by T. J. Lebbon
‘That part will be easy,’ she said. ‘You’re showing me how to get there.’
Holt drove with one hand and rolled a fresh cigarette with the other. It looked casual, but as with everything she watched him do, Rose knew there was a measured assurance about his actions. His movements were spare but efficient. He turned from the winding mountain road and started down a lane leading into a heavily overgrown ravine. The track was barely visible and looked unused, with plants sprouting from cracked earth and several small rockslides that the Range Rover negotiated with care. The landscape had become more hostile and beautiful the further east they’d driven, and now they were surrounded by steep slopes and deep forests. True wilderness.
‘How many people have you killed?’ she asked. The question just fell out, hanging in the air between them. Ash drifted from his cigarette to swirl across the car.
‘Fifteen,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Close, so I could see them die. Most of them with a gun, three with a knife. One with a broken wine bottle. Others?’ He shrugged. ‘At a distance, remotely, with bombs and machine guns? Many more.’
Rose blinked a few times, trying to compute what he’d said. So many dead at his hand, and here she was willingly riding into the wild countryside with him. And still she struggled to understand the way he sometimes looked at her – not lustfully, but with an indecision that seemed so unlike him.
But she was not afraid. Because Holt had already changed her so much, and if something went wrong she knew she would do her best to fight back. He had made her life mean something once more, and the last thing she believed he wanted was to take it.
They drove on in silence for a while longer, then he parked in the shadow of a cliff and killed the engine. The sudden silence was calming, and Holt sighed and sat back in his seat, tipping his hat over his eyes.
‘And now?’
‘I’ve been driving for three hours, and I’m not as young as I used to be. Now, siesta.’
Leaving Holt fidgeting to get comfortable, Rose jumped from the Range Rover, leaving the door open and looking at their surroundings. The deep, narrow valley was a wild place with no signs of humanity. The trees grew thick down here, but higher up she could see sparser slopes, sun-baked and desolate. A scatter of lizards scampered away into cracks and dark places in the ravine wall, and nearby were signs of a dried-up stream. When the rains came this place would flood.
Rose sat in the shadows and waited, watching the Frenchman snooze in the vehicle.
Killing is something you have to teach yourself, he’d said. Maybe that was true. But Holt would help her make the grade.
They spent three days parked and camped down in the ravine. He taught her the basics of how to follow someone across such a landscape, staying far enough back to remain hidden, but close enough to not lose your quarry. It was hot, hard, thirsty work, but he didn’t let up. He made Rose carry four litres of water with her when they left their camp in the morning, and she only had more water upon returning after sundown. Four litres felt heavy when they set out, but it was nowhere near enough.
Sometimes he stalked, sometimes he instructed her to stalk him. He talked about footprints and how to tell whether they were left accidentally or on purpose. He told her how to spot movement from a distance with the sun in your eyes. They triangulated sun flashes from uncovered equipment, and sounds from a radio he left tucked behind some rocks.
Once, when Rose had spent three hours tracking Holt towards a small clump of trees and bushes on a steep slope, he leaped from cover and fired his pistol at her. Dirt flicked up around her feet and scratched at her face and eyes, the blasts thumped at her ears, shock sent a cool flush through her that she thought might still her heart. Furious, she stood her ground as he advanced, ready to shout and rage at him. But when he was almost close enough to touch, he raised the gun again and fired it past her right ear.
Rose shouted and went down, hands pressed to the side of her head. On her knees, she looked around as sound slowly began to hiss back in from a hot distance. Holt’s mouth was moving but she heard only a distant mumble, like listening to him four rooms away through closed doors. A low whistling grew in her ears, and then a hum that would last for days.
‘Bastard!’ she said, and Holt raised an eyebrow.
‘We have to work on that,’ he said. ‘Get flustered in a gunfight and you’ll come second. Let’s eat.’
She was with Holt for seventy-three days. She’d lost track, but he had been keeping count. And he never once tried to touch her. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if he had. She was scared of him, she respected him, and however much she learnt and thought she had changed, he was someone from a very different world from hers. But she was not attracted to him, and she could not imagine ever being with another man now that Adam was gone.
It wasn’t the thought of betrayal that chilled, but simply that her life was on hold.
She felt that very keenly. While she was in Italy, learning things she had never imagined, everything else was frozen. Adam and her children were only just dead, no matter how much time had passed. The outside world moved on but nothing changed.
Slowly, the old Rose was eroded while the new Rose built herself up again with new talents, both deadly and subtle. But her deeper, inner self remained – a woman in love, a wife, and a mother in deep mourning. She would not lose her hold on that.
Ten weeks, he told her, was not a very long time. But he also added that with someone like him, it was worth a lifetime of study on her own. The internet might give her a thousand pieces of advice on breaking and entering a target’s property, but Holt was able to show her how it could be done silently, quickly, and with a gun still clasped in one hand. She could buy all manner of surveillance equipment online, but he demonstrated how to track a vehicle with a pair of runner’s GPS watches and a smartphone.
Close to the end of her time with him, the things he was showing her took a subtle change, the emphasis shifted. At the time it didn’t seem strange, but looking back on it she remembered a particular point when he seemed to make that decision. He left her one morning after showing her knife skills, and when he returned that afternoon he brought a pack containing forging paraphernalia. From then, they went from fighting and killing to more covert activities. He seemed to turn even more serious, if that was possible. He’d taught her to kill, now he was coaching her in how to stay alive. How to hide.
They talked a lot about staying below the radar, off the grid. It was easier than she had ever imagined. In her life before, she’d believed that everyone was a number, and to shed that number was almost an impossibility. But Holt told her that he’d existed for the past fifteen years without showing up on any databases, and with no trace of his identity stored or recorded anywhere.
‘What happened fifteen years ago?’ she asked, but Holt ignored the question.
Travelling with false documents, spotting and avoiding CCTV cameras, filtering money from existing bank accounts, making landline calls that did not leave a trace, dealing with mobile phones without leaving an electronic trail … Holt schooled her on all this and more.
Killing someone silently and instantly with an eating fork. High-speed driving techniques. How best to clean blood spots out of clothing, and how to dispose of soiled clothing if the bloodstains were too heavy.
Sometimes as the sun went down, they talked about music and movies.
When the final day came, she was not surprised. She knew from before breakfasting together that this was it. They drove out into the hills, and on the way Holt started summarising aspects of what he’d been telling her.
She listened for a while before saying, ‘I know you’re leaving.’
‘Something like this is never finished,’ he said. ‘You can always keep learning. I’m still learning. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you know enough.’
‘And I know enough?’
‘You’re an attentive pupil.’ He smiled across at her. Then the smile dropped and h
e returned his attention to the road ahead.
‘There’s still so much I don’t know,’ Rose said. She suddenly felt afraid, and alone, even though for now he was still with her. Maybe she’d secretly been hoping he always would be.
‘There’s a woman in Switzerland who will give you false documents, for a price. I’ll put you in touch with her. If she knows you come from me, the price should be fairer. And I know a guy in Germany, I’ll give you his address, he can help you with some computer stuff. A real whizz. He once emptied one of the CIA’s covert bank accounts and donated sixteen billion dollars to a donkey sanctuary in Spain.’
‘Lucky donkeys.’
‘Dirty money.’ He emitted that dry, clanking chuckle, then his face dropped a little. ‘I’ve done all I can for you, and more.’
‘Holt, thank you. I’ll see you—’
‘No, you won’t. Not after this. After this, I’ll be disappearing as well.’
‘Aren’t you already disappeared?’
‘Not enough.’ It was a strange comment, and he did not elaborate.
They reached a small lay-by and Holt pulled off, killing the engine and looking at the view. This landscape was wide, wild and harsh, peppered with white farm buildings and small villages.
‘Give me an hour,’ Holt said. ‘Then find me.’
They left the vehicle, he laced up his trainers, and Rose watched him jog away from the road and into the hills.
For the whole hour before she went after him, she wondered whether this was his way of saying goodbye.
Their final evening together was spent at a tourist restaurant in Sorrento.
Rose had found him after a couple of hours, and she realised that he hadn’t taken the day seriously. He’d done little to cover his tracks, and he had been sat waiting for her on a large boulder beside a fast-moving stream. On their way back to his vehicle they had been like friends taking a nice walk in the hills.
The restaurant was bustling with couples and families. They took a table near the back by the doors to the kitchen, and Holt sat facing the entrance.
‘Sparkling water or still?’ he asked.
‘You know how to show a woman a good time.’ Rose laughed, and he joined in. She didn’t think she’d ever heard his laughter so full and deep, as if he was forcing it to blank out a sadness.
It was a relaxed evening with flowing conversation, and as normal a time as she’d ever had with Holt. Knowing that their time together was almost at an end lifted the pressure of having to teach and learn. Now they were simply enjoying each other’s company.
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.
Chapter Eighteen
her world
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 engi
ne, 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.
