wouldn’t even be able to rest at night. Getting in would be easy, getting out a nightmare.

Jay only demurred when his request for a few Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles was rejected out of hand.

“You’re going in there to watch, not to fight. Leave the fighting to others.”

Which was just what Jay didn’t want to hear.

Row, row, row your boat…

And in the dream that’s what they did, with a line of men waiting for them on the beach. For some reason, the men couldn’t locate them, though Reeve could see them clearly enough. But Jay’s singing got louder and louder, and it was only a matter of time before the firing squad by the water’s edge let loose at them.

Row, row, row your boat…

Reeve woke up in a sweat. Christ… And the true horror was that the reality had been so much worse than the dream, so awful that when he’d finally made it back to Hermes they’d refused to believe his version. They’d told him he must be hallucinating. Doctors told him shock could do that. And the more they denied the truth, the angrier he got, until that pink haze descended for the first time in his life and then lifted again, and a doctor and two orderlies were lying unconscious on the floor in front of him.

He sensed movement, something low to the ground and in shadow, over beside one of the other cars. He turned his headlights on and picked out a thin, hungry-looking fox. A fox scavenging on the top floor of a multistory parking garage. What was wrong with the fields? Had things got so bad for the foxes that they were moving into high-rises? Well, Reeve could talk: he was hiding in a garage. Hiding because he was being hunted. Right now, he was being hunted by the bad guys; but all too soon the good guys—the so-called forces of law and order—would be hunting him, too. He turned off the headlights and got out of the car to exercise. Sit-ups and push-ups, plus some calisthenics. Then he looked in his traveling bag. He didn’t have much left in the way of clean clothes. At the first service station on the route he had scrubbed away the blood. There were dried stains on his sweater, but his white shirt was still clean. He was wearing it now. He’d tried cleaning his shoes, not very successfully. They looked like he’d been playing football in them.

In his bag he found Lucky 13. The dagger was a problem. He knew he couldn’t hope to get it past airport security. It would have to stay here. But it was a murder weapon; he didn’t want it found. He walked with the dagger over to the elevator, and pressed the button for it to ascend. Then he wiped the dagger with his handkerchief, rubbing off fingerprints, and held it with the handkerchief. When the elevator arrived, he leaned in, pressed the button for the floor below, and stepped out again as the doors were closing. He slipped the blade of the dagger into the gap between the doors and, as soon as the elevator started to descend, used the blade to prize open the doors a couple of inches. Then he simply pushed the hilt and handle through the gap and let the dagger fall onto the roof of the elevator, where it could lie until maintenance found it—always supposing these elevators had any maintenance.

It was still early, so he sat in the car for a while. Then he got out and went over to the far wall, and leaned out so he could see the terminal building. There were two terminals, separated by a monorail, but this was the one he wanted, and he could walk to it. There were bright lights inside, and movement, taxis pulling up—the start of another day. He hadn’t heard any flights leave in the past half hour, excepting a few light aircraft. But they would start leaving soon. During the night some larger planes had landed. At that hour, they had to be package operators or cargo.

Reeve made a final check on the contents of his bag, finding nothing immediately incriminating or suspicious. So he walked through the cool morning air towards the terminal building. He was starving, so he bought coffee and a sandwich first thing. He slung the bag over his shoulder so he could eat and drink as he walked. He walked among businessmen, all looking bleary-eyed and regretful, like they’d spent the previous night being unfaithful. He’d bet none of them had spent a night like his, but at least he was blending in better than expected. Just another disheveled traveler up too early.

He felt a little more confident as he walked to the desk to buy a ticket. He just hoped they’d have a ticket to spare. They did, but the saleswoman warned him he’d have to pay full business rate.

“That’s fine,” he said, sliding over his credit card. He was running up a huge bill on the card, but what did that matter when he might not be around come time to pay? Intimations of mortality bred a certain recklessness. Better financial recklessness than any other kind. He waited while the deal was done, looking for recognition in the woman’s eyes as she took details of his name from his passport. But there was no recognition; the police weren’t on to him yet. She handed back the passport and credit card, and then his ticket and boarding pass. Reeve thanked her and turned away.