And Then You're Dead

by Dan Latus

  ‘There are bunk beds upstairs,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘Better to stay together down here for now, though.’

  They took off their wet coats and hung them up to drip. Then they got Kyle into one sleeping bag, and Sam into another. By then, the water in the kettle was hot enough for John to make hot chocolate from sachets he had brought with him.

  ‘Mm!’ Sam said with contentment, despite her chattering teeth. ‘Hot chocolate! My favourite.’

  ‘I like it, too, Daddy!’ said a revitalized Kyle.

  ‘Of course you do,’ John said with a big grin. ‘That’s why I brought it.’

  He took mugs from the collection hanging on hooks near the cooker and poured drinks for them all. Then he pulled a chair across to where they had laid out the sleeping bags.

  ‘You and Kyle can get some sleep, Sam, but first tell me briefly what happened.’

  He listened intently as Sam retraced their steps, and the course of their day. There wasn’t a lot to tell, in truth, but it wasn’t hard to see why she had grabbed Kyle from school and fled. Nowhere had seemed safe.

  ‘Yugov, eh?’ he said afterwards, shaking his head. He didn’t ask her if she was sure.

  There was no need.

  ‘I panicked, John. All I knew was that we had to get away. I daren’t go back home.’

  He nodded. ‘That wasn’t panic. It was common sense. You did the right thing. Did you head for Gimmer Hall?’

  ‘Yes. I believed you would find us there.’

  He smiled ruefully. ‘I guessed as much, and was very disappointed not to find you there.’

  ‘We couldn’t go any further,’ she said sadly. ‘Kyle was so cold and tired. I wasn’t much better myself, and I couldn’t carry him.’

  He nodded. He didn’t want her to recall all that. It was too recent, and too raw an experience.

  ‘What about you?’ Sam asked.

  ‘You weren’t home when I got back. Then I received a phone call.’ He shrugged and added, ‘I didn’t know then exactly who it was, but I had a good idea. They just said they were here, they had come.’

  ‘For the money?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but they didn’t say. Why now, though, after all this time? And how did they find us?’

  ‘They have ways,’ Sam said with a sigh.

  ‘Not very efficient ways. We’ve been here a long time. If I can talk to them, I’ll give them the money gladly. It’s no use to us anyway.’

  ‘I believe they are not here for that reason,’ she said.

  ‘Not for the money?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then why have they come?’

  ‘For me,’ she said bleakly. ‘They want me.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Riley soon became frustrated. He couldn’t live with the pace these guys were setting. I’m too old for this, he decided. They’re going to fucking kill me!

  By then, he had climbed the hillside and reached the edge of the moor but there was no-one in sight or earshot any more. They’d all vanished into the sea of darkness that blanketed the moor.

  He couldn’t understand how the hell they’d managed it. Tait knew the country hereabouts, but the guys going after him – Yugov’s people – certainly didn’t. Still, there it was. They were gone, the whole damned lot of them.

  He paused for a breather, and a bit of reflection. His money was on Tait staying ahead of them, at least for a while. He was on home ground. Also, he had a lot of incentive. In the long run, though, it would be a different matter. He wasn’t so sure about the eventual outcome.

  But why had Tait suddenly upped and run? Was it just to get away from the people coming for him? Was it to collect the Olsson money before they got to it? Or was it for some other reason?

  And what had happened to Tait’s wife and kid? He hadn’t seen them all day, and that was nagging away at him. If they’d been abducted, where were they? And what was Tait doing? Was he abandoning them to save his own skin?

  Then there was Comrade Yugov’s friends. What the hell were they doing in this Godforsaken little place in the back of nowhere? If Yugov had joined the dotted lines and connected everything to Tait, why not until now? Why had it taken him ten years?

  Why, also, had all this happened at the same time as Ted Pearson had reactivated him? Hard to believe that was just a coincidence. Surely not?

  Besides, how had Yugov known where to find Tait? The same way as Ted Pearson had? Had he independently followed the same evidence trail? Or had he been tipped off? Had Washington sprung yet another leak?

  So many questions. He shook his head. It was beyond him.

  Dropping down from the skyline, to shelter from the driving rain, he rested a few moments while he considered what to do next. Part of him felt like just walking away, and letting Yugov’s people get on with it. That didn’t seem such a bad idea. No need for him to be there for the kill.

  Admittedly, he was here to see that Tait was taken down, but it wouldn’t matter to him, or to Ted Pearson probably, if someone else pulled the trigger. It would just save him a lot of hard work on this bitch of a night.

  On the other hand, he mused, it would also leave the circumstances of Jack Olsson’s death a mystery still. He really would like to know more about what had happened back then. And so would Ted, he guessed.

  The appearance of Yugov’s henchman, Kuznetsov, and his buddies was something else that needed explaining. He would like to know about that, too. And he wouldn’t be the only one. Yugov was a person of perpetual interest to all the intelligence agencies back in DC.

  So, all things considered, he’d better stay a while, and try to find answers to some of those questions.

  By then, he had given up on the hot chase. Instead, he came down the hill and headed back to his car, which was parked out of the way at the end of the Taits’ road. Then he got his head down for a couple of hours.

  He didn’t want to spend time returning to the hotel. At first light he wanted to be up on that darned moor, to see what he could find. It might well be a lifeless body, but you never could tell. Tait might prove to be smarter than he looked. He would need to be good, though, to escape from Yugov’s men. They were tough, resourceful people. He knew that from past experience.

  He shook his head and closed his eyes. This situation was like Churchill’s old description of Russia: an enigma wrapped up in a riddle.

  Just after six he woke up. He spent a few minutes sipping from a flask of coffee while he ate a ham sandwich, both of which he had with great foresight stored in the car. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew, as an old field hand, that you needed to take sustenance on board when you could.

  By the time he was done, the blackness all around was starting to fade a little. If he started off now, there should be enough grey light by seven to see his way across the moor. Better make a start.

  He followed the broad track back up the hillside easily enough in the near dark. On top, he rested a few minutes and watched a little more light seep in from the east. Already he knew there were plenty of narrow paths, sheep trails mostly, across the moor, but he waited until he could see footprints in the mud before he set off after Tait and his trackers.

  There was plenty to follow. Footprints from a few hours earlier. They had all been in a hurry. Nobody had bothered trying to conceal their tracks. He picked them up easily and followed them through the wet heather and the swampy bits in between, where rain water had puddled and failed to drain.

  Although the light was perceptibly increasing, visibility was not great. The heavy rain had stopped, but cloud hung low on the moor and there were patches of hill fog and sudden flurries of drizzle to dampen things down and impede progress.

  He couldn’t see very far ahead but that didn’t matter, so long as he didn’t run into anyone with hostile intent. All he really needed right now was just a bit more light, so he could follow the new tracks more easily.

  Soon, though, the tracks became confusing. They
changed direction frequently, and spread out and closed back in again. He puzzled over them initially. Three or four guys had come this way. One of them was Tait himself. So the others were trying to keep up with him. How the hell had they done that in the dark and the heavy rain?

  Then he nodded. He’d got it. The only way was if they were using night-vision equipment. Some state-of-the-art gear.

  Even so, they had struggled at times. The evidence was there on the ground. Tait had kept changing course, almost at random, and when he did that the guys following him separated, to make sure they didn’t miss him. Once one of them had him back in sight, they closed up again.

  Tait didn’t have gear like that. Riley nodded again, this time with grudging approval and respect. The man had set a cracking pace and used his wits to the full. To be able to keep ahead of men who had to be military trained, and military fit, said quite a lot about him. In fact, the whole damned lot of them were like Special Forces people, Tait included. He wondered just how long the fox had been able to stay ahead of the hounds.

  Things changed when the chase came to a rocky escarpment. With the eye of an expert hunter, Riley interpreted the marks on the ground and saw what had happened. Tait had been struggling to get clean away and had brought them to this place deliberately, figuring he would have a better chance here than on the open moor.

  If he could only get ahead by a few minutes, he would have thought, they would lose sight of him despite their fancy gear. Then he could take off in a straight line and get the hell away. Was that what had happened?

  It looked like it. Tait had made home advantage count. Riley found the spot where one man had slithered down a gully and out across a sandy stretch at the bottom. Other tracks showed that his followers had missed the gully and had hunted along the crest of the ridge, looking for a way down that wasn’t a suicidal leap into the dark. They had found it at the end of the escarpment. But by then it had been too late. Tait had won the valuable time and distance he needed, and had been able to get clear.

  Riley stood on a slab of bare sandstone and stared out into the growing dawn light. So Tait had done it, he thought with grudging respect. From a standing start, he had bested the four hard men who had come for him and got clean away. For now. But could he keep it up?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  John decided to let Sam sleep until she woke up herself. Kyle, too. As for himself, he was certainly tired, exhausted even – it had been a long time since he had last had a night like that – but the adrenaline was racing around his system still and would keep him awake as long as necessary.

  There was a lot on his mind. Relief, of course, that he had found Sam and Kyle, and found them no worse than wet, cold and tired. More pressing now, though, was how they were going to get out of here, and where they were going to go.

  Simply going home seemed out of the question. Somehow they had to get help, which probably meant they had to find a way of contacting the police and persuading them of the threat they were under. Explaining a lot of things, too. Such as Sam’s illegal status. And why anyone in the world – particularly Russian terrorists, or an organized-crime gang from eastern Europe– should be after them.

  Then what? What would happen after that? He had no idea. He just knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  Miss out the police, then? Contact someone else? But who? Some young kid on the MI5 or MI6 helpline?

  Basically, he had no idea who to contact. Besides, official involvement would probably spell the end of everything he and Sam had worked for here. But what else could they do?

  Anyway, even doing that was easier said than done. They had to get off the moor first. Yugov’s people were still out there, and their objectives wouldn’t have changed. They would want the money, all $10,000,000 worth of it – and probably him dead, as well. Probably Sam, too. Or Vlasta, as they would still call her.

  That brought him back to Sam’s belief that it was her they were after, not the money he had brought from Slovakia all those years ago. What on earth made her think that? Surely it couldn’t just be a matter of wiping out the last remnant of Viktor Sirko’s family? Did their relentlessness run that deep? After all this time?

  He shook his head. He had no idea. For now, anyway, he had more pressing matters to consider. Short-term matters. If things went badly, the short term would be all the time they had.

  He made his way around the building. It didn’t take him long. This had been a very simple farmhouse, like so many others in the hills. Originally, there had been one large room downstairs that served as a kitchen and living room, plus a back scullery and cupboards. Upstairs there had been two bedrooms. That had been it. No bathroom. No inside toilet. Not even running water. All that had been dealt with outdoors.

  Now, after the MOD conversion, the building had one big room downstairs still, and another, a dormitory, upstairs. A bathroom extension had been built, and there was piped water to that and to the kitchen. The house had a front and a back door, and windows on three sides. The one side that was windowless was close up against the steep hillside.

  He stood to one side of the main window in the downstairs room and frowned thoughtfully. They were in the process of drying off and warming up here, and they had needed somewhere to rest, but they would have to hope Yugov’s men didn’t find them. The house was indefensible. He couldn’t hope to hold off several attackers for long with his one hand gun.

  ‘John!’ Sam called softly.

  He turned with a smile to meet her.

  ‘John, you need some rest, too. You lie down for a while. I’ll keep watch.’

  He didn’t argue with her. He knew she was right. Exhaustion could lead to bad decisions and big mistakes. Even an hour’s sleep would be a big help.

  ‘What about Kyle?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s all right.’ Sam put a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn, and apologized for it. ‘I don’t think he will wake up soon.’

  He nodded and made for the sleeping bag she had left. They were lucky to have it, he thought as he surrendered to the fatigue that had been threatening to overcome him for some time.

  He was up again in a couple of hours. By then, it was late morning. The weather hadn’t changed. It looked like being another of those days when the world is liquid, and the difference between earth and sky is academic.

  ‘Anything happening?’ he asked, getting out of the sleeping bag.

  Sam shook her head.

  ‘Good. How’s Kyle?’

  ‘He’s fine, I think. Just very tired still. He woke up, but soon went back to sleep again.’

  That was good, he thought. The little feller needed some rest. He’d probably wake up with a raging appetite too.

  ‘John, what are we going to do?’

  ‘Stay here for a little while, I think. We need to talk. After that, we’ll decide our next step.’

  ‘Talk?’ she said with a sigh. ‘Is that all we can do?’

  ‘At the moment, yes. But we can eat first. I brought some packets of dried food. Let’s see what we can do with them.’

  He delved into his rucksack and hauled out various packages. All of them contained dried foods that could be reconstituted and made ready to eat by adding water and heating them up.

  ‘I didn’t know we had all this,’ Sam said with surprise.

  ‘It’s so long since I used any of it, I’d almost forgotten myself.’

  They heated up some stew and ate it avidly. Hunger improved the taste. Coffee followed.

  ‘What do you think is going on?’ John asked then. ‘Why has Yugov suddenly appeared on the scene?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Who knows? Information has become available, perhaps.’

  ‘After all this time?’ he asked sceptically. ‘Where from?’

  ‘People like him are always on the alert. They spend their lives scheming and planning, taking advantage of opportunities.’

  ‘Like Viktor?’

  ‘Yes, in a way.’ She sighed and added, ‘But my father did only
legal things.’

  ‘Of course,’ John said with an ironic smile. ‘Always.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not absolutely all of the time, but mostly. He was very different to Yugov, though. Yugov was always a vicious criminal, from the very beginning. Father didn’t mind competition in business, but Yugov … well, he was always different.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that. I saw some of that in action. Is he Russian?’

  ‘Well … Ukrainian, I think, but one of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the east. Father thought he was far enough away from Donetsk to be safe, but he wasn’t, was he?’

  John shook his head. That much was certainly true.

  ‘Sam, what did you mean when you said you thought they had come here for you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I don’t know what I meant. It was just talk, that’s all.’

  He frowned. He wasn’t satisfied, but he didn’t want to press her.

  ‘Yugov must be here for the money,’ he reasoned. ‘Somehow he found out I took it. Somehow. But how – ten years later?’

  ‘I don’t know, John. Does it really matter anyway? It’s more important to talk about what we should do now.’

  He was saved from answering by Kyle waking up with a little cry. Sam rushed to comfort him. When he was properly awake, she fed him some of the stew. He wrinkled his nose and grimaced, but he ate a little.

  He must be hungry, John thought with a wry smile. Then he returned to the question Sam had asked. The truth was that getting out of here without being intercepted was going to be a problem, one he had little idea how to solve.

  They would wait a little longer, he decided. Let their clothing dry some more. See if the weather changed. Do a bit more thinking, and try to work out a feasible plan.

  After eating, Kyle was better, less tired, more like himself. He began playing. He explored the old house. John went upstairs with him to look around the dormitory.

  ‘Soldiers stay here sometimes,’ he explained to his wide-eyed son. ‘They sleep here.’

  ‘Real ones?’

  ‘Real ones.’

  That aroused Kyle’s imagination. Further exploration and explanation necessarily took place. Father and son enjoyed a happy half hour.