Wanted (10 page)

Spartak had witnessed the tell too. He and Danny turned their backs on the two civilians, leaving them to Vasyl, and stared through the thinning dust cloud. Spartak switched on the powerful beam of his flashlight.

The scientific and medical equipment Danny had glimpsed from the stairs now shifted into focus. It was the kind you found in field hospitals – and God knew Danny had been in enough of them over the years. Drips on feeders up against the wall. Needles. Plasma bags. A defibrillator station.

Three gurneys also. With restraint straps. The kind used in ambulances by paramedics to transport the critically ill. A retinal image of the corridor of cells on the floor above flashed through his mind. He remembered what kind of building this was, what went on here . . .

At the very back of the room he could see what looked at first like a smooth, polished dark wall. But then, as the smoke and dust continued to clear, he realized it was made of glass.

And then his heart leaped. Because that was when he saw it. A flash of movement. Like a fish glimpsed through the murky waters of a storm-tossed pond. Then violent red. A piece of meat. That was what it looked like. It was as if someone had just thrown a piece of bleeding, raw meat hard against the other side of that glass.

Spartak fired first. Damn near got himself and Danny killed in the process too. The round ricocheted off the glass and embedded itself in the concrete wall just to the left of Danny’s head.

It was lucky Spartak’s weapon had been on semi not fully automatic. Because otherwise it would have already spat out enough lead to turn everyone in the room into sieves. But, as it was, Spartak had time to react to what was going on before his disbelieving eyes and not squeeze off another shot.

And what was going on was this: something human – humanoid – had emerged from the darkness on the other side of that glass. And not only was there now what looked like a piece of bleeding meat smudged up against the glass, but above it was an approximation of a human face too.

Approximation.
That was the word that went through Danny’s mind as he stared unblinkingly at the red raw eyes glaring out at him. Because what he was looking at could just as easily have been simian, some kind of an ape, or even something alien, something from a nightmare, something not really there or even possible at all.

He had seen plenty of burns in his career. From acid, fire and mustard gas. In Iraq and Afghanistan. In Africa and Bosnia. He’d seen what weaponry could do to human skin and hair. And what torturers were capable of.

But this was something else. Scales. It looked like some kind of reptilian scales. Not dry like a gecko’s . . . this skin was wet, oozing, and looked as if it might shuck itself off entirely, leaving nothing but raw flesh and exposed bone.

As Danny forced himself to move forward, knowing he had to determine what kind of a threat he was up against now, he caught his own half-reflection in the glass, his night-vision goggles, hooded head and mud-smeared clothing. He saw he was still holding up his weapon, still aiming, still primed to fire.

He tried to lower his arms, but couldn’t. Not because he wanted to attack: he knew now that this barrier was blast- and bulletproof, and would bounce back whatever he loosed at it. No, what kept his arms and weapon frozen in place was an irresistible, primitive urge to protect himself. He did it because he was afraid.

The man imprisoned behind the glass pulled back his bleeding fist and hit the glass wall again. But whatever noise he had been expecting was absent. Soundproof. As well as being blast- and bulletproof, that glass divide was soundproof too.

A hole – a
mouth
– opened in the centre of the face. It stretched, weeping blood at its corners. Its teeth were barely discernible from the swollen mass of gums. The lips moved, dripping blood. The jaw clenched and unclenched.

‘It’s trying to tell us something,’ Danny said.

It.
He had meant to say ‘he’, because he had guessed that what he was looking at had once been recognizable as a man. A pitiable man. A prisoner. Someone who’d been experimented on. Someone – he knew it already – who’d been injected with the smallpox hybrid to see what it would do. But what he saw before him was so different from himself that a part of him was still refusing to accept it as of the same species.

Tears. Danny saw them then, as Spartak pressed his flashlight up against the glass and switched it on, illuminating the man’s face and forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut against the glare. Tears. He watched them flowing down the face of the man on the other side of the divide.

Danny’s horror left him because – right there, crying – the other man changed. He was no longer alien or bestial. All Danny could see was a person in terrible pain, who was crying out for help.

Clothes . . . He registered next that the filthy garments the man was wearing were military. Winter combat clothing. Stained, crumpled and bloodied.

The man’s fist pulled back, then lurched forward again. This time the movement was weaker, and instead of the fist remaining bunched, it unfurled, its fingers pointing to Danny’s right.

Danny’s eyes tracked the movement. At the far edge of his side of the glass wall, he registered what appeared to be a doorway, a bulge in the glass, a chamber through which it might be possible to gain access to the space beyond.

Two long wooden desks formed an L in front of it. Some kind of control desk. Two lifeless plasma monitors fixed to the wall above stared blindly out across the room.

Danny crossed quickly to the control centre, passing other desks littered with cameras, notebooks and charts.

In the centre of the L-shaped desk, there was a row of monitors and keyboards. Judging from the scratches and smudges on them, they’d been there a couple of years at least. There was also a spanking-new state-of-the-art Mac. A ponytail of cables ran down from it into a series of hard drives, routers and junction boxes stacked in descending order of height on the floor.

His heart thudded. He couldn’t be certain, but the last set-up he’d seen like this had been the Kid’s, back in that old industrial redbrick in south London, which Glinka had used as his command centre on the day of the London attack and from which the Kid had orchestrated and tracked Danny’s movements across London as they’d run him before the cops.

He also saw cigarette butts on the floor. Along with a crumpled packet of Marlboro Reds. The Kid’s brand. And there, right next to it, as if any more confirmation had been required to prove that the Kid had been there, lay two crumpled, chocolate-stained doughnut boxes. The Kid’s favourite.

Danny switched his attention back to the Mac. Its power light glowed in its casing like the pulse of some hibernating beast. But he wasn’t tempted to open its lid and wake it. Not yet. Because if this really was the Kid’s handiwork, he knew, too, that the Kid was no slouch at explosives. It was perfectly possible that he’d have wired this computer either to explode the second anyone touched it, or if a password was entered incorrectly or too slowly.

Six strides, and he hauled one of the two cowering men – the younger one, with better eyesight – to his feet. ‘You fuck with me,’ he told him, in Ukrainian, ramming the silencer of his weapon hard into the man’s gut, causing him to double up in pain, ‘and I will execute you. Understand?’

The man whimpered a single syllable that he took to mean yes.

‘Who else was here with you?’ Danny said, jerking him upright. ‘Who imprisoned that man behind the glass?’

‘I – I don’t know their names.’

The older, heavier man, huddled like a terrified toddler on the floor, spoke next: ‘Their programmer . . .’ he was blinking frantically, as if he’d just been hauled from beneath a rock into the naked light of day ‘. . . they called him Glinka. They weren’t meant to not in front of us, but I heard them . . . I heard them call him that name.’

Glinka. Danny felt darkness growing behind his eyes even at the sound of the name. A flurry of images from the day he’d been set up rushed through his mind. The TV footage of the hawk-faced man – Glinka – his face covered with a balaclava, out on the balcony at the front of the Ritz Hotel, firing into the crowd of panicked civilians, gunning them down as casually as if he’d been mowing a lawn. Then Danny pictured Lexie in the back of the Kid’s van, blindfolded and tied. Glinka had personally held a gun to her head.

That was when he’d made this personal. Not just professional. Danny Shanklin now wanted his scalp.

‘Please,’ begged the skinny man, ‘we wanted no part of this. They said they would execute us. They kidnapped us from Kharkiv University. They took us in the middle of the night . . .’

Kharkiv. The name meant nothing to Danny. He glanced across at Spartak, who was still staring transfixed at the man imprisoned on the other side of the glass wall, still aiming at him, just as Danny had before him, as if he still didn’t dare to leave himself open to what he could not yet comprehend.

‘Kharkiv National Medical University,’ said Vasyl. ‘A science university.’

‘Is that what you are?’ Danny asked. ‘A scientist?’

‘A – a researcher, at the Institute of Clinical Genetics . . .’

‘In what?’

‘Contagious disease.’

‘Like smallpox,’ Danny said, not missing a beat.

And right there, along with the terror in the skinny man’s eyes, he saw something else, something even worse: shame.

Until he’d learned about the existence of the stolen smallpox, Danny had known little about the disease. Like the Black Death, he’d thought it had been consigned to history, eradicated in the last century, a conquered disease that was no longer a threat to anyone.

But since he’d discovered that he’d been used by Glinka and the Kid to steal the locations of six vials of weapons-grade hybrid smallpox developed by the former Soviet Union, he had dug up as much about the deadly disease as he could. A disease that was historically responsible for a third of all blindness, and the direct cause of 500 million deaths in the twentieth century alone. But a disease that had been eradicated in 1979. One from which we were now meant to be safe.

He had looked up symptoms too. Blindness. Lesions. Respiratory malfunction. And he’d found plenty of photographs online of smallpox victims from epidemics. And he knew now that the glass wall wasn’t just there to imprison whoever was on the other side, it was there to quarantine them too, to keep what they had been infected with at bay and to allow them to be observed.

‘The man on the other side of that glass. You infected him with the smallpox Glinka gave you, didn’t you?’ he said.

To test the hybrid Glinka had stolen, to find out if it retained its potency after all these years.

It was the only possible explanation for what had occurred here. This building had probably been set up for exactly this kind of work back in the dying days of the Soviet Union, a place where human experimentation could be continued out of sight of any watchful, disapproving post-
Perestroika
eyes, separate from any official Biopreparat station.

And somehow Glinka and the Kid had learned of its continued existence and had come here to avail themselves of its facilities. Through military or criminal contacts, Danny supposed. More likely the latter. Because, in spite of the money that had been sunk into it since its likely initial abandonment after Chernobyl, the security would have been far higher, the staff levels too, if it had been a military installation.

Which left three questions. Which criminal organization was bankrolling the place? How did they know Glinka and the Kid? And what had they been promised in return for their help?

The last question was the first to which he could hazard an answer. A share of the profits. Because what had already been demonstrated here – one only had to look at the prisoner – was that the smallpox hybrid was still potent. In fact, not only did it still work, but its symptoms appeared to be even more horrific than anything the original disease had been capable of inducing.

This was a weapon that could bring not just one man but a nation of men and women to their knees. It could make whoever controlled it not only powerful, but rich beyond belief.

‘Didn’t you?’ Danny said, gazing unforgivingly into the skinny man’s eyes.

But he was now staring, transfixed, at Spartak, who seemed about to rip him limb from limb.

Danny stepped between them. The last thing he needed was Spartak cutting loose on these two before they’d told Danny everything they knew.

‘They said they would kill our families, if we refused,’ said the skinny man. More tears streamed down his face. ‘They told us that if we did not work for them, they would—’

‘Work,’ Danny interrupted.

The researcher’s face crumpled. He’d just realized his mistake.

‘In other words, as well as getting kidnapped,’ Danny said, ‘you got paid.’

‘Please,’ begged the researcher, ‘they said those men were criminals, the ones behind the glass. They said they were child murderers and rapists who—’

‘Men?
’ Jesus Christ, was there more than one? He crossed quickly back to the glass wall. Pressing his face up against its chill surface, he peered deep into the gloom. And saw something. A body. Prone on what looked like a bed. Other beds too. Were more people trapped inside?

He shouldn’t have moved from between Spartak and the researcher – a guttural, frenzied roar tore through the room behind him.

Turning, Danny saw Spartak crashing across the room, smashing furniture aside. He seized the cowering researcher and dragged him to the wall, then hurled the man two-fisted across a paper-strewn desk, as if he were made of nothing more substantial than straw. The researcher landed in a twisted heap of limbs, and began desperately squirming away as Spartak thundered towards him.

‘No!’ Danny shouted.

But Spartak was beyond listening to orders now. He tore his goggles from his face and snatched up the screaming researcher. He locked his giant fist around the smaller man’s beanpole of a neck, as papers fluttered around them to the floor.