Cut and Run by Matt Hilton

ping as someone picked up the handset. I heard breathing.
    My first thought was that the police had made the connection between us and that I was being listened to by a roomful of detectives or FBI agents. They’d try to trace my call, and in my hurry to warn Imogen I hadn’t taken any precautions. But, somehow I knew that wasn’t the case. If the police were there, they’d have given Imogen instructions to act natural and to engage me in conversation. Listening to each other breathe into the mouthpiece was not natural.
    ‘Imogen?’
    There was a grunt: too masculine a sound to have come from Imogen. Fleetingly I wondered if she had found herself a new friend since last we’d spoken, but that thought was a non-starter.
    ‘Where’s Imogen?’
    The man holding the phone wasn’t ready to answer me yet. The chance of me phoning like this might possibly have shaken him. Or maybe he’d been sitting by the telephone waiting exactly for that.
    ‘If you’ve harmed her—’
    The man cut me off curtly, ‘It’s enough that you fear that I might.’
    ‘I’m going to kill you.’
    ‘No, Joe Hunter . I will kill you, but first I will kill all that you hold dear.’
    ‘Imogen means nothing to me.’
    ‘I’m expected to believe that? If that was true, why would she be the first person you thought to call?’
    ‘Don’t hurt her.’ I wasn’t begging. It was one thing that I was being targeted – in some respects I could expect some people to hate me enough to want to hurt me – but now that that had spilled over to include innocent people, it added new urgency to my need to stop this man.
    ‘I don’t fear you, Hunter. Your threats mean nothing to me.’
    ‘So face me. Leave Imogen alone and meet me.’
    ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It wouldn’t change a thing. I would kill you.’
    ‘You’re so sure, let’s do it then.’
    ‘I could have killed you yesterday. I could have killed you a dozen times while I’ve followed you unobserved. I could have killed you when I shot those two idiotic policemen.’
    ‘But instead you ran away. Like a coward.’
    ‘No. I allowed you to live so that I could make you suffer . We will meet, Hunter, but only when you’re begging to be released from your torment.’
    ‘Whoever is behind this, I will kill him too.’
    The man didn’t respond to that, which meant I’d hit a raw nerve.
    ‘Tell him that this time I won’t hesitate to put a bullet through his skull.’
    ‘Hunter,’ the man said, ‘you think you know what this is all about? You know nothing.’
    He hung up.
    Bryce stirred from where he was sitting. He approached me slowly. He had grown pale. It probably had as much to do with the look on my face as what he already feared. ‘Was it him?’
    Him? He was talking about Jesus Henao Abadia. A dead man.
    Yes, it was a dead man. If I had my way I’d make certain of that. But it wasn’t Abadia. This man’s voice was North American.
    Bryce’s face couldn’t have grown any paler if I’d put a slug through his heart. His eyes watered and I could see him shuddering.
    ‘Get a grip, Bryce,’ I told him. ‘You’re no good to anyone in this state.’
    Harsh words perhaps, but they were aimed as much at me as they were at him. I’d failed to keep Kate safe, and now it looked like I’d failed her sister as well.
    The man had expected me to call Imogen, and had waited for my call. His intention was to throw me off-kilter, make me fear what would happen next. Instead, he’d got me thinking.
    Putting away my phone, I stared at Bryce. He hadn’t stumbled on this case all by himself. He was retired from the Agency. Someone had fed him the details of the murders, someone had supplied him the photographs. Whoever had done so, they were not the same as the people threatening us. They wouldn’t have given him fair warning, they would have simply taken him and he would have been strapped in a chair and tortured like all the rest.
    ‘You know