Free Until Death by Ali Knight Page A

strain spreading across his back as he pushed down on the blade. The adrenalin was pumping through his body, driving him to work faster. It was hard, physical work, the humidity high and bugs the size of dessert spoons buzzing. He had to keep the correct angles; always working away from himself. He had seen what those machines could do to a human body. A chainsaw didn’t cut flesh, it shredded it. Each of the many teeth cut its own path, flesh exploding from the wound like streamers from a party popper. Sweat was running from his pores under his safety shirt, heavy with layer upon layer of string to tangle in those vicious teeth and save your limbs. The man was screaming fully now, his mouth a dark hole in the cloud of wood dust, his eyes dark pricks of terror. He cut the trunk a few inches above the guy’s head and jumped across him to chop the last, biggest and heaviest slice below the prone man’s feet.
    He turned off the machine and silence slammed against him, underpinned by the sobbing and gasping of the man on the tree trunk. He looked at his stopwatch. Four minutes, twenty-seven seconds. He was panting hard as he unhooked the heavy machine from the harness hanging at his side and pulled his goggles on to his forehead. He yelled something incoherent, the adrenalin and the smell of the tree fuelling a cocktail of mad joy in him. There was something else, tangy and salty. He looked down at the quivering man, a dark stain of urine spreading across his trousers. A sense of freedom and power overwhelmed him. A lumberjack used to working in the Amazon could fell and chop a giant rosewood or mahogany tree in less than two minutes. He had been used to it once, but he was out of practice now. He wasn’t going to be too hard on himself.
    The Wolf leaned close to the man. ‘Which ship is it on?’
    The man was trying to say something through his sobs, words tumbling too fast from his dry mouth. It sounded like ‘I don’t know’.
    The Wolf picked up the chainsaw again and the man screamed, tears carving a pale line in his wood-dust face. ‘It’s on the
Saracen
. I heard that—’
    ‘Be more specific. Where on the
Saracen
? There are hundreds of containers on that ship.’
    The man started moaning again, begging for his life. The Wolf looked across the hillside at where the brush had been cleared, the smoke from the burning blocking out the sun. The big trees were still left here, a line of fifteen hardwood trees a hundred feet high, bursting up through the forest canopy. The third tree in towered at least twenty feet above all the others. Its trunk was thicker, its branches higher, its reach wider. An exceptional specimen: a wolf tree.
    ‘Tell me now or I’ll shred you.’ The man had only strength to whisper. The Wolf leaned in and listened for a few moments, drew back and stared down at his captive. You could make a series of cuts in a trunk until it was so finely balanced that you could push over a 500-ton tree with a little finger. It would hit the ground with such force it would obliterate anything in its path. Trees spend centuries growing, and can be cut down in a couple of minutes. People were the same. Christos had been untouchable for nearly ten years, but now he finally had some information he could use. The Wolf just had to get everything into the right position, use his little finger and push.
    He yanked on the starter cord of the chainsaw, the man writhing and screaming with a final desperate intensity. The party poppers of skin rose high in the air. The Wolf cut him right across the middle. It would have been kinder to cut off his head.

12
     
    K elly returned home with Yannis, but after being back for only a few minutes the doorbell rang on the service lift. She checked the video monitor and swore silently. Jason, a production manager who had commissioned her to make the masks and some of the props for his latest play, and Salvatore, his assistant, were downstairs on the garage level.
    ‘Kelly, you