Hot Zone (Major Crimes Unit Book 2) Read online

  “Paper pictures,” she muttered. “Bits of string.”

  The confused guard threw his cigar down on the floor and stood on it, then just looked at Sarah. His dark complexion went almost white as he tried to comprehend what he was looking at.

  Sarah made it even more confusing for him. She swung her one arm around like a jellyfish and hopped towards him. The other arm, with the shiv, she kept tucked behind her back. “The doctor in the house isn’t dead,” she muttered. “The teeth were not his.”

  “The hell is wrong with you? W-where’s Rat?”

  Sarah did a quick squat thrust then threw herself into the wall, bashing her forehead and kicking out like a wingless fly. “Boom goes the dynamite.”

  The guard seemed to realise that he had to do something. She wasn’t just an insane woman, she was a prisoner on the loose. He stepped towards her and, as soon as he did, Sarah spun around and slashed his cheek with the shiv. As he recoiled, she booted him in the nuts and followed it up with a knee to the face as he doubled over. He was out cold.

  Two down, Sarah told herself. How many more?

  She raced down the corridor, passing through the only door at the end and hoping it led to salvation. When she opened it and passed through into what appeared to be a large warehouse, she was faced by a gang of glaring men. They seemed undeterred by the blood on her face and immediately sprinted towards her.

  Sarah bolted left, heading for the nearest side of the warehouse that had windows. Maybe she could throw herself clear through the glass and get to safety.

  The men chased after her, three of them in total.

  There was a bench up ahead, piled high with what looked like engine parts. Sarah slipped past it, waving her arms and shoving a bunch of metal debris into the path of her pursuers. She heard a man curse as he no doubt stumbled over one of the obstacles, but all three men continued to chase her. As she got closer to the windows, she saw that she wouldn’t be able to throw herself through the glass or scream for help. The frames started a good four-feet above the ground and did not lead outside; they merely separated one warehouse floor from the next.

  There was nowhere to run.

  Sarah spun around, swinging the bloody shiv.

  “Put the blade down,” one of the men growled at her, an older gentleman who had brought her food on occasion when Rat was busy, “and we’ll be gentle.”

  “Or don’t,” said a younger man with bad skin. “And we’ll make you fucking eat it.”

  Sarah wasn’t going back to her room. She was done being a prisoner. They would have to beat her to death before she allowed them to recapture her. Perhaps four months in captivity should have tamed her like a canary, but it had only made her desperate like a trapped dog, and now she felt rabid.

  “You can take me down,” she said in a snarl, “but the first one to try loses an eye. Or a testicle. That’s if you pussies have any.”

  A man she had not seen before, possessing a rough beard and scraggly grey ponytail, leapt for her then. She sent him back with a slice in his forehead the width of a pencil.

  “Damn it!”

  “Who’s next?” Sarah waved the shiv menacingly.

  Nobody else came at her.

  She glanced around, trying to find an exit, but there were a dozen doors leading off from the warehouse and no telling where any of them led. Then she saw it. A fire exit. It seemed to sparkle at her like a beacon. If she could only reach it, if she could make it outside…

  Sarah broke into a sprint, taking advantage of the men’s reluctance to grab her and their surprise at her sudden bolt. They gave chase, but Sarah had bought herself enough of a head start to stay ahead of them. She raced across the warehouse toward the fire door, panting and moaning in excitement. The closer she got, the more certain she was that she was going to make it. She was going to escape. The men at her back were bellowing at her to stop, making her even more confident that she was going to get away. The rabbit was escaping the yapping dogs.

  Sarah threw herself against the release bar of the fire exit and exited out into the glorious afternoon sunshine. She had hoped to find a street full of people, but instead found herself standing in a paved courtyard inhabited by a pair of black vans and a car she was sure she recognised. The sleek red Jaguar e-type caught her attention long enough to stop her in her tracks. It was a relic of her past.

  From the corner of her vision Sarah saw someone step out behind her. When she turned around to face the stranger, something struck her hard beneath the chin. Her legs folded, vision tilted, and when she finally managed to see straight again, she was lying on the ground looking up at a face she knew well. A face she both loved and hated.

  The stern green eyes glared down at her disapprovingly while Sarah shook her head in disbelief.

  Only one word escaped her lips. “Daddy?”

  6

  “Daddy!” Sarah wanted to say other words but she couldn’t. “Daddy…”

  Her father looked down at her with an expression of irritation that had defined her childhood. “Most men manage to break out within three months,” he said, “but then…you’re not a man, are you?”

  Sarah wanted to stand, but she couldn’t move from her spot on the floor. “W-what?”

  Her father offered his hand and yanked her up to her feet. “I’ll explain everything, but get yourself cleaned up first. You look like a savage. I heard your scars were bad, but I had no idea they were so unsightly, especially with all that blood on your face. Come on, stop dawdling.”

  Sarah followed her father and allowed herself to be ushered back inside the warehouse, the place she had just fought so desperately to escape. Suddenly the torment of her four-month incarceration was forgotten and all that remained were burning questions. Had her father been keeping her locked up? Why?

  She was directed to a toilet block and told to clean herself up and get the blood off her face. She did as she was told, feeling like a little girl, and came back out again as quickly as she could.

  “I don’t understand,” she said as her father walked her to their next destination. The group of men who had chased her now strolled casually behind her. The grey haired man with the thick gouge across his forehead was chatting away merrily to one of his colleagues even as his face dripped blood. These were hard men, the type of men her father was used to working with. Major Stone was renowned throughout the British military as one of the SAS’s most distinguished of distinguished men. He had seen action in every British conflict from the Iranian embassy siege right through to the most recent turmoil in Syria. He had spent a good portion of his life overseas or, at the very least, encamped somewhere ready to go overseas. Truth be told, Sarah barely knew the man.

  A man staggered into the warehouse on the opposite side, getting everyone’s attention. It was Rat, battered and bloody. He clutched the wound on his shoulder and walked in a stoop like Quasimodo. “Bitch stabbed me,” he shouted, slumping over one of the floor’s many tables.

  Nobody seemed to care.

  “Then perhaps you should have paid better attention,” said Sarah’s father flatly.

  Rat said nothing else. He remained slumped in pain until his colleagues took him under the arms and led him away. That left Sarah alone with her father as they continued walking through the oily warehouse.

  “Who are all these men,” she asked him. “And what is this place?”

  “They are my men, and this place is just an old assembly plant. I think they used to make elevator parts. What some men are willing to call a living baffles me.”

  “Don’t you care that I stabbed one of your men?”

  “Of course I care. Rat should’ve done better than to let you get the jump on him. I’ll deal with him later.”

  “I meant, don’t you care that he’s injured?”

  “He’ll live, but I’m sure you intended that.”

  She nodded. “I don’t kill a man unless I know he deserves it.”

  “Those feminine sensibilities will
get you nowhere,” he grunted. “The man was keeping you prisoner. He didn’t deserve your mercy.”

  “He wasn’t keeping me prisoner, you were. Why?”

  “I’ll get to that,” he motioned towards an open office door and led her inside the dim, windowless room. She took a seat on one side of a gnarled wooden desk while her father sat on the other. One of his men appeared and handed him a glass of brandy before disappearing quickly. Sarah’s father had not changed a bit in the years since she’d last seen him.

  “Why am I here?” she demanded, regaining a slither of her courage now that she knew who was responsible for her capture. Despite her fear of her father, she no longer felt in danger. What harm could a man mean to his own daughter?

  “Because you inserted yourself into things which did not concern you.”

  “What are you talking about? Why have you been keeping me prisoner? Why didn’t you come see me yourself, instead of hiding behind Rat?”

  “Because I needed to see how you operate under stress. I must say I am a little disappointed it took you so long to escape. Still, you are a woman, I suppose.”

  The comment from anybody else would have summoned Sarah’s anger, but from her father it was crippling. “I thought I was going to die,” she said meekly. “Is that what you wanted, me to be scared for my life? You’re supposed to be my father.”

  “I am your father, and you are my daughter. I needed to see if you were capable of being anything more.”

  Sarah leant forward and placed her clenched fist on the table between them. She tried to maintain eye contact with her father but failed. She was twelve-years old again, pleading with him not to vanish for another year, but as much as she wanted to hate him right now, she did not want to make him mad, or make him disappear on her.

  “I want answers,” she said.

  “Hesbani. There’s your answer.”

  Sarah flopped back in her chair, both eyebrows raising of their own accord. “Hesbani? What about Hesbani?”

  “You killed him.”

  Sarah said nothing. She wasn’t sure what question to ask or what her father was getting at.

  Her father accepted the silence as permission to continue. “Hesbani was my target. I had been tasked with bringing him home.”

  Sarah bolted forwards again. “You were helping a terrorist?”

  “No, you stupid girl. I was helping the Pakistani government apprehend him. They wanted Hesbani for acts of terror he’d committed within their borders in protest against their cooperation with the British and American government. I had a man already embedded in Hesbani’s operation, a man you knew…”

  Sarah’s eyes stretched wide as she realised. “Hamish?”

  Her father nodded gravely. “A good man. Risked his life getting close to Hesbani. Pity you took him out.”

  “Only after her tried to take out me!”

  Her father laughed, a rare gesture. “I admit he had issues, many of them aimed at you, but I wasn’t very much interested at the time. Never did I think the two of you would cross paths. Regardless, Hamish is gone and so is Hesbani, along with my men’s paycheque. Keeping you captive gave them some small restitution, but not enough by far.”

  Sarah shook her head in disbelief. “This was revenge?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Sarah. My men are not a bunch of simpering schoolgirls. We do not concern ourselves with things as petty as revenge. You have been held captive as a test. I wanted to see if you could escape. I was always against you joining the army, but you did it anyway and became a captain. I had resigned myself to almost accepting your bad decisions, especially when I heard you were unexpectedly married, but then the poor chap died, didn’t he?”

  Sarah thought about Thomas and almost let out a sob. She had gotten so good at not thinking about him that having him brought up unexpectedly got through her barriers and pricked at her heart.

  “Then,” her father went on, “you had your own accident and all but disappeared of the face of the earth. Licking your wounds, I assumed, but then, lo and behold, you pop up on the ten-o-clock news, hero of the hour. You even managed to make that ridiculous outfit, MCU, look respectable. Your victory saved them from the brink, you know? If you’d stayed on with them, I probably would’ve left you alone.”

  Sarah was still at a loss. Every couple of seconds she would remind herself that she was sitting in front of her father, the esteemed Major Stone, and would find it utterly surreal. Then she would remember that he had kidnapped her and held her hostage for four months and would get extremely angry. “Why didn’t you leave me alone? You’ve been pretty good at that for most of my life.”

  Her father rolled his eyes. “Save the melodramatics. Some men are meant for more than raising ungrateful children into ungrateful adults. You have no idea the freedoms you have because of men like me. I have done more for you away then I ever would have at home. You had your mother, so don’t act hard done by.”

  “Mum died when I was seventeen.”

  “Your childhood was already over, so why would you have needed her any longer? Anyway, I do not have you here to discuss family. You are here because you escaped, finally. As much as you interfering with Hesbani caused me great irritation, I was also impressed. It appears you do have a certain aptitude to our line of work, and to end up working within clandestine services, like your father, speaks of a certain family predilection, don’t you agree? I wanted to see for myself how much of a man you are. You certainly wear your scars well. If you cut your hair short, I wouldn’t even know you lacked a cock.”

  Sarah shifted in her seat. The thought of being anything like her father was akin to having bugs crawl beneath her skin. “Your men aren’t SAS, are they?” she said. “They look more like mercenaries.”

  “And mercenaries is what they are. I am no longer in the employ of the British Army. I was tired of murdering civilians and bombing weddings based on the merest whiff of semi-accurate Intel. Do you know how many woman and children I have killed at the bequest of so-called Right Honourable gentlemen? One Prime Minister after another, sending hired thugs to murder and devastate their enemies, and for what? This woman we have in charge, Breslow, is worst of all. Her foreign war policy is going to double the amount of young men endangering their lives for worthless causes. All she cares about is getting her fingers in as many pies as she can. Thought people would have learned their lesson about putting women in charge with Thatcher. One thing I can assure you, sweet daughter of mine, is that no war I have ever fought in was waged for any other reason than to take what the other man has. I am a murderer, Sarah, I cannot change that, but I can change the reasons why. My days of taking orders from Westminster have stopped, and if I get my wish, I’ll see the place crumble with Breslow buried beneath the rubble.”

  “So now you kill for money?” said Sarah, blinking. “Is that what you call honour?”

  “It is more honourable to kill for money than the false flag of liberation. The British Empire hasn’t liberated a single country in its entire existence — in fact it has only ever achieved the opposite. Now the Empire has crumbled and the Star Spangled Banner has replaced it with intentions even less noble and greedier. I am tired of the hypocrisy, Sarah. I fight for reasons of my own choosing now. As do my men.”

  “You didn’t seem too concerned about Rat,” she said. “You speak a good game, but you don’t seem any more caring than you ever have.”

  “Rat is merely wounded. I do not weep for wounds. I am no woman.”

  “I don’t know what you are, father. Tell you the truth, I’m tired of trying to figure it out. Am I allowed to leave here, or are you going to lock me back up?”

  “You are free to leave,” he said and she almost wept with joy. She kept her emotions contained, though, and gave only an imperceptible nod.

  “Then I am going home.” She got up out of her seat.

  “You have no home, Sarah,” Her father almost shouted it at her. “The Army did to you what it does to every sol
dier. It used you up and left you to die under the weight of your own nightmares. It sent you to war against people guilty of no crimes other than daring to have self-interest. Britain sends men like us to kill hundreds, in order to punish a scant few who actually deserve it. You, Sarah, are nothing more than a worn-down cog in a machine designed to trample poorer nations into the mud while blaming them for trying to claw their way out of it. Don’t you want to do things on your own terms? Don’t you ever wish you could put your skills, your experience, to a truly good cause?”

  Sarah sat back down. “What are you talking about?”

  “I am talking about recruiting you. A woman can be useful in certain situations and, as far as women go, you seem to be among the best.”

  “Better than most men,” she grunted.

  “Perhaps. I’m offering you a place on my team, Sarah. We fight for causes we believe in. We pay ourselves and fund our own operations. We do not take orders, we take jobs. If you are happy with your old life, daughter, then leave. Go back to whatever life you think you can have with that grotesque face of yours. Or join me and do what you’re good at.”

  “And what is that?” she asked curiously.

  “Killing bad guys.”

  7

  Howard pulled the Range Rover up in a skid, leaving it in a disabled bay right outside the main doors of the hospital. His ‘Official’ plates would take care of any complainers.

  “Where will we find Krenshaw?” he asked Dr Hart in the seat beside him.

  “He oversees a training scheme for interns wanting to specialise in childhood diseases. His experience with the African orphanages makes him a key expert in the field. Many doctors have studied under him.”

  “Then I hope he is innocent,” said Howard. “He sounds like a saint.”