Detonator Read Online Free PDF Page A

…?’
    It wasn’t the first time today I’d been called that.
    ‘How do you …?’ I didn’t bother finishing the question. It could wait. ‘Stefan?’ The name crept out of the muddle in my brain before I even knew it was there.
    He gave the smallest of nods, but didn’t utter a word. Then his hand shot out and clung to me, like a limpet. I murmured some reassuring waffle and managed to unclamp his fingers.
    My top priority now was to stop him going into shock. I knew this kid. There were things he could tell me. And if I lost him, we were both fucked. I had to make sure he didn’t go down.
    I pulled off my bomber and wrapped it around his upper half. Then I opened my mouth and listened, scanning as much as I could see of the road in both directions.
    All clear.
    I wiped my hands clean on the grass and went back to the Range Rover. We needed to make distance from it. But there was some shit I needed to do before we got out of here.
    My first instinct had been to bundle the kid back into the wagon, try to start it and drive somewhere safer where I could sort out my options. But hot-wiring those things was virtually impossible now, and most of them had trackers. I also couldn’t go through either tunnel without running the risk of being caught on camera. And moving the thing would leave whoever had done this in no doubt that I was still alive.
    My memory was shot to pieces, but I could still do the procedural stuff, if I didn’t think about it too hard. I shut the rear door so the corpse was out of sight and slid back on to the passenger seat. The clock on the dash read 13:27. The same as my Suunto.
    I flipped open the glovebox. A bunch of CDs, a French chocolate bar. A pack of cigarettes. Marlboro. A picture of a guy in an oxygen mask. A health warning in Cyrillic lettering. A slim box of matches. Brown. Gold lettering. Five stars. Hotel Le Strato, Courchevel.
    Beneath them, two spiral-bound map books. France and Italy. I chucked both into my day sack, along with the chocolate bar and the matches. I pressed the tailgate release. As the hydraulics worked their magic, I stepped out of the passenger door, closed it, and checked out the contents of the boot.
    A neatly folded suede jacket was draped across two matching cases. They smelt of money. Gold and brown, with a repeating pattern of Vs and Ls. And a couple of big holes where the rounds had blasted through the back of the seat.
    There was also a kid-size rucksack, containing a change of clothes, a washbag and a hand towel. I frisked the jacket and found two passports in crocodile-skin covers and a bunch of crisp euro and rouble notes in a gold clip. This guy obviously didn’t do credit cards any more than I did.
    The passports were both dark blue with gold lettering and some kind of shield. The first bearer was from Ukraine. His name was Francis Timis. And he had short-stay visas for France, Italy and Switzerland.
    Some more useful stuff clicked into place.
    Ukraine.
    Francis Timis.
    Frank Timis.
    Frank.
    I did know him.
    He had a job for me.
    He needed my help.
    He didn’t know who he could trust.
    That was why I was there.
    The second passport belonged to the boy, Stefan Timis.
    I replaced the cash and refolded the jacket. I pocketed both passports, and undid the cases. Nothing useful. Just clothes, and in the smaller one, some books that looked more like homework than fun. One of the spent rounds had gone most of the way through a maths instruction manual. I closed them again, grabbed the rucksack and pressed the button to shut the tailgate.
    I legged it back to the boy. He hadn’t moved a millimetre. He wasn’t even blinking. Just staring up into space. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
    I was tempted to fuck off out of there and leave him where he was. But I knew that wasn’t an option. I had to find out why I was in this shit, and right now he was the only one who could help. For starters, he’d know who’d killed his dad.
    He could also ID me.