T.J. Lebbon - The Hunt - ‘A great thriller...breathless all the way’ – LEE CHILD

‘My name’s Holt,’ he said.

‘Jane Doe.’

‘I thought I recognised you.’

She drank her double in one, then dribbled half back into her glass, keen to give the appearance of making it last. Stupid, really. He’d been watching her drink for half an hour, and she’d managed three in that time. He topped up his own glass from his bottle once more, and she paid close attention for the first time. And frowned. The fluid didn’t have that vaguely oil-like consistency of a spirit, not even vodka, and it was completely clear.

‘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.’

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.