Hunted (12 page)

Four minutes max. That was all the time he’d get, Danny was certain, before the police shut this whole store down.

He glanced at his left wrist, then remembered his watch had been stolen. By one of
them
. He’d get it back. It had been a present from Sally. Whoever had taken it would live to regret it. If he let them live at all.

He set an internal clock running instead. It wasn’t something he needed to think about consciously. Just something he could do. Like he was operating on Windows, was simultaneously processing two sets of data. It was an old trick. A childhood trick.

The police baton slid easily from the rip in Danny’s rucksack as he barrelled through the doorway into Harrods department store.

He’d straight away clocked from the look of the two liveried security guards blocking his path that they were both most likely
ex-forces
, the same as with so many of the security staff in London’s bigger stores.

Certainly neither of them looked like they were about to let anyone with Danny’s current personal standards of hygiene and attire get past them without a fight.

Three metres and closing. They’d still not seen him. A tall
brunette in a short black skirt and tight white top was hogging their attention, making them both laugh.

With two metres to go, as Danny accelerated across the polished floor round a chattering gaggle of foreign tourists, he brought the cop’s baton swinging round and down in front of him in a wide arc, activating its extension mechanism as he did.

The first that the taller of the two security guards knew about it was when the full weight of the baton cracked down on to his collar bone, extremely hard and fast.

Danny knew that directly striking the man’s neck, or indeed his skull or lower vertebrae, would have been a more efficient way of disabling him. But it would also probably have killed him. Or crippled him for life. And all Danny needed was to get past.

The blow he struck was more than sufficient for that. The guard sagged, his face scrunched up in pain.

His colleague – older, ruddy-faced, with a sinewy jaw – got a better look at Danny. At least long enough for his rheumy blue eyes to widen in alarm as Danny ripped his feet out from under him in a side-foot sweep, dropping him flat on his back beside his groaning friend.

Danny sidestepped the astonished woman and quickly built up speed. The store was busy. Plenty of human traffic. And over a million square feet of retail space to get lost in, if the stats Danny had once been told were true. All good news. But then the brunette started to scream and the customers up ahead of Danny shrank back.

These
damn clothes
. He had to get rid of them fast.

Air-con. Cool air. Danny sucked it up like a drink. But he also knew that if he didn’t find water soon, he wouldn’t need to wait for the police to take him down.

He ran straight past the staircases and escalators. His best chance of getting out of this building undetected, he’d already decided, was to stick to the ground floor. Get back out on to the street through another exit as quickly as he could. Hopefully blend into a crowd. Even better, a crowd starting to panic. Best of all, a terrified civilian stampede.

He just prayed that the cops hadn’t yet got enough numbers here to seal the whole building off.

More noise behind him. Men’s shouts this time. Or, more specifically, orders being shouted.

Danny jinked between a statue of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, and a waxwork of Mohamed Al Fayed, the ex-owner of the store.

The shouts were coming towards him. Meaning that whoever those guys were, they weren’t just here to block his way back out. An operational decision had just been made to no longer simply try to contain him.

Danny weaved between pillars, desperately trying to conjure up cover behind his back. It was possible the police had already realized from his behaviour on the CCTV that he wasn’t armed. Meaning it wouldn’t be so hard to bring him in alive.

But there was also his rucksack – meaning they might now be thinking he was planning on blowing himself up, having
cherry-picked
an iconic and crowded department store as the perfect detonation point.

In which case they’d be looking to neutralize him as quickly as possible, in any way they could.

The shop floor widened out before Danny now. Ambient lighting. Mirrors. Rows of designer-label clothes fanned out left and right. Warm air. A tinkle of piano music. The scent of leather and floor polish and factory-fresh goods.

Shoppers stared up, startled, from the racks they’d been leafing through as Danny raced on by. Another liveried security guard – this one clutching a personal radio unit – spotted him coming at him like a bull, and hurled himself aside before he got mowed down.

Half running, half sliding past a display of ten faceless male mannequins sporting black jackets, Danny saw a frieze of dark silhouettes blocking the doorway on to the street which he’d been planning on exiting through.

Armed police, he realized a split second later. Not the mass of tourists he’d hoped to lose himself amongst.

One of the cops shouted, and Danny knew it without a doubt: he’d just been made.

He veered left, away from the doorway, deeper into the store. MP5 shots rang out. Blood burst across the shoulder of a woman rounding a corner up ahead of Danny. She slammed hard into a glass cabinet and slumped to the ground.

Danny ran on. A prefab wall, signalling the onset of a huge Ralph Lauren concession, cut him off from the cops’ line of sight. But still more shots rattled out behind. People started screaming all around.

Over to the left, he saw a wide arched doorway. Up above was a brightly lit sign for the escalators. Stumbling, crashing through a cologne display, sending crystal bottles spinning, smashing to the floor, Danny rammed the baton back into his rucksack and then dug down deeper past it and pulled out his phone.

He burst through the arched doorway into what looked like a vast cosmetics emporium. Dozens of glistening counters. Hundreds of glinting mirrors. Shiny-faced girls with perfect make-up and hair. An almost overpowering collision of sweet and musky scents.

Anna-Maria flashed into his mind. Again Danny remembered saying goodbye, and the smell of her sweet perfume. But now with that memory came another. Of a date they’d once gone on. To a restaurant here in this store.

The bark of a megaphone brought him back. Everywhere he looked, customers were running, ducking, trying to hide. Danny tore a zigzagging channel through the stalls, past Dior and Karan and Ricci and Boss, their designer logos flashing subliminally before his eyes.

Another arched doorway up ahead. Beyond it, he saw escalators running up and down through the centre of the store, as sparkling and inviting as a waterfall.

‘The Kid,’ he said, panting, wedging his phone to his face.

A second later and: ‘Danny? You’re still there. Jesus, I thought you’d smashed your phone.’

‘What?’

‘On the TV footage,’ the Kid said, ‘taken by that damn helicopter. I saw it just now. You ran back for something outside the store. The same time we got cut off.’

‘It was nothing. Just the Bluetooth.’

Danny didn’t mention Lexie’s photograph. The Kid didn’t even know she existed.

‘The building’s totally surrounded,’ the Kid said. ‘It’s worse than the Ritz. Jesus, Danny. Why didn’t you go the way I fucking told you? You’d done that, by now I’d have got you in the clear.’

Danny vaulted over the handrail on to the escalator leading down. He took the sharp-toothed stairs as fast as he could, forcing his way past the protesting bulges of chattering civilians weighed down by shopping bags.

‘Danny. I don’t know what to do.’ The Kid sounded panicked, completely freaked out. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s game over, mate. I really think it is.’

‘No,’ Danny said. ‘Nothing’s over. It’s OK. I’ve got a plan.’

Anna-Maria … She’d told him how she’d worked here once. When she’d first come to England as a student. She’d worked here one Christmas vacation at the Oyster Bar, serving up champagne with a French accent and a winning smile to Britain’s weary shopping elite.

And then, years later, she’d brought Danny here on that date. And after their lunch, they’d come down here to the lower ground floor, where she’d bought him a shirt and a scarf.

That was when she’d shown him something and told him a
little-known
fact she’d learned while working here. The same fact that Danny now hoped was about to save his ass.

‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, noticing the low battery indicator on his phone beginning to flash.

‘No, wait. You—’

But Danny was no longer listening. Cutting off his connection with the Kid, he switched the phone off and bagged it, then hit the bottom of the escalator running. Stretched out before him was a huge retail area studded with men’s clothing concessions.

It was even busier down here than up on the ground floor, Danny saw, as he threaded his way into the loitering crowd.
Anna-Maria
had told him that the store was visited by more than
thirty-five thousand customers a day. Leading to a possible
thirty-five
thousand cases of mistaken identity today for the police who were looking for him, Danny hoped.

On his way past a pay counter, he snatched a grey suit right out from under the nose of a stunned shop assistant who’d been folding it into a bag.

Danny rounded a corner. He slowed to a walk, counting the CCTV points he could see. Four in total.

A group of young American men stood laughing up ahead, trying on hats. Danny walked right up to them. He took a red baseball cap off the head of a mannequin, whilst simultaneously sneaking a plain black cap off a shelf below. He pulled the red baseball cap on in full view of the nearest CCTV camera.

Then he moved swiftly over behind a giant cardboard hoarding advertising Tommy Hilfiger jeans, which blocked him off from the CCTV.

He reckoned less than two minutes had gone by since he’d entered the store.

He crouched and took off the red baseball cap, along with the rolled-up balaclava, and shoved them into his rucksack. Face to the ground, he threaded his arms through the sleeves of the suit jacket he’d just snatched, then jerked the plain black cap down tight on his head. Pulling the stolen suit trousers on over his Nikes and soiled tracksuit trousers, he tore one of the legs, but there was no time to do anything about that now.

Then he was moving again, fastening up the buttons of the suit jacket to conceal the red tracksuit beneath as best as he could. His change of appearance, he knew, wouldn’t fool anyone looking back through the CCTV hard-drive recordings. But with all the other confusion undoubtedly kicking off throughout the rest of the store right now, any misdirection might be enough to give him an edge. And he’d certainly stand a better chance of blending in out in the street dressed like this.

If he ever made it that far.

Again he fought the urge to run.
You’re just some guy out shopping
, he told himself, forcing himself not to react to the first of the distant
police shouts he now heard coming from back there near the escalators.

His eyes didn’t stop searching, scanning everything he saw, as he cast deep into his mind, trying to hook any memories he could of that day Anna-Maria had brought him here.

Until finally he saw what he was looking for. There, dead ahead, was a small coffee shop. And yep – right there where he remembered Anna-Maria pointing it out was a double doorway.

The sign above it read ‘STAFF ONLY’. There was a
radio-frequency
ID tag reader on the wall. Danny felt a swell of fear. He’d got no staff ID card to swipe. He’d have to try kicking his way through.

But then he got lucky. His first piece of luck that whole day. The door opened almost as he reached it and a stout middle-aged female exec in a three-piece charcoal-grey business suit looked Danny over curiously as she strode by. The redness of his face, the mess of his hair, something had snagged her attention all wrong.

Danny didn’t hesitate. He didn’t look back. He ducked on through the doorway before it swung shut.

Three minutes and counting since he’d first entered the store. Time was rapidly running out.

The little-known fact that Anna-Maria had told Danny when she’d brought him here on their date was this: Harrods owned a building across the street, to which the main store was linked via a short underground service tunnel.

The adjacent building had originally been used in the early twentieth century as a factory for goods sold in the main store, but was now mainly used for administration, coupled with six storeys of underground warehousing.

The good news for Danny was that the service tunnel between the two buildings was very much still in use. On account of the fact that most of the three thousand staff who worked in the main store exited the building this way once they’d finished their shifts.

The ‘STAFF ONLY’ doorway led through into a brightly lit, windowless corridor. An air-conditioner hummed.

Danny still stank of sewage. Even worse than before, he reckoned, down in this enclosed and sanitized environment.

He followed the corridor past a bunch of doorways and staircases leading off left and right. Hearing a muffled rumble of engines, he glanced up at the ceiling, and realized he must now be under the road.

Ten metres on and a security checkpoint loomed into view. Another RFID-controlled access point, he saw. And not just a wall pad either this time, but an electronic turnstile of the type used to gain entry to sports stadiums or underground train systems.

Just the other side of the turnstile, a tall, bearded uniformed guard stood stationed behind a wide table. A second guard – broad-shouldered and bald as Billy Zane – was sitting at a control desk, with a newspaper spread out in front of him, alongside a couple of lunchtime subs. A CCTV camera stared down from the ceiling.

A radio was switched on low, playing Sinatra. But the TV monitor on the desk beside the bald guard was tuned to what looked like internal CCTV of the underground warehouse system below. Not a news channel or any outside views of the building, thank God.

Past the guards Danny could see stairs leading up. To street level, he assumed.

A sign above the table read ‘BAG CHECK’. Making this the kind of security inspection point run by lots of stores these days to keep track of their staff.

The trouble was, Danny’s bag was way too bulky to hide. And once they looked inside … well, there was the cop’s baton, to begin with … then the lockbuster … not to mention several other particular items that would inevitably stand out. Especially if the guard had ever served in the police or military. As was more than likely the case.

Might as well just cut to the chase, then,
Danny thought.

He reached the turnstile and stopped.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, smiling awkwardly, as English as could be, making a show of going through his pockets, ‘but I think I’ve left my wallet and card upstairs.’

He knelt down and opened his rucksack. But even as he began searching through it, he saw the bearded guard’s shadow falling across the scuffed lino in front of him, meaning he’d already clocked that something wasn’t right and had just peered over the turnstile to get a better look.

Danny became excruciatingly aware of the tips of the red tracksuit jacket’s lapels rubbing at his throat. He felt as if the guard’s eyes were burning like lasers into the back of his head.

‘Jesus, mate. What the hell is that smell?’

‘All things, for all people, everywhere,’ Danny said, looking up.

‘You what?’

‘It’s your store motto,’ Danny said, again keeping his accent all English and smooth, smiling broadly now as he got to his feet. ‘I read it on the way in.’

‘So …?’

‘So …’ another smile, ‘so as an employee of this store, I think you’re now going to have to give me exactly what I want.’

‘What are you on about?’ The security guard’s wide brow furrowed as he tried to work out if Danny was playing some kind of a joke. ‘Hey … do I know you?’ he said.

Danny didn’t answer. Out of the guard’s line of sight, he slipped his hand into the rip in his rucksack.

‘Here, Alan …’ The bearded guard half turned to the bald guy over at the desk, who’d just taken a bite out of his sub and was idly watching Danny through heavy-lidded eyes. ‘You ever seen this fella, before?’

Danny knew he couldn’t just vault the turnstile and run past these two. Not because he wouldn’t make it ahead of them through those swing doors. Because he would.

No, he couldn’t run, because if he did, one or other of these guys would either activate an alarm or chase him out on to the street. In each case they’d end up alerting the police.

Which was why Danny had already reached the regrettable conclusion that his best option was just to get on and neutralize the pair of them now.

The intercom on the fat guy’s desk suddenly burst into life.

‘This is a store-wide security announcement. Code fourteen twelve. I repeat, code fourteen twe—’

Danny didn’t need to know what the number actually signified to know that it added up to trouble. His internal clock told him that it was just over four minutes since he’d first entered the store.
Meaning he’d been too slow. Someone, somewhere had just ordered the whole place locked down.

He used the cop’s baton again. Was used to its weight by now. Rearing up, he vaulted over the turnstile and slid across the table, simultaneously bringing the weighted end of the baton sailing round and cracking into the bearded man’s face.

Blood cascaded from his shattered mouth. Danny landed beside him, balanced, and kicked out hard into his ribs. The guard fell, clutching at his face. Then Danny was running again, a sprinter out of the blocks, smashing the overhead CCTV camera clean off its fittings with a sweep of the baton as he charged directly at the fat guy behind the desk.

This was all about speed. About shock and awe. His plan was simple. To make a big enough mess of the first guard to knock any thoughts of resistance clean out of the second guy’s mind. To move up on the second man fast, before he’d even thought about triggering any alarms.

It didn’t quite work out like that.

While the bearded guy he’d hit stayed right where he was on the floor, the bald guard kicked himself back from his desk on his wheeled swivel chair with surprising speed.

He got up – even bigger and wider than Danny had expected – and wiped the mayonnaise off his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he did what Danny could never have foreseen.

He grinned.