Hostage

Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2013

ISBN 9781908917591

Copyright © Emlyn Rees 2013

The right of Emlyn Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan, CF46 6RY.

The Quick Reads project in Wales is an initiative coordinated by the Welsh Books Council and supported by the Welsh Government.

Printed and bound in the UK

Cover design by The Design House

Hostage

Emlyn Rees

ACCENT PRESS LTD

Author's Note

The action in this story takes place four years before Danny Shanklin finds himself on the run from 44,000 cops, nine intelligence agencies, and dozens of TV news channels in the full-length novel
Hunted
, which is available now in paperback and as an eBook.

Chapter One

Casper, Wyoming, USA

30th November, 4.50 p.m., North American Mountain Time

Sacrificing someone evil to save the life of someone good had never been a tough choice for Danny Shanklin. Black and white. That was how the world worked. The only choice anyone really had to make was which side they were on.

Shanklin hoped no one would end up dead tonight, but if someone did, his job was to make sure it wasn't his client's wife, Mary Watts. Or himself.

Shanklin was in a taxi, crossing Richards bridge, the arched steel structure which spanned the churning grey guts of the North Platte river. His dark brown eyes stared across the ravine. Old eyes in a young face. Watchful eyes that missed nothing.

Shanklin's stomach growled with hunger. He'd failed to eat lunch. Too busy staring at the phone in his hotel room, willing it to ring. The club sandwich he'd ordered from room service had been so dry by the time he'd taken a bite that it had tasted like Styrofoam. He'd left it on the bedside table, next to an empty packet of painkillers and a half-drunk bottle of Coke.

‘Strange place to visit this time of day,' the taxi driver said. ‘It'll be dark in half an hour.'

Shanklin didn't answer. Up ahead, the State Veterans' Cemetery loomed into view. Rows of cold white tombstones protruded from the barren ground like teeth. The sun had already set. In less than half an hour, it would be dark.

‘You here to pay your respects to the dead?' the driver said, glancing in the rear view mirror at Shanklin's conservative grey business suit.

‘Something like that.' Shanklin's voice was gentle, but precise, like a school teacher's. Its accent was East Coast. Well-travelled.

He didn't look at the driver as he spoke. Didn't need to. He'd already made up his mind about him.

The taxi was a black Ford Crown Victoria Sedan. An ex-Police Interceptor, Shanklin reckoned, converted for civilian use. It smelt of fried chicken and root beer. Stuck to the dash was a Polaroid of two teenage girls. A torn strip of tape beside it showed where another photo had been ripped off. The fifty-year-old driver, weighing about two hundred and thirty pounds, had bloodshot eyes from working too many nights. His greying hair was unkempt. Black dirt rimmed his chewed-down nails.

Shanklin already had him down as a family guy. Possibly a retired cop. Recently divorced. Living alone. With alimony to pay.

Not in on the kidnap, in other words. Just someone the kidnappers had plucked from the phone book and told to fetch Shanklin from the Colonial Inn over on College Drive, where Shanklin had been waiting for them to contact him since he'd driven into town last night.

The taxi pulled over into the deserted cemetery lot. The wind howled, buffeting the windows, gently rocking the car like a paper boat on a pond.

Shanklin slowly ran his tongue across his dry lips, like he was tasting the air. An ancient dread was rising inside him. The fear that today might be the day when he didn't make it back. A day that reminded him of the woods where he'd grown up, and where a part of him had many years later been left dead the day his wife and only son had been tortured there and killed.

Sally and Jonathan. Their names opened inside his mind like beautiful butterflies spreading their wings. For a moment, here in the twilight of the cab, in Danny's mind's eye, they flew and Danny wanted to rise up with them, to travel far from here. But most of all he wanted to be near them again.

But then the vision darkened. The wings of the two butterflies crumpled and blackened, like torn strips of newspaper cast onto a fire. And Danny remembered them then as they had been when he had last seen them.

He remembered paper and stone and scissors. He remembered what that animal had done.

The Paper Stone Scissors Killer. That was the name the TV and newspapers had given to the murderer of Danny's wife and son, after the details of the ordeal they'd each suffered before being executed had been released to the police.

He'd made them play the childhood game of 'paper, stone, scissors'. He'd made them play it for their lives, until both of them had lost.

The serial killer had wanted Danny to play too, because he'd wanted to kill him also, but Danny had escaped. He'd escaped and had saved his daughter, Lexie. He'd not failed her, at least.

Lexie …

Danny remembered now how she'd watched in open-mouthed horror that grim morning, as he and the Paper Stone Scissors Killer had fought in the woods in the snow. Danny would never forget Lexie's screams and the swirl of fresh snowflakes and the spattering of his blood upon the ground.

And Danny would always remember the killer running. Danny had already disarmed him. He'd taken his pistol from him. He'd aimed at the killer as he'd run off into the woods, becoming a blur, moving so fast that Danny could hardly track him.

A squeeze of the trigger and Danny had watched the killer shift sideways and shudder, but somehow, impossibly, not fall. Danny remembered watching him start running again then, before finally fading into the gathering snow.

But most of all Danny remembered Sally and Jonathan. When his wife and son had needed him most, he had not saved them. He had failed to save them and because of that they had both died.

Again he saw his son, little Jonathan. He saw his eyes shining with fear and disbelief in those final seconds. Again he heard Sally's last, tortured breath.

Danny would never forget.

He would never forgive.

Here in the back of the cab, he cut the memories from his mind. Automatically. Like a computer firewall cut a virus. He threw them back down into the dark pit inside him where he locked away all the bad things that had happened to him.

‘It looks pretty cold out there …' the cab driver said.

‘No kidding,' Danny answered.

The skeletal poplar trees which studded the surrounding hillside were flicking back and forth like whips. Hard enough to flay the skin from your back.

Danny took a deep breath, like a kid standing at the side of swimming pool in winter time. He could still change his mind, he knew. He could tell the driver to take him back to the hotel. And from there to the airport. He could quit this life for something safer. It was always an option.

But instead he said nothing. The taxi engine idled.

‘You going to need a ride back?' the driver asked.

‘No.'

Danny slipped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth and started to chew. He was here by choice. By compulsion. To be tested once more. To test himself. But he'd been brought here by the needs and fears of other people. Weaker people than him. People he couldn't let down. People who'd paid him to take this risk.

He took the black leather attaché case from the seat beside him and got out and paid.

The icy Wyoming wind cut through his clothes, as he watched the Ford's red tail lights retreat across Richards bridge and follow the curve of Cemetery Road. Round to the right. Back into town.

The vents of Danny's suit jacket flapped like the wings of a bat. The suit wasn't Danny's usual look. The same went for his shirt, shoes and tie. He'd left his own tattered denim jacket hanging in the closet of his hotel room. With a note for Samantha tucked into its pocket. In case he didn't return.

Danny's eyes narrowed as he scanned the darkening scrubland for signs of life. Nothing moved.

Which didn't, of course, mean that no one was there.

With a world-weary shake of his head, Danny took off his clothes and stood naked with his hands in the air. Exactly as the kidnappers had instructed.

Inside the discarded suit jacket was a snakeskin wallet. In the wallet was a set of photo ID, showing Danny's face, someone else's name, and giving his profession as a lawyer with a firm in Washington DC.

Danny's body temperature was plummeting. He'd checked online before he'd left the hotel. Ice storms were forecast. The kind of weather that could kill a man. A buck-naked man even quicker.

He felt like a jerk. No doubt looked like one too. He hadn't even met the kidnappers yet, but already they were infuriating him.

They'd snatched Mary Watts three days ago from the parking lot outside her mother's nursing home in Atlanta, Georgia. No leads. No witnesses. The first indication that she'd gone missing had been when a letter listing the kidnappers' demands had been delivered by an anonymous courier to Ricky Watts's Washington office.

Ricky Watts had made the cover of
Fortune
magazine two years running. A real estate mogul. He'd been happily married to Mary for eight years. Didn't want to get rid of her. Or cash in on her. Danny knew. He'd checked.

The kidnappers had sent Ricky a photo of Mary stripped to her underwear, tied to a toilet with a gag in her mouth.

Every move they'd made had been efficient and ruthless. And Ricky Watts's response to their demands had been the same. He'd followed their instructions to the letter. He'd not involved the police or FBI. He'd agreed to pay ten million dollars in untraceable Venezuelan bearers' bonds. Not even the CIA could track those.

Smartest of all, he'd taken the advice of an ex-military buddy of his and had contacted Danny's new boss, Crane, who'd in turn contacted Danny and asked him to fetch Ricky Watts's wife back alive.

The money Watts was paying Danny for his services would be well spent. Danny's guiding instinct was to protect the bullied, the oppressed and the abused. He wasn't in it for the money. Never had been. Danny was here to make things right, to try and make it up to his wife and his son. He was trying to save other innocent people, because he had failed to save them.

Another cold blast of wind scoured his body. He chewed down harder on his wad of gum. He wished again that he'd eaten before coming here.

Chocolate. If he could have had anything right now, that's what he'd have chosen. He had a weakness for it. The sugar he'd once got from alcohol, he got from candy now. He'd had to stop drinking two years ago. If he'd carried on, he'd have been dead by now.

After Sally and Jonathan's deaths, once Danny had got out of hospital, after the police had failed to catch the Paper Stone Scissors Killer, Danny's whole life had fallen apart.

What had happened in the woods that day … he'd found no way to deal with it. A darkness had fallen on him and paralysed him. He'd been unable to shake it. It had seeped into him, had become a part of him. Time and time again, he'd wished himself dead.

His only glimmer of hope had been Lexie. Like a survivor from a shipwreck, he'd clung to his nine-year-old daughter as if she'd been a raft. As if she'd been the only thing he had left and the only thing that could keep him afloat.

He'd moved with her to California. He'd meant it to be a fresh start. But his drinking and the pills he'd got hooked on had gone with him. Then one day his mother-in-law had arrived from England and told him he was sick. She'd said she wanted to take Lexie back home with her, so that she could take care of her properly there.

And Danny had let her. The one thing he'd cared for, he'd let it be taken from him too. Because even in his boozed-up, drugged-up state, a part of him had known that his dead wife's mother was right. A part of him had known that if he'd kept clinging on to Lexie, then he'd have taken her down with him too.

Here in the cemetery parking lot, Danny flexed his toes. His feet felt like slabs of ice.

Lexie was twelve now and was still in London. Since Danny had got sober, he'd started writing her letters, but she never replied. He'd visited her too, but it had always been awkward. Sometimes she'd look at him as if she didn't know him. Other times she seemed to look through him as if he wasn't even there, or was nothing but the ghost of someone that she used to know.

A good friend of Danny's by the name of Tony Strinatti had died a few months back. Danny and Tony had met while working for the CIA's Special Activities Division. In his will, Tony had left Danny a houseboat on Regent's Canal in London. It was near where Lexie lived and went to school and Danny was planning on staying there as often as he could.

Lexie was still his hope. A shining beacon. And more than anything now, he wanted her back. He wished he'd never pushed her away.

Concentrate, a voice inside his mind told him. Focus on the present, on what you're doing now, or it might cost you your life.

Danny gazed across the cemetery gravestones once more and wondered whether the kidnappers had made up their minds about him yet. Because if they left him standing here much longer, they were going to need a blowtorch to thaw him out.