by James Phelan
Pip Durant sat at the window of an apartment block in Broome Street, New York. He adjusted the scope on his Steyr SSG 69, which fitted with the silencer, was accurate to sub-MOA at a range of up to 600 meters.
He watched the two men sitting outside the cafe. The crosshairs of the Kahle’s scope magnified six times, trained on Jed Walker’s heart. He switched to Bill McCorkell. He could kill them both within a second, as long as it took him to re-engage the compact manual bolt mechanism and shift targets.
“Walker, you’re not the only dead man still alive,” he said quietly to himself.
•
“Where’s Somerville?” Walker asked.
McCorkell smiled. “She’s around.”
“Clara?”
“Deported back to Italy. We let her superiors know she was selling out. Facing espionage and treason charges.”
Walker squinted at the sun’s reflection off a passing cab.
McCorkell said, “You’re going to need new ID to get out of the country.”
“Do you think I can’t get that? Shit, I’ll take you down to Canal Street, get you a bazooka for fifty bucks.”
“It’d probably be a Chinese copy that would blow your head clean off just aiming the thing.”
Walker smiled.
“You’ll need more than just ID,” McCorkell said. He placed a parcel on the table, slid it over to Walker. “For you, from the Vice President’s office. It’s the least he could do.”
Walker looked inside the envelope: a new passport, made out in his own name, social-security card, money in accounts, cash—the works.
“A clean slate. A thank-you. Nothing more. No commitment. Between you and him.”
“The least he could do,” Walker echoed.
Silence fell again between the two men. Walker looked left and right along the street. Just another hot June day; maybe a summer storm tonight.
“What are you going to do now?” Walker asked.
“I’ve got a new cell to take down,” McCorkell replied, “and I’ve got less than a month to do it. I’m going to need to set up a proper team. Of course if I could just draft the MVP . . .”
“Sounds great. Living the dream.”
“Yeah, well, like you I can’t find it in myself to walk away.”
“What was on Bellamy’s head chip?”
“Not much. But enough to start with. We have a date. A location.”
“You knew about my father being alive?” Walker said. “His involvement?”
McCorkell looked uncomfortable. “No. But we do now. The auto wreck, the closed casket—we exhumed the grave yesterday. It certainly wasn’t your father’s.”
“They planted DNA in the medical exam,” Walker said. “He planted it . . .”
McCorkell nodded.
“Where is he?”
“We don’t know.”
“He’s running Zodiac?”
“I’m working to find out.”
“And they think by doing these twelve attacks they’re strengthening America?”
McCorkell nodded, said, “I’m sorry. I’m as shocked as you. But I won’t rest until this is sorted.”
Walker looked around again. Something was making him uneasy. Enough done here today. Time to go. Got to keep moving. He stood, and pocketed his new ID.
“Where will you end up?” McCorkell asked.
“I’ll be around,” Walker said. He took a step away—
“Jed?”
He turned at the sound of the familiar voice.
Eve. She stood next to a patched-up Andrew Hutchinson, his arm in a sling.
Walker said, “Eve . . .”
A shot rang out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A new series character took a lot of work to create, and to all those who’ve had a hand in discussing this project, I thank you.
Firstly, thanks to my family and friends for putting up with my absence. Guess you’re used to it by now.
Special thanks are due to those who have been invaluable and integral to this project seeing the light of day. I had unwavering support from my three families: Phelan, Wallace and Beasley.
Thanks to my pro readers Tony Wallace, Jesse Beasley and Emily McDonald. Thanks also to Mal, Michelle, Tony and Chaz for your early feedback.
My agents, particularly Pippa Masson, Laura Dunn, Leslie Conliffe and Josh Getzer, for their enthusiasm and belief in my work.
My editorial team at Hachette, Vanessa Radnidge, Kate Stevens and Claire de Medici have been outstanding and understanding in dealing with an author bringing a new baby into the world.
My thanks to my writer friends, especially Lee Child. While writing this book, two good thriller writers died: Vince Flynn and Tom Clancy. I owe those guys a lot.
Nicole Wallace, as always, has been my muse and support. Thanks babe. x
Read on for the start of
THE HUNTED
The next Jed Walker thriller
PROLOGUE
The gunshot sounded. Then another.
Walker looked up. Alert, not alarmed.
Nine-millimeter. Double-tap. Fired from an elevated position. A couple of blocks east, atop one of the multi-story buildings. Fired downward and at close range to the target, minimizing the rapport.
No one in the New York street seemed to notice. Just another sharp sound in a big city; a car backfiring or machinery clanging or something big and heavy hitting the deck.
But Walker knew. And the man seated in front of him knew. And the guy standing two meters away beside Walker’s ex-wife knew.
“Somerville,” Bill McCorkell said from across the table. He shifted in his seat and added, “Right on time, I’d say.”
Walker looked up at the rooftop and saw Somerville, five stories up, a foot on the parapet, holstering her FBI-issued side-arm. He waved. She waved back.
Walker said, “She wasn’t shooting at birds, I take it.”
“Tying up a loose end,” McCorkell replied.
“Durant?”
McCorkell nodded.
Walker looked back up to the elevated position. She’d tracked Durant up there; it was a no-brainer what he’d been up to. Walker pictured the ex-CIA man’s body sprawled next to a sniper’s rifle. Walker wondered who would have been lined up in the scope first—him or McCorkell. On the street, a team of heavily armed NYPD uniformed officers appeared on foot from around a corner and entered the building. She’d planned it well. A good job all round.
“Thank Somerville for me,” Walker said, his eyes returning to McCorkell.
“You can thank her yourself,” the older man countered. He leaned forward on the table, “This is the beginning of things, Walker, not the end.”
Walker paused for just a moment. “This changes nothing.”
McCorkell sat there, silent, waiting.
“I’m not working for you,” Walker said. “Just tell Somerville she and I are even.”
“You two will never be even.”
Walker didn’t answer; instead he turned and walked the four paces to where the FBI man Andrew Hutchinson stood with Walker’s former wife, Eve.
Separated. Then widowed. Grieving for more than a year, never knowing what really happened to her estranged husband who’d been listed dead by the CIA and State Department.
Now this.
The two of them, standing there, facing each other on the Manhattan street.
She was smaller than he remembered. A little older. Sadder. Beautiful.
Hutchinson stepped around Walker to join McCorkell at the cafe table. Walker could hear them talking, animatedly, but he blocked it out.
Eve.
Looking into Eve’s eyes, he felt that it could have been yesterday he’d last seen her. A bunch of yesterdays ran through his mind. Most of them were firsts. Their first meeting, first kiss, first time they’d slept together, first time they’d fought. The last time they’d fought.
Standing before her, Walker was ready for war. For tears and fists. Anger. But if all t
hat was there, it was coming later.
For now, Eve hugged him. Tight. Silent.
He’d always loved that about her: no matter what happened, she knew what to say, and what not to say. They stood together, embracing, until McCorkell tapped Walker on the shoulder.
“We’ve just had word,” McCorkell said, moving into Walker’s line of sight over the top of Eve’s head. “We know where he is.”
From the tone, the poise, Walker knew what McCorkell meant before he elaborated.
“We’ve found your father.”
•
“He’s in the UK,” Special Agent Hutchinson said to his boss, Bill McCorkell. “That’s David Walker, right there.”
Walker looked over the photographs. The four of them—Walker, McCorkell, Hutchinson and Special Agent Fiona Somerville—sat in an office of the FBI’s New York Field Office. Eve sat at a desk outside the glass-walled office, waiting. The Lower Manhattan office building was a shared federal government space, and staffers milled about, looking busy.
Fair enough, thought Walker. They’d almost lost a VP on their turf just a few days back. The same day that Walker had heard from his father.
“Near Hereford,” Hutchinson said, showing a map on his iPad. “West Midlands, near the Welsh border.”
“I know the place,” Walker said. He looked at the long-lens shot of the man who had raised him. The man he hardly knew. “I spoke at the SAS once. My father did too, several times.”
“So he had friends there,” Somerville said.
“Probably. None I recall, no names,” Walker said. He stared blankly, recalling the place. “Hell, as a teenager I went with him on one of his trips and we fished the Wye together. How’d we get these photos?”
“British intel, about two weeks back,” Hutchinson said. The FBI man used a pencil to itch at his bandaged arm. “They’re investigating someone he was seen with.”
“Why?”
“We’re not sure yet,” Hutchinson replied, as he brought up a satellite map on a large screen. “The call that your father made to you at the New York Stock Exchange? It came from a location not far from the barracks.” He zoomed in on a dot on a tiny road at the center of a cluster of small buildings. “It came from a landline phone in this tavern.”
“That call was made three days ago,” Walker said. “He won’t still be in the area. The trail’s long dead. He’ll be gone. He’s good at disappearing.”
“I’ve just run his image through TrapWire and Scotland Yard’s CCTV program,” Somerville said. “He’s come up four times over the past six months, all within fifty clicks of that tavern.”
Walker studied the images that Hutchinson had brought up on the screen. A couple were grainy and blurred, taken from ATM cameras. Another showed his father in the background of someone’s Facebook photo. The last was a grab from a CCTV in a shop—in this last one the subject was looking directly up at it, as though he knew he’d been caught out.
“That last one,” Walker said. “Where’s that?”
“A gas station, just on the outskirts of Hereford on that same road headed to our tavern, soon after he called you,” Somerville said, checking the surveillance notes. “Later that night, it was robbed; all on-site stored footage was taken but this had been backed up off-site to the security company.”
“Does all that sound like the actions of a guy leaving the area?” McCorkell said to Walker. “He’s still there.”
“Covering his tracks . . .” Walker said, seeing his father’s eyes for the first time in a long while. He looked over to Eve, silent, present, but not taking it in, as though the reappearance of yet another dead Walker was one revelation too many. “You think he’s been there for the last six months?”
“At least,” Hutchinson said.
“Seems he’s made it something of a home base,” Somerville said. “He could be running Zodiac from there.”
“We don’t know his involvement in that,” McCorkell said.
“Yeah, well he did have contacts there,” Walker said. “He had a hand in the psych training and debriefing of SAS guys, since at least the Falklands.”
“No one you remember?” Hutchinson asked, cradling his bandaged arm. “Anyone there particularly close to your father?”
“Nope,” Walker said, thinking back. “But he had a few friends there, I’m sure. He’d go there every few years. They’d be drinking buddies and the like. Not close.”
“Close enough to work with,” Somerville said. “Then, and now.”
Walker nodded.
“You got dates for those trips?” Somerville asked. “I can get British Ministry of Defense personnel records to match, go through them.”
“Maybe,” Walker said, nodding. “But this is the SAS we’re talking about—whether serving or former, they’re not going to lay out the red carpet for a group of outsiders to look into their people’s whereabouts.”
“Worth a shot,” McCorkell said.
“Why haven’t we heard about this sooner?” Walker said. “Why didn’t his presence, along with someone that MI5 are looking into, flag something months ago?”
“We’re still waiting on answers to that too,” Hutchinson said. “Brits are dragging their feet in co-operating—we don’t know who they’re surveilling, or why.”
“I’m working on answers to that,” McCorkell said, looking to Walker as he spoke.
“I just can’t imagine him being in a place like that,” Walker said, “a place people might recognize him, when he’s playing the dead man.”
“He’s hiding in plain sight,” Somerville said. “It worked for you for near-on a year.”
“Yeah, but I was trying to stop a terrorist attack,” Walker said, “not playing a part in it.”
“You really think he’s a part of this, don’t you?” McCorkell said, matter-of-fact.
Walker remained silent.
“At any rate,” Somerville said, filling the silence. “No one’s been looking for David Walker until now.”
“News travels fast, even over the pond,” Walker said. “They’d have known he was supposed to be dead.”
“So, he’s staying off the grid over there,” Hutchinson said. “Maybe only a local friend or two know of his resurrection.”
Walker shook his head. “It’s not like him. He’s too smart, and being over there seems too risky.”
“He’s there because there’s something he needs,” Hutchinson said. “Protection. Connections. Something.”
“Maybe he’s retired there,” McCorkell said, leaning back and sipping a steaming tea. “For the fishing.”
“Right,” Walker said, deadpan. “You think he faked his death, had a hand in a terrorist attack on US soil, knew of an internal CIA takeover and an attempt on the Vice-President’s life—all from a tavern in rural England?”
McCorkell shrugged.
“You’re a pro at this, right?” Walker chided.
McCorkell feigned indifference. Walker looked from him to Hutchinson, then Somerville. The three of them watched him. Waiting. For an answer. An answer they’d been waiting to hear for three days.
“Look, Walker, this, with your father. It’s a lead,” Somerville said. “The best lead we’ve got to break into the Zodiac terror network. And we’re going to check it out. With or without you.”
“So tell us,” Hutchinson said. “Are you in?”
Walker looked from the UN intelligence team to the larger office beyond the glass wall. Eve sat there. She was looking at him. Her eyes showed nothing.
Walker nodded. “I’m in.”
1
“Nine years ago,” Walker said, looking through the car’s windshield at the English town. “That’s when I spoke here, after my first tour of Afghanistan.”
“For the CIA?” Somerville asked.
“No, before that,” Walker said.
“When you were Air Force?” Somerville asked.
Walker nodded.
“I still don’t get how the Air Force has
boots-on-the-ground frontline guys,” she said. “Airplanes, airbases, the Pentagon, sure. But humping around in the mountains with SEALs and Delta?”
“Someone has to have the brains in those Special Forces teams,” Walker replied.
McCorkell and Hutchinson rode in the back of the hire car, a Land Rover Discovery. Bill McCorkell was not a field man. Never had been. Just past sixty, he’d spent a lifetime as an intelligence and international-affairs expert, rising to the post of National Security Advisor to presidents from both sides of politics. His current role was driving a specialist UN desk, from which he ran a small team of multinational investigators in the field and reported directly to the Secretary-General. The intelligence outfit was known simply as Room 360, named after its office number in the United Nations building in Vienna, and its members were sequestered from the world’s best intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
Walker watched the familiar streets slip by. On the flight here, plans had been made. He and Somerville would check out the tavern. McCorkell and Hutchinson would visit SAS headquarters, Hereford, to see if any old-timers had had contact with David Walker, the dead man.
Andrew Hutchinson was lead investigator and, like Somerville, was on loan to the UN from the FBI. Just a few days earlier, in the events leading up to the terrorist attack at the New York Stock Exchange, he’d been badly wounded. Walker glanced back at the guy. He had a lot to be thankful to him for—the lawman had saved Eve’s life, and because of this his face was a mask of green and purple bruising, and his arm was in a sling.
Walker would not forget that.
And he would not forget Eve, who was now in temporary witness protection courtesy of the FBI. In Maine; that’s all Walker knew.
The English town slipped by. The trees were losing the last of their leaves. The sky was one big cloud of gray.
Whatever happened here, there would be tomorrows with Eve. Maybe not like those yesterdays, but at the very least, there would be closure. Answers. Discussions. Decisions made. Progress. For more than a year he’d been thinking about it, about her, never finding the courage to make the first move, allowing her to believe he was dead, always justifying his actions as a form of protecting her while completing his mission.