Free Wanted by Emlyn Rees Page A

been on high alert. He thought that the door was working to his advantage: it made whoever was in here feel too safe.
    Deciding which way to move next was easy. Even though this was the ground floor of a tall building, there was no up. At least, not where this stairwell was concerned. The way up was blocked, had caved in, and was nothing but a mass of impenetrable rubble and plaster.
    But there was a way forward. Straight ahead there was another set of double doors. But they weren’t wooden swing doors, like the ones Danny had just come through. They were state-of-the-art blast doors, like the one to his left. Also like that, they were controlled by an RFID keypad.
    With no direct access to the locking mechanism, the lock-buster couldn’t help. And while Spartak was carrying plastic explosives, enough possibly to take this door out, who knew how deep the facility went? Or how many people were inside? Or how well they might be able to react to a full-frontal assault?
    Footsteps. Danny turned to see that Viktor had returned. ‘I need the code for the door,’ he said to him, in Ukrainian. ‘Make him talk.’

CHAPTER 12
    Alive.
    Danny felt that way himself right enough. Alive and kicking. Buzzing with it. The proximity of death – the possibility that at any second his own life might end in a situation such as this – made him aware of each heartbeat, each breath, hearing, touching, seeing in a way he never did in his day-to-day existence.
    That was why people like him, Spartak and the twins got addicted to this. To danger. To risk. Because beside this vibrancy, immediacy and sheer precariousness, the rest of their lives felt monochrome and slow.
    Or that was what he used to think. Back when he was young, before he’d met Sally and had become a father to Lexie and Jonathan, and had been blown away by their births, the joy of their smiles and the light dancing in their eyes.
    They’d changed everything, his family. It was them he’d started thinking of at times like this, no longer thrilling to the danger he was putting himself into, no longer being seduced by it, but dreading it, wanting it gone, wanting to be safe at home with them.
    And that was where he wanted to be now. With Lexie. With the only family he had left.
    ‘Four, nine, two, three,’ Viktor’s voice crackled in Danny’s earpiece.
    Footsteps. He turned to see the twins closing in on him and Spartak.
    Turning his back on them, he punched the keys into the pad. The lock clicked. He hauled open the door and Spartak moved through.
    ‘Clear,’ the big man said.
    Danny walked in behind him. Nothing to right or left. Just a staircase leading down.
    The building they’d initially encountered might as well have been on another planet. Through this doorway they stepped out of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century. The whitewashed walls were spotless, with bright electric ceiling lights of a much more modern design than a building of this age could ever have been fitted with. Someone had spent a lot of money kitting the place out. And recently too. The dust-covered mausoleum of the upper floors was nothing but a memory now.
    Moving aside, Danny slipped his goggles round his neck. He motioned the twins forward to take point. They moved swiftly and silently down the steep flight of stairs, around the first bend and out of sight.
    Music. Somewhere below.
    What the hell?
    Spartak shrugged his huge shoulders and smiled thinly.
    Danny counted to ten in his head, listening over the music for any sign that the twins had made contact or had been detected. He wanted to leave enough space between himself, Spartak and them to diminish any possibility of their entire party being wiped out by an IED. But impatience gnawed at him with each passing second because he no longer believed there would be any additional security between here and wherever the guard had come from. The man’s relaxed attitude couldn’t have spelled out more clearly that Danny’s team was