by Jo Bannister
The man returned with a loaded syringe in his hand. ‘You know what this is?’
Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off it. ‘I can guess.’
‘You understand, this isn’t the finished product, it’s the raw material. I need to perform a standing castration on a colt, this is what I use. It’s a good product for horses. It keeps them sedated without interfering with their vital functions – cardio-vascular system, balance and so on. It stops them falling on me while I operate,’ he explained in layman’s terms.
‘For use by people as a recreational drug, of course, we have to vastly reduce the potency. Even a tiny amount of it at this strength would have catastrophic effects. I don’t just mean it would kill you, although of course it would. I mean it would fry your brain. I don’t know what that would feel like. No one has ever been able to say. But you’re going to find out if you give me any trouble. Do you understand?’
Daniel had thought he was past fear. He was mistaken. He had to force an answer out; and then try again because it was just a strangled whisper the first time. ‘Yes. Yes.’
‘Good. So now we wait quietly, yes?’
‘Yes.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was in Deacon’s voice as he spoke that he knew he was in for a fight over this. ‘Brodie, I need you to stop the car.’
She glanced at him, dismissive, didn’t so much as slow down. ‘Why,’ she asked waspishly, ‘are you feeling sick?’
‘I’m going to drop you off here. You and Alison. I’ll pick you up again, or have you picked up, inside half an hour.’
‘No,’ said Brodie, and kept driving.
‘I mean it,’ he said tersely. ‘This is a police operation. There are armed response units on their way, which means if he doesn’t come quietly there could be shooting. I don’t want either of you in the line of fire.’
‘I know what you’re doing,’ she retorted through clenched teeth.
‘I told you …’
‘ …the official version,’ she interrupted acidly. ‘What you’ll put in your report. What they want to read at Division, and what somebody’ll pat you on the back for. The Correct Way to Proceed in the Circumstances. But not the reason.’
He shook his head, bemused. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What do you want me to say?’
‘That you don’t want me to watch you sacrifice Daniel to the greater good.’
She could have spiked him with her Come Dancing stilettos without making him catch his breath like that. ‘I don’t want any of this! I’m stuck with it because it’s my case so I get the blame when it all goes pear-shaped. I’ll do everything I can to get Daniel out of there safely, the same way I would with any other hostage. For what it’s worth, most hostage situations end peacefully. Most hostage-takers eventually accept that they’re only making things worse for themselves and give up. But I don’t want to be handling a tricky situation with part of my mind on where you are and what you’re up to. Let me do my job, Brodie. Stay here, and let me get on with what I’m paid to do.’
‘No,’ she said baldly. ‘I’m coming with you, Jack. I’m going to be right there. I can’t make you fight for Daniel, but by God I’ll see if you don’t. If you let him die because that way you get to tie up all the loose ends, and his death will be on someone else’s record and someone else’s conscience, you and me are through. I’ll have lost a friend, and you’ll have gained an enemy.’
On the back seat Ally Barker had the distinct impression they thought they were alone. They were arguing with a passion that even married couples don’t use in public. They frightened her. After three months of the keenest loneliness she had dared to put her trust in these people, only to find they had no confidence in one another. It was like listening to your parents row, and knowing they were going too far – any second now one of them was going to say something unforgivable and the only possible outcome would be divorce. She wanted to knock their heads together. She wanted to scream just to remind them she was there.
‘Is that what you think?’ Deacon’s voice was rough with resentment. ‘Dear God, is it? You think it doesn’t matter to me whether Daniel comes through this? Because he’s your friend, and I’m jealous of the part of your life that he has access to and I don’t. That with him out of the way I no longer have to worry about the spectre at the feast. That’s what you meant by tying up loose ends?
‘Brodie, Daniel Hood’s a pious little prat sometimes. He’s sanctimonious and he’s arrogant and he irritates the hell out of me more often than not. And somewhere along the line he became my friend too. It’s the only reason I haven’t decked him a dozen times. I can’t explain it and I don’t know how it happened, only that it did. There’s something about the little sod that — I don’t know, I can’t find the words — touches people. He gets involved in their lives. You think he’s just watching from the sidelines, but he isn’t — he’s changing things. Changing people.’
She went to answer him but he wouldn’t let her. He had a point to make, and it was important, and she was going to hear him out. ‘But even if he didn’t – if we’d never met, if I’d never felt the urge to shove his telescope where no stars shine — I still wouldn’t be using him as a tethered goat to shoot a tiger. Not for fear of your temper tantrums but because that’s not what we do. We don’t make trades. We don’t put a value on this person’s life or that person’s suffering and weigh up whether it’s worth more than what we can get for it. It’s my job to protect Daniel to the best of my ability. And everyone else.
‘And right enough,’ he acknowledged, ‘that’s where a conflict can arise. It isn’t a question of who’s involved, it isn’t even a question of numbers. It’s not about Daniel at all. It’s about the man holding him, and the fact I have a good chance to take him off the street – him and his whole damned setup. There’s a drugs factory out there and if I get him, maybe I can close it down.
‘If numbers were the issue I’d have to tell you that that would be a good deal. We’d save a lot of lives that way. But it’s not even a consideration. The only decision I have to make is whether to take a dangerous man or let him run. And that’s no contest.’
Brodie was upset and afraid. This was Daniel they were talking about, and the fact that he mightn’t be around tomorrow, and that thought paralysed her brain and stopped her from seeing the sense, the wisdom, the morality even, of what Deacon was saying.
‘That’s a convenient argument, isn’t it?’ she spat. “It wasn’t my fault, I was only following orders”. Where have I heard that one before? You can dress it up any way you like, Jack, and you’ll probably convince people who don’t know you as well as I do, but I know what’s going on here. Yes, it’s a difficult decision, but not for you. You’ve hated Daniel’s guts from the day you met. No – from the day you told him to jump and he didn’t ask how high. From that day to this, a part of you has been waiting for a chance to make him pay.
‘It’s about Daniel, all right. And not Daniel and me but Daniel and you. He’s smarter than you are, and he’s a better man than you are, and you resent him like hell. And this is your time. You have his life in your hands. The only problem is that he’s not here to beg for it.’
Deacon had been a police officer most of his adult life. He’d never thought of being anything else. It was important work and he was good at it, and if the downside was that every so often someone used you as a punchbag, that was a price he would pay. He’d been shot at, he’d been cut, he’d been thumped and kicked until there was no part of his body that hadn’t been black and blue at one time or another. But he’d never been stabbed in the heart until now.
He had trouble finding a voice – any voice, much less one his colleagues would have recognised. ‘You’re upset. I know that. It’s why I don’t want you there while we deal with this. But afterwards we need to talk. If you really think I’m so jealous of Daniel that I’m prepared to gamble with his life and hope to lose, maybe we should call it a day. Because you have no id
ea who I am, and you shouldn’t be sleeping with strangers.’
Ally held up a tentative hand and mumbled, ‘You guys do know I’m here, don’t you?’ And Brodie snarled, ‘Shut up,’ and Deacon grated, ‘Don’t take it out on the girl.’
The lights of a petrol station hovered in the darkness like a spaceship. Deacon tried the voice of authority, that had bluff young policemen cowering under desks. ‘Pull in here.’ He waited for her to do as he said. He was still waiting as the lights twinkled and vanished in the mirror.
He pursed his lips. ‘All right. I’m not going to wrestle you for it. When we get there, if you’re still determined to obstruct me in the pursuance of my duty I will arrest you. Count on it.’
‘You don’t scare me,’ sneered Brodie.
‘I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to get you to see sense.’
‘By which you mean, see it your way.’
He hung onto his temper by his scuffed and often bruise-blackened fingernails. ‘Brodie, I’m just about past caring how this looks to you. But you will do what I require of you. I have the power to make you.’
She didn’t doubt that he meant it. Later she would regret forcing him onto this path, but right now all she cared about was Daniel. She had always insisted there was no conflict between her feelings for these two men, but all three of them had known that one day there would be a choice to be made. And none of them, herself included, could have predicted the outcome.
‘Do what you have to,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘And so will I.’
No one who knew him well would have been surprised to learn that Daniel Hood, tied up in a horse-box, helpless as a beast on its way to the slaughterhouse, was seeking consolation in mathematics. Unable to move enough to ease his muscles, his back was a slab of pain from the nape of his neck to the back of his knees. The blood flow congested by the baler-twine around his wrists had made his hands swell until the plastic cut into the flesh. Also, he had a headache. In such circumstances almost no one else in the entire world would have been thinking about the First Law of Thermodynamics.
To Daniel, the First Law of Thermodynamics held out the hope of something beyond the void in the same way that heaven serves believers. He’d been an atheist since he was old enough to vest his faith in logic and build a personal philosophy out of facts mortared together by probabilities, but the more he read and the more he thought, the less he felt constrained to accept that everything ended when the heart stopped.
The laws of thermodynamics are about the first thing a budding scientist learns, and the first of them is the law of the conservation of energy – that it can be transmuted but neither created nor destroyed. He reasoned that, since a personality undoubtedly exists despite having no physical structure, it must be a form of energy, in which case there was every chance that what the world knew as Daniel Hood would continue in some guise beyond the black hole and he’d get a chance to see what lay on the other side. He hoped so. Whatever it was, it had to be more interesting than nothing.
From the other end of the box came a soft rumble as the mare lifted her tail and, with a beatific expression, made another deposit in the straw behind her. Resignedly Kant took up his stick again and walked down the unoccupied half of the box, not really hopeful, just going through the motions.
This time it was different. Daniel saw him stiffen then lean sharply forward. He threw the stick away and pulled a long plastic glove from his pocket, and continued the search by hand. He picked up a wisp of straw from the floor of the box and cleaned them off, then he held them out triumphantly for Daniel’s inspection – three black rubber cylinders with rounded ends, just small enough to pass through the pony but big enough to contain a significant volume of liquid. In Windham’s kitchen or some similarly ad hoc facility, this catalyst would be combined with a few domestic chemicals and emerge as Scram in quantities so vast it could be sold cheap to teenagers and still make a fortune for everyone involved.
‘Mission accomplished,’ Kant announced with vibrant satisfaction.
‘That’s all of them?’ For obvious reasons Daniel was hoping the answer would be Nein, or even nine.
But no. ‘All.’
‘You counted them out and you counted them all back again?’
In times of war it’s things like that which betray spies. You can speak a perfectly fluent, colloquial version of someone’s language but something like that won’t make sense unless you were part of that society at the particular time it arose from. Daniel found himself trying to explain. ‘It was a reporter. In the Falklands. He couldn’t say how many planes …’ He gave up. ‘Now what?’
The man’s face went still. Of course, he understood why Daniel couldn’t share his enthusiasm at a job well done. ‘Now I deliver these and go home.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘No.’
In some ways life is harder on the strong. They have more to defend, more to lose. There were things Daniel would die to protect but his image wasn’t one of them. ‘I’m not a threat to you. I can’t get out of here until someone finds me and frees me. By the time I’m talking to policemen – and they’re shouting at me for knowing nothing they can possibly use — you’ll be safe. I know my life’s of no value to you, but it is to me. I don’t want to die for no good reason.’
Kant watched him with calm unflinching eyes. A vet resolves a lot of suffering and also ends a lot of lives: perhaps there wasn’t the barrier in his mind that stops the average manin-the-street, even when he’s very angry, from killing. At the same time, he was an intelligent man under no particular pressure to make a split-second decision on which his own safety might depend. There was just a chance that an appeal to reason would succeed.
Daniel saw it in his eyes first, and held his breath because he could have been wrong. But then the smile appeared on his lips too and the man nodded. ‘All right.’
Dead on cue a tiny electronic orchestra struck up with “Colonel Bogie”.
And the other reason you don’t take civilians on sharp-end police operations is that they don’t know the basics – the things so fundamental you don’t think to remind people – things like turning off the ringer on their mobile phones when they’re part of a surveillance.
It was Alison’s, buried in the pocket of her coat where she hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. In a busy street, even in a crowded room, it might have been barely audible. In the silence of a rural estate late at night, so far from the nearest traffic that they’d left the cars quarter of a mile away and crept up on foot, it filled the air.
They’d met up with the armed response vehicle and a contingent of officers from the local division at the gates of Sparrow Hill. Deacon had engaged in a quick briefing with their inspector before deploying into the estate itself. He expected to find the van in the courtyard behind the house, mainly because the stable block would seem the obvious place to head with a horse-box, but he wasn’t putting money on it. The driver might have figured out that an aerial search would find it harder to spot him under trees than among buildings, or he might have been smart enough to realise that would only apply in daylight. Either way, Deacon wasn’t making any assumptions. They would search the park as they advanced on the house.
He left Brodie and Alison in his car with an injunction to stay there and no confidence at all that they would obey. In fact, he walked away quickly so that he wouldn’t see when they didn’t. There wasn’t time for a confrontation, a shouting match could blow their cover instantly, and in spite of what he’d said he had no intentions of arresting either of them. Better not to know, then, that he was being defied.
Brodie gave him a minute’s head start then got out of the car. ‘Are you coming?’
Ally gestured nervously in the direction of Deacon’s departure. ‘But Mr Deacon said …’
‘Yes he did,’ agreed Brodie. Her voice was like iron. She shut the car door quietly and began walking up the drive. After a moment, torn and nervous, Alison f
ollowed.
In the darkness, unable to use a torch for fear of giving themselves away, it was difficult to be sure they weren’t overtaking the cordon. But as her eyes adjusted Brodie found she could see the movement of dark figures against the dark background and she took care to stay behind the advance. Anxious as she was to find Daniel, she didn’t want to be the one who found Werner Kant.
The van was in the stable-yard. As soon as the advance guard had a clear view under the gate-house they could see it. A small door in the side was open, spilling light onto the cobbles and silhouetting the single figure standing beside it. Deacon didn’t think it was Daniel. With the light behind it the face was obscure and the conditions made it hard to judge scale. In any group of men Daniel was usually the shortest, but here there were no reference points.
But if it had been Daniel standing out in the yard with nobody near him, he wouldn’t have been standing there long – he’ d have been running for dear life.
The firearms officers and the men armed with nothing but training and bloody-mindedness had been manoeuvred into position by means of whispered phone calls and were waiting his word to go. Deacon made them wait, watching to see if anyone else appeared. It only took one man to drive the horse-box but that didn’t mean he was alone. Also, he wanted to locate Daniel before the action started. If he was in the van the guys with the guns needed to know.
And that was when “Colonel Bogie” rang out in the stillness of the night.
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘Ah,’ said Kant softly. ‘We seem to have been discovered. I wonder how that happened.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Daniel said quickly. ‘I don’t know where we are, and I’ve no way of telling anyone if I did.’
‘Nevertheless, we are no longer alone.’
