Wanted (9 page)

He’d visited scientific and medical facilities with contamination barriers like this before. Methamphetamine and cocaine laboratories, too. Anywhere people wanted to be cut off from the civilian world outside.

But places like this cost money. He wondered who had originally equipped it and who controlled it now, if they were indeed the same people at all. Could be the Russian government or military, or a foreign government, investing in this as a rendition facility. Or even some criminal organization in need of a little privacy to do whatever they needed to do.

But
the smallpox.
That was Danny’s first thought. Were these precautions because of that?

He set off along the corridor to the right, knowing that whatever was being protected here would, more than likely, be further below, but wanting this floor cleared and his route of withdrawal secured first.

Spartak followed, past the desk and the sleeping-bag. With the computer and its speakers behind them, a different noise began to assert itself. The thrum of an engine – a generator, it sounded like. And there, up ahead, was just that. Floor-to-ceiling and noisy as hell up close. The guard had tried to drown it with the music in an attempt to get some sleep.

Danny’s first instinct was to switch the generator off. Do that, and it was possible he’d kill the power to the entire building, including the lights, giving him and his team with their night-vision goggles an instant and massive advantage. It might not even raise the alarm: whoever else was in the building might mistake it for an accident, rather than a deliberate act of sabotage.

Then he remembered the RFID-controlled doors leading down and up. Kill the power and he might inadvertently kill those too, trapping himself on this floor at the mercy of whoever was controlling the operation from the outside.

‘Clear,’ Spartak said, having finished checking the dark recesses behind the vast generator.

Danny set off back along the corridor, past the surveillance desk, and on down the corridor leading left.

Immediately, he slowed. This corridor wasn’t featureless like the last. Instead it consisted of a row of what looked like cells. With modern wheel-locking mechanisms, fish-eye peepholes and feeding hatches set into each of the reinforced doors. He and Spartak checked them one by one. All eight were locked and empty.

But inside Danny, anger was rising, not just aimed at Glinka and the Kid, but exacerbated by the building itself. He didn’t need to believe in ghosts to know that people had suffered here and died. He tried to ignore the sensation, as brittle as autumn leaves, shivering down the back of his neck. But he could not.

It wasn’t fear. It was a memory. He’d been in a place like this before back when he’d still been on the Company’s payroll. After one of his fellow operatives had been kidnapped from his home in the dead of night at the height of an African summer in 2004.

The girlfriend of the man who’d been taken had been left dismembered across the bedroom floor of her apartment as a warning that her boyfriend’s abductors should not be pursued. But Danny had followed. He’d tracked his fellow operative to an out-of-town industrial facility just like this, with its own warren of subterranean and hidden rooms, locks on the outside of the doors. Rooms with drains on the inside just like here. Rooms that could easily be sluiced clean of blood.

He had finally found what was left of his friend behind one of those doors. Too late. What his captors had done hadn’t been simply for information. The electrical burns and injection marks alone would have seen to that. No, the rest had been done out of some kind of sickness. Some kind of evil.

And that was what he couldn’t get out of his mind now, as he returned to where the twins were stationed and the music was still playing. Evil resided here. And always had.

These passages ran too deep. They’d been part of the original design. He doubted any part of this building had ever served as a telephone exchange. More likely, it had always been a front for whatever had gone on underground. Before Chernobyl had gone up. Back in the Soviet days. And right through to today. For whoever was funding it now.

Danny punched the code into the next door leading down. Another soft buzz. Another click. The door’s hydraulic hinges hissed as he pushed it open and headed down. He was leading from the front now. He needed to know what this facility was and who was controlling it. He needed to be the first to see.

Because whatever sickness was going on here, he was going to make damn well sure that he was the cure.
Evil?
Oh, yes, Danny Shanklin believed in the existence of evil all right. He’d seen for himself that there were no limits to the darkness of the human heart.

As Danny moved slowly down the stairs, he felt the cool air straight away. The product of an industrial ventilation system running off the generator above. He heard more music too. No longer classical. Rock. His finger closed gently round the trigger of the AK-9: confrontation was near.

He checked the Geiger counter again as he stood at the top of the next flight of stairs. The reading, he saw, had dropped. An acceptable risk. Glinka and his friends had chosen this building well. A high count above ground, but safe below. Perfect for keeping other people away while you went about your work undisturbed.

He slowed. There, just above the rising sound of drumbeats and guitar, he could have sworn he’d just heard somebody laugh. And, yes, he could smell food now too. Paprika. Coffee. It smelt like a damn restaurant down there.

The music cut. A snatch of DJ chatter betrayed that a radio station was playing. So far underground, it had to be WiFi. More money spent here recently, then. But for
what?

Another burst of laughter. Nearer this time. Was someone coming up? He couldn’t be sure. He crouched, froze, perspiration trickling down his back. Aiming down, ready to fire, he visualized what would happen next. He imagined his target coming into view, whoever they might be. He readjusted his aim, so he could snap off a body shot that would hopefully leave any target disabled but alive.

But no shadows stretched out towards him to indicate that someone was on their way, no footfalls, nothing. As another song started playing, a grim smile crossed his face. He’d recognized the tune: Blink-182’s ‘American Idiot’. He hoped to hell he wasn’t about to prove those lyrics right.

Reaching the next turn in the staircase, he slid the telescopic mirror from his jacket pocket and, inch by inch, extended it to its full length, until he could deploy it to look around the corner of the staircase and down.

He got a fish-eye view of what awaited him below. The staircase terminated in a vast room. Much bigger than anything he’d been expecting. Shiny walls. Bright lights. A clutter of workstations and scientific equipment. A laboratory of some sort.

Three people were sitting at a table, their shapes too distorted by the mirror for Danny to be able to tell their gender, let alone whether they were packing weapons or not.

Two looked as if they had blond hair. The same as Glinka and his woman. The third person’s hair was dark. The same as the Kid’s.

None was currently facing the stairs. One might turn before Danny was in a position to cover all three. And even though he would still probably get the drop on them, chances were it would spill into a firefight and fast.

Which might leave all three of them dead. Himself too.

Withdrawing the mirror, he signalled Spartak and the others to retreat back up the stairs, then followed. They grouped at the last of the vacuum doors they’d passed through and Danny slipped a stun grenade from his belt. He set and primed its digital fuse, then signalled to the twins to continue their retreat through the door, spiralling his finger in the air twice, telling them he wanted them on ground level, securing their exit and watching for anyone who might attempt to enter the building from the outside.

Spartak gripped his AK-9 with his ham-like fists and stood grim-faced to one side, as Danny flexed his arm back into a throwing position. For a fleeting second a memory struck him of teaching his son Jonathan how to pitch. Danny had been a baseball fan all his life. He’d always joked with Sally about how one day their boy might grow up to play for the Red Sox. But instead he’d been murdered by the Paper, Stone, Scissors Killer when he’d been just six years old.

Danny’s eyes darkened as his memory of Jonathan’s smiling face faded, obliterated by what had happened to him. He pulled the pin and silently counted down.

Three . . .

Two. . .

One . . .

Then threw.

He stepped smartly back behind the wall next to Spartak, already hearing the echo of the grenade pinging off the bottom step of the staircase and skittering across the floor of the room below. Danny closed his eyes and covered his ears.

Just in time.

WHOOMPH.

A ground-shaking bang signalled the grenade detonating. The stun grenade, or flashbang, as it was more commonly known, produced 160 decibels of sound with a blinding mercury and magnesium flash equal to 300,000 candlepower. More than enough to disorient, induce severe dizziness and generally terrify ten shades of shit out of anyone unfortunate enough to be in close range.

WHOOMPH.

Just to be on the safe side, Danny had programmed it to go off twice. Because if any of those three people down there were real pros, then, like Danny and Spartak, they’d have been partially conditioned to the effects of flashbangs during training.

Twice, though, would give anyone a headache. Twice gave Danny edge.

Ceiling lights flickered above his head. One bulb had burst, but the others powered right back up. No problem with the generator, then. The lights would still be functioning below.

Danny charged down the stairs. An acrid stink of magnesium. A pall of smoke. His goggles saw through it, picking out the thermal images of three bodies straight away. All were down, immobile. He closed in fast, weapon up, finger hooked round the trigger, ready – itching – to squeeze.

He could see two out of three of the faces of the fallen occupants of the room. Both were men. One early twenties and skinny, the other ten years older and fat as an ox. The skinny guy was out cold, must have cracked his head on something as he’d floundered in the wake of the detonation. The older man had his hands clamped to his ears, and was wheezing pneumatically through his mouth and flaring nostrils. His eyes were scrunched tight shut, as if he wanted nothing more than to make the world disappear.

He located the third person too, a little way apart from the others, his arms outstretched, so still he might have been frozen.

A blur of motion to the right: Spartak had entered the room. He crouched beside Danny, scanning for signs of life. Danny did likewise, but picked up no additional thermal images.

He swivelled, focusing on the man with the outstretched arms. He was big, like the Kid. Dark-haired too. But the wrong kind of hair. Not dreadlocked like the Kid’s. His was thin and greasy, trailing down his muscular neck.

The fat, hyperventilating guy started to puke, bringing up great gobbets of whatever he’d just consumed onto the pristine white material of what Danny now saw was a laboratory coat. This guy and the one lying beside him, he realized, were medics or scientists, unarmed by the look of it. Civilians. No weapons anywhere near them, or anywhere in evidence on the now overturned table they’d been sitting around. Playing cards littered the floor, alongside overturned metal food bowls and soft-drink bottles and cans. This looked more like a frat party than a war council.

The skinny scientist started coming round, with a moan. He coughed, choked and threw up too.

‘Motherfucker,’ Spartak said, as the guy sprayed spew all over his size-fourteen boot.

Danny shouldered his weapon and whipped out his Taser, leaning down to the muscular man, who was dressed like the sentry he had Tasered upstairs.

He still hadn’t moved. He was dead, Danny realized, when he turned him over. He shone a pen torch full beam into his wide-open eyes. The retinas failed to dilate.

There were no entry wounds that Danny could detect: the shock had been too much for him, triggering heart failure or a cerebral haemorrhage. He had been a heavy smoker, Danny saw, glimpsing yellowed fingertips. Should have gone into another line of work.

Danny checked through his pockets. No ID. Nothing but a disposable plastic lighter and a half-packet of cigarettes. He tossed both up to Spartak, who snatched them out of the air without a blink.

‘Status, Two and Three,’ Danny said, louder than he needed, in Ukrainian, watching the look that the two live captives exchanged as he did so. It told him not only that their hearing had come back but that they’d understood what he’d said.

‘Clear,’ the twins radioed back one by one, their voices faded, two floors of concrete all but wiping out the radio signal.

‘One: hold your position. Two: get back down here,’ Danny said, again in Ukrainian. ‘We have captives here, secured for interrogation.’

The elder of the two civilians, the overweight guy with the asthmatic wheeze, wasn’t slow to react. ‘Please . . . I beg you . . .’ he said. ‘We had no choice.’ Heavy tears ran down his face.

Footsteps.

Danny spun towards the sound, swinging his rifle smoothly into a firing position.

But it was Vasyl who emerged at the bottom of the steps. Danny looked back at the two men grovelling on the floor.

‘Apart from you two and him,’ Danny said, kicking the dead man, ‘how many others are in the building or guarding it outside?’

‘Two.’

No hesitation. And there was no way this man could have known that he had already disabled the two guards he’d encountered. That suggested he was most likely telling the truth.

The elder man now clasped his shaking hands in the prayer position. ‘They would have killed us if we hadn’t done what they’d said,’ he pleaded.

What? Danny was about to ask. What did they make you do?

The man’s eyes gave him his answer, flicking towards the back of the room.