Wanted (38 page)

I’m going to enjoy watching you learn how you will die . . .

The smallpox.

Sweet Jesus, they were going to inject him with the hybrid smallpox.

‘Hold him,’ Ruth said.

The guard grabbed Danny. He pressed his whole weight down on him, pinning him against the concrete wall and the metal bars that fixed the gate to the wall. Danny bucked. He fought. But it was useless. He couldn’t free his hands from where they’d been shackled.

The grey-haired woman came through the gate into the pen. Danny tried to twist out from under the heavy guard, but all he got for his efforts was a punch in the back of his head. He rammed his elbow back into the guard’s gut. This time the man reared back before throwing his full weight up against him, slamming Danny’s head against the gate bars and the concrete wall so hard that Danny heard something crack and thought he was about to lose consciousness.

He felt someone taking his jacket sleeve and rolling it up. With the last of his strength, he twisted his neck round – only to see the grey-haired woman gritting her teeth with determination.

He cried out, not from pain, but from the realization of what was happening, as she slid the needle into his arm. Dementyev and the blonde leaned over the gate, clearly enjoying the show.

‘I can see from your eyes,’ Dementyev said, ‘you’ve already guessed what this is. And, of course, you had the privilege of seeing for yourself how effective it is when you visited our facility in Ukraine.’

‘Go to hell,’ Danny said.

But Dementyev just laughed. ‘Oh, no, my friend, that is where you will be going. And very, very soon.’

The grey-haired woman stood up, her empty syringe’s needle now dripping red with Danny’s blood. The blonde blew Danny a kiss. Then she and Dementyev turned and walked away.

The guard let go of Danny and followed the grey-haired woman out of the pen.

Only Ruth remained. She gazed down at her prisoner with neither hatred nor pity. She stared at him with a mixture of boredom and cold resignation, as a farmer might who had brought an animal there to die.

‘Those others . . .’ Danny said. Through the bars of the slaughter-pen gate, he could see the grey-haired woman injecting another civilian, who just sat there unguarded, as if receiving nothing more than a flu jab.

It was the Kid’s voice that answered: ‘What about them?’ He stepped in beside Ruth and slipped his arm around her waist, watching Danny carefully, again no doubt hoping for a reaction.

‘Why are they letting you do this to them?’ Danny said.
Why aren’t they fighting?
The men and women, all young and of varying ethnicities, weren’t resisting what was going on.
Why aren’t they panicking or trying to escape?

‘Because they have paid for the privilege,’ said the Kid.

‘The
privilege?’
Danny thought he must have misheard.

‘Of becoming weaponized.’

‘Weaponized?’

‘Yes,’ the Kid said. ‘What better way to serve their masters, their beliefs, and state their case to the West, than to become carriers . . . distributors?’

My God, Danny thought. These people were the clients. They were the terrorists who’d bought the hybrid smallpox. And this was how they were going to use it. They were going to spread the plague themselves.

‘Once they leave here, they’ll split up and travel to different countries,’ explained the Kid. ‘Doing everything in their power to share.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Danny.

‘No, Danny. I’m just a businessman,’ said the Kid. ‘I’m just doing what I can to get by.’

‘Do you have any idea how many people are going to die if you go through with this?’

‘Every idea,’ said the Kid. ‘That’s one of the reasons I was able to charge so much.’

‘And what about you?’ Danny said, turning on Ruth, still not quite able to accept that she was just as crazy and immoral as the Kid.

But all she did was slip her arm around the Kid’s waist, to signal to Danny that they were one.

‘You do know you could catch it too?’ Danny said, desperate now to say something, anything, that might help to change their minds.

‘Not if we’ve also made sure to have an antidote synthesized,’ the Kid said. ‘Which we have.’

Danny’s blood ran cold. All the answers. Always. This was who the Kid had been, forever one step ahead of Danny, forever destroying other people’s lives, at absolutely no expense to his own.

The grey-haired woman called out and waved across. She was already packing up her workstation, Danny saw. Ruth checked her watch.

‘It’s time we left,’ she told the Kid. She turned to Danny. ‘Have a nice life.’ She grimaced. ‘Or death. Whatever.’

She turned and walked away.

‘I would shake your hand, bruv,’ said the Kid, ‘but . . . hygiene, you know? So instead I’ll just say goodbye. And I really do mean it this time. We will never speak or see each other again.’

Danny didn’t answer. The Kid gave a disappointed little shrug, then he smiled slowly, knowing it would be the last glimpse of his face Danny ever got. Then he turned and walked away with Ruth.

Danny watched them go. The black-haired guard followed. Then, one by one, the civilians left also, taking their bags with them. Until only Danny remained.

Danny looked down at the cuffs. Stainless steel. Tight around his wrists. No way was he going to be able to slip or snap them. He looked desperately around for something to pick the lock. But the slaughter pen was spotless. His heart filled with despair.

He stared at the needle mark on his arm. The smallpox would already be working its way through his system. He was screwed. He would die. Even if by some miracle someone found and freed him, he would still die and their reward would be that they would end up infected too. He pictured Commandant Valentin Constanz Sabirzhan. He’d give anything not to go down like that, to go down fighting instead. But it was too late now. Way too late.

Hideously, he pictured Lexie, too. What if one of these people was booked onto a flight to the UK? What if Lexie got infected? It would be his fault. He’d been fooled by the Kid. He’d been fooled by Ruth. If something happened to Lexie, he’d have no one to blame but himself.

Danny slumped. He felt as if all the energy had been sucked from him. But he’d forgotten he’d been shackled to the gates, and as he slid to the floor now, he jarred his wrists painfully.

And that was when he heard it – a cracking sound, the
same
sound he’d heard when the black-haired guard had slammed his head against the bars and the wall. At the time, Danny had thought it had been his own bones making that noise, but he knew now that he had been wrong.

And his heart began to race. He sat bolt upright. He looked at the metal gate and saw where the noise had come from.

The gate’s wall bar to which he’d been shackled had been fixed firmly to the concrete wall when it had been built. But Danny saw that it wasn’t any more. In fact, it was loose, which it hadn’t been when he’d first been shackled to it and had checked. It must have come loose when that psycho of a guard had decided to slam all his weight against Danny, damaging not just him but the gate.

Danny worked feverishly at it now, twisting the bar back and forth, first a millimetre, then two, then an inch, until – his heart leaped – it gave, twisting away from the wall. Only two inches, but enough, surely. Yes, he discovered. Enough for him to slip the chain of the cuffs through the gap.

Outside he heard a diesel engine roar into life.

He was already up and running straight across the barn to the door through which he’d come. He edged it open and looked outside, but could see no one. He opened it wider, but still the coast looked clear.

Hearing a vehicle drive away – a vehicle he was already too late to stop – Danny made a run for it. He’d seen that his rucksack was still where they’d stripped it from his back and dumped it by the table. He grabbed it and sprinted back into the relative safety of the deserted barn, where he hurriedly rifled through his belongings, cursing himself for not having a second handgun inside.

But at least he had a working mobile phone, he remembered. He had to contact Lexie. He had no way of knowing how many armed guards were still around this compound, or whether he had any chance of getting out alive. And even if he got away, where would he go? He was infected, as dangerous as the terrorists. He had no way of knowing how long the hybrid he’d been poisoned with would take to kick in.

He had to tell Lexie to find a way anonymously to warn the authorities. And to tell her to go somewhere even more remote than where she was now. He had to persuade her to stockpile food and water and get clear of the pandemic that was about to be unleashed.

He called the numbers for the disposable phones he’d left with her. He tried one, another, then the last. But she didn’t answer any of them.

Think, he told himself, fear running through him, not for himself, but for her. If she wasn’t answering, he needed to tell someone to find her, to protect her, to make certain that she came through alive.

He would have called Spartak. But Spartak was dead. So who else was there? Who else could he trust?

Ray Kincade. Yes. He was in the UK. He could reach Lexie within hours.

Danny rang his number. ‘Pick up . . . Pick up!’

But the phone went through to voicemail.

‘Ray,’ he said. ‘It’s me, Danny Shanklin. There’s something I need you to do. It’s my daughter, Lexie. I need you to go to her now and get her somewhere safe. I’m going to give you the address and then I’m going to tell you why . . .’

Just as he hung up, he heard another engine starting outside around the back of the barn. He ducked out into the courtyard again. He didn’t remember Ruth, Dementyev, Shepkin or the Kid searching Spartak’s body for weapons. He might still have his AK-9 on him. With that, maybe Danny could stop these people leaving here. He had to try.

He made a break for the steps, but slowed as he approached the overgrown patch of weeds where Spartak had fallen. He stopped. Because Spartak’s body was gone. And so were his weapons. They must have taken the weapons with them, Danny guessed. But could they really have taken the huge Ukrainian’s body too?

A rattle of automatic gunfire. Then another. Two more short bursts. The noise was coming from the other side of the barn.

Seconds later, Danny peered around the edge of the barn to witness something impossible. Spartak Sidarov was crouched behind a stack of firewood, his AK-9 up and firing.

Directly in front of him, a dirt track stretched into the distance. On the horizon, Danny could make out the shape of a white minibus, no doubt full of the terrorists who’d just allowed themselves to be infected with the hybrid disease.

Closer, a black Jeep had slewed to a halt at an angle with its back tyres shot out. Its passenger door was open and the unmistakable figure of the blonde was lying motionless on her back on the ground.

Someone – or possibly more than one person – was hidden from view on the other side of the Jeep and was returning fire at Spartak in short, sharp, controlled bursts. Danny remembered Dementyev on the balcony of the Ritz methodically mowing down civilians on the street below, using just such a style. Was it him? Or the Kid? Or even Ruth?

This last question was answered with a blur of movement barely yards away to Danny’s left. Ruth. She was darting between where she’d been hidden behind a small outbuilding and a clump of bushes. He could see what she was up to right away. She was trying to flank Spartak, to get around behind him. Danny saw the glint of a pistol in her right hand. Spartak was so focused on whoever was shooting beside the Jeep that he wouldn’t see her. He wouldn’t stand a chance.

And even though he was still cuffed and without a weapon, there was no way in hell Danny Shanklin was going to stand for that.

He waited until the very last moment. Ruth – or whatever the hell her real name was – was making her final run, this time from behind the clump of bushes to the cover of a tree fifteen yards to Spartak’s rear. Once there she’d be able to close in on him and shoot him in the back of the head.

Danny broke cover the second he thought he was out of her peripheral vision, running as hard and as fast as he could at her from just behind her and to her right.

The first she saw of him was when he was less than five yards away. There was a lull in the gunfire and she must have heard his footfall. The look of complete shock on her face switched almost instantly to a blank expression he’d seen in close combat so many times before. She was a professional. He was now just a target, nothing more.

But as she brought her handgun round to fire, he changed his angle of running. Just enough. Enough for her to fire and to miss. Enough for him to hit her then with everything he’d got. To smash her backwards, so that the two of them ended up sprawling in a tangled heap on the ground.

Danny knew from fighting her in the Kid’s apartment that she was good. Good enough, certainly, to best him with his hands cuffed as they were. Which meant he had to finish her now, before she got up.

She rammed her elbow hard into his face, and again. But he didn’t try blocking it as instinct and training had taught him. Do that and she’d have the chance to break free. Instead he took the pain, then twisted underneath her, hooking the cuffs’ chain over her head and jerking it hard back against her throat.

Her whole body flexed as he cut off her air supply. Again she tried slamming her elbow into him, but again he took it, hooking his legs around her now and using his full body strength to pull the chain tight.

She still didn’t quit. She tried rolling left. And again. Her pistol – the SIG Sauer P226, he glimpsed it – just out of her reach.

She jerked her head forward, then brought it smashing back into his face. He felt his cheekbone crack, but when she tried the same move a second later, he knew her strength was leaving her. He had won.

Her last movement was to twist her head round as far as she could, blood flecking her lips, the last of the air hissing from her lungs, enough that, for just a second, her eyes met his. An instant of desperation, of begging, but then she was gone. He watched the light die in her eyes and did not let go until he was certain she was dead.