True Colours

AFGHANISTAN, 2002

Ahmad Khan and the three paratroopers drove most of the way to the site of the rendezvous in silence, punctuated only by the terse directions that Ahmad gave them and the Paras’ radio transmissions back to base; if they failed to send the correct signal every thirty minutes, the alarm would at once be raised.

The road climbed steadily towards the mountains, its surface increasingly rough and pitted with crudely repaired craters where shells, mortar rounds or IEDs had blasted holes. Their progress was slow, but after driving for an hour and a half they reached a dead-end valley flanked by steep-sided hills. There the road dwindled to not much more than a narrow dirt track, running alongside the bed of a river that a few weeks before had been a roaring torrent of meltwater but was now just a dried-up jumble of rocks.

Ahmad told the driver to slow down still more as they approached the site of the RV with his men, and his keen gaze raked the road ahead and the hills on either side, alert for any danger, anything out of place. As they crested a low rise, he saw ahead of them a group of men wearing Afghan robes, standing at the side of the road in the shade of a clump of pine trees. He frowned. He was an hour early for the rendezvous, but his men were already there.

His frown deepened as they got closer to the group and he realised that most of the dozen or so men were strangers. The only face he recognised was Ghulam, his second-in-command.

One of the men held up a hand in greeting, but Ahmad felt the rising tension from the three Paras and heard the metallic click as the man alongside him slid the safety catch off his M16. ‘It’s all right, drive forward slowly,’ Khan said, but just as the words left his mouth he caught a brief flash of reflected light from the hillside out of the corner of his eye. His heart began to race. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. He reached inside his shirt, undid his money belt, and shoved it down the back of the seat behind him until it was out of sight. Ignoring the questioning look from the soldier alongside him, he told the driver to stop.

They were still some fifty yards short of the group of men, who emerged from the shade and began to walk towards them as they saw the Land Rover pull to a halt. ‘Wait here,’ Khan said. ‘Let me do the talking.’

He got out and walked up the road, calling out the traditional greeting, ‘Salaam alaikum’.

Ghulam returned the greeting. He was smiling but his eyes were hard and Khan began to fear the worst. He stared at Ghulam’s face, trying to get a read on the man. Ghulam was tense; that much was obvious.

He slowed as he saw that there were two men among the group who weren’t his followers. One he recognised as the commander of another Taliban company. His name, Wais, meant ‘Night Wanderer’. The name suited him well, for he was a dark and elusive character, at home in the shadows and on the margins, seeing everything, saying nothing. The other man was a stranger, but the AK-74 he carried, including a laser sight, and the way the others deferred to him as he stepped forward, suggested he was a powerful figure. ‘Alaikum salaam, Ahmad Khan,’ he said. ‘I am Piruz.’

‘And what wind has blown you here?’ Khan said.

‘We heard that you were bringing friends with you,’ said Piruz, waving an arm towards the assembled men. ‘We wanted to meet them. Will you not introduce us?’ He began walking slowly along the track towards the Land Rover.

Khan’s brain was racing. He glanced towards the Paras, who were showing increasing signs of agitation. ‘The faranji are no friend to any true Afghan,’ he said. ‘But just the same, they may have their uses sometimes.’

Piruz showed his teeth in a smile. ‘Then let us see what use we can make of them.’ As he neared the Land Rover, he raised his hand in greeting. ‘Welcome, English,’ he said. ‘Please lower your weapons, you are our guests and we mean you no harm.’

The gazes of the three soldiers flickered between Piruz and Khan, clearly uncertain what they should do. Still smiling and affable, Piruz leaned into the back of the Land Rover, resting his arm on the back of the seat that Khan had vacated. ‘You use the M16, I see,’ he said. ‘Do you find that …’ His voice was drowned by the roar of his weapon. Blood and brains sprayed into the air as the soldier in the back slumped over the side of the vehicle. Without a pause, Piruz swung his AK-74 through a short arc and shot the front-seat passenger through the back of his head. The windscreen shattered as the rounds smashed through it and Khan saw the blood-red smear from what was left of the soldier’s head as it slid down the windscreen.

The engine roared as the driver stamped on the accelerator in a frantic attempt to escape, but Piruz’s rifle barrel was already swinging towards him and the next shot hit the driver, punching a hole through the back of his seat. The Land Rover swerved and crashed nose down into the ditch at the side of the road, and though the driver, badly wounded, managed to stumble out of his seat, another burst from Piruz killed him stone dead before he had taken three steps.

As Khan brought up his own weapon, he felt a gun barrel in the small of his back and heard a voice hiss, ‘One more move and you will be as dead as those faranji scum.’ His weapon was taken from him and the next moment blows, kicks and rifle butts began to rain on him. As he sank to the ground, he was dimly aware of Piruz standing over him and he heard him say, ‘Hold his arms.’

There was a momentary pause and then an agonising sensation in his cheek and he smelt singeing flesh as Piruz forced the end of his gun barrel – burning hot from the rounds he had just fired – into Khan’s face. ‘That’s enough for now,’ Piruz said. ‘There will be time later to deal with the traitor as he deserves, but we need to get away from here before the faranji troops come looking for vengeance, and we need him to be able to walk.’

Khan was pulled to his feet and his wrists were bound tightly behind him with electric cable which bit into his flesh. Most of the Taliban group moved away from the road, heading up into the mountains and dragging Khan with them, but he saw that a few men were remaining behind, some digging an IED into the ground alongside the Land Rover, others running out a command wire towards a copse of wind-stunted acacia trees a hundred yards away, while still others tracked them, brushing dirt, leaves and gravel over the wire to hide it from view. Khan saw no more as two Taliban fighters took his arms, forcing him along the path that climbed the ridge towards the next valley.

He stumbled on, filled with despair. Even if British or American troops turned up and even if he wasn’t killed in the ensuing firefight, the Westerners would assume that he had deliberately led the soldiers into the ambush that killed them all.

He was dragged through the mountains, half conscious and disoriented. They climbed one ridge and descended into a rocky valley only long enough to begin scaling the next ridge beyond. Night had now fallen but still the forced march continued and at every pause along the way Khan was subjected to a fresh beating.

They eventually stopped, an hour before dawn, and laid up to rest for the day in a pine wood near the head of another desolate valley. Through the tree canopy high above him, Khan caught occasional glimpses of the vapour trails of military jets etched across the skies, and once there was the distant clatter of a helicopter’s rotors, but the noise grew no louder. He looked around for Ghulam but his friend was keeping his distance. If he was his friend, of course. Khan had no way of knowing for sure.

While most of the Taliban slept, Piruz made sure that Khan had no rest at all. Two Taliban fighters forced him to stand upright and stood guard over him, and whenever he tried to lean back against the rock face or his head sank on to his chest, they kicked him or whipped him with the electric cables they wore as belts around their waists.

The torture began in earnest after Piruz woke up, apparently refreshed after just a few hours’ sleep. Sharp splinters of wood were jammed under his fingernails, caustic liquid was forced into his eyes and he was then dragged to the mountain stream running down the hillside, thrown down and held under the water while his feet beat a tattoo on the rocky ground, the blood roared in his ears and his lungs filled with water. Just when he was about to pass out, he was dragged from the water and revived, coughing, spluttering and gasping for breath, only to be interrogated and then forced back under the water again. They wanted to know who he was working for and what information he had given to the British.

He came to rely on the torture to keep himself focused, using the pain to blot out Piruz’s questions and his own urge to tell him something, anything that would end his ordeal. The more they hurt him, the more determined he became. He would die without telling them anything.

When the near-drowning failed to loosen his tongue, Piruz had him flogged with the cable-whips until strips of his flesh hung from his back. Eventually he was thrown in the dirt at Piruz’s feet. ‘You are a traitor,’ Piruz said, for what seemed like the thousandth time. ‘Confess and by the Prophet’s holy name I will be merciful.’

Khan knew that he could not win. If he talked he would be killed and if he did not he would also be dead. The truth would not save him, and nor would silence. His only hope lay in a lie.

‘I am no traitor,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘You saw for yourself that I led the faranji into a trap where I knew my men were waiting. If I was going to betray my men there would have been many, many faranji soldiers with me, not just three, and those little more than boys. But I know who the real traitor is. Free me and I will tell you.’

Piruz silenced him with a blow to the mouth that loosened several more teeth and his men then brought their gun butts down on Khan’s feet and hands. Piruz had him tied to a tree, the rough bark agonising against the open wounds on his back. Piruz then produced a knife with a wicked, curved blade and held it in front of Khan’s eyes. ‘I shall castrate you, traitor,’ he said. ‘You will talk now or you will be no man at all, you will be less than a woman.’ He cut through Khan’s belt and a moment later Khan felt the bite of the knife-edge and hot blood trickled down his thigh. He knew real terror then and for the first time his resolve weakened. That cut might not have been a deep one, but Piruz was ready to cut him again and again, a cruel smile playing around his lips.

Wais the Night Wanderer had remained on the sidelines while Khan was tortured, but as Piruz raised his knife hand again Wais stepped forward. ‘Don’t kill him, Piruz,’ he said. ‘Not yet. He will talk, I am sure of it. And when we do kill him, Fahad will want to make an example of him. It will be a lesson that none can ignore. Whether they are warriors or cowards who hide behind the skirts of women, those who turn aside from the path of jihad, no matter what feats of arms they may have done in the past, will feel the holy wrath of Allah – may his name be praised – upon them.’

Khan saw Piruz hesitate and he waited, his heart pounding. Fahad – the Lynx – was the Taliban commander for the whole region, and one of Mullah Omar’s closest advisers. Piruz would surely not dare risk his wrath. There was a long silence, but then Piruz lowered his hand and strode away, his jaw clenched tight.

As he also turned away, Wais caught Khan’s eye for a fraction of a second. His expression was unreadable and yet Khan felt a sudden surge of hope. Perhaps there was still a way that he could survive.

The Taliban group moved on that night, crossing a final mountain ridge, even steeper than those before, and fording a river that was deep enough to reach to their chests and so cold that Khan let out a gasp as he was herded into it by his captors. The rushing water reignited the pain from his shredded back, but he bit his lip and made no other sound. To complain would only reawaken Piruz’s cruel desire to inflict more pain, he was sure. As he climbed out of the water he saw Ghulam farther down the riverbank. They made brief eye contact and Ghulam gave him a slight nod, a small gesture but one that filled Khan with hope.

In the middle of the night, Khan woke from an uneasy sleep to find Ghulam standing over him with a bottle of water. Khan’s wrists were bound behind his back so Ghulam had to hold the bottle to his mouth. ‘Piruz found out that you had gone to see the Brits. I managed to warn your men but it was too late for me to run. I don’t know what I can do to help you now.’ After the few snatched words, Ghulam hurried away.

The next morning, the Taliban arrived in a village that they still controlled despite a year-long concentrated effort by the American and British forces to dislodge them. The village dogs set up a chorus of barking as the Taliban fighters approached. Khan was paraded through the streets at the head of the column, covered in dried blood and dust, his clothing torn and his wrists bound behind him.

The frightened villagers peered from behind their doors and shuttered windows as the column of men moved past, too frightened to show themselves in the open.

They came to a halt in the dusty square in the centre of the village, where two Toyota Landcruisers were already drawn up. Standing in front of them, flanked by his personal bodyguard, was Fahad the Lynx, with his ten-year-old son at his side.

Piruz paid his respects to Fahad and he presented the AK-74 he had taken from Khan to Fahad’s son. The boy darted a nervous glance at his father and then, at his nod, gave a grave bow of thanks. He began turning the weapon over in his hands, squinting along the sight towards Khan and pretending to pull the trigger. His father gave an indulgent smile and Piruz roared with laughter.

The Taliban fighters then went from house to house, rousting out the villagers and forcing them to assemble in the square. As they watched silently, Khan was methodically kicked and beaten before he was dragged in front of Fahad.

Piruz puffed out his chest, revelling in the moment, his voice carrying to the farthest reaches of the village. ‘I accuse Ahmad Khan,’ he said, stabbing the air with his finger as if plunging a dagger into Khan’s heart, ‘of the grossest treachery, the betrayal of the faith, his country, and the nation’s protectors, the Taliban, charged by Mullah Omar himself with the sacred duty of guarding the Islamic Emirate from its enemies. I demand death for the traitor, who is not even man enough to confess his crimes.’ He spat in the dirt at Khan’s feet.

A few of the villagers applauded or shouted ‘Allahu akbar’ but most remained silent.

‘Ahmad Khan, you have one final chance to confess your crimes, before Allah, whose name be praised, sits in judgement upon you,’ Fahad shouted. He signalled to the guards flanking Khan to untie his hands.

As he rubbed some life back into his wrists and hands, Khan let his gaze travel over the faces of his persecutors. They all stared back at him with undisguised hostility, except for Ghulam, who was looking at the ground. At last he began to speak and, despite his exhaustion and the pain from his wounds, his voice was steady and clear. ‘Who among you has done more for our country than I? I have fought the Russians, the Americans, the British, the Afghan army and the Pakistani army. I have risked my life scores of times and I bear the scars on my body to prove it. Yet this is how you treat me in return?’ He pointed an accusing finger at Fahad’s son. ‘You take the weapons from heroes and you give them to children. And now you even accuse me of treachery? Give me a weapon and I’ll show you the real traitor.’

‘Liar!’ Piruz shouted, and raised his weapon ready to shoot him, but Fahad placed a restraining hand on his arm. He stared at Khan in silence, his eyes hooded, then reached into his robe and pulled out an old Makarov pistol that had been taken from a dead Soviet soldier many years before. It was so old that parts of the gunmetal had been worn to a shiny, silver patina. Fahad emptied the magazine into his hand, then put a single round back in the chamber, pocketing the rest of the ammunition.

He threw the pistol to Khan, while several Taliban covered him with their weapons. ‘Because you fought well for us in the past,’ Fahad said, ‘I am giving you this last chance to preserve your honour. Kill yourself now like a man, or we will kill you like the dog you are.’

Khan stared down at the weapon in his hand, then suddenly whipped it up to the firing position and shot Wais with a bullet between the eyes. As Wais slumped to the ground, already dead, Khan screamed, ‘He’s the traitor. Search him, if you don’t believe me.’

The Taliban fighters were screaming at Khan, their fingers tightening on their triggers, but Fahad held up a hand to silence them. ‘Hold your fire and search the body,’ he shouted.

Ghulam stooped over Wais’s lifeless body, running his hands through his robes. ‘There is something!’ he shouted. He straightened up, holding a bulging money belt he had taken from the dead man’s waist. He opened it, stared inside then took out a thick bundle of notes and threw them on the ground. There was a gasp from the watching crowd as the breeze stirred the thousands of US dollars that lay there.

‘Wais has been in the pay of the British for many months,’ shouted Khan. ‘He has been giving them information about our bases and our leaders. They know him as Abu Qartoob.’

Ghulam passed the money belt to Fahad, who flicked through the notes, his face impassive.

‘I heard that Wais had been seen talking to a British officer, but I needed you to see that for yourself,’ said Khan, pointing at the money belt. ‘I was never a traitor. It is Wais who has been betraying you!’

‘We have misjudged you, brother,’ Fahad said, walking over to him and embracing him. He motioned for his son to give the AK-74 to Khan and the boy sullenly obeyed, clearly unhappy at having to return the weapon.

Khan slung it on his shoulder and then walked over to where Wais still lay and spat on him. He watched the spittle dribble down the side of the dead man’s face and drip from the stump of his earlobe – the rest shot away in some long-forgotten gun battle that had earned Wais the Arabic nickname he had chosen as his code name. Khan offered up a silent prayer of thanks for Joshua’s mention of Abu Qartoob. He knew that Wais had tried to protect him and had even intervened to save his life up on the mountainside when Piruz was a heartbeat from killing him, but when it came down to a choice of his own life or Wais’s, there was only ever going to be one outcome. His fellow agent’s reward for saving Khan’s life had been to die in his place.

‘What now, Ahmad Khan?’ Ghulam asked him later.

‘Now?’ Khan said, loud enough for the other Taliban to hear. ‘I shall go home to my daughter, sleep – for it has been two days and nights since I last closed my eyes – and give my wounds time to heal, and then I shall return to again put myself at the service of Mullah Omar and his lieutenant, Fahad the Lynx.’ He made a small bow as he said it, which Fahad acknowledged, but his expression showed that while Khan might have been partly rehabilitated, he was still far from trusted.

As he made his slow way back to his home he reflected on how lucky he had been and knew that time was running out for him. Piruz and Fahad had not been convinced. They would watch and wait, and another slip, however small, would be his downfall. He had to get out. Any lingering doubts that might have remained were removed as soon as he saw his daughter. The dark shadows under her eyes and the way she started as a log shifted in the hearth showed that she still lived in fear.

‘We may go on a journey soon, Lailuna,’ he said. ‘Somewhere far from the men who frightened you. Would you like that?’

She flinched as if she had been struck, but she nodded and then hugged him with such force that he winced at the pain from his wounds. ‘Yes, Father, I would like that,’ she whispered into his chest. ‘I would like that a lot.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said McIntyre as the gate pulled back to reveal the massive mansion. ‘How the other half lives, huh?’

Shepherd waved at Gunter and drove towards the garage. ‘That’s less than half of it,’ he said. ‘It’s like an iceberg, most of it is underground.’

‘How much do you think a place like this would go for?’

‘A hundred million, give or take,’ said Shepherd.

McIntyre whistled softly.

‘So, I’ll introduce you to Dmitry and get you sorted with a transceiver and fitted up for the thumb sensor. How’s your Russian, by the way?’ The garage doors rolled up and Shepherd drove slowly down to the first basement level.

‘All those hours in the Regiment’s language lab paid off,’ said McIntyre. ‘But my Serbian’s better. Why?’

‘Don’t let on that you can speak the language. See if you can pick up anything useful.’

They drove down into the car park and Shepherd took McIntyre over to the security centre.

Dudko was sitting in front of the CCTV monitors and Popov was in the briefing room with Ulyashin. Ulyashin’s crutches were leaning against one wall.

Shepherd introduced McIntyre as Alastair McEwan, a former soldier who had been bodyguarding for more than ten years. The three Russians shook hands with McIntyre and Shepherd could see them all weighing him up. McIntyre grinned amiably as he shook hands.

‘Can someone fix Alastair up with one of the rooms?’ said Shepherd. ‘And get him fixed up with a security code and a transceiver?’

‘He’s staying here?’ asked Popov.

‘Most of the time,’ said Shepherd. ‘You can use him in the house but he’s up to speed on mobile security.’

‘But not armed?’

‘Not sure we’d trust him with live rounds,’ said Shepherd. He grinned when he saw the look of confusion on their faces. ‘Just a joke,’ he said. ‘Alastair isn’t a police officer so he’s not licensed to carry a weapon.’ Shepherd’s phone rang. It was Button. He went outside to the car parking area to take the call.

‘I’m having problems getting information on the bodyguarding teams who were looking after Zakharov and Czernik,’ she said. ‘We’ve spoken to the men’s companies but they’re point blank refusing to help. Their head offices are overseas so there’s not much pressure I can bring to bear.’

‘You want me to run it by Grechko?’

‘You read my mind,’ said Button. ‘But be tactful, obviously.’

‘Tactful is my middle name, you know that.’

‘I thought Spider was your middle name.’ She laughed, and ended the call. Shepherd put the phone away and went back into the control centre.

‘Where is Mr Grechko?’ he asked Dudko.

‘Pool,’ said the bodyguard, flicking through a magazine filled with photographs of classic cars. ‘What do you think about the E-Type Jaguar? A good car, right?’

‘A penis on wheels,’ said Shepherd.

Dudko frowned. ‘What?’

‘It’s a substitute for a small penis,’ said Shepherd. ‘I wouldn’t get one, if I were you.’

‘But it’s a classic, no?’

‘It’s a classic, but trust me, anyone seeing you in one will think you’ve got something to hide.’

Dudko frowned. ‘You think I have a small penis?’

Considering that Dudko’s physique clearly owed more to steroids than it did to exercise, Shepherd figured that the man probably did have problems in that area but he just smiled and shook his head. ‘Girls might, though.’

‘You drive a BMW, right?’

‘An X5. SUV. Can’t fault it.’

Dudko grinned mischievously. ‘What does that say about your penis?’

‘That I look after it,’ said Shepherd, patting him on the shoulder. He took the stairs down to the third underground level.

Grigory Sokolov was standing by the doors. Despite the fact they were indoors and underground he was still wearing his Oakley sunglasses. ‘Grigory, I need a private word with Mr Grechko,’ said Shepherd.

‘He doesn’t like being disturbed while he’s swimming.’

‘I know that, but this is important.’ Shepherd pressed his thumb against the scanner and tapped in his code before pushing the doors open. Sokolov started to follow Shepherd but Shepherd put a hand on his chest. ‘A private word,’ he said.

‘Dmitry says I’m not to allow strangers alone with Mr Grechko.’

‘I’m not a stranger,’ said Shepherd.

‘You are to me,’ said Sokolov, folding his arms.

‘Call Dmitry, he’ll tell you it’s OK,’ said Shepherd.

Sokolov put his hand up to his Bluetooth earpiece as Shepherd went into the pool room. It had been built in the style of a Roman bath with stone columns and carved figures of naked Roman gods. At one end was a huge stone lion with a plume of water cascading from between its open jaws. Grechko was in the water, swimming lengths with a lot of splashing and grunting. Shepherd realised that the Russian wasn’t wearing trunks; there was a white stripe of untanned skin across his backside.

Grechko was an uncoordinated swimmer, his legs and arms thrashing in the water with an irregular beat, but he was a powerful man and moved at quite a speed. His turns at either end were ungainly and involved him slapping the poolside with his hand before twisting around with a loud grunt and powering himself forward by pushing with his feet. He would keep his face down in the water until he lost momentum and then he would began thrashing and splashing again.

The Russian swam a further ten lengths before climbing out of the pool at the far end. He picked up a towel, slung it over his shoulder, and walked towards Shepherd with a wide grin on his face. ‘You swim naked, Tony?’ he asked.

‘I’m not much of a swimmer,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m more of a runner.’

‘Then you should run naked. All exercise should be done without clothes, the way God intended.’ He began towelling himself dry.

‘There’s something I need to ask you,’ said Shepherd. ‘Miss Button is trying to identify the bodyguards who were working for Zakharov and Czernik before they were killed.’

Grechko stopped towelling himself. ‘She suspects their bodyguards?’

‘It’s too early to say,’ said Shepherd. ‘She’s been in touch with the people at both men’s companies but they’re not being helpful.’

‘And you want me to ask them?’

‘I think you’ll probably have more luck than she’s having. Could you approach them and ask them to cooperate with her?’

Grechko nodded. ‘No problem. But why?’

‘We’re starting to think that the assassinations might have been an inside job,’ said Shepherd.

‘One of their bodyguards killed them?’ Grechko wrapped the towel around his waist and stood with his hands on his hips.

‘It’s possible.’

Grechko jutted his chin up and looked down his nose at Shepherd. ‘This is not good,’ he said.

‘It’s just a theory.’

‘And we could have an inside man on our team? He could be in the house right now?’

‘It’s unlikely,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ve been through the CV of every man on your team, especially the new arrivals. And everyone checks out.’

‘People lie on their CVs.’

‘That’s true. I’m in the process of checking all references, and calling them myself. If I spot any discrepancies, I’ll act immediately.’

The Russian rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know what a Judas goat is?’

‘I know,’ said Shepherd. ‘The bait in a trap. But that’s not what’s going on here, Mr Grechko.’

Grechko stared at Shepherd for several seconds, then he nodded slowly. ‘I trust you, Tony. I’m not sure why I do, but I trust you.’

‘I won’t let you down, Mr Grechko.’

Shepherd spent most of the day in the control centre, reading through the files on the various members of the bodyguarding team. He made more than two dozen calls around the world, checking on references, and found nothing untoward. He decided to go for a run on the Heath and spent an hour and a half running and doing press-ups and sit-ups before running back to the house to shower and change. He was heading to the kitchen to pick up some sandwiches when his mobile rang. It was Button. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’ve checked all the bodyguards for both men and there’s no common dominator,’ she said.

‘No offence but you did check photographs and not just names?’ said Shepherd.

‘No offence taken, Spider, and yes, I had the HR departments send over photographs. There are no matches. I’ll email you all the pictures now so you can check them against your team there. But if there’s no match between Zakharov and Czernik it’s doubtful that there’ll be a match with the men there.’

‘Yeah,’ said Shepherd, running a hand through his hair as he paced up and down the corridor. ‘So we’re no farther forward?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘But that doesn’t make any sense. If the sniper wasn’t shooting bodyguards to insert himself into the close protection teams, what was he doing it for?’

‘That’s a good question,’ she said. ‘I wish I had an answer.’

‘It can’t be a coincidence,’ said Shepherd. He stopped pacing. ‘What if it’s not about inserting himself into the team, but getting an intel source in place?’

‘Someone to feed him information?’

Shepherd’s heart was starting to pound. ‘That’s it. He’s got someone on the inside feeding him information on the target. He puts a bodyguard out of commission and when the target boosts his security the killer gets his own man on board. But it’s a different man each time.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Button. ‘So we’re looking for a connection between the new arrivals, some common denominator.’

‘The common denominator is the killer, because he’s paying them, presumably,’ said Shepherd. ‘But he can’t be pulling their names out of a hat. They must be people that he trusts, which means he’s known them for a long time, worked with them perhaps.’

‘And the killer is a sniper, which suggests military training. The bodyguards are pretty much all Russian, or at least former Soviet Union, so that suggests that the killer is too.’

‘So what you need to do is to compare the work histories of the new arrivals on all three teams and find a common point.’

‘I’m on it,’ she said, and ended the call.

Sheena the chef had prepared a selection of sandwiches and cakes and Shepherd took them back to the control centre.

McIntyre was there on his own when Shepherd opened the door and his eyes sparkled when he saw the food. ‘I could get used to this,’ he said. He took a bite out of one of the sandwiches, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘I might have something useful for you,’ he said.

‘I’m all ears.’

‘Last night the guys were talking about another Russian oligarch who was killed a while back. Name of Buryakov. Know him?’

Shepherd shook his head.

‘According to the guys, he had a heart attack or something. But two months before he died, someone tried to shoot him. A sniper.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Somewhere in Germany, I forget where.’ He grinned. ‘I don’t have your photographic memory, remember?’

‘So a sniper took a shot and missed?’

‘Yeah, just like with Grechko. And just as in Grechko’s case, a bodyguard took a bullet. In the arm.’

Shepherd nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s interesting.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Bit unusual for a sniper to hit the wrong target, right?’

‘Very unusual,’ said Shepherd. Long-range sniping was challenging at the best of times, Shepherd knew from experience. It was easy enough to screw up a kill shot and a sudden change in wind could result in the target being missed completely. But hitting a completely different target, even if they were in close proximity, was rare in the extreme. ‘Who was talking about this?’

‘That skinny guy, the one with the shaved head. What’s his name? Volikov? Volvakov?’

‘Volkov,’ said Shepherd.

‘Yeah, that’s the one. He was talking to that big guy, the one who’s forever watching porn on his iPad. Molotov.’

‘Molchanov,’ corrected Shepherd.

‘Yeah, well, Volkov apparently knows one of the guys who was on this Buryakov’s team. Apparently the round missed Volkov’s mate by inches and hit this other guy. The head of security was fired and the whole thing was hushed up.’

‘Why?’ asked Shepherd.

‘Volkov said it was because this Buryakov reckoned no one would do business with him if they thought he was being targeted like that. Fair point, right? You’d hardly want to sit down with him if at any point a sniper was going to take a pot shot. Collateral damage, and all.’

‘This was all said in Russian, right?’

‘Yeah, they had no idea I was listening. I tell you, some of the things they say about me, I have trouble pretending not to understand. When this is over, I’m going to have a few scores to settle, I can tell you.’

‘Sticks and stones, Jock, remember that.’

McIntyre grinned wolfishly. ‘I won’t be needing sticks or stones,’ he said. ‘My fists’ll do the job just fine.’ He leaned closer to Shepherd and lowered his voice. ‘What about the other thing?’

‘Soon,’ said Shepherd. ‘Lex and I will dig the hole tomorrow night, and Jimbo and Lex are keeping tabs on Khan, making sure we’ve got his movements off pat.’

‘Who’s Pat?’ He laughed when he saw Shepherd’s look of contempt. ‘Just trying to lighten the moment, Spider.’

‘And don’t use my bloody name,’ whispered Shepherd.

‘OK, got you,’ said McIntyre. ‘So we’re ready to go the day after next?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘Two days, three at the most. Lex is keen to get back to Thailand. And the longer we leave it, the more chance there is that something will go wrong.’

‘Nothing’ll go wrong,’ said McIntyre. ‘That bastard deserves what’s coming to him.’

The door opened and Popov walked in. ‘You two are a devious pair,’ he said.

Shepherd felt his cheeks flush. ‘What do you mean?’

Popov grinned and pointed at the plates on the table. ‘You kept quiet about the sandwiches.’ He grabbed a couple of sandwiches and headed for the briefing room. ‘As leader of the pack I’m entitled to first bite of every kill,’ he said.

Charlotte Button arrived at the house at just after midday. Shepherd had called her the previous evening to tell her about the attack on Yuri Buryakov and she had woken him with a 6 a.m. phone call to tell him that she needed a meeting with Grechko.

Grechko was sitting in his study, signing letters with one of his secretaries, a striking Russian blonde called Emma. He didn’t get up when Button and Shepherd entered, in fact he studiously ignored them and continued to sign letters with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. Only when he had finished and Emma was gathering the letters together did he look up. ‘Miss Button, you are becoming a regular visitor.’

‘Something has come up, Mr Grechko,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if we sit?’

Grechko waved at a chair on the other side of the desk. Button sat down but Shepherd went to stand by the window.

Button smiled pleasantly at Grechko. She was wearing a dark blue suit that was almost black and a pale blue silk shirt. ‘Things have moved on since I last came to see you,’ she said. ‘We’ve taken a look at the case of Yuri Buryakov. You were also a friend of Mr Buryakov’s, weren’t you?’

‘It is a small world, Miss Button. There are not many Russians like us and we tend to stick together.’

‘But you were aware that he had died, surely?’

Grechko nodded. ‘Of course. I was at his funeral. But he had a heart attack. He was at a conference and he had the heart attack there and then he died in hospital.’

‘Why didn’t you mention to me that Mr Buryakov had also been the victim of a sniper attack?’

Grechko’s jaw dropped. ‘A sniper?’

‘About two months before he was murdered, a sniper shot at Mr Buryakov. One of his bodyguards was shot in the arm.’

Grechko shook his head. ‘He never mentioned it to me.’

‘Did you see Mr Buryakov before he died?’

‘About three weeks before. We were at a racetrack. Ascot, I think. He owns many racehorses.’ He put up a hand. ‘I’m sorry. Wrong tense. He owned many racehorses,’ he said, correcting himself.

‘And he didn’t say anything about a sniper?’

‘I would have remembered,’ said Grechko. ‘Are you sure about this? I read nothing in the papers.’

‘We have since spoken to members of Mr Buryakov’s former security team and we have confirmation that there was an attempt to shoot him at long range in Berlin. According to the people we spoke to, Mr Buryakov didn’t want anyone to know. He saw the attack as a sign of weakness on his part. One of his bodyguards was hit in the arm and was paid a substantial sum for his silence.’

Grechko frowned. ‘So he was attacked by a sniper, and then he died. Exactly the same as happened to Oleg.’

‘You see the pattern, then? Yes, Oleg Zakharov narrowly escaped being shot by a sniper. Then he died. And the same happened to Mr Buryakov.’

Grechko sat back and folded his arms. His face had gone as hard as stone. ‘Yuri had a heart attack.’

‘And you yourself were recently shot at by a sniper. Possibly the same sniper who shot at Mr Zakharov and Buryakov.’

Grechko’s eyes fixed on Button. ‘What are you saying?’ he said, his voice a low growl.

‘I think you know what I’m saying, Mr Grechko,’ she said. ‘There is every likelihood that you will be attacked again. Not by a sniper, but by an assassin who is much closer.’

‘I keep telling you, Yuri wasn’t assassinated. He had a heart attack.’

‘Heart attacks can be induced.’

‘This makes no sense to me,’ he said. ‘If they are using an assassin, why use a sniper first? And how is it that the sniper misses?’

‘Well, did he miss, that’s the question,’ said Button. ‘Did he miss, or was he shooting at the bodyguards?’

‘Why would he deliberately shoot a bodyguard?’ growled Grechko. ‘Bodyguards are ten a penny.’

‘Thank you,’ said Shepherd quietly.

Grechko turned to scowl at him but Shepherd was already looking out of the window.

‘That’s a very good question,’ said Button. ‘But until we have the answer, I’m going to suggest that you minimise your travel arrangements, and increase your security. After what happened to Mr Zakharov, Mr Czernik and Mr Buryakov, I think you have to be very, very careful until we identify this man and apprehend him.’

‘Apprehend him?’ said Grechko? ‘When you find out who he is you tell me and I’ll have him taken care of.’

‘That’s not how we do things in this country,’ said Button.

‘Which is one of the many things wrong with it,’ said Grechko. ‘When you catch him you need to get him to give up the person who is paying him. It won’t be enough to just talk to him severely with that stiff upper lip of yours. Some Russian persuasion will loosen his tongue, though.’

‘We are perfectly capable of handling this, Mr Grechko,’ said Button, icily.

‘You need to get him to tell you the truth, that he is working for those bastards in the Kremlin,’ said Grechko. ‘You need him to tell you and then you need to go public.’

‘If that’s the case, then of course that information will be released. But one step at time, Mr Grechko. First we need to catch him.’ Button took a deep breath, knowing that the Russian would not react well to what she was about to say. ‘Mr Grechko, we are coming to the opinion that the attempt on your life is personal, not political.’

‘Of course it’s personal,’ said Grechko. ‘The dogs in the Kremlin hate my guts. They hate anyone who is richer than they are.’

‘We don’t think it has anything to do with the Russian government,’ said Button patiently. ‘What the killer is doing indicates that he is on a personal mission rather than being paid to kill.’

Grechko threw up his hands. ‘You’re talking in riddles, woman,’ he said contemptuously. ‘A sniper almost took off my head. How can that not be a professional hit?’

‘Have you ever paid for someone to be killed, Mr Grechko?’ asked Button quietly.

Grechko’s eyes hardened and his jaw clenched as he stared at her. ‘I would be very careful about making allegations like that, Miss Button,’ he said eventually. ‘Your prime minister is a good friend. He would not be pleased to hear that you have made an accusation like that.’

‘I was speaking hypothetically, Mr Grechko. Because if, hypothetically, you were hiring an assassin, would you hire one who could not do the job properly? Of course you wouldn’t. And I am equally sure that if the Russian government was using an assassin, they would use the best. There have been a number of very successful assassinations of Russians in the UK over the last few years, as I’m sure you know.’

Grechko nodded slowly. ‘You are saying that the man who tried to kill me is not a professional?’

Button shook her head. ‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. But I am saying that if a professional sniper wanted to put a bullet in your head, it’s quite a stretch to shoot a bodyguard in the leg instead.’ She leaned forward. ‘We are starting to think that the sniper intended to shoot the bodyguard. He did that for two reasons. To scare you. And to force you to increase your security arrangements.’

‘Scare me? You think I am scared?’

Button shrugged. ‘If you know that someone is trying to kill you, you would obviously be apprehensive, wouldn’t you? And what did you do immediately after the attempt on your life?’

‘I beefed up security.’

‘You hired more people?’

‘Of course. But not out of fear, Miss Button. Do I look like I’m shaking in my shoes?’ He held out his hands, palms down. ‘See, no trembling. I am not a man who scares easily.’ He sat back and folded his arms, then he slowly frowned. Button said nothing, knowing that it would be better if he worked it out for himself. His eyes widened and he put his hand up to his jaw. ‘He wanted me to increase my security?’

‘We think so, yes,’ said Button quietly. ‘We think it is possible that he has put his own person on your team. Somebody who is feeding him intel so that the next attempt doesn’t fail.’

Grechko pointed at Shepherd. ‘I already told him I won’t be a Judas goat,’ he said. ‘I will not be bait in a trap.’

‘There is no trap, Mr Grechko,’ said Button. ‘This is an on-going investigation. So far I have cross-referenced the security teams of all four of you and there are no common denominators.’

Grechko scowled. ‘OK, let’s assume that what you’re saying is true. That the sniper didn’t want to kill me, he only wanted to scare me so that I would hire more bodyguards. Why go to all that trouble? Why not just shoot me at Stamford Bridge? He knew where I’d be, he had a clear shot, why not do it then?’

Button looked across at Shepherd. He was watching her carefully and she flashed him a quick smile before looking back at Grechko. ‘Because for the killer it’s personal. He wants you to know who he is. You’ve done something to this man, something that he wants to punish you for.’

Grechko ran a hand through his hair. ‘Where have you got this idea from, Miss Button?’ he said. ‘It seems to me that you’ve been watching too many James Bond movies.’

Button picked up her briefcase and swung it on to her lap. She clicked the locks open and took out an A4 manila envelope. She put the briefcase back on the floor and slid three photographs out of the envelope and lined them up on the coffee table. Grechko walked back to the sofa and sat down. He put his head in his hands as he stared at the photographs.

‘Oleg Zakharov, Yuri Buryakov, Sasha Czernik. All three men were friends, and business contacts.’

It wasn’t a question but Grechko nodded and said, ‘Yes.’

‘All three are now dead.’

Grechko put up his hand to stop her. ‘Sasha had a heart attack.’

‘He was, as you say, forty-five and had no history of heart problems.’

‘He was overweight,’ said Grechko. ‘Fat.’

‘But according to his physician, his heart was healthy, his cholesterol levels were well within the normal range and his blood pressure was fine.’

‘You checked?’

Button smiled and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I checked. There was no reason for Mr Czernik to have had a heart attack. But there are a number of chemicals which if injected are perfectly capable of mimicking the effects of a heart attack.’

‘There was an autopsy. They would have found a poison.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Button. ‘There have been a number of Russian deaths in the UK over the past year or so which have been suspicious but which have shown nothing untoward during the post-mortems.’

‘The same killer, you think?’

‘No, not at all. I’m just pointing out that it’s possible to kill someone by inducing a heart attack and leaving no trace.’ She gave him a second or two to absorb what she had said before continuing. ‘We have made further enquiries into the deaths of Mr Czernik, Mr Zakharov and Mr Buryakov,’ she said. ‘In each case, within the week following their deaths, a bodyguard died. One from what appeared to be a heart attack, one crashed his car into a tree, and one died in what appeared to be a street mugging. All three of those bodyguards had taken their posts when security was increased.’

Button sat back and waited for the information to sink in. Shepherd could see that the Russian was having difficulty processing what he’d been told. He kept looking at Button, then at the floor, then back to Button, as the creases in his forehead deepened. ‘He has inside information,’ said Grechko eventually. ‘That’s how he kills them. And then he kills the people on the inside. He knows their security details, he knows everything?’

‘It looks that way, yes.’

Grechko sat back and ran his hands through his hair. ‘So what do we do? If you’re right, the killer already has his man on my team.’

‘Or woman,’ said Shepherd.

Grechko looked over at Shepherd. ‘Woman?’

‘Alina Podolski joined your team after the sniping incident,’ said Shepherd.

‘She came highly recommended,’ said Grechko.

‘By whom?’

‘Dmitry,’ said Grechko. ‘He said he’d worked with her.’ He turned back to Button. ‘You haven’t answered my question. What do we do? Do I dismiss my whole team and bring in a new one?’

‘There’s no guarantee that the killer wouldn’t have his own man – or woman – on the new team,’ said Button. ‘At least now we know we have a relatively small pool of suspects to work on. We’re assuming that everyone on your security team prior to the sniping is clean. So we only have to look at the new arrivals, of which there are …’ She looked over at Shepherd.

‘Six,’ he said.

‘So we have six possible suspects.’

‘I want them out of the house now,’ said Grechko. He made a fist of his right hand and pounded it into his left. ‘Actually, I’ve a better idea, let Dmitry work on them, he’ll find out who the traitor is.’

Button held up her hands, a look of dismay on her face. ‘That would be absolutely the wrong thing to do,’ she said. ‘It would immediately tip off the killer and he would vanish.’

‘At least then I would be safe.’

‘But for how long? You would never know if or when he intended to come back to finish the job.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, we need to identify the intel source and follow that back to the killer.’

‘And how do you intend to do that, exactly?’

‘We’ll need the mobile phone numbers of all your staff. Plus home addresses, addresses here in the UK if they have one, and any other information you have.’

‘Dmitry can supply you with everything you need,’ said Grechko. ‘I’ll talk to him. What about lie detectors?’

‘Lie detectors?’ repeated Button.

‘You have them, surely? To tell if people are lying. We can question everyone and see who is lying.’

‘Again, that might tip the killer off,’ said Button, standing up. ‘I think for the moment at least we should confine ourselves to thorough background checks and phone monitoring.’ She leaned forward and looked down at the three photographs. ‘There is something I found a little … unusual,’ she said.

Grechko jutted his chin but didn’t say anything.

‘Mr Zakharov made his money in finance and property. He started with a small office block in Moscow and grew it into one of the biggest property developers in the country.’ She tapped the photograph of Yuri Buryakov. ‘Mr Buryakov made his money in oil. He started with a small refinery and built it into one of the world’s biggest independent oil companies.’ She nudged the third photograph. ‘And Sasha Czernik. Steel and aluminium. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, he was an assistant manager at a steel smelting plant in Kazan. Within five years he owned a dozen factories, blast and steel-making furnaces, steel smelting and rolling units, pipe-manufacturing lines and continuous casting machines. Now his company is one of the biggest steel and aluminium conglomerates in the world with factories in Italy, Germany and Brazil, and he had just started moving into Africa.’

Grechko nodded slowly. ‘Sasha did well, yes.’

‘You all did well, Mr Grechko,’ said Button. She gathered up the pictures, put them back in the envelope and put the envelope into her briefcase. ‘Amazingly well. In 1992 you yourself were a middle manager in a trucking company that moved building materials for the government.’

‘Before 1992, everybody worked for the government,’ said Grechko. ‘There was no private sector.’ He grinned. ‘Not officially, anyway.’

‘That’s right,’ said Button. ‘I read somewhere that you made your money selling second-hand jeans.’

Grechko laughed. ‘Not just second-hand,’ he said. He banged his hands down on to his knees. ‘You couldn’t buy Western jeans for love nor money. So when I wasn’t working I used to hang around the tourist hotels and look for Western teenagers. I’d offer them whatever I could for jeans, worn or otherwise. Sometimes I’d do a swap for vodka or some crap souvenirs, but if they wanted money I’d give them money because I could sell them for three times as much on the black market. The Russian kids, they couldn’t get enough Levi’s and Wrangler’s.’ He laughed and slapped his knees again. ‘Those were the days.’

‘The interesting thing about the four of you is that you have all been friends for a very long time,’ said Button. ‘And you have all become very, very rich. To be honest, you four are among the richest men on the planet.’

‘So? We all worked very hard to get where we are.’

‘I’m sure you did, Mr Grechko. But I do find it interesting that your businesses are all so different. Oil and gas, banking and property, steel and aluminium, trucking and shipping. You were never in competition.’

Grechko laughed. ‘Perhaps that’s why we remained friends for so long.’

Button smiled thinly and nodded. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ she said. ‘But it is interesting that you all started from nothing, all moved into different businesses, and all became very wealthy, and now three of the four are dead. And it’s starting to look as if the same man killed the three of them and is trying to kill you.’

Grechko’s eyes had hardened as she spoke. ‘The dogs in the Kremlin hate us all,’ he said quietly. ‘And they kill what they hate.’

‘That may be,’ said Button. ‘But the more we look at this, Mr Grechko, the more it seems to us that these killings are not political. They are personal.’

Grechko said nothing, but both his hands clenched into tight fists and his knuckles whitened.

‘So I have to ask you, can you think of anyone who might want to murder you, Mr Zakharov, Mr Buryakov and Mr Czernik? Someone you crossed over the years, someone out for revenge?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Grechko.

‘What exactly do you think is ridiculous?’

Grechko leaned towards her. ‘You know what Putin has been doing? You have seen what happens to people who cross him. Why do you want me to jump at shadows when I know who is trying to kill me?’

‘Because if this is personal then understanding the killer’s motive means we will stand a better chance of identifying him.’

Grechko stared at her for several seconds, then he shrugged. ‘I can’t think of anyone.’

‘But you have enemies?’

Grechko snorted contemptuously. ‘The world does not give you money, Miss Button. You have to take it. The strong get rich and the weak stay poor. That’s how natural selection works. If it did not work that way, the entire world would be communist.’

‘So I’ll take that as a yes.’

Grechko waved away her comment with a flick of his hand. ‘You wouldn’t understand, you have spent your whole life under a capitalist system,’ he said. ‘You have a nice car, I have seen it. A BMW. You wear that nice Cartier watch and I am sure that you are treated by the very best private doctors. You have children?’

‘A daughter,’ said Button.

‘And I am sure that she is privately educated. You reap all the benefits of living in a capitalist country.’ He bared his teeth and tapped the front two with his finger. ‘Do you see my teeth, Miss Button? My wonderfully even, white teeth? They cost me fifty thousand dollars. Why? Because when I was a child I had state-supplied dental care and the drunken dentist they let loose on me was more concerned about his vodka than his patients. By the time I was twelve, half my teeth were rotten. I had a basic education, I had crap food, I wore cheap clothing and I lived with my parents in a flat close to a munitions factory that was exactly the same as the flat of every other family. We had the same furniture, the same cutlery, the same oven, the same refrigerator, everything was the same as our neighbours. The only difference was the colour of the sofa, which changed each year. My parents had the 1983 sofa. It was green.’

Button opened her mouth to speak but Grechko held up his hand to silence her. ‘Every child got the same bicycle. Your parents put your name down for it when you were born and it was delivered on your fifth birthday. Every bike was the same. There was a black economy, of course there was, how else could I buy and sell my jeans. But it was small and it was illegal and, my God, did they punish you if they caught you. So eventually I got a job working in a shitty office for a man who thought his mission in life was to treat me like a serf. Then I got married and was given my own flat and my own sofa, which was blue, and yes, I bought and sold jeans on the black market because it was the only way I could lift myself out of the shit that is the communist system. I did what I had to do, Miss Button, and you would have done the same. Then in 1992, everything changed. The reins were loosened. Finally people were allowed to think for themselves, to act for themselves. But we still had nothing. So if you wanted something, you had to take it. You had to grab it with both hands before someone else took it and once you had it you had to make sure that no one took it from you. No one owned anything before 1992, can you understand that? Everything belonged to the state. And no one gave you anything, you had to take it. Those that took, got rich. Those that sat on their backsides stayed poor. So if you’re asking me if I trod on a few feet to get where I am today, then yes, of course I did. And I broke a few heads. So did Oleg, so did Yuri and so did Sasha. And so did all of the oligarchs that you are so quick to welcome to your shores. None of us are angels, Miss Button, but you overlook that fact in your rush to take our money.’ He could see that she was about to object but he silenced her with another curt wave of his hand. ‘Not you personally, I’m not saying that, but your political masters. Do you have any idea how much I have paid them over the years? Millions. Literally millions. And like pigs they stick their snouts in the trough and demand more. And not just to their parties. They come in person with their grasping hands out. Members of your House of Lords, the highest office in the land, sticking their tongues up my arse to get what they want. Former prime ministers asking me to hire them as consultants for a million dollars a year.’ He sneered dismissively. ‘Money is all that matters to them, so you insult me by suggesting that I have done anything wrong in trying to better myself. Would you rather that I was still working ten hours a day collating timesheets and checking milometers and going home to a flat with a blue plastic sofa and sandpaper sheets and looking forward, if I was lucky, to a week by the Black Sea once a year?’

‘Of course not,’ said Button. ‘And please don’t take offence from what I’ve said. But with the greatest of respect, can I ask you to just consider that there might be someone from your past who is behind this, someone who might have a grudge against you.’ She didn’t wait for him to reply, she picked up her briefcase, stood up and extended her right hand. ‘Anyway, be assured we will do our absolute best to protect you,’ she said.

Grechko stood up and shook her hand. He smiled, but it lacked any human warmth, it was more an animal-like baring of his fifty-thousand-dollar dental work. ‘I am grateful for all your help with this,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are a very busy woman.’

‘Trust me, Mr Grechko, you are right at the top of my list of priorities.’

Grechko released his grip on her hand and walked with her to the door. ‘I’ll show Miss Button out,’ said Shepherd. ‘Then I’ll go and have a chat with Dmitry.’

Grechko nodded and went over to a phone as Shepherd walked with Button along the hallway and out through the front door. Her black BMW was parked in the turning circle. ‘I thought you were going to ask him if he’d killed anyone on his route to the top,’ said Shepherd.

‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ said Button. ‘He won’t listen, will he?’

‘He’s sure that it’s the Kremlin behind the killings. But if he has got some skeletons in his past, he’s hardly likely to tell you, is he?’

‘Well, it’s making our job a lot harder,’ said Button. She took her key fob out of her pocket. ‘We’re going to take a closer look at Zakharov, Buryakov and Czernik.’

‘He might have a point,’ said Shepherd. ‘About the lie detector.’

Button wrinkled her nose. ‘I meant what I said. Anything out of the ordinary might spook the killer.’

‘I get that, but what if we made it look like the lie detector was for some other reason?’

‘I’m listening.’

Shepherd chuckled. ‘That’s all I have, unfortunately. But we could handle it so that all the staff have to take a lie detector test. Obviously we’re just interested in the six new arrivals to the bodyguard team.’

‘And we ask them right out if they’re helping a potential assassin?’

‘We’d need a good operator, that’s for sure. But he could be looking for general signs of nervousness. I’m just saying, the background checks haven’t turned anything up yet, which means that we’re pinning a lot on phone records. But if this assassin is as good as we think he is, I don’t see him giving much away on the phone.’

‘That’s a fair point,’ said Button.

‘I don’t mean to sound negative. I just think we might need to be a bit more proactive.’

Button unlocked the BMW. ‘On that front, you need to get closer to the six newcomers. See if your Spidery sense tingles.’

Shepherd chuckled. ‘I’ve met all six of them. And they all seem kosher.’

‘But then they would, wouldn’t they? You need to have a closer look, and I’ll talk to our technical people, see if they have any suggestions. And be careful, Spider. If the killer does have his own person on board, he’ll probably move quickly.’ She got into her car, started the engine and waved before driving off. The electric gate was already rattling open. As Shepherd turned back to the house he saw Grechko at the window. Shepherd nodded but Grechko didn’t see him, he was staring at Button’s BMW as it drove through the gate and turned into The Bishops Avenue.

The New Forest consists of more than two hundred square miles of pasture, heath and woodland and is the perfect place for dog-walking, horse-riding, exploring ancient monuments, and disposing of a body. Shepherd knew that the best way of getting away with murder was to make sure that the body was never found, which was why he and Harper were driving through the New Forest looking for a suitable place for a grave. They had driven there in a white Transit van that Harper had bought from a dealer in Croydon. It still had the details of a plumbing firm painted on the sides and a cartoon of a dog in a flat cap cleaning a drain across the rear doors. Harper had paid in cash and had swapped the plates for a set showing the number of a similar van he’d seen in central London.

Harper had driven the van, leaving London on the M3 as it began to get dark, turning on to the M27 and then following the A31 for ten miles before, on Shepherd’s instructions, turning off on an unnamed road that twisted and turned through thick woodland. There were no street lights and no other vehicles around so Harper had the lights on full beam, carving tunnels of light out of the darkness. Shepherd pointed ahead. ‘OK, let’s see if we can turn off somewhere here, some place where the trees are far enough apart for us to drive in a ways.’ He’d spent an hour or so perusing a map of the New Forest so he knew exactly where they were.

Harper slowed down and indicated he was going to turn, then laughed at his stupidity and switched off the indicator. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. He slowed the van to a crawl, then spotted a gap in the trees and turned off the road. The van bucked and rocked and the steering wheel twisted and turned as if it had a life of its own. He managed to get a hundred feet or so before the trees were so close together that he had to stop. He braked and switched off the engine. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

‘Should be OK,’ said Shepherd. He opened the passenger door and stepped out. The only sound was the clicking of the engine as it cooled. He blinked slowly as his night vision slowly kicked in. There was no way of telling which way the road was, other than by the tracks in the mud.

Harper climbed out of his side of the van. ‘What about poachers?’

‘Poachers?’

‘Yeah, poachers.’

‘You might as well worry about a UFO landing where we are,’ said Shepherd. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere. And tonight we’re just digging a hole.’

He walked around to the rear of the van and opened the doors. There were two brand-new spades there that Harper had bought from a garden centre before picking up Shepherd. Shepherd took them out, handed one to Harper, and shut the doors. ‘We need to walk a bit farther,’ he said, nodding at the vegetation. ‘Fifty feet or so should do it.’

He walked through the trees, the spade on his shoulder. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket and had tied a scarf around his neck. Harper, as always, had on his parka, the hood up. Shepherd trod carefully – the ground was uneven and protruding tree roots threatened to trip him at every step. They reached a small clearing and Shepherd motioned for Harper to stop. The two men stood in silence, their breath feathering in the night air. A fox barked off in the distance and then went quiet. Shepherd tested the ground with his spade. ‘This’ll do it,’ he said.

The two men began to dig and soon worked up a sweat. After ten minutes of hard digging Shepherd took off his jacket and scarf and put them at the base of a spreading beech tree. ‘The way you’ve organised this, it’s like you’ve done it before,’ said Harper, resting on his spade. He looked around. ‘You got any more bodies buried out here, Spider?’

‘I haven’t, but it’s the disposal area of choice for London’s underworld.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Sure,’ said Shepherd. ‘Despite what you see on the TV, we’re not awash with serial killers and professional assassins. But they are out there, and the good ones never get caught. And the reason they never get caught is that the bodies are never found.’ He took a deep breath and flexed his shoulders. He was physically fit but the earth was hard and his arms and back were already aching. ‘There are anywhere between six hundred and seven hundred murders a year in the United Kingdom, an average of about two a day. The vast majority are committed by a friend or family member, or a neighbour, and are wrapped up by the cops in a couple of hours, a day at the most. More often than not, the murderer’s at the scene when the cops turn up, grief stricken and ready to confess.’

‘Yeah, well, we won’t be doing that, that’s for sure,’ said Harper. He took out his cigarettes, lit one and blew smoke up at the night sky. It was a cloudless night and away from the city all the stars were visible overhead, stretching off into infinity.

‘See, the key to solving any murder, assuming the killer doesn’t immediately confess, is to find the motive. If you know why someone has been killed you almost certainly know who by. And that’s why it’s almost impossible to catch a serial killer who kills at random, or a professional who does it for money.’

‘That’s why the cops profile, right?’

‘Yeah, all serial killers are white middle-aged men who wet their beds and set fire to their pets when they were kids,’ said Shepherd, his voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘It’s not as simple as that. You watch TV and you think that catching serial killers is easy, but in fact profiling is next to useless. Look at the Yorkshire Ripper. White middle-aged male killing hookers in Leeds. That’s as specific a profile as you could wish for. They spent millions trying to get him and they caught him by accident. Fred West? They only got him because he was so stupid he let one of his victims escape. And he buried his victims under his house.’ He pointed at the hole they were digging. ‘The real professionals – the ones that think about what they’re doing – they make sure their victims are never found. Because without a body it’s almost impossible to get a conviction.’

‘It happens, though.’

‘Only where there’s a clear motive. Which is why no one must ever know why Khan has been killed. With no motive and no body, the cops won’t get anywhere, even if they suspect foul play. But if we do this right, it won’t even get to that. People go missing every year. Any idea how many?’

Harper shook his head.

‘Over two hundred thousand,’ said Shepherd. ‘That’s how many are reported missing. Now, all but two thousand or so turn up over the following year, but two thousand is still a hell of a lot, and unless there’s some sign of a crime the cops just don’t have the resources to follow them up. Unless they’re kids. Everything changes if kids are involved, obviously.’

Harper took a long pull on his cigarette, blew smoke, then extinguished it on the sole of his trainers and slipped the butt into the pocket of his parka. He nodded at the hole. ‘Isn’t that deep enough?’ They had dug down just over two feet and shovelled the earth into a neat pile.

‘There’s a reason that gravediggers go down six feet,’ said Shepherd. ‘Any less than that and there isn’t enough weight to keep the coffin down. The earth really does give up the dead unless you plant them well deep.’ He dropped down into the hole and started to dig again.

Harper watched him, grinning. ‘Sadly there’s only room for one of us in there.’

‘We’ll take it in turns,’ said Shepherd. He worked hard for another ten minutes and stepped out to let Harper took his place. The more they dug the harder it became. The earth was stonier and more tightly packed and once they got below four feet it was hard to move in the hole. It took them an hour to go down the last two feet but finally Shepherd was satisfied. He was in the hole and Harper had to offer him an arm to pull him out. It was six feet deep, just over six feet long and varied in width from three feet to four feet.

‘Can you do the GPS thing with the mobile?’ asked Shepherd.

Harper nodded and pulled out a cheap Samsung phone. He switched it on and scrolled through the menu. ‘What the hell did we do before mobiles?’ he asked.

‘We’d have drawn a map with a cross on it,’ said Shepherd. ‘Seriously.’

Harper laughed, tapped on the screen and showed it to Shepherd. ‘All done,’ he said.

‘Bring your spade,’ said Shepherd, and he headed back to the van. Harper followed him. They tossed the spades into the back of the van and closed the doors. Harper took a deep breath. ‘I’ll be glad when this is over,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ agreed Shepherd.

‘But it needs to be done, right?’

Shepherd nodded. ‘No question about that,’ he said.

Shepherd had just got back to his Hampstead flat when his phone rang. It was Button. ‘Sorry to bother you so late, but our interrogation boys have come back to me about the lie detector idea,’ said Button. ‘They seem to think that it’s workable. The latest equipment is a lot more reliable than it used to be, and they’ve had some quite noticeable successes over the last few months.’

‘OK …’ said Shepherd, hesitantly.

‘They came up with quite a clever idea, I think. If Grechko says that he’s had an expensive watch gone missing, he could request that all his staff be put through a lie detector. Everyone, his cooks, maids, serving staff, cleaners – and the security staff, of course. Now, because nobody has actually stolen the watch, everyone should pass with flying colours. But our guys can put in a few general questions, such as “Have you ever given details about the security arrangements at the house to anyone else”, and that should show up anyone who is helping our elusive killer. But in a way that doesn’t raise any suspicions. What do you think?’

‘I guess so,’ said Shepherd.

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘No, it’s not a bad idea. You’re right, if the maids and cleaners are done first, the bodyguards won’t realise it’s about them. What about the timing?’

‘That’s the problem, of course,’ said Button. ‘It’s best if the same operator performs all the tests. It maintains consistency. And each test will take at least half an hour.’

‘Grechko has a big staff.’

‘Exactly. Including gardeners and maintenance workers, we’re looking at about fifty people. Assuming two an hour, ten hours a day, it’ll take three days to clear them all. And that’s pretty hard going for the operator. It can be as stressful for them as for the people taking the test, it requires a lot of concentration.’

‘And we can’t put all the new bodyguards in the first day because that would look suspicious.’

‘Perhaps not. We could say that we’re doing the new arrivals first.’

‘Except that if anyone was stealing it’d be more likely to be the cleaning staff or the serving staff.’

‘I agree, it’s a difficult line to tread. But we’re not having much luck on the phone front and I do worry that if we don’t do something, the killer might try again. I’m going to run this by Mr Grechko first thing in the morning and if he’s agreeable I’ll get our lie detector guy out there in the afternoon. Strike while the iron’s hot. If there’s anyone you think should be looked at urgently, feel free to put the names forward.’

‘Will do,’ said Shepherd.

‘OK, we’ll talk tomorrow. Sleep tight.’

The line went dead and Shepherd put down the phone. He couldn’t go to sleep yet. He had to shower to get rid of the New Forest dirt and then he had to put his clothes through the washing machine, twice. And his boots had to be thoroughly cleaned to remove all traces of what he had been doing that night.

Shepherd arrived at the house at seven and got to the briefing room to find that the chef had delivered a plate of egg and bacon rolls, a large bowl of creamy kedgeree and a plate of croissants. McIntyre was already tucking into a roll and he grinned at Shepherd. ‘You didn’t tell me how good the scoff was,’ he said.

‘Scoff?’ repeated Popov, who was sitting at the head of the table with a notepad in front of him.

‘Food,’ translated Shepherd.

Grigory Sokolov was making coffee and he looked over at Shepherd. Shepherd flashed a thumbs-up in answer to the unspoken question and Sokolov handed him a mug of coffee.

‘What’s today looking like?’ Shepherd asked Popov.

‘Quiet,’ said Popov. ‘We have three visitors during the day, and four guests for dinner. I’ll run all the details by you but they have all been here before.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Where the hell is Leo? He’ll be late for his own funeral.’ At the exact moment he finished speaking the door opened and Tarasov appeared. He apologised for his lateness and sat down, pushing his Oakleys up on top of his head.

After the briefing, Shepherd went out into the garden and called Shortt. ‘Tomorrow, is tomorrow good for you?’ he asked Shortt.

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Shortt. ‘How did you get on last night?’

‘Lex had me doing most of the manual work but we’ve got it done. We’ve got the van sorted and the guns. So we need to do it as soon as possible.’

‘Why not today?’

‘I’ve got a lot on and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get away. But tomorrow should be good and I’ll send Jock over to yours during the day.’

‘I’ll make sure the little woman’s playing golf,’ said Shortt.

‘See you tomorrow, then.’ Shepherd ended the call. He looked at his watch. It was just after half past eight. He figured that it would be late morning at least before he heard from Button so he changed into his running gear and went for a run on Hampstead Heath for the best part of an hour.

When he returned to the house he showered and changed and went back to the security centre, where McIntyre was monitoring the CCTV monitors. ‘This is one hell of a system,’ he said to Shepherd, nodding at the screens.

‘The best that money can buy,’ said Shepherd. ‘It switches to IR at night, and all the cameras are motion and heat sensitive. Where’s Popov?’

‘Grechko wanted to see him.’

‘Did he say why?’

McIntyre shook his head. Shepherd went into the briefing room to make himself a coffee. He was just adding milk when Popov stormed in. ‘You won’t believe this,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Shepherd, even though he had a pretty good idea what was upsetting the man.

‘The boss has lost a watch. And he thinks it’s been stolen.’

‘I would think he could live without a watch,’ said Shepherd.

Popov busied himself at the coffee machine. ‘Not this one,’ he said. ‘It’s a Patek Philippe worth four million dollars.’

Shepherd whistled. ‘Four million dollars?’

‘It’s one of his favourites. He’s had it for years. He said it was in his study yesterday and went missing some time in the afternoon.’

‘Is he calling in the cops?’ asked Shepherd.

‘He’s got a better idea. He’s bringing in a lie detector expert and he wants everyone in the house to be tested. And he wants you in there supervising.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Because you’re a cop and for some reason he trusts you more than me. I have to say, Tony, this really pisses me off.’ He turned to face Shepherd. ‘It’s as if he doesn’t trust me. Does he think I stole his bloody watch?’

‘It’s more that he wants an outsider supervising,’ said Shepherd. ‘Someone impartial.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll be the first one to be tested, that’s for sure.’ He grimaced and sat down. ‘I’ll tell you this much, when I find out who stole the watch, I’ll personally castrate them.’

The lie detector expert arrived at just after three. His name was Jules Lee and he was Chinese but spoke English with a strong Newcastle accent. He was driving a Volvo estate and, to show his displeasure, Popov insisted that Sokolov and Tarasov searched Lee and his car thoroughly and checked his ID before allowing him to drive into the underground parking area. Shepherd went with him. ‘They’re letting us use the library for the tests,’ said Shepherd. ‘Is there anything you need?’

‘I’ve got everything with me,’ said Lee. He was a small man, barely over five feet, and was sitting on a cushion to see over the steering wheel. It was difficult to judge his age as his face was almost unnaturally smooth and devoid of wrinkles or blemishes, but there were dark liver spots on his hands that suggested he was in his fifties. He was wearing round wire-framed glasses and a grey suit and had a thin gold wedding band.

‘What about a translator?’ asked Shepherd. ‘Is it better to do it in English or Russian?’ He pointed to a parking space.

‘Either will be fine,’ said Lee, reversing into the space. ‘I’m fluent in both.’

‘Seriously?’

Lee grinned. ‘I speak six languages,’ he said. ‘What can I say? I had a tiger mother. She wasn’t above paddling my backside if I didn’t remember a hundred new words by bedtime.’

‘And Charlie’s explained everything?’

Lee nodded and switched off the engine. ‘It’s an interesting one,’ he said. ‘Challenging.’

Shepherd took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and gave it to Lee. ‘These are the six who joined Grechko’s security team after the sniping attempt,’ he said. ‘Max Barsky, Thomas Lisko, Alina Podolski, Viktor Alexsandrov, Timofei Domashevich and Yakov Gunter. Of the six I think that Domashevich is the …’

Lee held up his hand. ‘Best not to influence me,’ he said.

‘Understood,’ said Shepherd. ‘Did Charlie explain that we need to question those six at random so that no one realises they are being singled out?’

‘She did,’ said Lee. He put the paper in his pocket, popped the rear door and climbed out of the car. Popov came walking down the ramp towards them.

‘He doesn’t seem happy,’ said Lee, opening the rear door.

‘His nose is a bit out of joint, but he’s OK,’ said Shepherd.

Lee’s equipment was in two metal cases and he insisted that he carry them both. Popov led the way to the lift. He pressed his thumb against the scanner, entered his four-digit code and walked into the lift first.

When they arrived at the ground floor, Popov led them along to the library. Two tables had been set up in the middle of the room with two high-backed chrome and leather chairs. ‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked.

‘This will be fine,’ said Lee, placing the two cases on one of the tables. ‘I would like a glass of water if you have it, and perhaps green tea?’

‘I’m not a fucking butler,’ said Popov, but he put up a hand in apology when Shepherd glared at him. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you tea and water.’

He left the room and Shepherd watched as Lee assembled his equipment. Shepherd wasn’t sure what to expect – he’d seen polygraphs in movies and they always had lots of needles moving across graph paper, but Lee’s kit seemed to be a regular laptop, albeit in a brushed stainless steel case. Lee connected two rubber straps to the computer, and several other attachments, which he laid out on the second table.

Popov returned with a tray on which there was a bottle of water and a glass of ice, and a handleless cup with steaming green tea. He put the tray on the table and sat down. ‘You can do me first,’ he said.

‘I have a list to work through,’ said Lee as he tapped on his keyboard.

‘If you are to question any members of my team, you will do me first,’ said Popov.

Lee looked over at Shepherd, and Shepherd nodded. Lee fastened the rubber straps around Popov’s barrel-like chest, attached a white clip to his left index finger and asked him to remove his tie and open his shirt. Popov did as asked and Lee dabbed two electrodes with gel and placed them on his shoulder blades.

‘OK?’ said Popov, as Lee went to sit in the chair and looked at his computer. ‘Right? I did not steal Mr Grechko’s fucking watch. I have never stolen a fucking watch. I will never steal a fucking watch.’ He scowled at Lee. ‘Are we done?’

Lee looked at him over the top of his glasses. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t quite as simple as that,’ he said.

Monotok woke with a start, his heart racing. He stared up at the ceiling and took slow deep breaths. He’d always had bad dreams but the nightmares were visiting him more often now and he didn’t understand why that would be. Three of the men were dead and the fourth would be dead soon and he had always believed that killing them would end the nightmares.

The dreams were never the same, not exactly. But they always involved the death of his parents, or the man who had taken care of him after they had died – Boronin, the farmer.

Monotok was six years old when the Berlin Wall had fallen. He’d watched it happen on television with his mother and father, and his father had told him then that the world – their world – was about to change for ever. Monotok wasn’t called the Hammer back then, of course, he was little Kirill, a sickly child who caught every bug going, with pale skin and spindly arms and legs that never seemed to get any stronger no matter how much food his mother forced down him. ‘Kirill, soon the world will open up to us Russians, and we must be ready to take advantage of it.’ Monotok’s father was the manager of a steel factory some two hundred miles east of Moscow, a huge hellish place of flames and smoke that always filled Monotok with a mixture of dread and awe whenever his father took him to visit.

It seemed to the young boy that the factory was staffed by giants, big men stained with soot and sweat with bulging muscles and rippling chests who communicated with nods and grunts but who smiled whenever they saw how scared he was, hiding from them behind his father’s legs.

Monotok was eight when the Soviet Union fell apart, and again his father had tried to explain the significance of the monumental event. He had chosen his words carefully, because even as the Soviet Union collapsed, the KGB were still everywhere and the state came down heavily on dissenters. Monotok remembered little about what his father had said, other than that he was excited about the prospect of being given more responsibility at work and that the government would let him run the factory the way he wanted to. His father had big plans, he wanted to expand the factory, seek out export markets, and increase the wages of his staff. All of it would happen in time, he promised his son, all they had to do was to wait and see.

What Mark Luchenko didn’t know was that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union would result not in a capitalist boost for his factory but in his own death and the death of his wife, Monotok’s mother.

Monotok was orphaned shortly after his ninth birthday. His uncle took him away from the house and they never returned. By the age of ten, Monotok had been ‘adopted’ by a farmer, Sergei Boronin, a widower who bought Monotok from his uncle for fifty roubles, as if he was mere livestock.

Boronin’s farm, little more than a smallholding, was in a remote area, beyond the Ural Mountains, a thousand miles east of Moscow. He proved to be a vodka-sodden, petty tyrant who beat Monotok, kept him out of school and used him as virtual slave labour on his farm. If Monotok complained or didn’t work fast enough, or if Boronin was angry or hung over from one of the vodka-fuelled binges that followed his weekly visits to the small town where he sold his animals and bought his supplies, Monotok would get another brutal beating.

There was worse to come. One night Boronin returned drunk as usual from a trip to town. Monotok was already in bed, and when he heard his bedroom door open, he pretended to be asleep, fearing another beating. There was the shuffling sound of Boronin’s footsteps and then a creak as he sat down on the edge of the bed. He spent some time looking down at the boy and then the blanket was pulled aside and Monotok felt the farmer’s calloused hand on his thigh. He lay motionless, still trying to feign sleep, though his heart was pounding. He heard the rustle of fabric as Boronin fumbled with his trousers and then the farmer’s weight was on him, crushing him and pinning him down, and a moment later the boy felt a burning, agonising pain.

That brutal ritual became such a regular part of his life that he grew to dread the sky darkening into evening because he knew what the night would bring. At first it was just Boronin himself, but after a few weeks, other men began to appear at the isolated cabin in the forest, bringing a bottle of vodka and perhaps a couple of roubles for the farmer. Monotok would hear voices and the clink of glasses, and then his door would open and a figure would be outlined against the glow of light from the kitchen where Boronin still sat, pouring himself another drink.

Monotok ran away twice but both times was found by the police, who ignored his tearful pleas and protests and returned him to his guardian. Each time, after the police had drunk Boronin’s vodka and gone, Boronin would wrap the end of his belt around his fist and beat the boy almost senseless.

In the end Monotok became numbed to everything that happened to him. The beatings and the nightly abuse became just another part of his life, as hard, unvarying and predictable as the work of feeding and mucking out the animals that he had to carry out. But, although now outwardly calm and resigned to his fate, inside he burned with dreams of revenge.

He was patient – he had to be – but every day he schemed, planned and prepared for his opportunity. Although Boronin worked him like a dog, Monotok used what little spare time he had to further build his strength and stamina, taking long runs through the taiga – the forest that spread unbroken across northern Russia, spanning nine time zones – and using logs, buckets of water and large stones as primitive weights.

On the rare occasions when Boronin took Monotok with him to town, he grabbed the chance to toughen himself and hone his fighting skills by picking fights with much bigger boys. Inevitably he took a few beatings at first but kicks and blows were too familiar to him to be a concern, and before long, he was flattening any boy who got in his way, landing his blows with a cold, cruel calculation, his pulse rate barely rising above normal as he beat them into submission and then laid them out with a final brutal punch or kick.

When he was fourteen years old, he felt he was ready. He chose his moment well: a midwinter night so bitterly cold that his footsteps rang like struck metal on the ice-bound ground as he crossed the yard from the barn where the animals were housed. He waited for Boronin to return home from the town that night, stumbling drunk through the snow, clutching yet another bottle of vodka. Monotok watched him struggle out of his coat and make his unsteady way to his seat by the fire, but as Boronin turned his baleful, bloodshot gaze towards him Monotok spat in his face and then rained blows and kicks on him, beating him relentlessly to a bloody pulp.

He left him lying unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood while he went through his pockets. He took all the money and valuables he could find, and when he could not pull the farmer’s gold wedding ring from his swollen finger, he severed it with a knife, giving a cold smile as Boronin jerked back into consciousness with an ear-splitting scream of agony.

Monotok pocketed the ring, straightened up and booted him in the ribs one last time, savouring the crack of splintering bone. Monotok – measured, unhurried – picked up the bottle of vodka that had fallen from Boronin’s fingers as the assault began and poured the alcohol all over Boronin’s clothes. Then he pulled a blazing chunk of wood from the fireplace and set fire to him.

He retreated to the doorway as blue flames snaked over Boronin’s body, then caught the fabric of his frayed clothes. Monotok watched impassively as the blinded farmer stumbled to his feet and blundered around the room, trying in vain to beat out the flames with his hands. The tattered curtains caught fire, adding to the inferno. Boronin fell to the floor and began rolling on the ground in a frantic attempt to extinguish the flames, and howled in torment as his flesh blackened and burned. Eventually he collapsed in a smouldering heap while the flames began to devour his log-built home. It burned down around him, becoming his funeral pyre.

Monotok left the farm for ever that night. He made one other call, on the uncle who had sold him into his slavery. He flattened his uncle as soon as he answered the knock at his door, cut out his tongue so that he could not cry for help, then hamstrung him by severing the tendons behind his ankles so he couldn’t walk. Monotok then slashed him with a knife across his face, torso and arms – enough to weaken him from blood loss but not enough to kill him – and then threw him into the pigsty behind his house. He watched the pigs begin their feast, then moved away through the forest into the night.

Monotok walked through the night, following forest tracks and single-track roads without seeing a single vehicle. He reached a remote station just after dawn, warming himself by the stove in the wooden hut that served as a waiting room and drinking black tea from a samovar watched over by a toothless old babushka, as he waited for the westbound train. He travelled a thousand miles west to Moscow and moved into an abandoned apartment in a dismal Stalinist-era block, where the lifts had not worked in twenty years and the stairs stank of urine and worse. It was one of Moscow’s poorest and most violent districts, but his neighbours, mostly drug addicts, alcoholics and petty criminals, who preyed on each other and on the handful of other inhabitants of the block, too old, too poor or too ill to escape, soon learned to stay out of his way.

For almost two years he lived a semi-feral existence, using his wits and his fists to survive, always in and out of trouble with the law for thefts and assaults. Then he made what could have been a fatal mistake, giving a savage beating to a man who richly deserved it, but who was also the son of a Russian mafia boss. With a price on his head and no other way out, though still aged just sixteen, Monotok lied about his age and enlisted in the army. The minimum age was eighteen but he was tough and powerfully built, and his battered face, marked and scarred in scores of fights, made him look much older than his years.

He joined the Spetsnaz – the Soviet Special Forces, or ‘Special Purposes’ troops, as the Russians themselves described them. Unlike the British SAS, the Spetsnaz were not soldiers first who then became special forces by passing a bruising selection process; raw recruits were inducted straight into the Spetsnaz and did their entire military training with them.

Spetsnaz training was designed to break down recruits and then rebuild them, but they never broke Monotok. He never once failed to do what was asked of him, no matter how gruelling the task. When his instructors ordered him to do a hundred press-ups with a full bergen on his back, he did it. When ordered to run a mile through a forest with a colleague over his shoulders, he gritted his teeth and did it. They made him lie fully clothed in an icy mountain stream for two hours, and he emerged close to death but still smiling. He knew that there was nothing they could do to him that was worse than what he had suffered at the hands of his tormentor.

When fully trained, Monotok and his unit were deployed to a barracks north of Prenzlau, close to the Polish border and a few miles from the Baltic coast. They left there only for training exercises and to go on operations, where Monotok proved himself the fittest, strongest and most ruthlessly effective soldier of his entire unit. He was too much of a loner to be a good team player – none of his comrades liked him or trusted him – but he was a cool and cold-blooded killer, who never showed the slightest trace of emotion, fear or panic, no matter what was thrown at him, and he never failed in the task he was set. His talents were noted by his superiors and he began to be selected for special assignments, assignments that more often than not involved assassinations.

Monotok was a skilled assassin, and he killed without remorse or conscience. He had been trained as a sniper but was as comfortable killing with knives, garrottes and handguns as he was with a rifle. After a dozen kills he was sent with his unit to Chechnya. Russia was tightening its grip on the republic following a terrorist attack on a Moscow cinema by armed Chechen rebels that ended with the death of one hundred and thirty civilians. Monotok was part of an assassination unit tasked with killing a dozen of the rebels who had planned the raid. Within six months of arriving in the republic all were dead. In 2006, Monotok was part of a unit responsible for the targeted bombing of Shamil Basayev, the prime mover in the Chechen Islamic rebel movement, but Basayev was only one of twenty Chechens that he helped kill that year. He had become a relentless killing machine, devoid of all emotion or empathy as he carried out his orders.

It was in 2009 that Monotok saw the picture that took his life down a different path. He was still in Chechnya, but Russia was winding down its anti-terrorist operations there and Monotok was preparing to return to Prenzlau. The picture was in a week-old copy of Komsomolksaya Pravda, the biggest-selling newspaper in Russia. It had started life as the official organ of the Communist Union of Youth but following the break-up of the Soviet Union had become a tabloid with more than three million readers. One of Monotok’s colleagues had returned from leave with the paper in his pocket, and during a break between missions Monotok had flicked through it. He had never been a big reader and rarely watched television. He didn’t care about anything that happened in the outside world, his life revolved around the Spetsnaz and his assignments, he cared for little else. Monotok had recognised the man in the photograph immediately, though the name meant nothing to him. Pyotr Grechko.

The story was about Grechko trying, and failing, to buy Liverpool Football Club. Monotok wasn’t interested in football, or any sport, but he read and reread the story more than a dozen times. Peter Grechko was one of the richest men in the world, the story said, a man who had fought his way up from humble beginnings to head a transport empire that literally spanned the world. But Monotok knew the truth about how Grechko had started on the road to unimaginable wealth, and as he stared at the newspaper he decided that the time had come to get his revenge. He left the Spetsnaz in the winter of 2010. His superiors offered him all sorts of incentives to stay – promotion, money, more leave, foreign travel – but Monotok refused them all. The only thing he cared about was the revenge that was rightfully his.

Monotok went freelance, working for a former Spetsnaz colonel who had joined up with a former KGB assassin to set up a murder-for-hire company. Assassinations were a common way of solving political and business disagreements in post-Soviet Russia and Monotok had an average of one job a week. Clients included the Kremlin, the Mafia and even legitimate businesses, eager to use a professional service that guaranteed to keep the killings at arm’s length. Monotok earned good money, ten times what he earned as a soldier, and he learned quickly. For the Spetsnaz he had been a simple killer, following orders, but as a freelance he learned about electronic surveillance, accessing databases, and gained access to fake documentation that allowed him to move freely around the world under a number of aliases. His hired a tutor to teach him English, and as his fluency increased the company sent him farther afield and Monotok killed in Europe and the United States. When he wasn’t working, Monotok dug up as much information as he could on Pyotr Grechko. And it didn’t take him long to track down three more faces from his past. Oleg Zakharov, Yuri Buryakov and Sasha Czernik. All four had become rich and powerful oligarchs, men who had the sort of wealth that others could only dream of, men for whom the world was a giant playground. But Monotok knew the truth about the four men, he knew that it wasn’t hard work or luck that had brought them their wealth. It had been cold-blooded murder, and for that they had to pay. Now Zakharov, Buryakov and Czernik were dead, and soon Grechko would join them. Then maybe the nightmares would finally stay away and he could sleep soundly for the first time since he was nine years old.

He tensed as he heard a key slot into the front door lock, but then almost immediately relaxed. It was seven o’clock in the morning. It was the girl, returning home. He heard the front door open and close, and then a shuffling sound as she removed her shoes. He smiled as he heard her tiptoe down the hallway and gently open the bedroom door. She paused, then tiptoed towards the bathroom. He let her get all the way to the bathroom door before speaking. ‘I’m not asleep.’

She jumped, and then laughed. ‘I was trying not to wake you.’ She jumped on the bed, rolled on top of him and kissed him.

‘Alina, you will never be able to sneak up on me, no matter how hard you try. If I had been a heavy sleeper when I was a teenager, I would have died, beaten to death as I slept.’

‘My wild man,’ said Podolski. She laughed as he ran his hands over her body. ‘Are you going to hammer me?’ she asked.

He rolled her on to her back and she opened her legs as he moved on top of her. ‘There’s no one I’d rather hammer than you.’

She put her hands either side of his face. ‘Bullshit, Kirill. You’re using me. Don’t pretend otherwise. You’re using me to get the inside track on that pig Grechko.’

‘You’re helping me,’ said Monotok. ‘And I’ll show you my gratitude.’ He started to pull off her shirt and slid his hand up to her breasts.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, pushing him off her. ‘You fumble.’

He laughed as he rolled on to his back and she straddled him. ‘I do not fumble.’

She undid her shirt, slid it off and tossed it on to the floor. ‘You fumble,’ she said. ‘But I forgive you.’ She undid her bra and let her breasts swing free. ‘Now shut up and hammer me.’

Afterwards, he lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, his arm around her as she toyed with the hairs on his chest. She felt tiny lying next to him, soft and warm like a small bird. ‘Something strange happened today,’ she said quietly.

‘Really? What?’

‘We’ve all got to take a lie detector test. Grechko’s orders.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he asked.

She laughed softly. ‘Because I wanted you to hammer me,’ she said. ‘And if I told you, you’d want to talk and not fuck.’

He gave her a small squeeze. His heart had started to race but he forced himself to stay calm and to keep his voice level and soothing. ‘You’re a bad girl,’ he said, then kissed her softly on the top of her head.

‘And you’re a bad man. That’s why we’re so good together.’

‘You’re not a bad girl, Alina. You have no idea what it is to be bad. So who has been questioned so far?’

‘The butler. Two of the maids. They did Dmitry first, he insisted.’

‘And who is carrying out the tests?’

‘Some sort of expert.’

‘Russian? Or English?’

‘Chinese. British Chinese. Or Chinese British. But he speaks Russian.’

‘And he will be questioning everyone at the house?’

‘That’s what Dmitry says. But it’s nothing, it’s about a stolen watch. Grechko has lost one of his watches. It’s worth four million dollars, they say. It’s a Patek Philippe, made of platinum. Old and very valuable.’

‘And they say someone stole it?’

‘From his bedroom. There is no CCTV there. It’s not a problem, he’s just asking if you stole the watch, I didn’t so it’ll be OK.’

‘How long does each test take?’

He felt her shrug. ‘Half an hour. Maybe more.’

‘Then he’s not just asking about the watch,’ said Monotok. ‘This expert, does he seem to know the two British guys who joined the security team?’

‘I’m not sure. But Tony is sitting in on the tests. He’s in the library all the time.’

‘And who did he arrive with, this expert?’

‘He came alone. Just after three o’clock yesterday afternoon.’

‘And when did the watch go missing?’

‘Yesterday, I think. Grechko called Dmitry in yesterday morning.’

‘Who hired this expert? Who called him in?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Dmitry didn’t say.’

‘But it wasn’t Dmitry’s idea?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘And he’s British, you said?’

‘That’s right. Well, like I said, he’s Chinese. But he has an accent like he comes from the North. Not Scottish. It’s strange.’

‘If it was Grechko’s idea he would probably have used a Russian. Don’t you think?’

‘He prefers Russians, yes.’

Monotok nodded. ‘What about the woman who comes to see Grechko? The one who knows Ryan. Has she been again?’

‘No. What’s wrong? You think this is about you?’

‘I think it is unlikely that any member of Grechko’s staff would be stupid enough to steal from him. Especially a four-million-dollar watch.’ He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘They know,’ he said quietly.

He felt her tense. ‘They know what?’

‘They know that someone is passing information on Grechko. At least they suspect. When are you due to be tested?’

‘Tonight. After I report for work.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a problem?’

‘They’ll be looking for signs of anxiety. Nervousness.’

‘I’m not nervous,’ she said, stroking his chest.

‘You don’t feel nervous but the signs will be there. Respiration rate, sweat, skin conductivity, pulse rate. Things that you have no control over.’

‘I’ll take deep breaths and think sweet thoughts.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll think about you hammering me.’

‘That won’t work,’ he said. ‘There are ways of beating the machines but it takes practice and the right drugs.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Did they say when they want to test you? Is there a schedule?’

‘They just come and get you. It could be any time.’

He nodded as he stared up at the ceiling. ‘We do it tonight,’ he said quietly.

‘Tonight? Are you sure?’

‘It has to be,’ said Monotok. ‘If they suspect you in any way they’ll move you from the team and then you’ll be no use to me.’

She grabbed a handful of chest hair and pulled, hard enough to make him yelp. ‘See! You are using me!’

He rolled on top of her and kissed her. ‘You’re helping me, and I’m grateful. Really grateful. And when this is over, I’ll show you how grateful.’

‘You won’t leave me?’

‘Alina, I swear I won’t leave you. Once I’ve taken care of Grechko it’s over. The four of them will be dead and I can move on.’

‘With me?’

‘With you.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

She smiled and kissed him again.

Monotok returned the kiss and then broke away. ‘Who is on the shift with you tonight?’

She frowned as she tried to remember. ‘Vlad, and his bloody porn. He’ll be in the security centre for the whole shift. Leo will be there, he’s not on shift but he lives in the house. Same with Konstantin. The British guy. Ryan will be there. He’s been working with the lie detector guy. And Boris. And Max. And Dmitry. He’s always there. Thomas will be on the gate. That’s all. Grechko is in all night and there are no visitors expected.’

‘Max still fancies you, right?’

‘He’s just a boy,’ she said. She laughed and ran her hand down his chest towards his groin. ‘Are you jealous?’

‘Of course I’m jealous,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘OK, we’ll use Max. You can call him and tell him you’ll give him a lift. Tell him there’s something you need to talk to him about.’

‘OK, but you need to do one thing for me,’ she said, slipping her hand between his thighs.

‘Anything,’ he said.

‘Hammer me again,’ she said, rolling on to her back and opening her legs.

Shepherd and McIntyre walked across the lawn at the rear of the house. It was lunchtime and Jules Lee was taking a break from his second day of conducting the lie detector tests. They had already done four of the new intake of bodyguards – Thomas Lisko, Viktor Alexsandrov, Timofei Domashevich and Yakov Gunter. Lisko had been one of the first to be done the previous day, and Alexsandrov had been tested just before Lee had left at seven o’clock. Both had passed with flying colours. They had done Domashevich and Gunter that morning and they had also passed. Max Barsky and Alina Podolski were pencilled in for later that evening. Lee had agreed to work until late, though he had dropped heavy hints about expecting to be paid overtime once he went beyond six o’clock. That meant that either Barsky or Podolski was the mole or the test just wasn’t working. Or his whole theory was wrong and none of the six was helping the killer.

In a perfect world they would have just questioned the six suspects but that would have tipped off the mole that it wasn’t about a missing watch so Lee had to interrogate the bewildered kitchen and housekeeping staff with the same intensity that he questioned the suspects.

‘This is money for old rope, isn’t it?’ said McIntyre, taking a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum from his pocket and slotting a piece into his mouth.

‘Bodyguarding?’ Shepherd shrugged. ‘It’s all good up until the moment you have to throw yourself in front of a bullet.’

‘Yeah, but the pay’s good and that cook is brilliant. Her club sandwiches are out of this world. Chicken, egg, ham, cheese and I don’t know what else. And those chips. How does she make them taste that good?’

‘She fries them twice,’ said Shepherd. ‘She explained how it works, something about cooks them inside and keeps them crispy. Jock, you know this isn’t a real job, right?’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said McIntyre.

‘You know what I mean. I’m here to catch the guy that’s trying to kill Grechko. Once that’s done, I’m off.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Jock, you’re here to help me. When I go, you go. You’re not even here under your own name, remember? You’re Alastair McEwan.’

‘I get that, but a job’s a job, right? I can do this standing on my head, and it pays a hell of a lot better than babysitting an empty office building.’ He grabbed Shepherd’s elbow. ‘I’m serious, Spider. I want to give this a shot.’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘Go for it, then. Your CV’s good enough.’

‘Dmitry was saying that he’s got mates out in Cyprus who work with former SAS guys.’

‘Yeah, I heard that. I didn’t get any names, but there are some principals who prefer SAS protection.’

‘And I can do the old Sean Connery impersonation a treat, that’ll go down well.’ He grinned. ‘The name’s McIntyre,’ he said in a passable impersonation of the Scottish actor. ‘Jock McIntyre. Licensed to kill.’

‘Licensed to bullshit, more like,’ said Shepherd. ‘But yeah, seriously, go for it. Now to get to the point, we’re doing it tonight.’

McIntyre nodded, suddenly serious. ‘OK.’

‘You need to meet up with Jimbo this afternoon and get the suppressors sorted. Lex will pick you and Jimbo up in the van and I’ll meet up with you in Bayswater.’

‘How do I get to Wembley?’

‘I’ll call you a minicab. Get it to drop you at Paddington and then catch a black cab from there to Wembley but get out a few hundred yards from Jimbo’s house and walk the rest of the way. I’ll tell Popov you have to collect some things from Reading. Remember to leave your mobile here.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m tied up here with the lie detector test but I’m only interested in one and when that’s done I’ll drive over in my X5. We’ll use the van out to the New Forest then when it’s done we’ll shower and do laundry at my place and then drive back here.’

‘Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.’

‘Has to be that way, Jock. We’ll only get one go at this and it has to be done right.’

Podolski pressed the doorbell and tidied her hair, her crash helmet tucked under her arm. The door opened and Max Barsky grinned at her like a lovesick schoolboy. It was clear from the moment he’d first seen her that he fancied her, especially as they were both from the Ukraine. He was a nice enough boy, but at twenty-three, that was what he was, a boy. And Podolski preferred men. ‘Alina, come in,’ he said, stepping to the side. ‘The place is a bit of a mess, I had hardly any time to tidy up.’

‘You need a woman to take care of you,’ she said, patting him on the arm as she walked by him.

‘So what was so urgent that you needed to see me before the shift?’ he asked.

She put her crash helmet on a table in the hallway and turned to face him. ‘What do you think?’ she said, and smiled.

Barsky frowned, not understanding, but as Podolski unzipped her leather motorcycle jacket, a smile slowly spread across his face. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked, unable to believe his luck.

He took a step towards her, forgetting that the door behind him was still open. Monotok stepped into the hallway and brought the butt of his gun down on the back of Barsky’s head. He fell to the ground without a sound. Monotok put the gun away and closed the door, before dragging Barsky into a cramped sitting room that stank of stale pizza and sweat.

He took a handful of long plastic ties from a backpack and gave them to Podolski. ‘Do his ankles,’ he said. ‘One’s enough but use three or four. Then find something to gag him with.’

As Podolski began to bind Barsky’s ankles with the plastic ties, Monotok reached into the backpack again and pulled out a pair of rubber-handled secateurs. Podolski grimaced. ‘Is there no other way?’ she asked.

Monotok grinned cruelly. ‘It’s a bit late to worry about that now, my love,’ he said. He knelt down next to the unconscious man and lifted up his right hand. Podolski turned her head and closed her eyes as Monotok slotted the blades of the pruning shears either side of the thumb. He pressed hard and there was a crunch like a stick of celery being broken and blood spurted across the carpet. ‘See,’ said Monotok as the severed thumb fell away. ‘It didn’t hurt a bit.’

‘There you go,’ said McIntyre, placing the two home-made suppressors on the kitchen table. He’d made the two suppressors from plastic Evian bottles packed with Brillo pads. A clear tube made from the tops of bottles formed a passage for the bullets through the bottle, and the wire wool would absorb most of the sound of the round firing.

Shortt picked one of them up and nodded appreciatively. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘I hope you cleaned up after yourself?’

‘All the waste is in a carrier bag in your garage,’ he said. ‘We can burn it with the rest of the stuff.’

Shortt gestured at the two Makarov pistols on the table. ‘And we use duct tape to fasten them to the guns?’

‘Duct tape works just fine. It’ll be good for two or three shots and that’s all we’ll need.’

The doorbell rang and both men jumped. Shortt grinned shamefacedly. ‘If it was the wife, she wouldn’t ring the bell,’ he said. He went to open the front door. It was Harper. The white van was parked in the street outside.

‘Hey, hey, the gang’s all here,’ said Harper.

‘Come on in, mate,’ said Shortt. ‘We’ve got time for a coffee before we head off to meet Spider.’

The gate opened and Podolski waved at Thomas Lisko in the guardhouse. He waved back. She looked to her left, where Monotok was at the wheel of Barsky’s car. Because she had stopped the bike close to the driver’s door Barsky wasn’t able to see who was driving. As the car moved forward, Podolski matched its speed, keeping herself between the car and the guardhouse.

As they approached the garage the doors rattled up and Podolski accelerated and led the car down into the parking area. The gate closed behind them.

Podolski drove over to the far end of the parking area and climbed off the bike. Monotok reversed into a parking space and switched off the engine. Podolski removed her crash helmet and put it on one of the bike’s mirrors. She smiled at Monotok. She wanted to go over and kiss him but she knew that he wouldn’t open the window in case anyone was watching on the CCTV. He winked and reclined his seat so that he was almost horizontal.

She flashed him a smile and started walking to the security centre, her heart racing. She took deep breaths to calm herself down, one hand holding the shoulder strap of her backpack.

She took off the glove on her right hand and pressed her thumb against the sensor, then tapped in her security code. Vlad Molchanov was sitting in front of the CCTV monitors. As the door opened he hurriedly switched off his iPad but not before Podolski caught a glimpse of naked flesh. She couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. ‘So what’s happening, Vlad?’ she asked.

‘Mr Grechko’s in the pool. He just went in. Dmitry’s in the gym with Leo. Konstantin’s in the library doing the lie detector thing.’

‘Where’s Boris?’

‘In here!’ called Volkov from the briefing room. ‘Glad you made it, I’m gasping for a cup of coffee.’

‘I was just about to offer,’ said Podolski. She put her backpack on the floor, then slipped off her motorcycle jacket and hung it on the coat rack by the door. ‘Where’s Tony?’

‘The library. He’s in on all the lie detector tests. You know they want you in there this evening?’

‘Yeah, Dmitry told me yesterday.’

‘They’re doing Konstantin then one of the kitchen workers and then you.’ He frowned. ‘What happened to Max?’

Podolski froze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He came in with you, right? Where is he?’

Podolski forced a smile. ‘He went to see the chef. Said he hadn’t eaten all day.’

Molchanov chuckled. ‘He’s always eating, that lad. He’ll be as big as a house soon.’

Podolski went over to the coffee machine and made three coffees. Volkov was engrossed in a bodybuilding magazine so didn’t notice as she took the small plastic vial from her pocket and poured the contents equally into two of the mugs. Both Volkov and Molchanov took two sugars in their coffee so she spooned it in and stirred vigorously. Monotok had told her that the drug was tasteless, fast acting, and would render them unconscious for at least eight hours.

She put one of the mugs down in front of Volkov and he thanked her with a grunt. She took the other two mugs through into the outer room and gave one to Molchanov. She sat down and sipped her coffee as she looked at the CCTV screens. On one she could see Barsky’s car. The lights reflecting off the windscreen meant she couldn’t see Monotok, but she knew that he was there. Waiting.

Lex Harper looked at his watch for the hundredth time. It was coming up for six. ‘He’ll be here,’ said Shortt. They were sitting in the white Transit van in the car park on top of the Whiteley’s shopping centre in Bayswater. They had arranged to meet Shepherd there at just after six.

‘He’s always on time,’ said McIntyre. He was sitting in the back of the van on the floor. Next to him was a holdall containing the two revolvers and the two Russian pistols with the home-made suppressors now attached with duct tape.

‘He’ll be here,’ said Shortt. ‘Stop worrying.’

Monotok took slow, deep breaths, preparing himself mentally for what was to come. In his right hand he was holding a SIG Sauer P227. It was one of his favourite handguns, a high-powered, high-capacity pistol that took .45 ACP rounds and held ten in the clip. In his left hand he held a pair of ATN PVS7 night vision goggles, standard issue to US Army ground troops. They weighed just one and a half pounds and were powered by two AA batteries that would sustain the unit for at least ten hours. The gun was to take care of any of Grechko’s security team who tried to get in his way. When he finally came face to face with Grechko, he wouldn’t be using the gun. He’d be using the hunting knife in a nylon scabbard on his belt.

There was a dull thud from the briefing room, followed by the sound of a mug hitting the floor and shattering. Podolski looked over and through the open door she saw Volkov slumped over the table. ‘What was that?’ said Molchanov, slurring his words. He put a hand up to his face. ‘I feel funny.’

Podolski stood up. ‘Are you OK?’

Molchanov frowned as if he was having trouble hearing her. He pushed himself up out of the chair but then all the strength went from his legs and he slumped down. Within seconds he was snoring heavily. Podolski hurried over to her backpack. She put it on the desk under the CCTV monitors and unzipped it. She took out a matt black box the size of a laptop computer and screwed in four rubber-covered aerials of differing sizes, the smallest the size of a cigarette, the largest the size of a fountain pen.

She took it through to the briefing room, where Volkov was sprawled over the table. There were pieces of broken mug and a small pool of coffee on the floor. Podolski placed the jammer on a chair and switched it on. Four green lights winked on. She took out her mobile phone and looked at the screen. For several moments nothing happened, then one by one the signal bars disappeared. The jammer was powerful enough to kill all mobile phone signals within a hundred yards or more, enough to cover the whole house. And its battery was powerful enough to keep it going for at least three hours, which would be more than enough time for Monotok to do what he had to do.

She went back to her backpack and took out a pair of secateurs. They were the ones that Monotok had used to cut off Barsky’s thumb and there was still blood on the blades. She headed for the door. First she had to cut the phone lines, then she had to come back to deal with the power, exactly as Monotok had told her.

Shortt looked over at Harper, who was tapping his gloved hands on the steering wheel again. ‘Lex, mate, will you relax,’ he said.

‘He’s late,’ said Harper.

‘He’s not late,’ said Shortt. ‘And even if he was, we’ve plenty of time. We don’t want to get there early and be sitting in the car park too long. We want to get there just before Khan leaves.’

‘What if something’s happened?’

Shortt sighed. ‘If something’s happened, he’ll call.’

‘I’m going to check, just to make sure,’ said Harper. He reached into his pocket and took out a Nokia mobile.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ said Shortt when he saw the phone. ‘No mobiles, remember?’

‘Relax, Jimbo. My phone’s in my hotel. This one’s a throwaway that we’ve used to mark the place where we’re going to dump the body.’ He switched on the phone. Shortt put up his hand to acknowledge his mistake. ‘I know what I’m doing, Jimbo. Don’t panic.’ Harper grinned. He tapped out Shepherd’s number but frowned as it went straight through to voicemail. ‘His phone’s off.’

‘He’s probably on his way,’ said Shortt. ‘We’ve got time.’

Harper switched off the phone and sat tapping it against his knee. He looked at his watch again. ‘I just want to get it done,’ he said.

‘We all do,’ said McIntyre.

Podolski sat back on her heels and looked at the fuse box in front of her. She had opened the metal panel in the briefing room to reveal the wires and fuses that controlled the power and lighting in the house. She took a folded sheet of A4 paper from her pocket. It was a photograph of the fuse box. She had used her Samsung phone to take several pictures of the box a few days earlier and Monotok had blown them up and spent hours analysing them before marking on one of the pictures which wires she had to cut and which fuses she had to trip.

It was important that some of the circuits remained live – Monotok needed the thumb sensors to be working so that he could move around, and they needed the gate to be working so that they could make their escape. But they had to cut the power to the CCTV cameras, the lights and the lifts.

She looked at the photograph, then began to cut the wires.

The lights went out, plunging the car park into darkness. Monotok smiled to himself. He switched on the night vision goggles and slid the strap around his head and adjusted the fit. He could see everything clearly, albeit with a greenish tinge. He opened the car door and got out and headed for the security centre. The door to the driver’s room opened and one of the drivers, Yulian Chayka, stood in the doorway. ‘What happened to the lights?’ he shouted into the darkness in Russian. ‘Is anybody there? What the hell’s going on?’ He was waving his hand in front of his face. The darkness was absolute and Monotok knew that Chayka could see nothing.

The keypad to the side of the security centre door was still glowing. The power had to be on for the doors to open so he had been very specific what fuses Podolski had to pull and which she had to leave in place.

As he reached the door, he slid the gun into the pocket of his jacket and took out a small plastic bag containing Barsky’s bloody thumb. He pressed the thumb against the sensor and tapped in the four-digit code that Podolski had given him. The door clicked open and he put the thumb back into the bag and into his pocket.

He pushed the door open and stepped into the room. She was sitting in one of the high-backed chairs, facing him. Molchanov was slumped in his chair, unconscious.

She smiled, even though he knew she couldn’t see him. ‘It worked,’ she said. ‘It worked perfectly.’ She stood up and held out her arms. ‘Say something, it’s spooky in the dark.’

‘I’m here,’ said Monotok.

She smiled, moving her head from side to side as if that would help her see. Monotok looked to the left. All the monitors were blank.

‘What about Volkov?’

‘In the other room. Out for the count.’

‘And Grechko’s still in the pool?’

‘That’s where he was when the lights went out.’

‘And Popov?’

‘In the gym with Leo. The only man down on Basement Three with Grechko is Ivan.’ She waggled her hands. ‘Give me a hug, I want to feel you.’

Monotok smiled and walked towards her. He avoided her hands and walked slowly around her. She continued to waggle her hands in the direction of where she thought he was.

She took a step forward and he moved behind her.

‘Kirill, come on, stop messing me about.’

Monotok put his hands on her hips and she stiffened, then relaxed. She ground her hips back, pressing herself against him. He ran his hands up her sides and caressed her breasts. She reached behind her with her right hand and rubbed his groin.

‘Why don’t you hammer me in the dark?’ she said, as she felt him grow hard. ‘How sexy would that be?’ She ground against him again, harder this time.

Monotok chuckled and slid his gloved hands up to her shoulders. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said.

‘Crazy for you,’ she said. ‘Come on, baby, hammer me. Hammer me good.’

He put his hands either side of her head as she pressed herself against him. He slid his left hand up on to her head, his right hand under her chin, then he pulled hard, twisting her head to the right, hearing a loud crack and feeling the vertebra snap away from her skull. He felt her turn into a dead weight and he stepped back as she slumped to the floor.

He bent down and pulled the Bluetooth earpiece from her ear then lifted up her jacket and pulled the transceiver off her belt. ‘Consider yourself hammered,’ he whispered.

Harper tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, then looked at his watch. ‘This is not good, guys,’ he said. ‘We can’t sit here all night. We have to make a decision.’

‘He could be tied up in the house,’ said McIntyre. He stretched out his legs and they banged against the two shovels in the back of the van. ‘He’s organising lie detector tests for the staff.’

‘He could have changed his mind,’ said Harper.

‘Bollocks,’ said Shortt. ‘He wouldn’t and even if he did he’d have let us know. Something’s happened, he’ll get in touch.’

‘Yeah, but that leaves us sitting here with four guns and our thumbs up our arses,’ said Harper. He banged the steering wheel with the flat of his right hand. ‘Guys, it’s time to shit or get off the pot.’

‘Do it without him, you mean?’ asked McIntyre.

‘I don’t see that we’ve got any choice, do you? If we get caught with those guns we go down for ten years.’

‘He’ll be coming,’ said Shortt.

‘Then he’ll be too late,’ said Harper. He tapped his watch with his finger. ‘We’ve got just enough time to get to Shepherd’s Bush and pick him up. If we leave it any later we’ll miss him.’

‘Then we’ll do it tomorrow,’ Shortt said.

‘Jimbo, the hole’s dug. We’re all geared up for doing this now. Every day we leave it is another day we can get caught. Do you want your wife and kids visiting you in prison?’

Shortt sighed and looked at his own watch as if he hoped it would show a different time to Harper’s. ‘Screw it,’ he said. ‘Try his phone again.’

Harper took his Nokia out of his pocket and switched it on.

‘Why do you do that?’ asked Shortt as Harper waited for the phone to power up.

‘It’s counter-surveillance 101,’ said Harper. ‘Whenever your phone is on you’re vulnerable. They can track you and they can listen in.’

‘Who can?’

Harper tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Dark forces, mate,’ he said. He tapped out Shepherd’s number and once again it went straight through to voicemail. ‘It’s still off,’ he said. ‘Look, I say we go ahead. The three of us.’

‘I’m up for it,’ said McIntyre.

‘Jimbo?’ said Harper. ‘This has to be unanimous. The three musketeers and all that. We’re primed, we’re ready to go. Just say the word.’

Shortt sighed and then slowly nodded. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’

Shepherd stood by the window, looking out over the grounds as Lee continued to ask questions of Serov. Serov was the twelfth member of staff to be questioned, the fifth bodyguard, and Shepherd had sat in on all the sessions. Lee switched easily between English and Russian, and while Shepherd couldn’t understand the Russian bits he could tell that Lee spoke the language with a strong Newcastle accent. Shepherd had spotted Lee’s technique early on. There were basically three types of questions. There were irrelevant questions which were used solely to establish a baseline and they usually involved the examiner asking something like ‘the sky is blue, true or false’ or ‘when water freezes it turns into ice, true or false’. They were simple questions to which everyone knew the answers so lying was out of the question.

The second type of question wasn’t related to the investigation into the missing watch and was designed to get the subject to lie. Lee would ask a baseline question and then follow it with something like ‘I have fantasised about having sex with Mrs Grechko’, knowing that the subject would say no but knowing that it was almost certainly a lie. Mrs Grechko, the new Mrs Grechko, was a very sexy woman and the bodyguards – with the exception of Alina Podolski – were red-blooded males.

Once Lee had established the baseline and knew how the subject would react when lying, it was time to ask the relevant questions. In a normal investigation that would be about the missing watch but in this case Lee had to ask about the watch but also ask less specific questions relating to their relationship with Grechko. ‘Would you ever do anything to hurt Mr Grechko?’ was one. ‘Have you ever given information about Mr Grechko’s movements to a third party?’ was another.

The skill of the technician was in analysing the responses of the subject while being asked the relevant questions and assessing whether they were more similar to the baseline or to the established lies. It wasn’t something that Shepherd could do just by observing body language or listening to their voices. Lie detection was a complicated business, and even a skilled practitioner like Jules Lee had to proceed slowly and methodically. He was now on his third set of baseline questions to Serov, and if previous experience was anything to go by he’d be doing it at least another two times.

Shepherd’s Bluetooth earpiece crackled. ‘What the hell’s happening? Vlad, can you hear me?’ It was Popov, clearly anxious.

There was no answer from Molchanov.

‘Vlad, what the hell is going on?’ said Popov. ‘Boris, are you in the security centre? Will someone talk to me?’

Shepherd put his hand up to his earpiece. ‘Dmitry? It’s Tony. What’s wrong?’

‘The power’s gone down here,’ said Popov. ‘Where are you?’

‘The library,’ said Shepherd. ‘Everything’s OK here.’ The lights were all on and Lee’s equipment was functioning perfectly.

‘Thomas, do you have power in the guardhouse?’ Popov asked Lisko.

‘Yes,’ said Lisko. ‘And there are lights on in the house, too.’

‘It must just be underground that has the problem,’ said Shepherd. ‘But the emergency lights are on, right?’

‘Nothing’s on,’ said Popov. ‘We’re in complete darkness. Vlad, what the hell’s going on? Is anyone in the security centre? Boris, Alina, Max? Where the hell is everybody?’

‘Dmitry, who’s with you?’

‘Just Leo.’

‘Where’s Ivan?’

‘Basement Three, outside the pool.’

‘Ivan, are you there?’ asked Shepherd.

‘I’m on Basement Two,’ said Koshechkin.

‘What are you doing there?’ interrupted Popov. ‘You’re supposed to be outside the pool.’

‘He’s doing lengths,’ said Koshechkin. ‘He’ll be another half an hour.’

‘Not in the bloody pitch dark, he won’t,’ said Shepherd.

‘Where exactly are you, Ivan?’ asked Popov.

‘The games room,’ said Koshechkin. Shepherd could hear the embarrassment in the man’s voice.

Popov said something to Koshechkin in Russian, clearly giving him a major bollocking. Deservedly, too. Koshechkin was supposed to be a bodyguard and a bodyguard was never, ever supposed to leave his principal unprotected.

‘Ivan, can you get down to the pool?’ asked Shepherd.

‘I’ll try.’

‘Have you got your phone? You can use the light from the phone, enough to see in front of you, anyway.’

‘It’s in my locker,’ said Koshechkin.

‘Get to Grechko as quickly as you can,’ said Shepherd. ‘Dmitry, can you get to the security centre?’

‘It’s pitch black. We can’t move around.’ Shepherd heard a muffled thud followed by a loud Russian curse. ‘Stay where you!’ shouted Popov. ‘Leo’s just tripped over something,’ he explained. ‘Somebody’s going to get hurt.’

‘Have you got torches?’

‘No, no torches,’ said Popov. ‘There’s a back-up for the main electricity supply and there are two emergency circuits. It’s impossible for all three to go down at the same time.’

‘Impossible maybe, but that’s what’s happened,’ said Shepherd. ‘Where are your mobiles?’

‘In the changing rooms,’ said Popov.

‘So make your way there and get your phones out. See if you can get out of the gym and into the security centre. I’m with Konstantin, I’ll see if he can get some torches down there.’

He looked over at Lee. ‘We’re going to have to stop this for the moment,’ he said.

‘Problem?’ said Lee, peering over the top of his glasses.

‘Power failure downstairs. I need Konstantin to get down there with some lights.’

Lee nodded and began removing the straps from Serov’s chest. ‘See if there are torches or candles in the kitchen, then get them down to Dmitry,’ Shepherd said to him. ‘He’s in the gym. And make sure the security centre is OK, they’ve gone quiet.’

‘Will do,’ said Serov. He took the sensor from his finger and handed it to Lee, then pulled the electrodes off his shoulder blades.

Shepherd went out into the corridor and took his phone out of his pocket. He had to call Shortt to tell him to postpone the Khan business. He frowned as he saw that he had no signal. He went back into the study, picked up a telephone and put it to his ear. There was no dial tone.

Shepherd put a hand to his earpiece. ‘Ivan, be careful down there, OK? This might be more than a power cut.’ He started walking to the door. ‘Dmitry, we might have a problem. The phones are out. And I’ve lost my mobile phone signal.’

‘The landlines too?’

‘I’ve just tried the phone in the library and it’s down.’

‘But all the power’s on upstairs?’ said Popov.

‘No problems here at all.’

‘It could just be some fuses have blown.’

‘That wouldn’t explain the phones,’ said Shepherd, pushing open the library door. ‘Something is jamming our mobiles.’

‘Can you get to Mr Grechko?’ asked Popov.

‘I’m going to try,’ said Shepherd.

Monotok walked down the stairs. As he reached the door to Basement Three he heard a noise from above. He froze and held his breath. Someone had opened the door on Basement Two. He heard the shuffle of feet and then a hand brushing against the wall. It could only be Koshechkin, making his way down to Basement Three. Monotok started breathing again and turned to look up the steps. Koshechkin was moving so slowly that he must have been totally unable to see. Monotok drew his knife and waited.

Shepherd walked down the corridor towards the lift, taking another look at his phone. There was still no signal. The killer must have been using a cellular phone jammer. He put the phone away as he reached the lift. He pressed the button but the light didn’t come on. He pressed it again but nothing happened. He put his ear up against the door but couldn’t hear anything. The lift had been put out of commission, probably by cutting its power. He touched his earpiece. ‘Ivan, where are you?’

‘In the stairwell heading down to Basement Three. The lifts aren’t working.’

‘Yeah, the power’s been cut. Get to Grechko as quick as you can.’

‘Tony, it’s pitch black down here. I can’t see a thing.’

‘Quick as you can,’ repeated Shepherd.

‘Tony, if I slip I’ll break my neck.’

‘Just do it, Ivan. Grechko’s in danger. This isn’t an accident.’

‘You think the killer’s down here?’

Shepherd could hear the uncertainty in the man’s voice. ‘Don’t think about that,’ he said. ‘Your job is to protect Grechko. Now go ahead and do that.’

He put the phone in his pocket and headed for the emergency stairs.

Monotok smiled when he heard Koshechkin ask whether the killer was in the basement. Part of him wanted to whisper ‘yes, I’m here’, but he knew that if he did he’d be making it difficult for himself. As it was all he had to do was wait in the dark with the knife and Koshechkin would come to him. It was almost funny watching the man make his way down the stairs, one at a time, feeling ahead with the toe of his shoe and keeping one hand flat against the wall. He’d reach out with the toe of his right foot, then tap it against the concrete step and only then would he place the foot down. Then he’d put his left foot next to his right foot and then start the whole process again. It was taking him a full five seconds for each step. Tap, step, step. Tap, step, step. With the hand scraping against the wall each time he moved. Monotok gripped the knife and waited.

Shepherd opened the door to the stairwell and looked inside. The light spilled in and he could see the first half-dozen stairs but everything was dark beyond that. He touched his earpiece. ‘Dmitry, how’s it going?’

‘We’re trying to get our phones out of the lockers.’ Shepherd heard Tarasov curse as he bumped into something. Shepherd realised that the gym would be a nightmare to navigate in the pitch dark.

‘I’m going down to the security centre,’ said Shepherd. ‘Ivan’s heading to Grechko. Konstantin, how are you getting on with torches?’

‘I can’t find any,’ said Serov. ‘I’ve got matches. I’m looking for candles.’

‘Quick as you can,’ said Shepherd. He took his phone out and switched it on. There wasn’t much light but he figured it was better than nothing. He stepped into the stairwell and let the door close behind him. The light from the phone cast a faint glow, barely enough to illuminate the first three stairs.

He moved as quickly as he could down the steps to Basement One. There was a faint diffuse light coming from the keyboard next to the thumb sensor. Clearly it still had power. That made sense because if the power had been cut to the locks there’d be no way of opening them. He pressed his thumb against the sensor, tapped out his four-digit code and pushed open the door.

‘Who is it? Is someone there?’ Shepherd heard a voice, coming over from his left.

‘Who’s that?’ he shouted. ‘This is Tony Ryan.’

‘It’s Yulian, Yulian Chayka.’

One of the drivers, Shepherd realised. He must be standing at the door to the driver’s room. ‘Yulian, do you have a flashlight?’

‘No,’ shouted the driver. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The power’s off. What about the cars? Are their flashlights in the cars?’

‘I don’t think so. What do we do?’

‘Stay where you are,’ said Shepherd. ‘You’ll hurt yourself if you move around in the dark.’ Shepherd moved his phone around but the light was so weak that it barely illuminated the floor. He took a deep breath and went into his memory. He’d walked around the parking area and the security centre many times, so he knew the layout. The fact that it was pitch black shouldn’t make any difference to his mental picture of his surroundings. He headed towards the gym, walking confidently even though he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

Koshechkin continued to move down the stairs. Tap, step, step. Tap, step, step. He reached the turn and shuffled across to the next flight of steps, keeping his left hand against the wall.

Monotok looked up and smiled. Koshechkin’s suit was a greenish black in the night vision goggles, his face a pale, almost fluorescent, green, and there was a flash of bright green at the top of his shoes whenever his white socks were exposed. His tongue was sticking out between his teeth.

There was just eight steps between Koshechkin and the knife in Monotok’s hand. It was a big knife, the stainless steel blade a full eight inches long, one edge wickedly sharp, the other serrated, with a thick groove along the blade so that the blood would flow out and negate any suction effect. Tap, step, step. A tap with the right foot, the right foot on the step, then the left. Tap, step, step. Six steps left. Tap, step, step.

Koshechkin stopped and cocked his head on one side. Monotok froze and held his breath. Koshechkin licked his lips and then moved his head from side to side, listening intently. For a moment Monotok thought that Koshechkin was going to turn and run back up the stairs but eventually the bodyguard recommenced his descent. Tap, step, step. Tap, step, step. Tap, step, step.

Monotok pulled back the knife and there was the faintest rustle from his sleeve. Koshechkin stopped and cocked his head again, deep furrows across his brow, his right foot poised in midair.

Monotok moved quickly, stepping up and thrusting the knife into Koshechkin’s chest, between the fifth and sixth rib, aiming for the heart. He plunged the knife in as far as it would go, then pulled it out and just as quickly stabbed Koshechkin again, slightly to the right of the first wound. Then again. And again. The massive damage to his heart and lungs meant that he bled out in seconds and Monotok moved back down the stairs to give the man room to fall. Koshechkin died without making a sound, a look of confusion on his face.

Monotok turned and went back down the stairs to the door to Basement Three. He took the severed thumb from his pocket, held it against the scanner and then tapped in the four-digit code. The door clicked open and Monotok grinned. It wouldn’t be long now until Grechko was dead.

Shepherd saw the faint outline of the keypad to the gym, almost as if it was floating in midair. It was disorienting but he knew it was just his mind playing tricks as it tried to make sense out of the blackness around him. He focused on walking, a strange experience when he couldn’t see where he was placing his feet. As he got closer the pale glow from his phone illuminated part of the door. He pressed his thumb against the scanner and tapped in his code. The lock clicked and he pushed the door open.

‘Dmitry, over here,’ said Shepherd, waving his mobile around. ‘Can you see the light?’

‘I can see it,’ replied Popov.

‘Head towards me. Where’s Leo?’

There was a loud bang and Tarasov cursed in Russian. ‘I don’t know where the fuck I am,’ he said.

‘Can you see the light from my phone, Leo?’ asked Shepherd, waving his mobile around again.

‘No, I can’t see anything. Wait. Yes. I see it.’ A few seconds later there was a crash and another loud curse. ‘Who the hell leaves weights on the ground?’ shouted Tarasov.

Shepherd continued to wave the phone around and after a minute or so he heard a footfall ahead of him and then Popov appeared in the faint glow. Shepherd put a hand on his chest. ‘Hang on for Leo,’ he said.

It took Leo another thirty seconds to reach them, and he bumped into Popov.

‘OK, this is what we’re going to do,’ said Shepherd. ‘Dmitry, keep a hand on my shoulder, Leo you hold on to Dmitry. I’ll lead us to the security centre.’

The two men did as they were told and as a group they began to walk to the security centre. The feeble light from the phone was barely any help in illuminating their way.

‘How can you see?’ asked Tarasov. ‘It’s pitch black.’

‘I’ve got a good memory, I can recall the layout, pretty much,’ said Shepherd. He was moving at a slow walk in what he knew was the direction of the door to the security centre. It was difficult because he couldn’t see where he was placing his feet and his brain kept playing tricks on him, persuading him that at every step he was going to put his foot in a deep hole. It was a relief each time his foot hit the hard surface.

Tarasov kept misjudging the pace and banging into Popov, making both men curse.

Eventually Shepherd saw the outline of the thumb scanner and keypad ahead of them, apparently floating in the air. He became disoriented and almost stumbled but he fought to focus and after three more steps he was at the door. He pressed his thumb against the scanner and put in his code. The door lock clicked and he pushed it open.

‘OK, guys, we’re entering the security centre. Don’t move around until we know what the story is,’ said Shepherd. The three men slowly filed into the room. Shepherd’s right foot touched something and he told them to stop. He bent down and there was enough light from his phone to see Podolski, lying face down on the floor. ‘It’s Alina,’ he said. He transferred the phone to his left hand and felt for a pulse with his right. He knew as soon as he touched her neck that he was wasting his time. His heart lurched. He checked both Podolski’s ears. Her Bluetooth earpiece was missing. He patted her down and confirmed that her transceiver was missing. ‘She’s dead,’ he said, straightening up.

‘Dead?’ repeated Tarasov.

‘The killer’s down here,’ said Shepherd. ‘He’s taken Alina’s radio.’ He put his hand up to his earpiece. ‘Ivan, this is Tony. Where are you?’

There was no answer.

‘Ivan. Where are you?’

Popov interrupted and spoke rapidly in Russian. The only word that Shepherd could make out was ‘Ivan’.

‘Dmitry, I think Ivan’s in trouble,’ said Shepherd, though he knew that he was underplaying the situation. Koshechkin was probably already dead. ‘From now on we’re going to watch what we say on the radios, he’s probably listening in.’

‘So what do we do?’

Shepherd went through Podolski’s pockets and found her phone. He switched it on and gave it to Popov. ‘Where are the fuses?’ asked Shepherd. ‘In this room?’

‘In the briefing room.’

‘Find out if he’s just pulled the fuses or cut the wire. Either way do what you can to restore power. I’ll go down to Grechko.’

‘Leo can go with you.’

‘I’ll move faster on my own,’ said Shepherd, taking off his jacket and tossing it on to a chair. ‘My memory’s pretty good, even in the dark. But it’ll slow me down if I have to worry about Leo. But see if you can find another phone for him and send him down after me.’ He stood up and headed for the door.

Monotok walked quickly down the corridor. Ahead of him was the door to the pool room. He took the severed thumb from his pocket, pressed it against the scanner and tapped in the four-digit code.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside, the tang of chlorine stinging his nose. Grechko was at the far end of the pool, sitting on a lounger with a towel around him. ‘Is someone there?’ Grechko shouted. ‘Who is it? Dmitry?’ His voice echoed off the walls.

Monotok walked slowly towards him. ‘No, it’s not Dmitry,’ he said. ‘It’s just you and me.’

Grechko drew his legs up against his chest. ‘Who is it? Who’s there?’

‘My name is Kirill Luchenko, does that name mean anything to you?’

Monotok could see Grechko frowning as he peered into the darkness. Monotok stopped next to a lounger. He put down the gun then took off his night vision goggles, blinking in the darkness.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘I told you. My name is Kirill Luchenko, but my friends call me Monotok. And I’m here to kill you.’ He took his knife out of his pocket and placed it next to the goggles.

Grechko stood up and the towel fell from his shoulders. Grechko stood there naked, his hands out in front of him as he moved his head from side to side in a futile attempt to improve his vision. ‘You are an assassin, is that it? Someone paid you to kill me and you skulk in the dark like the coward that you are?’ He jutted his chin up, his hands still moving through the air.

Monotok reached into his pocket and took out a small Magnalite torch. ‘No one paid me, Grechko. This isn’t about money.’ He switched on the torch and shone it at Grechko. The light was blinding and Grechko threw up his hands to shield his face. Monotok bent down and picked up the gun. He wasn’t planning to shoot Grechko – he was going to use the knife to end the pig’s life – but he wanted him to know that he had a gun and that he would use it if Grechko came at him. He shone the torch at the gun, and then back to Grechko’s face. ‘If you take one step towards me I’ll shoot you in your shrivelled-up nuts.’

Grechko stayed where he was, squinting into the light. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay you whatever you want. Anything.’

‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’ said Monotok. ‘This isn’t about money. This was never about money.’ He stopped and stared at Grechko. ‘Actually, that’s wrong, isn’t it? This is all about money. It always has been.’

Shepherd hurried down the stairs, two at a time, keeping his left hand against the wall for balance,. The light from the phone was barely enough to see by but his memory stood him in good stead and he knew exactly where he was. He saw the glow of the thumb scanner and keypad at the door to Basement Two but hurried on by.

He put his hand up to his earpiece. ‘How’s it going, Dmitry?’ he asked.

‘I can’t make sense of the wiring,’ said Popov. ‘I’m not an electrician.’

‘We really need lights down here, Dmitry.’

‘I’m doing my best, Tony.’

Shepherd’s foot caught on something and he pitched forward. His left hand slammed against the wall and he twisted as he fell, his right hip slamming against the stairs. The fall knocked the breath out of him and he lay against the wall, gasping for air. He pointed his mobile at whatever had caused him to stumble and winced when he saw Koshechkin’s pale face, his eyes wide and staring. Shepherd panned the light down the bodyguard’s body and winced again at the glistening blood all over the chest. He pushed himself to his feet, then took the last few steps to the door that led to Basement Three.

‘There he is,’ said Harper. ‘There’s the bastard now.’ They had parked the Transit van next to Khan’s CRV behind the supermarket where he worked. Khan had just turned around the corner. He had a carrier bag in each hand and had his head down, deep in thought, as he walked.

‘Get the tape ready, Jock,’ said Jimbo. He was holding a large spanner in his gloved hands. They didn’t want to use the guns in the city, even with suppressors fitted. McIntyre reached for a roll of duct tape and pulled off a piece.

Shortt opened the passenger door and climbed out.

Harper wound down the driver’s-side window as Khan got closer. ‘Hey, mate, you got the time on you?’

Khan looked up as if his mind was elsewhere. ‘What?’

‘The time, mate? What’s the time?’

Khan looked at him, frowned, then twisted his left wrist to get a look at his watch. He opened his mouth to speak but Shortt came up behind him and slammed the spanner just behind his right temple and Khan dropped like a stone. His carrier bags fell to the ground and one burst open, scattering oranges across the tarmac.

McIntyre kicked the rear doors open and helped Shortt drag the unconscious man into the back. As McIntyre slapped duct tape across Khan’s mouth, Shortt picked up the bags and spilled fruit and threw them into the van before slamming the door shut. McIntyre pulled a sack down over Khan’s head.

‘Nicely done, lads,’ said Harper as Shortt climbed back into the van and put the spanner into the glove compartment. He started the engine and drove slowly on to the main road as McIntyre wound duct tape around Khan’s arms and legs.

‘I was too young to know what was going on when the Soviet Union imploded,’ said Monotok. ‘My father tried to explain, but I was a kid. He was excited, though. He thought Russia was going to change for the good. He thought it would make his life easier and the lives of the men who worked for him.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘He had no idea.’

He jabbed the knife towards Grechko and Grechko flinched.

‘During Gorbachev’s perestroika it was every man for himself. But when Yeltsin took over, everything changed. The rules changed. You had only two ways of getting rich. Yeltsin handed it to you, or you took it. He gave whole industries to his friends, lock, stock and barrel. But you, you were never a friend of Yeltsin. You had to take what you wanted, didn’t you? You had to grab it with both hands and you didn’t give a fuck who you hurt in the process.’

‘You don’t know what it was like back then,’ said Grechko. ‘If you weren’t in with Yeltsin or his cronies you got nothing. It was a closed club.’

‘So you and Zakharov and Buryakov and Czernik formed your own club, didn’t you? You decided to take what you wanted. To kill for it.’

‘You weren’t there. You don’t understand.’

‘I was there!’ shouted Monotok. ‘That’s the point! I was there!’

He took a step forward. The hand holding the torch was shaking and the beam swept back and forth over Grechko’s pale body.

‘I was in bed when you came to our house. It was the day before my birthday and I couldn’t sleep. Do you remember the house, Grechko? The house of Mark Luchenko? Do you remember him? And what about my mother? Misha? Do you remember Misha Luchenko? You should do because you raped and killed her.’

Shepherd moved as quickly as he could in the darkness. He was coming up to a junction in the hallway, he knew that much. The pool room was to the right. Storage rooms to the left. The light from his phone was next to useless and didn’t even reach his feet but it allowed him to see part of the wall, which was enough to keep him moving in a straight line. He wanted to talk to Popov to see what was happening upstairs but he couldn’t now that he knew that the killer had a transceiver. He didn’t want him to know that he was heading for the pool room.

Monotok took a deep breath. He knew that the longer he spent talking the harder it would be for him to escape, but he didn’t care any more. He had devoted the last four years of his life to getting his revenge, and Grechko was the final piece of the puzzle. He wanted Grechko to know why he was dying and who was killing him. ‘I heard you and Zakharov and Czernik and Buryakov come into the house. I heard you shouting at my father, telling him to sign the papers that would transfer the steel plant over to you. I crept out of my bedroom and looked down from the top of the stairs. Do you remember now, Grechko? Mark and Misha Luchenko?’

Grechko had begun to shiver, either through fear or the cold. Either way, Monotok didn’t care.

‘At first my father refused. He said it wasn’t his to give away, but you knew how it worked, back then. Nobody really knew who owned what. Before 1990, the state owned everything. And the local party officials and the police could be paid off. If you had the right paperwork, it was yours. That’s what the four of you were doing, back then. You stole steel plants, trucking companies, ships, buildings, factories. You took by force and you killed if you had to.’

Monotok waved the knife in front of him. ‘Look at me, Grechko. Look at me now or I swear to God I’ll slice off your balls and shove them in your mouth.’

Grechko raised his eyes and stared at him. There was no fear in his eyes, just hatred.

‘I saw you rape my mother, Grechko. And only then did my father sign your papers. Then you killed him. And then you killed her. And I had to crawl away and hide under my bed until you’d gone.’ He gritted his teeth and shook his head angrily. ‘You took my father’s plant. You killed his deputy, too. You gave it to Czernik and within five years how many plants did he have? Ten? Twelve? All of them stolen. That’s how you got your start, all of you. You threatened and you killed and you stole and by the time the millennium rolled around you were all billionaires. Did it make you happy, Grechko? All that money? Knowing how you got it? Knowing that it’s going to be the death of you?’

Grechko said nothing. His shivering had intensified.

Monotok stepped towards Grechko, holding the knife low. He didn’t want the first blow to be a killing one. Or the second. Or the third. He wanted him to bleed out slowly. And painfully.

Shepherd pressed his thumb against the scanner and tapped out his four-digit security code. The door clicked and he gently pushed it open, just an inch or two. The only sound was the hum of an air-conditioning unit and the gentle lap of the water against the side of the pool. He pushed the door open a little more. The darkness was absolute. He pushed the door further and stepped inside.

As soon as he heard the lock click, Monotok switched off his flashlight and put it and the knife on the lounger. He pushed the night vision goggles on and turned to look at the door, just as the man stepped into the room. He was in his late thirties and wearing a shoulder holster. In his right hand he was holding a mobile phone and the screen glowed weakly.

Monotok picked up his gun and pointed it at the man, his finger tightening on the trigger.

‘He’s got a gun!’ screamed Grechko in the darkness.

The man crouched, dropped the phone and reached for the gun in the holster but Monotok had all the time in the world to aim and pull the trigger twice.

The man staggered to the side and fell into the pool with a loud splash.

Monotok grinned. He took off the night vision goggles and put them and the gun back on the lounger. He picked up the flashlight and switched it on. He panned the beam around and found Grechko, crouched like a frightened animal with his back to the wall, as naked as the day he was born.

He bent down and picked up the knife. ‘Now where was I?’ he said. ‘Before we were so rudely interrupted.’ He smiled. ‘Ah yes, now I remember. I was about to kill you.’

Shepherd’s eyes were stinging from the chlorine in the pool and he blinked several times. The pool wasn’t much more than six feet deep and his feet brushed the bottom. The vest had done its job but he still patted his chest with both hands to make sure that neither of the bullets had penetrated.

The Glock was still in its holster, his fingers hadn’t even touched it before the rounds had hit him. They had been two good shots. One just above the heart, one below it. If it hadn’t been for Amar Singh’s vest, Shepherd would have died instantly.

He wafted his arms up to drive himself down to the floor of the pool, then pulled the Glock out with his right hand. The gun would still fire, he knew that there was no way that water could get into the cartridge. The only danger was if the barrel was full of water when he pulled the trigger. He kept the barrel of the gun pointed down as he braced his feet against the bottom. He would only get one chance at this so he had to get it right. He moved his left hand across to support his right around the butt of the Glock, then pushed down hard with his legs.

His mind was totally focused on what he needed to do. He had to keep the barrel down until it was in the air. He had to aim in the general direction of the killer. If the torch was back on he could make the first shot a killing shot. If the pool room was still in darkness then the first shot would have to go high and in the light from the gun he’d see the target and his memory would have to help him go for the kill with the second.

He powered up through the water and burst through the surface, his eyes wide open. He brought up the gun. The torch was on, illuminating Grechko, who was curled up against the wall, covering his face with his hands. The killer had his back to Shepherd, outlined by the light from the torch.

The killer started to turn at the sound of cascading water but Shepherd had already started to pull the trigger. The first shot hit the man right between the shoulder blades. The second was a few inches lower. Shepherd managed to get off a third shot, catching the man at the base of his spine, before he crashed back into the water.

He kicked with his legs and swam to the ladder to climb out. He crawled over to the torch and picked it up. The man he’d shot was lying face down on the floor, blood pooling around his chest.

The knife was by his side and Shepherd kicked it away and then put his Glock back in its holster.

The emergency light by the door flickered into life. Popov must have fixed the circuit, but the main lights stayed off.

Grechko got to his feet and wrapped his towel around his shoulders. ‘You killed him,’ he said quietly.

He was in shock, Shepherd knew. But there was nothing he could do for him, right now. He put his hand to his earpiece but realised it was missing.

Grechko walked over to Monotok’s body and sneered at it. ‘Call yourself a killer?’ he said. ‘Look who’s laughing now. I’m here and you’re dead so fuck you and fuck your mother.’ He hawked up saliva and spat on the body.

‘We need to get upstairs,’ said Shepherd. ‘We’ll have to use the stairs, the lifts aren’t working.’

Grechko pointed at the door to the changing rooms. ‘I need to get dressed,’ he said.

Shepherd nodded and they went together to the changing rooms. There was another emergency light there with just enough glow to see by. There was a pile of towels on a shelf and Shepherd grabbed one and patted himself down, but his shirt and trousers were still soaking wet and his shoes squelched as he walked. Grechko pulled on his trousers and shirt but didn’t bother with his shoes and socks. They went to the stairwell. Before Shepherd opened the door, he warned Grechko about Koshechkin’s body. The emergency lighting illuminated the stairwell and the Russian stared in horror as he stepped over the corpse.

‘What happened?’ he asked Shepherd.

‘Knife,’ said Shepherd.

Grechko shivered, knowing how close he had come to meeting the same fate. ‘You saved my life, Tony,’ he said as they headed up the stairs.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Shepherd.

‘Anything you want,’ said Grechko.

Shepherd stopped and turned to look at the Russian. ‘Anything?’ he said.

The Russian nodded. ‘Money. Women. A car. Anything. Just name it.’

Shepherd stared at Grechko, his face a blank mask. ‘You know what I want, Mr Grechko?’

‘Just name it,’ repeated Grechko.

Shepherd nodded slowly. ‘I want to know why he wanted to kill you so badly.’

Grechko said nothing.

‘I want to know what you did to him that made him hate you so much. I want to know what drove him to kill Zakharov, Buryakov and Czernik and to go to such lengths to get to you.’

Grechko remained silent but stared at Shepherd.

‘Must have been something pretty important, yeah?’ Shepherd met Grechko’s gaze and the two men stared at each other for several seconds. When it became clear that Grechko wasn’t going to say anything, Shepherd smiled thinly. ‘That’s what I thought.’ He turned and carried on up the stairs, with Grechko following.

When they reached the ground floor, Shepherd used his thumb and code to open the door. He held it open for Grechko, who walked out into the hallway and headed for the study. ‘Where is Dmitry?’ Grechko said over his shoulder.

‘The security centre,’ said Shepherd.

‘Send him to me.’

Shepherd scowled at the retreating figure. ‘Yes, your majesty,’ he muttered. He went back down the stairs to Basement One.

He heard footsteps below him. ‘Who’s that?’ he shouted.

‘Leo,’ shouted Tarasov.

‘Is Dmitry still in the control centre?’

‘Yes,’ replied Tarasov, coming back up the stairs. ‘He managed to get the emergency lights on. Mr Grechko is OK?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘And the killer?’

‘Not so OK,’ said Shepherd. ‘No longer a threat.’

‘I’ll check downstairs,’ said Tarasov.

‘Be careful, Ivan’s down there,’ said Shepherd. ‘He didn’t make it.’

Shepherd pushed open the door to Basement One and made his way over to the security centre. Dmitry was in the briefing room, peering into a large metal panel. He looked over when Shepherd came in. ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, frowning at Shepherd’s wet clothes.

‘I went for a swim,’ said Shepherd. He grabbed his jacket and slipped it on over his wet shirt.

‘What about Mr Grechko?’

‘He’s OK. He’s in the study. He wants to see you.’ He gestured at the fuses and wiring. ‘What’s the story?’

‘Some of the fuses have been pulled, that’s how I got the emergency lights on. Some of the circuits have been cut so we’ll need an electrician.’ He straightened up. ‘I can’t work out how he knew exactly what circuits to interfere with.’

‘He must have had help.’

Volkov was sprawled across the table, snoring. ‘Drugged?’ asked Dmitry.

‘Looks like it,’ said Shepherd. ‘Alina usually makes the coffee.’

‘She was helping him? So why did he kill her?’

‘So she couldn’t betray him.’ He nodded at the door. ‘You should go and take care of Grechko. He was a bit shaken up.’

Popov nodded at the far corner of the room, behind where Volkov was lying. ‘Your mobile phone signal should be back. There’s a jammer over there, a big one. I switched it off.’

As Popov walked out, Shepherd took out his mobile. He was showing two missed calls from a phone that had withheld its number, and one from Jimmy Sharpe. There was one voicemail message, from Sharpe, and he listened to it. It was short and sweet – ‘Call me back, you bastard.’

Shepherd went back out into the car parking area as he called him back. ‘I’ve got something on Farzad Sajadi that you might be interested in,’ said Sharpe.

‘That case is closed, pretty much,’ said Shepherd. He looked at his watch and realised that he’d missed the RV with Harper, Shortt and McIntyre. They would either have put the operation on hold or gone ahead without him.

‘He’s in witness protection,’ said Sharpe.

It was the last thing that Shepherd had expected to hear. ‘Witness protection?’

‘The whole witness protection thing is now under the control of the National Crime Agency, which is why it wasn’t showing up on the PNC,’ said Sharpe.

‘A witness to what, Razor? The bastard was in Afghanistan.’

‘I haven’t got any details at all,’ said Sharpe. ‘There’s a rock-solid firewall around the database. All I know is that Farzad Sajadi is there. There’s a number you can call where you can speak to a representative, but the problem with that is that all sorts of alarm bells are going to ring.’

‘Understood.’

‘It’s not a call I can make, with the best will in the world,’ said Sharpe.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Shepherd. ‘You’ve done more than enough.’

Sharpe gave Shepherd the number and ended the call. Shepherd walked outside and called the number. A woman answered. ‘Good evening,’ she said, then remained silent.

‘I was told to call this number for information on an Ahmad Khan,’ said Shepherd.

‘I’ll need your name, position and ID number,’ said the woman. She sounded young and had a Home Counties accent. Shepherd gave her the information. The woman repeated it back to him. ‘And you are enquiring about who?’

‘Ahmad Khan. Now using the name Farzad Sajadi.’

‘Please stay on this number, someone will call you back shortly,’ said the woman, and the line went dead. Shepherd paced up and down. After a few minutes his mobile rang. The caller was withholding the number. This time it was a man, middle aged and with a Welsh accent. ‘Mr Shepherd?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you confirm your ID number please.’

Shepherd repeated the number.

‘You were asking about Farzad Sajadi aka Ahmad Khan?’

‘I need to know what he’s doing with a British passport and why he’s here under two names,’ said Shepherd.

‘I’m afraid there’s a limit to what I can tell you, Mr Shepherd.’

‘It’s important,’ said Shepherd. He was about to say that it was a matter of life and death but realised how clichéd that would sound.

‘I assume it is or you wouldn’t be contacting us,’ said the man. ‘The problem is that I have only a minimum amount of information on my terminal. Most of the information is protected and can only be accessed at a higher level. To protect the principal.’

‘He is under witness protection, then?’

‘That much I can certainly tell you,’ said the man. ‘He came from Afghanistan in 2003 and we prepared the new identity for him. And for his daughter, too.’

‘They have full citizenship? Their passports are genuine?’

‘Of course,’ said the man. ‘All his paperwork, and the paperwork of his daughter, is in order.’

‘Does it say why?’

‘Why?’ repeated the man. ‘I don’t think I follow.’

‘He was a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. How does a man like that get a British passport?’

‘I don’t have that information in front of me,’ said the man. ‘What I can tell you is that there are two contact numbers on the file. One is for our own Defence Intelligence and Security Centre and the other is for the Defense Intelligence Agency.’

‘The DIA? The Americans?’

‘That’s correct. It’s a number in Washington, DC.’

‘Can you think of any reason why the DIA would be involved with the relocation of a Taliban fighter to the UK?’

‘A Taliban fighter, no. But the relocation of Afghanis with new identities has been going on for years. Usually with translators or Afghan army officers who have been directly threatened. Some politicians have also been relocated.’

‘With new identities?’

‘If their lives have been threatened, yes. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s because the person concerned has done this country a great service.’

‘A service?’

‘Risked their lives to save British citizens, for instance.’

‘You think that’s what has happened in Khan’s case?’

‘I’ve no way of knowing,’ said the man. ‘All I have is the information on the screen in front of me. If you want more information you will have to either contact the two agencies I mentioned, or make an official request. But I can tell you from experience that such information is rarely released. Everything is geared towards maintaining the anonymity and safety of the principals.’

Shepherd realised he wasn’t going to get anything else from the man so he thanked him and ended the call.

He tried Harper’s phone and it went through to voicemail. So did Shortt’s. Shepherd cursed. They were almost certainly on their way to the New Forest, with Khan bound and gagged in the back of the van. He looked at his watch and cursed again.

He hurried back to the control room, knelt down by the side of Podolski’s body, rolled her over and went through her pockets. He pulled out her keys and ran to her bike. The crash helmet was sitting on one of the bike’s mirrors. Shepherd pulled it on. It was a tight fit but wearable. He inserted the key, started the engine and twisted the throttle. The engine roared and he headed for the exit.

Harper gave the mobile to Shortt. They were driving through a wooded area and according to the milometer they were close to where they needed to turn off. ‘Switch it on and check out the map,’ he said. ‘It’ll show where we need to turn off.’

Shortt switched on the phone. ‘What about calling Spider?’ he asked.

‘Waste of time,’ said Harper. ‘This’ll be over within half an hour. Khan will be dead and buried and we’ll be on our way back to London.’

Shortt scrolled through the phone’s menu and opened the map application. The map showed the position of the van as a small arrow, and there was a flashing dot to the left of the road some way ahead. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said.

‘Let me know when we need to turn off,’ said Harper, checking his rear-view mirror.

The speedometer flickered at about ninety and Shepherd bent low over the motorbike’s tank to lower his wind resistance. He’d been caught by two speed cameras as he sped west but that didn’t worry him, he was more concerned about being pursued by traffic cops, but so far he’d been lucky. He was moving faster than the van, he was sure of that, because Harper had Khan in the back so he wouldn’t be doing more than the speed limit. There was a chance, just a chance, that he’d get to them before they had an opportunity to pull the trigger. Shepherd didn’t need the GPS to tell him where the grave was, his photographic memory was more than up to the job. The question was whether or not he’d be able to get there in time.

There was a line of cars ahead of him waiting to overtake a sluggish coach. Shepherd gunned the engine and pulled out into the opposite lane, flashing past the cars and coach, the wind ripping at his clothes, now almost dry after his soaking in the pool.

A car coming in his direction flashed its lights at him in disapproval but Shepherd wasn’t concerned about what other drivers thought about his speed. All he cared about was getting to the New Forest before Harper put a bullet in Khan’s head.

Ahmad Khan could barely breathe. The duct tape across his mouth was enough to suffocate him but the sack they’d pulled over his head meant that every breath was an effort. He tried to stay calm and to breathe slowly and evenly because he knew that panic would only increase his oxygen consumption. He began to lose track of time and started counting slowly, marking the minutes with his fingers, but the lack of oxygen made it difficult to concentrate and he began to drift in and out of consciousness. At some point the van began to shake and vibrate and he realised that they had driven off the road and were crossing rough ground. They slowed and the lurching intensified and then they stopped.

He heard the rear doors being opened and a gruff voice. ‘Get him out.’

Hands seized his legs and dragged him across the floor of the van, then more hands grabbed his shoulders. He heard feet tramping across vegetation as they carried him, face down. Then he felt a lurch and he flipped over and he was falling. For a second he imagined that he had been thrown over the side of a cliff but then he hit the ground, hard enough to force the air from his lungs. He rolled on to his back. The sack was pulled roughly from his head and he blinked his eyes. They were outside and he was surrounded by trees. He lay there, staring up at the branches above his head, the duct tape across his mouth pulsing in and out in time with his breathing.

Something moved in front of his face. A water bottle. Evian water. Khan thought he might be hallucinating then he realised that the bottle had been taped to the barrel of a pistol. Khan recognised the gun. A Makarov. A common weapon used by the Taliban, usually after it had been prised from the dead hand of a Russian soldier. It wasn’t a common weapon in England. He stared at the gun, wondering what its significance was. He knew what the significance of the water bottle was. It was a silencer, to deaden the sound of the shot that would take his life.

The man holding the gun sneered down at him. ‘Do you know who I am, you piece of raghead shit?’ the man snarled.

Khan shook his head. Maybe they had the wrong man. Maybe this was all some horrible mistake.

‘You killed three of my mates and now I’m going to kill you.’

Khan looked to his left. There was another man there. In his forties. White. Staring at Khan with cold eyes. The man’s face was familiar, but Khan knew very few Westerners. It had to have been in Afghanistan. Which meant that he was a soldier.

‘Look at me, you bastard!’ shouted Harper. ‘I’m the one who’s going to put a bullet in your head.’

Khan looked up at the man again. Three of his friends, he had said. When had Khan killed three men? He had killed many men over the years, which three was he talking about?

‘You shot them in the back, you fucking coward. At least you get to see my face.’

‘Just do it, Lex,’ said a third man, standing somewhere beyond Khan’s feet. Khan tried to get a look at him but all he could see was a gun. A revolver.

Khan tried to speak but he could barely breathe and the only sound he could make was a grunt from the back of his throat.

The man with the Makarov grinned. He was wearing gloves. Black leather gloves.

‘The men you killed were friends of mine,’ said the man. ‘I’m going to tell you their names so that they are the last things you think about before you die.’

Khan blanked out the man’s words. There was only one thing he wanted to think about just then. If he was indeed going to die then he wanted his last thoughts to be of his darling daughter, the light of his life.

Khan heard the roar of an engine off to his left. Then a flash of light through the trees. His heart leapt as he thought that perhaps rescue was at hand, that somehow the police had found out what was happening and were coming to save him. The engine noise got louder and he realised it was a motorbike and not a car, and then he saw it, bumping across the rough ground.

The man with the Makarov saw it too and he brought up the gun with both hands and fired.

The bullet glanced against the side of Shepherd’s crash helmet and ricocheted off to the side. He swung the handlebars to the right but hit the curved root of a beech tree and before he could do anything he was hurtling off the bike, arms flailing. He hit the ground hard but rolled and scrambled behind a tree. He flicked up the visor as a second round thudded into the trunk by his head. ‘It’s me, Spider!’ he screamed at the top of his voice.

‘It’s Spider!’ echoed McIntyre, holding up his hand.

Harper lowered his gun as Shepherd stepped out from behind the tree. The engine of the bike was still roaring and the air was growing thick with exhaust fumes. Shepherd pulled off the helmet and dropped it on to the ground, then knelt down and twisted the ignition key and pulled it out.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Harper. ‘You gave me a shock there.’

‘You might think about identifying your target before pulling the trigger,’ said Shepherd, straightening up.

‘Yeah, well, we weren’t expecting you on a bike, were we?’ said Harper. ‘Anyway, you’re here now, better late than never.’

He walked over to Khan and pointed his gun at the man’s face.

‘Put the gun down, Lex,’ said Shepherd, walking towards Harper.

‘What, having second thoughts, are you?’

‘We’re not shooting him, Lex.’

Harper continued to point his gun at Khan’s face. Khan stared at Harper, his eyes cold and emotionless as if he didn’t care whether he pulled the trigger or not.

Shepherd reached into his pocket and took out his Swiss Army knife. He folded out the blade and stepped between Harper and Khan. ‘Spider, mate, I’m slotting him tonight, come what may,’ said Harper quietly.

‘He killed Captain Todd,’ said McIntyre. ‘And he shot you, Spider. The bastard deserves to die.’

‘Then let’s at least hear his side of the story,’ said Shepherd, kneeling down next to Khan. He used the blade to sever the duct tape at the back of Khan’s head, then pulled it away from his mouth. ‘Did you shoot me?’ he asked Khan.

Khan shook his head. ‘No, sir, I did not.’

Shepherd put a hand on Khan’s shoulder. ‘And Captain Todd. Did you kill him?’

Khan shook his head again. ‘No.’

‘Of course he’d say that!’ shouted Harper. ‘He knows we’re going to slot him, Spider. He’d say anything to save his skin.’ He waved the gun at Khan. ‘Get out of the way. If you don’t want to do it, you can leave it to me.’

‘He didn’t do it, Lex,’ said Shepherd quietly.

‘Bullshit.’

Shepherd turned back to Khan. ‘But you were there, outside the al-Qaeda house in Pakistan? It was you I saw. Outside the house?’

Khan nodded. ‘Yes, I was there.’

‘We know he was there, we saw the bugger,’ said Shortt. ‘And we saw him kill Captain Todd.’

‘And the three Paras!’ shouted Harper. ‘Let’s not forget the three lads he shot in the back.’

‘Take a breath, Lex,’ said Shepherd.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ yelled Harper, waving his gun over his head. ‘We brought him out here to slot him, let’s just get on with it.’

Shepherd looked over at Khan again. He forced a smile. ‘Tell him,’ he said. ‘Tell him what happened the night that Captain Todd was killed.’