Wanted (11 page)

‘Look!’ he roared in Ukrainian, slamming the man’s head against the glass divide and pinning it there, so that the researcher now found himself eyeball to eyeball with the man he’d experimented on. ‘Look at what you’ve done.’

The researcher was silent now, rigid with fear. His breath came in short, sharp gasps. His shoes weren’t touching the ground. Urine flowed freely down his legs.

‘You fucking scum,’ Spartak spat. He shifted his grip to lift the man with both hands and dash his head against the wall of bulletproof glass.

But Danny threw himself between the researcher and the glass. Gripping the man’s torn coat and shirt, he pushed back with all of his might.

Spartak’s eyes were two black beads. Danny had seen him like that before – three years ago, when he had hired him to help retrieve a US senator’s daughter from a South American kidnap gang. The drop-off and handover had been compromised by the local police. By the time Danny’s team had reached the location where the girl had been held, she was dead. Dead and used.

‘Don’t,’ he ordered Spartak now, remembering again what Spartak had done to that girl’s kidnappers when they’d eventually tracked them down. ‘Stop. We need him alive.’

Spartak spoke through gritted, gold-capped teeth. ‘He’s Spetsnaz.’

‘What?’ Danny stared at the guy shaking in their hands, at his baby-smooth white skin, his thin neck and wrists, and the fingers that looked about as strong as a spider’s legs, as if they’d done nothing more strenuous than type.

‘No,’ Spartak growled, ‘not him.
Him.
’

Danny twisted his head towards the glass wall, as he followed Spartak’s furious stare. The bigger man was looking past him into the room on the other side of the glass.

And that was when he finally noticed what Spartak had already seen. There, directly behind Danny, stood the bleeding, infected prisoner. Even through the mess of his flaking, disintegrating skin the tattoo on his right forearm, which he’d pressed up against the glass, was visible. And unmistakable. It was of a fist and a star. And it was identical to the one Spartak had on his own arm, the tip of which was showing even now where his sleeve had been pulled upwards during his struggle with the researcher.

The tattoo was Spetsnaz.

Which meant the prisoner was Russian Special Forces.

Spartak tightened his grip around the man’s throat. The researcher’s face darkened in a rush of blood. His eyeballs started to bulge.

‘No,’ Danny said.

Spartak’s expression stayed hard as concrete. His neck tendons flexed.

‘Let him go,’ Danny ordered, trying to twist Spartak’s hands away from around the terrified man’s throat, ramming his face up towards Spartak’s and staring into the bigger man’s eyes. ‘Let him fucking go. He might know how we can help them.’

Spartak’s face grew so red it looked like it would burst. But then he blinked. His fist slackened. He lowered the choking researcher so that his feet were once more touching the ground. But he didn’t let go of his throat. Flecks of spittle hung from the man’s lips and his eyes streamed tears.

Danny glanced back through the smeared glass at the infected soldier. A sudden brightness had filled his eyes. A keenness. He was staring at the tip of Spartak’s tattoo, which was now plainly in sight: he knew Spartak was his brother-in-arms.

But something else was growing in the prisoner’s eyes too. Hatred and hunger. A thirst for revenge, which made Danny glad the screen was there. And thankful it was soundproof. Because if the prisoner were to say what was clearly now on his mind, Spartak would obey him. He’d kill the scientist. He’d snap his neck on the spot.

Spetsnaz were every bit as lethal and elite as the British SAS or the US Navy Seals. And even though Spartak Sidarov had left their ranks more than ten years ago to become freelance, he’d still owe a debt of loyalty to the other man. In circumstances such as this, for him he’d willingly kill.

The researcher hung trembling off Spartak’s outstretched arm.

‘Put him down,’ Danny said.

Finally Spartak obeyed. He let the scientist go and stepped back.

The man slumped against the glass divide, massaging his throat and gasping for air.

‘Listen to me,’ Danny said, stepping towards him and pressing his AK-9 against his chest. ‘My friend here wants you dead. And not only dead, he wants you screaming in pain as you die. Your only chance of getting out of this is to give me exactly what I want.’

‘Anything.’ The scientist sounded as if his windpipe had cracked.

‘When did they leave? The others who were here?’ Danny said, gripping a handful of his hair and twisting it so that it nearly ripped out. ‘Answer me. Now.’

‘Yesterday. Yesterday afternoon.’

Danny gritted his teeth, furious to have missed them by so little. In England, had the dying torturer lied to him about when he could meet up with Glinka? Had he snatched the last laugh by sending Danny here just too late?

‘How many others were there?’ he said. ‘Not including the two men upstairs.’

‘Six.’

‘Any women?’

‘One.’

‘What colour was her hair?’

The man looked confused, as if the question might be a trick.

‘You heard.’

‘Blonde.’

‘Her name?’

‘I don’t know.’ The man’s face tensed. Clearly he was sensing that this failure might lead Danny to let Spartak off his leash.

Danny pictured the blonde as he’d last seen her, walking with Glinka to that Cessna light aircraft, leaving Danny in the English farmhouse with those men whose job it had been to torture him and his daughter to death.

‘What about the hacker?’ he said, his dark eyes angling towards the L-shaped desk. ‘The Englishman. The one who set up that computer.’

The researcher seemed shocked that he knew such details at all. ‘I did not know he was English. He spoke . . . many languages . . .’

Many?
Could they be talking about the same person? If it were true, then it confirmed just how deep the Kid’s act had gone. It also begged the question, what other secret skills did he possess? And how might he now deploy them to prevent Danny hunting him down?

‘His name in English,’ the scientist was saying, ‘I think it was . . .’

Two words followed, in mangled English, but clear enough for Danny to translate, and to confirm his suspicions one hundred per cent.

The Kid.

He still didn’t know why the Kid had betrayed him to Glinka. For money? For power? Or because he’d had no choice? Had Glinka been blackmailing him in some way?

He no longer cared. He just wanted to get his hands on the Kid. He wanted to make him confess to everything he’d done. To force him to tell the authorities the truth and, that way, to give Danny and his daughter back their lives.

Danny shoved the researcher hard into Spartak, who snatched him up in his arms. ‘Bring him,’ he ordered, crossing to the L-shaped desk.

Spartak obeyed, visibly shaking, a volcano about to erupt.

‘Sit him down,’ Danny said.

Spartak rammed the researcher into the seat, as if he wanted to push him right through it. He kept him gripped by the back of his neck.

‘Is the computer rigged?’ Danny said. ‘Is it alarmed or wired in any way?’

‘No.’ The researcher frantically shook his head. ‘We use it continually for our – for our work.’

Work
. That word again. The neutral catch-all that could somehow excuse all
this.

Danny watched for ‘tells’, for any sign he might be lying.

‘I swear it,’ the man said, starting to weep again. ‘We use it to control their environment – the lighting, the heating, their water supply . . .’

Their.
Danny felt a shiver run down his spine, as he peered through the glass, past the infected soldier, who was still hovering, like a distorted reflection in a tarnished mirror, into the gloom beyond.

‘And each subject – each patient,’ the researcher hurriedly corrected himself, ‘this computer is monitoring them also.’

Patient.
Spartak’s fist had clenched so tight at the word that the veins on the backs of his hand had stood out as taut as iron wires and the researcher’s air supply had once more been cut off.

Danny glared at Spartak, a warning not to hurt the researcher any more. His hand slowly relaxed, releasing another series of gasps as the man gulped more air into his lungs.

‘Each of them also,’ the researcher said, in a hurry now to please Danny, ‘has been fitted with a diagnostic collar to relay physiological changes – their temperature, heart rate, their sickness . . . the extent of the disease . . .’

A collar, like a chimp in a vivisection lab.

A movement to the left. Vasyl, Danny saw, was talking into his radio. And moving. Fast. He’d dragged the other researcher to his feet, and was now marching him forward to the glass barrier, the barrel of his weapon rammed into his back. The young mercenary had pulled his goggles off his face. His expression was as dark as Spartak’s. It was the face of someone who wanted blood.

Of course, Danny thought. The twins were more than likely ex-Spetsnaz too. That was probably how Spartak had recruited them. Through an ex-special forces network. They, too, would regard the infected soldier as one of their own.

Vasyl slammed the second researcher up against the glass just as Spartak had done with the first. He held him there, forcing him to behold what he had done.

‘Log in,’ Danny told the researcher at the desk.

‘But—’

‘What?’

A bead of sweat ran down the skinny man’s brow. ‘It will activate the cameras,’ he croaked, as the pressure of Spartak’s grip bore down.

‘What cameras?’

‘The ones that he . . . set up to transmit the images . . .’

‘Images of what?’

‘Of them.’ The man’s eyes were flickering, terrified, towards the glass wall and back. The soldier had moved across. He was now right in front of them, and staring. ‘To demonstrate the effects of the virus,’ the researcher gabbled, his voice fluctuating with fear, ‘to enable the people – the buyers – to observe for themselves the effects. That is why they have kept us here – to keep transmitting these images, along with the data reflecting the changing condition of the patients, onto a private access website every hour so that the buyers might continue to see how truly effective this hybrid continues to be . . .’

Buyers.

Danny could hardly believe what he was hearing. Glinka and the Kid had been advertising their work, had been demonstrating the virus’s effects on human test subjects over the net. His eyes were already scanning the walls. It didn’t take him long to spot the cameras. Two of them, one bolted to each wall at either end of this side of the glass divide. High up. Close to the glass.

Spartak took two steps sideways and twirled his rifle, like a majorette’s baton, smashing the nearest camera clean off its pivot with a single blow.

Vasyl was moving swiftly too. Forcing the older researcher to his knees, he cracked him hard across the back of the head with the barrel of his weapon. A warning that nearly knocked the man out. Grabbing a chair, he stood on it and battered the second wall camera to pieces with the butt of the Glock pistol he’d been wearing across his chest.

Glass rained down on the man, who curled up into a foetal position with his face to the wall, as blood trickled down his neck.

Danny focused back on the skinny researcher and the laptop at his side, hearing it chime its welcome. Start-up software booted up, splitting the screen into five windows. Two of them he didn’t understand. Computer code, it looked like. The Kid’s first language, not his. The other three windows showed medical graphs. Vital signs. Each had a different name at the top.

The heart rates of the first two graphs had already flat-lined. Meaning probably that two of the so-called patients were already deceased.

The only patient left alive, the man staring out through the glass at them now, was . . .

‘Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan,’ Danny read.

Beside him he heard Spartak’s breath catch.

‘What?’ Danny said. ‘You know him?’

‘No, but . . .’

Danny saw the colour had drained from his old friend’s face.

‘But I do know of him,’ Spartak said.

Spartak stared into the infected man’s eyes with increasing outrage as he told Danny who he was. A hero. The commandant of the FSB Academy. A personal adviser to the Russian prime minister no less.

‘Then what the hell is he doing here?’ Danny said.

And why was he dressed for combat? As if he’d come here looking for a fight. Did it mean Sabirzhan had somehow known that Glinka had gone hunting for the smallpox? And he’d tried to prevent him getting it? Or, after he’d got it, he’d attempted to take it back? Perhaps not even here at all? Somewhere else. Somewhere cold and remote. Somewhere Arctic clothing such as he was wearing would be required.

Hope flared momentarily bright inside Danny. Because if someone else – someone as influential as Commandant Sabirzhan – had worked out what Glinka was up to, they might also have worked out, or at least might have come to suspect, that Danny was innocent of the London attack.

‘I need to know how he ended up here, who he’s working for,’ he said.

‘First we get him out.’

Spartak was already at the bubble doorway set into the glass wall. It consisted of three separate chambers, one on this side of the glass, one on the other, clearly locked from the inside with the third between them. It had a vacuum funnel running upwards from its roof and jets studding its walls, with pipes leading down. A decontamination chamber. A safeguard to allow someone wearing protective clothing and breathing apparatus to pass safely into and out of the partitioned room beyond.

‘No,’ Danny warned, as Spartak grabbed the door’s round steel wheel-handle with both hands.

The skinny researcher had leaped to his feet. ‘You can’t. If you breach that door, we’ll all be killed.’

‘The hybrid,’ Danny snapped, rounding on the smaller man. ‘How is it transmitted?’

Just how contagious is it?