Wanted (39 page)

He pushed her off him. Breathless, he rolled to his left and picked up her handgun. He checked the magazine and saw it was half full. It was only then he realized that the firing had stopped.

‘Stay the hell down, you fat fuck.’

The voice was Spartak’s. Danny struggled to his feet and looked across to see that the position his friend had previously been occupying was now deserted. He edged forward, his arms up in a firing position, not knowing what the hell he might find next.

What he saw was Spartak, by the Jeep, his AK-9 trained on something on the ground before him.

That something, Danny saw, as he closed in, was Adam Gilloway, a.k.a. the Kid. To his right, out of reach, was a machine pistol. To his left, unmoving, with the middle of his face now nothing but a bloody hole, were the remains of Dementyev.

‘It’s me, Danny,’ he called, in warning.

‘I know.’ Spartak glanced at him and flashed him a grin.

Danny drew level with Spartak. The Kid was semiconscious. He was bleeding heavily from his chest. His eyes connected only briefly with Danny’s, a look of total disbelief, before he rolled shuddering onto his side.

‘Unfortunately it’s not fatal,’ Spartak said. ‘And good work back there, taking that bitch down,’ he added. ‘I guess that’s another life I owe you, eh, my friend?’

‘Talking of which,’ Danny said, ‘the last I saw of you, you were actually dead.’

‘No,’ Spartak said, ‘merely nearly dead.’

‘Merely nearly?’

Keeping his AK aiming at the Kid, Spartak raised the side of his combat jacket to reveal the bulletproof vest he was wearing underneath. ‘I never did fully trust that woman,’ he said. ‘She was way too good-looking for you, huh?’

Danny smiled. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t believe his friend was alive.

‘And your neck wound?’ he asked.

‘I have a thick neck, my American friend,’ Spartak said. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed before? It will take more than one fucking bullet to cut through that.’

Danny looked up, hearing something.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said, ‘is that choppers?’

‘Yes, but do not worry,’ Spartak reassured him. ‘They’re just some friends of mine.’

‘Of yours?’

‘Yes.’

But this time when Danny looked at him, he saw the grin had been wiped from his face. Any hint of humour had gone with it. Danny didn’t like this. Not one little bit. ‘What kind of friends?’ he said.

‘Friends who want back what was stolen from them. Friends who want to talk with this man, Mr Kid.’

Before Danny could say anything else, three helicopters appeared on the horizon. All had civilian markings on them, but were clearly military in spec. Two peeled off to the right, which was in the direction the dirt track leading away from here went. It was the same direction the minibus had gone. The bus’s passengers wouldn’t stand a chance. Seconds later, the sound of heavy machine-gun fire rattled across the valley, but was almost as quickly drowned by the approach of the third chopper, which now circled above Danny and Spartak, then wider again above the farm and outbuildings. It set down in a paddock less than fifty yards away.

Danny watched several heavily armed men climb out and start running towards them, spreading out into an attack formation as they came.

‘Again, I say don’t worry,’ Spartak shouted, as the chopper’s rotor slowed and the noise diminished. ‘These people are not here to hurt you, but to help.’

‘Which of you is the medic?’ Spartak demanded in Russian, as the first three men from the helicopter reached them.

A young blond man stepped forward and asked, also in Russian, ‘Which is the one who needs the antidote?’

Spartak nodded towards Danny as four other men from the chopper knelt beside the Kid, frisking and binding him, then laying him out on a stretcher and starting to tend to his wounds.

The blond medic, meanwhile, took a loaded syringe from a pack in his jacket. Without ceremony, he rolled up Danny’s sleeve and injected its contents into his arm.

‘Who are these people?’ Danny asked Spartak, when the two of them were left alone.

‘My people.’

‘Your
people? You’re telling me you’re one of them? One of the hardliners? You’re one of the people responsible for stealing this smallpox back in 1990 and keeping it hidden since?’

‘We keep it for good,’ Spartak said. ‘Not evil. For our country. You understand?’

‘No,’ Danny said. ‘All I understand is that this hybrid has been responsible for my whole life being trashed. And it nearly just got turned into a global pandemic.’

‘And yet it hasn’t. Everything instead has ended well.’

Danny looked around at the corpses of Dementyev, his woman and Ruth. He could hardly believe what he was hearing. Because if Spartak was part of this hardline Russian group, as he claimed, that meant he’d been part of them back when he, Danny and the twins had raided the facility in Pripyat. ‘You’ve been using me right from the start,’ he said.

Spartak wagged a finger at him. ‘No, my friend. Not using, but helping. We have been helping one another.’

‘No,’ Danny said, ‘you’ve used me to lead you to the Kid. To get your precious hybrids back.’

‘Yes, but I have also helped you to capture him too. In this, we had a common goal.’

Danny was too tired for this bullshit, for this doublespeak. He saw more men walking towards them slowly from the helicopter. One was being pushed in a wheelchair. He recognized the two men walking either side of him as the Ukrainian twins, Viktor and Vasyl. ‘I thought we were friends,’ he said.

Spartak looked genuinely hurt. ‘But we
are
friends, Danny.’

‘Friends don’t fucking lie to each other.’

Spartak shrugged heavily. ‘Sometimes even friends have to,’ he said. ‘If they have a previous loyalty. Such as I do to my people. To my country.’

‘So what now?’ Danny said.

‘Now,’ Spartak said, ‘we take Mr Kid over there . . .’

Danny looked across to see the Kid being carried on the stretcher to the chopper.

‘. . . and we remove him to a special facility where we can talk to him at our leisure, after which we will, among other things, ensure that he confesses to the atrocities committed in London, thereby clearing your name . . .’

‘And the smallpox?’

‘What about it?’

‘What’s to stop him telling the press about it? Or MI5? Or the CIA? What’s to stop him doing a deal?’

Spartak smiled. ‘He will not be speaking to any of those people.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’ll be able to read about it in the media in the next few days. The whole story about how he was arrested in Moscow, confessed to masterminding the London attack and provided compelling evidence to prove this, then unfortunately hanged himself in his cell before he could stand trial.’

‘You’re going to kill him.’

‘No, Danny. Not me. What?’ Spartak smiled. ‘Do you think I look like a murderer?’ His grin, which Danny knew so well, momentarily flickered back into life. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there is someone else who will have the pleasure of doing that.’

Danny followed Spartak’s gaze towards the stretcher with the Kid on it, which had now come to a halt beside the man in the wheelchair. Danny couldn’t hear what he was saying to the Kid, but he recognized his profile and the chewed-off ear.

‘Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Spartak said. ‘It seems a lot of people are coming back from the dead today.’

‘But I thought you passed him the pistol.’

Spartak frowned apologetically. ‘I gave him the antidote. I had to tell you he was dead or you would have called in the authorities to help him. And the existence of the hybrid would have become known.’

‘More lies.’

‘Necessary lies, my friend. Necessary secrets. Just like the hybrids themselves, which will vanish again and this time stay hidden for good.’ He rested his arm heavily on Danny’s shoulder. Danny did not push him away. ‘And no one, not even you,’ he said, ‘will be able to prove they ever existed at all.’

Necessary lies . . . Danny watched the men carrying the Kid continue their walk towards the waiting helicopter. When the Kid had said goodbye to him in the barn, he’d been right. They would never speak to one another again.

It was less than forty-eight hours since the shootout at the farm in Germany. And Danny – thanks to Spartak and his associates, who’d arranged diplomatic transportation – was now at the end of his journey, in the back of a taxi that had brought him from the private airfield, where he’d entered the UK, to the flat he’d left Lexie hidden in.

Danny paid the driver and got out. He looked up at the balcony of the apartment, but Lexie was not there, even though the sun was shining down from a blue, blue sky. He’d tried calling her countless times on the phones he’d left her with, but still hadn’t had any luck. A part of him wondered if she wasn’t answering on purpose, as some kind of punishment. Another part thought she might have seen the news that had been breaking and had simply hightailed it back to her former life and friends.

The thought of that worried him sick. His concern wasn’t to do with MI5 or any other spook agency trying to get hold of her to use her against him. Far from it, events had come to pass exactly as Spartak had said.

The media had today begun reporting in a frenzy how Adam Gilloway, a.k.a. the Kid, had been arrested in Moscow and had confessed – with overwhelming accompanying proof – to being paid by the Georgian Secret Service to mastermind the London attack and the assassination of Georgia’s own UN peace envoy.

He’d furthermore admitted that his aim had been for the attack to be blamed on the Russians, thereby polarizing international opinion in favour of Georgia’s claims on the disputed border states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And he’d also provided incontrovertible proof of Danny Shanklin’s innocence, before going on to hang himself in his cell to avoid standing trial.

All of which meant – also as Spartak had predicted – that Danny Shanklin’s name had been cleared. Before leaving Germany, Danny had met with Crane/Melville, in InWorld™, who’d agreed to broker debriefs over the next few days with MI5 and the CIA to get them off his back.

Danny had already settled on his story. He’d say nothing about the smallpox. What would be the point when he had no proof? He’d tell them he’d escaped from London and had hidden with his daughter. He had been nowhere and had done nothing other than that.

No, what worried Danny, and the reason he’d hightailed it back to Wales just as fast as he could after the Russians had pronounced him free of the virus, was the PSS Killer. He was in the UK and, no matter how many times he had tried calling Ray Kincade, Ray still hadn’t answered.

Maybe, Danny had reasoned, this was because Ray had received Danny’s first message. Maybe he’d come here to find Lexie, as instructed, and had taken her somewhere safe. Maybe there was a message waiting in the apartment for him, telling him how to get in touch.

He hurried up the stairs and unlocked the apartment’s front door. He could see Lexie’s boots on the rug in front of the TV, where she must have kicked them off. He walked through to her bedroom and then his, but she wasn’t in either. He checked the bathroom, but it was empty too, although her toothbrush and washbag were still there.

It was only when he walked through into the kitchen that he saw it. A white envelope had been pinned with a magnet to the fridge.

That was when he felt the first dart of panic rising inside him. The handwriting on the envelope was both elegant and precise.

He stood in front of the fridge and just stared at the envelope for several seconds, before reaching out and opening it.

The note inside read:

SHE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE HER MOTHER.

IT’S SO GOOD TO SEE HER AGAIN.

WE WANT TO SEE YOU TOO, DANNY.

NOW LOOK INSIDE THE FRIDGE.