Hunted (4 page)

Danny put his coffee down on the floor of the van, pulled out his phone and fitted his state-of-the-art Bluetooth to his right ear. He tapped the In World icon on his phone’s screen, then waited a second or two until the website’s home page popped up, before logging himself in.

InWorld was an open-world game accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Each day, more than 300,000 players were logged in globally at any one time. The game’s vast environment included four virtual continents and twenty-eight virtual cities to explore, each of them containing thousands of individual locations.

It was a tough place to track someone electronically, in other words. Or eavesdrop on them. Making it the perfect place to host online meetings, if what you required was total anonymity and privacy. As Danny always did.

The virtual city he chose to beam into now was called Noirlight, and the precise urban location High Times Square.

Onscreen, a stylized realization of a crowded market square came into view. Ambient sounds – footsteps, street hawkers, distant car horns – synched through Danny’s Bluetooth to fit the action onscreen.

InWorld allowed players to design the characters they controlled – their avatars – to look pretty much any way they wanted. Your
avatar could resemble yourself, or a cartoon version of yourself, or look like someone else entirely. You could be tall or short, black or white. Or something more abstract, like an alien or a fish.

A system status message tickertaped across the bottom of Danny’s phone screen, reading ‘F8 IS NOW ENTERING HIGH TIMES SQUARE’, informing the other nearby players that Danny’s avatar was about to beam in.

Danny had chosen to call his avatar ‘F8’ for no reason other than that it had been the first key he’d looked at on his laptop when he’d originally been prompted to come up with a name. But he had to admit it had a nice phonetic ring to it, particularly considering the nature of business he was always here in InWorld to discuss.

A plain-looking cartoon avatar of a dark-haired man in jeans and a white T-shirt materialized onscreen next to the replica of the Trevi Fountain in the middle of the square.

Danny had designed his avatar to look as undistinguished as possible. He wasn’t here to socialize with strangers. The less attention he garnered, the better.

‘WELCOME BACK TO NOIRLIGHT, F8,’ another system status message displayed.

Danny steered F8 quickly through the throng of other avatars milling around the square, before launching into ‘Fly’ mode, taking his avatar up into the permanently twilit sky.

Danny’s ‘Buddies’ list at the bottom left of his screen showed the name ‘CRANE’ in green lettering, letting Danny know that his ops provider was already logged into the system and would no doubt already be waiting for him at Harry’s.

If the real Crane was in North America – although Danny had no way of knowing where he might be at any given time – it would be early morning for him.

Danny tried to picture him sitting sleepily in an apartment somewhere, fixing himself a coffee, idly eyeing his computer screen, waiting for Danny to show. But when he tried to imagine Crane’s face, all he saw was darkness, a mask.

Danny steered F8 over the skyscrapers and buildings of Noirlight before finally touching down in a heavily shadowed back alley, next
to a dingy-looking doorway with the letters ‘HA RY’s B R’ sparking and fizzing intermittently on a red neon sign.

The three-dimensional modelling tools available to InWorld players allowed them to construct virtual real estate – houses, restaurants and shops – and also to protect and control that real estate just like you would in the real world. Meaning you could decide who was allowed in and who wasn’t.

Harry’s Bar had been built and was owned by Crane. And as Danny steered F8 across to its rotting, uninviting front door, a virtual doorman with two virtual leashed Rottweilers stepped out from the shadows.

The doorman was a MOB, a non-player entity, part of the InWorld programme. Or more specifically, a security subroutine. He was visually impressive and intimidating. Perfect for steering unwanted players away.

Onscreen he towered over F8, all jaw and brawn, while the two Rottweilers boxed F8 in and began to growl.

What their programs were actually doing was data-sniffing, confirming that F8 was who he claimed to be and had a right to be here. Just as quickly as they’d appeared, the dogs now slunk back with their master into the shadows. The door to Harry’s Bar swung open with a theatrical creak.

Danny steered F8 inside. The room was decked out like a speakeasy. There were no other avatars in sight. The only sign of life was another MOB, standing behind the polished bar. A grizzled old barman, straight out of Central Casting, with a waistcoat, a paunch and a greased-back slick of salt-and-pepper hair.

‘Long time no see, pardner. What can I get you?’ the barman said, his computer-generated voice emerging as a pleasing New Orleans drawl.

‘Bloody Mary,’ Danny said. ‘Heavy on the spice.’

This was one of the access codes Crane had given him. The barman set about mixing F8 a virtual drink, while Danny waited, knowing that in reality his own voiceprint was now being checked, as a means of providing yet more proof that he was indeed who he said he was.

Finally the barman handed over F8’s drink and told him, ‘Good health.’ Meaning Danny had been cleared to proceed.

A floor-to-ceiling bookcase on the wall to the right of the bar slid sideways, revealing a previously hidden doorway. Danny steered F8 through into Crane’s private office, a windowless room with a wood fire crackling, blazing ruby red in a cast-iron hearth. Art deco ceiling lights bathed the exposed brick walls in a sapphire blue glow.

But Crane was nowhere to be seen. Looking round, Danny saw a virtual paper note left twinkling for him on the burnished mahogany desk.

He zoomed in on the message, until it filled his entire screen:

Both mildly surprised and irritated at having had his time wasted, Danny checked his ‘Buddies’ list, and sure enough the name ‘CRANE’ was flashing red, meaning that he had just logged out.

Danny had never met Crane in the flesh. Only online here in Noirlight. He’d been given details for how to contact him by a former colleague, who used to push work Danny’s way from time to time after he’d first gone freelance.

Danny didn’t even know if Crane was his ops provider’s real name. What he did know was that he was reliable and had never let him down. He’d also never attempted to persuade Danny to take on jobs he didn’t want. Meaning Danny trusted him and his judgement implicitly.

Danny would still go ahead with today’s meeting at the Ritz, then. But even so, as he logged out of InWorld, he couldn’t shake the sense of unease that had been dogging him all week.

He couldn’t help wondering who this mystery client was. Or why they were insisting on meeting him blind. Or how the hell they’d
managed to keep their identity secret from someone as connected as Crane.

He couldn’t help feeling, in other words, that somehow something was wrong.

Which was why he’d brought the Kid in as backup. Because Danny knew better than to ever ignore his own intuition. He’d learned that long time ago. On a morning that had started with a walk in the woods, but had ended with blood on the snow.

‘Do you like killing, Daddy?’

Like?
It wasn’t a question Danny Shanklin had ever been asked. Not one he’d thought about, either. Not once throughout his schooling or training. Never in all those hours he’d spent learning how to defend himself and his country, and how to attack.

Like
had nothing to do with it, the way he saw it. Killing was about what was necessary. About what had to be done.

Icy wind stirred in the sycamore trees. Sunlight sparkled on the snow. In Danny’s hand was a rabbit, dead not more than half an hour, its body still warm.

He glanced across at his daughter. Lexie was nine years old, swamped in a torn and battered camouflage jacket that had belonged to Danny himself when he’d been eight.

Her long blonde hair – fine, like her mother’s – was matted from where she’d slept on it. Snow creaked beneath her waterproof climbing boots as she rocked back and forth on her heels.

A snowflake glistened on her button nose, beside the five freckles that never went away even in winter, and which Danny had gazed at more times than he could remember over the years, as she’d fallen asleep in his arms.

It was the fifth of January. Just gone eight a.m. Danny and Lexie
were hunched down by the ancient hawthorn fence that partitioned the pastures in the snowy valley from the dark woods above. The air was heavy with the dank scent of pine.

Danny’s father, the Old Man, had bought this rocky hilltop off a sheep farmer for next to nothing nearly forty years before, and had later built a log cabin on its summit the year Danny had been born. Danny had been coming here ever since, first with his parents, then his friends, and now with his own family too.

His wife Sally adored it. She thought giving the kids a taste of this simple life was an antidote for their New York city existence of boundaries, restrictions and TV shows.

‘What I mean,’ Lexie said, ‘is we don’t
have
to kill, do we?’ Her voice was gentle but commanding, like her mother’s. Danny could have listened to it all day. ‘Because we’re not poor like some people in the world are poor, are we, Daddy? And there were plenty of Wal-Marts where we could have stopped off and picked up meat on the way here.’

She was a preternaturally analytical child – something her school teachers had picked up on already, much to Danny’s unspoken pride. And she was right about this, of course. Danny didn’t need to hunt to eat. He was on a better-than-good government salary, and the home business Sally had set up – organic baby foods, frozen in sachets for busy working moms – had recently started turning a profit.

‘It’s not about rich or poor or going shopping,’ Danny said. ‘It’s about doing something for ourselves. Without anybody else’s help.’

It’s about more than that too
, he nearly said.
It’s about who we are. About our place in the world. It’s about learning to be hunters, not prey.

‘The way Grandad taught you.’

‘That’s right.’

Grandad. That was what Danny’s kids called the Old Man. He’d been dead two years now, but Danny still sometimes felt that he was right here looking over his shoulder. He missed him like hell.

He loosened the noose of the wire snare from around the dead rabbit’s neck. It had been a clean kill. The animal would have died quickly, garrotting itself as it struggled to break free. It flopped as
Danny lifted it up, like a glove puppet with the hand pulled out. Its dead black eyes glistened like olives. A cold breeze ruffled its fur.

‘Killing it ourselves means we know where it’s come from,’ Danny said. ‘Meaning we know it’s not been fattened up with growth hormones. Filled up with crap,’ he paraphrased, having listened to his daughter laughing along to enough
Simpsons
episodes to know better than to talk down to her now. ‘Meaning we also know it’s not spent its life in a cage either,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know about you, Lexie, but I think it’s going to taste a whole lot better for that.’

Lexie didn’t reply. Danny didn’t push her for an answer either. She had an independent mind and he respected that. She’d reach her own conclusions in time, he knew. And he hadn’t brought her up here to mould her, just to hang out.

She walked ahead of him, casting a long, thin shadow before her, to where he’d set the last snare.

They’d walked the fence together with little Jonathan just before sundown the previous afternoon, with Danny pointing out the
telltale
tufts of fur snagged on the fence barbs and the smooth worn dirt of the rabbit runs beneath.

As he’d tied the snares, he’d explained to his kids how settlers and farmers had been hunting this way for hundreds of years, knowing how each dusk and dawn the rabbits would come creeping out of their warrens in the high woods to feed on the lush green grass below.

Danny had wondered when he’d woken today whether the snow might have deterred the rabbits from venturing out. Three inches had fallen overnight, and heavy flakes were drifting slowly down again now. But it seemed the snowfall had only made his snares that much harder for the rabbits to detect, because he already had two dead in the bag. And now a third. More than he’d hoped for. More than enough for the stew he’d cook and eat with Sally and the kids later on by the hearth.

It irked Sally, Danny bringing Lexie out like this on his morning rounds whenever they were up here at the cabin. But Danny had been even younger when the Old Man had done the same for him.

And Lexie wouldn’t be left behind. She’d always been like a shadow to Danny. She wasn’t afraid of anything that walked this earth. Not while she was by his side.

The Old Man had shown Danny more than the dead catch too. Danny had been taught how to skin the rabbits himself by the time he’d been seven.

No difference between this and peeling a banana
, the Old Man had told him the first time he’d assigned him the responsibility of prepping and cooking supper on his own.
Take a hold of it by its hind legs. Lift it up. Slit it up the belly from top to bottom, then hook out the guts. See … that way they tumble down over the head and don’t ruin the meat. Now snap back the head and see how smoothly the whole skin shucks off …

The Old Man had been Chief Combatives Instructor at the United States Military Academy, where Danny’s half-Russian,
half-English
mother had lectured in modern languages. Death had been in his blood, and he’d wanted his boy brought up the same.

But Danny was prepared to meet Sally halfway. He let Lexie come with him to collect the catch, but he always did the prepping alone, out back away from the cabin, only bringing the meat inside once it had been skinned and decapitated and washed of blood, so that it looked like it had just been bought from a store.

He dropped the dead rabbit into his drawstring canvas bag, unhooked his bowie knife from its scabbard on his belt, and cut the length of cotton holding the snare to the fence, his fingers already too numb from the cold to unfasten the knot.

He dropped the snare into his bag, on top of the other snares and the kill. No point in leaving traps out here when he was away. Not because they’d rust, which they wouldn’t, but in case another animal got itself tangled in such a way that it wasn’t killed outright and Danny wasn’t here to deliver the
coup de
grâce
. No point in causing anything any suffering, unless you had no choice.

A bird – a crow, he thought – launched itself up cawing into the sky over the trees near where the cabin was. Then another, a few metres to the left. Something must have startled them. Maybe snow falling off a branch, Danny thought.

And yet something didn’t sit quite right as he watched the two birds flying off into the distance. Something he couldn’t quite place. A tightening in his gut. An apprehension. He thought of Sally and Jonathan asleep back there in the cabin. He suddenly wanted to be by their side. To run there even.

You’re just tired
, he told himself.
Just tired and hungry
. But seeing his daughter shiver, he said, ‘Come on, let’s turn back.’

Lexie’s pale skinny shins protruded like sharp white blades from her shiny black three-quarter-length leggings. This item of clothing had been all the rage at her school the last few months and had been her favourite Christmas present. She’d got them early, in time for a friend’s birthday party, and had pretty much refused to take them off other than to be washed any time since.

‘Do we have to?’ she said. ‘It’s so beautiful out here.’ She was staring out across the valley, past the winding black snake of the river, towards the distant Canadian border, with her eyes shining brightly, her cheeks rosy as apples and a trace of a smile playing on her bow-shaped lips, so clearly proclaiming to the world that she was glad to be alive.

She slipped her arm round Danny’s waist and hugged him, making him realize how fast she was growing, and how one day she’d be standing here not with him, but with a man of her own, and how he wanted that happiness for her, the same happiness he had with Sally, but how at the same time the thought of her not being his little girl any more nearly broke his heart.

‘I know, princess,’ he said, thinking again of those crows, for some dumb reason not being able to stop himself now, ‘but come on, let’s go get that kettle on and fix your mother some coffee. Stoke up the fire a little too.’

Again Danny pictured Sally and Jonathan back there in the cabin. Jonathan had just turned five. He’d be curled up beneath the sheepskin cover on the pine bed the Old Man had built for Danny’s mother so many years ago.

The snow began falling faster, big fat flakes drifting to the ground, as they set off tramping back into the woods.

The cabin – single-storey, asphalt roof, with wood smoke curling
up lazily from its solitary chimney stack – came into view through the pine trees a few minutes later.

Seeing it there, safe and sound, he felt himself relax. He remembered yesterday too, being out here with Sally and the kids. How he’d promised her he’d start looking into changing his career. Or at least she’d said he’d promised. What he’d actually said was that he’d think about it. But in her books that was the same.

But what’ll you do instead?
That was what he asked himself now, as he led Lexie past the old hawthorn clump and on towards the cabin. He already knew he couldn’t take a desk job, that he’d be incapable of directing operations for any length of time without wanting to get directly involved himself.
Meaning you’ll have to become a civilian.

Only some people said you never quit the CIA. Not in your heart. That it was a vocation, not a job. That the Company had chosen you, not the other way round. And now that he worked for the Company’s Special Operations Group, specializing in the covert collection of intelligence from hostile nations, he knew it would be even tougher to walk away.

Danny stopped, brought up short.

He stood and stared.

The cabin was ten metres dead ahead. Cobwebs of condensation – Danny’s wife and child’s breath – lay stippled on the glass of the two windows either side of the door. The curtains were drawn, red-and-white check, sewn by Danny’s mother on her old Singer machine. Icicles hung like the teeth of some primeval creature from the eaves. Other than a collar of dark wood around the smoking chimney’s base, the slanted roof was blanketed with snow.

But it was the snow on the ground that Danny’s eyes locked on now. The pattern of boot prints – right away Danny could see it was wrong.

Two sets of prints – his and Lexie’s, occasionally interlocking, but mostly side by side – led away from the cabin door, showing the route he and his daughter had taken that morning as they’d set out to check the snares.

But now Danny could see a third set of prints – bigger than his own – leading in towards the cabin from the woods to the right.

He knew it for certain now. What his intuition had told him before. Whoever had walked this way, they’d scared those two crows into flight.