The Ice House by John Connor Read Free Book Online Page B

about five kilometres distant and could see no traffic at all on the road. The road was a dead end below him, finishing without warning a few hundred metres after the parking space.
    He moved back and turned to her. She was about five metres away, kneeling down. He saw her fumbling quickly to put something in her pocket and immediately realised that she would have a phone of her own, of course. All kids did these days, no doubt. She didn’t want him to know she had it because she didn’t trust him. ‘Have you got a signal?’ he asked her. She looked startled, then guilty. She was still quietly sobbing to herself. He sat up and got his own mobile out, switched it on, waited for it to boot, then waited for a signal. There was none. They had taken down the masts covering the area, he decided. Probably the fixed line too, if there was one. That partly accounted for the absence of response to the explosion. They must have done it while he was lying there, waiting, during the morning – planted some small timed device to do some specific damage. Perhaps that was what the guy on the opposite ridge had been up to. There was a mast up there – he could see it now, still intact across the other side of the valley. Or maybe they arranged it with the service provider, paid to have it cut on some computer system. That was possible, though more risky, unless you knew people clever enough to hack in and do it remotely.
    ‘I have no signal,’ he said to her. ‘What about you?’
    She shook her head, then sat back in the grass and started chewing her lip. She was getting more and more agitated. She wanted to speak to her mother. He understood that. But her mother was dead. He needed to work out a way to deal with that. He needed to tell her. But not yet. That news would slow them down, take some dealing with, and he didn’t know how to do that. The first priority had to be to get out of this area, change cars, get lost in a higher density population area. Then get out of Spain.
    At least, he had to do that. He still had to work out what to do with her. He had promised her protection. But how could he achieve that? So far he had given it no thought at all. She would have relatives here, or even in England, maybe, but they wouldn’t be able to protect her without using the police, and the police here, at least, were in on it. That had just been demonstrated in the most effective way imaginable. Official assistance was out of the question. Whoever he was up against, it was just him and the girl as long as he was in Spain.
    The only sure solution would be to trace the contract, find out who wanted her dead, then do something about it, and he would need to be in London for that. All his resources were there, including the connections within his brother’s world. And Viktor himself – he would know what to do, maybe, or at least he would help. He could help extract him from this mess too, of course – set up a charter so they didn’t need to go near a public airport. But Carl would have to consider all those options when he was capable of clearer thought. Right now things were out of control.
    He switched his phone off. He would have to tell her to do the same. If Jones had resources enough to take down part of the communications network then they might have the ­capability to trace her mobile and pinpoint her via triangulation of the signal reception at two or more masts, once everything was switched back on, or once they passed into an unaffected area – maybe as soon as they got into the next valley. If you had money enough things like that were possible. He knew because he’d arranged it once in the past, though not in Spain.
    ‘My dad will be coming soon,’ she said again, looking back in the direction they had come. He pushed himself a little closer to her and started to pack the spotting scope away. ‘Come here,’ he said, trying to talk gently. ‘I want to show you where we are going.’ She didn’t move. ‘I can see