The Englishman kept pulling her along the side of the wall, the second man following close behind. After about fifty metres he came to a halt next to a black rope hanging down from the top of the wall. Dutch watched as he slung his weapon over one shoulder before rappelling up the rope with consummate ease. He dropped into a crouch on top of the wall and gestured to her to follow.
‘You know how?’ the second man said to Dutch, gesturing at the rope with a tilt of his chin. Unlike the Englishman, this man’s accent was very definitely Russian.
‘I’m not sure…’
‘Just grab hold of it.’
She stared up at the waiting Englishman with considerable uncertainty, but the sound of more shooting from across the prison gave her all the impetus she needed. She gripped the rope in both hands and struggled to ascend the same way the Englishman had, her boots scuffing against the rough bricks, but her muscles felt like worn rags after all the climbing she’d already done.
She felt her grip loosening when the Englishman reached down and grabbed her wrist, hauling her the rest of the way up. Dutch soon scrambled into a sitting position beside him on top of the wall, gasping for breath.
‘I’ll go back down the other side first,’ said the Englishman, ‘then you. But please don’t try to run away, Miss McGuire. I don’t want to have to shoot you.’
‘What are you—military?’ she asked, still gasping for breath. ‘You’re not Russian Special Forces, for sure.’
Instead of replying, he scrambled back down the rope to the street outside. The rope’s other end came from a winch, mounted on the rear of a decrepit-looking mini-bus. The bus had the name of a children’s charity written on one side in Cyrillic.
Climbing back down turned out to be easier, but not by as much as she’d hoped. She dropped the last metre, landing hard. The Russian followed close behind her.
She looked around. A row of warehouses stood on the opposite side of the road, and she could see the dark waters of a river beyond them. Instead of re-winching the rope, the Russian cut it with a knife, discarding it at the foot of the wall.
‘Okay,’ said the Englishman, turning towards Dutch, ‘now we—’
He saw the punch coming and tried to dodge back out of range, but not fast enough. Dutch clipped him on the jaw with sufficient force to send him stumbling against the side of the bus, the assault rifle slipping from his grasp. She ran, legs and arms pumping, aiming for a narrow gap between two of the warehouses.
The Russian shouted something after her, but didn’t shoot. Her gut told her it wouldn’t take her more than fifteen, maybe twenty seconds to swim to the far shore of the river. It meant risking hypothermia, but at least it wouldn’t kill her. Or so she hoped.
She heard one of the men come running up behind her. Dutch willed herself to run faster, but exhaustion slowed her. She cried out as hands tackled her from behind, knocking her flat.
‘Don’t move!’ shouted the Englishman, twisting her arms behind her back.
She shoved an elbow back and felt it connect with his ribs. He let out a grunt, and in the next instant an armour-plated elephant danced a waltz on Dutch’s spine. Her back arched, her body going into convulsions and her teeth clenching together. She recognised the angry buzz of a Taser.
At that precise moment, staying flat on the ground with her face in a mud puddle seemed like the best idea ever.
‘Get the tracker,’ she heard the Englishman say.
The Russian grunted and his shadow fell across Dutch. She caught the glint of light from a blade and struggled to lift herself, but her muscles felt like broken rubber bands.
His fingers probed the back of her neck, working their way down to her left shoulder. The blade broke her skin and began to dig deep into the upper muscles of her back. Dutch opened her mouth to scream, but the fingers of his other hand had already clamped themselves around her mouth. A guttural howl escaped from between his fingers regardless as he worked the blade deeper.
When he finally unclamped his fingers from around her mouth, she gulped air and vomited noisily onto the ground. She coughed and spat, then grunted as the Russian pushed her onto her back. He stood over her with something resembling a ball-bearing grasped between two fingers, his hands sticky with her blood.
‘Don’t want the Russian authorities following us where we’re going, da?’
He threw the ball-bearing away, then, with the Englishman’s help, got her back on her feet. Her arms were pulled behind her back and something tightened around her wrists. She was dragged aboard the mini-bus and deposited on the floor at the rear, rows of empty seats on either side of her.
The bus started forward, and Dutch rolled against the iron base of one of the seats. Up front, one of the two men sat on an improvised driving seat made from an upturned bucket, a jacker’s plug-in wheel pushed into a hole smashed through the dashboard. Dutch recognised the technique; hacking self-drive cars had provided much of her income as a teenager living on the streets of New Detroit.
The bus kept moving for another half hour. When it finally stopped, the two men dragged her back outside and propped her up against the side of the bus. Dutch saw they were in an empty back-street next to a long, dark limousine with tinted windows. The limousine door opened, and a driver—an actual, human driver, judging by her one brief glimpse of a non-jacker steering wheel—stepped out.
‘You run into any trouble?’ he asked the Englishman. He wore an expensive-looking dark wool suit,
