Hostage (2 page)

Chapter Two

Casper, Wyoming, USA

30th November, 5.09 p.m., North American Mountain Time

Danny stood like the last leaf left on an autumnal branch, shaking in the howling wind. The moon wouldn't be up for another six hours. Patches of starlight glimmered between thickening banks of black cloud. Darkness was closing in.

His jaw kept working, chewing the gum. Each chew represented a passing second. One thousand, one hundred and forty since he'd stepped out of the taxi. Nineteen minutes and counting.

Danny played a game with the numbers. He tried picturing each one that passed through his mind as a different colour. First red, then blue, then orange, then green. Always in that order. It kept him focussed and alert and it stopped his mind from wandering.

Because in a situation like this, when you were waiting for an aggressor to call the shots, the worst thing you could do was to fixate on what might be coming next, or how and when they might finally make their move.

Fretting got you nowhere. It just used up energy. The plain truth was that Danny had no way of knowing how the kidnappers would play this. He'd just have to rely on his reactions and his training when they did.

That and preparation, of course. Because, above all else, Danny believed in the old saying that most battles were either won or lost before they'd even started. And he'd already done everything in his power to get ready for what might happen next.

Keep breathing … Nice and steady … In and out, he told himself.

His hands had tightened into fists. The three-quarter stumps of two of his fingers could not be seen. And yet like so many times before when he'd found himself in danger, he swore he could still feel them, even though he'd forever vividly remember the electrifying pain of them being lopped off.

Concentrate … Keep counting …

The kidnappers would almost certainly be locked onto him by now. They'd be watching him through thermal-imagining binoculars. Or a night-sight. From somewhere safe. Embedded. Somewhere they could slip away from easily if they sensed a trap, or didn't like the way Danny looked.

Just count, Danny told himself, trying not to shudder, attempting to block the cold from his mind. Make each colour a number … First red, then blue, then orange, then green …

If the kidnappers were watching Danny right now, what they would see was this. Danny Shanklin was five foot ten. Mid-thirties. Slim. With a crooked nose and sharp, angular features, which left him looking more hawkish than handsome. He was clean-shaven and bespectacled. Smooth-skinned. With a tan. His light brown hair was short and neatly cut. A mesh of ancient, childhood scar tissue showed at the back of his neck. Too neat to be accidental.

Normally, his jaw was rough with stubble and the only glasses he needed were shades to protect his eyes from the sun. His hair usually hung down past the nape of his neck and he had to wear a baseball cap just to keep his straggly fringe from getting in his eyes.

Normally, he also kept the scar tissue on the back of his neck hidden by growing his hair over it. Likewise, he preferred to keep the deep pale scar on his right thigh concealed. This was the one the Paper Stone Scissors Killer had given him on the same day he'd torn Danny's family apart.

But Danny had got himself smartened up two days ago. Pimped. Just for them, the kidnappers. So that he now looked exactly like the kind of man they were expecting to deliver their ransom. A smart, big-city lawyer.

Inspecting him now, they might also notice, however, that Danny was surprisingly toned for a desk jockey. Lithe and muscular. In all probability, they'd mark him down as one of those spoilt yuppie types with a personal trainer. Either that, or a fag.

Whichever, Danny looked like he could jog better than punch. Not much of a threat to anyone. Least of all them.

Other aspects of Danny they'd miss entirely. Like the fact that his nose was crooked, not as a result of some genetic kink, but because it had been badly broken twice in the last five years.

And they'd certainly miss the tiny tattoo beneath the heel of his left foot. An intricate depiction of a dragon devouring its own tail, which Danny had inked himself during a temporary incarceration in a Columbian jail in 1994.

Danny kept chewing. Another thirty seconds had passed. Nineteen and a half minutes in total.

Not good news for Mary, he was thinking. Because the longer the kidnappers failed to make contact, the greater the chances of them carrying out their threats. And what they'd informed Ricky Watts they'd do to his wife if their demands weren't met was this:

… film her rape and torture. Shoot her in the stomach. Film her slow death. Post the footage on the internet …

They'd told Watts to tell his lawyer to check into Room 12 at the Colonial Inn, where a car would then pick him up. The lawyer was to strip off his clothes at whatever location the car dropped him off.

All of which Danny had done. To the letter. He could think of no way they might have yet guessed that he wasn't really a lawyer.

The kidnappers had also specified the exact model of the blast-proof attaché case the bearers' bonds were to be carried in. A Toritech Slim-1. But they'd left no instruction for the case to be opened for inspection.

Which was remarkable, Danny considered, staring down at it now, seeing as how the attaché case was big enough to hold weapons, explosives and tracking devices.

All of which meant, he figured, that what the kidnappers were doing now – making him stand here naked – had nothing to do with checking him for weapons, wires, or GPS.

This was all about manipulation and domination.

Headgames.

Tell the monkey to jump. If it obeyed now, the chances were it would jump again when you told it to later. Humiliating Danny like this was designed to make him easy to control. The same as using female prison guards for male political prisoners and suspected terrorists. The best way to get them to crack was for female guards to strip them and shame them. Embarrass them. Make them feel like children Make them believe they were weak.

These kidnappers were copying this exact same tactic. They were proving to the supposed big city lawyer just how weak he really was. And how out of his depth. So he'd be even more likely to do precisely what they said.

It was a smart tactic. And if their positions had been reversed, Danny might have done exactly the same.

He felt his muscles beginning to spasm. The last time he'd been this cold, he'd been diving in the Norwegian fjords. Training. He'd been ten years younger. Maybe not so mentally resilient, but a little fitter, a little faster, with a metabolism a lot more capable of dealing with a temperature nosedive like this.

Tonight he felt his age. It was almost screaming at him, in fact, that turning forty wasn't so far away, so why the hell wasn't he working somewhere safe behind a desk, like so many other men his age.

Instead he felt brittle and fragile, like the gentlest tap from an ice sculptor's hammer could send fissures zigzagging through him, and explode him into a thousand shards.

Memories of home flashed through his mind. The beach and the heat and the woman waiting for him there. He thought of London, too, and the woman he had met there the last time he'd visited the English capital.

She'd contacted him and had brought him in as a security consultant, after the attempted kidnapping of one of her more famous clients. Her name was Alice De Luca and she was over six feet tall and had long red hair and fierce green eyes. From the first moment he'd seen her, she'd made Danny think of the warrior queen of the Ancient Britons, Boadicea.

But there was a softness to her, too. The touch of her skin beneath his fingertips. The way she stretched in the morning. The sound of her sigh. And a smile which soothed even his most frightening memories. And which made him forget, if only for a while. He pictured her face through candlelight now. He pictured her face as the freezing wind blew.

Then he remembered where he was. He forced the images from his mind. For self-protection. Because distraction here meant death. Danny lived in two worlds. That one and this. He could never allow the two to mix. Or both would be destroyed.

He forced himself to count. He made each colour a number … First red, then blue, then orange, then green …

He bit down on his cheek until he tasted blood. He forced himself to focus on the here and now.

Still no movement nearby.

Nothing.

But as he listened to the roar of the wind, another image surfaced in his mind. This time it was of Mary, the kidnappers' victim. Danny pictured her in the toilet cubicle. With her jaw swollen. Yellow and black. New bruises on old. Eyes screwed up. Not wanting to see.

The numbers Danny was counting seemed to stutter. A controlled anger began to rise in his mind. Whoever had taken that photo deserved to pay.

He kept on chewing, still counting the seconds off at the back of his mind.

Twenty minutes. The clouds had sealed into a solid, seething mass above him. Visibility was down to thirty yards. Danny felt sick with cold. And sick for Mary.

‘Don't give up,' he muttered.

The words were meant for her. He knew he never would.

It was time to show the kidnappers more of what they wanted. Let them watch their rich city lawyer cracking up. Tempt them in. He sank to his knees and covered his face, as if he couldn't take any more and was trying to hide his shame.

That was when he heard them. High-pitched engines. Powerful and fast. Cutting through the wind. Rising in volume. Racing out of the darkness towards him from behind.

Chapter Three

Casper, Wyoming, USA

30th November, 5.14 p.m., North American Mountain Time

Danny quickly got back on his feet. He twisted his fingers into fists above his head. He waited.

Four minutes slowly slipped by and still he saw no movement in the gloom. Every few seconds he'd catch another snatch of an engine's growl, as whatever vehicles these were cut back and forth across the hills behind the cemetery.

Always they stayed out of sight, remaining cloaked deep in the dark. They were still a hundred yards or more away, Danny guessed. But were they really getting any closer?

From the high pitch of their engines, he was guessing that they were motorbikes or quad bikes. He couldn't tell which yet. He tracked the snarl of their engines rising and falling on the hissing wind, as if he was trying to tune a crackly radio station on a dial.

Then the pitch rose. Its volume grew. Finally, whoever these riders were, they were closing in.

A burst of heat – of raw energy – ripped through Danny. He forgot his frozen, naked skin.

Danger.

Anger.

Dread.

The hunger to survive.

All these feelings smashed into each other inside Danny, like forks of lightning in a storm. They made him feel what he craved the most. They made him feel alive …

He felt as if he'd just been tipped from a warm bed into an ice-cold plunge pool. Or like a junkie who'd just got his fix from a syringe of heroin which was now racing like molten lava through his veins. Danny's senses sang, as if his whole body was a tuning fork that had just been struck.

He overflowed with purpose and intent.

But most of all, Danny felt like a gambler. He felt like a gambler whose eyes were locked onto the red and black spin of a roulette wheel, as it finally began to slow, and a silver ball clattered across the grooves of the wheel towards where it would finally rest.

Danny felt like a gambler, because deep down he knew that this was exactly what he was each time he took on a job like this. He was a gambler taking a calculated risk with his own life.

He saw the riders now, emerging from the gloom. He grew even more tense as he watched them racing towards him. Two motorbikes. Two slanting silhouettes. Their headlights were switched off. That was why he hadn't been able to see them until now.

They crested the nearest hillside and raced down towards where Danny waited. They rounded the cemetery buildings and bounced down onto the parking lot. They rushed towards Danny like missiles homing in on a target.

Neither bike slowed. In fact, they seemed to be accelerating. A part of Danny wanted to spin away from them and run. But another, trained, part of his mind made him stand his ground. There was no point in running. He'd not get five yards before they chased him down and knocked him to the ground, or ran right over him.

He didn't move an inch. He braced himself. He prayed that his gamble was right and that these people wouldn't just mow him down anyway. He prayed that they still needed him alive.

His gamble paid off. The two bikes skidded to a halt less than six feet away from him. His heart thundered against his chest, as if it was trying to punch clean through the cage of his ribs.

Slow your breathing, Danny commanded himself. Slow your breathing and your adrenaline will slow too … Save all the energy you can, because chances are this isn't nearly over with …

There was just enough light left for Danny to make out the details of the two motorbikes. A Kawasaki and a Suzuki. They looked like they'd both been recently stolen. Their licence plates had been snapped off.

Their riders kept on revving their engines. They were deliberately trying to frighten Danny, but they had no idea how much worse he'd seen than this.

Again he pictured his dead wife and son. He pictured the face of the man who had killed them. Danny's fists tightened so hard that he felt his fingers compacting as if they might crack. He threw the image of the Paper Stone Scissors Killer back deep down inside his mind.

Focus on now, he told himself. Only here … Only now … Focus on this, or you might wind up dead … And who will save Mary Watts then?

The bikes edged towards him like a pair of snarling wolves. But still Danny stood his ground.

If they'd wanted him dead or injured, they would have already crushed him. But they hadn't done that, had they? And they wouldn't do now.

Danny focussed on the riders. There might have been only two bikes, but there were three people riding them. Two on the Suzuki on the right. One on the Kawasaki. All were wearing black balaclavas. All of them also had night-vision goggles strapped across their faces. And all were aiming weapons right at Danny Shanklin's head.

He waited to see what they'd do next. Every cell in his body felt suddenly aligned. And trained. And targeted. He felt like a weapons system waiting for someone to hit ‘fire'.

Still the riders did not move. Three against one. Danny knew that these were bad odds in any fight. But he wasn't planning on letting it come to that. He was still hoping he wouldn't have to fight at all.

Life was worth more than money. And this meant that the number one rule in any hostage retrieval scenario was that you paid up. You did that and, nine times out of ten, you got the hostage back in one piece.

The bike engines cut. The headlights came on. They dazzled Danny. He shielded his eyes. The wind lulled. No one spoke. Danny knew this moment well. It was the calm before the storm.

The Kawasaki rider kicked his bike up onto its stand and dismounted. From what Danny had been able to make out before the headlights had dazzled him, this guy was skinnier than the other two.

As he stood between Danny and the headlight beam, Danny squinted, and found himself finally able to see. He estimated that the skinny guy was maybe an inch or two taller than him. He was wearing a black jacket, trousers and boots. He had a submachine gun gripped in his fists. Its shape was unmistakable. It was an Uzi Model B.

Danny had reckoned on the kidnappers packing something more severe than this. He'd been expecting them to be armed with Personal Defence Weapons, like an MP7 or a P90. The kind of weapon that could penetrate body armour. The type used by specialist law enforcement agencies and the military. A weapon that would indicate that the kidnappers were ex-law enforcement or military themselves.

But the Uzi was a catalogue gun. It was something that people could buy online with a credit card and the right kind of fake ID. A street gun. A hood gun. Which meant that the skinny guy now thrusting its barrel towards Danny's chest might be nothing more than a street punk himself.

This was the kidnappers' first mistake. They'd lost their psychological edge. Danny now suspected they weren't professionals at all.

Not, he also understood, that this information would help him if the skinny guy decided to pull the trigger. At this range, the Uzi would leave Danny looking as if he'd just been mown down by a truck. Good for straining vegetables, but not much else.

The skinny guy said nothing.

He just stared.

What was he thinking? Danny wondered. Maybe he was trying to scare him. Maybe he wanted Danny to react. Maybe he wanted him to wet himself or break down and cry and beg for mercy.

Or maybe the skinny guy wanted none of these things. Perhaps he was simply enjoying this moment of holding power over another human being. Perhaps the best part of all this for him was standing here and thinking he was completely in control.

Danny stared back.

He said nothing either.

Why? Because he knew that, just as answering someone else's question with silence was the best way to get that person to talk, so the best way to get the skinny guy to give away clues about his identity was for Danny to do nothing at all.

Danny squinted at the night-vision goggles on the skinny guy's head. He wondered what he was seeing through them right now.

His view of Danny through them would be tinted, making Danny look like he was underwater. Danny's whole body would be tinted a pale and sickly green, like some alien from a badly made film.

Danny would look unreal. Even more so because he was not speaking or moving. He might start to freak the skinny guy out. The skinny guy's confidence might even begin to ebb away.

Or not.

‘Open the goddamn case,' the skinny guy snapped. His accent was flat. Deliberately so, Danny guessed. The guy was trying to give away as little as possible about himself.

Danny didn't answer.

‘I said open it,' the skinny guy said again.

Again he kept his accent flat, but this time Danny detected a slight quiver in the other man's voice. A sign of nerves? Danny wondered.

Nerves were not something that a man with an Uzi should be feeling when facing an unarmed, naked opponent. Once more Danny found himself considering the possibility that these kidnappers might be much less professional than he had previously thought.

Danny didn't move, still testing the skinny guy, still probing for a weakness.

‘Are you deaf?' the skinny guy yelled, losing his cool completely now. He gripped the Uzi tighter in both hands and took a half step forward. The gun's barrel wavered in the cold night air.

It wasn't only the fact that he was nervous that the skinny guy had just given away. The guy's accent … it was New York. Queens, to be exact. Danny would have bet his life on it. He'd grown up in New York himself. His father had been Chief Combatives Instructor at the United States Military Academy. That's where he'd met Danny's half-English, half-Russian mother. She'd been a lecturer in modern languages there.

So now Danny knew where the skinny guy was from. How much more would he give away? Enough for Danny to be able to profile him and even identify him once tonight was over? That was certainly Danny's hope.

But first he had to make sure he survived.

‘Do it now,' barked the skinny guy. His head bobbed with agitation as he spoke. ‘Do it, dammit, or I'll shoot you damn well dead.'