Wanted Read Free Page A

old days whenever they’d gone into combat together?
    A half-smile softened Valentin’s face, as he remembered his old comrade. But then his smile died.
    Had Nikolai betrayed the vials’ locations before he’d died? Within minutes he would know.
    He checked the luminous dials of his watch. Enough time had passed, surely, for Lyonya and Gregori to be reporting back.
    ‘Status, Alpha Two,’ Valentin said.
    Nothing.
    ‘Status,’ he repeated.
    Still no reply.
    He felt a fresh surge of adrenalin, of nerves. But it might just be the weather, he reminded himself. Or the terrain. Either was more than capable of interfering with their comms . . .
    He checked his Bluetooth microbead’s placement, but it was fine. He peered up at the trees through the thickening snow. It was turning into a whiteout. Not even the satellite his comrades in Moscow had covertly accessed would be able to see him now.
    Meaning that he was truly alone.
    ‘Status,’ he tried one final time, knowing that if there was no reply, he would have to go in.
    A shadow moved across the slit of yellow light in the ground-floor window. Valentin waited for the curtain to be raised. For Lyonya or Gregori to look out. Nothing.
    He had no choice. He slipped through the delivery gate and moved swiftly, silently, to the back door. He listened, hoping to recognize one of his men’s voices. He heard nothing.
    Crouching, poised, weapon at the ready, he reached up for the door handle and gently turned it. A click. It wasn’t locked. Still no noise inside. No voices. His sixth sense was a siren wail inside his head.
    He edged the door open, listening, perplexed, as the drumming of the diesel engine grew louder not softer, watching as a widening slice of the pharmacy’s storeroom was revealed.
    A second door was already open inside, leading out into the alleyway where the dairy lorry had been parked. He realized that what he had thought was a shadow on the floor was a growing pool of blood.
    The red dot of a laser sight rose swiftly up his chest towards his head.
    He had been right to be afraid. And his comrades had been right to send him here. Because whoever had set up Colonel Nikolai Zykov for that assassination in London had also succeeded in extracting the codes for the locations of the smallpox vials from him before he had died.

CHAPTER 4
SCOTLAND
    Cleaning his wounds, God bandaged them tightly, careful not to step past the perimeter of the plastic sheeting, beyond which no one’s – neither his own nor his victims’ – blood must flow.
    He sealed his bloodied clothing and the scalpel into a Ziplock bag, pulled on a new plastic jacket and surgical mask, then a fresh pair of gloves.
    He set about tearing the photographs of Shanklin from each of the newspapers. He folded each image lengthways, then lengthways again, and ripped them into squares. He screwed each square into a tiny ball, then gathered them into the box he’d placed beside the rolled-up magazine, the surgical scissors and the jagged shard of rock.
    No longer fearing the EMPTINESS . . . no longer fearing HER . . . he turned back to face the family . . . and stretched out his arms like the rays of the sun . . . and let them, his worshippers, behold their true God.
    The TRUE GOD need fear no one. Not even the BITCH GODDESS. Because the TRUE GOD cannot be defeated. The TRUE GOD will always prevail.
    Even after Shanklin had attacked God with that knife in the woods, even when he’d tried to shoot God with God’s own pistol, he had failed. Because God had been mightier. God had summoned a snowstorm, which had gathered around him like a cloak. Before Shanklin’s disbelieving eyes, God had disappeared.
    At the base of the mountain on which Shanklin’s cabin had been built, God had found a place to hide. He’d crawled into an agricultural drainage tunnel and had daubed himself in black mud as the snow had continued to fall. He’d stayed there for two days until the police and their dogs had gone