The Hunted Read online

  Praise for James Phelan and his work

  “James Phelan has produced a big, juicy, rollicking tale in the spirit of Robert Ludlum. We haven’t seen an international thriller like this for a long time.” —Jeffery Deaver on Patriot Act

  “James Phelan is one of the hottest thriller writers to arrive on the scene in years.” —Vince Flynn

  “James Phelan has earned a new avid fan.” —Steve Berry

  “Vivid and suspenseful . . . an espionage novel with grunt.” —Sydney Morning Herald on The Spy

  “Walker’s so tough he’s got muscles in his spit.” —West Australian

  “A finely honed story which proves the thriller genre is alive . . . Can’t wait for the next one.” —Sunday Times on Fox Hunt

  “Phelan gets the balance absolutely right . . . An absolute must-read for fans of Clancy, Ludlum et al.” —Bookseller & Publisher on Patriot Act

  “Like all good thrillers . . . Phelan keeps the reader guessing right up to the last page.” —The Age on Patriot Act

  “Phelan’s techno-thriller is in the same league as Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy.” —Sun-Herald on Blood Oil

  James Phelan is the bestselling and award-winning author of twenty-eight novels and one work of non-fiction. From his teens he wanted to be a novelist but first tried his hand at a real job, studying and working in architecture before turning to English literature, spending five years at a newspaper and obtaining an MA and PhD in literature. James has written five titles in the Lachlan Fox thriller series, and the Alone trilogy of young adult post-apocalyptic novels. The ex-CIA character of Jed Walker was first introduced in The Spy, which was followed by The Hunted, Kill Switch and Dark Heart. James has also written a fourteen-book adventure series for Scholastic, titled The Last Thirteen. He has been a full-time novelist since the age of twenty-five, and spends his time writing thrilling stories and traveling the world to talk about them.

  To find out more about James and his books, visit:

  www.jamesphelan.com

  Follow and interact with James:

  www.facebook.com/realjamesphelan

  www.twitter.com/realjamesphelan

  www.instagram.com/realjamesphelan

  www.whosay.com/jamesphelan

  BY JAMES PHELAN

  The Jed Walker books

  The Spy

  The Hunted

  Kill Switch

  Dark Heart

  The Lachlan Fox books

  Fox Hunt

  Patriot Act

  Blood Oil

  Liquid Gold

  Red Ice

  The Alone series

  Chasers

  Survivor

  Quarantine

  New York • London

  © 2017 by James Phelan

  Cover design by Luke Causby

  Cover photographs courtesy Arcangel Images

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  e-ISBN 978-1-63506-021-8

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  In memory of Matt Richell, a publishing champion and wonderful man.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  The gunshot sounded. Then another.

  Walker looked up. Alert, not alarmed.

  Nine-millimeter. Double-tap. Fired from an elevated position. A couple of blocks east, atop one of the multi-story buildings. Fired downward and at close range to the target, minimizing the report.

  No one in the New York street seemed to notice. Just another sharp sound in a big city: a car backfi
ring or machinery clanging or something big and heavy hitting the deck.

  But Walker knew. And the man seated in front of him knew. And the guy standing two yards away beside Walker’s ex-wife knew.

  “Somerville,” Bill McCorkell said from across the table. He shifted in his seat and added, “Right on time, I’d say.”

  Walker looked up at the rooftop and saw Somerville, five stories up, a foot on the parapet, holstering her FBI-issued side-arm. He waved. She waved back.

  Walker said, “She wasn’t shooting at birds, I take it.”

  “Tying up a loose end,” McCorkell replied.

  “Durant?”

  McCorkell nodded.

  Walker looked back up to the elevated position. She’d tracked Durant up there; it was a no-brainer what he’d been up to. Walker pictured the ex-CIA man’s body sprawled next to a sniper’s rifle. Walker wondered who would have been lined up in the scope first—him or McCorkell. On the street, a team of heavily armed NYPD uniformed officers appeared on foot from around a corner and entered the building. She’d planned it well. A good job all round.

  “Thank Somerville for me,” Walker said, his eyes returning to McCorkell.

  “You can thank her yourself,” the older man countered. He leaned forward on the table. “This is the beginning of things, Walker, not the end.”

  Walker paused for just a moment. “This changes nothing.”

  McCorkell sat there, silent, waiting.

  “I’m not working for you,” Walker said. “Just tell Somerville she and I are even.”

  “You two will never be even.”

  Walker didn’t answer; instead he turned and walked the four paces to where the FBI man Andrew Hutchinson stood with Walker’s former wife, Eve.

  Separated. Then widowed. Grieving for more than a year, never knowing what really happened to her estranged husband who’d been listed dead by the CIA and State Department.

  Now this.

  The two of them, standing there, facing each other on the Manhattan street.

  She was smaller than he remembered. A little older. Sadder. Beautiful.

  Hutchinson stepped around Walker to join McCorkell at the cafe table. Walker could hear them talking, animatedly, but he blocked it out.

  Eve.

  Looking into Eve’s eyes, he felt that it could have been yesterday he’d last seen her. A bunch of yesterdays ran through his mind. Most of them were firsts. Their first meeting, first kiss, first time they’d slept together, first time they’d fought. The last time they’d fought.

  Standing before her, Walker was ready for war. For tears and fists. Anger. But if all that was there, it was coming later.

  For now, Eve hugged him. Tight. Silent.

  He’d always loved that about her: no matter what happened, she knew what to say, and what not to say. They stood together, embracing, until McCorkell tapped Walker on the shoulder.

  “We’ve just had word,” McCorkell said, moving into Walker’s line of sight over the top of Eve’s head. “We know where he is.”

  From the tone, the poise, Walker knew what McCorkell meant before he elaborated.

  “We’ve found your father.”

  •

  “He’s in the UK,” Special Agent Hutchinson said to his boss, Bill McCorkell. “That’s David Walker, right there.”

  Walker looked over the photographs.

  The four of them—Walker, McCorkell, Hutchinson and Special Agent Fiona Somerville—sat in an office of the FBI’s New York Field Office. Eve sat at a desk outside the glass-walled office, waiting. The Lower Manhattan office building was a shared federal government space, and staffers milled about, looking busy.

  Fair enough, thought Walker. They’d almost lost a VP on their turf just a few days back. The same day that Walker had heard from his father.

  “Near Hereford,” Hutchinson said, showing a map on his iPad. “West Midlands, near the Welsh border.”

  “I know the place,” Walker said. He looked at the long-lens shot of the man who had raised him. The man he hardly knew. “I spoke at the SAS once. My father did too, several times.”

  “So he had friends there,” Somerville said.

  “Probably. None I recall, no names,” Walker said. He stared blankly, remembering the place. “Hell, as a teenager I went with him on one of his trips and we fished the Wye together. How’d we get these photos?”

  “British intel, about two weeks back,” Hutchinson said. The FBI man used a pencil to itch at his bandaged arm. “They’re investigating someone he was seen with.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Hutchinson replied, as he brought up a satellite map on a large screen. “The call that your father made to you at the New York Stock Exchange? It came from a location not far from the barracks.” He zoomed in on a dot on a tiny road at the center of a cluster of small buildings. “It came from a landline phone in this tavern.”

  “That call was made three days ago,” Walker said. “He won’t still be in the area. The trail’s long dead. He’ll be gone. He’s good at disappearing.”

  “I’ve just run his image through TrapWire and Scotland Yard’s CCTV program,” Somerville said. “He’s come up four times over the past six months, all within fifty klicks of that tavern.”

  Walker studied the images that Hutchinson had brought up on the screen. A couple were grainy and blurred, taken from ATM cameras. Another showed his father in the background of someone’s Facebook photo. The last was a grab from a CCTV camera in a shop—in this last one the subject was looking directly up at it, as though he knew he’d been caught out.

  “That last one,” Walker said. “Where’s that?”

  “A gas station, just on the outskirts of Hereford on that same road headed to our tavern, soon after he called you,” Somerville said, checking the surveillance notes. “Later that night it was robbed. All on-site stored footage was taken but this had been backed up off-site to the security company.”

  “Does all that sound like the actions of a guy leaving the area?” McCorkell said to Walker. “He’s still there.”

  “Covering his tracks . . .” Walker said, seeing his father’s eyes for the first time in a long while. He looked over to Eve, silent, present, but not taking it in, as though the reappearance of yet another dead Walker was one revelation too many. “You think he’s been there for the last six months?”

  “At least,” Hutchinson said.

  “Seems he’s made it something of a home base,” Somerville said. “He could be running Zodiac from there.”

  “We don’t know his involvement in that,” McCorkell said.

  “Yeah, well he did have contacts there,” Walker said. “He had a hand in the psych training and debriefing of SAS guys, since at least the Falklands.”

  “No one you remember?” Hutchinson asked, cradling his bandaged arm. “Anyone there particularly close to your father?”

  “Nope,” Walker said, thinking back. “But he had a few friends there, I’m sure. He’d go there every few years. They’d be drinking buddies and the like. Not close.”

  “Close enough to work with,” Somerville said. “Then, and now.”

  Walker nodded.

  “You got dates for those trips?” Somerville asked. “I can get British Ministry of Defence personnel records to match, go through them.”

  “Maybe,” Walker said, nodding. “But this is the SAS we’re talking about—whether serving or former, they’re not going to lay out the red carpet for a group of outsiders to look into their people’s whereabouts.”

  “Worth a shot,” McCorkell said. “Let’s see where we can get.”

  Somerville nodded.

  “Why haven’t we heard about this sooner?” Walker said. “Why didn’t his presence, plus the fact that MI5 are looking into him too, flag something months ago?”

  “We’re still waiting on answers to that too,” Hutchinson said. “Brits are dragging their feet in cooperating—we don’t know who they’re survei
lling, or why.”

  “But we’re working on it,” McCorkell said, looking to Walker as he spoke.

  “I just can’t imagine him being in a place like that,” Walker said, “a place people might recognize him, when he’s playing the dead man.”

  “He’s hiding in plain sight,” Somerville said. “It worked for you for near-on a year.”

  “Yeah, but I was trying to stop a terrorist attack,” Walker said, “not playing a part in it.”

  “You really think he’s a part of this, don’t you?” McCorkell said, matter-of-fact.

  Walker remained silent.

  “At any rate,” Somerville said, filling the silence, “no one’s been looking for David Walker until now.”

  “News travels fast, even over the pond,” Walker said. “They’d have known he was supposed to be dead.”

  “So, he’s staying off the grid over there,” Hutchinson said. “Maybe only a local friend or two know of his resurrection.”

  Walker shook his head. “It’s not like him. He’s too smart, and being over there seems too risky.”

  “He’s there because of something he needs,” Hutchinson said. “Protection. Connections. Something.”

  “Maybe he’s retired there,” McCorkell said, leaning back and sipping a steaming tea. “For the fishing.”

  “Right,” Walker said, deadpan. “You think he faked his death, had a hand in a terrorist attack on US soil, knew of an internal CIA takeover and an attempt on the Vice-President’s life—all from a tavern in rural England?”

  McCorkell shrugged.

  “You’re a pro at this, right?” Walker chided.

  McCorkell feigned indifference. Walker looked from him to Hutchinson, then to Somerville. The three of them watched him. Waiting. For an answer. An answer they’d been waiting to hear for three days.

  “Look, Walker, this, with your father. It’s a lead,” Somerville said. “The best lead we’ve got to break into the Zodiac terror network. And we’re going to check it out. With or without you.”

  “So tell us,” Hutchinson said. “Are you in?”

  Walker looked from the UN intelligence team to the larger office beyond the glass wall. Eve sat there. She was looking at him. Her eyes showed nothing.

  Walker nodded. “I’m in.”

  1

  “Nine years ago,” Walker said, looking through the car’s windscreen at the English town. “That’s when I spoke here, after my first tour of Afghanistan.”