Authors: Emlyn Rees
The police riverboat powered straight past Danny, on towards Hammersmith Bridge and into the fray. The cop standing on its prow even gave Danny a friendly nod as it ploughed by, kicking up a V of foaming waves in its wake.
Half an hour later, he moored Francisco’s rib at a pier on the south side of the Thames, right alongside Battersea Park. Even though the Kid had already moved out further south, this was still the nearest Danny had been able to get to where he’d be.
From a tourist stall on the towpath next to a giant statue of Buddha, he bought a blue baseball cap adorned with the legend ‘I LOVE LONDON’. He ditched the panama in a bin, telling himself that if one day all this came good, he’d need to find a replacement for Alice to give back to Francisco.
From the river, Danny had seen the police setting up roadblocks across Albert Bridge to the west and Chelsea Bridge to the east, no doubt to enable them to begin searching vehicles and checking pedestrians for ID.
Looking nothing like him, the Kid might have been able to cross over and back to collect the data stick and card from the shopping mall on the north side, but for Danny, being anywhere near the police was way too risky. Every single one of them would by now have an image of his face on their phone.
He entered the park itself, avoiding both the main roads either side running across the bridges, in case any further ID checkpoints had been set up along them.
Once out of the park, he set off on the three-kilometre journey to Clapham on foot. The roads this side of the river were slow-moving anyway, and the risk of facial recognition systems snagging him on public transport was too high – even if the tubes or trains were running at any useful capacity, which he doubted.
He stuck to the back streets wherever possible, further limiting his exposure to CCTV. The deeper south of the river Thames he went, the less scrutinized he felt, and the more normal his surroundings became. Less police. Less gridlock.
By the time he’d cut through Killyon Road on to Clapham Manor Street, where he passed by a pub called the Bread and Roses, he felt he was leaving hell further behind him with every step he took. Through the open pub window he saw people crowded round the TV, watching what had been happening across the river. But it was clearly a case of something happening there, not here.
Outside the pub, people were drinking, chatting, unconcerned about what was happening elsewhere. For Danny, it was as if he’d stepped into another city entirely. One where he was no longer running for his life. One where he’d finally almost escaped.
Which I have
, he told himself ten minutes later, outside the small side-street cinema the Kid had directed him to, as he finished off a Styrofoam cup of pungent black coffee and waited for the Kid to call.
So long as nobody recognizes me. Hopefully I’ve bought myself some time.
Another twenty minutes went by – enough for Danny to start to feel once again on edge – before the Kid’s name flashed up on his phone’s screen.
Fifteen minutes after that, and Danny was walking past a parade of run-down 24/7 food stores and low-rent cafés and bars in Streatham. Burger wrappers and gnawed chicken wings littered the gutters. A police siren whooped in the distance. From somewhere closer came a muffled shout and the tinkle of breaking glass.
Danny turned down a short alley. A reek of blocked drains filled the air. Gang tags and graffiti patterned the crumbling brickwork like tattoos on an ageing boxer’s musculature. Distorted snatches of TV shows and drunken disputes in a dozen different languages drifted down from the tenements above.
He was tiring again by the time he reached the shabby
three-storey
redbrick the Kid had described. He pressed the buzzer. The Kid must have been watching out for him through the private CCTV camera peering down from the guttering above. Because less than five seconds later he opened the reinforced,
security-alarmed
door.
‘Nice to have you back, bruv,’ he said with a wide grin, slapping his hands down on Danny’s shoulders before pulling him in and hugging him hard.
The Kid looked relieved and exhausted and about as fried as Danny felt. He was dressed in an oversized, scuffed black leather flying jacket and had a lit cigarette clamped between his teeth.
‘It’s good to be back,’ Danny said. ‘And thanks again, Kid. For everything. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be locked up or dead by now.’
‘All part of the service.’ Another grin from the Kid.
The stink of cigarette smoke funnelling from his nostrils was like sweet perfume to Danny right now. He could hardly believe it, that here they were, finally face to face again. The van this morning seemed a lifetime ago.
‘Come on, man. Quick,’ the Kid said, stepping back into a gloomy whitewashed corridor lit by a single bare bulb. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
Danny followed him inside and pulled the door closed behind them. A wave of relief and fatigue swept over him, as if he’d just got home after a twenty-hour flight. He wanted to collapse. To lie down. To sleep for a week. But the Kid was right. They needed to move on the stick and swipe card now.
He followed the Kid’s lumbering gait down the corridor and on through a set of white swing doors.
A huge bare-brick open-plan work space. Harsh halogen lights shone fiercely down from a high metal-girdered ceiling. Looked
like they been rigged in a hurry. Bare wiring ran down from them into a wall socket. Pieces of plaster were missing in the ceiling where they’d been fitted.
The only natural daylight came from three small rectangular windows set up out of reach at the back of the room. All of them were barred. Another set of swing doors stood opposite the ones the Kid had led Danny through.
Not much in the way of creature comforts, Danny noticed. A bunch of mattresses stacked up in one corner. Several utilitarian grey plastic-backed chairs and a chipped beige Formica refectory table. No heating, he realized, breathing in the cool air.
Whoever the owner was, they clearly weren’t much interested in interior design. Only work. Four desks stood piled high with screens and tech. The floor was a jungle of cables leading between them. A series of lifeless plasma monitors hung on the wall to the right like a weird modern art installation.
Two long wooden desks had been pushed together to form an L, behind which the Kid now squeezed. He sat with his back to the wall.
‘Pull up a chair, bruv,’ he said.
Danny did. He sat opposite the Kid.
‘This place looks like it’s got more tech than NASA,’ he said.
‘Better tech too,’ said the Kid with a smile.
The room reminded Danny of intelligence command posts he’d worked from in Kuwait and Iraq.
The Kid was already typing. Glancing up, he checked his watch, then his phone. In spite of the cool temperature in here, Danny watched a trickle of sweat run down his brow.
‘Shouldn’t be too long now,’ the Kid said, almost to himself, without looking up.
Danny noticed a microwave oven over on a sideboard. A bin beside it was stacked high with empty food packaging. Instant meals. But there was no garbage stink, meaning that none of it could have been there long.
‘Looks like someone’s been living here,’ Danny said.
The Kid stared blankly round.
‘Several someones, in fact,’ Danny said, nodding over at a bunch of sleeping bags rolled up beside the mattresses.
The Kid shrugged, as if he hadn’t given the matter any thought. His phone beeped on his desk. When he looked down, he smiled.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘we can finally begin.’
‘So … the data stick?’ Danny said. ‘What have you got?’
The Kid sat back a little in his chair. The glow from his computer screen cast dark shadows across his face that for some reason made Danny think of Crane in his equally eccentrically lit office in Noirlight.
‘Nothing,’ said the Kid. ‘It’s blank. Here, you can have it.’
Without warning, he tossed the data stick to Danny and pulled a black leather attaché case across the desk towards him.
A wave of confusion washed over Danny as he turned the stick he’d just snatched out of the air over in his hand.
‘But you told me on the phone that you’d found files,’ he said. ‘Encoded Russian files.’
‘I know.’ The Kid smiled awkwardly. ‘And that
was
the plan. For me to shoot you a bunch of horseshit. About how I’d cleverly worked out that the data signatures on the swipe card and data stick both belonged to one Colonel Nikolai Zykov, the military attaché to the Russian embassy here in London. AKA the dead guy in the hotel room.’
Horseshit?
Danny replayed in his head what the Kid had just told him. It made no sense. What was he doing? What was he saying?
The Kid flipped his laptop round so that its screen faced Danny.
‘Look. I’d even gone to the trouble of getting hold of a photo of the colonel for you.’
A magnified newspaper article filled the screen. Something about a state visit three months ago by some high-powered female Russian official to London. A photograph accompanied the article, showing two women and a uniformed man.
Danny stared into the man’s face. He was sixties, gaunt-looking. The two women in the photograph were smiling. But not him. Was this really the man whose shredded face Danny had stared down at in that hotel room?
The Kid spun the laptop back round to face himself. Then he opened the attaché case, its lid concealing its contents from Danny.
‘I was also then going to tell you that Zykov had a reputation as a communist hardliner,’ said the Kid, reaching into the attaché case, ‘which is true. And that he’d subsequently become involved with a number of clandestine Russian nationalist military groups prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 – also true. All of which would then have made it entirely possible for you to believe that he might have been involved in today’s assassination plot to kill Madina Tskhovrebova outside the Ritz, thereby allowing him to stir up another expansionist war between Georgia and Russia …’
Danny felt as if the room were somehow shifting away from him, as if he wasn’t really here at all. This
couldn’t
be real – could it? – what the Kid was saying. Because if it was true, then the Kid had been planning on lying to him, manipulating him, controlling him – but
for what
?
The Kid pushed the lid of the attaché case away from him, letting it fall down flat now on the desk, whilst simultaneously removing a Glock 18 machine pistol and a fully loaded magazine from its moulded-foam bed. He rammed the Glock’s extended magazine home.
A rushing sound filled Danny’s ears.
‘I was then going to tell you that there was an encrypted file on the data stick named Tskhovrebova,’ the Kid said. ‘You know, the
same as the assassinated writer.’ He spoke of her like she was nothing but a piece of deleted data herself. ‘And then I was going to tell you that the file had been created by Colonel Zykov only hours before the assassination took place this morning … giving you further proof that he had to have been involved in the hit.’
The Kid flicked the selector switch on the machine pistol’s slide from semi-automatic to full, giving it a cyclic rate of 1,300 rounds per minute. With the thirty-three rounds in its extended magazine, that gave it more than enough punch to rip a man in half. Twice.
He stood and aimed the weapon right at Danny’s heart.
‘Don’t worry, Danny. I’m not going to shoot you just yet. Not unless you give me no choice.’
A flood of adrenalin had swept through Danny’s body. Every muscle tensed. His brain felt like it was on fire.
This is really happening
, he told himself.
The Kid’s betrayed you … He’s threatening to execute you too.
‘Then,’ the Kid said, ‘just when I’d got you all royally pissed off at poor old Colonel Zykov, I was going to drop the bombshell on you that I couldn’t actually open the file, because the encryption software that had been used to create it was of a type only ever used on the secure internal operating systems of Russian governmental offices. Thereby allowing me to help you reach the conclusion that the only way for us to decrypt the file would be for you to break into the Russian embassy and plug me in direct.’
‘But … but why?’ Danny’s voice was cracked. He tried to swallow. Couldn’t. His mouth had turned dry as cement dust. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
The Kid half grimaced, half smiled, like a teacher growing frustrated and bored with a child who was failing to grasp some obvious concept.
‘Well naturally,’ he said, ‘because there really is something on Colonel Zykov’s computer in the Russian embassy that I want you to help us steal.’
Us …
Danny looked round. This room. The layout. The fact that it had reminded him of an intelligence command post. The bead of
sweat he’d seen trickling down the Kid’s brow. The way he’d glanced with relief at his phone. No way was he working alone.
A swish.
The swing doors to the right of the Kid opened and the blonde woman from the Ritz walked in. Her fawn linen suit was badly crumpled, the dark bags beneath her eyes were even more pronounced than before. She had a twenty-one-millimetre
armour-piercing
Russian pistol in her hand, which she now pointed at Danny’s face.
Another click.
This time behind Danny. He turned to see the bearded man who’d searched him in the hotel suite. He was still wearing his black suit and black shirt. He was armed with an H&K MP7 submachine gun. It was aimed at Danny’s back.
When Danny looked back at the Kid, he saw that the man he’d thought of until barely a minute ago as someone he could trust with his life was no longer smiling.
Never trust in anyone fully but yourself.
Danny should have listened harder to the Old Man. Because the only other person Danny had trusted this whole long day had been playing him right from the start.
‘And now of course you’re wondering why the fuck I’m telling you that I was planning to trick you,’ said the Kid. ‘Because there’s no way you’re going to break into the Russian embassy and plug me into their government intranet now, right?’
‘Right.’
A snort of laughter. The Kid shook his head. There was something close to deep personal satisfaction in his eyes. ‘Wrong. You see, my devious little plan to trick you into going in there no longer matters. Because we’ve found a much better way to make you do exactly what we want.’
‘What?’
The Kid’s eyes narrowed now as he watched Danny’s face for a reaction. ‘You really shouldn’t have put that new battery in your phone till you were way past that address you left her at,’ he said.
Danny’s skin turned cold.
‘Because the second you switched your phone back on, your exact location popped up on my screen, Danny. And that’s when we worked out where it was you must have dropped her off.’
Her
…
The Kid watched Danny as the implication sank in.
‘So really it’s all thanks to you that we’ve got your little girl now …’
The Kid turned his laptop screen round to face Danny again. This time the view was of the back of his van. And now Danny saw why the hawk-faced man wasn’t here.
He was sitting beside Lexie. She’d been blindfolded, and her hands were tied. The hawk-faced man cocked his head and gazed up at the camera filming him. He stared into deep into Danny’s eyes. Oh yes, he knew Danny Shanklin was watching him now.
And Danny knew he’d been right about the man all along. He did not make mistakes.
On the other side of Lexie was the tall, thin, bespectacled man, now dressed in an oversized blue raincoat, with his black attaché case on his lap.
Danny turned to the Kid. He fought every atom in his body that wanted to throw itself at him. Three weapons were covering him. He wouldn’t even get close.
‘You son-of-a-bitch. I’ll kill you for this.’
The Kid adjusted his grip on the machine pistol and slowly shook his head.
‘No, Danny. You’re going to do exactly what we say. Or first we’ll kill her. And then we’ll kill you too.’