Wanted (32 page)

Part of the group that had killed her mother,
she meant. Anya Silver.

He propped himself up on his elbows, touched the back of his head and winced. He felt something shift as he applied more pressure and realized that whatever wound was there had been dressed.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told him. ‘It’s clean. The explosion in the flat threw us both clean across the hallway outside. I got lucky, I guess, didn’t even get a scratch, but you got smacked right into a wall . . .’

He gave another exploratory prod with his forefinger. A low red pain exploded across his entire back. Some kind of nerve damage. It hurt like hell.

‘It could have been worse,’ she said. ‘Those British Victorians, they did things properly. It was only thanks to the thickness of the walls in that building that we weren’t shredded on the spot.’

She was right, of course. They were both lucky to be alive.

‘Pills on the bedside table,’ she told him, buttoning up her jeans and crouching down to pull on a pair of brown leather sandals.

‘Where am I?’

‘My hotel room.’

‘But how—’

The room lurched sideways. His skull felt as if someone had tried to cleave it in two with an axe. A wave of nausea washed through him. He retched, but this time nothing came up.

‘Well, that’s a relief, at least,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left inside you.’

She swam into focus again. The beautiful woman who’d tried to cut his throat. She looked younger here in the warmly lit room. Early thirties? Her face was bruised, he saw that too. Her lower lip was cut. From the explosion? Or his own work? The former, he hoped.

‘Ruth,’ he said. ‘Your mother . . .’ he said. ‘I read about her after the massacre . . . I read about them all . . . all of the civilians killed . . .’

‘Why?’

‘Why
what?
’

‘Why read about them?’

To give me strength, he wanted to say. To remind me that this wasn’t just about myself. To make sure I’d never give up.

‘How did I get here?’ he said. ‘How the hell did we get out of that apartment block?’

‘The bomb – a gas leak, the news is saying – blew the front room and the kitchen clean out.’

Danny felt his chest tightening. ‘What else?’ he said.

‘What else
what?’

‘What else did the news say? About us? About me? About the footage of us that the Kid took?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ He screwed up his face. It made no sense. ‘But he must have leaked it. And if he had, every cop in London would be searching for us right now.’

‘Well, they’re not.’

‘So what’s your take on it?’ He pinched his brow. He still felt groggy. He needed to wake up, to think smart.

‘The way I see it is that, one, he doesn’t want any spooks nosing round his flat having connected it to you. Maybe because he’s worried they might link him to the attack.’

Which made sense, he agreed. ‘And two?’

‘Two: he might think he’s already got us, that we’re already dead,’ Ruth said. ‘Even if no fatalities have been reported from that apartment-block explosion, he might think that they recovered and ID’d our bodies, but just haven’t gone public with that information yet while they’re trying to figure this whole mess out.’

The Kid was certainly arrogant enough to think we couldn’t have got away, Danny thought. ‘And how
did
you get us out of there before the authorities closed in after the explosion?’ he asked, his memory still hazy as hell.

‘Speed,’ she said. ‘And smoke. And, trust me, there was a hell of a lot of that. I carried you out through the smoke.’

Carried
him? He took in the tone of her muscles again.

‘And on down the fire escape leading out to the back,’ she continued.

So she’d spotted it too.

‘That was where I’d parked my car,’ she added.

‘Who saw us?’

‘No one.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘As sure as anyone can be who had a bell the size of Big Ben ringing inside their head.’

Anger ripped through him. ‘You stupid motherfucker.’

She blinked, surprised. ‘And there was me expecting a thank-you.’

‘Not you,’ Danny said. ‘Me. I can’t believe I was so stupid. I can’t believe that son-of-a-bitch nearly killed us both.’

He pushed himself up onto his elbow, swung his legs round and sat up. As the sheet slipped from him, he saw he was naked. He dragged it back up across his lap.

‘Where the hell are my clothes?’ he said.

‘Gone,’ she told him. ‘After we got back here, I ditched them. They were pretty much dead from all the smoke and I couldn’t risk taking them to a dry cleaner.’

Again he reached up and tentatively touched the back of his neck. He winced. ‘You dressed it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘You’ll live.’

‘Without seeing a doctor?’

‘You already have.’

He looked up at her, confused, then startled. This just got better and better, he thought, shaking his head carefully in response to the look of cool amusement on her face.

‘Well, a fourth-year medical student anyway,’ she said. ‘I never did take those final exams.’ She handed him another glass of water. And two pills.

‘What are these for?’ he said.

‘To help you sleep. And when you wake, we’ll talk about where we need to go next.’

‘We?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or didn’t I make that clear? I got you out of there. You owe me now. And, the second you’re fully
compos mentis,
you’re going to start to pay me back. You and me, we’re partners now.’

Danny didn’t know how long he slept, but when he woke, he was still in the same room, the only difference being that the bin had been emptied and the sheets changed, somehow without Ruth having disturbed him.

He saw she’d left new clothes for him on a chair by the bed, still in the shop’s carrier-bag – jeans, a jacket, underwear, a couple of shirts. He got up, showered, careful to keep his dressing dry, then cleaned his teeth with the new brush he found on the basin. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t feel half as bad as the last time he’d seen his reflection.

He found Ruth sitting in a high-backed wooden chair in front of an oval glass table in the small sitting room of her hotel suite. She was staring into the screen of a brand-new iMac. USB wires trailed off it, linking it to various pieces of computer hardware that Danny didn’t recognize.

She didn’t see him at first, as he stood there watching her work. Damn, she really is beautiful, he thought, at the same time feeling a momentary pang of guilt, wishing he could at least get word to Anna-Maria that he was OK.

Ruth didn’t take her eyes from the screen. Several different windows were open on it, he saw, as he joined her at the table. Numbers scrolled down the one she was looking at. The one beside it showed a map of the world.

‘The thing with your erstwhile friend the Kid maybe thinking we’re dead,’ she said, ‘gives us the edge, in that he’s not going to be worrying about us coming after him now.’

‘I guess. Or it would if we had any means to do that, if we had any leads.’

‘Maybe we do.’ Keeping her eyes glued to the screen, Ruth took her hand off the mouse and tapped a black metal box on her right.

‘What’s that?’ Danny said.

‘His router.’

‘Whose? You mean . . .’

‘Yep, the Kid.’

He had a flash memory then of her holding something just like this as he’d spun her away from the nest of wires beneath the Kid’s TV in his apartment, just before the grenade had gone off.

‘And that video of him,’ he said. ‘It came through this?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Meaning he’d dialled through to us live right then?’

‘Correct.’

‘And routers keep records of what’s come through them?’

‘Not normally,’ Ruth said.

‘No? Then what use is . . .’

She faced him – and smiled. ‘Someone needs to tell them to do that.’

‘Someone?’

‘Yes, Danny. Someone like me who knows what they’re doing. Someone who’s capable of thinking very fast and clearly under pressure. Someone like me, with only a pen torch for guidance, while a psychopath makes a speech about how clever he is and openly refers to me as a “little lady”, before attempting to blow me to Kingdom Come.’

Danny leaned on the desk. He could feel his hands trembling. But this had nothing to do with the physical beating he’d taken. It was pure adrenalin. ‘Are you telling me we can trace his call? We can find out where it came from?’

‘Normally, no. That would be impossible.’

He had already learned that
normal
didn’t appear to apply to this woman. ‘And abnormally?’ he asked.

She rewarded his attempt at humour with another polite smile. ‘Abnormally,’ she said, ‘it’s possible to do precisely that, but only if you possess some very expensive equipment. Of a type not available to the public. In fact, of a type available to very few governments’ agencies.’

‘Just tell me what it is,’ Danny said. ‘I still have contracts. I still have people who can get me things I need.’ He was thinking of Spartak, of course. And, dammit, he needed to call him too. In case his own enquiries into Glinka and his team had come to fruition.’

‘Unnecessary,’ said Ruth, reaching forward and tapping another of the pieces of hardware plugged into the iMac’s screen, ‘because the kind of equipment needed for this is exactly the kind of tracking equipment Mossad agents based in the United Kingdom are issued with as part of their standard ops kit.’

Danny’s eyes locked back on the iMac screen, specifically on the window showing the world map. A white line, he saw, was slowly scrolling down it. When it got to the bottom, it vanished, only to appear at the top of the window and commence the scan again, like a comb moving through hair.

‘In other words,’ Danny said, ‘you’re going to be able to show me where the Kid was when he made that call to us and where he might be right now?’

Ruth twisted round in her seat to face him. ‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’

The spark of amusement that had been in her eyes just a moment ago had gone. A toughness, like tungsten, had taken its place. ‘Not unless you tell me everything,’ she said. ‘Everything that happened to you the day my mother died. And everything you’ve discovered since.’

Danny’s brow crumpled. Where to begin? With what the torturer had told him? About the smallpox? About what had happened in Pripyat? About the scientists he and Spartak had discovered there? About what they’d said of how Glinka and the others were planning to sell the hybrid to the highest bidders? About what they’d done to Commandant Sabirzhan and his two colleagues? About what Spartak had been forced to do too?

He couldn’t tell her any of that. Information was power. It was the only advantage he had. But there were other things he could tell her, information that would give her no advantage over him in finding the Kid or Glinka if her own methods floundered – in which case Danny would ditch her and move on alone.

He could tell her the truth about how he’d been set up. Nothing about the smallpox. Just about how Glinka and the others had killed the UN peace envoy, then massacred the civilians who’d happened to be there because they’d been paid by the Georgian Secret Service so that the Russians would get the blame.

He could tell her the truth right up to the point at which the mercenaries who’d carried out the massacre had gone on to uncover the existence of a lethal Cold War hybrid smallpox, which they’d made their own.

‘OK,’ Danny said.

He turned away to go and get dressed.

But Ruth hadn’t finished. She placed a restraining hand on his wrist. ‘One other thing,’ she said. ‘In case you’re thinking of leaving out the bit about the smallpox hybrid,
don’t.’

Danny swallowed.

What? But how?

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

Her grip tightened. ‘I said
don’t,’
she warned. ‘Because most of that you’ve already told me.’ Her eyes narrowed, their blue irises now as sharp as blades of steel. ‘You see, that’s the funny thing about Fentanyl,’ she said, staring at him unblinkingly. ‘As with most other opiates, even when people think they’re fast asleep and dreaming, in reality they’re just delirious and keen as hell to shoot off their mouth to anyone who might be there.’

The seaside town Ray Kincade found himself in was around fifteen miles from the farmhouse where the young Scottish family had been murdered.

He was in his hire car, following the signs for the beach. The vehicle was a deliberately different colour and model from the one the PSS Killer might have seen parked near the farmhouse. It was raining and the streets were all but empty. A knot of school kids huddled round a shared cigarette or joint in a bus stop. A woman pushed a pram determinedly into the howling wind outside a tourist café.

The beach itself was deserted. Waves roiled along its wide eyelid of sand. The masts of fishing boats swung like metronomes in the small harbour to the east. The sky was an unrelenting swirl of grey clouds. The forecast said it would stay that way all week.

Ray counted eight cars and two vans in the car park he turned into at the edge of the town. As he cruised slowly up and down the rows, checking the makes and models of the vehicles, he remembered his first couple of years as an SFPD rookie, way back before he’d joined the CIA.

He smiled grimly to himself. The uniform and patrol car had been his be-all-and-end-all back then. Who’d have thought that same career path would bring him so many years later to Scotland, looking for the perpetrator of the worst string of unsolved murders in American history?

He didn’t just suspect that the man who’d attacked him in the farmhouse was the notorious Paper, Stone, Scissors Killer, he
knew.
Not having the forensics contacts here to prove it empirically beyond any reasonable doubt, he’d carefully removed the bloodstained handle of the knife with which he’d stabbed his assailant and air-couriered it inside an evidence bag to an old colleague of his at Quantico.

He would have called in the Scottish cops when he’d been at the farmhouse. That had, in fact, been his initial plan once he’d become convinced that the PSS Killer had been there. Only then, in the struggle, he’d lost his phone. And by the time he’d got back to the farmhouse to recover it, he’d changed his mind. Because that torn newspaper and those nail-gun marks on the floor had proved to Ray that the PSS Killer had been there. As, of course, did the fact that the man who’d attacked him bore an almost total resemblance to the artist’s impression of the PSS Killer furnished by Danny Shanklin. But none of that amounted to a compelling enough case to present to the Scottish police to convince them of what they were dealing with.