Wanted (37 page)

His mind could hardly grasp the fact that they were finally there, quite literally in his sights. Any second now, with three squeezes of the AK-9’s trigger, they’d be dead. He could feel his forefinger tightening, as if it had a will of its own, as if all the hatred he felt for these three people were coursing down his arm into his fingertip, desperate to be unleashed.

But no. He needed them alive. And something else . . . This felt wrong. Where were the sentries? Why wasn’t any of the three armed? How, after all the planning they’d done and the precautions they’d taken until this point, could they have left themselves so exposed?

Twenty yards. Danny was still in the cover of the trees and the undergrowth. They hadn’t yet seen him. They were deep in conversation. None of them had even looked up.

The farmyard was lower than the ground he was approaching from. It was walled and a short flight of stone steps led down into it. His eyes scanned the surrounding area and the overlooking windows. But there was nothing anywhere to indicate that he was walking into a trap.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said into his mike.

He stepped out into the open, half expecting someone to open fire on him, unable to believe he really had got the drop on them like this.

A crackle of dirt beneath his feet.
Now
they looked up. All three. They each stared into his eyes.

But it was too late, Danny thought triumphantly. He was too close. Even if they had handguns tucked into their belts, or heavier hardware hidden under that table, his AK-9 would rip them in half before they’d get a single shot off.

Looked like they knew it too. None of them moved. In his peripheral vision, he saw Spartak emerge into the open beside him and march towards the steps. Danny moved steadily forwards too, keeping his distance from his friend. He stopped at the edge of the high ground, so that he was staring down into the courtyard and right into the Kid’s eyes.

‘I bet you thought you’d never see me again,’ Danny said. He was staring only at the Kid, but his words were meant for Dementyev and Shepkin too.

But the Kid’s face showed neither fear nor surprise.

‘Quite the opposite, actually, bruv,’ he said. ‘You see, you’re late. We’ve been waiting for you here for over an hour.’

Thud. Thud.

Danny turned in horror to watch Spartak, who was positioned at the top of a small flight of stone steps, lurch forward as if he’d been punched hard twice in the back. He swayed for a moment, teetering on the edge of the top step, as though he might fall. But instead he rocked back on his heels, and seemed to regain his balance.

Another thud. And this time Danny saw blood burst from the side of Spartak’s neck. The big man slowly tipped then, like a forest tree being felled. He didn’t reach out his hands to protect himself. Instead his face broke his fall with a sickening slap. His body slithered down the steps head first into a patch of overgrown weedy ground in the yard below. He didn’t make a sound. He didn’t move.

‘Lower your weapon,’ a voice Danny recognized only too well said behind him.

Ruth
. . .

He felt a burning sensation in his gut. Something much worse than anger. It was the same thing he’d felt just a moment ago, when his eyes had locked on the Kid. He’d been betrayed again. This time by her.

‘Do it now,’ Ruth said, still behind him, ‘or I’ll execute you too.’

He could barely believe what had just happened. She’d just killed Spartak. She’d shot him from behind in cold blood.

His eyes fixed on the Kid. He wasn’t smiling. Not yet. But he would, Danny knew, the second he lowered his AK-9.
Just kill him,
a voice in Danny’s head said.
You’re as good as dead anyway. Pull the fucking trigger. Let his death be the last thing you see.

But a more powerful memory filled his mind. Of Lexie. If he killed the Kid now, Ruth would take him out. But if he didn’t, there might still be . . . He might still find a way to do what he had always done: survive.

‘OK.’ His voice was trembling. From the adrenalin. From the rising fury inside him.

He slowly crouched and did as he was told. He put his weapon down.

The Kid’s smile, the one he’d been expecting, was unleashed. A grin of amusement, of triumph, the expression of an expert player of games, who had planned everything perfectly and had now won.

He slowly ran his tongue across his lower lip, as though tasting the moment.

‘You didn’t really think I’d be dumb enough to let you track me across Europe using a GPS code, did you?’ he asked.

Danny thought back to Ruth’s hotel room . . . to how she’d nursed him back to health . . . to how she’d told him about stealing the Kid’s router from his apartment before the explosion . . . to that program he’d seen running on her computer that she’d said had enabled her to track the Kid’s location across the globe . . . All lies. She’d been working for the Kid the whole time.

‘Or rather,’ the Kid said, ‘you must have believed it. Because why else would you be here?’

Danny said nothing. He glanced at Spartak, his corpse mostly hidden by the weeds. His friend. A man he had thought was practically invincible. He still couldn’t believe he was gone.

‘Kind of persuasive, isn’t she?’ said the Kid, a lascivious twinkle in his eyes.

Die, Danny thought.
I pray I get to watch you die.

But even as he thought it, he could feel this hope fading.

‘Bring him to the barn,’ the Kid said, looking past Danny to where Ruth was standing behind him. ‘And you two,’ he added, looking down at Dementyev and Shepkin as he got up, ‘hurry our friends inside along. I want everyone gone from here in the next half-hour.’

No, Danny thought. The Kid hadn’t just
said
this to Dementyev and Shepkin, he’d
ordered
it. They worked for him, not the other way round. Another error Danny had made. The Kid wasn’t just the brains, he was the boss.

He shot Danny another half-smile now, almost as if reading his thoughts, then turned his back on him. He walked across the courtyard and into the farmhouse, whistling as he did so. It was a tune Danny was meant to recognize and did – that old Burl Ives number, ‘Ugly Bug Ball’. Another drop of poison. Another kick in the guts. Because that was the tune the Kid’s niece, Beyoncé, had been singing when he had called at their house. The Kid hadn’t been alienated from his sister at all, he now understood. She must have phoned him the second Danny had left and told him where he would be heading next.

Allowing Ruth to meet him at the Kid’s apartment. And allowing her then to win his trust.

‘You heard,’ she said, behind Danny now. ‘Move.’

He glanced over his shoulder at her. She didn’t try to avoid his eyes. But something about her face was different. Any beauty he’d ever seen in her was now gone. She looked through him, like he wasn’t even there.

‘Do it now,’ she said.

He thought back to the night they’d spent by the fire. He remembered holding her. He remembered their first kiss. But all of it had meant nothing.

‘Down the steps,’ she told him.

He forced himself to look away, to stop thinking about her. He had to see her as she saw him. She was nothing to him now, except an enemy.

He did as she’d commanded. He walked towards the steps, but stopped when he reached the top. Spartak’s body still lay in a heap at the bottom.

‘Down,’ Ruth said.

His mind was racing. One on one, he knew he could take her. But Dementyev and Shepkin were still watching them. And both, Danny now saw, were armed. Dementyev was wearing a shoulder holster, which was visible beneath his open denim jacket, and the blonde, Shepkin, had a pistol butt protruding from the waist of her jeans.

Danny walked down the steps. He had to step over his old friend’s body. He’d seen more bodies than he cared to remember, many of them people he’d been close to, over the years. But the sight of Spartak left a part of him feeling dead too. And he knew it already. They wouldn’t even bury him. They’d just leave him there to rot.

Dementyev – the man he had known as Glinka, the man who’d shot so many of those civilians in London – smiled now as Danny walked towards him. He and the blonde gripped their pistols in their hands.

The blonde stepped in beside Danny and twisted him smartly round so that he was facing Ruth again. This time she did look at him, gazing into his eyes unashamedly, clearly trying to read him, an amused smile playing across her lips.

The blonde frisked him and stripped him of his handgun and ammo clips, then took his rucksack, along with his comms. She tossed the rucksack to Dementyev, who looked through it, before dropping it on the ground.

‘I’m going to enjoy watching you learn how you will die,’ he told Danny.

The blonde said nothing. She just spat hard into Danny’s face. She looked like she wanted more than anything for him to react. So she can kill you, he thought. So she can take you down herself.

He felt her saliva trickling down his cheek.

‘Into the barn,’ Ruth said.

Up ahead a black-haired, powerfully built man opened the barn door and stepped outside, a submachine gun in his fists. No silencer. No need out here, Danny realized. If they were going to execute him by shooting him, no one would hear.

Watching you learn how you will die . . .

Dementyev’s words echoed through Danny’s mind. It was only then that he was struck by the strangeness of what he had said. He remembered when he’d first met Dementyev in the Ritz Hotel before the massacre: he had gone there thinking he was going to be offered a hostage retrieval job. Dementyev’s English had been flawless.

It was a promise of something hideous to come. Danny would learn something terrible, and soon.

They were injecting people. Civilians. As Ruth and the black-haired guard marched Danny across the cavernous interior of the barn towards a concrete bay set into its side, he saw that twenty or more men and women in civilian clothing were gathered there. Some were sitting on the floor, or packing bags. Others queued for their turn in a chair, where a woman was methodically loading syringes, then injecting their contents into these people.

‘Into the pen,’ Ruth said.

The concrete bay. It was a slaughter pen, Danny now saw, as he stepped through its waist-high metal gate. There were drainage holes in the floor and a tap with a hose fixed to the washable concrete wall. This was where whoever owned the farm would normally bring livestock for slaughter.

‘Shackle him,’ Ruth told the guard.

She covered Danny with her AK-9 while the guard did as instructed. He used metal handcuffs, looping their chain around one of the bars on the metal gate. Then he stepped back, leaned against the opposite wall of the pen and lit a cigarette,

‘Why didn’t you just kill me,’ Danny said to Ruth, ‘when you first had the chance?’

‘You mean back in London?’

Her eyes twinkled. She might think nothing of him, he realized, but she still clearly thought enough of herself and how she’d tricked him to be happy to gloat.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘after the explosion in the flat. When I was unconscious. Why didn’t you just finish me off then?’

‘Because we needed to know what you knew,’ she said. ‘Because we realized when you broke into the testing facility at Pripyat and slaughtered the team there that you could not have been acting alone. And we couldn’t afford to leave any loose ends or risk someone else coming after us. So we needed to find you. And that was when Adam’s sister called.’

Adam . . . the Kid . . . Again Danny remembered the look in Beyoncé’s mother’s eyes as he’d handed her the envelope containing five thousand pounds. She must have known even then that she was going to phone the Kid the second Danny had left. He thought he’d been so clever. But, as with Ruth, he’d been a fool.

‘And so you staked out the apartment in London,’ he said.

‘And when you showed, all I needed to do was to win your confidence.’

‘But we both nearly died,’ Danny said. ‘He – Adam – the Kid – your boss, he tried to blow us both up, remember? We only just made it out of that apartment block alive.’

‘Oh, Danny,’ Ruth smiled, ‘you still don’t get it, do you?’

‘Get
what?’

‘There was never any danger. The injury to your head? That was me. I knocked you out.’

‘But the explosion was in the papers . . .’

‘Yes, because after I’d knocked you out, got you into my car and sedated you, I went back and rigged the apartment to blow. So that you wouldn’t suspect . . .’

‘And then?’

‘I kept you drugged and interrogated you for two days to find out everything you’d been up to. All about Spartak Sidarov. That was when we decided we needed to neutralize him too.’

Danny remembered the video conversation he’d had with Spartak on the laptop when he’d identified Glinka and the blonde as Dementyev and Shepkin. It was Ruth who’d said they needed back-up. It was Ruth who’d insisted he bring Spartak here today.

‘So that’s it?’ he said, hating her afresh, remembering how she’d killed his friend. ‘Everything about you is a lie?’

‘That’s a melodramatic way of putting it, Danny, but, yes, it’s also probably true.’

‘Even your name.’

Another half-smile. An apologetic shrug.

‘And your mother wasn’t Anya Silver, was she?’ he guessed. ‘She wasn’t one of the victims of the massacre outside the Ritz.’

‘I’m afraid not, Danny. Not even a distant relative. But enough of the small-talk, eh?’ she said. ‘It’s high time we got this show on the road.’

Ruth shouted a name Danny didn’t recognize, and the woman injecting the civilians nodded and gathered up some equipment. She left the person she was with and walked over to the slaughter pen.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Danny said, as the woman – grey-haired and in her early sixties, with eyes that wouldn’t meet his – loaded a fresh syringe.

But even as he asked, he saw Dementyev and the blonde walking towards him, quickly, as if they knew something wonderful was about to happen and wouldn’t miss it for the world. And Dementyev’s words came back to haunt Danny.