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The fire had died down to glowing embers, and I listened more than watched as Cole pulled himself inside the sleeping bag, the synthetic fabric rustling.
There was the momentary glow of his phone screen as he checked the time, and then he turned in the darkness, his back towards me, and I heard him sigh.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 MINUS THREE DAYS
I opened my eyes. A thin gray moonlight was trickling through the curtains, and Cole was snoring on the hearth rug in front of the now-dead fire. The wound under my ribs hurt, and I was very cold, but I was also certain that neither of those things was what had woken me. Something else had prodded me from sleep.
Gabe had always said that what made me a great pen tester wasn’t my physical skills. It wasn’t that I was faster, stronger, quicker at picking locks, or more daring at scaling walls. There were plenty of guys more capable of forcing doors, or women with fancier kit. No. What had saved me, time and time again, what had made me a wickedly good shoplifter back in the day, was that I noticed stuff—stuff that other people didn’t—and that I trusted my gut.
The blind spot in the cameras. The pause in a security guard’s footsteps. The tag that could be deactivated with a ballpoint pen.
I had noticed something—before I was even fully awake. I just wasn’t sure what.
For a few minutes I lay there, listening, trying to work out what it was that had made me startle awake, my heart already racing before I had opened my eyes.
It wasn’t Cole getting up to use the toilet. It wasn’t thunder—the weather outside was still, and through the crack between the curtains I could see nothing but calm whiteness—presumably the sea mist had rolled in again overnight.
And then I heard it—the sound that had propelled me into consciousness even before I’d fully recognized what it was.
A burst of static from a police radio, and a muttered call sign.
Heart pounding, I jolted upright and tiptoed across the bare boards to crouch below the window. Gently parting the curtains, I could see someone—I thought it could be Malik, though I wasn’t sure—standing outside the house, speaking very low into a radio. Up the track, an unmarked black car was parked sideways across the road, deliberately blocking in Cole’s Mazda, and further away I could see the glow of headlamps through the mist, twisting and turning with the narrow lane as another car closed in.
Whoever was outside must be waiting for reinforcements. I had to get out, before they surrounded the house.
A huge, sick wash of adrenaline coursed through me, but I pushed it down and instead concentrated on scooping my belongings into my rucksack with shaking hands. It was extremely cold—my breath was coming in white clouds—but I was too keyed up to feel it, shivering more with nerves than from the chill.
“Cole,” I whispered. He was still asleep, snoring peacefully. “Cole, get up, I need the sleeping bag.”
“Wha?” he mumbled, turning over, and I felt a rush of furious impatience.
“Get up. I need the—never mind.” I yanked, trying to pull the sleeping bag off him. For a moment his body came with it—slithering across the rug—but then it jerked free, and I bundled it up as Cole sat upright, blinking and more than a little confused.
“What the f—” he said, his voice at normal volume, and I hissed at him in an agony of fear.
“Shut up, there’s police, outside. I have to go.”
“But—” Cole started, but I was already grabbing my rucksack and peering through the rear windows of the cottage. There was only one door, but at the back there were two large windows, one of which opened above a straight drop onto sand, the other onto what I strongly suspected was a gorse bush. The question was whether I risked the prickles, for the cover, and to break my fall. For a moment I hesitated, unsure. Then I went for the other window—the straight drop. The prospect of cover from the police was tempting, but the landing would probably make a noise, and if I got tangled in the bush I might never get out. The idea of flailing there painfully, twigs cracking, trying to stifle the sounds of pain as the thorns pricked me… it wasn’t appealing.
The window gave a squeal as I pushed it up, and I winced, holding my breath. But there was no sign from the front of the property that anyone had heard, and I dropped my rucksack gently out of the window and then climbed after, lowering myself down the side of the shack with my feet braced against the wooden shingles, until I was hanging full length. The stretch made the area below my ribs screech with pain. I could feel the dressing pulling against the skin and the wound beneath opening up.
I let go, dropping soundlessly to the sand, on all fours as I always did, but this time, in spite of the soft landing, I had to close my eyes, biting my cheek against the pain in my side and waiting for the hot throbbing to recede.
I was just straightening up, one hand pressed to my ribs, when I heard the sound of an engine and the crackle of tires on tarmac coming from the front of the cottage. The reinforcements were here.
Drawing a deep breath, I shouldered my pack and began to run, into the mist.
I had no real idea where I was going, only that I was heading through the dunes, away from where the taxi driver had dropped me off. It was ridiculously hard, running through the shifting sand—the rise and fall of the dunes was almost impossible to see in the mist and darkness, and I was glancing over my shoulder for pursuers when I ran almost full pelt into something that stopped me short with a jolt.
Shit. Shit.
Barbed wire. My nemesis.
It looked to be the remnants of some long-forgotten fence, perhaps, coiling up out of the soft sand like a weed, and it had tangled itself in my shoes and jeans, hooking into the loose fabric and the skin beneath. I couldn’t rip myself free without losing a chunk of flesh. Carefully, cursing my inattentiveness and the farmer for not picking up his fucking debris, I began to uncoil the strands.
From behind me I could hear sounds, someone pounding on the front door, raised voices, and when I glanced back, I could see the headlamps of a car piercing the mist, and something else—something smaller—the swing of a torch beam, perhaps. I unhooked another coil. I was almost free.
And then I heard it, a voice, maybe through a loudspeaker, though I wasn’t sure.
