Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,90

was him, but her eyes remained just as wide. His face and white t-shirt were covered with blood, and with the gun in his hand he must have looked like something out of a nightmare. He saw that she was unharmed though. He rushed forward, dropping the gun, then pulled the tape off Nikki's mouth, blood running down into his eyes and down the side of his face.

'Are you OK?' he asked quietly.

She nodded frantically, looking at his face.

'What happened to you?'

'I'm fine,' he said. 'It's just a cut. Looks worse than it is.’

'Where is he?' she asked, scared.

'He's dead. We need to get out of here. They'll be back any minute.'

As he undid her ankles, she shook her head. 'No. They won't.'

He paused and looked up at her.

'Why?'

'Because I told him where Director Cobb and his family are.'

Archer looked at her as her chin quivered. Tears brimmed in her eyes and fell down her cheeks.

'I'm sorry, Arch. He told me he'd kill you if I didn't tell him where they were. Then he put the knife to my stomach. Said he was going to cut out my ovaries and show them to me.'

'It's OK. He's gone. C'mon.'

He helped her up, wiping blood from his eyes.

'Wait,' she said, grabbing a towel from a hook beside her with her free hand. She pushed it to Archer's cut, and he held it there, trying to staunch the flow of blood. Gun in hand, he took the lead and moved out into the safe-house, keeping her behind him protectively.

The place had been abandoned.

The team were gone. He could see two televisions set up on a desk, silently playing the news, the one to the right showing a fresh report of the second gunfight at the ARU’s headquarters.

But he saw something else in the distance in the dark.

A series of red numbers.

Counting down.

And they were at 1:01.

1:00.

00:59.

'Oh shit,' Archer said. He turned to Nikki. ‘Stairs! Go!’

She ran forward towards the door to the stairwell. Archer went to follow her, but suddenly stopped. Nikki burst open the door to the stairwell, and turned back.

‘Arch, we have to go!’ she shouted.

‘Wait!’ he shouted.

In the silence, the room was still, the only activity the two muted televisions and the red numbers ticked down. But Archer heard something else, faint but unmistakeable.

Whimpering.

There was another door beside the bathroom, a store cupboard of some sort. He ran forward, wiping blood from his eyes and pulled it open.

A woman and a boy were in there, both bound and gagged with duct tape.

They stared at him in terror.

TWENTY SEVEN

The garden of the north London hospice covered about three acres, centred around the duck pond that provided some quiet space for the patients and their visitors. The outer fence was there both to provide privacy and a sense of security to the residents at the hospice, but also as a soft deterrent to anyone who was tempted to access the park from the outside.

The whereabouts of the English soldier had been a puzzle for the Panthers squad. They’d kept his dog tags from the night they kidnapped him, so they knew his name, but the fat CIA analyst who had pulled the information on the others hadn’t been able to come up with anything on the guy. In the car on the way here, Wulf told Flea that once they’d arrived in England, the group had scoured everything they could think of. Phonebooks, internet, everything they could access. But nothing. No one had any idea where he was. They had reluctantly come to the conclusion that, like the American soldier Webster, Fletcher had died in the years since. There was no way he’d still be a soldier, not without seven of his toes. However, when Worm had tailed the two cars leaving the police station earlier, they had led him here. And after he moved around into this garden, just before the police shut the curtains in one of the rooms, he had seen a familiar face lying in the bed.

Corporal Fletcher.

Flea scaled the outer fence of the hospice garden with ease and had crept forward, the dark shrubbery and trees providing perfect cover. He was lying prone on his front, the Dragunov Tigr hunting rifle set up towards the building, his shoulder in the stock. The Dragunov was a Russian weapon, semi-automatic and gas-operated, and despite being bought illegally on the street was in pretty good condition. The end of the barrel was fitted with a flash suppressor, which made it