Wanted (8 page)

Get a grip.

Who was he kidding? This would never be as easy as that. He needed to get real, bite back his desire for vengeance. The need for closure too. All that could come later. Vengeance for the dead civilians they’d left scattered across that London street and the grieving families. Closure because they’d murdered his friend, Alice De Luca, for trying to help Danny and his daughter escape.

For now he had to be a machine with a heart of stone. Like Spartak. Like the twins. Later, this could be personal.
Would
be personal. But not yet. This was nothing but work.

Danny used the amplifier again. Still nothing. He slowly turned the handle until it clicked, then began to force the door open, using his shoulder to pile on pressure, tension ratcheting inside him as the rusted hinges squeaked in protest, every bit as excruciating as the bark of the lock-buster’s gears.

No gunfire. No voices. Was nobody home? He pushed the door another inch, then two more, raking the growing gap with his unblinking eyes for alarm wires. Five inches, ten . . . enough to peer through properly into the dark space looming beyond, his finger poised on the AK-9’s trigger.

His goggles picked up nothing. No heat signatures. Danny kept on pushing until the gap was big enough for him to slip through. He glanced back at Spartak, who was already creeping up silently behind.

Dropping into a crouch, he edged through the gap, scoping the room once more, just to be sure. An administration centre, it looked like. A row of ten windows to his left. Thirty or more desks. Antique, pre-digital equipment. A thick layer of dust lay across the floor. No footprints. Two doors led off, one dead ahead, the other to the right.

Sheet lightning flashed outside, illuminating the opaque, grime-smeared windows. Details leaped out: telephones on desks, staplers, stacks of paperwork, left undone. Danny pictured a different time: he heard the sound of typing and people talking, smelt cheap coffee in the air.

But now there was nothing. This place was as derelict and rotten as the station waiting room he’d hurtled through earlier.

He signalled Spartak to go ahead.

‘Vvodty,’
he told the twins, ordering them to abandon their wait outside and enter the building.

Danny moved in on the door to his right, went through the process with the amplifier and turned to see Spartak doing the same at the other. A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision. The twins had now entered the room.

He tried the handle of the door he was at. It moved easily. Wasn’t locked. He waved the nearest twin to him. The younger man crouched, covering the door from an angle that would allow him to see into the room beyond as it came into view.

Danny flattened himself against the wall on the hinge side, stretched out his arm and began pushing the door open.

A long, drawn-out creak.

Then silence.

The watching twin edged forward, stopped and signalled that the next room was clear. Danny waved him through, then followed.

He found himself in what looked like an old delivery bay. But even as he was looking round, the twin’s hand shot up in warning, and Danny dropped into a dead-still crouch. A shiver of electricity rippled across his shoulders as the twin pointed at the floor.

There were boot prints everywhere, fresh, like astronauts’ prints on the moon. And not just one shape, grip and size. Several. And not just leading in one direction, but many.

Apart from the doorway through which Danny and the twin had just entered, the only way out appeared to be through a closed set of double wooden swing doors ahead. To Danny’s left, there was a smoked, bevelled-glass window at waist height, against which the rain battered and raged.

His goggles picked out more signs of life and recent habitation. A row of cigarette butts stood on the windowsill, which was wet and slick with water – the window must have been recently opened. A plastic bottle of Coke stood on the floor, a couple of inches of black liquid still in it, with carbonated bubbles rising.

A rustling. Danny spun, pumped up, ready to fire. A black rat scuttled across the area. Its sharp eyes glared fearlessly at him, before it buried its snout in the remnants of some food inside a crumpled, discarded plastic package.

Another burst of adrenalin. Danny whipped round to face the double doors. There, at the limit of his hearing, a noise had just registered. A thudding. Muffled. Distant. More a feeling, in fact, than a sound. A vibration. Switching on and then off. Coming from somewhere deep below.

At first Danny thought it was some kind of machine. A flash memory hit him of the New York apartment he’d grown up in and how the clothes-dryer there had shaken and thumped so loudly in the last minute of its cycle that he’d always watched it, mesmerized, expecting it to tear itself free from its brackets and march across the floor.

But this sound was too irregular to be mechanical. Boots, he decided. That was what it sounded like. Boots on stairs. Someone was coming towards them.

Viktor could feel it too: he was staring at Danny in wolfish anticipation. Danny signalled him to hold his position and keep the double doors covered. Then he turned to see the other twin and Spartak emerging from the administration centre. He motioned them back through the doorway and signalled for them to shut the door behind them.

Wordlessly, Danny and Viktor, now alone in the delivery bay, positioned themselves either side of the swing doors. Through the thin gap between the frame and the door, Danny now detected the faint glow of artificial light filtering from somewhere deeper in the building.

The footsteps kept coming, closer and closer. One person, Danny decided, which gave him and the twin the advantage in numbers as well as surprise. The timbre of the noise changed now, the boots no longer thudding on stairs, but clacking towards them across wooden tiles.

Danny hooked his weapon over his shoulder and reached into his jacket pocket, as whoever was heading their way started whistling tunelessly. A sentry’s whistle, a whistle of boredom. A whistle of someone inattentive who’d be easy to take out. Hardly the hallmark of Glinka, or even the Kid.

Nothing’s ever easy,
he heard an echo of the Old Man’s voice say.

The light through the frame gap brightened. A flashlight beam? Then
whoosh:
the double door furthest away swung open, obscuring the twin behind it.

Whoever he was – he was six two, and big with it, about the same size as the Kid – he strode through the doorway and into the delivery bay.

Danny stepped in smartly behind him, ramming the Taser hard against the back of his neck. He pulled the trigger. A snap. A buzz. The man’s body switched from being as rigid as a board to wilting, as if it had been filleted. Releasing the Taser’s trigger, he caught the man as he fell, supporting him upright.

Viktor slipped round fast from behind the open door, which the downed man’s body was preventing from swinging shut, and helped take his weight, even catching the flashlight as it slipped from his fingers, preventing it hitting the floor.

Danny unhooked his weapon from his shoulders and turned to look through the open doorway into the stairwell beyond. No one else there. The man had come alone.

They laid him on the floor. Danny checked his face. He had never seen him before.

As Danny rose, Viktor tied and gaffer-taped the man before the effect of the Taser wore off. Danny fetched Vasyl and Spartak, then stepped through into the stairwell, as the twins worked together to drag the already moaning and twitching captive into the administration centre and out of sight.

The wooden tiled floor of the stairwell was warped and buckled in places. But that was where the decrepitude ended. On the left – set into the external wall, Danny surmised, the one overlooking the car park – there was a modern steel blast door, with galvanized bars locked across. An RFID keypad winked red from its top right corner, showing it was locked.

No one would fit a door like that unless what was concealed inside the building was of extreme worth. But Danny took heart that no one had yet raised the alarm over the guard he had killed. That and the fact that the guy he had just Tasered hadn’t exactly been on high alert. He thought that the door was working to his advantage: it made whoever was in here feel too safe.

Deciding which way to move next was easy. Even though this was the ground floor of a tall building, there was no up. At least, not where this stairwell was concerned. The way up was blocked, had caved in, and was nothing but a mass of impenetrable rubble and plaster.

But there was a way forward. Straight ahead there was another set of double doors. But they weren’t wooden swing doors, like the ones Danny had just come through. They were state-of-the-art blast doors, like the one to his left. Also like that, they were controlled by an RFID keypad.

With no direct access to the locking mechanism, the lock-buster couldn’t help. And while Spartak was carrying plastic explosives, enough possibly to take this door out, who knew how deep the facility went? Or how many people were inside? Or how well they might be able to react to a full-frontal assault?

Footsteps. Danny turned to see that Viktor had returned. ‘I need the code for the door,’ he said to him, in Ukrainian. ‘Make him talk.’

Alive.

Danny felt that way himself right enough. Alive and kicking. Buzzing with it. The proximity of death – the possibility that at any second his own life might end in a situation such as this – made him aware of each heartbeat, each breath, hearing, touching, seeing in a way he never did in his day-to-day existence.

That was why people like him, Spartak and the twins got addicted to this. To danger. To risk. Because beside this vibrancy, immediacy and sheer precariousness, the rest of their lives felt monochrome and slow.

Or that was what he used to think. Back when he was young, before he’d met Sally and had become a father to Lexie and Jonathan, and had been blown away by their births, the joy of their smiles and the light dancing in their eyes.

They’d changed everything, his family. It was them he’d started thinking of at times like this, no longer thrilling to the danger he was putting himself into, no longer being seduced by it, but dreading it, wanting it gone, wanting to be safe at home with them.

And that was where he wanted to be now. With Lexie. With the only family he had left.

‘Four, nine, two, three,’ Viktor’s voice crackled in Danny’s earpiece.

Footsteps. He turned to see the twins closing in on him and Spartak.

Turning his back on them, he punched the keys into the pad. The lock clicked. He hauled open the door and Spartak moved through.

‘Clear,’ the big man said.

Danny walked in behind him. Nothing to right or left. Just a staircase leading down.

The building they’d initially encountered might as well have been on another planet. Through this doorway they stepped out of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century. The whitewashed walls were spotless, with bright electric ceiling lights of a much more modern design than a building of this age could ever have been fitted with. Someone had spent a lot of money kitting the place out. And recently too. The dust-covered mausoleum of the upper floors was nothing but a memory now.

Moving aside, Danny slipped his goggles round his neck. He motioned the twins forward to take point. They moved swiftly and silently down the steep flight of stairs, around the first bend and out of sight.

Music. Somewhere below.

What the hell?

Spartak shrugged his huge shoulders and smiled thinly.

Danny counted to ten in his head, listening over the music for any sign that the twins had made contact or had been detected. He wanted to leave enough space between himself, Spartak and them to diminish any possibility of their entire party being wiped out by an IED. But impatience gnawed at him with each passing second because he no longer believed there would be any additional security between here and wherever the guard had come from. The man’s relaxed attitude couldn’t have spelled out more clearly that Danny’s team was now well within the operation’s security perimeter.

Ten . . .

Danny began his descent. The music got louder the further underground he went. Something classical, it sounded like. A swell of strings, no beat. It was so surreal that, under any other circumstances, like Spartak, he might have smiled. But it sent a shiver through him. It was too domestic, too
normal
a sound. It felt so out of place that he couldn’t help wondering who the hell had switched it on.

At the bottom of the first flight of stairs he found the source of the sound: speakers and a laptop. The table on which they stood was flanked by the twins and was positioned in front of a row of flat-screen wall monitors, showing views of the building outside . . . including the car park.

How the hell could anyone who’d been sitting there have missed Danny’s firefight outside? Sure, the music would have muffled any noise and the storm might well have covered his team’s insertion through the back of the building, but the muzzle flashes from his running battle with the guard he’d killed would have lit these screens like the Fourth of July.

Unless, of course, no one had been watching. Danny rounded the desk to see a sleeping-bag on the floor. The remains of a bottle of vodka, too. The guard he had Tasered upstairs should have raised the alarm, but he’d failed. He’d been too drunk, too lazy, and now he was paying the price.

Two corridors branched off, left and right. Midway between them, beside the surveillance desk, there was another blast door, this time with a small round observation window set into it.

As the twins and Spartak covered the two corridors and the way back upstairs, Danny edged towards the door, wary that someone might even now be approaching from the other side. But when he peered through the window, he saw nobody. Only another set of well-lit stairs leading further down into the bowels of the building.

The view was slightly distorted: whatever material the window was made of was inches thick, and he could see that there were two layers, with what he supposed might be a vacuum between.