Wanted (26 page)

‘You’ll need these too.’ He took her other hand and put the SIM card and battery in that. ‘Don’t put these in unless you know I’m not coming back.’

She nodded. She understood. ‘And after I’ve used it, I should destroy it, right?’ she said. The same as she’d done with the other disposable phones he’d given her.

‘That’s right. But with this one it’s even more important, because there’s a possibility that people might know the number is one I’m planning on using. Meaning the second you do use it, this phone will be easy to trace for anyone looking for its number going live. Anyone looking for
you.’

Something in her broke. Tears flooded her eyes. She threw her arms around him and hugged him tight, as if she wanted never to let him go. She pressed her face into his shoulder. He hated himself for having reduced her to this, for fear now being a part of their love.

He rested his chin on the top of her head, closed his eyes and breathed in, cherishing not just this moment but a thousand others, remembering his little girl right back to the day she’d been born.

He’d loved her then with every atom of his being and nothing had changed. He would protect her. He would give her back her life.

Even if it cost him his own.

Danny Shanklin was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low across his brow, and old-school wide-lensed Aviator shades, covering as much of his face as he could without drawing attention to himself. Along with his beard, he hoped this would be enough to prevent him getting ID’d by any of the couple of hundred thousand CCTV cameras incorporated into New Scotland Yard’s facial-recognition surveillance system.

This was the first time Danny had been back in central London since the entire city had shuddered into gridlock on his account and its thirty-three thousand cops had focused on snatching him out of the panic-stricken crowds.

It couldn’t have been be more different now. It was a warm, balmy evening and London was no longer a city in shock, terrified that a series of Mumbai-style attacks was about to happen. The commuters had gone back to commuting. Even some of the tourists had returned.

In fact, as Danny turned the corner into the quiet suburban street he’d come to visit, for a fleeting moment, he almost felt normal being there.

How easy would it be to hail a cab and ask it to take him to see Anna-Maria? And how tempting. He thought back to the last night he’d spent with her on his houseboat, just hours before he’d walked into the trap that had been set for him at the Ritz. As he passed the bloom of a magnolia tree, he remembered her perfume and the feel of her smooth, hot skin against his.

How easy . . . but how impossible too. Danny’s converted coal barge in north London’s Little Venice, his home-from-home in the UK, where he and Anna-Maria had slept together the night before the attack at the Ritz, had already been picked apart.

He had seen it on the news. Even though the vessel was registered to a Swiss holding company, one of the neighbouring boat owners must have recognized his face from the TV mugshots and called in the cops.

Danny had watched the news footage over and over online, showing a steady stream of forensics officers confiscating boxes of his belongings and packing them into vans for further examination. It was a joke, of course. There wasn’t a single item in there to incriminate him. The most suspicious thing on that boat was the previous owner’s taste in flock wallpaper.

Not that the cops were interested in Danny’s innocence. They just wanted proof of his guilt. The same went for the press. Rather than getting colder, the story had grown hotter with time. And in the absence of any sightings of Danny, they’d spun his life into an inversion of the truth. Instead of painting his career in a positive way, they’d homed in on the negatives. On his alcoholism following his wife and son’s death. On his turning his back on the intelligence community, which had trained him. They’d used words like ‘recovering addict’, ‘rogue’ and ‘loose cannon’ to describe him. They’d raked back through his entire past and he’d bet they were still out there, digging for more dirt.

Which was why he couldn’t see Anna-Maria. Because she was probably being watched as well. No matter how careful they’d been over the years to keep their occasional meetings from her husband, it was more than likely that someone some time had noticed them together, and that they, too, would have gone to the police.

Cut it out,
Danny told himself angrily. There was no point in dwelling on what a screw-up this all was. He needed to focus on making it right. He counted the numbers of the red-brick terraced houses he passed. There were odd numbers on this side of the street, evens on the other, meaning he was now only four doors away.

He took the stack of leaflets from his pocket. Menus from a Chinese takeaway he’d gone into ten minutes ago. He’d snagged twenty from the pile on the counter and now started delivering them, one through each letterbox of the houses on this side of the street.

He slowed as he approached number thirty-nine. The building was much like the rest, but with a fresh paint job on its wooden bay window frames and door. A recycling box piled high with empty bottles, mostly vodka and white wine. The curtains weren’t drawn. The living room was empty, its lights out. Danny spotted a big flat-screen TV and what looked like the spiked leaves of a marijuana plant on the kitchen sideboard. He made a show of tying his shoelace on the doorstep and listened, but no one was home.

The lock wouldn’t be a problem. But he didn’t want to frighten the woman he’d come to see. He tugged a glove onto his right hand, took a fingertip-sized mike from his bag and pressed its adhesive back against the brickwork behind the drainpipe.

Removing his glove, he slipped an audio bead into his ear and continued his delivery run of menus down the street.

A block away there was a small park. Danny sat on a bench and unfolded a newspaper. To a casual observer, he was reading, but in fact he was locked in deep thought.

Considering that he’d once trusted the Kid with his life, he sure as hell didn’t know much about him. Like a lot of ex-government intelligence operatives, both he and the Kid had kept their private lives to themselves. Danny’s knowledge of the Kid’s work history prior to his meeting him was sketchy too. The first job they’d teamed up on had been five years ago in Basra, where Danny had been training executive protection units in fieldwork, while the Kid had been honing their counter-surveillance protocols. A mutual friend, now dead, had introduced them. But that point of contact was all it had taken for Danny to start trusting the Kid too.

He’d seen what the Kid had been capable of: running the best surveillance and counter-surveillance ops Danny had witnessed outside his time with the CIA. The two of them had partnered on at least ten protection jobs and hostage retrievals since. Along with Spartak Sidarov, the Kid had become Danny’s first port of call for back-up.

Before Danny had contacted Crane from the caravan to ask for his help, he’d made a list of everything he knew about the Kid that might help Crane track him down. It hadn’t been long. He’d mailed it to Crane’s new avatar, Melville:

First name: Adam

Surname: Fitch

Age: 35–40

Employment: British Army and GCHQ-trained cryptologist and coder; four years with the European Network and Information Security Agency; then private sector, working with me and God only knows who else.

Other than the Kid’s age, which Danny had estimated, he no longer knew what, if any, of the other information was true. If the Kid had been prepared to kill him and his daughter, then Danny was guessing he wouldn’t have much of a moral objection to lying through his teeth about the rest of his life.

Crane had got back to Danny yesterday, the portal of contact once more being a message posted on the InWorld™ Public Contact Board, which he had been regularly checking in on. The message he’d found there, tagged for the attention of Danny’s new avatar Jackal, was:
FISHERMAN SEEKS LOST HOOK.

The subsequent conversation Danny had had in the Rest Cure café in the city of Steem with Crane’s new avatar, Melville, had gone like this:

Melville:
‘The records of the EPU company you and the Kid worked for in Basra were compromised by a hostile virus less than a month ago. Whatever photos of the Kid were filed there, along with any links to other organizations he’d worked at previously or after, have now been wiped.’

Meaning the Kid had already set about removing all traces of himself from the net, and any obvious means by which Danny might trace him, long before he’d helped set Danny up at the Ritz.

But Danny had refused to be discouraged by this. Rather, he’d expected it and had instead comforted himself with the thought that, while the Kid hacking a private security company’s files might have been within his capabilities, it would have been a hell of a lot tougher for him to tamper with any other records on him held by British Military Intelligence, GCHQ and ENISA – or any of the other organizations the Kid had claimed he’d worked for.

Jackal:
‘What did your UK and European government contacts dig up?’

Melville:
‘No employee named Fitch was on the payrolls of the British military, GCHQ or ENISA during the time the Kid was likely to have been there.’

Which meant that the surname Danny had always known the Kid by was a fake. Because if the Kid really had worked for these organizations, he’d have had to use his real name to pass their rigid security protocols.

Melville:
‘However . . . six employees named Adam of a similar age to the Kid
were
employed by British Military Intelligence. And of these Adams, only one of them, Adam Gilloway, went on to work for both GCHQ and ENISA.’

Danny’s heart had begun racing right then, because this had meant that maybe the Kid had told him his real first name.

Melville:
‘My contacts sent me the photos of all three of the separate employee files held by these organizations for Adam Gilloway.’