Wanted by Emlyn Rees Read Free Book Online Page A

contamination too.
    ‘Tut,’
Danny said into his mike, meaning he was now in position.
    ‘Tut,’
the three others echoed. They were awaiting his orders.
    The building Danny had travelled all this way for was now less than four hundred metres away. According to the basic commercial satellite images he’d studied, and the limited reliable map work available for the area, he’d concluded it was an abandoned telephone exchange, which had once been the town’s main employer.
    He and the others had been over their plan of attack a dozen times already. Attack? He hoped it came to that. There was still the grim possibility that the birds he’d come here to capture had already flown.
    Of the unit of six mercenaries who’d assassinated the Georgian-sympathizing UN peace envoy in London ten days ago, there were now only three left alive: their leader, known only as Glinka, and on whom Danny had so far been able to turn up zero intelligence; his woman, a blonde, whose face he would never forget; and Adam Fitch, a.k.a. ‘The Kid’.
    Until ten days ago, Danny would have described the Kid as one of only three people left alive whom he’d have trusted with his life. Until the moment when the Kid had pulled a Glock 18 machine pistol on him and had told him that, unless he stole the secret locations of six smallpox vials from Colonel Nikolai Zykov’s office in London’s Russian Embassy, he would execute Danny and his daughter.
    Danny had done what Glinka and the Kid had asked of him. But instead of being released, as he had been promised, he and his daughter had been handed over to three cold stone-eyed killers, whose job it had been to get rid of them in any way they saw fit.
    Things hadn’t worked out like that. The three men who’d been left to murder Danny and Lexie had ended up dead themselves.
    Danny had made sure that the last of them to die, the torturer who’d planned to practise his despicable art on Danny and Lexie, had told him everything he knew during the final, prolonged and increasingly agonizing moments of his life.
    He had confessed that certain elements of the Georgian Secret Service had paid Glinka to assassinate the UN peace envoy and blame it on Colonel Zykov so that the UN would perceive this as an act of Russian aggression and would therefore once more demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from the former Georgian border territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
    The dying man had also told him that Glinka had set Danny up to take the blame for the London massacre and assassination so that he could publicly run him through the televised, police-choked streets of London, like a fox before a baying pack of hounds. Danny would gain international media attention and condemnation for the terrorist atrocity, and occupy the cops long enough for the real killers to get clean away.
    The torturer had told him, too, about the smallpox. About how, after selecting Zykov to take the fall for the assassination – he was a high-standing member of the Russian Embassy staff in London – Glinka had recognized him as the same scarred soldier who’d raided the Biopreparat chemical-weapons facility at which Glinka had been stationed as a guard back in 1990.
    Glinka knew Zykov had stolen the smallpox all those years ago and had decided that, as well as framing him for the assassination, he would take it for himself by torturing Zykov to discover the vials’ current whereabouts.
    The last thing the dying torturer had told Danny was what had brought him to this wasteland: the date and the GPS coordinates of where the torturer had intended to meet up with Glinka, the blonde and the Kid.
    Namely here.
    Tonight.
    Bang centre in the deadliest part of the Zone.

CHAPTER 9
    ‘Move, Two and Three,’ Danny said in Ukrainian.
    He pictured the twins – silent, lethal – moving like missiles towards their target.
    He began counting down from thirty.
    The plan was for the twins to close in on the abandoned telephone exchange from