The Hunt: ‘A great thriller...breathless all the way’ – LEE CHILD

‘You’re drinking water?’

‘Please don’t tell anyone,’ Holt said. ‘My reputation won’t survive. And Celso will eject me from his bar.’

She snorted laughter and took another drink. She couldn’t tell whether it was really single malt, but she didn’t give a fuck. It burned on the way down. That was all that mattered.

He might have been one of them. They’d found her at last and he’d come out here to deliver the killer blow. She’d been expecting it, and fear of the Trail had no bearing on why she continued to hide. It was life she was trying to elude, not them. And right then she didn’t care if he was Trail. The difference between death and this excuse of an existence was negligible.

‘You mutter when you’re drunk,’ he said.

‘I do not.’

‘You might think you don’t, but you do. You ramble. You’re just too drunk to even notice, or remember when you eventually surface.’

‘I never surface. There’s nothing to surface to. I just drink, sleep, wake, repeat.’

‘Well, if you want to do anything about what happened, that’s the first thing we have to change.’

He tipped his glass back and drained his water, and Rose stared at him open-mouthed.

‘How much do I say?’ she whispered.

‘You talk to your dead family,’ Holt said.

Rose dropped her glass and sobbed, so violently that Holt must have thought she was having a fit or a stroke. She pressed her hands to her face and squeezed, trying to hold in all the memories of her dear dead loved ones, afraid that they’d be gone forever if she let them go.

Holt’s arm rested hesitantly around her shoulders. There was no pressure there, nothing other than a desire to comfort. No one had shown her such kindness since …

Since she had run. Escaped. Since she’d fled normality, left the world, and let herself be consumed by the stark underside of life. There was no kindness this far down.

She rested her head against his shoulder and started to cry. That was when he told her the rest about what she mumbled in her drunken stupors – the sorrow, the guilt, the fury.

Lowering his voice he whispered close to her ear, ‘You tell Adam how much you want to kill them all.’

Rose’s crying paused, a dammed flow burning as it readied to burst through again.

‘I can help,’ Holt said. ‘I know all about killing.’

Chapter Nine

trail

He was still wearing his running kit from that morning. It had dried during his journey here in the car, and he could smell the odour of his early run. When he’d sweated that out, everything had still been normal.

For a moment he considered waiting where he was, rucksack and bag at his feet while he waved his arms over his head, motioning the helicopter to land on the widened area of road. He’d talk with them. Negotiate. Offer them money, or whatever else they wanted, so long as they released his wife and the girls. They must have made a mistake, anyway, and picked on the wrong family. He’d swear silence.

Then he remembered the woman’s cold, calm smile in the van as she’d waved a gun towards his blindfolded loved ones. And he knew that Rose had left him with very little choice.

Shrugging on the rucksack, slinging the holdall over one shoulder, he jogged across the lay-by and leaped the ditch beside the road. It only took a couple of seconds to see where he should be headed; an outcropping a few hundred feet up the hillside, a worn gully leading up to it, stream splashing down over rocks and past scrubby trees. Most of the way he’d be hidden from sight from the helicopter, so long as he stayed low. He’d worn his black running tights and a black technical tee shirt that morning, so it could have been worse. On a road run it would have been hi-viz gear all the way.

As he ran, that sense of unreality gave him pause several times, and he stopped and snorted disbelief. But he could hear the helicopter growing closer, rotor sounds whup-whupping across the valley and echoing from the mountains.

Don’t stop, he thought. Run fast, keep low. Not far, then I can see what’s going on. Hide, watch, figure out how fucking mad Rose is. Was she in with them in some weird way? An agent provocateur whose job it was to guide and steer him, as she’d said they would have done to him in the city?

But there were those people she’d killed. Though he had never witnessed a death in real life – the only body he’d ever seen was his father’s laid out in the hospital’s chapel of rest – he knew for sure that such brutality, such violence, could not have been faked. And in her eyes and voice afterwards, the truth of her revenge.

She was mad, but right then he’d be mad to ignore everything she had told him. He had to assume it was the truth until he could prove otherwise.

He slid down into the gully, one hand out to keep balance. The ground here was covered with short, stumpy grass, with frequent tufts of a hardy purple heather and a more ragged low-level shrub. There was sheep shit everywhere. Clumps of wool clung to plants, and down in the gully he found the scattered remains of a dead animal – a stripped spine, ribs, leg bones, and a sad skull with scraps of skin still attached.

The stream was barely a trickle. In the wetter months this would be a torrent, but now it was easy to climb its course, moving from rock to bank and back again. He kept his head down, using his hands as well as his feet when the incline grew steeper. He didn’t worry about his feet getting wet, but knew he might suffer later. Wet socks often resulted in blisters.

Glancing up frequently, Chris made sure he was heading towards the rocky outcropping he’d noticed. He’d become quite proficient at judging distances across landscapes such as this, and knew that features could often appear much closer than they really were. He’d scouted this one well. The helicopter was much louder now, approaching the wider area of road where Rose had dropped him off.

He only hoped it could not land anywhere else. He hoped that they wanted a hunt, and not just a quick kill, otherwise they could simply shoot at him from the air. He hoped he was faster than them, fitter, better prepared for confronting the changeable elements these mountains could throw at the unwary.

Chris was also painfully aware that he knew nothing. This was ridiculous, unbelievable, and everything here was new.

Breathing hard now, he moved slowly and methodically, resisting the temptation to leap and run up the gully formed by the stream. He’d soon wear himself out that way. Walking uphill, pushing down on his knees when not using his hands for support, would be as quick as trying to run. Gravity might only be a theory, but it was an insistent one.

The stream ran down directly through the rock feature he was aiming for, finding its way amongst the jumble of massive boulders that might have been there for ten million years. As he approached them he paused, pressed low to the ground and turned on his side so that he could look back down the way he’d come. The road already seemed a surprising distance below him, and the helicopter was just appearing from behind a fold in the land. It was close to the road, stirring up a storm of dust and dried plants as it dipped lower.

He’d never been interested in aircraft, not even as a kid. And with two little girls there wasn’t much call for toy soldiers and Airfix models. But he reckoned this was similar to the helicopters used to ferry workmen back and forth to oil rigs in the North Sea, a passenger craft with enough room for a dozen people, as well as equipment and luggage. Still dwarfed by the landscape, it took up most of the road as it touched down.

Chris scrambled the last twenty feet out of the gully and into the jumble of rocks, ensuring that he was properly out of sight. He was sweating already. Some of that was fear. He panted hard, catching his breath, and made sure he had a clear view between rocks down to the road.

The helicopter’s rotors kept spinning, though the motor’s tone lowered.

He tracked the route of the road as best he could up towards the ridge, and there at the top … was that a car? He wasn’t sure. It was too far to see, and from this angle the sun shone into his eyes. But he hoped that was Rose up there, paused to see what was happening.

She could have stayed with him. Rose and her gun, her knowledge of what was going on, everything she knew about these people and what they wanted … she could have stayed and helped him.

But she was using him, a lump of meat as meaningless to her as he was to these rich hunters she’d told him about. Her only aim was revenge against the people who’d murdered her family. To the hunters he was quarry, to her he was bait. It amounted to the same thing.

‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered, shaking, shivers passing down his back and tingling his balls. He still couldn’t quite believe it. People would pay to hunt people? Though he’d always regarded himself as a long-term optimist, he was also aware that in a society of millions there were bad eggs, twisted people with perverted desires. Whether sick or evil, or occupying the wide spectrum in between, these were realities that he did his best to ignore. They were the people he hoped never to meet, and who he was happy leaving alone in their own skewed realities. But he’d always known that such bad eggs sometimes crossed over into the gentle masses. It was one of his greatest fears.

Today he had met them, and his world had changed. Rose was one. A bad egg, whatever the cause of her badness.

And now, these others. The helicopter was filled with them. Rich people who might present a respectable facade for all but one day of the year, and today they wanted Chris Sheen dead by their hand.

He dropped the bag and rucksack from his shoulders and opened the rucksack, rooting around for the phone he’d seen before. His hand delved deep, moving other objects aside until he found the familiar shape of a smartphone.

He unlocked the screen. There was no service. ‘Shit. Shit!’ He stood, making sure he was still hidden by the rocks, holding the phone up towards the sky as if willing contact. He turned it this way and that, never taking his eyes from the top left corner. No service.

Later. He would call the police later.

Slipping the phone into the small, zipped back pocket of his running trousers, he crouched down again and opened the holdall. It contained a new pair of road-running shoes, useless to him up here. A woollen sweater that would hold water and become too heavy. A pack of sandwiches past their sell-by date and speckled with mould. There were spare socks and underwear which he slipped into the rucksack, but most of what the Trail had packed for him was useless. Of course. If what Rose had told him was true, they’d expected a chase through the city. Their aim would have been to make the hunt more exciting, not to give him anything useful.

He shoved the Adidas bag down between two rocks.

His shivering persisted. It was a warm September day, but in these mountains there was always a cool breeze drifting across the shadowed slopes. And after his sudden burst of activity, hunkering down motionless meant he was rapidly cooling. Got to keep moving, he thought. If I have to start again quickly, got to keep warm. So as he watched the helicopter he stretched his legs, massaged his muscles, kept the blood flowing.

The aircraft’s big side door opened and people started to climb out. From this distance it was difficult to make out much detail. But Chris could see that they wore camouflage clothing, carried rucksacks, and he was quite certain that the objects slung on their shoulders were guns of some sort, not walking sticks.

His blood ran cold, stomach tingled. Like real hunters, he thought.

Two people exited, three, and the fourth tripped and fell from the aircraft, sprawling in the dust. The others stood around and watched, not one of them going to help. The fallen figure stood and brushed themselves down. A fifth person jumped down from the helicopter, and the five stood around, seemingly aimless. At an unseen signal they hurried to the roadside, then slipped down into the ditch. There they waited. Someone shouted at them from the helicopter, gesticulating from the shadowy interior. Don’t want them to be seen dressed like that, with guns. Too close to the road. But Chris realised he hadn’t seen a single vehicle since Rose had left him standing there, and he wondered just where they were. He had been running in Snowdonia several times, but he couldn’t immediately recognise any of these peaks. He guessed they were more remote, in places where casual holidaymakers might not visit.

Three of the five seemed to be overweight. Either that, or their clothing was thick and bulky. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought they were all men. One had already stripped off his camouflage jacket and tied it around his waist. He seemed to be wearing a black bandana around his head. A real Rambo character. One of the fitter-looking ones was tall and blond, standing apart from the others and shielding his eyes to stare up at the mountains.

Chris wished he had binoculars. He delved into the rucksack again, realising he hadn’t checked every pocket. But though he felt around inside, he didn’t find any.

It was as if Rose had given him not quite enough to survive, and on purpose.

She wants me to lead them on, survive just long enough for her to do her thing. He wished he didn’t think that, but he could not deny the logic of the idea. She wanted to kill the people she called the Trail; those who organised the hunt, not the hunters themselves. And to do so the hunt had to continue, and she had to draw them in. If he escaped too quickly and his family were killed, her own venture might be over.

Until this happened to some other poor bastard.

But he had his own reason to lead on the hunt and not escape. She knew that, and if what she had told him about her own murdered family was true, she knew it better than him. If he escaped, his family would die.

‘I need to stay alive. But I can’t escape.’ It was impossible. He could see no good ending to this, and he felt like curling up and crying it all away. Man up, Terri would have said, laughing ironically because over the past few years, when his love of the outdoors had led to new, more extreme adventures, he’d become what she sometimes called ‘gnarly’. You’re just a bit dangerous, she’d sometimes say to him, and he could tell that she liked that.

‘Harden the fuck up,’ he said.

He looked down the hillside again, and three of the five hunters had vanished. In the few seconds that he’d spent looking through the rucksack and feeling sorry for himself, they must have spread out and started up the mountainside, secreting themselves behind scattered rocks and clumps of vegetation. He squinted and scanned close to the road, but he could only see two. Rambo was advancing slowly up the slope, making no effort to hide. Close behind him came another man, fat and already struggling.

The helicopter started powering up. Something glinted from its interior, the sun glaring from glass, and Chris realised that they were looking for him. They must have spotted him as they were descending, and now one of the bastards from the Trail was trying to give the hunters a head start. He crouched down further, realising that the sudden movement was the worst thing he could have done.

He didn’t hear the shouted instructions, because they were too far away. But looking between rocks, he could see the shape in the helicopter pointing directly up at his position.

As the aircraft doors closed and it lifted away in a violent storm of dust, something smacked from a rock thirty feet to his left. It took him a moment to realise it had been a bullet.

Shouldering the rucksack, Chris hunkered down and crawled back into the rocks, keeping low, climbing one boulder and dropping behind another. Down the slope the helicopter soon rose into view against the mountain opposite. It looked so small and harmless, but he dreaded it coming towards him. It could act as spotter, hovering above him wherever he went and however fast he ran, and it would draw the five hunters towards him like moths to flame.

Maybe he could run faster than them, move across the terrain quicker. But with the helicopter above there was no escape.

That’s exactly what they want, he thought. Yet again the hopelessness of the situation smashed in. Any chance he had of saving his family involved becoming a trophy kill for one of those people behind him.

He wondered what it would feel like to be shot. Would there be pain? Would he know he was going to die? He wasn’t sure which he’d prefer – an injury that killed him slowly, awareness leaking away as darkness came. Or a sudden head shot, bringing death before he knew it.

The sound of the helicopter changed. He paused, crawled across a low slab of rock and risked a look across the valley. The aircraft was rising, following the line of the road back up towards the ridge where it disappeared. And the car he thought he’d seen up there – the BMW Rose had taken from the Trail people she had killed in his house – was gone.

More gunshots rang out. They whip-cracked across the valley, and though he listened hard, he did not hear any bullet impacts. They were already shooting blind, flushed with the initial excitement of the hunt.

He clipped the rucksack tight. In the hip pockets he found a handful of energy gels, and he tore one open and gulped down the sweet contents, placing the empty wrapper back in the pocket. Then he took a moment to examine the steep mountainside above him. If he climbed he would be slow, and an easy target if any of them happened to be a good shot. But if he moved along the slope to the south, he could just make out a slope of jumbled rocks and boulders that led up to a shoulder of the mountain. That’s where he would aim for. There would be cover there, and once up on the ridge he’d be able to make a better judgement about where he was and where he should go.

Heart thumping, feeling strong and yet terrified, Chris started to run.

Chapter Ten

vet

‘I was a vet,’ she said. ‘We lived near Chelmsford, nice little village, friendly community. We had good friends. Adam was a landscape gardener. The kids loved the countryside. I treated animals, put them down, made them better. It didn’t feel like I was making a difference, not in the scheme of things. But for every sad owner’s face I saw, there were a dozen happy ones. Sometimes it’s the pets that make a person’s life worthwhile. A little old lady with a scratchy cat, a young boy with his dog. You can tell a lot about people by their pets.’ She turned to Holt where he sat by her window, ever-present bottle of water in his hand. ‘You ever had any pets?’

‘No. But I am a vet.’

Rose snorted, then sniffed back a shuddering sob. Jesus fucking Christ on a bike, how she’d kill for a drink.

She’d pleaded with him at first, told him how the way to come down was by reducing her intake day by day. But Holt had shaken his head. He wasn’t the sort of man you argued with, or who did things by half. She’d only known him for three days but she recognised that already. Short, slight, bespectacled, hair greying, dark skin weathered and leathery and so lined she couldn’t tell wrinkles from scars, he projected the look of a bookworm, not a mercenary. But he had such stories.

She’d only heard a few of them so far, but he held the weight of many more. A red history, heavy with death.

That was in the Comoros, on an island called Anjouan. A man called Badak had already killed three families. He shot the men and women to death, then raped the children and hacked them to pieces with a machete. His men feared him as a demon. I tracked them for three days, shot two of his men from a distance. The others fled. A day later I caught Badak in a snare, tied him to a tree, sliced him from throat to cock, and stuck a lizard inside him. I filmed the whole thing and let the people see.

The stories were like a dark star within him, the black hole of his endless, terrible experiences drawing her with a dreadful gravity. They promised experience. He promised help. At last, she perceived a route out of the spiral she had descended into.

She saw a way to hit back.

‘Why are you helping me?’ she asked.

‘Am I helping you?’

Rose nodded. She was sweating in the steamy hotel room, shaking with alcohol withdrawal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw her family as she had found them. With a drink inside her, at least they were sometimes still alive.

But yes, he was helping her. For the first time in almost a year the future, however bleak, seemed further away than the next drink. She had cast aside initial doubts and suspicions, trying not to worry about just how she had bumped into him, how someone like him happened to find her. She’d even asked him. His response had been that, sometimes, people like them washed up on the same shores.

So she had assigned their meeting to coincidence. And he had made such promises.

‘At first I thought you just wanted to fuck me,’ she said.

‘Is that what most men want of you?’

‘Hah!’ She shivered, drew a hand over the sweat beading her brow. ‘Only if they’re desperate. And I’ve never let them. Not once.’

Holt shrugged and stared from the window. Rose couldn’t even remember the name of the little town where they had met, but here in Sorrento it was scorchingly hot, the streets bedlam, and the smells of delicious cooking and rank sewage wafted through the curtains with each breath of sea air. Her mouth watered and her stomach rolled. Four miles east of them people lived in cheap, chaotic housing, while in the harbour’s à la carte restaurants holidaymakers spent a local’s daily earnings on a plate of imported meat. A site of such contradictions seemed a perfect place to hide.

‘It’s been a long time since I had a cause,’ he said, turning to face her. He was very still when he spoke, only his mouth and eyes moving. Every movement was spare and necessary. ‘Sometimes my causes were convenient because they paid well. That’s the definition of soldier of fortune, I suppose. On occasion, just now and then, I believed in something. But what you tell me happened to you … ’ He sighed. ‘It’s the children. Not you. Not your husband. Don’t care what one adult does to another, because it’s the adults who run the world. We can make our own choices, mostly. But when the children are hurt, that’s when I become sad. And angry.’

The children, she thought. Less clouded by alcohol than she had been for a long time, yet shaken by the burning need she still felt for blessed oblivion, her memories were becoming richer by the hour. Molly, stabbed behind the ear and left sitting up as if still waiting for her mummy. Isaac, lying in his own blood. Alex, one little hand still clasped in his father’s and his face a mask of dried blood. There were flies on them. They’d been there for so long by the time she found them that time had moved on, and nature had moved in.

‘You have children?’ she asked.

Holt stared from the window, silent. It was as if she’d never asked the question at all. Maybe he’d had children and they were gone, but she could not ask him that. She knew how that would burn.

‘I’m ready to learn from you,’ she said. ‘Everything you know. All of it. And I’ll pay you, somehow, one day.’

Holt turned to her again and his face creased into a smile. He had a beautiful smile. ‘I have almost three million dollars in a bank account in the Seychelles.’

She raised her eyebrows.

Holt shrugged gently. ‘What’s a man like me to do with beaches and blue seas?’

‘How long will it take?’ Rose asked.