Wanted (7 page)

This time his eyesight was clear. He scoped in until he could see the thin black line of the lace pulled tight to the eye of the boot.

‘Sleep tight.’ His lips framed the word silently as he squeezed the trigger.

The round fired from his AK-9 smashed through his target’s ankle at such a velocity that it ripped his leg from under him and sent him crashing hard to the ground.

Danny waited. He watched. The man didn’t move.

It was possible, he supposed, that the velocity and the round’s impact alone had been enough to send his target into shock, or even kill him outright by inducing a heart attack. But while Danny wanted him alive to question, the risk of his victim being alive enough to send comms to anyone inside the exchange was just too big to take.

His target’s body bucked twice in the mud as he loosed off two more rounds. One to the chest and one to the head.

‘Danny?’ Spartak’s voice came again.

Still no movement from the fallen target.

‘Hold your positions,’ Danny whispered into his mike, in Ukrainian, eyes still locked on the stationary body. ‘I’ve got one hostile down. I think he’s alone.’

Silence, except for the drumming of the rain and the wail of the wind. Danny rolled right and came up slowly, snapping his goggles back up from where they’d been hanging by their strap around his neck. He wiped the mud from the lenses and checked the front of the exchange.

It was lifeless as the grave.

He nudged the body with the toe of his boot as he reached it, ready to shoot. He clocked the bloodied hole in the side of the Honda guy’s hood and knelt. The dead man’s finger was trapped in the trigger guard of his APS. Danny eased it free, inspecting the weapon.

The APS was old, but clean. A favoured weapon, then. This guy had been a pro and it might just as easily have been Danny lying face down in the mud.

He rolled the body over, his hands shaking now, as another burst of adrenalin rushed through him. Not from the kick of the kill, or from how close he’d come to winding up dead himself, but from who this dead man might be.

The body was too skinny for the Kid and too broad for the blonde. But how about Glinka? The exact right size for him, Danny reckoned. He peeled back the hood to reveal . . .

Someone else. A dark-skinned guy in his late thirties, whose face meant nothing to him.

Disappointment flooded him. But then came relief. Because the plain fact was that, no matter how much he might want Glinka dead, he still needed him alive to confess to what he’d done in London. To prove Danny’s innocence of the crime.

He checked the dead guy’s pockets for ID, his neck for military tags, but got nothing.

The Honda’s door was still open when he reached it. No one else was inside. But he saw the dead guy’s screw-up. His comms were lying on the dash beside the smouldering joint he’d been smoking when Danny’s shape had first loomed in his vision from out of the dark.

There was nothing to identify the man either. The glove compartment and door pockets were empty. The same went for the boot.

Danny switched off the car’s searchlight and took the keys. He ground the joint out in the mud. Then he radioed in the specs of the dead man’s weapon and comms to the rest of his team.

‘Status,’ Danny said.

Spartak came back first: ‘There’s a fire exit half open on the south side. The windows above it are choked with vines. It looks as good a motherfucking way in as any other.’

The twins each reported they’d seen no one. Neither suggested a better way in.

‘Converge on One,’ Danny ordered.

He worked his way quickly back into the side-street and looped round to where Spartak lay in the rubble of a collapsed building. The twins were already there, in position ten yards either side.

Danny had a clear view of the exchange. Twelve blacked-out ground-floor windows, two hogged with ivy and vines. The promised ground-floor fire exit stood dead centre in between, its door hanging twisted off its frame.

‘Anyone we knew?’ Spartak asked, referring to the dead man Danny had left behind. No doubt he wanted to know if it had been Glinka or the blonde or the Kid.

‘No.’

Danny slammed in a fresh magazine. He’d already told the others that once they were inside they were to try to avoid headshots and disable the targets instead. Again a command he wouldn’t normally have given, because there were few things more dangerous than a wounded armed man. But again he had no choice.

He needed to take one of these bastards alive.

A rumble of distant thunder barrelled across the swirling black sky, flicking a switch in Danny’s mind and bringing a memory of tube waves rolling in and enveloping the bright white sands on the Caribbean island of St Croix where, for the last several years, he had made his home.

Warmth: a memory of it assailed him. Warmth, and the smell of the sun on his skin, the glint of his board, and the prickling of water droplets drying on his shoulder blades as he stretched his arms wide and dug his nails into the sand.

Rain pissing down washed the Caribbean vision away, making it fade and disperse, like squid ink in the sea. Danny grimaced, wiping the raindrops from his brow, determined. Once this was over, he’d take Lexie to St Croix. How could he not have done so before? He should have spent all the years that had slid by teaching his daughter to surf, fish and fly kites. How could he not have mended what had been broken between them? And how could she have grown up so fast?

In the final few seconds of waiting – slowing his breathing, readying himself for what would come next – he felt a burst of hatred for himself, for the selfishness of his grief. He’d wallowed in self-pity when he should have stood tall. For Lexie. No matter how ruined he’d felt inside, he should never have let her move to England to be with her grandmother. He should never have stepped back from being her father as he had.

Lightning split the sky. He raised his hand and jabbed three fingers forward twice. The twins moved in on his command, a pair of pincers closing in at either side of the fire exit. No wonder Spartak had vouched for them. Danny couldn’t fault their work.

He moved in too, joining the twin on the left – Viktor, the over-display on Danny’s night goggles told him. No eye contact passed between them. They were focused on what was ahead, on keeping themselves and each other alive. The only acknowledgement the twin made of his presence was to shuffle sideways, so that Danny could be nearest to the building’s looming entrance.

Danny slid the goggles from his face so that they hung round his neck. He slipped a convex-lensed telescopic mirror from his sleeve and breathed on it, then wiped the condensation off the lens with the dry palm of his hand.

He edged the mirror forward inch by inch, using it to check through the gap left between the fire-exit door and the wall into which it had once been squarely set. Through a blur of reflected moonlight and raindrops, he saw that the space immediately on the other side of the door was empty. He stared into the darkness beyond, searching for signs of movement, but saw nothing.

He tilted the mirror down, eyes straining to filter useful information from the moonlight, looking for footprints in the first few feet of the damp corridor inside, and searching for signs of IEDs. Again, he got nothing. So far so good.

He could order the twins into the breach. He could let them take the risk. Maybe he should. That was how plenty of leaders he knew operated, considering themselves their most precious tactical asset and those beneath them in rank as expendable.

He knew neither twin would complain. He’d already wired money anonymously from one of his numbered Swiss accounts into one of theirs. They’d follow his orders. He owned them for as long as his money was good.

But a part of him wanted,
needed,
to be first in. Not only because he trusted his judgement and experience above theirs, but also because he wanted to be first to confront whatever might be waiting inside. He remembered the dead who had been littered across the London street as he’d looked down on them from that hotel balcony. The adults, yes, but mainly the children, thin-limbed and broken, as if frozen in a two-dimensional montage of impossible twists, turns and somersaults against the hard, cold concrete backdrop.

Danny thought of his own dead son too. His dead wife. In the cold vortex of the wind and the rain, he reached deep into his memory, and there he saw her as she’d once been, and remembered the slow, sensual curl of her smile as they’d walked through a park, her laughter as she’d played catch with the kids, or the sound of her yawning in the morning, as she rolled slowly onto her side to face him, in a tangle of crisp white sheets, her eyes opening, her hand reaching out to touch his, before pulling him into her soft, sweet embrace, as if he were falling through a perfect, never-ending summer sky.

It had been so long since he’d seen her and Jonathan alive. A thousand lifetimes was how it felt. They were gone. His brain told him so, but his heart, his soul, could not accept it.

Instead he dared hope. He dared pray. He dared to believe that if he died, they
would
be there. And all this might fade, like a dream, and he would find himself awakening once more in their arms.

A crackle from his radio. Danny slid the mirror shut and hooked it into his jacket. Snapping his night-vision goggles back on, he switched on his flashlight and gripped it on the barrel of his AK-9, then slithered flat on his belly through the gap between the door and the ground.

His mud-spattered clothing rustled on the concrete. He stared ahead, ready to fire, but no one leaped out of the shadows. The corridor terminated fifteen feet away and was clear. The stink of mildew clogged his nostrils. His skin burned with sweat.

He stilled himself and listened hard, wary that someone might even now be reaching for the handle of the door, wanting to maintain the element of surprise. He waited for it to creak, for a muffled voice to be raised. But then, hearing nothing but the whip of wind and the drumming of rain behind him, he moved in further, away from the entrance, deeper into the dark.

Halfway along the corridor, he trailed a gloved finger across the floor, leaving a clear line in the muck gathered there, which his goggles picked out just as surely as if it had been written in black pen. But that was the only mark there was. It seemed that no one had set foot there for years.

He studied the closed door at the end of the corridor. No light showed around its frame. Was it sealed? Or blocked off? Or even bricked up from the other side?

He crouched, then stood, weapon up, safety off. He moved quickly to the end of the corridor, again cursing the fact that he was operating outside the law. He was low on equipment. Had no fibre-optics or micro-drills to enable him to search for sounds of occupation in whatever room lay beyond this door. No way, even, of telling if the door was alarmed or wired to explode.

He examined it up-close. Its paint had long since peeled away. He pressed his hand against it. MDF, he guessed. Still dense and solid to the touch. Dust rimmed its dark frame, but there were no corresponding build-ups of dust on the floor directly below, which suggested that the door had not been recently opened. Might not have been opened for decades, he supposed.

He used a hand-held metal detector to scan the door frame, searching for signs of sensors. Then he pressed the small plastic amplifier, with which Spartak had provided each of them, against the door. Its needle barely moved above its tenth percentile. What fluctuations it did make, Danny attributed to the storm outside.

He squeezed himself tight to the wall and waved his hand across the door’s dark keyhole. He did it again, half expecting a sudden gunshot to punch a zigzag of splinters into the corridor.

But no shot came. Danny pushed himself slowly off the wall and brought his head level with the keyhole. When he peered through, he saw only darkness. He stood upright and tried the handle. It didn’t budge. Meaning the door was locked or corroded, most likely both.

He dug into his zipped jacket sleeve pocket. The one item of high spec equipment he’d brought with him from England was the lock-buster. A gift last year from an old Company friend who now consulted for a European security-accoutrements firm.

A shiver chased down his spine. The green world seen through his goggles had just darkened, the change of light implying nearby movement. Danny swivelled round, instinctively bringing up his AK-9 as he did so.

Then he lowered it. Spartak had either grown bored of waiting outside, or sick of the weather. His hulking silhouette ballooned as he continued to squeeze himself between the door and the wall, then moved along the corridor towards where Danny stood.

Danny twisted the lock-buster’s nozzle into the keyhole and pressed himself tight to the wall. If someone was there and awake or waiting on the other side, then there was no way they wouldn’t hear what was coming next, and chances were they’d react by pumping a few hundred rounds through that MDF into the corridor.

If someone was asleep, he might get lucky. Maybe they’d put down to the storm the noise he was about to make. Luckiest of all, no one would be there.

He glanced back over his shoulder, but Spartak didn’t need any telling. He was already on the floor, his weapon trained on the door, doing a pretty good job for an elephant of making himself as small a target as possible by wedging himself against the wall.

Danny pulled the lock-buster’s trigger, wincing as its gears whirred and ground. It took two seconds, but it felt like ten, before a single note of snapping metal rang out.

No shot came this time either. No splinters of wood or eruptions of shouting from the other side of the door. He used the handheld plastic amplifier again to check. Its needle remained low. The loudest thing he could hear was his own heartbeat thumping a whole lot faster than he’d have liked.

He turned to see Spartak grinning at him, now crouched, his weapon still trained on the door, ready,
wanting,
to move in.

Danny, too, felt the urge for it all to kick off. He pictured Glinka on the other side. Glinka and the Kid.
Please, God, let them be there.
The two of them drunk on whisky, their weapons out of reach, easy pickings. The scenario stretched out in his mind. He pictured them later, too, cuffed, trussed up in the back of a van, just as they’d trussed up Lexie. He pictured them being hauled out into the glare of a searchlight to the snarling of dogs and barked orders from whichever security service he chose to hand them over to, once they’d confessed to what they’d done.