Hunter Hunted by Jack Gatland (best romantic books to read .TXT) 📕

a role that would have meant that his office was technically under Gladwell’s remit, although Baker and Gladwell might have never even met while in the same building. However, this also meant that Baker’s office would have definitely seen the schedule.

And four soldiers were killed because of a leaked itinerary, all possibly to give a security firm with links to Baker a nice, hefty contract.

Declan leaned back in the chair. In Parliament, you could get away with being blackmailed, or even having kids out of wedlock. But costing soldiers’ lives? If that came out, it was political suicide. Somehow, Declan had to find a way of proving a connection.

Leaving the secret study, Declan walked over to the boxes in the room outside, finding one marked BOARDGAMES. Opening it and rummaging through it as quietly as he could, he found what he was looking for, an old Travel Scrabble game. Walking back to the desk, he opened the box, pulling out a green felt bag and emptying the tiny white squares of letters onto the surface. Then, brushing through the pieces, he laid the ones he needed out into a line.

R A T T L E S T O N E

Moving them around, he realised that although he could think up a few six or even seven letter words, he couldn’t think of any word that used all eleven. Even googling anagram solver and typing the word into a particular site found nothing larger than nine letters.

So not a known word then. A name perhaps?

Declan leaned back from the table, staring at the random collection of words. He didn’t even know if all eleven were used here. Gathering the eleven letters together, he placed them into the green bag and put it beside Frost’s stolen warrant card.

There was a noise outside; quietly making his way over to the window, he peeked out. It was just another police car arriving, most likely the next shift. Returning to the desk, Declan stopped, reached into his pocket and pulled out the Micro SD card that he’d taken from Nasir’s camera earlier that day. They’d never searched him when he was arrested, and therefore they’d never found it.

Quietly and carefully, Declan went downstairs, methodically making his way over to the side of the living room, and to the waist-high side cupboard beside the drinks cabinet. Opening it up, he found a digital camera nestled at the back of a low shelf, a good decade old and probably unused for years. Opening it up, Declan saw it had a Micro SD slot. Slipping Nasir’s card in and closing up the compartment, Declan opened up the back, replaced the AA batteries and turned the camera on. It wasn’t a touch screen, the buttons and dials on the camera moving through the options, but Declan could open the photo library on the card after a couple of attempts. The last five or six images were taken in the shopping centre, general photos of people and places, although a couple at the end were closeups of the team that had been sent to take Nasir out. One of them, when zoomed to its maximum, showed a gun, likely the same gun that killed Nasir in what looked to be a shoulder holster. Declan took the burner phone and, unable to transfer the image in a traditional sense, simply zoomed in and used his phone’s camera to take a picture of the screen.

Starting at the first photo on the card, a countryside shot that looked like it was taken the day before, and then scrolling through the photos on the card, Declan scrolled through images of Brompton Cemetery; artful shots that seemed more for magazine articles than for keeping, and images of the street outside, including the image that was now plastered across every newspaper in the country; the stranger in the cap and aviators, now known to be Declan. From the way the images flowed, it looked like Nasir had taken a position across the road to take a shot of Declan before entering the cemetery after him, continuing to take shots as he did so. This was shown by images of Kendis talking with Declan now appearing on the photo feed, taken at a distance and before Nasir showed himself.

Scrolling even further forward, Declan trawled through a couple of street photos—

Declan stopped scrolling.

On the screen was an image of Kendis Taylor, in the early evening and sitting on a bench in a City of London park, arguing with a skinny, red-headed man in a suit who sat beside her. It was taken from a distance, but it was definitely her. And the man seemed familiar, as if from television. Declan zoomed in and took a photo of this image too. These latter images gave the impression that Nasir had been tailing her after she’d spoken with him and Declan. Which, if he’d been working for Rattlestone, was incredibly likely. Nasir and Kendis must have parted ways an hour or two before she died though, and Declan rubbed at his chin as he started flicking back through them one more time. Why did Nasir follow Kendis, and why did he stop?

Placing the camera down, Declan stretched, ensuring that the car out front couldn’t see him. He was hungry, and irritated by so many questions that he couldn’t answer and so snuck his way into the kitchen, grabbing some bread, ham and butter from the fridge, making a quick sandwich that he ate as he returned upstairs. This was the safest place for him; the police had already examined the location, and they were convinced that nobody was inside. All he had to do was keep quiet and decide what to do next.

He changed out of the cheap clothes.

’So where exactly are we, and why the hell did we have to walk here?’ Bullman rubbed at her ankle as Anjli looked back to her.

‘First, I don’t have a car, Ma’am. And second, I didn’t want this visit being