Hostage Read Free Page B

of their engines rising and falling on the hissing wind, as if he was trying to tune a crackly radio station on a dial.
    Then the pitch rose. Its volume grew. Finally, whoever these riders were, they were closing in.
    A burst of heat – of raw energy – ripped through Danny. He forgot his frozen, naked skin.
    Danger.
    Anger.
    Dread.
    The hunger to survive.
    All these feelings smashed into each other inside Danny, like forks of lightning in a storm. They made him feel what he craved the most. They made him feel alive …
    He felt as if he’d just been tipped from a warm bed into an ice-cold plunge pool. Or like a junkie who’d just got his fix from a syringe of heroin which was now racing like molten lava through his veins. Danny’s senses sang, as if his whole body was a tuning fork that had just been struck.
    He overflowed with purpose and intent.
    But most of all, Danny felt like a gambler. He felt like a gambler whose eyes were locked onto the red and black spin of a roulette wheel, as it finally began to slow, and a silver ball clattered across the grooves of the wheel towards where it would finally rest.
    Danny felt like a gambler, because deep down he knew that this was exactly what he was each time he took on a job like this. He was a gambler taking a calculated risk with his own life.
    He saw the riders now, emerging from the gloom. He grew even more tense as he watched them racing towards him. Two motorbikes. Two slanting silhouettes. Their headlights were switched off. That was why he hadn’t been able to see them until now.
    They crested the nearest hillside and raced down towards where Danny waited. They rounded the cemetery buildings and bounced down onto the parking lot. They rushed towards Danny like missiles homing in on a target.
    Neither bike slowed. In fact, they seemed to be accelerating. A part of Danny wanted to spin away from them and run. But another, trained, part of his mind made him stand his ground. There was no point in running. He’d not get five yards before they chased him down and knocked him to the ground, or ran right over him.
    He didn’t move an inch. He braced himself. He prayed that his gamble was right and that these people wouldn’t just mow him down anyway. He prayed that they still needed him alive.
    His gamble paid off. The two bikes skidded to a halt less than six feet away from him. His heart thundered against his chest, as if it was trying to punch clean through the cage of his ribs.
    Slow your breathing, Danny commanded himself. Slow your breathing and your adrenaline will slow too … Save all the energy you can, because chances are this isn’t nearly over with …
    There was just enough light left for Danny to make out the details of the two motorbikes. A Kawasaki and a Suzuki. They looked like they’d both been recently stolen. Their licence plates had been snapped off.
    Their riders kept on revving their engines. They were deliberately trying to frighten Danny, but they had no idea how much worse he’d seen than this.
    Again he pictured his dead wife and son. He pictured the face of the man who had killed them. Danny’s fists tightened so hard that he felt his fingers compacting as if they might crack. He threw the image of the Paper Stone Scissors Killer back deep down inside his mind.
    Focus on now, he told himself. Only here … Only now … Focus on this, or you might wind up dead … And who will save Mary Watts then?
    The bikes edged towards him like a pair of snarling wolves. But still Danny stood his ground.
    If they’d wanted him dead or injured, they would have already crushed him. But they hadn’t done that, had they? And they wouldn’t do now.
    Danny focussed on the riders. There might have been only two bikes, but there were three people riding them. Two on the Suzuki on the right. One on the Kawasaki. All were wearing black balaclavas. All of them also had night-vision goggles