Hunted by Emlyn Rees Read Free Book Online Page A

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 curlingup 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 –