The Hunt (12 page)

In that enjoyment, lay guilt. And it was not long before Rose felt the ghosts of her family crowding around her, memories dank and heavy. She started telling stories about her children, and as she saw them running and rolling and playing, and heard their laughter, she began to cry. She looked down and tried to hide her tears, but Holt scolded her.

‘Never stop crying. I haven’t.’

Rose dabbed at her eyes and looked around. She had no wish to bring attention to herself. He’d given her plenty of advice about remaining innocuous, all but invisible in plain sight, and here she was making a scene. But Holt didn’t seem to care. His gaze was distant, and she knew that now was her last chance.

‘Holt, your past. What happened to make you
…
’

‘Make me the monster I am today?’

‘No. The man you are.’

He sighed heavily and held up his glass of water, swilling it around as if it were the finest red. She’d never seen any sign of his erstwhile alcoholism, but now she could see the glimmering need in his eyes.

‘My wife left me,’ he said. ‘She found out what I did. What I am. She took my daughter. I haven’t seen her in almost fifteen years. My little girl will be an adult now.’

‘You could find them!’

‘Of course I could,’ he said. ‘Her leaving me and taking my Carrie isn’t what makes me sad. It’s the fact that they’re better off without me.’

‘Holt—’

‘Coffee? I need coffee.’

They stared at each other, wallowing for a while in each other’s loss. Then the waiter arrived and the moment was broken, and as he left Holt started rolling a cigarette. Rose knew that this meant he was ready to leave. And this time, from this restaurant, he would be leaving alone.

They drank their coffee. Then he stood, kissed her warmly on the cheek, and bid her goodnight. She watched him weaving his way between tables, passing couples enjoying a romantic meal, and she was amazed at how many people did not look at him. He moved like a ghost. She wondered what he had been like in his previous life, and what had made him change. He’d really told her nothing at all.

After sitting there a little while longer she realised that he’d left her with the bill. For all that he did for her, it was the only payment Holt ever took.

With a chill, Rose realised that she was now more alone than she had ever been before.

Rose slipped the phone into her jacket pocket and hunkered down between the rocks, still and silent. She’d left the dead man’s rifle with him, hoping it would make the scene seem more real. She already thought that had been a bad mistake. She was at least a hundred metres away from the corpse – way beyond an effective pistol shot – but she didn’t want to risk being seen or heard. Someone used to spotting from a helicopter might see the slightest movement out of place. And up here in the mountains, a breeze could carry the sound of a cough or tumbled stone a long way.

Even though she heard the helicopter approaching, there was no saying it hadn’t already dropped off some of its passengers.

She listened intently, looking at the expanse of sky visible above the mountainside. Its rotors and engine were muffled and blurred, echoing from distant slopes and peaks. It was coming in from behind the mountain. There was nowhere to land on this slope, and she hoped that it would swing down the mountainside and hover, dropping a rope ladder for the hunter’s rescuers to climb down and attend him.

Hopefully, they wouldn’t see that he was dead until they were on their way down. He might have fainted. The wet patch on his crotch might be where he’d fouled himself.

By then she’d have rushed closer, spare magazines for her weapon at hand. And she’d keep shooting at the tail rotor until the bastards crashed.

She was moving moment by moment, taking opportunities as they arose and doing with them what she could. Holt would not have approved of such randomness – he was an advocate of caution and preparedness. But he’d also said that in combat situations, every plan would deviate at some point. If you were lucky it would be far into the engagement, when the bulk of the work was done. If you were unlucky, the plan would be screwed from the first moment.

Rose had prevented any plan fuck-ups by not really having a plan at all.

Arriving at Chris’s house that morning she’d thought,
I’m going to get as many as I can
. You couldn’t scheme against the Trail, because even after so long she knew so little about them. You couldn’t second-guess or assume. They might be determined to play this compromised hunt through to the end, or they might kill Chris’s family at any moment and then vanish, disbanding the entire network of their UK cell and building it again afresh. What kept her going was the idea that she would kill as many of them as she could before that happened.

Including Grin.
Especially
Grin, that bitch. From Chris’s description, Rose was certain it was her holding his family at gunpoint. She knew some of the others from the negligible information she’d managed to find, but she felt that she was intimately familiar with Grin’s sick, stinking soul.

As she thought about the bitch, she touched her right thigh. They had that much in common.

The helicopter did not appear, and the sound of its engines did not change. The landscape muddled the echoes, muffling them, and Rose wondered what she’d actually heard. A hard breeze whistling between rocks somewhere across the slope? A distant car engine, echo gathered and bounced from one valley to the next?

She moved position slightly, shifting from behind shielding rocks to a shallow depression from which she could see more sky. The dead hunter was a dark hump across the shale. Looking at him, she searched for a feeling of regret or shame. But there was nothing.

She saw movement up on the ridge. Crouched down, she expected the hulking shadow of the helicopter to burst into view, its rotors whipping at the sky and raising a storm as it emerged from behind the shielding hulk of the mountain. But the movement was small, resolving into three people edging down towards the shale slope.

They’d topped the ridge much higher up than Rose, so high that the air around them was still hazy with low cloud. They moved slowly but confidently, spread out so as not to offer a huddled target to anyone taking a shot at them.

Me
, she thought.
They’re worried about me
. They’d have seen the abandoned car by now, know that she was still somewhere up here in the mountains. And when they got close enough to see that the injured hunter was actually on his own – and closer still before they realised that he was dead – they’d know that she was responsible.

She had to think quickly. Two of them carried rifles over their shoulders. They were dressed casually – jeans, tee shirts, loose jackets – nowhere near prepared for a prolonged stay in the mountains. Which meant that the helicopter had landed somewhere up there, and they fully expected to return to it soon.

She’d never kill three of them. One perhaps, but even that was not guaranteed. They carried rifles, and once she’d let off her first few shots, they’d be at an advantage. Their range, accuracy and killing power would be much greater than hers, and she had only the element of surprise on her side.

Maybe she should have taken the dead bastard’s rifle after all. But she’d hoped that seeing his weapon still with him would ease any suspicions they might have.

Moving back into the depression, then away from the shale slope and across the mountainside, Rose climbed carefully uphill, always maintaining cover between her and them. It meant that she was moving blind – if they’d caught sight of her, if they had suspicions, they could move across the shale slope and be upon her before she saw them. But it was a small gamble loaded in her favour.

They’d check out their injured client first.

She came to a spur of rock, twelve feet high, easy to climb, but she’d be dangerously exposed while doing so. Hesitation and doubt had no place here. She started climbing, pausing as she rose above the surrounding cover and glancing back across the hillside. She could see the dead man and much of the shale slope, but the spur still hid the upper parts of the mountainside. If the men were descending, they still hadn’t come far.

Climbing on, trying to move fluidly so as not to perform any sudden movements, Rose soon reached the head of the spur. She rolled onto the rough heathers growing there and paused on her stomach, face pressed to the ground.

Now she could see them. One was leaping quickly from rock to rock down the other side of the spread of scree, the other two were trying to crawl down the scree slope on their behinds. Good. They weren’t used to the mountains, didn’t know what they were doing. It gave her a flush of optimism for her and, curiously, for Chris as well. She’d not entered into this believing that she would help him in any way – she intended striking as hard as she could at the Trail, then melting away to face them another day, leaving Chris to his fate – but maybe that was misjudged. Perhaps she and Chris really could help each other.

She wondered which Trail members had come. She knew more about them than they could have believed possible, but even that was negligible. But she was too far away to identify them.

The first man had drawn level with the dead hunter beyond the scree, and now he stood shielding his eyes and calling.

‘Mister Lyons!’ His voice carried across the hillside.

Rose pushed herself backwards across the heather, glancing to her left. She’d be hidden from view in a few metres.

‘Hey! Max! You okay?’

Not long until they found out. Rose moved faster, slipping behind a thicket of sparse shrubs. She didn’t wait to see them approach the man, check him over, find that he was dead, because she knew what their first reaction would be.

They’d climb quickly back up to the helicopter. And they knew exactly where it was.

She made sure the pistol was tight in her belt and started to climb, pulling with her hands, pushing with her feet. Where the slope levelled a little she pushed on her knees, and where it grew steeper or more technical she used her hands again, grabbing rocks and pulling. She kept a careful eye on where she was in relation to the mountaintop, and also on the scree. If she could see the slope of loose stone, then they could see her.

Five minutes passed, ten. They’d have realised by now that their hunter was a corpse, and she hoped they wouldn’t overreact. If they did, Chris’s family would be dead in moments and then the hunt would be off. The other hunters would be gathered in, and then the Trail would come in force to make the kill themselves.

But there was so much money involved, she was confident that they wouldn’t yet abandon something that had taken so long to set up.

She reached the ridge a few minutes later. She’d emerged from cover and had to ascend a rocky slope, darting from boulder to boulder and doing her best to not be seen. She could see way down the scree slope now, and the three men were still visible around the dead man. One stood cradling his rifle and keeping watch while the other two did something. She was too far away to see what.

The ridge was wider this high up, and exposed to the elements. A strong breeze blew from the north, carrying stinging raindrops that impacted her face and hands. She leaned into the wind, crouching, and pushed on.

As the slope behind her disappeared from view, she took one last look. The Trail men had lifted the body and were trying to drag him uphill. One still stood guard, scanning the mountainside all around. Making sure she wasn’t seen, Rose crouched lower and hurried from view.

Dragging the body across the scree slope then all the way back up here would take them at least half an hour. Time was on her side.

She was looking for somewhere flat, a convenient site for the helicopter to touch down. It should have been easy to spot the helicopter, but she scanned the ridge leading up the mountain and what she could see of the slopes beyond, and there was nothing.

Had it lifted off again? She hadn’t heard it, but she could not be sure. Sounds were distorted up here, confused by the wind, echoes, and the deceptive distances. She moved across the ridge closer to the drop down the other side. If she looked carefully, if she had binoculars and a better sense of direction and distance, she might be able to see the place beside the road where this had begun. But mist drifted in swathes, and the rain was increasing.

She moved up the ridge, jogging now to try to warm up.

Should have looked after yourself
, Adam said.

‘Yeah, right, I’ve always been great at that.’ She laughed, the sound surprisingly loud. A few minutes later she had to climb a steeper jumble of rocks, careful not to slip on the wet surface and snap an ankle. How ironic that would be. They’d come back up here eventually, find her crawling for cover with pistol in hand, and take their time to shoot her from a distance. ‘Fuck that,’ she muttered. ‘Swallow a bullet first.’

Fuck that, bunny!
Adam said.
You’ve got too much to live for
.

She coughed a laugh, ducked down, looked around to make sure no one had heard her. Sounds carried.

‘Let me do my thing, baby,’ she said. ‘You rest and just let me
…
’

She topped the rise of tumbled boulders, many larger than a family car, and there was the helicopter. The slope beyond opened into a wider shoulder between mountains a little higher up, a rock-scattered escarpment that had a few flatter, windswept areas. The wind blew hazy sheets of rain and mist across the ridge, wavering clouds that brought the helicopter in and out of focus.

Rose moved quickly, scrambling further up the slope so that she could approach it from above. They would not have left it unguarded, but if she was too cautious, too slow, she wouldn’t have time to get away.

And that’s what she wanted. Once those three Trail members were trapped up here in the mountains, her own hunt would begin.

The dead man’s satphone in her pocket crackled.

She dropped to the ground, snatched it out and switched it off, lying flat and searching for signs of movement around the grounded aircraft. A waft of smoke was plucked from the helicopter’s open cabin door. Whoever they’d left behind was sitting inside, smoking and sheltering from the elements.

The satphone might have been one of the other hunters calling back to see if Max was all right, but she doubted it. They weren’t friends, or companions. More likely it was one of the Trail. They’d have found the bullet wound, figured out some of what had happened, and were trying to contact her.

She almost returned their call, but it wasn’t the time. Not quite.

Circling around, keeping to cover as much as she could, she started approaching the helicopter from uphill, closing on its tail end. Holding the pistol in one hand she kept the other held out for balance, scouting the ground before her.

Another gust of wind blew a sheen of rain across the escarpment, and Rose took advantage to move rapidly closer. Close up, the helicopter was even larger than she’d thought, and the smell of fuel and heat hung in the air. Even above the breeze she heard the ticking of cooling metal. She took a deep breath, readying herself for confrontation.

After one more glance around to make sure there was no one else, she emerged from behind the machine and walked confidently towards the doors, staying wide. She held the pistol down against her leg. Surprise would give her a couple of seconds’ advantage, and looking like she belonged there would confuse the pilot.

A woman was sitting up in the helicopter’s main cabin, legs dangling out the door. She wore a flight suit and smoked a cigarette, and when she saw Rose her eyes went wide. She made no sudden movements, other than glancing quickly around the escarpment. She looked at the gun in Rose’s right hand.

‘I’m just the pilot,’ she said.

Rose hadn’t expected a woman. It should have made no difference – she knew that some Trail members were women, including Grin – but for some reason it threw her. Perhaps some deeper, motherly part of her, a base instinct stronger than learning and experience could touch, still doubted that a woman could really be so brutal.

As Rose wondered how to handle this, the pilot rolled to her right and pulled something out of the flight suit’s pocket.

Rose knelt and lifted her pistol, squeezing the trigger in the same movement, right knee slamming against rock, gunshot thundering in her ears, and she felt an ice-cold kiss across her right arm.