Wanted (3 page)

No longer fearing the EMPTINESS . . . no longer fearing HER . . . he turned back to face the family . . . and stretched out his arms like the rays of the sun . . . and let them, his worshippers, behold their true God.

The TRUE GOD need fear no one. Not even the BITCH GODDESS. Because the TRUE GOD cannot be defeated. The TRUE GOD will always prevail.

Even after Shanklin had attacked God with that knife in the woods, even when he’d tried to shoot God with God’s own pistol, he had failed. Because God had been mightier. God had summoned a snowstorm, which had gathered around him like a cloak. Before Shanklin’s disbelieving eyes, God had disappeared.

At the base of the mountain on which Shanklin’s cabin had been built, God had found a place to hide. He’d crawled into an agricultural drainage tunnel and had daubed himself in black mud as the snow had continued to fall. He’d stayed there for two days until the police and their dogs had gone away.

It had been another two days after that when a security guard had tried to restrain God, after he’d caught him attempting to steal antibiotics from a doctor’s surgery across the border in Canada. God had left the guard for dead. But the guard had not died, and a day later God had found himself pulled over in a stolen car by a highway patrol unit. The maimed guard had later identified God as the man who’d attacked him. CCTV footage from the surgery had confirmed that God had been there.

God had been found guilty of assault and attempted robbery. But he’d not been accused of any of the many other crimes he’d committed before that. The police and the lawyers had made no connection between him, paper, stone and scissors, or with the attack on Shanklin’s family across the border.

Once more he had prevailed.

He’d been sent to prison for what he’d done to the guard. Each day he’d counted off the hours and had pictured Shanklin’s face. And had pictured the guard’s face. And had pictured Shanklin’s daughter’s face. Until the three had become one.

After his release six weeks ago his first task had been to track down the security guard. The man had moved jobs several times since, but that had not been enough to keep him from God. It was regrettable that the guard had lived alone, without any family. But God would still never forget the look on his face as he’d rattled his last shuddering breath.

Paper . . .

God had then dedicated himself to tracking down his cancer, so that he could at last cut it out at the root.

He’d made a study of Danny Shanklin. He’d learned that he was from a military family. His bastard of a father had been chief combatives instructor at the United States Military Academy. His half-English, half-Russian whore of a mother had lectured in Russian. Shanklin himself had gone to West Point. After graduating from NYC with a master’s in modern languages, he’d then joined the US Army Rangers. The CIA had come next. Langley. Special Activities Division. Camp Perry. Special Operations Group.

Oh, yes, Shanklin had been reared in a nest of vipers indeed . . .

It was when Shanklin had been seconded to the FBI that he’d first come to God’s attention. He had attempted to trap God. But he had failed. And it was then that God had hunted him down and had followed him and his family into the woods, where he had killed Shanklin’s wife and son.

During God’s subsequent time in prison, he’d now learned, Shanklin had stopped using his old bank accounts and known addresses, and had liquidated his assets. He’d set himself up instead with a complex web of financial aliases, no doubt assuming that his whereabouts would be untraceable.

But God had once worked for the American government, too, and still had many contacts there. So God had soon discovered that, over the last few years while God had been in prison, Shanklin had resurfaced. As a personal security consultant here. A hostage negotiator there. Always using a fake name. He’d made a business out of helping people. He’d stopped them getting hurt.

But in all Shanklin’s attempts to drop off the grid and disappear from public view, he had made one terrible error. Even though he’d moved her to England, he’d allowed his daughter to keep her own name. Perhaps because – like the FBI – he had come to believe that God, having vanished for so many years, was dead. Or perhaps, through some sentimental attachment to his dead wife and son, he had tried to keep their family name alive.

Shanklin’s daughter’s first name was Alexandra. She was now seventeen and in her final year at a boarding school in London. According to her Facebook profile, her nickname was Lexie and she had 117 friends. Her interests included sport, books and films, and she was in a relationship with a young man her own age, who liked football, rock music and skateboarding.

God had not wasted any time. He’d arranged false identification and had booked a flight to the UK so that he could snatch the girl. Snatch her and use her as bait. Bait to catch Shanklin. So that God could finish off what he had started in the woods.

But God had arrived at Heathrow Airport two days ago to be confronted by the spectre of Danny Shanklin’s face staring out at him from every TV screen he saw.

God gazed down now at the newspaper headlines on the floor, which said that Shanklin and a Russian diplomat, Colonel Nikolai Zykov, had assassinated a United Nations envoy in London and had simultaneously massacred the civilians who had been walking past the Ritz Hotel at the time. Colonel Zykov had died of a heart attack in the hotel room shortly afterwards. Danny Shanklin had fled across London, the subject of what was now being described as ‘the Biggest Manhunt in History’. He had somehow foiled half a million CCTV cameras, nine intelligence agencies, 33,000 cops – and escaped.

God did not care if Danny Shanklin had done what the newspapers said. God did not care why Danny Shanklin might have decided to kill all those people. Or whether he had even done it.

No, people killed and were killed every minute of every day, and God did not care about them.

What God cared about was that Danny Shanklin now had a price tag of ten million dollars on his head. And was at the top of every global security and intelligence agency’s Most Wanted list. Which meant that Shanklin would once again be doing everything in his power to vanish from the face of the earth.

What God cared about most was that Shanklin had got to his daughter first and had taken her into hiding with him – and had thereby taken her from God.

Anger flowed red. It flowed like fire through God’s veins. And, there, again, he felt her slithering up from the black – the
BITCH GODDESS
– probing, searching for weakness, trying to seep back into his mind through the gaps. But this time he blocked her. He turned to the family. He focused on them instead.

He focused on paper and stone and scissors . . .

He went for the older girl first and stretched out his clenched fist. She was in her late teens, around the same age as Danny Shanklin’s daughter.

L

E

X

I

E

God’s tongue flickered hungrily across his lips as he savoured each letter of Shanklin’s daughter’s name, like a fresh and wondrous taste in his mind.

A sound like running water. Vibrations. A numbness like dental anaesthetic. A booming echo. A soft and sensual moan.

Am I dreaming? Valentin Sabirzhan strained to see through the blurred slits of his eyes. A shiny surface ballooned, then distorted and shrank in the weak light. What was it he could see? Some kind of wall? Whatever it was, it was curved.
Where am I?
A cave? No, the surface of the wall was too reflective. It’s metal, he thought. And –
yes, right there
– he could see rivets running upwards in a line.

A gasp. Laughter. Another moan. Of what? Pain? Delight?

Valentin tried to move. Couldn’t. His body wouldn’t respond to the commands his brain was frantically sending out. Every part of him felt numb, cradled, and seemed to be tingling, as fuzzy and here-and-yet-not-here as his mind.
What’s happened to me?
Panic ripped through him.
Have I broken my back? My neck?

‘See how he’s trying to blink away the blood,’ a woman’s voice said in Russian.

Blood?

Another gasp. Of pain. Oh, yes, there was no mistaking it this time. More laughter followed. The sound was so near, yet Valentin knew it was not directed at him but at somebody else.

‘Look . . . see how hard he is trying, even though his eyelids are no longer there . . .’

No longer there?

Fear. Valentin felt it then. This was no dream. No nightmare either. He would not wake from this. It was real.

He tried again to move. Desperately now. But it was like trying to will a body frozen in ice to move. Only this time – yes! – even though he couldn’t move, he did at least feel something. A tightness at his wrists. In his knees and ankles too.

Not paralysed, then . . . I’ve been
tied.
My
wrists
have been bound to my ankles behind my back.
But how? By whom?And why?

A blur of memories hurtled through his confused mind, like a section of film flicked to fast forward: icicles glinting in the branches of a tree; a snowbound village in a valley at night; and danger – yes, the sense of danger – was everywhere, all around.

He became aware of another sensation cutting through the numbness: a throbbing in his neck, as steady as a pulse, yet painful and localized and
wrong.
Heat was radiating outwards in waves from that point, as if he’d suffered a terrible burn. Or had been shot.

His whole body jolted. His stomach lurched. At first he thought someone had hit him, but then he realized he’d been shaken from below. Gravity, he felt that now too. He was curled up like a foetus on his side.

Another jolt. And that hissing sound he’d heard before, along with those vibrations – weren’t they coming from beneath him as well?

A memory from fifty years ago solidified in the confused mists of his mind. He was racing on his bicycle down a steep road in the small town in which he’d been born. He was trying to catch up with his big brother, Yan, when his front wheel had hit a rut. And suddenly there he was: airborne, exhilarated, whooping with delight . . .

A rut, a rut in the road – was that what had jolted him just now? Yes, I’m in some kind of a vehicle, he thought. I’m in some kind of . . .

Truck.

The word hit him like a brick to the back of his head. He remembered everything then, as if he’d just turned on a burning white light in a previously pitch-black room. The journey from Moscow. The helicopter dusting down in the forest. Lyonya and Gregori. The pharmacy door. The spreading pool of blood. That red dot of a laser sight creeping up his chest.

That’s it, Valentin thought – too late. That was what it was about the view of the village that had felt so terribly wrong.

After he’d switched his binoculars from night-vision to infrared, a heat signature had shown on the milk truck’s tank as well as its cab. It had been warm when it should have been cold. Because – yes, he understood everything now – refrigerated milk wasn’t being pumped into it: people had been concealed inside. Whoever it was who’d tied him up. That was how they’d got into the village without being observed by the satellite. And that was how they were fleeing it as well.

This miserable realization was followed by an even darker one. Valentin’s old friend Nikolai Zykov had not managed to keep his secret. These people had found the vial.

A clanking of boots on metal. A shadow stretched out, enveloping him. Then pain. Ripping through his kidneys. Someone had kicked him and now they stamped hard on his back.

A roar exploded inside him. But only a guttural growl emerged. He felt himself choking. He tried to open his mouth. No good. He prised his front teeth apart with his tongue and probed between his lips. Stickiness. His mouth had been taped shut. He sucked sour air in through his nose. He felt his chest shudder and heave.

Again he heard the woman’s voice, but it was closer now, right beside him: ‘It looks as though Granddad’s awake . . .’

Granddad?
She meant him.

He fought to suck oxygen into his lungs. He waited for the next bolt of pain. Instead came more clanking. More echoes. A torch beam flickered. He braced himself as her shadow fell across him again.

Instead a rush of ice-cold water smashed into his face. A boot pressed down hard on the side of his head. A terrible pressure that did not let up. Surely his cheekbone would crack.

The torch beam was thrust down towards him. He blinked too late. His vision blistered red. A man barked a single syllable. Someone – two people? – seized Valentin and jerked him upright. Silhouettes shifted left and right as the torch beam withdrew.

Whoever had hold of him twisted him round, forced him to his knees and gripped him by his elbows and throat. The ceiling . . . it was barely a foot above his head . . . He tried to struggle, but he couldn’t move. Even at full strength, he doubted he would have been able to throw them off. Enfeebled as he was, he didn’t stand a chance. He sagged, electing to conserve what little energy he had, his only idea being to advertise his weakness as best he could to make himself appear even less of a threat to them than he already was.

A tranquillizer. That explained the swelling in his neck and his inability to move. They must have shot him with a tranquillizer in the pharmacy. Anything else at that range and he’d have been dead.

What about Lyonya and Gregori?

Had they been tranquillized too? Hope leaped inside him. What if they – or the pharmacist – had escaped? They’d have alerted Valentin’s comrades by now. Help might already be on the way. Even now this vehicle might be being tracked and his ordeal would soon be at an end. And then – then he’d get hold of these
sisterfuckers
, he’d get hold of them and—

The glare of the torch beam receded. Valentin opened his eyes, stared through the dancing blizzard of retinal flashes and saw his hopes crushed.

Lyonya and Gregori were framed in bright torch light, illuminated like exhibits in a museum for Valentin’s benefit, trussed up on their sides and gagged, bound like him with their ankles and wrists tied behind their backs.