Shadow Creatures (8 page)

‘It’s a fair trade,’ Calum said. He swung himself across the room towards the door. Macfarlane moved inside, out of his way, and walked across to the crate. ‘Come on,
then. Let’s get this out of the way so we can concentrate on the big rat.’

‘I saw a big rat once,’ Macfarlane said conversationally to Tara. ‘In a warehouse by the side of the Thames. Big thing, it was, ’bout the size of a cat.’

‘This one is larger,’ Tara confided.

‘Right.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘You’ll probably need a shotgun, then. I just used a revolver.’

Calum swung himself into the wheelchair, while Tara went out into the corridor and held the lift doors open. Macfarlane emerged from the apartment with the crate held in his arms like a dancing
partner. He swung the door closed with his foot, and Calum activated the security systems with a remote control on his key ring.

Tara hadn’t used the warehouse goods lift to go downstairs before. She’d always used the stairs. It was old, wooden and creaky, and it shuddered so much that she was worried they
might not make it to the ground floor.

Outside, the limousine was a symphony in polished black metal and chrome. ‘Ready to go?’ Tara asked.

‘As ready as I’ll ever be,’ Calum replied.

By the time Rhino had read and considered the text message from Gecko, the solicitor representing the Somali kidnappers – Tzuke – had left the cafe.

Moments later, the elderly woman who had been sitting in the corner of the cafe got up and walked out without catching Rhino’s eye. She turned the same way that Tzuke did as she left.

The blonde waitress watched her go with a frown. She seemed to be just about to run after her when Rhino caught her eye.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay for her coffee. I . . . know her.’

The blonde smiled uncertainly. ‘OK – thanks!’

Rhino sat there for a few moments, imagining the elderly woman following Tzuke discretely from a distance. Her age made her almost invisible. Anyone looking for a follower would be expecting
someone younger, stronger, more military-looking.

One of the surfers at the other table got up and went to the counter to pay for his coffee. As he handed the money across, he half turned and, without looking at Rhino, said: ‘What’s
our next move?’

‘When Liz reports back on where his office and home are located, I want both of them bugged. Surreptitiously, of course. Landlines and mobiles bugged as well,’ replied Rhino.

‘Of course. “Surreptitious” is my middle name.”

“Your middle name is Franklin. I’ve seen your personnel file.’

‘You want him followed after that?’

Rhino shook his head. ‘He’ll pay the banker’s draft into a bank as quickly as he can. Unless we’ve got someone actually looking over his shoulder we won’t know what
account it gets paid into. He’ll let his clients know that he’s paid it in though, and that the handover went smoothly. If we can trace the call, we might have a shot at identifying
them and where their base is.’

The surfer nodded. ‘Probably won’t help these particular hostages,’ he said grimly.

‘They’ll be free, if the pirates fulfil their side of the bargain. Knowing who and where they are might help us when the next hostages are taken for ransom.’

‘Or,’ the surfer said quietly, ‘we could just go in mob-handed and take them all out in whatever rat-infested corner of Somalia they have their base. Stop any more
piracy.’

‘But who would pay us to recover hostages if there are no more pirates?’ Rhino asked.

The surfer frowned. ‘Doesn’t that make us—’

‘Don’t go there,’ Rhino interrupted harshly. ‘Just be content that we’re on the side of the angels.’

The surfer smiled. ‘As long as someone has told the angels that, I’ll be happy.’ He gestured to his friend, who got up and collected their possessions from the table.
‘Good working with you again, Rhino.’

‘Likewise. I’ll have your fee paid across via bank transfer.’

‘Appreciated.’ He slid some money across the counter towards the waitress and left, along with his companion.

The girl looked curiously at Rhino. ‘Do you know
everyone
in here?’

‘I’ve got a lot of friends in the area. It’s nice to see them from time to time.’

She smiled sunnily. ‘Fair enough. It’s good to have friends.’ She paused. ‘Did you want that other coffee now?’

‘Yes, please.’

He sat there until he had finished his second coffee and until Tzuke was a good distance away, and presumably unaware that he was being followed by a little old lady who had been one of the
first women in Special Forces. Everyone called her ‘Grandma’, but Rhino knew some of the missions she had been involved in over the years, some of the things she had done, and she was
about as far away from the popular conception of a cuddly grandmother as a lion was from a Siamese cat.

He thought for a moment about Gecko’s text message. Hong Kong. He hadn’t been there for a good few years, but he remembered its bustle, its life and its vibrant energy with great
affection. He’d still been in the British army then, and was on a highly sensitive mission close to the Chinese border, but he’d managed to take a week’s leave afterwards, and
spent it enjoying Hong Kong’s nightlife. It was the island, just a little way off the mainland, that was officially Hong Kong, of course, but the former British dependency expanded to the
area of Kowloon on the mainland and back into the New Territories.

After waiting long enough for Tzuke to clear the area, Rhino walked the couple of miles to the station. The sun beat down on him, bringing out a light sweat, but there was a cooling breeze
coming in from the sea, and Rhino comforted himself with the thought that he had been in places a lot hotter than this while wearing body armour and a helmet at the same time.

From Poole station he caught a train to London. He had a netbook with him, so he was able to catch up on work – responding to emails and bringing his accounts up to date. The netbook was
fully encrypted, of course, and virus-protected too. It had to be. It would be embarrassing at the very least if his contacts list, his mission reports and the contents of some of his emails were
obtained by someone like Tzuke, or the people for whom he worked.

As the thought crossed his mind, he glanced around casually, as if trying to work out where the train was on its journey. Nobody in the carriage was paying him any interest. Three of the other
passengers had got on at Poole with him, and so theoretically could have been following him in the same way that his people were following Tzuke, but he wasn’t detecting any interest from
them. He would just have to keep an eye on them when he got out at Waterloo station and, of course, make sure that if he got up to go to the toilet that he took his netbook with him.

The journey took just over two hours. By the time he looked up from his screen again he was approaching London Waterloo station. Calum’s warehouse apartment was a reasonable walk or a
short taxi ride away. He decided to go on foot – the route would take him along the Thames, past a number of historic sites, and Tower Bridge. He always enjoyed walking around London.

As he walked off the train and on to the concourse at Waterloo station, he kept an eye on the three people who had got on with him at Poole. He made sure that he was last off the carriage,
following them rather than the other way round. None of them looked back to see where he was, and as soon as they got through the ticket barrier they headed off in the direction of the Underground.
Either nobody was following him or, he thought with a prickle of unease, whoever
was
following him was exceptionally good. Unlikely, but possible.

As he headed for the exit, his invisible mental antennae pricked up. Something had caught the attention of his subconscious mind – something important. Was it a watcher – a follower?
Instead of glancing around to see what or who it was, Rhino let his mind and gaze wander. He knew how his subconscious operated. It would either bring the anomalous element to his attention, or it
wouldn’t find it again.

His gaze drifted to the coffee shop on the far side of the station, and his conscious mind suddenly realized that his subconscious had identified two people there. They were sitting at a table
talking, heads close together. The reason his conscious mind had ignored the information was that he’d never seen them together before, and he hadn’t known that they knew one another.
In fact, there were very good reasons why they
shouldn’t
know one another.

One of them was named Craig Roxton. He was tall and thin, with a face that was all angles and planes. His hair was blond and fine, and in high winds it would whip back off his face into a short
comet’s tail. Rhino knew that because he knew Craig Roxton. The man had once been in Special Forces, fighting alongside Rhino in some of the most unpleasant places in the world. They had both
left the British army at more or less the same time, and for more or less the same reasons, but they had gone in different directions. Rhino had ended up in hostage rescue and bodyguard work
– things that made him feel as if he was doing some good in the world. Roxton had become a mercenary, hiring himself out to anyone who could pay, and willing to do anything they wanted. And
the last employer that Rhino had heard about, the last set of people whose money Roxton had been taking, was Nemor Incorporated.

Nemor Incorporated – the secretive, mysterious company that had tried to use Tara to spy on Calum, and then had kidnapped Natalie and threatened to torture her. Not a nice bunch of people,
which meant, as far as Rhino was concerned, that they and Craig Roxton deserved one another.

If it had just been Roxton there by himself, sipping a cappuccino, or if Roxton had been sitting with a total stranger, then Rhino would have slipped back into the crowd and gone on his way. He
had no desire ever to encounter Roxton again. The problem was that he was sitting at a table with someone Rhino knew.

It was Professor Gillian Livingstone – Natalie’s mother.

Rhino moved into the shadow of a row of ticket machines. He let his body and head point across the concourse, towards the main exit, but allowed his gaze to drift sideways so that he could see
the two of them without them being aware that he was looking in their direction. The fragmentary hope he’d nurtured that the two of them had accidentally ended up on the same table –
two travellers heading in different directions whose lives had momentarily crossed – was dashed when he saw Gillian pass Roxton a sheet of paper. He picked it up and read through it, then
nodded and said something to her. She shook her head.

This, Rhino decided, was bad. The possibility that there was a link between Gillian Livingstone and Nemor Incorporated meant that Calum’s team potentially had a spy in its midst. Rhino
didn’t believe that Natalie was involved as well – he had seen how terrified she had been when she had escaped from Roxton’s clutches – but her mother was privy to all
Calum’s secrets.

The question was, what was he going to tell Calum?

And what was he going to tell Natalie?

‘Comfortable?’ Tara asked Calum as they set off in the car towards Farnborough.

‘Not so’s you would notice,’ he said. He and Tara were sitting in the back of the limousine and Tara could see that Calum’s knuckles were white as they clutched at his
knees. ‘Cars make me nervous, for obvious reasons.’

‘I understand.’

The limousine joined one of the main arterial roads that linked the beating heart of London to the rest of the country.

‘Can I put some music on for you, sir?’ Mr Macfarlane’s gruff voice asked from the front.

‘What are you listening to at the moment?’ Calum asked.

‘Dubstep,’ the voice came back straight away.

‘Definitely not!’ Calum and Tara chorused together.

Calum glanced at Tara and raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d go for post-rock,’ he said, ‘and I think Tara here would go for emo. What have you got that’s in the
middle?’

‘Dark Wave, I fink,’ Macfarlane said judiciously. ‘Perhaps some Dead Can Dance?’

Tara nodded. ‘I’m willing to give it a go,’ she said.

Within a few moments the car was filled with a throbbing soundscape that had elements of African rhythms, Celtic pipes and Eastern European plucked strings. Tara hadn’t heard anything
quite like it before, but she approved immediately.

‘Good choice,’ Calum said.

‘Thank you, sir.’

The car drove on and Calum seemed wrapped up in his own thoughts, his forehead lowered broodingly as he stared at something that only he could see, and so Tara busied herself on her tablet
computer. She checked her emails, and immediately saw one from the
lostworlds.co.uk
fan who had emailed her before – Tom Karavla.

So, it was ‘Tom’ now, and not ‘Tom Karavla’ she noted. He was getting less formal, more friendly. She felt a little shiver of pleasure at the thought:
she had a new friend.
Another
new friend, to go along with Calum, Gecko, Natalie and Rhino.

Calum glanced up from whatever dark realm his thoughts had taken him to. ‘Something interesting?’ he asked.

‘Just someone wanting to talk about cryptids,’ she said.

Calum’s lowered eyebrows raised in interest. ‘Have they seen one?’

‘No – they just want to talk about dinosaurs.’

‘Dinosaurs!’ Calum snorted dismissively. ‘I don’t think anyone seriously thinks there are any dinosaurs out there in the wild. Not any more.’