Hunting Ground

by L J Morris

Sinclair and Porter were just ahead of McGill and were now running across the roof of the adjoining building. At the edge of that roof was a gap of around ten feet s to the next, slightly lower, building. Porter jumped the gap and fell awkwardly but was quickly back up and running again.

  Sinclair cleared the gap easily and soon caught up with Porter. She ushered him towards another fire escape at the far end. ‘Start climbing down, Callum. I’ll wait for Frank and we’ll catch you up.’

  Porter nodded. He was out of breath and bleeding from the scrapes he had picked up when he fell. ‘Okay.’

  As Porter started his descent, Sinclair looked back at the other roof. McGill was sprinting for the edge, arms and legs pumping. The first bullet hit him in the left calf but the adrenaline coursing through his blood stream was enough to keep him going. The second round hit his right thigh as he was taking off and threw him off balance. As soon as he was airborne, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. The third bullet hit him in the small of the back.

  ‘FRANK.’ Sinclair ran back towards McGill, firing shots as she went. She hit one of the men in the centre of his chest and he went down, no longer a threat. The second man took cover behind an air conditioning vent as Sinclair’s shots ricocheted off its metal surface.

  McGill landed chest first on the building’s parapet and slid backwards. He grasped the brickwork and was now hanging with the brick edge under his arms. His strength was dwindling and his vision was blurred, he wasn’t going to be hanging there for long.

  Sinclair dropped her gun and dived towards the parapet. She grabbed McGill’s arms and braced her feet against the bricks. ‘Hold on, Frank.’ She pulled as hard as she could, but McGill was almost dead weight.

  Fighting to stay conscious, and with three gunshot wounds, he couldn’t help much. ‘Get out of here, Ali. There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘I’m not letting you go, Frank. Come on, work with me here.’ She pulled with every ounce of strength she had left. Her muscles burned with the effort. It was starting to work, McGill was moving, inch by inch, but it wasn’t happening fast enough.

  The man who had hidden behind the air conditioning vent came out of his cover and approached them. He swapped out his magazine and re-cocked his weapon. ‘Game over. You lose.’ The two men from the 4x4 were now at the top of the first fire escape and were making their way towards them. ‘Let go of him and stand up.’

  Sinclair looked into McGill’s eyes, pleading with him not to give up. McGill smiled at her. ‘Let me go, Ali. It’s okay.’

  ‘NO.’ She looked up at the man who now stood above them. ‘If you’re going to shoot us then get on with it.’

  He levelled his gun and took aim at a point between McGill’s shoulder blades.

  Porter pulled his trigger first. It was a perfect shot and struck the man between the eyes. Death was instant. No chance to retaliate, just a sickening thud as he hit the concrete four storeys below. Porter fired again, killing one of the other two men and wounding the other. He dropped Sinclair’s weapon and grabbed hold of McGill’s arm. Together they pulled and heaved until the three of them collapsed, onto the roof, panting for breath.

  Sinclair immediately started checking McGill’s wounds. ‘I think you’ve been lucky, Frank.’

  ‘Lucky I’m not a stain on the concrete like our friend down there.’

  ‘You’re lucky the wounds aren’t worse.’

  ‘I don’t know, they don’t feel lucky. The one in my thigh spun me round a bit. I think it moved me out the way of the last one.’

  Sinclair rolled McGill towards her and checked his back. ‘This one’s gone in and come straight back out again, left a hole in one of your love handles. The one in your thigh is a flesh wound but there’s no exit for your calf. Bullet’s still in there. Do you think you can walk? We need to get out of here.’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  Sinclair looked at Porter. He was as white as a sheet. All of this was way outside his comfort zone. ‘You okay, Callum?’

  ‘I will be, might need to throw up first, though.’

  ‘Where did you learn to shoot like that?’

  ‘I’m from Texas. Grew up with a gun in my hand. Never had to kill anyone before.’

  Sinclair gave him a reassuring smile. ‘Well, we both owe you a big one.’

  McGill held up his arms. ‘Enough of the soppy shit. Help me up.’

  Sinclair and Porter grabbed an arm each and lifted McGill to his feet. They draped his arms around their shoulders and McGill hobbled along, hanging between them.

  * * *

  When they got back to the campervan, Sinclair and Porter lifted McGill into the back and Sinclair got out the van’s first-aid kit. McGill’s three wounds were still bleeding, but not as badly as they had been. She treated them with antiseptic, packed them with gauze and taped them up. That was as far as her medical knowledge went.

  The van was parked on a quiet side street and was screened from the surrounding properties by trees, but they had to move on. Vadim’s men now knew they were here. Sinclair looked at Porter. ‘We can’t go back to Danny’s apartment, we don’t know how compromised we are. Did you leave anything there? Anything they could use to find us?’

  Porter shook his head. ‘No, Frank told me to pack everything in here in case we had to run.’

  ‘Good thinkin’, Frank.’ She patted McGill on the arm. She could tell he was in pain but trying not to show it. ‘You need proper medical treatment and a place to hide.’ She popped two painkillers out of a foil strip and handed them to McGill. ‘Take these, get some rest.’

  McGill half sat up and swallowed the pills as Sinclair poured water into his mouth. ‘Thanks, Ali.’

  ‘We need to re-group and figure out what to do next – I don’t know what to do, where to go. Any ideas?’

  McGill laid back down. ‘Old friend of mine … retired out here … the south. Isolated farmhouse near a place called Pau. He’ll help us … we can trust him … take all night to get there …’

  Sinclair covered McGill with a blanket and brushed some dirt from his face. ‘It’s okay, Frank. You rest now. I’ll look after you.’

  Chapter 15

  Data scrolled up one of the computer screens in Danny Kinsella’s apartment as he tapped at the keyboard. The other screens showed a combination of documents, photographs and live news video. The glow from the screens reflected off Simeon Carter’s glasses as he scanned them, trying to follow the information. ‘What does it look like, Danny?’

  ‘We’ve been hacked.’

  ‘Can you tell who by?’

  ‘No. Whoever they are, they’re good. This was done by someone with a lot of resources and manpower. Possibly state backed.’

  ‘The Russians? GCHQ?’

  ‘Could be the North Koreans, for all I know.’

  Carter took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘It could’ve been worse. Most of the information is secure. I keep it on a separate part of the network that isn’t connected to the outside world. What they got was mainly protocol info. They tracked some of my messages and calls to the phone we gave to Sinclair. They couldn’t see the content of the messages, I encrypted them, but they can see the number of the phone any messages went to.’

  Carter’s heart sank. ‘And they used it to find Ali and Frank.’

  Kinsella nodded. ‘It’s looking that way. The phones we gave them have been switched off, probably destroyed.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Modern phones are never really switched off. They just go into standby. You have to take the battery out or smash the whole thing.’

  They hadn’t heard anything from Sinclair for more than twenty-four hours. They had no idea where she and McGill were, or if they were still alive. Carter was worried. He had confidence in his team’s abilities, but it didn’t make not knowing any easier. ‘Can you find them at all, Danny?’

  ‘I can’t track them if they don’t
want me to, they’re too good for that, but it’s almost impossible to completely disappear in the modern world.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can cross-reference news and police reports, check webcams and CCTV, we can find them by the effect they have on the world around them, like ripples in a pond. It won’t allow us to follow them but I think we can assume they are still alive.’

  ‘I hope so, Danny, I really do. What have you found so far?’

  Kinsella tapped a few keys and pointed to two of the displays. One showed a series of news reports about the incident at Shawford’s flat. The other showed a police report that Kinsella had hacked into. ‘These reports show a gunfight took place at Henry Shawford’s flat. From the police report, it looks like Shawford was shot in the head from the roof a building opposite. They found three more bodies and a lot of blood on the roof. All the dead were male, none matched McGill or Porter’s description.’

  ‘It sounds like the sort of chaos they would cause. They got away then?’

  ‘Yeah, but at least one of them is wounded.’ Kinsella tapped another key and brought up a blurred CCTV image of a campervan. ‘One thing that only we know, is the type of vehicle they are in; Sinclair told us when she sent her last message. If you look closely at this picture, the driver is Porter and the passenger is Sinclair.’

  ‘McGill is the one that’s wounded.’

  ‘He could be dead.’

  Carter took off his glasses and cleaned them. ‘I don’t think so. If McGill was dead, Sinclair would have left his body somewhere. We would have picked up a report.’

  Carter knew Sinclair would be looking for somewhere to hole up; a place for McGill to heal and time to formulate a plan. All he and Kinsella could do was keep gathering evidence to out Vadim. That had to be their priority.

  Kinsella scrolled through the police report. ‘There is something that this tells us.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They’ve stopped trying to make these deaths look like accidents. Shawford was hit by a sniper, there’s no hiding that. Whatever they’re planning it must be big, and it must be happening soon. They aren’t worried about the police investigating the assassination of a retired academic.’

  Carter hated not knowing where Sinclair and McGill were. He couldn’t protect or support them if he had no idea what was going on. He really needed Kinsella to find something – and fast. ‘Keep at it, Danny. We need to know what we’re up against.’

  Chapter 16

  Maison des Fleurs was a typical southern French farmhouse. The main house was two storeys of local stone topped with a red tiled roof. The walls had been whitewashed in the past but, after years of neglect, were now faded and weathered. Flaking pale blue paint clung to the wooden shutters that were mounted to the wall at either side of the four front windows. One of the shutters leaned at an angle, its bottom hinge finally giving in to the rust. The matching pale blue door had black wrought-iron fittings that were speckled with rust but looked like they’d had more care than the shutters. Two empty hanging baskets framed the front entrance and added to the image of abandonment.

  To the left, were two slightly smaller buildings, built in the same style as the house, but with no windows, and recently painted. The right-hand side of the farmyard was dominated by a large wooden barn, which looked newer than the rest of the buildings and was well maintained. Two acres of land stretched out, away from the house, and at the other end of the plot was a group of long-derelict greenhouses, the glass in their frames broken and the wood rotten. The whole property had the look of being in the middle of a renovation project.

  Sinclair slowed and stopped the van in front of the stone gateposts at the end of Maison des Fleurs’ sweeping driveway. ‘There’s no movement up there, no vehicles.’

  Porter peered through the windscreen. ‘Are you sure this is it?’

  Sinclair pointed to the lopsided sign that hung from one of the gateposts. ‘Maison des Fleurs. It’s the right place.’

  ‘Do you think it’s safe? It couldn’t be a trap, could it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Vadim did, but Frank wouldn’t lead us into an ambush.’

  ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘We’ll go up there, put on the lost tourist act, see how it goes.’

  ‘Couldn’t that be a bit risky?’

  ‘Yeah, but Frank needs help. It’s a risk we’re going to take.’ Sinclair put the van into gear and swung on to the driveway.

  The tyres crunched on the gravel as Sinclair parked the van in front of the house. She looked in the mirror and checked on McGill. He’d been asleep for most of the ten-hour journey. Only waking long enough to drink some water every couple of hours. ‘How is he?’

  Porter sat next to him and checked his pulse and his breathing. ‘He’s not too bad, Ali. A bit of a temperature and his pulse is a little fast, but the bleeding has more or less stopped.’

  Sinclair smiled. ‘He is pretty indestructible. You stay with him for now, Callum, out of sight. I need to check things out.’ She pointed at the house. ‘We don’t know this guy at all.’

  Porter nodded. ‘Okay. Be careful.’

  Sinclair opened her door and stepped out into the early morning sun. She rubbed her eyes, they were tired and felt gritty. She and Porter had driven for two hours at a time while the other one watched McGill. It had been a long night. She shielded her eyes with her hand and squinted in the bright sunlight – she couldn’t see anyone. There was no sign of a car and the gravel on the driveway had weeds and moss growing across its surface. Maybe Frank’s friend had moved on.

  She walked up to the door and knocked. ‘Hello?’ The door wasn’t locked and it creaked open. She probably should have said something in French, but all she knew was: my name is Ali, and, which way to the library? ‘Anyone there?’

  ‘You looking for something?’

  Sinclair spun to her left. Standing at the corner of the building was a man carrying an old shotgun. He looked to be in his sixties, but it was hard to tell. He was tall and tanned with grey stubble covering his face and head. He didn’t look threatening, but Sinclair had to be ready. She tightened her grip on the Glock 19, nestled in the small of her back, and gave the man a wide smile. ‘I’m sorry. We were just looking for somewhere to camp. Thought you might let us set up on your land?’

  The man shook his head. ‘There’s no camping here. This is private property.’

  Sinclair could tell the guy didn’t want any visitors, she didn’t even know if he was Frank’s friend. She didn’t want a shoot-out in broad daylight, so she decided to leave and come back on her own to take the things she needed. ‘Okay, thanks. We’ll move along, leave you alone.’

  ‘You’ve got blood on your clothes. Everything okay?’

  Sinclair looked at her jeans. She hadn’t really noticed the state she was in: too tired, too worried. ‘Just a nosebleed.’

  ‘You can’t fool me, I used to be a medic. I know major blood loss when I see it.’ He edged up to the van and looked through the back window. ‘Who’s hurt?’

  ‘My friend, Frank. Frank McGill. He said you might …’

  ‘Frank?’ The man slid open the van’s door and climbed in. He slapped McGill’s face and tried to bring him round. ‘Frank? Frank?’

  McGill came to and tried to focus. ‘Holy shit, Gabriel Vance. How’re you doin’, you old fucker?’ He passed out again.

  Vance sat McGill up and looked at Porter. ‘Help me get him into the house, now.’

  They carried McGill into the house and up the stairs, sitting him on a bed in a back room.

  Vance issued orders to Sinclair and Porter. ‘There are towels in the bathroom, cover the bed then lie him on it. I’ll get my medical kit, one of you go down to the kitchen, get a bowl and fill it with hot water.’

  Sinclair and Porter did everything Vance told them to, without question. In this situation, he was in charge.

  Vance got to work, cutting off McGill’s cl
othes and examining his wounds. It was obvious he had a lot of experience in this kind of thing – Sinclair recognised a battlefield medic when she saw one. She chewed the inside of her lip; her panic replaced by frustration at not being able to do anything. The stress and adrenaline rush of the last few days was catching up with her. She needed to relax, needed to sleep, but she wasn’t leaving until she knew Frank was okay.

  After two hours, McGill’s wounds had been cleaned and dressed. Vance checked the drip he had set up and administered some antibiotics and morphine. ‘He’s going to be fine, looks like he had a lucky escape. He’ll sleep for a few hours, I’ll check on him later. Now, we all need a cup of tea and something to eat, and I think you owe me an explanation.’

  ‘Okay, doc. Put the kettle on and I’ll follow you down.’

  Vance and Porter left the room and went downstairs to the kitchen. Sinclair sat on the edge of the bed and held McGill’s hand. ‘Don’t scare me like that, Frank. I’d be lost without you.’ She kissed his forehead. ‘I’ll speak to you when you wake up.’

  The kettle was boiling as Sinclair joined the others in the kitchen. Porter was sitting at the table as Vance made three large mugs of tea. ‘It’s the only thing I miss about England, a nice, hot mug of builder’s tea.’ He placed the mugs on the table and took a seat. ‘Milk and sugar there if you need it; there’s plenty of food in the fridge when you’re ready.’

  Sinclair stirred her tea and sat down opposite Porter. She took a sip and stared at her mug, trying to decide how much detail to give Vance. She decided to tell him everything. They didn’t have many people on their side and she sensed this guy could be a big help. If Frank trusted him, that was good enough for her.

  Vance listened in silence as Sinclair told him all about the last year: the events on the island and the subsequent cover up; her being sent back to prison because no one was supposed to know anything; the second prison break and the conspiracy they had uncovered. She didn’t miss out anything. When she had finished, she took a drink of her tea and let out a long breath. If someone had told her that story, she wouldn’t have believed them.