Hunted (15 page)

‘Excuse me, sir?’

Danny looked up to see the Argentinian waitress staring down at him, a plate and bowl in her hands. He realized he was holding his breath. Looking down, he saw his fists clenched on the table. He forced himself to exhale, and felt his chest shaking as he did.

Come on, Crane
, he thought, glaring at his phone.
The second I’ve
finished with him, I can talk to the Kid
. He had already messaged the Kid to say he was OK.

He moved back a little from the table, so the waitress could serve him his food. Steam rose rapidly off the bowl of spaghetti. Its dollop of sauce was the colour of raw liver. Stacked up on the plate was a mesh of stringy fries.

‘Thanks,’ Danny mumbled.

He grabbed a fistful of fries and stuffed them into his mouth, then began forking up spaghetti, efficiently, like a mechanical digger clearing rubble from a construction site.

He slopped sauce across his chin and the already stained white tablecloth. One of the City boys shot him a look of disgust, but Danny just carried on staring right back at him and chewing until the bigger man looked away.

He started on the second coffee, tossed down more water after
that. The warm feeling of food in his stomach, the idle chatter and piped mall music, and the softness of the padded chair on which he sat, for a second it almost made Danny feel normal.

He began to collect his thoughts. But the image of the
hawk-faced
man kept flashing into his mind.

The chiming of a glass bell – the alert noise for incoming mail. Danny’s screensaver – a downloaded photograph of a Provençal villa, with a Photoshopped picture of himself and a nameless woman and child, all chosen to match his current French ID – vanished as he picked up his phone from beside his drained coffee cup.

He tapped in the phone’s security access code. A bundle of indecipherable code scrolled across the screen. Meaning the message was encrypted. Meaning also that it had to have come from Crane.

Danny’s heart began to race as he used another password to activate the phone’s encryption software, allowing him to translate the garbled message into English.

The unscrambled message read: DRINKING. NOW.

Whatever Crane had been doing, whatever the cause of his delay in getting back to Danny, he was waiting in Harry’s Bar now.

Danny pulled out of his mail program, tapped the InWorld icon on his screen, then logged in. He was relieved to see that ‘CRANE’ was indeed listed in green lettering on his ‘Buddies’ list at the bottom of the screen.

Now that his Bluetooth headset was broken, Danny was forced to switch his phone over to non-audio mode. Or else, without an earpiece, he’d risk being overheard.

Non-audio mode in InWorld meant that Danny and Crane’s conversation would now emerge in the form of cartoon speech bubbles from their onscreen avatars’ mouths.

The specially designed InWorld-compatible security software they’d both be using would ensure that bit by bit their conversation would also be automatically encrypted and unscrambled as it shuttled back and forth between them via the latest version of global instant messaging. And what with text encryption being faster and more accurate than audio, they’d end up communicating just as quickly and safely as any other way.

Danny did a final three-sixty check around the mall. Then the restaurant, the bankers, and the steam rising off what little was left of his food … it was suddenly as if none of it was there.

His entire focus was on Noirlight now.

Danny bypassed Crane’s security MOBs – the alleyway doorman with his snarling Rottweilers, and the grizzled old barman – as fast as the InWorld engine and Crane’s security protocols would allow.

Then he steered his avatar, F8, who was dressed as normal in blue jeans and a plain white T, past the floor-to-ceiling antique bookcase beside the bar, and on into Crane’s private office.

The wood fire was still flickering ruby red in the cast-iron hearth, but Danny could no longer hear it crackling. In fact, stripped of its audio ambience, the whole scene had a flatness to it that made it feel even more illusory than it already was, and consequently even less suited to solving Danny’s real-world problems.

But Danny wasn’t here for the atmosphere. He was here for Crane. And there Crane’s avatar was – dark hair, side-parted, dressed in a sombre grey suit, white shirt, black tie, like he was fronting a funeral parlour – sitting as per usual behind his wide mahogany desk, lit from above by the sapphire glow of art deco lights.

The effect was to leave Crane’s avatar’s face deep in shadow. A deliberate affectation, Danny had always thought. A joke even, to
make light of the clandestine circumstances under which they always met.

But he saw nothing funny about it today. He was sick of deception. He wanted the truth.

Danny left F8 standing in the doorway as he started to type on to the small touch keyboard at the bottom of his phone’s screen. A cartoon speech bubble emerged from F8’s head, and steadily inflated as words scrolled through it.

F8: You seen the news?

A hesitation. Possibly due to a momentary confusion on Crane’s part over the fact that they weren’t using audio. Then, as Danny’s avatar’s speech bubble slowly faded and dissolved, a new speech bubble emerged alongside Crane’s avatar’s face.

CRANE: Were you in the hotel when the shooting started?

F8: In the room. Drugged. Set up by the people you sent me to meet.

Another pause. So long this time that, for a few seconds after Danny’s speech bubble had faded away, he was left wondering if the InWorld system had timed out or bugged out and jammed up his screen

CRANE: Where are you now?

F8: That’s not important.

Never trust in anyone fully but yourself
… Danny couldn’t think of a single reason why Crane might betray him. But until he got some answers about what the hell had gone down today, and until Crane had satisfied him that he was playing this straight, he wasn’t giving any information away that he didn’t need to – especially concerning where it was he’d gone to ground.

F8: Who is your US government contact?

CRANE. Come on, Danny. You know how it works.

Yeah, you protect their anonymity, even though they nearly got me killed.

F8: What department do they work for?

CRANE: The same people you once did.

The Company then, Danny thought. Or its Special Activities Division or Special Operations Group, at any rate. Either one of
which was capable of instigating black ops abroad. But here? In London? In the capital city of one of the US’s chief allies? And publicly murdering a whole bunch of civilians like that? Danny wished he could believe it wasn’t possible. But he’d been involved in this game too long for that. Agents did go rogue. And sometimes big time, just like today.

F8: Do you think your contact knew what the client they fixed me up with was planning on doing?

CRANE: Are you asking me if I think the US government is actively involved in an international act of terrorism and mass murder? No.