Who Dares Wins

ONE

Shepherd’s Bush, London. Six years later.

It was a cold May evening – no longer winter but not yet summer – and the traffic along the eastern end of the Uxbridge Road was sluggish. The many pedestrians on either side of the street moved more quickly than the cars and buses whose headlights illuminated them as they trudged home from work. The air was filled with traffic noises, fumes and the smell of food being cooked in Middle Eastern fast-food joints.

One man moved more slowly than the others, partly because he felt no need to hurry, but also because he was not built for speed. He wore a large woollen overcoat that went some way to disguising his generous stomach. His head was covered with an old-fashioned Trilby hat which, although seldom seen in this – or any – part of London, did not look out of place. In one of his gloved hands he carried a briefcase, the sort a doctor might have, its leather worn and soft; and he surveyed the world through a pair of glasses – square, thick rimmed and outmoded.

He found this part of London rather distasteful. In the past he had listened to his students assure him that it was vibrant and colourful, but to him it always looked dirty and ramshackle. He passed a bus stop where a teenage girl listened to something appalling over the speaker of her mobile phone; the people around her either didn’t mind or were too timid to ask her to turn it off. Further along the street there was a grocery stall. The vegetables – some of which he did not recognise – were neatly and abundantly displayed. As he passed, however, he felt the hostile eyes of the shopkeeper – arms crossed as he stood in the doorway – on him. It still did not make him hurry, but it did nothing to change his opinion about this part of town.

A few doors down there was a newsagent’s. He entered. It was almost empty, just a middle-aged woman buying cigarettes. His eyes wandered to the top shelf of the magazine rack and he selected three pornographic magazines at random. With a bit of luck he wouldn’t need them, but they were a necessary insurance policy. He paid for them without embarrassment, slipped them into his briefcase and left the shop.

He had examined the map carefully, so he knew when to turn left. There was a pub on the street corner, an unfashionable place only half full. By the time he had passed it, the noise of the main road was already receding. There were far fewer people in this side road, which made him feel more conspicuous. It was easy to get lost in a crowd, but in a less populated residential road where everyone was familiar with the sight of their neighbours, one was more likely to stand out. He pulled the brim of his hat further down and bowed his head as he walked.

He found the house he was looking for soon enough. He didn’t stop, though. Instead he kept walking a few metres, crossed the road and examined the place from a short distance. It was one of a row of terraced houses – a couple of storeys high and mostly, he assumed, divided into flats. The flat with which he was concerned was in the basement. There was a metal gate at street level and a small garden, unkempt and overgrown. That was good. It obscured the front window from the gaze of passers-by. Parked outside was an ancient Ford Escort – nothing expensive, but it had been souped up with a spoiler and go-faster stripes.

The man looked at his watch. A quarter past seven. He felt inside the jacket of his overcoat. It was there, he reassured himself. Ready to be used. He crossed the road again and approached his destination. The metal gate creaked slightly as he opened it, but that was okay. He descended the steps inelegantly on account of his girth, stopped at the front door and used his free hand to ring the bell.

It took almost a minute for the door to be answered by a tall young man. He had cropped brown hair, a slightly hooked nose and a protruding Adam’s apple. He wore a tracksuit and no shoes, and he exuded a certain shiftiness as his eyes moved up and down, sizing up the newcomer.

‘Yeah?’ he demanded, one hand still clutching the half-open door, the other pressed flat against the wall.

The newcomer took care not to let any expression show on his face. ‘Good evening,’ he said quietly. His voice bore the trace of a foreign accent. He had been in the UK for many years, however, and was sure that nobody would be able to place his nationality with any confidence.

The young man continued to look surly and impatient. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m here on…’ He cleared his throat and allowed himself a small, nasty smile. ‘I’m here on agency business.’

That certainly grabbed the young man’s attention. His eyes narrowed slightly, as though he were judging whether or not to believe the newcomer, then he licked his lips and looked briefly up towards the street. Nervousness? The newcomer thought so. A little excitement? Possibly.

The young man opened the door a bit further, allowing him to enter. He nodded as he did so, muttering a brief ‘Thank you’. The older man noticed with satisfaction that the younger man’s tracksuit trousers were made of a thin, flowing material. Ahead of him was a narrow kitchen; to his right a door that led into the main room of this small flat. It was about what he expected. A large television screen hung on the wall. The sound was down, but it was filled with images – extreme skiing of some kind. Just the sort of thing he would be interested in. On the floor in front of it was a tangled mesh of wires connected to a video console. In the middle of the room was a coffee table, covered with the accumulated debris of more than one day’s worth of ready-meal packaging. There were, he noticed, no books on the shelves. That didn’t surprise him. He knew enough about this young man – and others like him – to realise that the slow pleasures of reading would be unlikely to appear high on the list of his priorities.

He stood in the middle of the room, placed his briefcase on the floor and slowly slid his leather gloves off his hands.

‘Thought you lot had forgotten me,’ the young man’s voice said from behind him. He made no attempt to hide the dissatisfaction in his voice.

‘Oh no,’ the newcomer replied mildly. ‘We haven’t forgotten you.’ He placed his bare hand back into the pocket of his coat just as the young man walked past him to turn off the television.

In all his years of doing this kind of thing, he had learned that it is best to grab your opportunities when they arise. For that reason, as the young man faced the television with his back to him, the newcomer moved swiftly. From his pocket he pulled a hypodermic syringe and instantly removed the plastic cap that covered the protruding needle.

He stepped forward.

The area around the centre of the buttocks was, he knew, the best location. It was fleshier for a start. Easier to puncture. And the mark that the needle would undoubtedly leave would be somewhat hidden around that area of the body.

He jabbed his arm forward and his aim was true. He squeezed the syringe.

‘What the f…?’ the young man started to say. By the time he had turned to look at the newcomer, however, the needle had been removed.

The two men stared at each other, one of them holding the needle and making no attempt now to hide it, the other gazing at it in a mixture of confusion and horror.

The young man took a step forward. His attacker did not flinch. He knew it would only be seconds before his victim was completely incapacitated.

Sure enough, as the young man tried to take a second step, he appeared to have difficulty moving his leg, as though he had suddenly been frozen. The young man looked down at the ground, then up again at the newcomer.

And then he collapsed. His attacker caught him as he fell – it wouldn’t do for his body to be too bruised – then laid him out on the floor. By the time he had finished doing this he was red-faced and out of breath.

The newcomer surveyed the scene. The young man’s eyes were still open, still seeing; his limbs, however, were completely paralysed. The injection had done its work. It was a useful compound, suxamethonium chloride – a muscle relaxant that had the effect of completely paralysing the body while leaving the mind aware and remaining difficult to detect in the bloodstream. He did not have the opportunity to use it often, but for this particular job it was just right.

He opened his briefcase, dropped the syringe inside and then put his gloves back on. Walking into the kitchen he searched through the drawers, taking good care to put everything back in its proper place. He grunted with contentment when he found a roll of large, clear polythene bags. He’d brought some with him, of course, but much better for his purposes to use what was already here. He tore off a bag – it shimmied a little under the soft touch of his gloves – left the roll artfully on the cluttered work surface, then returned to the main room.

It was not entirely straightforward to remove the young man’s clothes, but he managed it and dumped them in a pile by the coffee table. Returning to his naked body, he slipped the plastic bag over his victim’s head. He pinched the open end around his neck before inclining his head slightly and looking directly into the young man’s eyes.

It was very hard to read any expression there, but his victim would know he was being suffocated. It was curious to witness the young man making no attempt to struggle. The plastic bag formed a concave hollow around his mouth which popped out and then in again. Over a period of about a minute the movement became gradually weaker until it stopped completely.

The young man was dead, but his assassin’s work wasn’t finished. Not yet. Letting go of the plastic bag his eyes fell upon another door at the opposite side of the room. He went through it to find the young man’s bedroom. It was stark: a chest of drawers, a cupboard and a large, unmade bed in the middle; an iPod left carelessly on the floor and a laptop computer next to it. The man took the laptop and switched it on. Opening the Internet browser he searched through the history of recently visited websites. They were largely what he expected: links to details of fast cars and gadgets, information on handguns and other weaponry, military websites and of course a good deal of pornography. He smiled. It looked like he wouldn’t be needing those magazines after all. Using the wireless connection that the laptop had automatically picked up he navigated to what looked like the young man’s favourite – it was nothing too specialist, he noted as he started to play a long video. He did, however, allow himself a few guilty seconds to watch the three naked, entwined bodies before placing the laptop on the coffee table.

Only then did he step back to admire his handiwork. It pleased him.

Auto-erotic asphyxiation. The young man had a history of it. For a moment the fat man wondered what pleasure anyone could possibly derive from the act of bringing oneself almost to the point of suffocation in order to achieve sexual gratification. Then he shrugged. People such as the young man he had just killed derived pleasure from all manner of pursuits that he himself would never consider. Foolish pursuits. Dangerous pursuits. In a strange kind of way it made them easier to eliminate. No doubt some girlfriend from the past would be found to confirm the young man’s penchant for such activities. He felt confident, from his considerable experience of these things, that his death would be put down to a tragic – if unsavoury – accident.

It wouldn’t do to stay here much longer. The man closed up his briefcase, glanced momentarily and with satisfaction at his little production, then let himself out of the flat. He closed the door silently before ascending the stairs, turning right and walking calmly back to the Uxbridge Road.

This really was quite the most unpleasant part of London, he decided. He would be very glad to get back home.

Much like the portly man who even now was making his way back up the Uxbridge Road, the car that travelled round the raised, curved slip road and into an almost diametrically opposite part of London was not built for speed. But it was being driven very quickly anyway.

It was a Renault, small and neat. The interior was immaculately tidy and faintly perfumed. It would be easy to mistake this car for one that had just been driven out of the showroom, but in fact it was a couple of years old. It just happened to have been very well looked after. The owner, Kelly Larkin, sat in the passenger seat. Her hair, which she had spent so much time on that morning, was mussed and unruly – at least by her standards. The scream of the small engine roared in her ears and, not for the first time, she found herself shouting. ‘For God’s sake, Jamie! Just slow down!’

No more than fifteen metres ahead, a car heading towards them moved into their lane to avoid a parked motorbike. Kelly clamped her eyes shut as her boyfriend slammed the engine into fifth gear and swerved sharply to avoid it. The angry sound of a horn filled her ears before fading quickly away. When she dared to open her eyes again the car had completely left the motorway and was on a wide, three-laned thoroughfare that would take them past Walthamstow and into that unfashionable slab of north-east London where she lived.

Jamie had a grin on his face. He was a good-looking guy, there was no doubt about that, but at the moment he looked like a psycho. He chewed on an imaginary piece of gum and held the steering wheel with a single finger. When he glanced into the rear-view mirror it was to admire himself.

At twenty-six, Jamie Spillane dressed like a teenager in his Converse boots and hooded tops. Kelly found herself with him quite against her better judgement; but at her age, thirty-three, she found herself being less and less picky in her desire not to end up on the shelf. She glanced at the speedometer. Ninety-six. ‘Please, Jamie,’ she begged as her left hand clutched the passenger door even more tightly. Perhaps pleading would have a better effect than shouting. ‘Please just slow down.’

Jamie turned to look at her. Instantly she wished she’d kept her mouth shut, because it meant his eyes were off the road. He had a neatly shaved goatee beard, which actually made him appear almost childlike because it looked so inappropriate. It was that look that had first attracted her to him, but right now she wished he would just grow up. He winked at her. Either he was totally oblivious to her fear, or it thrilled him. Whatever, he didn’t slow down. Kelly just closed her eyes again and tried to master the cold sickness that left her body weak. She would have liked to start crying, but somehow she was too scared even for that.

As they entered the outskirts of Walthamstow, Jamie reduced his speed. Not by much, though. He ran two red lights – they were just the ones Kelly counted when her eyes were open – and as he turned into the top of Acacia Street the speedometer was still wobbling around fifty. The tyres screeched as he took the corner; Kelly screamed at the sight of a couple of kids running across the road ahead. But at the last minute he swerved again and by some act of God managed to miss them. Outside her flat he swung the car to the side of the road. One tyre pulled up on to the kerb as he came to a halt, but he didn’t bother to rectify his inexact parking. He flamboyantly turned off the ignition, flung his arm into the air and turned once more to look at Kelly. His grin was still there and he was out of breath, as though he had run all the way from the M11, rather than driven.

Kelly opened the car door and stormed out. The air was cold, but she was too furious to take her coat from the back seat. As her heels clattered along the pavement she found that her mind was bubbling with angry words. Kelly was not the type to have a stand-up argument in the street, but, knowing that if she stopped now she wouldn’t have much choice, she hurried to her front door. If Jamie thought he was coming in after that little display, he had another think coming.

As she approached the door, Kelly fumbled in her handbag for her house keys, then frowned as she realised Jamie had them. She breathed out huffily and, feeling her muscles tense with anticipation of the impending row, turned around.

Jamie was at the end of the little pathway that led up to the front door of her flat. He held the keys up and jingled them as he sashayed towards her. When he was less than a metre away, Kelly tried to grab them, but she was too slow: he jerked his hands out of the way.

‘Just give me the fucking keys, Jamie.’

‘Touchy, touchy…’ he replied.

‘You’re an idiot, Jamie. You could have killed us.’ She made another swipe at the keys; this time Jamie grabbed her wrist. He pushed her up against the door, pressed his body against hers and went in for the kiss. Kelly turned her head to one side to make her lips inaccessible. She wasn’t the type to snog in public any more than she was the type to argue. ‘Just open the bloody door,’ she hissed. ‘It’s freezing.’

They tumbled inside. Kelly stopped to pick up her mail – what looked like a gas bill nestled among a flurry of pizza delivery leaflets – while Jamie opened the main door to the flat, looking for all the world like he owned the place. It wound Kelly up even more – she’d only been seeing the guy for six weeks and he was practically living there, eating her food and channel hopping her television with his feet up on the coffee table. He said he had his own place, but Kelly had never seen it and was beginning to wonder.

‘That’s the last time you use my car,’ she stated as she slammed the door shut, more to make it clear that she was still pissed off than anything else. Jamie was helping himself to a beer from the fridge in the kitchenette area that formed part of the main room. She noticed that the surfaces were considerably less tidy than they had been when she left for work that morning. Jamie had clearly been there for most of the day and hadn’t bothered to do much cleaning up after him. Kelly put her large, fashionable handbag down on the cheap blue sofa and turned to face him. ‘I said, that’s the last time you use my car, Jamie. I’m sick of you driving it like bloody Lewis Hamilton.’

Jamie took a pull from his beer. ‘Thought you liked me picking you up from work.’

Kelly bristled. Now was hardly the time to admit it, but she did like the way the other secretaries at the law firm where she worked would congregate not very subtly in the foyer whenever she happened to mention that Jamie was meeting her at home time. He was several years younger than her – than any of them, in fact – and was, by all appearances, a Good Catch. Of course, she had kept quiet about the down side of being with Jamie: the constant sponging. Kelly even found that she would fool herself, whenever her purse was light, that it was down to her own scattiness. But Kelly wasn’t scatty by nature. She was methodical and thrifty. If she thought there were two twenty-pound notes in her purse, there should be two. Not one. Deep down she knew that, but she chose to ignore it. She chose to ignore, too, the time when she had searched through his jacket while he was in the bath. Kelly’s intention had been to flick through the messages on his mobile phone, but instead she had found something else: a thick wad of notes – two or three hundred pounds by the look of it. A lot of money for a young man who was ‘between jobs’.

‘Anyway,’ Jamie continued as he walked louchely up to her, ‘what would you rather be doing? Putting on a nice pair of slippers like all those other boring old cows you work with?’ He hooked his free arm around her waist and lightly kissed her neck. ‘Watching Gardener’s World?’ He said it in a mock high-pitched voice that made Kelly smile despite herself.

‘No,’ she breathed, her voice still a bit surly. And then, ‘You just scared me, Jamie.’

‘Don’t you like being scared?’ he asked.

He kissed her on the neck once more. This time it sent a little shiver of pleasure down her spine. Her boyfriend pulled away, then looked at her with an obviously fake little-boy-lost look. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said with an irresistible half smile. ‘I’ll never do it again.’

‘Liar,’ she whispered.

And then he kissed her again, on the lips this time as his free hand formed an arc around the curve of her buttocks. It was a serious kind of kiss and she could not help but close her eyes. Her tense body became softer, more compliant. Though their mouths were still locked in a kiss, she heard herself gasp.

Jamie was far from gentle as he removed her clothes, but for some reason she didn’t mind that. It took almost no time at all for her trouser suit, blouse and underwear to be relegated to a crumpled pile on the floor. She kept her fashionable glasses on, as well as her bead necklace, because she knew he liked that.

Jamie took a step back and surveyed Kelly’s body. It flashed through her mind that she had gone from utter fury to absolute desire in minutes; a small corner of her brain wondered how Jamie had done that, or what she should think of herself for being so easy. But she didn’t really care that much. She liked the way her young lover looked at her. She liked being desired. She liked the way she could now pretend to be in control.

She gave him a steady, cool stare, then turned and walked into the bedroom, making very sure to sway her naked hips seductively as she went.

TWO

An unmarked white minibus stopped at the entrance to RAF Credenhill. The MOD policeman on duty spoke briefly with the driver, glanced into the vehicle, then nodded and allowed the barrier to open. The bus drove into SAS headquarters and came to a halt. Eight men spilled out.

They crossed the courtyard to the main building, each of them carrying a heavy bergen and walking with the slow gait of soldiers who had been in the field for a long time. Their calves were beasted, their clothes baggy from the muscle mass they had lost on op. Sam Redman was at the back of that little group, his friend Mac alongside him. Both men had deep tans, their skin weathered by several weeks of harsh sunshine. Their beards were bushy – almost comically so – and Sam was looking forward to shaving his off. They’d had twelve hours at Bastion, during which time he’d been able to clean up a bit and wolf down a few platefuls of nosh – hardly Gordon Ramsay, but better than the biscuits brown and Panda Colas they got with their ration packs. Now he needed scalding hot water, rough soap and a proper fry-up from his favourite greasy spoon in Hereford. And after that, come evening, a few beers. Quite a few. It had been a rough two months.

One of the lads in front of them, a young Cockney boy new to the Regiment, turned his head. ‘Keep up, you two,’ he called. ‘They’ll be pensioning you off if they think you can’t keep up with the young ’uns.’

‘Don’t you ladies worry about us,’ Mac replied quickly. ‘We’ve got all the energy in the world. Just ask your mum. It were only last week we were taking turns giving her a Bombay Roll. Gave her a right good fucking seeing to. Tell her I said hello, won’t you?’

A few of the guys laughed. Mac just looked at Sam and rolled his eyes before looking around at the bleak, utilitarian surroundings of Credenhill. After the bright blue skies, golden desert and lush vegetation of Afghanistan, it was drab and grey, this featureless compound under a Tupperware sky. ‘Nice to be home,’ he observed without a trace of sarcasm.

‘Too right,’ Sam replied. Unlovely though it was, it was a hell of a sight better than being in the green zone of Helmand Province, not having to worry about some black-robed, bearded bastard taking potshots at you or your mates. ‘Too damn right,’ he repeated.

An hour later, Sam had finished the process of dumping his kit in his single-bunked room and checking his weapons back in. There were no messages for him in the squadron office and he was looking forward to getting to the ground-floor flat on the outskirts of Hereford that he called home. Passing through the mess room, however, he saw Mac again. Unlike Sam, Mac was already cleaned up and shaved. Like many of the troopers they’d just returned with, Mac was bunking down at Credenhill. For the rookies it was because they were relatively new to the Regiment and had not yet bought themselves a place in the town; for Mac it was because his missus had kicked him out of the house for the umpteenth time. Some indiscretion with a Regiment groupie, no doubt – Sam had long since given up asking.

His friend was sitting alone at a table with a broadsheet newspaper spread out in front of him. Sam sat heavily opposite him. ‘What do you think you are?’ he asked, flicking the newspaper with his forefinger. ‘A fucking intellectual?’

Mac ignored him. ‘Listen to this,’ he said before reading from the paper in a mock-posh voice. ‘“Questions are being asked as to how long the SAS can continue operating at such an intense level. ‘There is concern in the Regiment that if they keep going at this high tempo it won’t be long before they suffer a big loss,’ one source said.”’

‘One source?’

‘Yeah,’ Mac scoffed. ‘Your mum probably.’ Then, realising what he had said, he looked up. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘Forget it,’ Sam replied, reaching to another table and grabbing a tabloid paper. It was the usual stuff, none of which interested him much. His eyes lingered briefly on the topless model on one of the inside pages; he read a report about the war in Afghanistan which used phrases like ‘brave heroes’ and ‘our boys’ – phrases that would never be uttered within the confines of Credenhill, or any other regimental barracks for that matter. His attention was caught by the story of some kid who’d been found dead in his London flat with a plastic bag over his head and a laptop full of porn. Death by misadventure, the coroner had said.

‘Dirty fucker,’ Sam mumbled.

‘What?’

Sam folded up the paper and tossed it on to another table. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He stood up. ‘I’m out of here. Catch you later, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Mac replied. ‘Later.’

Sam was about to walk away from the table when someone else entered the mess room. No one could say that Mark Porteus, the burly CO of 22 SAS was a particularly friendly man, but there weren’t many who held that against him. He wasn’t supposed to be likeable. His cropped hair was almost completely grey, his face deeply lined. He had a scar on the left of his chin where the skin was completely white – a souvenir from Northern Ireland – but somehow his features wouldn’t be complete without it. A Sandhurst graduate, Porteus was a career soldier from the tip of his boots to the top of his head and was held in respect by every man in the Regiment – and in awe by quite a few of the younger ones. He was wearing combats – Sam couldn’t remember when he’d last seen the CO out of them.

‘Boss,’ Sam greeted him across the room. He liked Porteus. He’d known him for years.

Porteus appeared to see him for the first time. His eyes narrowed and, for a brief moment, he looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Sam,’ he nodded in their direction. ‘Mac.’

And then he turned, leaving the mess as suddenly as he had entered it.

Sam’s brow furrowed and he looked over at Mac. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ he demanded. Normally Porteus would always stop to talk.

Mac shrugged. ‘It’s the beard,’ he replied. ‘Makes you look a bit dodgy. I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but the Mullah Omar look’s not really that hot right now.’

Sam looked back over towards the entrance to the mess room, his eyes narrowed. ‘If I want fashion tips,’ he said vaguely, ‘I’ll buy Cosmo. I’m off.’ He gave his friend a smile and walked out of the mess. Tempting though it was to stay and shoot the shit with Mac, he had a job to do. And putting it off wasn’t going to make it any easier.

Kelly Larkin glanced up at the clock. Twelve thirty. A bit early for lunch but what the hell. She was still bleary eyed and could do with getting out of the office. All morning her mind kept flitting back to the previous night: the stupid car journey, making love before getting drunk and making love again. She blushed. The boy had stamina, there was no doubt about that. Kelly pushed back her chair, grabbed her bag and headed out of the little typing pool she shared with four other secretaries.

She was waiting for the lift when one of her colleagues – a dark-haired girl from up east with a voice like a thousand cigarettes – hurried after her, her coat only half on. Her name was Elaine and she was good fun – Kelly had even shared a few drunken confidences with her in the past. ‘Going for lunch?’ she gabbed. ‘Mind if I come?’

Kelly inclined her head. ‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘I’m not much company today, though.’

Elaine gave her a sly look. ‘Yeah, you look a bit peaky. Keeping you up all night, is he?’

Kelly opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment the lift arrived with three of the law firm’s suited partners inside. The two secretaries clamped their mouths shut and Kelly could sense they were both doing their best not to laugh as they all silently took the lift to the ground floor and spilled out into the foyer. Elaine lit up the moment they were outside; by the time they had walked thirty metres down Chancery Lane to the sandwich bar where they regularly went she had smoked the whole cigarette and stamped it out on the pavement.

The sandwich bar wasn’t busy yet. Kelly wasn’t hungry either, but she ordered a panini anyway from the camp Italian who called all his female clients belissima. She and Elaine sat quietly for a minute or two, munching mouse-like at their lunch. It was Elaine who broke the silence. ‘So…’ she began, her gravelly voice cheeky and inquisitive. ‘What did you get up to last night?’ It was an innocent enough question, but the piercing look she gave Kelly made it quite clear she was after some juicy gossip.

Kelly shrugged. ‘Not much,’ she replied. ‘Just stayed in with Jamie.’

Elaine raised an eyebrow and nodded, not taking her gaze from Kelly, who felt herself blushing again. ‘You know what they say, darling,’ Elaine observed. ‘You’re as old as the man you feel. He must be taking a good ten years off you.’

Kelly thought of the car journey. ‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘Or putting it on.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean, then?’

Kelly’s brow furrowed. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s just something… something a bit shifty about him. I never meet any of his friends and he doesn’t even mention his family. He says he’s got a place of his own, but he never seems to go there. He’s been living with me practically since we met. He hasn’t got a job or anything…’

‘What does he do for money?’

Kelly shrugged and avoided her colleague’s eye.

‘Fucking hell, love,’ Elaine retorted to Kelly’s silence. ‘Don’t tell me you’re bankrolling him and all.’

‘Not much,’ she said. ‘Just now and then.’ She didn’t mention the missing twenties from her purse, or the wad of cash she had once found, or her suspicion that Jamie might even be involved in dealing drugs. But even so she realised how foolish she must sound.

Elaine’s demeanour had changed, from gossipy girlfriend to resolute ally. ‘Just don’t let the bastard take you for a ride, all right love? Sounds like he’s stitching you up like a kipper.’

Kelly smarted and it must have shown in her face, because Elaine clearly felt the need to justify her comment. ‘Well,’ she continued forcibly, ‘you hear about it, don’t you? Young men giving older women what they want in the sack…’

‘I’m not that old!’ Kelly protested.

‘… telling them all sorts of rubbish to keep their interest up,’ Elaine continued as though she hadn’t heard. Her eyes widened mischievously. ‘What’s he been telling you?’ she teased. ‘Let me guess – his dad’s a squillionaire and he’s going to inherit as soon as the old boy pops it!’

‘Elaine!’

‘I know, I know!’ She was warming to her subject now. ‘He’s on the run from…’ She looked around the room, as though it would give her some sort of inspiration, her eyes finally settling on the Italian behind the counter. ‘The Mafia!’ she decided. ‘He can’t go back to his house because Al Pacino’s sitting there waiting for him with a – oh, I don’t know, name a kind of gun…’

With that, the two women dissolved into giggles. ‘Seriously though, love,’ Elaine said when their laughter had subsided. ‘Don’t let the geezer take you for a ride. You know what men are like. Bone idle, most of them. He should be taking you out a bit, treating you right. And I’m not just talking between the sheets.’

Kelly blushed for a third time. She eyed Elaine over the brow of the cup. Her friend was right. Jamie Spillane had some explaining to do. She wasn’t going to be taken advantage of. Not by him, or by anyone.

She would bring it up with him, Kelly Larkin decided, that very night.

For the first time in weeks, Sam felt clean. The second he’d got back home he had stripped off and walked straight into the shower. The Afghan dust seemed to have soaked into the very pores of his skin and a once-a-day wash with a few baby wipes in the field hadn’t made any difference. There was black shit under his fingernails and his hair was matted in thick clumps, glued together with blood and sweat. Fuck Afghanistan, Sam thought. I won’t be going back there on holiday any time soon. He scrubbed himself vigorously, but no amount of soap would get rid of the dirt of his latest operation. Only when the water started to run cold did he step out. The mirror in his small bathroom was clouded over. He wiped away the condensation, then smeared shaving gel over his dishevelled beard and started to hack away at it. It took a good half-hour for his face to become smooth-skinned again. Looking in the mirror as he shaved he was surprised to see a tightness around his eyes. In his mind, Sam was still the fresh-faced kid who had signed up at seventeen at his brother’s insistence, more to keep him on the straight and narrow than anything else. But that was a long time ago and the mirror didn’t lie: Sam looked a lot older than the mental picture he had of himself.

Looking down at his torso, he saw that it was cut and bruised. Out in the field you never noticed stuff like that. It was only when you got home that the scars of a mission became apparent. He slung the razor into the sink, grabbed a towel and used it to wipe his face, before stepping back into his bedroom and finding a clean shirt and a pair of jeans. Only when he’d put these fresh clothes on did he really feel like he was home.

His car keys were just where he’d left them before he’d gone out to Afghanistan – in a little wooden box in the front room. The room itself was largely bare – a sofa, a TV, a few shelves with nick-nacks on them. It was the space of a person who didn’t spend much time there. A space that lacked the softening touches of a female influence. It wasn’t that Sam’s flat hadn’t played host to plenty of women. It had. They just hadn’t been given the opportunity to stay around long enough to get stuck into the soft furnishings. As Sam took the keys from their box his attention was caught by a photograph. His brother looked young in the picture. To his side was the black Labrador that had been his constant companion whenever he was at home. More than once he’d heard people wonder out loud if Jacob preferred dogs to people. Sam hadn’t seen him for six years and the photo had been taken some time before that. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Sam missed his brother, but he was angry with him too. Not a word for all these years, nowhere to be found – and Sam had certainly tried. For all he knew, Jacob could be dead.

Sam suppressed a shudder at that thought. Clutching the car keys he turned and left.

Sam’s flat might have been small and barely furnished, but he had not applied the same restraint to his choice of car. The black Audi was parked up outside his front door, gleaming and immaculate. He clicked the doors open, climbed inside and drove off without bothering about the seatbelt. Normally he’d drive hard, but today he was in no hurry. Far from it. He had been dreading this little trip ever since they touched down at Brize Norton. Out on ops, he could forget about what he had left back home; back on British soil he knew what his duty was, even though it was a chore to have to fulfil it. It took twenty minutes to reach the institutional building he was headed for – even the slowest old granny in a Robin Reliant could have made it in fifteen.

It didn’t matter what part of the world Sam had been to or for how long; nor did it matter what had happened while he’d been away. This place never changed. The red brick of the building was always immaculate; there was always a fair smattering of cars in the car park that surrounded it; and as he walked into the main reception there was always that faint, hospital-like smell of antiseptic.

This wasn’t a hospital, however. At least not quite. It called itself a residential care home and the brochure made it look like a place of great luxury; the reality, however, was quite different. With places like these, Sam had found out, you get what you pay for. And on a military pension with precious few savings, Sam’s father couldn’t afford much.

The nurse sitting behind the wooden reception desk recognised Sam as he entered. ‘He’ll be looking forward to seeing you,’ she said pointedly. ‘It’s been a while.’

Sam grunted and hurried on, down the institutional corridor and up the stairs which clattered and echoed as he climbed them. He walked past the emergency exit, doing his best to ignore the old lady who tottered along with the aid of a frame. The very fact of her presence there made him scowl. It just brought home to him the reality of the place where his father was forced to live. The reality of his condition.

The door to his father’s room was closed. He knocked, but didn’t wait for a reply before opening it and stepping inside.

Very little had changed since his last visit. His father lay in a hospital bed with high sides staring blankly at the television. His pyjamas hung loosely from his body. Sam remembered, when they were growing up, thinking his dad was the strongest, most muscular man in the world and he probably wasn’t far wrong. Now he looked like a scarecrow that had been dressed up in clothes too big for him. Hanging to the side of a bed was a colostomy bag, half filled with deep brown liquid.

The small room smelled of the uneaten lunch that sat on a tray by his bed: a perfect sphere of mashed potato and a pool of brown stew. It was bland and barely furnished, with just one threadbare armchair for visitors and a small table for the kettle and tea-making facilities that were checked every morning by unenthusiastic care workers. Not that they had to replenish the supplies very often. Dad never had visitors. Just Sam. He’d lost count of the times his doctors had said that visitors would do him good, help keep him alert; but Sam knew his father better than that, and he accepted that the last thing the old man wanted was for anyone to see him like this.

‘Hi, Dad,’ he announced as brightly as his glum mood would allow. ‘It’s me, Sam.’

Ever so slowly, his father turned his head. ‘I might be a fucking cripple,’ he replied, ‘but I’m not blind.’

Nobody who knew Max Redman in the old days would ever have been able to imagine him in this state. A giant of a man with a personality to match, there was a time when he filled the room with his personality and his stories of a life in the Regiment. He had travelled the world and seen things only a soldier could see and his name still came up in conversation among some of the older guys back at base.

‘No, Dad,’ Sam replied, trying to keep his voice level. ‘I know you’re not blind.’

‘Well that’s something, I suppose.’ Max weakly turned his head back to the television.

‘You should eat some lunch.’ Sam dug a teaspoon into the mashed potato on his father’s plate. It had a dry crust around it – Sam started to raise the spoon to Max’s mouth, but his father raised a bony wrist and pushed it away.

‘I’m not a fucking kid, either.’

Sam let the spoon fall back on to the plate.

Father and son sat in awkward silence.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Max asked finally.

‘The Stan,’ Sam replied quickly, grateful that the silence had been punctured. And then, more quietly, ‘You knew that.’

Max remained expressionless.

‘Nasty,’ Sam continued. ‘Taliban crawling all over the place like ants. Nail one of them and another two pop up in his place. We could have used Jacob out there.’

At the mention of his other son’s name, Max’s eyes closed briefly. In his private moments, Sam wondered whether it was Jacob’s disappearance that had sparked all this off. The doctors had said no – it was a purely physical condition, a gradual wastage of the muscles that would eventually leave him too weak to breathe. But Sam had seen it happen. When Jacob had left the country it had hit both their parents hard. Their mother had died two years later; by that time Max was already having difficulty walking. His subsequent decline was sudden and steep.

‘Jacob was a real soldier,’ Max muttered.

Sam didn’t say what came into his head – that if Max had only told Jacob that, just once after he’d been kicked out of the Regiment, his brother might never have done a runner. Instead he took a deep, steady breath. ‘We’re all real soldiers, Dad.’

‘Not like him. None of you.’ Max turned to look at his younger son again. ‘Especially not you, Samuel Redman. If it wasn’t for your brother, God knows where you’d have ended up, so you can stop talking about him like that for a start.’

Like what? Sam wanted to say, but he knew better than to carry on with this childish argument. Jacob had always been Dad’s favourite. Since his disappearance, he’d achieved almost mythical status in the old man’s eyes. ‘Look, Dad. I just wanted to see how you were, but you’d obviously prefer it if I wasn’t here…’

‘Don’t be so fucking touchy, Sam. Pass me a ciggie.’

By Max’s bedside there was an opened packet of cigarettes. His habit of smoking in the room infuriated the nurses, but they had learned not to complain too heavily. Sam placed a cigarette in his father’s mouth and lit it using the orange lighter stashed away in the packet. Max took several deep drags and appeared to relax a little. With difficulty he lifted his arm and waved the burning cigarette in the direction of a photograph in a tarnished silver frame that sat by the TV at the end of the bed.

‘Pass me that,’ he instructed. Ash fell on the sheets.

Sam did as he was told.

Max was in the middle, flanked by his two boys who stood on either side of him. Jacob and Sam looked younger there. Sam’s unruly blond hair was a little longer than it was now – this was taken before his Regiment days – and there was a heaviness around his face. Puppy fat, some people might call it. His eyes twinkled and he looked like he was not taking the whole thing entirely seriously.

Jacob was a different matter. His features were quite different to Sam’s, even though anyone would be able to tell that they were brothers. Jacob’s hair was jet black, his eyes gun-metal grey. His eyebrows were dark and heavy and he had a dimple in his chin that made him look not cheeky but intense.

‘Remember when this was taken?’ Max asked.

‘Of course,’ Sam replied. It was the day he’d passed selection for the Paras. It had been Jacob’s suggestion. ‘You’ll like them,’ he’d said archly. ‘Bunch of fucking lunatics, like you.’

‘He always looked out for you, Sam.’ For once, Max’s voice did not sound accusatory.

‘You talk about him like he’s dead.’

Max turned to look at his son. His tired eyes narrowed and they were suddenly piercing. ‘He probably is dead.’

‘Why?’

Max’s cigarette had burned to a stub. He awkwardly waved it in the air, not knowing where to extinguish it. Sam took it from his father’s shaking hands, stubbed it on the bottom of his shoe and threw it into the waste paper bin. ‘Why do you think Jacob’s dead, Dad?’

Max’s thin face hardened. ‘You know what those bastards are like,’ he replied cryptically. ‘Jacob was an embarrassment to them. We both know how easy it is to get rid of people who are an embarrassment.’

Sam closed his eyes. ‘Come on, Dad,’ he said softly. ‘Why would they bother? Jacob took the rap. He wasn’t going to blurt anything to anyone. None of us were.’ He paused. ‘You hurt him, Dad. You and mum. More than you think. When they kicked him out of the Regiment you refused to even see him.’

‘Shut up, Sam. You don’t know what you’re talking about. So we argued. Happens all the time. We’re arguing now – doesn’t mean you’ll never come and see me again.’ His breathing was weak and shaky. ‘If your brother was still alive, what’s the one thing he’d do if he knew I was cooped up in this shit hole, pissing into a pipe and wasting away to a fucking skeleton? What’s the one thing he’d do?’

Sam looked at the floor. He knew the answer, of course – argument or no argument, Jacob would come to his father’s bedside. Nothing would stop him. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it, because then he’d have to come to the same conclusion Max had arrived at. The conclusion which, in his darkest hours, had always nagged at the edge of his mind. Jacob dead? That didn’t bear thinking about. It would leave a hole in their life too big to be endured.

The silence was strained and uncomfortable. Max stared at the photograph in his hands and for a moment Sam felt as though his father had forgotten he was there.

‘I’d better be going, Dad,’ he muttered quietly. ‘I’m back for a bit. I’ll come again soon.’

Max didn’t answer. He was still looking at the photograph as Sam left the room and closed the door quietly behind him.

THREE

‘You never talk about your family.’

Kelly was fired up, ready for an argument. She’d been acting it out in her head all the way home on the Tube and before that – ever since lunch with Elaine. Ask him all the questions she wanted answers to and if he got shirty, confront him about the missing money from her purse.

‘Nothing to say.’

Jamie was sitting in his preferred position, lounging on the sofa with his feet up on the coffee table. The TV was on with the sound down and he was fiddling with his iPod.

‘For God’s sake, Jamie, there must be something to say.’ Kelly stood in the kitchenette area of the room throwing together some supper. She wasn’t a very good cook, but Jamie didn’t appear to mind. He ate anything. ‘What about your mum and dad? Am I ever going to meet them?’

‘Might be a bit difficult, that.’ Jamie avoided her gaze. She noticed, though, that his eyes twitched slightly.

‘Why?’

‘They’re dead.’

He said it quietly, his attention firmly on the screen of his iPod. To Kelly, he looked like someone who was doing his best not to let his emotions show. She let the salad servers fall to the side and hurried over to the sofa where she sat down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. This wasn’t what she had expected – all of a sudden the road plan of her argument had taken a turn for the worse. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

Jamie shrugged.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Told you. Nothing to say.’

They sat there in silence for a moment. Kelly felt a creeping sense of guilt about the light-hearted conversation she’d had that lunchtime. She had the urge to be more sensitive now. ‘What did they die of?’ she asked quietly.

‘Mum, cancer.’

‘What sort?’

Still Jamie wouldn’t look her in the eye. But she saw his face twitch as he spoke. Heard the catch in his voice. ‘At the end,’ he said, ‘everywhere. Started in the lungs. Spread to the… Oh, I don’t know. Ask a fucking doctor.’

Kelly’s wide eyes blinked; she felt herself holding back tears. She squeezed his shoulders gently, not knowing quite what to say. Only then did Jamie look at her. Kelly could see the hurt in his eyes.

‘Took her about six months to die. Painful. They put her in one of those places for the last couple of weeks…’

‘A hospice?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘A hospice. Gave her liquid horse on a drip.’

‘You mean morphine?’

‘Same thing. She had this button, you know, to give herself more if she wanted it.’

They sat in silence and for a moment Kelly felt closer to him than she ever had. She too had seen a loved one die in this way – an aunt. She knew something of what he was feeling.

‘How old were you?’ she asked.

Jamie looked down. ‘Seventeen,’ he said.

Seventeen. Barely a man. It all sounded so terribly sad.

‘What about your dad?’ she asked.

Jamie sniffed. ‘Army.’ He stood up, leaving Kelly’s hand to fall to her side. ‘Actually, special forces.’

‘What,’ Kelly asked, ‘like…’

‘SAS,’ he interrupted. He pulled gently on the lobe of one ear. ‘Never really talk about it,’ he added. ‘Dad didn’t. Just got on with the job. Know what I mean?’

Kelly didn’t know, but she nodded anyway.

‘How old were you when he…?’

‘Thirteen.’ He spoke quickly, as though he were trying to get it over with. ‘Out on operations. Northern Ireland. They never told us exactly where or how.’

‘Jamie, that’s awful.’

Jamie shrugged for a second time. ‘It’s the life, isn’t it?’ he said, as though he were talking to someone who had undergone the same experiences. ‘You know the risks when you take it on.’

‘But you were just thirteen. A little boy.’

‘No point crying about it.’ All of a sudden he seemed to have closed up. Kelly stood and stepped towards her boyfriend, wanting to give him a hug. But as she approached, Jamie walked into the bedroom. When he returned he was carrying his coat. ‘Where are you going?’ Kelly asked with concern.

‘Out.’

‘What, now?’

‘Yeah,’ Jamie replied. ‘Now.’

‘Oh, Jamie. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘I’m not upset. Just want to be by myself.’

‘But I’m cooking dinner.’

‘Not hungry.’ He headed towards the door.

‘Don’t go out, Jamie. Please. I want to talk.’

Jamie Spillane turned to look at her. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Well I don’t. I’ll be back later, all right?’

Kelly looked at him, her eyes full of sympathy and confusion. ‘All right,’ she replied weakly.

And with that, Jamie walked out of the flat. Kelly sat on the sofa for a good long while after that, staring blandly at the silent TV screen. The supper she was cooking went uneaten; all she could do was think about what Jamie had told her.

His mum.

His dad.

And how alone he really was.

The Lamb and Flag had an old-fashioned pub sign swinging outside. That was its only concession to tradition, however. Inside it lacked any of the trappings of comfort to be expected from a more appealing hostelry: this was a place designed for drinking, not socialising, and the few punters were mostly on their own doing just that. There was a bar with three pumps of lager – one weak, one strong and one cheap – and five optics of spirits on the wall behind it. You’d need to drink the lot, Sam reflected as he approached the bar, in order to start harbouring romantic thoughts about the barmaid. She had a thicker neck than most of the boys back at base and a smile that made the Taliban look like Blue Peter presenters. The best that could be said of her was that she didn’t share the fanatics’ taste in facial hair.

Sam tapped one of the beer pumps at random. ‘Pint,’ he said shortly.

The barmaid poured his drink wordlessly and unenthusiastically, before accepting his twenty-pound note in a chubby hand and plonking the change back down on the beer-stained bar. Sam drank half the pint in two gulps, closing his eyes as the warmth of the alcohol immediately seemed to radiate from his chest. After drinking warm water out of a pouch for the best part of two months he enjoyed a proper drink. He finished the whole pint in less than a minute and, having ordered another one, carried it to a corner table by a window that had a scenic view on to the car park. That way he could keep an eye on his black Audi – the smartest car out there by a pretty large margin and no doubt an object of envy for the shitkickers who frequented this place.

The Lamb and Flag was out of the way and that was why Sam had chosen it. The guys would have converged on one of the regular Regiment haunts in the middle of Hereford, but at the moment he didn’t feel like joining them. They’d be drinking themselves into post-mission raucousness. Good on them. If he hadn’t spent time in the company of his father that afternoon, he’d be doing the same, but now he wasn’t in the mood. He’d even ignored the two messages that had come through on his mobile phone. Both from girls he’d been with before he left for Helmand. Normally on his return from an operation, he’d be pretty much indiscriminate about who he took to bed. The sex was all that mattered and the well-used springs of his double bed would take another battering. But not tonight. He took another large gulp of his pint and ignored the curious looks of the locals.

Sam couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known that Jacob was the favourite. Growing up it hadn’t seemed a problem. He had admired his older brother just as much as his mum and dad had. But looking back he couldn’t help wondering if he’d been such a waster as a kid precisely because he knew he could never live up to Jacob’s example. When his brother was a smart young recruit in a neatly pressed uniform, Sam was hanging on street corners and enjoying petty theft. By the time he was fifteen he’d lost count of the occasions he’d been collared for playing truant, hotwiring cars and joyriding. There were never less than three girlfriends on the go, simply for the thrill. There were brushes with the law, of course; the occasional night in the local police cells. Some of them he kept a secret from his family; some he couldn’t. Everyone knew what he was up to, though. He was, as his dad had told him a million times, ‘on a hiding to nothing’.

It had all stopped on one particular day. Sam remembered it as clearly as if it were a week ago. He was in with a bad crowd. Not criminals exactly. Just chancers. Chancers with a plan to mug some office worker. His mates had been watching the guy for a week, making note of what time he left the office with his bag full of cash. On the day in question they were to hold him at knife point. Sam’s job was to borrow his dad’s car for the afternoon and wait on the street corner to pick him up. The hapless victim probably wasn’t carrying more than a few hundred pounds, but Sam’s mates had spoken of the winnings they hoped to receive as if it were all the riches in the world. Sam himself wasn’t that interested in the money. It sounded exciting, that was all. It made his mouth dry to think about it. His blood warm.

To this day Sam didn’t know how Jacob had got wind of it. Maybe he’d seen him take his father’s motor and followed him; maybe it was just fluke. All he did know was that as he was sitting in the car waiting for the job to go off, his brother had climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Fuck off, Jacob,’ Sam had said.

Jacob shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied, his dark eyes more intense than Sam had ever seen them. ‘Don’t think I’ll be doing that.’

There was a silence. A silence that Sam remembered well. It put him on edge and caused a hotness at the back of his neck. Embarrassment.

‘I think you should drive home, Sam,’ Jacob said. ‘Now.’

Sam looked into the rear-view mirror. No sign of his mates. Not yet.

‘You think you’re the big man. You think you’re the brave mister soldier. You think I’m too yellow to do this.’

Jacob’s expression barely changed. If he was insulted by Sam’s words, it didn’t show.

‘I don’t think you’re too yellow to do it,’ he replied calmly.

They sat there in silence for a moment. Jacob did not take his gaze away from Sam’s eyes.

And then Sam had started the car. As he pulled out into the traffic he saw his mates arrive, but he didn’t stop. He drove home with his brother, neither of them saying a word.

It was months later that Sam heard what happened to his accomplices. Three years, each of them. Out in eighteen months if they were lucky. But by then, Sam’s life had changed. On Jacob’s insistence he had already been recruited into the Paras; by the time his mates were back on the streets, Sam had his sights set on the Regiment. As his brother was so fond of saying, you’re a long time looking at the lid.

He drained his pint and walked back up to the bar. The barmaid’s face spread fatly into a toad-like smile. Jesus, Sam thought to himself. Is she giving me the come-on? It was enough to put him off his beer. For a split second he considered fleeing to another pub, but that thought was interrupted by his mobile phone buzzing in the pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out and looked at the screen. Number withheld. His instinct was to leave it: it was probably one of the girls calling to give him his welcome-home present. But as his eyes flickered up again at the barmaid, the prospect suddenly didn’t seem so bad. He flicked the phone open and walked out of the pub to answer the call.

‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘Evening, Sam,’ a voice replied. ‘Jack Whitely.’

Sam’s brow furrowed. Jack Whitely was the Ops Sergeant back at base. What the hell was he doing calling him now?

‘What is it, Jack?’ He knew he didn’t sound very friendly, and he didn’t much care.

‘You’re called in. Squadron briefing. 07.00.’

‘What are you talking about? We only got back this morning. We’re not standby squadron.’

‘07.00, Sam. CO’s orders. I’m calling in the rest of the squadron now.’

‘Good luck,’ Sam snapped. ‘It’ll go down like a pork chop at a fucking bar mitzvah.’

‘They’ll get over it. Go and get your beauty sleep, Sam. Or sleep with whichever beauty you’ve got lined up. I’ll see you in the morning.’

There was a click as the Ops Sergeant hung up.

Sam stood for a moment looking out into the darkness, with the phone still pressed to his ear. When he finally clicked it shut, it was with a sigh of pure irritation. After eight long, dry weeks in the field the beer was going to his head. He was knackered and he needed to lay up for a bit. A squadron briefing first thing in the morning was the last thing in the world he wanted. He glanced over his shoulder through the frosted glass window of the pub door. There was a warm glow from inside that belied the spit-and-sawdust nature of the place and he wanted to go back in. Then he looked back out towards the car park.

‘Fucking hell,’ he whispered to himself as he stuffed the phone back into his pocket, pulled out his keys, walked to the car and headed for home.

It was midnight and the pubs were chucking out. Jamie Spillane had tried to get drunk, but without much success. It wasn’t lack of money – earlier on he had withdrawn cash on the card Kelly kept hidden at the back of one of her dressing-table drawers; it was just that the booze wasn’t doing its job. He wasn’t feeling woozy and pleasant; he was feeling lairy and on-edge. The bar staff had lowered the lights in a last attempt to get the punters out, but Jamie was sitting in the corner, his half-drunk pint on the table in front of him.

‘Drink up please now, sir.’

Jamie looked up. The guy standing in front of him wore a suit and tie, had a shiny, shaved head and was built like a brick shithouse. Jamie vaguely recognised him as one of the bouncers that had let him into this place a couple of hours earlier.

‘Now, please, sir,’ the bouncer repeated.

Jamie picked up his glass. Slowly he put it to his lips and took the most minute of sips before placing it down on the table. He looked up at the bouncer and gave him a smug smile.

‘All right, sunshine,’ the bouncer growled. ‘Out you get.’

Jamie stayed where he was, his chin jutting out with arrogance. He felt a frisson of excitement at the confrontation to come and took a perverse pleasure in sipping once more from his drink.

The bouncer looked over his shoulder and gestured at his colleague. A second man approached. He was taller, his bright blue eyes small and aggressive, his nose long and aquiline. ‘Playing silly buggers, is he?’ the man asked in a quiet Cockney accent.

The broad-shouldered man nodded.

‘Look, son,’ the new arrival continued. ‘Piss off home, eh? We’ve had a nice quiet night and I don’t want to spoil my lovely manicure on your jaw.’

Jamie took another sip. ‘Tell you what,’ he replied. ‘Why don’t you two homos go back to the gents where you belong and…’

He never finished the sentence. With a flick of his big hand the broad-shouldered man swiped Jamie’s pint away then leaned over and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, before pulling him over the table towards him. Jamie was thrown to the floor at the feet of the two men. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, then pushed himself upright again.

The tall man was standing in front of him now, the broad-shouldered one behind him. Jamie staggered from one foot to the other, a leering smile obstinately on his face, then held up both hands palm outwards.

‘All right!’ he said. ‘All right! I’m going.’

The tall man physically relaxed. His shoulders lowered and his jaw loosened. It was then that Jamie made his move. With a sharp, upward movement he jerked his knee sharply into the man’s bollocks. Instantly he doubled over with a groan like a collapsed lung, giving Jamie the opportunity to hit him round the side of his face with a clenched fist. It stung his knuckles and barely seemed to make his victim move, but his smile broadened as he did it anyway.

He was half-expecting to be walloped from behind, so when it came it was no surprise. It knocked the wind out of him, though, so that he was bent double. And when the tall man returned the punch, it was with interest. Jamie felt his neck cricking and a spatter of blood spray from his nose. Seconds later he was lifted from his feet, taken to the pub door and unceremoniously flung on to the pavement.

A group of lads on the other side of the road jeered as Jamie scrambled to his feet, flicked a V sign at the bouncers still standing threateningly at the doorway to the pub and stumbled off into the Soho night.

As he walked, Jamie used the back of his hand to wipe away the blood that oozed from his nose. People were glancing at him and he quite liked that; and even though his face hurt, he was flushed from the excitement of the encounter. He wandered aimlessly for a few minutes, waiting for the blood to stop flowing and his head to stop ringing. When finally it did, he stopped and looked around. Soho was still busy at this late hour. Cafés were open, so were clubs; and on the other side of the road was a seedy-looking entrance with a fat, overly made-up woman behind a counter and a neon sign over the top. It flashed its message in big, bright letters: GIRLS.

Jamie smiled and almost instinctively moved his hand into the back pocket of his trousers. His fingertips felt money there. Notes. He looked up at the woman. The stare with which she returned his gaze was dismissive and unfriendly, but Jamie didn’t care.

Stage two of his impromptu night out had just been decided on.

But at that exact moment he was interrupted by the ringing of his mobile phone. He cursed and pulled it out. Sleek and thin. The latest model. No number flashed up on the screen and he almost didn’t answer. The truth was, though, that Jamie Spillane was not the kind of young man to ignore a phone call. His curiosity always got the better of him. If it was someone he didn’t want to speak to, he could always pretend not to hear them. He accepted the call and put the handset to his ear.

‘Yeah?’

Jamie recognised the voice, of course. The slurring, shouting, barely articulate female voice at the other end, a sound he remembered from his earliest childhood. He sighed and looked up at the neon light in front of him, all enthusiasm for his next adventure instantly dissolving into nothing.

When he spoke, it was with the stuttering hesitation of someone trying to get a word in edgeways.

‘Jesus, Mum,’ he said. ‘What do you want? I told you not to call me. What do you want…?’

FOUR

Sam spent a restless night, knowing he had to wake early. He was up with the sun and, his fridge being bare, ate breakfast at a café before heading back to base. He arrived there fifteen minutes before the agreed RV, in time to see the rest of the squadron arriving. To a man, they looked unshaven, hungover and above all thoroughly pissed off to be called in so early.

He found Mac outside the squadron office. ‘They told you what all this is about?’ Sam demanded. As a troop sergeant, Mac would normally have been pulled in early, had the mission explained to him and the plans presented. But he looked more like he’d spent the evening with a bottle of JD than the ops sergeant and he shook his head.

‘Got the call when I was in the boozer.’

‘Yeah,’ Sam observed. ‘You look like shit.’

‘The good ladies of Hereford didn’t agree with you,’ Mac replied with a wink.

Sam shook his head. ‘It’s no wonder your missus won’t let you back in the house,’ he said. ‘Other women would’ve stuck a knife in your back by now. We’d be reading about it in the News of the World.’

‘Who dares wins, mate,’ Mac said.

Sam couldn’t help smiling. ‘You know where the briefing is?’

‘Kremlin.’

He nodded and together they started walking towards the briefing room. As they walked they chatted. ‘Been to see the old man?’ Mac asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘How is he?’

‘Fine,’ Sam lied. ‘Terror of the fucking nurses.’ He said it with a note of finality. Mac took the hint and didn’t say any more.

The Kremlin was located deep inside the main HQ building, near the records room and the CO’s office. The two men walked in silence. When they entered the briefing room itself, they saw about twenty of the guys already there. Major Jack Whitely was up front: a short, squat man in camouflage gear, with a shock of ginger hair and sharp green eyes. He stood at a lectern, rifling through some notes. As Sam and Mac took a seat at the front row he nodded a greeting to them and then went back to what he was doing.

Over the next couple of minutes a further ten men arrived and at 07.00 hrs precisely Jack Whitely cleared his throat. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get started.’ He flicked a switch on his lectern and the lights dimmed. An overhead projector at the back of the room beamed light onto a white screen behind him. Jack picked up a small remote and pressed a button. A map of Central Asia appeared behind him.

‘At 12.00 hrs on Thursday you’ll be bussed to Brize Norton,’ Whitely announced. Today was Tuesday. They had about forty-eight hours. ‘From there you’ll be taking an all-expenses-paid flight to Bagram Airbase, northern Afghanistan.’

Several of the men in the room groaned noisily. Sam felt like joining them and so, from the look his friend gave him, did Mac. ‘What was the fucking point in coming back?’ Sam whispered.

‘All right, guys,’ Whitely said firmly. ‘Listen up.’ He flicked the button on his remote again. A new map appeared on the screen.

‘We have a training camp in southern Kazakhstan,’ Whitely continued. ‘An area called the Chu Valley. We ’re expecting there to be about twenty individuals there. Our orders are to make sure they don’t wake up in the morning.’

The men were silent now. Listening hard.

‘Mode of insertion,’ Whitely announced, ‘HALO. Air troop, this is your gig. Rest of the squadron to remain on alert at Bagram in case of problems.’

All of sudden, Sam was in the groove. He’d been in hundreds of briefings like this before and any tiredness or annoyance he had felt when he first arrived had been shed. He listened keenly, his senses alert, knowing that he had to be on the ball. Air troop was his. He needed to be on top of things.

‘There’ll be a further briefing at Bagram,’ continued Whitely. ‘We have spooks on the ground who’ll give you more detail on the geography. But first off, you need to be made aware of something.’

Whitely looked out over the briefing room. In the dim light Sam could see that the Major’s face had suddenly gone serious, as though he were judging the mood of the men.

‘MI6 have supplied us with pictures of the targets we expect to find there.’ He pressed the button on the remote for the third time.

It was not in the nature of Regiment men to express surprise. They’d been asked to do enough morally ambiguous things in their time to be largely shock-proof. But Sam knew, as the image beamed out by the overhead projector changed, they would be taken aback by what had just appeared. On the screen in front of them were twenty grainy photographs. They varied in their quality. Some looked like passport photos, taken in cheap booths; others looked like they had been cut and pasted from bigger pictures. But they all had one thing in common. White skin. Caucasian features. The squadron wasn’t being presented with the usual brown skin, beards or turbans.

‘Your targets,’ Whitely announced firmly, ‘are British citizens. They’ll be speaking English. That shouldn’t distract you from the job in hand.’

There was a brief silence before a voice called from the back of the room. ‘What’s the story, Boss? Who are they?’

‘That, I’m afraid,’ Whitely replied, ‘is for our masters in the Firm to know, and for us not to find out. It’s an in-an-out job and is strictly under the radar. The UK ’s relationship with Kazakhstan is good, but fragile. Any whiff that this is our doing and we’ll be giving the suits in Whitehall a right headache, and I know how upset you’d all be if that happened.’

There was a smattering of cynical laughter.

Sam didn’t join in.

He had barely heard what Whitely was saying, and laughter was the last thing on his mind.

His attention had been grabbed by something else.

Something on the screen.

Sam Redman had a good eye. A mind for detail. As soon as the photographs had appeared on the screen he had methodically and meticulously studied each one for a few seconds. His gaze fell on one picture. It was halfway down the group of images, no bigger than the others, no less indistinct. And yet when he saw that photograph, his blood turned to ice in his veins. The man had dark hair and a beard, flecked with grey, that covered most of his face. There was a bruise to one side of his forehead. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. Dark eyes, with shadowy rings dug underneath them and thick-set eyebrows.

Sam would know those eyes anywhere, because they belonged to his brother.

It was like a dream – a dream in which he urgently had to do something, but couldn’t force his body into action. This was a mistake. It had to be. Sam looked over his shoulder at the guys congregated in the room around him. Their faces glowed in the dim light of the OHP, but their expressions registered no surprise as they gazed at the screen. Sam’s eyes darted from one face to another. None of them, he realised, would recognise Jacob even if they saw him. They were either too young or never knew him.

All of them, he realised, except one person.

Sam faced forward again and glanced to his right where Mac was sitting. His friend looked up at the screen. There was no twinge of recognition in his face.

And then the room was plunged into darkness as the OHP was switched off. ‘All right, guys,’ Whitely announced brightly as he turned the main lights on again. ‘RV back here 09.00 on Thursday. Rest up before then. Tell your missus to keep her hands off you – everything goes right you’ll be back for tea and blow jobs Sunday lunchtime.’ He straightened his papers on the lectern and headed for the door.

There was a hubbub in the room as the assembled squadron rose to their feet and started chatting. Sam didn’t move. There was a sickness in his stomach, a kind of breathlessness. If he opened his mouth to speak, he wasn’t quite sure what would come out. Everything was confused in his head. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. Perhaps it wasn’t Jacob, just someone who looked like him. That would make more sense. The bearded figure in the picture looked rough and worn. Jacob had always taken care of what he looked like.

He tried to persuade himself in the few moments that he sat there that he had indeed made an error; but deep down he knew he hadn’t. It was Jacob.

Sam closed his eyes, took a deep breath and turned to look at Mac. But his friend wasn’t there. He was already walking out of the room, deep in conversation with one of the younger guys. Almost before Sam knew it, he was alone.

The sudden burst of anger came from nowhere and was beyond his control. With a swipe of his hand he hurled the chair on which Mac had been sitting on to its side, then stood and kicked it a good couple of metres. It was stupid, pointless, and didn’t make him feel any better. He left the chair on its side, though, and, cursing under his breath, stormed towards the door. There was a suspicion at the back of his mind that someone was playing games with him. He didn’t like it. He wanted it to stop. Now.

The drab, flat corridors of the Kremlin were unpopulated at this hour. Sam stormed through them, a thousand questions bursting from his brain. When he came to Mark Porteus’s office he barely stopped to draw breath before knocking on the door: not a polite rap, but a solid thump with a clenched fist.

No answer.

‘Boss!’ he shouted, banging again on the door. But still nothing. ‘Boss!’

‘Everything all right, Sam?’

He turned. It was Jack Whitely. The Ops Sergeant’s green eyes were narrowed. Sam clenched his jaw and gave him an unfriendly stare. Whitely was an old hand. Several tours with the Regiment. He was organising this mission – surely he knew what was going on. Damn it: if Porteus couldn’t tell Sam what the hell was happening, Whitely was the next best thing.

‘What’s…?’ he started to say.

And then he stopped.

Amid the confusion in his head, one single thought began to crystallise.

What if Whitely hadn’t recognised his brother? Or Porteus. Or even Mac. What then? If he alerted them to it, Sam would be instantly pulled from the op.

Whitely blinked, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, Sam?’

He drew a deep breath.

‘Nothing,’ he said. And then, because Whitely was still looking strangely at him, ‘09.00 on Thursday.’

Whitely nodded. Sam walked away. He could feel the Ops Sergeant’s eyes burning into his back. It took everything he had to keep his pace steady and his mind calm.

Kelly Larkin awoke, bleary eyed. The room was dark and in her drowsiness she thought it must still be the middle of the night. It was a lovely feeling, splintered only when she saw the orange glow from her bedside alarm clock. Seven-thirty.

‘Shit!’ she hissed, suddenly awake. She clambered naked out of bed and hurried to the underwear drawer of her dressing table, pulling on some knickers and awkwardly hitching her bra behind her back, before she finally remembered the revelations of the previous evening. Jamie’s confession; the way he had stormed out of the flat; how she had stayed up waiting for him until sleep finally overcame her. And now, she realised as she turned round to look at her bed, there he was. Asleep. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Quietly Kelly walked round to his side of the bed and perched on the edge. His head was covered with the duvet, his breathing regular and heavy. Kelly gently uncovered his head to look at his slumbering face.

What she saw made her catch a breath.

His upper lip was smeared with blood, dark brown and flaking at the edges. The smear itself extended up on to his right cheek before streaking gradually away. The blood, though, was not the most distressing thing. His skin was purple, bruised and mottled; his right eye was blackened and closed up. Jamie looked like he’d been in the boxing ring.

Kelly shook him by the shoulder – not forcefully, but tenderly and with concern.

‘Jamie,’ she whispered. ‘Jamie, wake up.’

He didn’t stir, so she shook him again. This time he started. His eyes opened and he looked around without moving his body, as though he didn’t know where he was. When his eyes fell on Kelly, he shut them again for a moment before pushing himself up on his elbows.

Kelly touched his face lightly with her fingertips. ‘What happened?’ she breathed. ‘What time did you get back?’ The pungent smell of last night’s alcohol wafted under her nose.

‘Late,’ Jamie replied non-committally.

‘I know it was late, Jamie,’ Kelly retorted a bit more sharply than she had intended. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Nothing I can’t cope with.’ He smiled at her – a peculiarly gruesome expression given the state of his face – then stretched out his hand towards her breasts.

She shrugged him away and stood up. ‘I’m late for work,’ she said. With her back turned to Jamie she walked to her wardrobe and pulled out a charcoal grey two-piece suit and cream blouse; still with her back turned to him she put it on. Tears were coming. She didn’t know if she’d be able to stop them and she didn’t want him to see.

Her eyes were hot now as she finished getting dressed. She felt a riot of emotions all trying to burst out. Confusion; anger; sympathy. Almost on an impulse she turned round, the first tears dripping from her eyes. He was still sitting there, eyeing her up with that self-satisfied look on his face. ‘For God’s sake, Jamie,’ she railed. ‘I just don’t know what to think.’

His expression changed to one of wariness.

‘All I want to do,’ she wept dramatically, ‘is get close to you.’ She knew she was sounding dramatic, but she couldn’t help it. Rushing to his bedside she sat down again and grabbed his hands.

‘Those things you told me last night,’ she continued. ‘It meant so much that you opened up to me.’

Jamie looked down at the duvet.

‘You don’t have to be embarrassed,’ Kelly insisted. ‘I know you’ve been drinking. I can smell it on you. But please just tell me, what happened last night?’

There was a pause. Jamie took a deep breath and when he gazed back up at her, his forehead was creased. He looked for all the world to Kelly like a confused little boy.

‘I can’t,’ he said quietly.

‘Why not?’

‘I just… I can’t,’ he replied. ‘There’s things I can’t tell you about me. Things it’s best you don’t know. That you wouldn’t believe.’

She squeezed his hand a bit harder. ‘I would believe you, Jamie. Just trust me.’

Another pause. Jamie’s eyes flickered away from her. He looked like he was trying to make a decision.

‘All right,’ he said finally. He got out of bed, approached the window wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and gently parted the curtains with one finger. He looked outside, let the curtain fall closed and then turned to look at her. He wavered slightly, as though drunk. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said.

Kelly shook her head. ‘No it isn’t.’

He shrugged. ‘All right then. There’s things I can’t tell you because I’m…’ He faltered. ‘I don’t know what the proper word is. I’m an agent.’

Kelly blinked. ‘A what?’

‘An agent.’

‘What…?’ she hesitated. ‘Like an estate agent?’

Jamie closed his eyes in frustration. ‘No,’ he replied, exasperation in his voice. ‘A secret agent. A spy.’

She blinked again. There were no tears now. They had instantly dried up.

‘A spy,’ she repeated.

Jamie nodded.

All the anger Kelly Larkin had felt a couple of minutes ago disappeared. She smoothed the legs of her trouser suit, stood up and turned to face Jamie. He looked so ridiculous there, semi-naked in her bedroom.

‘And your dad was in the SAS?’ she asked. ‘And your mum died of cancer?’

Jamie nodded.

‘And you thought that if I believed all that it would make it okay for you to steal money from my purse?’

Jamie’s lips parted slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

Kelly walked up to him as coolly as she was able. She came to a halt right in front of him.

She smiled.

And then, with all the force she could muster, she slapped him hard round the side of the face.

‘Ow!’ he shouted, but she was already talking over him, her voice a low, menacing hiss.

‘Get out of my house, Jamie Spillane,’ she spat. ‘And don’t come back. I’ve had enough of you, your sponging and your stupid, insulting lies. I never, ever want to see you again. You’ve got five minutes.’

With that, she turned her back on him, walked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She locked herself in and listened at the door, waiting to hear the sound of her ex-boyfriend leaving the flat.

Sam floored it home. He barely saw anyone else on the road, not because there weren’t any cars, but because he was blind to them. He blocked out the angry sound of horns as he cut up the other road users; he ignored red lights and pedestrian crossings. After his encounter with Jack Whitely outside the CO’s office, Sam had walked straight out of the Kremlin and left the base as quickly as possible. He didn’t stop and speak to anyone. He just had to get out of there. And now, as he sped round the roads of Hereford, there was one thought in his mind. Get home. Get away from everyone else. Then you can try to work out what the hell is going on.

Coming to a halt outside his flat, Sam parked badly, one wheel on the pavement, the back of the car jutting out into the road. He didn’t care. He just leapt from the vehicle, ran into the house and – for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on – locked himself inside. He drew several deep breaths before going into the kitchen and opening one of the cupboards. It was empty apart from a half-drunk bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a glass and downed it in one, before pouring another and waiting for the alcohol to do its work on his nervous system.

Jacob had changed. There was no doubt about that. He looked older, more weather-beaten. It probably wasn’t so surprising that Mac hadn’t recognised him. Sam’s brother had just been one of a number of faces and the photos were of poor quality. He sipped at his whisky, closed his eyes and tried to get his thoughts straight. It made no sense. Why would the Regiment be sending out a troop to kill a bunch of British citizens; why would they be eliminating one of their own?

As that thought crossed his mind, he stopped. He gently placed his drink on the kitchen worktop and closed his eyes. Sam thought back to the previous day. He was in his father’s room. The old man had said something. What was it? Sam’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember the exact words.

You know what those bastards are like. Jacob was an embarrassment to them. We both know how easy it is to get rid of people who are an embarrassment.

He shook his head. His father’s words were nothing, just grief-induced paranoia, the delusions of an old man with time on his hands coming up with reasons to explain his favourite son’s absence.

Weren’t they?

‘Damn it!’ he shouted, kicking the kitchen unit so that it rattled. Sam downed the Scotch, then started prowling around the flat like a caged animal. He needed answers, but there was nowhere he could get them – if Sam alerted anyone to what was going on, there was no doubt about what would happen. He’d be pulled from the op and a team of trained SAS killers would fly to Kazakhstan to eliminate his brother, without Sam being able to do anything about it.

Morning passed into afternoon. The effects of the alcohol wore off, leaving only an uncomfortable, nagging sensation in the pit of Sam’s stomach. His phone rang several times; he ignored it.

Afternoon melted into evening. Sam felt like a prisoner in his own home, as though even stepping over the threshold would somehow reveal his suspicions to everyone, like an escaping convict walking into the beam of a searchlight. As the light outside began to fail, so it grew darker in his bare front room. He sat on the old sofa and allowed the gloom to surround him. From where he sat he could see out into the road. His badly parked Audi was just outside; occasional passers-by sauntered across his field of vision.

Evening became night. The streetlamps flickered on outside. Still Sam didn’t move. He had no idea what time it was and he didn’t bother to check. Before long he was sitting in darkness.

By the time he noticed the figure on the other side of the street, Sam couldn’t have said how long it had been there. It was faceless, the head covered with a hood, the kind worn by kids. If this was a kid, though, it was an unusually tall, stocky one. He stood leaning against a lamppost; and although Sam could not see his face, he had the sudden, unnerving sensation that this person was looking straight through the window of the flat and into Sam’s front room.

The unnerving sensation that he was some shadowy sentinel, keeping watch.

Sam froze.

The figure was in the light; Sam was in the dark. Chances were this guy couldn’t see him. Slowly, he slid down the sofa on his back and on to the floor. On all fours he crawled out of the front room and into the corridor. It was very dark in his flat, he used the tried and tested Blade method of not looking directly at objects, but looking around them, using his periphery vision, which is better attuned to seeing in the dark. He made his way confidently to the bathroom without switching on any lights. Once in there, he fumbled towards the toilet. Sam lifted the lid of the cistern and carefully groped inside.

The handgun was there, a fully loaded Beretta 92 9 mm, carefully perched on the mechanical intestines of the cistern. He picked it up gingerly to stop it from falling into the water; but once it was in his hand, he gripped it firmly.

He felt a whole lot better with the reassuring weight of a weapon in his fist.

Chances were it was just some guy waiting for his girlfriend, or his dealer, or who just happened to be standing outside Sam’s house. But there was no doubt that Sam felt a cold, bristling uncertainty, a kind of sixth sense that experience had taught him never to ignore. He checked the weapon quickly before leaving the bathroom and walking back down the corridor, the shallow, steady sound of his breath the only noise in his ears.

He stopped at the door to the front room, pressed his back against the wall and, squinting his eyes slightly, peered across the room and out of the window. Sam gripped the weapon a little bit more firmly when he realised the figure under the lamppost was no longer there.

Out of the blue, a motorbike roared down the street. It made Sam start momentarily, but more than that it messed with his hearing, which had been carefully tuned to the quiet. The noise of the motor took a while to fade; only when it had finally disappeared could Sam readjust his ears to the thick silence of his flat.

But silence wasn’t what he heard.

It was faint, but it was there: the sound of footsteps. They were brisk and they were getting louder.

Sam felt his jaw setting solid. The handgun was pointed out in front of him now as he backed up and headed towards the front door.

The top panel was made of frosted glass. He stood several metres from it and held the gun at arm’s length towards the door. Head height. His eyes twitched slightly as he watched the blurred silhouette of a figure come into view. It was easy to determine the curved outline of the man’s hooded top, the broad shape of his shoulders.

It would take two shots, he calculated, to kill him. One to shatter the glass, one to finish him off. And Sam was ready to do it; ready to defend himself at the first sign of danger.

The figure remained perfectly still. In some part of his brain that was not concentrating on keeping the guy in his sights, Sam wondered if the hooded figure knew he was there.

Movement.

Sam’s trigger finger twitched.

A noise.

It was the sound of the letter box opening. Sam watched as an envelope slowly glided through the hole in his door. Instinctively he threw his back to the wall, not knowing whether that envelope was concealing something else; but it fell harmlessly to the floor. Almost immediately, the silhouette melted away and Sam heard once more the sound of footsteps, getting quieter this time. He ran to the front room window just in time to see the unknown delivery boy disappear round the corner of the street.

Only then did he shake his head. Jesus, he thought to himself. And you thought Dad was paranoid. He felt stupid. He felt angry with himself. But why, then, did he still not want to turn on the lights?

Why did he still not want to illuminate himself?

Why did he still feel safer with the gun in his hand?

He stepped away from the window and returned to the front door. The envelope was still lying there.

Sam Redman bent down and picked it up.

FIVE

It was a plain, brown A4 envelope. There was no writing on the front and the seal had been Sellotaped down. It crossed Sam’s mind as he opened it up that the lack of saliva on the seal would make it difficult for anyone to discover who this envelope had come from, if they were of a mind to do so.

Inside there was a thin sheaf of papers stapled together at one corner. In the darkness of the hallway Sam was unable to read what they said; he made his way back to the bathroom, closed the door and switched on the light above the shaving mirror. Only then, as he sat perched on the edge of the bath, did he start to read.

The document consisted of four pages. It was barely legible, however, because large chunks of the text had been blacked out. At the top of the front page was an official stamp.

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

SUPPRESSED UNDER DA-NOTICE 05 (UNITED KINGDOM SECURITY & INTELLIGENCE SERVICES & SPECIAL SERVICES)

Sam read those bits of the text that remained: ‘.. a car park of a service station on the M4… cold day… seemed agitated… second meeting in a country pub…’ It was meaningless to Sam. He held the paper up to the light, hoping to read what was underneath. Nothing doing. Whatever this was, it had been heavily censored. Someone had wanted to make sure that it was incomprehensible. They’d done a good job.

But there was something else.

On the top page, scrawled in blue biro and roughly circled, was a name – Clare Corbett – and next to it a telephone number. A mobile.

Sam looked at the number for a good long while. He even went so far as to punch it into his phone. But something stopped him from dialling. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his head. Everything was so muddled, so confusing. Who was this Clare Corbett? Did the document he held in his hand come from her? What was the point of him seeing it if he couldn’t understand a word that was written?

No. This wasn’t right. He saved the number to his phone, but didn’t dial. He had a another idea.

Sam glanced at his watch. Ten thirty. He couldn’t believe that the day had passed – it seemed like only a few minutes ago that he was in the briefing back at HQ. It was late, but that didn’t matter. He sniffed and then searched for another number on his phone. Nodding with satisfaction when it appeared on his screen, he allowed his thumb to hover over the dial button.

He stopped again, then shook his head. No. He knew that it was too easy for someone to listen in on his phone calls and until he knew what the hell this was all about, that wasn’t a risk he was going to take. He switched off the light, allowed his eyes to get used to the darkness, then moved to his bedroom.

Sam’s leather jacket was slung over the back of his chair. He put it on, secreted the handgun in the inside pocket, then returned to the front door. Moments later he was on the pavement, walking almost at random until he found a public phone box.

Only then did he make his call.

Detective Inspector Nicola Ledbury of the Metropolitan Police had endured, even by her standards, an extremely shitty day. The trial she’d been working on for three months solid had gone tits up on a technicality, prompting a bollocking from the judge and her DCI – no doubt there would be more to come in the morning, if she ever made it in. She dumped her bag in the hallway and went to the kitchen to pour herself a large glass of wine. As she did so, she looked at the clock on the oven. Ten-thirty and she was just getting in. No wonder her personal life was such a disaster.

She took two deep gulps of wine before going into her small bathroom. As she always did, she glanced in the mirror. Nicola knew she was quite pretty on a good day, but today wasn’t one of them. Her blonde hair was a disaster and she had bags under her eyes. The kind of clothes that she had to wear on the job flattened out her slim, curvy figure and she couldn’t wait to get out of them. So, running the bath, she started to strip. Her clothes stank of London fumes – it was disgusting and all she wanted to do was wash away the grime of the city. Her blouse dropped to the floor, then her bra. As she was undoing her trousers, however, she felt her mobile phone buzz against her skin. Nicola’s heart sank. Who the hell was calling her at this hour? She pulled out the phone and looked at it. Number withheld.

The DI sighed. It was probably the office. Wearily she switched off the bath taps and took the call.

‘Yeah?’ she intoned, making no attempt to hide the reluctance in her voice.

‘Nicola?’ A man’s voice. Quite deep. She recognised it, but couldn’t place it.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Sam,’ came the reply. ‘Sam Redman.’

A pause as a little smile played across her lips.

‘Hello, Sam,’ she replied, her voice all of a sudden kittenish and full of intonation. She quickly stepped half-dressed out of the echoing bathroom, touching her hand to her hair even though there was nobody to see. ‘Long time no speak.’

‘I’ve been away,’ came the reply.

‘Anywhere fun?’

‘Not really.’

Sam’s voice was curt, almost businesslike – a far cry from his boyish fair hair and mischievous eyes – but that didn’t bother her. It was just the way he was. In the couple of weeks they’d worked together while he and his SAS mates were body-guarding a witness, she’d grown used to it. Fond of it, even – fond enough, at least, for them to indulge in a bit of extra-curricular activity. Nicola blushed slightly to think about it.

‘So,’ she said lightly, ‘you thought you’d phone me to arrange a…’

‘Listen, Nicola,’ he interrupted. ‘I need a favour.’

She hesitated. There was something in his voice. He sounded tense.

‘What’s the matter, Sam? Everything all right?’

‘Fine.’ He sounded like he was simply brushing away the question. ‘Listen, I’ve got a mobile number. I need a billing address. Can you get it for me?’

As he spoke, Nicola felt deflated and she couldn’t prevent it from sounding in her voice. ‘I suppose so,’ she replied. ‘What’s it for?’

‘Mate of mine,’ Sam replied blandly. ‘Getting funny phone calls. Wants to put a stop to them.’

He was lying. Nicola could tell that easily enough, but she couldn’t be bothered to make a thing of it.

‘All right, Sam,’ she sighed. ‘It’ll take me twenty-four hours. Give me the number and call me tom…’

‘I haven’t got twenty-four hours,’ Sam said. ‘I need it now.’

A pause. ‘Sounds like your friend really wants to put a stop to these calls,’ Nicola remarked lightly.

‘Can you do it?’ Brusque, businesslike.

‘It’s half-past ten at night, Sam.’

‘Can you do it?’

Nicola sighed again, heavily this time. ‘All right, Sam. I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Good.’ He gave her the number, then said, ‘I’ll call you in half an hour.’

Without another word, the phone clicked off.

Nicola looked at the silent handset, then longingly back at the half-run bath. Then, muttering under her breath, she went to find herself a dressing gown.

Sometimes, she thought to herself, she was just too obliging for her own good.

Sam replaced the phone on its cradle, then immediately walked away from the booth.

He was just outside a parade of shops, most of them shut apart from a kebab shop half full of pissed-up kids. Sam was hungry, but something stopped him from wanting contact with anyone else, so he walked purposefully away. The half-hour passed slowly. He found a second pay phone in about ten minutes, then spent the rest of the time hanging around waiting to call his contact again. He didn’t really know what he was going to do if he found out an address for this woman – it rather depended on where she lived – but at the moment he didn’t know what else to do. It was just gone eleven when he made the call.

‘It’s me.’

‘Somehow I thought it would be.’ Nicola sounded annoyed.

‘Did you get the address?’

‘Yeah, I got it. You didn’t tell me it was a woman.’

‘I didn’t know,’ he lied.

A disbelieving silence. ‘Look, Sam,’ Nicola said finally, ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but I’ve got enough trouble at work as it is. This isn’t going to put me any deeper in the shit, is it?’

Sam sniffed. ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ he lied. ‘I promise. It’s just personal.’

He breathed steadily as he waited for Nicola to reply.

‘All right,’ she said, her voice heavy with resignation. ‘You got a pen?’

‘I can remember it.’

‘Fine. Ground Floor Flat, 31 Addington Gardens, W3. Hope your friend likes Acton, Sam. Personally, I think it’s a dump.’

Acton, London. At this time of night he could make it in a couple of hours.

‘Thank you, Nicola. I owe you one.’

‘As far as I can remember,’ she replied, a hint of archness returning to her voice, ‘you already did.’

For the first time that day, Sam smiled. ‘Don’t let the bed bugs bite,’ he told her quietly, but there was no reply. Nicola had already hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, Sam was in the car, one finger on the steering wheel as he hurtled out of Hereford down the A road that would lead him to London. The screen of his SatNav illuminated the route, but he barely glanced at it. He knew the way well enough. The lights of the cars ahead of him were nothing but a blur – not only because the speedo was constantly tipping a hundred, but also because his mind wasn’t really on the road. The events of the day churned over in his head, a series of disjointed visions; but the more he thought about them, the more confused he became. Sam didn’t even know who he was going to find at Addington Gardens. Clare Corbett, whoever the hell she was? Or someone else? He glanced down at the passenger seat. The handle of his handgun was peeping out from under the document in its envelope. There were enough rounds in there for him to keep himself safe; he couldn’t shake the feeling that he would be discharging some of them before the sun was up.

It was gone one in the morning by the time Sam approached London. The roads were practically empty and he burned up the tarmac, slowing down only when the time came to pull off the motorway. The female voice on the SatNav was irritatingly calm as it guided the speeding Audi through the West London suburbs and by a quarter past one he was nearing Addington Gardens. It was an ordinary residential road with a long line of terraced houses on either side. Sam didn’t turn into it, deciding instead to park several streets along. Once he’d come to a standstill, he took his jacket from the back seat, secreted the handgun and the document inside then climbed out of the car. The locking lights illuminated the dark street as he walked towards his destination.

There was nobody about – just an urban fox further down the pavement who stared at him with glinting eyes for a few seconds before turning tail and disappearing. In the background Sam could hear the vague hum of traffic on the main road, but here all was still. At the end of Addington Street he loitered, his narrowed eyes surveying the scene. He didn’t really know what he was looking for, but he’d recognise it if he saw it. There was no sign of anybody at this time, and none of the vehicles looked suspicious.

Except one.

It was a white van, old, well used. Counting down the house numbers from the end of the street, Sam calculated that it was parked outside number 75. Too close to the address he was visiting for his liking. He decided to investigate further.

Sam walked casually along the pavement. As he passed the white van he saw there was nobody in the front seats. But there was a panel blocking off the rear of the vehicle, so he couldn’t see inside. On the back doors there were blacked-out windows and a little sticker: NO TOOLS ARE KEPT IN THIS VEHICLE OVERNIGHT.

With his right hand, he gripped the gun inside his jacket. He approached the back of the vehicle along the pavement side and then, with a sudden sharp jerk of the elbow on his left arm, he shattered the window, then immediately pulled out his gun and aimed it into the body of the van.

Nothing. Empty. Sam drew a deep breath and withdrew his gun from inside the window. Somebody would be cursing the vandals first thing in the morning, but he wouldn’t be losing too much sleep over that. He turned his attention to the house numbers. Number 31 was only a few paces away.

There was nothing to distinguish it from the other terraced houses along this street. It had a small front garden that had been concreted over and was now home to only a couple of wheelie bins and a few old crisp packets that had been blown in. The ground-floor flat had a large bay window at the front, blocked with wooden slatted blinds. On the wall just above the window the cover of a security alarm blinked in the night. As Sam opened the metal gate it creaked quietly, so he didn’t close it before walking up to the bright blue front door.

By the side of the door was a video intercom with two buttons, one for the ground-floor flat, the other for the first floor. Next to each button was a scrawled name tag. The tag for the ground floor was simply marked ‘CC’. Clare Corbett.

Sam took the envelope from his pocket and removed the document. Then, with one hand over the lens of the intercom camera, he pressed the button, holding it down for several seconds without releasing his finger.

And then he waited.

There was no reply.

Sam cursed under his breath. He hadn’t really considered the possibility that there wouldn’t be anybody here. His hand still covering the camera, he rang the intercom again.

Again he waited.

This time, his patience was rewarded.

The woman’s voice that came over the loudspeaker was groggy and throaty, as though its owner had just woken up. But it was wary too.

‘Who’s that?’ it demanded.

Sam put his mouth to the intercom. ‘Clare Corbett?’ he asked.

‘Who’s that?’ the voice repeated. Tense. ‘Who is it? Why can’t I see you?’

He let his hand fall from the camera and replaced it with the document. ‘I need to talk to you about this.’

A pause.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve got some more information,’ Sam improvised. ‘You need to hear it.’

A scratchy sound came over the intercom, the sound of movement. ‘All right,’ the voice said finally. Reluctantly. ‘Wait there. I’ll get dressed and let you in.’

Sam put his hand back over the camera. He didn’t know quite why he wanted his face to remain anonymous, but he did, and there was nothing to stop whoever was inside the flat from looking out even when they weren’t speaking. Secreting the document back in his jacket, he used his free hand to grip the gun. He had no idea who was going to answer the door and he wanted to be prepared for any eventuality.

A minute passed.

Two.

Sam looked over his shoulder, then back down at the intercom.

Why had nobody opened the door yet?

He rang the bell again, but this time he didn’t wait for an answer. Something told him there wasn’t going to be one.

Hurrying back on to the pavement he looked from one end of the road to the other. Had there been an alleyway leading behind the houses when he turned into Addington Street? He thought there had. Sam glanced back at the front door. Nothing. Not even a light. Whoever he had just spoken to was taking too long to answer the door. There was something else going on.

He thundered to the end of the road. Sure enough, a pokey alley led down the side of the end-of-terrace house. Sam sprinted down it, turning a corner at the end. He knocked a dustbin as he ran; it clattered over and spilled its putrid contents on the ground. In the darkness he could see movement up ahead. He didn’t shout: he just upped his speed.

There was an open door, a wooden one leading from the garden of one of the terraces. And beyond it, running towards him, a woman. She had blonde hair – shoulder length – and wore a chunky, knee-length cardigan. When she saw Sam bearing down on her she immediately turned and ran in the other direction. Sam easily caught up and grabbed her. The woman flipped and fought, like a fish that has just been pulled from the water. She kicked Sam hard in the shin, in the groin. It hurt, but he just held her, firmly, until it became perfectly clear that she wasn’t getting way. It took about a minute for the fight to go out of her, for her limbs to stop flailing and go limp. Only then did Sam realise how badly she was shaking.

He turned her round and looked at her face. The silver moon illuminated her features. The skin was white apart from where Sam’s hand had been, where it was a mottled red. A sob escaped the woman’s lips and her eyes were suddenly filled with an unmistakable look of total, abject fear.

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please! I haven’t told anyone. I’ve done what you said. I haven’t told anyone!’

She hid her face in her hands.

‘Please!’ her voice was muffled now. Filled with brutal, racking sobs of terror. ‘Please, don’t kill me.’

SIX

Sam held the woman in silence for a moment, while she continued to cry. Beneath the tears he could tell she was attractive. She smelled of perfume. But she was a pitiful sight with her raw eyes and streaked mascara.

‘Who else is in the house?’ he demanded.

‘Nobody,’ she breathed. Sam heard a trace of a Northern Irish accent in her voice.

He waited a couple of seconds and then, with a sudden movement, pulled out his handgun and held it to the side of her head.

‘Who else is in the house?’

‘Oh, God…’ The woman’s knees buckled. ‘Nobody. I swear. Oh, sweet Jesus, I swear…’

Sam narrowed his eyes. She was telling the truth. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get back in there. I’ll be right behind you. If you shout for help, I’ll shoot. Do you understand?’

No reply. Just a trembling wreck of a human being.

‘I said, do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

He nodded at her and stepped aside. With shaky, nervous steps the woman moved into her garden. The back door to her house was still open, but there were no lights on inside. Sam followed her in, closing the door behind him. He was in a kitchen. Behind him were wide French doors with slatted blinds above them. Sam stepped further into the room. ‘Put the blinds down,’ he instructed.

The woman did as she was told, slowly and clumsily. Sam found himself growing impatient. But the woman was scared. Telling her to hurry up wouldn’t have done any good. When the blinds were finally lowered, she turned to look at him.

‘Turn the lights on,’ he told her.

She edged round him, her eyes constantly glancing at the gun. By the main door was a light switch. She flicked it on and illuminated the room. Sam looked around. The kitchen was immaculately tidy, nothing out of place on the work surfaces. There was art on the walls and cookbooks on the shelves. It was a pleasant, comfortable, ordinary place. In the middle of the room was a pine table with four chairs neatly tucked underneath. The woman still trembled as she stood by the door.

‘Are you Clare Corbett?’ he asked.

She nodded her head.

He pointed his gun at one of the chairs round the table. ‘Sit down,’ he told her.

Clare didn’t move. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ she asked.

‘Sit down.’

The woman stepped fearfully towards the table, pulled out a chair and sat. Her wide eyes looked up at Sam, who tucked the gun back into his jacket.

‘If I was going to kill you,’ he said, ‘you’d already be dead and I’d be halfway out of London by now.’

Clare closed her eyes. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ Her breathing was a little steadier now, however. She appeared fractionally less frightened.

Sam pulled out the document and dropped it on the table in front of her. ‘This fell through my door a couple of hours ago. Care to tell me what it is and why it’s got your name scrawled on it?’

The woman looked down at the papers in front of her. For a moment she didn’t reply, but just gazed at the document.

‘Who are you?’ she asked finally. ‘How did you find out where I live?’

‘You’re not asking the questions, sweetheart. I am. What do you know about that document?’

Clare looked up at him again. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she replied weakly. ‘You don’t know what they’re like. You don’t know what they’d do to me.’

Sam didn’t take his gaze from her. ‘You’re right,’ he replied. ‘I don’t even know who they are. But I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we pretend that I make them look like Mother fucking Theresa?’ He pulled the weapon from his jacket again. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

Clare looked nervously at the gun. When she spoke, her voice was cracked and timid. ‘It’s an article,’ she whispered. ‘I wrote it. It got spiked.’

‘Spiked?’

‘Pulled. Withdrawn.’

‘Why?’

Clare took a deep breath, as though steadying her nerves. ‘Reasons of national security,’ she replied. ‘At least that was the phrase they used.’

‘You keep saying “they”. Who are you talking about?’

‘They said they were from the Government. They took my laptop and all my notes.’ Words started to tumble from Clare’s mouth. ‘I’m a journalist. I contacted the Foreign Office for a quote and an hour later they were here. Three of them. One of them sat at this table. He told me… he told me that I should forget about my story. That if I didn’t, people would die. That I wouldn’t be safe…’

She started to cry again, wiping the tears away from her face with the back of her cheek.

Sam lowered his weapon. This woman, whoever she was, was a mess. But she was also a mess who had information he needed, and now that she had started to speak, threatening her wasn’t going to be the best way of making her open up even more. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite.

‘You thought I was one of them?’ he asked.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Then who are you?’

‘What was your story?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she breathed. ‘They meant what they said.’

Sam allowed a silence to fall between them. When he spoke, his voice was softer. Calmer. ‘Is your front door locked?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What about the burglar alarm?’

Clare shook her head. ‘It’s a dummy.’

‘All right then. Listen to me carefully. I’m in the military. As long as I’m here I can make sure nothing happens. You believe me, don’t you?’

She nodded again.

‘Good. Listen, Clare, I’m sorry if I frightened you out there. Truth is, I’m not quite sure what’s going on or who I can trust. I think I can trust you, but you’ve got to tell me what you know. Will you do that?’

Still she looked at him timidly. ‘All right.’ She smiled, a scared little smile. Her breath came in long, slow sighs, as though she were psyching herself up to speak.

And then she did. Slowly. Nervously.

‘About a month ago, this guy got in touch. He’d read one of my articles – I can’t remember which one – and said he wanted to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘He didn’t say. To be honest, I thought he was a nutter. Refused to meet anywhere there might have been CCTV. I kept trying to put him off – thought he sounded like the type to do a Jill Dando on me – but he kept calling till I agreed to meet him just to shut him up.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘To start with, out of town. He wanted to go somewhere deserted, but I wouldn’t do that, so we met in the car park of a service station on the M4. He was scared shitless.’ Clare looked down. ‘I know I’m not one to talk.’

‘Carry on.’

‘He said his name was Bill. Cockney lad. I didn’t believe him, but I don’t think he expected me to. He was…’ She shrugged. ‘Mid-twenties? A bit younger maybe. Bolshie. Would’ve come across as a bit of a wide boy if he wasn’t so frightened.’

Clare started to chew on her thumbnail, clearly perturbed by the memories.

‘What was he frightened of?’

She paused and breathed heavily, steadying herself. ‘I didn’t believe him at first,’ she said. ‘It just sounded like… I don’t know… just rubbish. Thought he was a timewaster. He said he’d been recruited by MI5 as some kind of operative. Someone to do their dirty work.’

‘MI5 already have people to do their dirty work,’ Sam stated.

Clare looked sharply at him before carrying on. ‘He said he’d been taken to some kind of training camp, a place where they were trained up in certain techniques. Weapons training, surveillance, things like that. The camp was in…’

‘… Kazakhstan,’ Sam completed her sentence under his breath.

Her eyes narrowed at him as she nodded. ‘Like I said, I thought it was all bullshit. Bill could tell I wanted to get away so he stopped talking. He just made me promise to call him if I wanted to know more.’

‘And did you?’

‘I didn’t want to. I just tried to ignore it for a couple of days. But I couldn’t. I kept thinking about it. The story was far-fetched, but he sounded convincing. At least, he sounded as though he had convinced himself. So I called him back. Arranged to meet again, somewhere we could talk more privately this time. He asked me for some money – a couple of hundred pounds.’

‘Didn’t that make you suspicious?’

‘Not really,’ Clare replied. ‘Everyone thinks their story’s worth something and most people think it’s a lot more than that. I also got the impression that he really needed the money. We arranged to meet at a country pub, out in the sticks somewhere. That’s where he told me everything he knew.’ She tapped her finger on the document. ‘Everything that ended up in there. Look, could I have a glass of water?’

Sam nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

The woman stood up and turned her back to him. As she took a glass from a kitchen cabinet and filled it with water, she spoke. ‘So are you going to tell me your name?’ she asked, clearly trying to sound bold, but unable to hide the tremor in her voice.

‘Sam,’ he replied.

‘And what part of the military are you in, Sam?’

She turned to face him and drank deeply.

Sam didn’t reply. Clare nodded, as though his silence had confirmed a suspicion of hers, then took her seat once more.

‘In the article,’ she resumed, ‘I call them “red-light runners”. In fact, that’s what Bill called them.’

‘Who?’

‘People like himself. People MI5 are targeting. From what he said, they’ve been on the lookout for thrill-seekers. Danger merchants. The kind of young men who would run a red light without a second thought. Long story short: Bill told me that MI5 have ways of identifying people like this. It’s amazing really, the kind of information they have on all of us. The red-light runners, they all fit some kind of…’ She searched around for a phrase. ‘Psychological profile. They look at the obvious things, of course. Criminal records, employment history. But smaller stuff, too. Speeding fines to judge their attitude to risk, supermarket club-card points to draw a picture of their lifestyle. Air miles – the kind of person they’re looking for is more likely to have visited Ibiza than Vienna, if you know what I mean. They use all this information to draw up a profile of people willing to take risks. And willing to be groomed.’

There was a noise. Clare’s head shot round to see what it was.

‘It’s nothing,’ Sam told her. ‘Just the house creaking. Carry on.’

Clare took a moment to compose herself. ‘Bill was terrified,’ she continued. ‘He kept referring to a job, something the security services wanted him to do. He never told me what it was, but it was enough to give him second thoughts about working for them. He was on the run, hiding from them.’

‘If he’d gone dark,’ Sam asked dubiously, ‘what was he doing talking to you?’

Clare shook her head slightly. ‘That’s what I couldn’t work out. At first I thought it was just the money. I mean, the kid had to eat, you know what I mean? But then maybe I thought it was more than that. I think perhaps he was gambling that if he spilled the beans and it appeared in the national press, it would embarrass MI5 into shutting the operation down.’

‘The guys from Five,’ Sam muttered, ‘don’t really do embarrassment.’

The woman shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she replied. ‘It was difficult for me to back any of this up. It was all down to Bill’s word and I wasn’t even sure how much I believed him. The only thing I knew for sure was that he was very, very frightened of being found out. That led me to believe that there was at least something in what he was saying. And whatever it was that the security services were asking him to do, it was something bad.’ She looked straight into Sam’s eyes. ‘Something one of these red-light runners would baulk at.’

For some reason, the stare she gave him made Sam feel deeply uncomfortable.

‘Go on,’ he told her.

‘That was the last time I saw Bill. We spoke on the phone once or twice, when I wanted to ask him a question or check a fact. I wrote my article sitting at this table. I didn’t show it to anyone. I didn’t even mention it to anyone. To be honest with you, I didn’t even think it would see the light of day. I thought it would be laughed at.’

‘So why did you carry on writing it?’

Clare stuck her neck out slightly. ‘Because I believed it,’ she said. ‘I believed, at least, that some of it was true. My plan was to show it to the powers that be, to gauge their reaction to what I had written.’

‘And did you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Clare replied, her Irish accent suddenly light and dancing. ‘I did that all right.’ She stared into the middle distance, as though remembering something that left her numb. ‘I did that all right,’ she repeated.

‘And what happened?’

Clare frowned. ‘It sounds a bit stupid, doesn’t it? Giving everything you’ve got to the enemy, I mean. But actually I wasn’t being all that dumb. The way I figured it, they could do one of three things. If it was all a load of rubbish, they’d just ignore it. I’d have been stymied if they’d done that, to be sure. If it was true, they could either deny it – that’s what I was hoping for – or slap a DA notice on it.’

A DA notice. Sam stretched out and picked up the document. He read the front page again.

‘So that’s what they did.’

‘Sure,’ Clare told him. ‘That’s what they did. With bells on. I don’t know how much you know about DA notices, Sam. The MOD uses them to suppress information that might compromise national security. It’s a voluntary code, not the sort of thing they can actually enforce. Not legally, anyway. But my editor would never print something that had been suppressed under a DA notice. It’s just the way it works.’

Sam dropped the document back down on the table.

Clare closed her eyes and pinched her forehead. ‘It happened about a week ago. I sent my article to the Home Office for them to comment on it first thing in the morning. About four hours later there was a knock on my door.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘a ring on my bell, I suppose. But you know what I mean. I answered it. There were two men there. They said they were from the Government and asked if they could come in.’

She paused before continuing weakly. ‘I should have asked them for identification,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t. I don’t know why. Suppose I thought I was probably on to something. I let them in and we came back in here. That’s when I realised something was wrong.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there was another man standing by the back door. They didn’t seem surprised to see him, so he was obviously one of them. The damn door was locked when I answered the bell, I’m sure of it. So I don’t know how he got in.’

Any number of ways, Sam thought, but he kept that to himself.

‘There was one man who was older than the others,’ Clare carried on. ‘He wore a big black raincoat, even though it was a fine day outside. Looked like someone’s granddad. Well…’ She hesitated. ‘Not my granddad, anyway, but someone’s. Sort of posh. Polite. I didn’t like it. He sat down where you’re sitting now. The other two just stood by the doors. The old man didn’t tell me his name. None of them did. But he sure as hell knew mine. He told me that they were going to search my house, take away my computer, any notes I had. And then he told me to forget everything I had heard about this…’ She raised her fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks. ‘This “red-light runner nonsense”.’

Clare’s words were tumbling from her mouth now. Sam had the impression that she felt somehow relieved to be unloading them.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t really take it lying down. Occupational hazard, I suppose. If it was such nonsense, I asked him, why was he coming to my house to intimidate me? He didn’t say anything, not at first. He just handed me a picture.’

Clare passed her hand across her face. The memory of that picture, whatever it was, was clearly traumatic.

‘It was Bill,’ she whispered. ‘Although I could only just recognise him. He was lying on the ground. He was dead. His legs were pointing in different directions and one side of his face was all mashed up. There was blood all around.’

She sobbed suddenly, loudly. ‘It was awful.’

Sam let the woman take her time.

‘The old man held the picture in front of me for a long time,’ Clare continued. ‘A minute at least, maybe two, before he spoke. I’ll never forget what he said, not as long as I live. “A terrible accident, Clare. It could happen to anyone, and it would be a dreadful shame if it happened to you. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Then he told me again to forget everything about what I’d written. And he told me that if I ever saw him again, it would mean I was in a whole load of trouble.’

A silence fell on the room, and a coldness. Clare pulled her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders.

‘I’ve barely left the flat since it happened. Only to buy food. I keep seeing things from the corner of my eye. I keep imagining I’m being followed. And now you turn up on my doorstep. Holy Mother, are you surprised I’m so frightened?’

Sam looked steadily at her. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m not surprised at all.’ He glanced beyond Clare to the kitchen door. ‘You said you keep seeing things from the corner of your eye. Is that you, or do you think they’re really there? Do you think you’re really being watched?’

Clare shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

Sam considered that for a moment. Then, without a word, he stood up and headed out of the kitchen.

‘Don’t go!’ Clare shouted. He turned to look at her. ‘Don’t leave me alone,’ she added weakly.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Sam told her. ‘Just wait there.’

He explored the flat in the darkness. Towards the front, off the main corridor, there was a lounge. This was the room he’d seen from outside with wooden blinds. He edged towards them, lifting a gap in them with one finger, and peered out. All was quiet on the street. No movement. No people. He let the blind fall closed again and allowed himself a moment in the darkness.

Who the hell had posted this article through his letterbox? And was Clare telling him the truth? The only way he could be sure was by forcing it out of her, but the woman seemed so brittle she could snap. In any case, forcing things out of frightened women wasn’t what he’d signed up for. And whatever the truth, Clare was certainly frightened. She certainly believed at least some of what she was saying. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. At least for now.

Sam walked back down the corridor, passing Clare’s bedroom on the right-hand side. Even in the gloom he could see the unmade bed that had been left in a hurry, the nightclothes strewn on the floor. Back in the kitchen, Clare was weeping again, her head buried in her hands. Sam walked round her, checked through the blinds of the back door, then spoke again.

‘Who else knows about this?’

It took a moment for Clare to stop sobbing. ‘No one.’

‘I mean it, Clare. Friends. Family. Boyfriend. Someone you called because you were scared.’

She shook her head. ‘On my mother’s life. I didn’t want anyone else to be in danger. Jesus, I wish I’d never started any of this. They weren’t messing with me, Sam. You know how you can tell, when someone’s stringing you along. That old man, he’ll have me killed if he thinks I’ve told anyone about this. I know he will. You’ve got to keep it a secret – you can’t let anyone know you’ve been here.’

Sam walked up to her. He perched himself on the table and put a hand on her slim shoulder. ‘Remember what I told you?’ he asked. ‘That if I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. Well the same goes for them. If they wanted you out of the way, they wouldn’t bother playing with you first.’ And then, quietly, ‘Look at your friend Bill.’

She looked up at him with wide, scared eyes. ‘Do you know who they were?’

Sam paused before answering. ‘I think they were MI5.’

A silence.

‘Think about it,’ Sam continued. ‘Your man was on the run. You alerted the security services to his whereabouts and a few hours later he was dead.’

‘But…’ Clare looked shocked. ‘I never told them. I never once said where he was.’

‘You didn’t need to.’ He walked to the table and pointed at the telephone number scrawled on the document. ‘Did you speak to him on that phone number?’

She nodded mutely.

‘Five would have had your phone records up in about ten seconds flat,’ Sam told him. ‘As soon as they narrowed down the possible numbers for your man, they’d have kept tabs on them. The minute he made a call, his phone became a tracking device. All he had to do was dial out for a pizza and the spooks would have had his location. Easiest thing in the world.’ He didn’t add that he’d done it himself before now.

Clare was shaking her head. ‘You mean… you mean it’s my fault.’

‘You didn’t kill the guy,’ Sam said.

‘But I…’ She became breathless. ‘I…’

‘You didn’t know.’

‘But… you’re really telling me that the British government murdered Bill?’

He stared at her. As he sat there on the edge of the table in this strange flat with a woman he’d never met before, the memory of the previous day’s briefing filled his mind. The rough, grainy photographs of the targets. The picture of his brother. And the Ops Sergeant’s stark warning. Your targets are British citizens. They’ll be speaking English. That shouldn’t distract you from the job in hand.

A silence. Sam stood up and looked again through the blinds.

‘Why are you here, Sam?’ Clare asked suddenly. ‘Who gave you this copy of my article?’

Sam sniffed. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘You said you were in the military. Care to elaborate?’

‘Not really.’

‘But you knew about the training camp. The one in Kazakhstan.’

Sam nodded.

‘And you seem to know more about how MI5 work than the average joe.’

‘You need to stop thinking so hard, Clare.’

Out of the blue, she slammed her hand down on the table. ‘I need to know what’s going on!’ she announced with sudden spirit. ‘Holy Mother, half an hour ago I thought you were going to kill me. I think I deserve an explanation, don’t you?’ She paused and caught her breath. ‘I’m not stupid, you know. You’re in the military and you deal with MI5. In my book that makes you special forces. Right? Right?’

Sam stayed quiet.

‘Damn it!’ she exploded. There was a fire in her now that he hadn’t expected. All of a sudden she was no longer the frightened woman who had wept uncontrollably. She stood, then strode over to him, her arms raised and her fists clenched. ‘Tell me what’s going on!’ Sam blinked, then realised she was actually going to try to hit him in the chest in fury.

He grabbed her slender wrists. Her eyes flashing, Clare struggled, but without success. Sam kept hold of her and for the second time he smelt her perfume. He pulled her towards him and felt her breasts pressing lightly against his torso. She was warm. Almost comforting.

The struggle stopped and they stared at each other. Clare was blushing faintly. Maybe it was the anger; or maybe, Sam thought, it was something else. Her breathing trembled. Sam knew what it meant. He knew how easily some women would give themselves up to a man they thought could protect them.

He knew, even as he spoke, that he should keep his mouth shut. That sharing what he knew could lead to trouble for both of them. But his natural caution had been replaced by other emotions. ‘I’m SAS,’ he said. Calm. In control. ‘An operation has just been ordered. We’re to deploy to the training camp in Kazakhstan and neutralise all the British citizens there. Looks to me like you’ve opened up a can of worms. Five have got a covert network across the country. It’s started to spring a leak so they’re shutting it down. Permanently.’

Clare drew away slightly. ‘Neutralise?’ she asked. ‘You mean… kill?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘Kill.’

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘How many of them are there?’

‘Twenty.’ He felt his face tensing up as the image of Jacob, bearded and rough, passed into his head. ‘Maybe more.’

Clare breathed deeply as she assimilated the information. Sam noticed that she didn’t pull her wrists away from his hands.

‘I still don’t know why you’re here,’ she whispered. ‘I still don’t know what this is all about.’

‘It’s about someone trying to warn me.’

‘What of?’

Sam knew he shouldn’t tell her. He knew he should keep it to himself. But he could feel her warm breath and could sense that she was looking at him through different eyes. And anyway, maybe she was right. Maybe he did owe her some sort of explanation.

‘One of the targets,’ he said quietly, ‘is my brother. And if anyone thinks I’m going to go out there to put a bullet in his head, they can think again.’

She had stopped asking him questions soon after that. She’d stopped crying too. But she hadn’t stopped looking at him, that look which was a mixture of apprehension and something else. It was edging towards morning when Clare slipped into her bedroom, leaving Sam sitting at the table, the lights dimmed almost to nothingness, the document and his gun laid out in front of him. She wanted to be alone, she said. She wanted to think. That was fine by Sam: he knew she wouldn’t want to be by herself for long.

It was a Regiment tradition to laugh at Five, to take the piss out of the suited goons who turned up at HQ with a slew of orders and an unwillingness to get their own hands dirty. Civil serpents, they were called. Fags. Tossers. And a lot more besides. But beneath all that, away from the bravado and everything that went with it, there was at least some sort of respect. The Security Service was secretive; it was difficult to understand; it had sent the Regiment on operations that most people would find morally dubious. But nobody doubted that they were on the same side.

At least that was what Sam had always thought. In the last few hours, though, he had become less sure. He didn’t know whose side he was on, nor even what the sides were. All he knew was that somewhere, in some godforsaken shit hole in central Asia, his brother was a target. He didn’t know why and he didn’t know how; all he knew was that Jacob had been shat on by the Government once before. He was damned if he was going to let it happen again.

A noise. His hand grabbed the gun at lightning speed.

It was only Clare. She stood in the doorway, her pretty features softened by the dim light. She was wearing a nightdress that fell to just above her knees. One of the straps had slipped slightly down her shoulder, but she made no attempt to adjust it. They stared at each other for what seemed like an age.

Sam stood up. Almost absent-mindedly he brought the gun with him. As he stepped towards Clare, he saw her lips part slightly. She was several inches shorter than him; as he grew closer she raised her head.

His gun hand was pressed into the small of her back now. The nightdress was satiny and so thin it might as well not have been there. Her body felt warm, but she was trembling.

‘Stay with me,’ she whispered.

Sam nodded, then pressed his lips against hers.

She kissed him nervously at first, as though she shouldn’t be doing it. But that timid kiss soon turned into something else. Something more passionate. Gently Sam slid the straps of her nightdress from her shoulders. The garment fell to a silent, gossamer heap on the floor, leaving Clare naked. She pulled her lips away and opened her eyes. There was still a look of anxiety on her face. No smiles. That was good. Sam didn’t feel like returning one.

She turned and walked to the bedroom. Sam followed, laying his gun on a small table by the doorway. Clare was standing by the bed. The bright moon shone through her bedroom window illuminating her body. His eyes followed the line of her hips, the curve of her breasts. He placed the gun on a chest of drawers and stepped towards her.

Clare’s breath was heavy. Shaking. She stretched out a nervous hand and slid it between the buttons of Sam’s shirt. He started to undo them and as he felt her hand wander over his torso, he felt at least some of the tension of the past twenty-four hours ease away. He pulled Clare towards him and kissed her again, before gently but firmly pushing her onto the bed. She gazed up at him as he removed his shirt.

‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

Sam gave her a serious kind of look. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

He lay on the bed, softly ran his hands over her breasts and then kissed her again.

‘Not yet,’ he said.

SEVEN

The same moon that shone into the West London bedroom of Clare Corbett shone into an attic room on the other side of the city. It was a good deal less comfortable – a single bed, a rickety wooden table and a chair. It smelt a bit – not just of the fast-food packaging on the floor, but also of the neglect that is particular to a certain type of rented accommodation – and it only contained one person. Jamie Spillane lay on the bed and gazed through the skylight. He wished sleep would come, but he knew it wouldn’t.

Jamie felt stupid. He must have still been drunk the previous morning when he came clean to Kelly. Either that or just desperate to tell someone. But that had been the one thing they’d told him not to do. He remembered their words. ‘It’s not called the Secret Service for nothing. If you tell anyone, you won’t only blow your cover, you put them in danger as well. So remember that, and keep your fucking mouths shut.’

In the darkness his own stupidity hit him yet again.

At least she hadn’t believed him. That was something. Kelly wouldn’t go blurting it out to anyone. She’d just bitch about him to her friends, tell them what a useless bastard he was. He didn’t mind that.

Or did he? Truth was that the idea made him feel a bit uncomfortable. If he was honest with himself, he’d have to say that he liked Kelly. It wasn’t just the sex, although that was good; he liked the way that she just… looked after him a bit. He felt bad now about taking the money from her, bad that she knew about it and had something else to chalk up against him. The few weeks he’d spent with Kelly had been all right. He’d been kicked out by girlfriends before now, of course he had. But he felt particularly gloomy about this one.

Not least because he had nowhere to go. Home wasn’t an option, obviously. Jamie had decided he was never going back there. His mum and dad were the last people in the world he wanted to be with. He felt embarrassed that he had made that stuff up about them, but Jamie wasn’t so naïve about himself that he couldn’t admit that these were little fantasies about his parents that he’d had since he was a child. That his dad was, well, someone. Not just a pathetic, pissed-up waste of space. And his mum? He sneered in the darkness. Jamie didn’t even want to think about her.

Maybe he had tried to tell Kelly his secret because he knew he could never tell his parents. They always thought he was worthless. As a kid, when he’d gone off the rails, it hadn’t made them pay more attention to him. It had just reinforced their opinion. When he’d spent three months in a young offenders’ institute for joyriding and smashing up someone’s motor, they had seemed totally unsurprised. They didn’t visit him once. When he got out, the petty crime had continued. He got a buzz out of it. And somewhere deep down he wanted his parents to take notice. They never did.

Which was why he was here. A cheap, faceless bedsit. Rooms rented by the week. When he had been targeted by the Security Service and told he’d be put on a retainer of a few hundred pounds a month, paid directly and anonymously into a bank account, it had sounded like a deal too good to be true. But a few hundred pounds, he soon realised, doesn’t get you very far. He wouldn’t mind if they’d just give him something to do – anything to do – but since he’d got back from the training camp, there’d been nothing. Silence.

He’d been warned that this would be the case. ‘You won’t hear from us,’ he’d been told. ‘Not until the time comes for you to be activated. When that happens, we’ll find you. Just carry on as normal. Live your life. And remember: don’t tell anyone.’

This wasn’t living his life, though. Nothing like. He wanted some excitement. He was hungry for it. And he wanted something to do.

Jamie wouldn’t be able to tell his parents about it. He knew that. But he would know. He would know that he wasn’t the useless kid his mum and dad saw.

The moon continued to shine into the attic. Jamie continued to lie awake, waiting for morning, whatever it might bring.

A podgy man with square, thick-rimmed spectacles sat in the leather driving seat of his large, comfortable car. The coldest hour, he thought to himself, was always just before sunrise. He was glad of his coat and glad, too, that sunrise was just around the corner. He had spent too much time for his liking in this bland estate on the outskirts of the monstrosity that was Milton Keynes and he was looking forward to this particular engagement being over. That would happen – if everything went according to plan – very soon.

The Americans called what he was about to do the Boston Brakes Technique. Trust the Americans, he thought to himself, to claim the credit for everything. The technique in question, or course, had been used all over the world, not just in Boston. He himself had performed it five times and though he was not one for conspiracy theories, it did not take a genius to understand that the famous car crash under the Pont de l’Alma in Paris bore all the hallmarks of what he was about to do.

Car crashes, he found, were so satisfactory. They were commonplace, for a start. How many of them happened around the world every day? He did not know the exact statistic, but it was many, certainly. The cynic in him suspected that a small but significant number of these accidents were in fact carried out by the security services of various countries for precisely the reason he favoured them. Nobody would suspect foul play. And nobody would examine in any detail the crushed, crumpled shell of a wrecked motor vehicle; certainly they would not look close enough to find the small electronic device attached to the car’s steering column – if, indeed, the device itself had survived the crash.

He looked a little further down the residential street in which his car was parked. The vehicle he had targeted was on the other side of the road about twenty metres down. He couldn’t see it in the darkness, but as the sky gradually started to move from black to steely grey, the vehicle came into his field of vision. Only two nights previously, in the small hours of the morning, he had broken into it with some ease. It had taken only a few minutes to remove the panel below the steering wheel, attach the device – no bigger than the smallest mobile phone – and walk briskly away, though not before locking the car carefully once again.

It was pathetically easy to kill people sometimes.

He looked at his watch. A quarter-past five. In one hour and thirty minutes, the door of the house outside which the vehicle was parked would open. A louche youngster in his mid-twenties would walk out, approach the car and slouch into the driver’s seat. Until then, he just had to wait. He would have liked to listen to something – there was a cassette of sacred choral music slotted into the dashboard – but if he did that he risked attracting attention. So he just sat there in silence.

A quarter to seven. The house door opened and a figure appeared. He wore sunglasses, quite unnecessarily, and a T-shirt with the logo of a pop group that the man didn’t recognise. No doubt his target’s musical tastes were buried somewhere in the details that had been supplied to him – the man’s employers were extraordinarily thorough – but he had not retained them. It wasn’t necessary for what was to happen today.

The car – an old silver Ford with shiny alloy wheels and certain other modifications intended to make it look like a much more desirable object than it actually was – pulled out into the road. The man didn’t follow. Not yet. Instead, he switched on a small visual display unit that was gummed to the front windscreen. It looked like a satellite navigation unit; indeed that’s what it was. It just wasn’t the kind that anyone could buy in the high street.

A map appeared, and on it two green dots. One did not move. The other, which was flashing, did. At the side of the screen a digital display showed some constantly changing numbers: the other car’s increasing speed. The man waited for the vehicle in the road to disappear from sight. And then he followed, using the tracking screen to stay behind his target, but at a distance.

He knew where the young man was likely to go, of course. On to the motorway and then north towards the service station where he had worked for precisely seven months and two weeks. His take-home pay was £180 a week, £130 of which was spent on rent. He bought his food from the local Tesco – the cheapest brands of everything except, it seemed, cigarettes. No doubt he found the extra money – the retainer, paid into his bank account anonymously – immensely useful. However, as was so often the way with these people, he squandered it on trinkets for his car, expensive evenings in nightclubs and, more than once, prostitutes. Whether his target had ever been activated, the man didn’t know. That was information which was neither useful to him, nor supplied.

He drove slowly. Safely. If his target forged too far ahead he didn’t worry. It was not his intention to stay close, after all. At least, not just yet. The early morning traffic had not built up and it didn’t take long for the flashing green light on his screen to reach the blue map line that indicated the motorway. As soon as it did, the speed indicator started to blur. In the space of about ten seconds, it went from a steady 35 mph into the decidedly unsteady nineties.

The man’s own car stayed well within the speed limit. Even when he himself reached the motorway he stayed in the slow lane at under 50 mph, allowing more impatient drivers to overtake him.

On the passenger seat lay a little black box. Had a child seen it, they might have thought it was the control unit for a radio-controlled car. In fact it wasn’t far off. Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, the man stretched out the other one and picked it up. He glanced back at the screen: his target’s car was doing nearly 100 mph now. That would be just right. He flicked his thumb on to the switch; it moved with very little resistance. Then he carefully put the unit back on the passenger seat, his free hand back on the steering wheel, and continued his slow, steady journey.

The green light continued to flicker. That was as it should be. The man pictured what was happening inside his target’s car. The steering column would have been disabled, as would the brakes, and at that precise moment the driver would be struggling with the newfound realisation that he was unable to control his car.

The man watched the screen intently. Ten seconds passed.

Fifteen.

And then, without so much as a blip, the green light disappeared.

He smiled. About two miles, he calculated, between himself and the place where the accident had happened. In about a minute the traffic would start slowing, almost to a standstill. He had no desire to get caught up in that, so when he saw an exit signposted up ahead, he switched on his indicators and prepared to leave the motorway.

The traffic started to slow. By the time he bore left it was grinding to a halt. He drove his car up the slip road at the top of which there was a roundabout, one exit of which led to a bridge passing back over the motorway. He took that exit, and as he passed over the road he looked out to his left. There, scattered across the motorway, was the result of his morning’s work.

He continued to drive, but as soon as he could he pulled off the main road and into a lay-by before leaving the car and walking back to the bridge. It was a weakness, he knew, something he really ought to master; but he couldn’t resist examining exactly what he had achieved. He stood at the side of the bridge, peering through his square glasses onto the devastation below.

There were three cars involved in the crash, as far as he could tell. It was difficult to determine exactly, because they no longer resembled cars so much as smouldering chunks of scrap metal. He ran through the crash in his mind. The car would have slammed directly into the back of the other two motors; he imagined the target jolting forward in his seat at the moment of impact, the sudden jerk of the neck and then the contorted metal of the second car’s chassis plunging through the windshield and driving through the skull. He could see something shiny, red and sticky, lying on the road. Lumps of brain matter, perhaps, or the bowels of one of the other victims. A few members of the public had left their own cars and were approaching the wreckage. It was clear, though, that there was nothing they could do. It was clear that the occupants of all three cars would be dead. So much the better. If anything was likely to dilute people’s attention away from one death, it was the occurrence of several others at the same time.

He imagined what the eye witnesses would have to say. The nutter in the Ford was driving like a lunatic. A hundred miles an hour, easy. It was his fault. Stupid bloody idiot.

Everything had gone very well. He could return home now knowing that his job had been successful. The man allowed himself a brief smile as he wandered back to his own car, put the key in the ignition and, unnoticed by anyone or anything, drove smoothly away.

Sam didn’t know where he was. A corridor. Cement walls. There was nobody else around. He was on his own. It was dark. He could only see because of the NV, which cast a sinister greenish hue all around. There was a weapon in his fist. A submachine gun. Heckler & Koch, MP5 – he could tell from the view through the weapon’s aperture sight as he stealthily continued down the corridor.

There should be other people here. Other guys backing him up. But he knew there was none. He felt out of control, but all he could do was continue down the corridor. All he could do was wait and see.

He could hear his breath and his footsteps on the hard, cold floor. But nothing else.

A door. It seemed out of place, here at the end of this corridor. Through the NV he couldn’t tell what colour it was, but it appeared wooden and panelled. The kind of door you’d see in someone’s house. There was a burnished doorknob and no keyhole, which suggested it couldn’t be locked. He stood there for a moment, looking at this door. It seemed familiar, somehow, but Sam couldn’t quite place it.

His weapon at the ready, he prepared to kick it open. But just as he raised one foot, the door swung inwards.

Everything happened in a second. Sam’s eyes focussed on a figure in the room beyond. It was a man whose back was turned to him. Firing the weapon was like a reflex action; Sam’s aim was precise. There was a flash in his NV as the round burst from the barrel of the MP5; he knew that his aim was true and that he had hit the figure directly in the back of the head.

A silence. No movement. From this range, and with this weapon, the figure’s head should have been decimated. But it remained whole.

Sam paused. Then, not knowing quite why, he removed the NV goggles from his face. There was enough light to see. As he did so, the figure turned around. It was with a sickening feeling that he realised the person ahead of him was not, as he had previously appeared to be, a grown man. He was just a boy. It was only when the two of them were facing each other that he saw who it was.

Jacob couldn’t have been more than thirteen, though he had always looked old for his age. His dark hair was scruffy and boyish; his gaze – those dark, intense eyes – was confused. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Just a choking, coughing sound. And then blood, overflowing from his mouth and dribbling over his chin.

Only then did the rest of the room come into focus. Only then did Sam recognise it. It was a room from his childhood, the lounge of the house where he had grown up. Jacob was standing in front of the three-bar electric fire that had stood for as long as he could remember in the grate. With a jolt he realised that to one side, sitting in a comfortable armchair, was his father – younger, more vigorous. And on the other side, one hand squeezing the other in an expression of undisguised despair was his mum.

Sam didn’t understand. His mum was dead.

‘What have you done, Sam?’ she whispered, and he realised that up till now he had forgotten what her voice sounded like.

Both parents looked at him, and then at Jacob. His thirteen-year-old brother’s face was pale now. When he collapsed it was almost in slow motion. A pool of blood spread unrealistically around his head. Sam couldn’t tell whether he had taken a few seconds to die, or an hour.

He looked back up towards his mother, but she was no longer there. He opened his mouth to call her name, but before he could do so his father was suddenly in front of him. Max looked young and strong. He stretched out his arms and grabbed the barrel of Sam’s gun and pulled it into the flesh of his lean stomach.

‘Kill me!’ he hissed.

Sam shook his head.

‘Kill me now!’ insisted his father. ‘You might as well.’

Sam tried to pull the weapon away, but his father was too strong for him. Far too strong. The older man held the weapon firmly against him and, staring Sam straight in the eye, used his other hand to fumble for the trigger.

‘I didn’t mean it…’ Sam heard himself saying. ‘I didn’t know it was him…’

But by then, it was too late.

It was the sound of the dreamlike rounds discharging into his father’s spectral body that woke Sam. He sat bolt upright and as the bright morning sun beamed through the windows it took a moment for him to work out where the hell he was. Then he remembered. He looked to his side: there was no one else in the bed. Climbing out, he pulled on his clothes and only then did Clare appear in the doorway.

‘I got up early,’ she said. ‘Before you could sneak out.’ She smiled to show that it was a joke, but they both knew it wasn’t.

She too was dressed, in the same clothes that she wore last night. Leaning against the frame of the doorway it was clear to Sam that she was trying to look cool. Unsuccessfully. The worry lines in her face were still all too evident.

‘I have to go,’ Sam said shortly.

Clare nodded, unable to hide her disappointment.

‘You’ll be okay,’ he told her. ‘I told you last night, if they wanted to…’ He chose his words carefully. ‘To get rid of you, they’d have done it already. Those spooks that came here, you’ll probably never see them again.’

Clare didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t say so.

‘Can I call you?’ she asked. She looked momentarily surprised that she had blurted out the question. ‘I mean, look, don’t worry. I know what last night was. I’m not going to ask you to marry me or anything. I just mean, can I call you, you know, if I need to? I won’t make a nuisance of myself.’

Sam pushed gently past her, doing his best not to catch her eye. ‘I don’t think you should,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ Clare replied weakly.

‘It’s too easy for them to track your calls. Mine too. You want my advice? Forget you ever saw me. And don’t mention anything of this to anybody. Ever.’ They were in the kitchen now. Sam turned to took at her. Clare had her arms wrapped around her, embracing herself as though no one else would.

‘I won’t see you again, will I?’ she asked quietly.

Sam narrowed his eyes. ‘No,’ he replied. There wasn’t any point stringing the girl along.

She nodded with the expression of a child coming to terms with something difficult to understand. ‘You sure know how to make a girl feel special, Sam.’ She tried to make light of it, but when she spoke again her voice was little more than a whisper.

‘Those people,’ she said. ‘At the training camp. Are you… Are you really going to kill them, Sam? After everything I’ve told you, is that really what you’re going to do?’

The question hung in the air. Sam looked darkly at her. Any number of responses came into his head, but he knew none of them would be appropriate. He looked towards the back door. He would leave that way. Just in case.

He walked up to Clare and lightly touched his fingers to her cheek. The skin was soft and warm.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anybody I was here. I have to know I can trust you.’

She looked steadily into his eyes. For a moment she didn’t respond. When she did, her question came out of the blue.

‘Why’s your brother there, Sam? What’s he doing?’

Sam refused to allow any emotion to show on his face. Clare was making him address things he was trying not to think about. What did Jacob’s presence at the training camp mean? It was an MI5 facility. Was he being held captive? Was he being forced into something? Once more, his father’s conspiracy theories flashed through his mind. He did what he could to subdue them. They made no difference to what he had to do.

‘I have to know I can trust you.’ He ignored Clare’s question and repeated his own.

‘You can trust me,’ she said quietly.

He nodded. Somehow he knew she was telling the truth.

‘I have to go,’ he said, and without another word he raised the blinds, unlocked the door and slipped back out into the garden.

Jamie Spillane looked at his watch. Midday. Maybe he had slept or maybe he hadn’t. In any case he was still lying on the bed wearing the same clothes from last night. The rumbling in his stomach was telling him it was time to eat. He pushed himself heavily on to his feet and surveyed the debris of fast-food packaging on the floor around him. Jesus. He’d only been here twenty-four hours and it already looked like a shit hole. Smelt like a shit hole, too. He probably wasn’t too fresh himself, but the thought of taking a shower in the grubby communal bathroom wasn’t very appealing.

He grabbed his wallet and stuffed it into the pocket of his baggy jeans, then left the room, taking care to lock the door behind him. There were other people staying here, as well as a nosy landlady, and he could tell that they would rifle through his room without a second thought if they reckoned they could get away with it. He knew, because he would do the same. Fortunately, though, he didn’t bump into any of them as he descended the three storeys of uncarpeted stairway, opened the main door to the faceless mid-terrace which housed the room he was renting and stepped out into the street. The sun was bright today. It made him wince, like an insect on an upturned brick. Instinctively, he pulled his hood over his head. It didn’t keep the sun out of his eyes, but it did make him feel more comfortable as he tramped down the pavement.

It took a while to find a supermarket. There were plenty of shops in this run-down area of North London, but they mostly sold cheap booze and cut-price phone cards. By the time he saw the familiar blue logo, he’d been walking for a good twenty minutes and was, he realised, a bit lost. He shrugged. He’d soon find his way back again. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the diary, after all.

The shop was almost empty; the few customers were elderly, pushing or carrying almost empty baskets of ready meals and cheap teabags. Jamie wandered the aisles aimlessly. He put chocolate milk and sandwiches in his basket before approaching the checkouts. There were only two of them open and so, despite the relatively few customers, each till had a queue. He joined the shortest and waited.

There was only one customer ahead of him when his mobile phone rang. Jamie pulled it out and looked at the screen. No number was displayed; to his surprise he noticed a little lurch in his stomach as he wondered if it might, just possibly, be Kelly. He placed his basket at the end of the counter and started to offload his purchases onto the moving belt with one hand. With the other, he answered the phone.

‘Yeah?’ he said. Cool. He didn’t want to give anything away.

A crackly kind of pause.

‘Hello?’ Jamie bellowed in the way only people talking into mobiles can. Briefly he considered hanging up, but at that moment a voice spoke.

‘Jamie Spillane?’ it asked.

Jamie couldn’t place the voice. ‘Who’s this?’ he demanded.

Another pause. ‘You know who it is.’

Jamie blinked. The checkout girl had scanned his items and was looking up at him with a bored, impatient expression. ‘Four pounds eighty-six,’ she said, a bit too loudly, as though she were saying it for a second time. Jamie hardly heard her. He left his lunch languishing by the plastic bags and hurried away from the checkout and out the shop.

‘I thought you’d forgotten I existed,’ he said under his breath. Silence. He was on the street now. The traffic was noisy. ‘Hello?’

‘You knew it could be some time.’ The more the voice spoke, the more Jamie recognised it. ‘The company is activating you.’

The company. Jamie knew what that meant. He knew that nobody would ever use the phrase ‘MI5’.

‘I’m listening,’ he replied. He had a finger shoved into his other ear to keep out the noise and it crossed his mind that this wasn’t quite how he had imagined things would happen. ‘Are you there?’ he asked when there was no reply.

‘I’m here.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

Again a pause.

‘Have you told anyone, Jamie?’

He was glad nobody was there to see his face. ‘Of course not,’ he replied. No hint of a lie in his voice. A bus had come to a halt just in front of him. Passengers spilled out and one of them caught his eye. Jamie started walking, speaking as he went. ‘Don’t worry about it, mate. It’s all cool.’

He carried on walking. His mouth felt dry. Jamie was frightened of the man at the other end of the phone. But he had to keep silent. He didn’t want to get Kelly involved in this stuff.

Silence. He continued to walk briskly. Randomly. He was getting a bit out of breath now – through exercise or excitement, he wasn’t quite sure which – so he came to a halt on the corner of a residential street. It was quieter here.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What do I need to do? What’s the job?’

He held his breath as he waited for the answer.

‘The job,’ the voice replied, ‘is difficult. But it’s important, Jamie. Lives depend on it. We’re asking you because you showed more aptitude than the others. Can we count on you?’

Jamie’s face twitched. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, you can.’

‘Good. You need to listen carefully, Jamie. If you don’t understand something, ask me to repeat it. Do you understand?’

Jamie looked around. The residential street was practically deserted; certainly nobody was paying him any attention. That was good. He pulled himself up to his full height. All of a sudden, he felt tall again. Excited. Useful. The row with Kelly, the shitty bedsit – all that disappeared from his mind.

‘Yeah,’ he announced into the receiver. ‘I understand. Go ahead. I’m listening…’

EIGHT

Sam’s dream had stayed with him, a shadow that haunted him for the rest of the day, just as it had haunted his night. Other things haunted him too. Clare’s story; the anonymous package. Who had given it to him? No matter how hard he thought about it, he just couldn’t make things add up. Driving back from London he could barely keep his car straight, let alone his thoughts. But as he approached the outskirts of Hereford, he realised he had come to a decision. And if he was going to pull it off, he had to pretend that everything was normal.

He headed straight for Credenhill. There were things that needed to be done before the op. The last thing Sam wanted to do at the moment was see any of the guys, but he had to make sure he was prepared. Pretend nothing’s wrong, he told himself. Pretend it’s just an ordinary op. If he didn’t put in an appearance, people might start to ask questions.

It was midday by the time he approached the weapons store and it was with relief, as he stepped inside, that he saw it was just him and the armourer. He was a tall man with short, spiky hair. Sam didn’t know his name. He hoped there’d be no wisecracks from him, no inappropriate questions about what use the weapons he dished out were going to be put to.

‘Didn’t think I’d be seeing your lot so soon,’ he observed drily.

A little voice in Sam’s head told him to act naturally. If you can’t keep it up in the armoury, he told himself, you’ll have no chance in the field. ‘Gluttons for fucking punishment,’ he replied before flashing a forced, rueful smile.

‘Diemaco?’

Sam nodded. ‘And the Sig.’

Each man’s weapon was particular to him. The rifle and handgun that Sam would be taking to Kazakhstan were the same ones that had kept him alive in Helmand Province; the same ones that had claimed more Taliban scalps in the previous few weeks than Sam could frankly remember. The armourer kept the weapons separate, safe and ordered in this locked, secure building. But it was up to Sam to test fire his guns on the range in preparation for the op, to make sure that they were still zeroed in to his eye. It took the armourer less than a minute silently to locate his Diemaco C8 and place it carefully on the counter along with a small box of 45 mm rounds. The Sig followed, a P226 with a 9 mm chamber and an extended twenty-round magazine. A box of rounds for the handgun and Sam was good to go. The armourer listed what Sam was checking out, then handed over the slip of paper for him to sign. He scrawled his illegible signature at the bottom of the paper, nodded curtly at the armourer and gathered up his weapons.

There were two guys at the range already, both from Sam’s troop. Jack Craven and Luke Tyler had been out with him in the Stan. Good lads. Young. Up for it. The sort of troopers who would be down the range whether there was an operation in the offing or not. Sam stood back and watched their practice rounds. They were both firing their Diemacos and their aims were both true. By the time they had finished shooting, the body-shaped targets at the end of the range were punctured in all the right places. They lowered their weapons, then turned round.

‘What you gawking at, Granddad?’ Craven called good-naturedly. He was a Geordie and thought that gave him a licence to take the piss out of everyone.

Sam winked it at him, then turned to look through the window of the small hut that overlooked the range. He couldn’t quite see who was in charge, but whoever it was gave him a thumbs up. Sam sniffed and approached one of the firing alleys. He carefully laid the Sig on the ground behind him, before loading the Diemaco, pressing the butt of the weapon into his shoulder and taking aim.

He had lost count of the number of times he had stood at this range, firing the same weapon at the same target. It was routine. Comfortable. The sort of thing he could do in his sleep. But as Sam stood there, the two younger troopers looking on, he found himself shaking. Anger, he realised. And frustration. His lips were curled, his face set; and as he lined up the sights to the target, he noticed that it felt good to have this gun in his fist. It made him feel in control. He discharged the weapon in a single, brutal burst. His aim was perfect: each round thundered into the head of his target; by the time he had finished, his cardboard enemy was fully decapitated. Swapping one weapon for the other, he loaded the Sig and, discharging it at arm’s length, gave the target a bellyful of lead. And with each shot he felt better. Not less angry. Just better. The cloak-and-dagger letters, the spooks with secret agendas – they weren’t what Sam was built for. This was. It felt good to be a soldier again.

He lowered his weapon, then turned back to the other two. They were watching him, arms folded and with grins of appreciation on their faces. ‘Like fish in a fuckin’ barrel!’ Craven shouted as Sam walked up to join them. The younger man clapped a big hand on Sam’s shoulder. ‘Shame it weren’t our bearded mates from Now Zad at the end of the alley.’

Sam smiled. ‘I’d have fuckin’ RPG’d them if it was,’ he replied.

‘What’s the gossip, then?’ Tyler asked out of the blue. He was a broad-shouldered Cockney with a rugby-player’s nose and a werewolf’s eyebrows. ‘How come we’re being sent straight back out?’

Sam shrugged. ‘No gossip,’ he said quietly. ‘Least, if there is, I haven’t heard it.’

‘Fuckin’ out of order if you ask me,’ Craven announced, ignoring the fact that nobody had. Sam couldn’t help feeling, though, that despite his words he didn’t sound all that offended. ‘“B” Squadron on standby,’ he continued. ‘Bunch of fuckin’ lard-arses that lot. Probably want to send some real shooters out, make sure the job gets done proper.’ He started singing his own words, rather tunelessly, to a song Sam half recognised. ‘You say HALO, I say goodbye…’

The three of them smiled at Craven’s remarks. No one really thought that badly about the other squadrons, but slagging them off was a common enough way to pass the time. Back at the armoury they signed their weapons back in. ‘Everything as it should be, gentlemen?’ the armourer asked.

‘We’ll sign them out again in the morning,’ said Sam. He nodded at Craven and Tyler, then left the armoury without another word. In the morning he would return well before the RV time to assemble his weapons and pack his kit, but until then he wanted to be out of there.

Back home he paced the flat throughout the afternoon. He ate dinner in a café, then returned to pacing into the small hours, playing over the events of the last couple of days, trying to make sense of them, without success. His head was a jumble of images: Jacob’s picture; the faceless figure at his door; Clare’s terrified face and the tempting curve of her body in the moonlit room; her story. Even now he didn’t know which bits of it to believe. He tried to sleep, his handgun resting by his side. But sleep wasn’t going to come. Not tonight. And as the grey light of morning appeared once more, Sam felt almost as if he were in a dream. There was something unreal about what he was about to do. For years he had followed orders without question. It was hard-wired into him. Second nature. Even after Jacob had been expelled from the Regiment; even after Sam and Mac had been told, in no uncertain terms, that if they ever leaked what had happened that day to anyone they would be facing court martial; even then, with all the anger that came with it, he had stayed loyal. He hated the authorities that had belittled and humiliated his brother; but he had never been fighting for them. He had been fighting for the men who stood alongside him, the men he risked his lives with. That was what it was all about.

Only now everything had changed.

Now, he wasn’t fighting with the men in his troop. He was fighting against them. And they didn’t even know it. As Sam prepared to return to HQ, he knew that his objective was different to everyone else’s. If his brother was at the camp, there was no way Sam would let him come to harm.

It made Sam sick to the stomach to acknowledge it, but if that meant putting the operation at risk, then that was the way it had to be.

Credenhill. 07.00. Sam walked into his single-bunk room. The kit he had dumped in here only a couple of days before was still lying on the floor. Vaguely aware of the bustle and noise of the other guys in his corridor doing the same thing, he upturned the bergen so that everything fell out, then carefully went about the business of repacking. It was reassuring to be performing this familiar, repetitive process. It made him feel calmer. More focussed. His sleeping bag was filled with thick Afghan dust. He shook it out before rolling it back up and stashing it with his Goretex bivvy bag. It was an in-and-out job, and if everything went as it should he wouldn’t require either item, but he needed to be prepared. He checked his bright halogen torch and then his small med pack. Sleeping tablets, aspirin, swabs. The patrol medic would have the big stuff – drips, morphine and all the rest of it – so that the rest of the guys could travel a bit lighter. At the squadron stores there was already a buzz of activity. Sam kept himself to himself, speaking only when he was spoken to, as he took a handful of unappetising ration packs to stash away with his kit. Boil-in-the-bag chicken curry with powered soup starter, a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar. All made by some mysterious, unheard-of manufacturer based up in Scotland. There was also something that he understood to be a biscuit, but looked more like a large, circular piece of mould. The boiled sweets were the only item that wouldn’t taste of shit. The Americans got to have gourmet packs made by designer chefs, and the Regiment got meals that some Jock had probably shat directly into. Fucking nice to be appreciated. At the signal store he signed out his sat phones and comms kit, returning to his bunk to stow them carefully away before going back to the armoury to get himself tooled up.

The Diemaco was waiting for him, of course, along with a matt black device that looked like a camera but was in fact a thermal imaging sight for the carbine. Sam signed out his Sig along with the ammo he needed, as well as a stash of flashbangs, white phosphorous and fragmentation grenades. They would be hitting the camp at night, so the 4th generation NV sights were essential. Back at his bunk, Sam removed the jeans, shirt and jacket that he’d been wearing for a couple of days. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the wall. His face was unshaven; there were dark rings under his eyes. For a fraction of a second he saw his brother staring back. Sam took a sharp intake of breath and looked away.

His camouflage gear was packed up in his metal locker. The digital camouflage was made up of tiny squares, like a pixelated image in the familiar browns, greens and khakis. Sam was relieved to pull it on.

08.50. The kit was packed and double checked. RV in the briefing room in ten minutes. As he walked across the courtyard he saw two unmarked white minibuses parked up. Craven and a couple of other guys loaded heavy flight cases into the back of one of them. Away from Credenhill you wouldn’t give these vehicles a second look. If you did, you’d probably think they were transporting a school football team. But the flight cases didn’t contain sports gear. Far from it. These were the support weapons – a light machine gun, most probably; perhaps a mortar.

Unlike last time he had been here, the corridors of the Kremlin were now buzzing with activity. There were perhaps twenty-five guys in the briefing room and there was a low murmur of voices. Not rowdy, but not subdued either. The first thing Sam did was seek out Mac. The troop sergeant was up front with Jack Whitely, a sheet of plans in front of them. When he saw Sam enter, Mac raised a hand in greeting; Sam returned the gesture, but made a point of sitting at the back. Was it just Sam, or had Mac given him a penetrating kind of look? Ordinarily he would have told himself to stop being so paranoid; but just at the moment, paranoia seemed to be the sensible option. Someone knew more about his operation than they were letting on. Someone had tipped him off by posting that letter. Was it someone currently within the confines of RAF Credenhill?

09.00 precisely. Whitely did a head count. ‘All right,’ he said with brisk, military authority. The buzz of conversation immediately died down. ‘Looks like you all made it out of bed. Transport leaves in twenty minutes. No further briefing till you reach your forward mount position. Let’s get moving.’

The sound of scraping chairs as everyone in the room stood up. Sam led the way, walking decisively to his bunk to pick up the gear, then heading to where the buses were parked up. On the tarmac several hessian sleeves were laid out. Sam was the first to place his Diemaco on the sleeve – the others behind him did the same. When there were enough weapons on the hessian, it would be tied up into a bundle ready for transportation. Sam left it for someone else to do that, though. Next to the weapons bundles were the parachute rigs, straight from the para store – chutes, oxygen, goggles, helmets, straps. Sam had done enough high-altitude jumps in his time, but you never got blasé about making them and he felt a little surge – somewhere between apprehension and excitement – at the sight of the gear. He placed his tightly packed bergen in a pile ready to be loaded, and was first into one of the buses, taking a seat up front.

Tyler sat next to him. ‘Nothing like an away break,’ he commented as he settled into his seat.

‘Yeah,’ Sam replied, looking over his shoulder to see that the bus was full and the back doors were being secured. No sign of Mac. He must have got into a different bus.

‘Yeah,’ he repeated, his voice a bit distant. ‘Nothing like.’

Brize Norton. 12.00.

As they arrived, it was clear that the squadron was coinciding with another movement of troops. The airbase was full of soldiers. Soldiers leaving, soldiers coming back. Sam watched them from the window of the white van as it drove up to the bland terminal building. Some of them would have just landed in the UK for their R and R package in the middle of their tours. They were the ones with smiles on their faces. The glum, serious-looking ones would be returning by the same flight, most likely to one of the war zones of the Middle East. Kandahar, maybe, or Baghdad. No wonder they looked so fed up.

The squadron’s convoy of white vans pulled up outside the terminal and the men de-bussed. Once they were all out, the vans drove away. They would be approaching the special forces jet that was flying them to Bagram so that the gear could be swiftly loaded without having to go through the regular check-in process. Like a swarm of camouflaged bees, the Regiment men headed into the terminal. From the looks they were attracting from the uniformed squaddies all around, it was clear that everyone could tell they were not regular soldiers. And it was true: there was an aloofness about the SAS guys. Everyone in that echoing terminal building was on the same side, but that didn’t prevent a feeling of ‘them and us’. Sam just kept his eyes front and ignored the looks he was getting. The sooner they got on the flight to Bagram, he thought to himself, the better.

He queued to check in behind Craven, Tyler and another air troop member, a hard-nut little Scot called Cullen. Nobody knew his first name, or if they did they had long forgotten it, because Cullen was the only name he answered to. Cullen curtly answered the routine questions of the RAF soldier at the check-in desk before flashing his military ID and moving through to the lounge. Craven and Tyler did the same as Sam fished into his pocket for his own ID. It was a small, battered card, about the size of a driving licence, with a grainy, somewhat out-of-date picture of Sam and the few details that were deemed necessary for someone in his line of work. Name: Redman, Sam. Rank: Sergeant. Blood Group: AB. Religion: C of E. Sam snorted slightly as he read it for the millionth time. If he came home in a body bag they could say whatever prayers they liked. It made no difference to him.

There weren’t many people in the departure lounge, but they were all in camouflage gear, idling on the uncomfortable chairs and staring up at the departure screens and televisions dotted around the place. Out of one of the windows Sam saw pallets of cargo being loaded into the belly of an aging Tristar. That elderly war horse of an aircraft was for the regular troops or for their supplies. The Regiment guys knew they could expect something else – a C-17 – manned by special forces crew; but until its departure was announced, Sam would be staying here. He bought scalding hot, tasteless coffee in a plastic cup from a machine and stared blankly up at a news programme on one of the television screens. The hawk-like face of the Russian prime minister beamed the smile of a politician.

Sam found a deserted corner of the lounge and settled down to wait.

The cabin smelt of that mixture of grubby upholstery and air conditioning that clings to aircraft the world over; the engines were already humming. The squadron spread themselves out – there was plenty of room to do so. Almost immediately several of the guys started pulling hammocks from their bags and pinning them to the side of the cabin. Once take-off had been completed, they would knock back a sleeping pill and use the seven-hour flight to get some shut-eye. Along one side of the cabin there was a double line of stretcher beds. The first time Sam had ever been on a military flight – years ago, now – the sight of these beds had been more than a little unnerving. Now they were just part of the furniture, despite the fact that he’d seen plenty of guys unconscious, dripped up and full of morphine on those things. Some of them had survived; some of them hadn’t. You didn’t think of the ones who never made it when you were preparing to go out into the field. Do that and you’d never go anywhere, or do anything.

He chose a window seat over the wing and buckled himself in as soon as he sat down. He turned to look out of the window, but almost immediately he became aware of somebody taking a place in his row of seats. Sam turned to look. It was Mac. His friend was eyeing him a little suspiciously.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

Sam sniffed and looked away. ‘Course,’ he replied, aware how disagreeable he sounded. ‘Shouldn’t I be?’

He sensed Mac shrugging. ‘Dunno, mate. Just look like you’ve been sucking a lemon all day, that’s all.’

‘Just tired of schlepping to and from…’

‘Me too,’ Mac interrupted.

They sat in awkward silence.

The noise of the engines increased slightly and the aircraft gradually edged into movement. Sam could feel Mac’s gaze on him, but he stubbornly refused to return it. Normally in this situation he’d feel a sense of camaraderie. He’d want to talk to the guys, to feel comfortable with them. It was important. It would help grease the wheels in the field. But Sam felt totally unable to do it. He felt as alien to the squadron as they felt to the squaddies queuing up in the terminal building. With the others he could pretend. But with Mac… no. The man sitting next to him knew him too well. Mac would be able to see through any forced smiles or half-arsed banter.

The calm voice of the captain came over the loudspeaker. Sam barely heard it. He continued to stare out of the window as the aircraft turned on to the runway, accelerated sharply and smoothly rose into the air. The plane juddered as it hit the cloud line; Sam remained as still as a statue. Only when it was levelling off did he allow himself to turn back to Mac.

His friend was still looking at him. A thoughtful look. He opened his mouth as though about to say something and Sam felt his stomach lurch slightly. But Mac said nothing, having clearly thought better of it. When he did finally speak, it was not in the conversational tones of a friend. It was as a troop sergeant talking to one of his unit.

‘I’m going to do the rounds,’ he said. ‘Talk to the guys. We’re going in tonight. There won’t be much time at Bagram to rest up. You should get some sleep.’

Sam nodded, then looked away again. Mac didn’t move, though, so he turned back with one eyebrow raised enquiringly. His friend’s lips were pursed, his eyebrows narrow. He held out his hand and offered Sam a small white pill. Zaleplon – half the squadron would be taking them to blank out the boredom of the flight. ‘I mean it, Sam,’ he said quietly. ‘Get some sleep.’

Sam took the pill. He rolled it around thoughtfully in his fingertips. Mac was suspicious of something, that much was clear. Did he know? Did he suspect? Sam couldn’t tell. What was more, he was never going to find out while they were 30,000 feet up and surrounded by the rest of the squadron. And it was true. He could use some sleep.

‘Thanks, Mac,’ he said. He popped the pill in his mouth, swallowed it and pushed his chair back.

Unlike most people, Sam could sleep easily in an aircraft seat and that was exactly what he intended to do.

It was the pilot’s voice that woke him. He roused himself quickly from his deep, dreamless sleep. The Zaleplon had knocked him out, but also ensured that he woke up feeling alert. Outside it was dark and he could feel that the aircraft was beginning to lose height. Looking around, he saw that the rest of the guys were getting ready for landing, removing their hammocks and settling down in their seats. There was quiet in the cabin – the quiet of anticipation, broken only by the noise of the engines and now by the pilot’s announcement.

‘Gentlemen, we’ll soon be landing at Bagram. To conform with the current night-landing regulations in this operational theatre, we’ll be turning off all lights both inside and outside the aircraft. Please ensure your seatbelts are fastened and your luggage is safely stowed.’

As it always did, it struck Sam as faintly ridiculous that this instruction should be given to a bunch of guys who, only a few hours from now, would be hurling themselves from the back of a plane. But he checked his belt nevertheless.

The lights were switched off soon after that, plunging the cabin into pitch darkness. Looking out the window Sam saw that even the small wing lights were no longer flashing. Down below he could make out an occasional fire, evidence of a settlement in the arid expanse of northern Afghanistan. How many Taliban were out there, he wondered idly, mortars at the ready in the hope that they might see an ISAF forces aircraft in the sky and get lucky with a potshot? If that happened, they’d get to fall from a plane a bit earlier than they expected, so Sam was more than happy to go through the procedure of a blind landing.

Cloaked in that precarious blackness, with only the whining sound of the jet engines for company, Sam felt at once vulnerable and strangely comforted. Darkness suited him. Hid him. As a Blade he’d been taught to live and hide in the shadows, out on patrols, making himself unseen, always being the grey man. That was the drill – disguise yourself whenever possible, then close in on your target and neutralise it. That was really all he knew.

He heard the pilot’s voice, as calm and reassuring as if he had just delivered a planeload of holiday makers to the Costa del Sol.

‘Welcome to Afghanistan,’ he announced, as the plane turned from the runway and trundled towards the main terminal building of Bagram Airbase.

NINE

It was only Sam’s second visit to Bagram. Most of his previous ops in Afghanistan had been in Helmand Province, which meant a flight to Kandahar in the south before connecting to Camp Bastion a bit further west. But in the summer of 2006 he and three others had been assigned to a job guarding an Afghan politician with an unpronounceable name who, on the instruction of President Hamid Karzai, was making an under-the-radar deputation to a warlord in Parvan Province. He was an unlikeable man who treated the Regiment unit like his own personal servants. At least, he had on the way there. They had left Kabul in an armoured vehicle and as they approached the warlord’s village they had driven straight into an ambush. The unit had fought their way out of it and hotfooted back to Kabul, noses bloodied but no lives lost. The politician had wet himself in the middle of the firefight, though. He was a lot less bolshie on the return journey. The secret talks, of course, were never held.

Having been here once before, then, Sam knew what to expect. The large runway was surrounded by three big aircraft hangars. Various other support buildings – originally built by the Soviets during their occupation – provided a pretty basic level of facilities to the troops at the base, though lots of them were little more than empty shells, having been destroyed by warring Afghan factions over the years. The airfield itself was surrounded by the enormous, craggy, snow-topped mountains that characterised this part of the world, but these were obscured by the darkness as Sam and the rest of the squadron disembarked into the warm, dry air. Instead, all they could see were the bright lights and bustle of the airfield at work. The loadies had already started to unload their pallets of equipment and forklift them on to a truck, while the guys themselves were directed towards one of the hangars, outside which an American A-10 Thunderbolt was parked. The aircraft had a mouthful of shark-like teeth painted on its nose, from which protruded a 30 mm gun. Even though it was 11 p.m. and still swelteringly hot, a technician was hard at work on the undercarriage – he barely glanced at the men who, almost deafened by the roar of their own aircraft’s engines, walked past him and into the hangar.

It was a huge, cavernous space the size of a couple of football pitches. There were three aircraft housed in there, but hardly any people: just a British Army representative who ushered them in towards the right where an area had been walled off with some temporary partitions. Waiting for them was a man in regular civvies. He wore square glasses with titanium rims and had a tanned face that was beginning to show signs of age. His hair was black, though, with no sign of grey: it was impossible to tell how old this man was and his expression was similarly inscrutable. Sam remembered Whitely saying that a representative from the Security Service would be waiting for them. The moment he saw him, one word went though Sam’s head: ‘wanker’. The very sight of him filled Sam with a sudden, burning anger.

Once the squadron was assembled, the man spoke – the clear, confident voice of someone used to talking in public. ‘Don’t get too comfortable, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘You’ll be going in tonight.’ He looked around. ‘Air troop sergeant?’

Mac stepped forward.

The spook nodded. ‘Get your lads together. The rest of you, remain on standby.’

The British Army representative spoke up. ‘You can get food at the PX,’ he announced. ‘And I’ll show you where you can bunk down.’ He walked back towards the entrance of the hangar. There was a brief moment of camaraderie among the men – those who were remaining on standby briefly shaking hands with those going on the op. Nothing over the top. Nothing showy. Nobody said ‘good luck’; nobody said anything at all, really.

The others quickly melted away, leaving the eight members of air troop alone with the spook. There was Sam and Mac, Craven, Tyler and Cullen; and three others. Matt Andrews was the troop medic. He was black-skinned with short, cropped hair and a quiet, serious manner. Steve Davenport was one of the regiment’s parachute instructors. He’d done more HALOs than most of the guys had had hot dinners; he’d taught half of them everything they knew and it was always good to have him along during an airborne insertion. And finally there was Hill Webb. Real name Hillary, but call him that and you’d be given a pretty swift demonstration of the Regiment’s more advanced fighting skills. Sam had always found him to be a testy little fucker, but sometimes that was exactly what you wanted.

‘You’ve been briefed on the basic nature of the operation?’ the spook asked when they were all alone. It was only half a question, though, and didn’t require an answer. He turned and led them to a corner of the partitioned room where a large whiteboard had been erected. Two maps were pinned to the board, both of them a couple of metres square. One was an aerial view of a piece of land, crystal clear. It looked like it had been photographed from only a hundred metres up, but in fact it was a satellite image. Next to it was a simple map, a line drawing showing the salient areas of the region in more detail.

‘Your objective is here,’ the spook told them, without preamble. He pointed to three long, rectangular-shaped buildings, set at right angles to each other in a horseshoe arrangement with a small, separate building, not much bigger than a shed, at the north-west corner. Arcing round from the south of the training camp to the west was a thin band of forest. Sam glanced at the scale and estimated it to be about two hundred metres deep. North of the camp and the forest, running west to east was a perfectly straight road. Still further east, stretching further than the boundary of the maps, was what looked like agricultural land. The spook pointed at it. ‘Hemp plants,’ he told them shortly. ‘This area is known as the Chu Valley. It ’s a major centre for marijuana production. There are no major settlements close by, but you need to be aware of the possibility of hemp farmers moving their product up and down this road under cover of night.’

The man moved his attention to the area south-west of the band of forest. ‘You’re aiming to HALO into this area here,’ he said. ‘The trees should give you some cover from which to make your assault. We expect most of the targets to be in the southernmost building, but we can’t guarantee that. All the buildings need to be cleared before you call in air to pick you up. We don’t expect there to be any resistance and there’s no intelligence of anything in the way of an armed guard. Once the targets have been taken out, we’ll need photographs for identification purposes.’

‘Aye, well,’ Craven piped up. ‘ Tyler can do that. Fucking takes enough pictures of the showers, don’t he?’ He accompanied his joke with a wanking motion to make sure everyone got the message.

‘All right, all right,’ the spook interrupted. ‘Estimated time of insertion: 03.00 hrs. Daylight at 04.27. You need to be well out of there by then. No more than an hour on the ground. Have you got any questions?’

Silence.

‘Good.’ The spook looked solemnly at them. ‘For gentleman of your abilities, it should be a walk in the park.’

Cullen snorted. ‘If it’s going to be so damn easy,’ he muttered in his thick Scottish brogue, ‘maybe you’d like to come along?’

The spook made some reply, but Sam didn’t hear it. He was too busy staring at the maps for a final time, recording the lie of the land, committing it to memory as he knew his patrol mates would be doing. It was a simple set-up, on the face of it. Their unit would be inside the buildings before anyone even knew they were there. The fact that there were only four buildings to clear made it even more straightforward.

Unless, of course, your objective wasn’t what it appeared to be.

As Sam examined the plans, he tried to work out where his brother might be; but it was impossible to tell. Any of these buildings could house him, and when they hit the compound he would be as much at a disadvantage as any of them. If Jacob was going to get away, he needed to be warned of their approach; but Sam couldn’t think of any way to do that without making it clear to his unit that he had compromised the mission.

Nor did he have time to give it much more thought. ‘You’ve got half an hour,’ the spook told them. ‘The aircraft are waiting. Flight time to your insertion point, about two hours.’ He looked them all individually in the eye. ‘Good luck, gentlemen,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ll be here when you get back.’

Three and a half thousand miles away, night was falling over London. The windows of the MI6 building on the Albert Embankment started to twinkle in the half-light and workers started to spill from its main entrance and hurry towards the Tube station.

Inside the building, though, plenty of people remained. Their jobs involved parts of the world in very different time zones to London, after all, so the usual boundaries of the average working day meant nothing to them. Among those offices that were still inhabited was one, high up, that overlooked the river. It was a spectacular view, with the bridges all lit up, and the occupant of that office knew he would never tire of it. He stood at the window in a well-cut suit, his tie an immaculate Windsor knot and his hands behind his back, gazing out. He was an elderly man – older, at least, than most of the people who worked for the Firm and were happy to take their retirement at sixty-five and forget all about the complexities of their working lives. Not so Gabriel Bland. Some of the younger members of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service joked that the only way he’d leave was in a box. Bland had heard the jibes and didn’t mind them. They were probably true. Others joked that he had the kind of icy demeanour that indicated he was – that he absolutely had to be – some kind of sexual pervert. These rumours were not true, but again Bland ignored them, remaining perfectly polite even to those members of the service that he knew to be the most enthusiastic champions of such gossip.

On the desk behind him there was a computer – something Bland really could not get used to – and a small pile of files. There was work to be done on them, but really he knew he would be unable to concentrate on such things. Not tonight. He looked at his watch. Nearly seven o’clock. That would make it almost midnight in Afghanistan where a covert unit were preparing to undergo a mission on his orders. Godwilling they would be successful. If not, things could become exceedingly uncomfortable…

A knock on the door. ‘Come!’ Bland called without turning.

He watched the door open in the reflection of the window. A much younger man walked in. He too wore a suit and had hair that was neatly parted to one side and flattened down with some shiny product. It was a curiously old-fashioned look for someone only in their mid-thirties. ‘Yes, Toby?’ Bland intoned.

Toby Brookes. Of late, MI6 had taken to encouraging all manner of people into the service. Brookes, however, reminded Bland of himself as a younger man. A little too eager to please, perhaps. But a good worker. Conscientious. Able to see the bigger picture. Heaven knows, Bland thought to himself, in these troubled times that was an important attribute.

‘Something’s been flagged up, sir,’ Brookes said efficiently. ‘Clare Corbett. I thought you’d want to see it.’

Bland sniffed. He allowed himself one final glance at the river, then turned to face his young assistant. ‘Be so good,’ he asked mildly, ‘as to shut the door, would you Toby?’

Brookes did as he was asked before speaking again. ‘It might be nothing,’ he said in his slightly nasal tone of voice. ‘But I thought I’d bring it to your attention.’

‘That’s most kind of you, Toby,’ Bland murmured.

‘The Met carried out a search,’ Brookes continued. ‘A billing address for a mobile phone number registered in her name.’

Bland remained silent.

‘Like I say,’ Brookes continued, suddenly sounding a little less sure of himself. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘When was this request processed, Toby?’

The younger man examined a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Tuesday night,’ he said. ‘Forty-eight hours ago. I guess it took a while to come through the system.’

Bland turned once more to look out of the window. ‘Do you know who the police officer in question is who requested this information?’ He watched Brookes’s reflection as he once more looked at his sheet.

‘A DI Nicola Ledbury.’

‘I see.’ Bland furrowed his hairy, eagle-like eyebrows. ‘I wonder, Toby, if I might ask you to invite Miss Ledbury to come and have a brief word with us.’

‘Of course.’

He turned again and allowed a friendly smile to spread across his lips. ‘Tonight, Toby. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.’

Brookes nodded and gave his superior a look that showed he understood.

‘Thank you, Toby,’ he said quietly. And as the young man slipped out of the room, he returned to his place at the window, surveying the splendour of that scene as he calmly slotted this new piece of information into the jigsaw of his mind. It worried him that he could not yet see the whole picture.

Bagram airbase. Midnight.

Before the off, the unit spent every spare moment checking and rechecking their rigs. There was no banter; there was hardly any conversation at all as they went about the business of getting kitted out. Sam approached the runway knowing that his freefall rig was firmly strapped to his body. He had checked the chute several times and strapped his weapon to his side. As he carried his rucksack and helmet away from the aircraft hangar in the company of the rest of the unit, he couldn’t help but feel the familiar sense of tension that always preceded a HALO jump.

It was the little things that could go wrong. At thirty thousand feet there was very little oxygen and the temperature was freezing. Any slight malfunction of the rig and you’d pass out. Problems like that you could predict and prepare for; others you couldn’t. During a high-altitude jump over the Syrian Desert, his mate had hit Sam’s rucksack from one side as they dived from the aircraft. The rucksack had shifted, changing Sam’s centre of balance. He’d started to spin; and once the spinning started, it didn’t stop. Freefalling at one hundred and fifty miles per hour it hadn’t taken him long to black out. He’d have been a goner if it weren’t for the HALO rig’s automatic opening device that kicked in at four thousand feet. When he regained consciousness, the capillaries in the whites of his eyes had burst, his inner ears were fucked and he was too dizzy even to walk, let alone continue the operation. He put that thought from his mind. Burst capillaries or not, nothing was going to stop him from completing what he had to do on this op. Nothing at all.

‘We need to talk.’

Mac had started walking alongside him. His friend put a firm hand on Sam’s arm and forced him to a halt, while the others carried on walking. Sam’s body tensed up.

‘What do you mean?’

Mac stared straight into his eyes. ‘You think I didn’t recognise him?’ he murmured.

Sam felt suddenly trapped.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he spat. But even as he spoke, he felt his hand move almost involuntarily to his weapon.

Mac glanced down at Sam’s gun hand. ‘Christ’s sake, mate,’ he hissed. ‘If I was going to stop you, do you think I’d have waited till now?’

The noise of the airfield around him retreated. In that moment there was only Sam and Mac.

‘I couldn’t tell you before, Sam. Not till we were here.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Sam was suddenly angry with his old friend. He didn’t know why. He just couldn’t control his emotions.

‘Think about it, Sam. Something about this whole operation stinks. The Regiment sent out to kill one of their own? And fuck knows what sort of surveillance we’re all under. You and me start having cosy little confabs, it’s going to send up warning signals for someone, isn’t it?’

Sam thought about that. He realised that of all the people he couldn’t trust, Mac was the most trustworthy.

‘I don’t think Five know he’s there,’ Sam said quietly. And then, in response to Mac’s sharp look, ‘Or whoever it is who’s behind this. If they did, they’d hardly be sending you and me on the op.’ He took a deep breath, quickly wondering whether he should tell Mac everything he’d learned – the letter, Clare, the red-light runners, what they were really being sent to Kazakhstan to do – and just as quickly deciding not to. It didn’t change anything. It didn’t change what he had to do. ‘I’m not going to let anyone kill him, Mac. I don’t care about the other targets, but I’m not going to let anyone kill my brother.’

‘And you think I am? Jesus, Sam, he was my friend. God knows what he’s got himself mixed up in, but…’

A shout from up ahead – Tyler, his Cockney voice rising above the noise of the airfield. ‘Havin’ a mass debate, you two?’ he barked lewdly.

Sam and Mac looked towards him, then started to follow the rest of the unit, but slowly.

‘Maybe we should tell the others?’

Mac shook his head. ‘You can’t, Sam. You’ll only get them all a stretch in the nick for disobeying orders. You know J. better than anyone – you think he’d want us to do that on his account?’

Mac was right. There was one thing Jacob had always insisted on, and that was fighting his own battles. ‘So how we going to play it?’ he demanded.

Mac walked silently for a moment. ‘When we get to the camp,’ he said finally, ‘We’ll need to make some noise, let J. know someone’s coming…’ He let the sentence trail off, clearly aware that it wasn’t much of a plan.

‘What if Jacob comes out shooting?’ Sam asked.

But Mac didn’t answer. They had caught up with the rest of the unit.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ Cullen said darkly.

Mac smiled at him. ‘Well,’ he said, his voice suddenly much brighter than it had been only seconds ago, ‘we didn’t really want to miss the party.’

There were two C-130 Hercules aircraft waiting for them up ahead; a refuelling lorry was just driving away. The two aircraft would fly in convoy over a commercial airline route until they reached the insertion point. Once the unit had jumped, one of the Hercules would refuel the other in midair before returning to base. The remaining plane, its fuel stores replenished, would circle at a high altitude until they received the radio signal from the guys on the ground that they were ready to be picked up.

But the moment when that was to happen, Sam thought – the planes’ engines roaring in his ears as the unit boarded their aircraft – seemed a very, very long way off. Mac’s sudden admission had been a shock; Sam didn’t know whether he felt better or worse.

They sat in the belly of the Hercules, four to a bench, facing each other. For now their rucksacks and helmets were on the floor in front of them, but when the time came to make the jump, that would change. Around them a loadie checked the plane’s apparatus and made it ready for flight. Sam sat opposite Mac. The two of them did their best not to catch each other’s eye, but it was difficult and every time it happened, Sam felt a little surge in his stomach. It wasn’t the usual pre-HALO butterflies. It was something else.

It was deafeningly loud in there, but Craven managed to make his voice heard above the noise. ‘Nothing like a nice quiet evening in,’ he shouted. A light-hearted comment, but delivered in a deadpan way. Craven clearly didn’t expect a response; nor did he get one.

At that moment the tailgate of the Hercules closed and the lights of the airfield disappeared from sight. A sudden lurch as the aircraft juddered into motion. Any minute now and they would be airborne.

And then?

Sam kept his breathing steady as he prepared for the ordeal ahead of him.

The telephone on Gabriel Bland’s desk rang three times before he picked it up.

‘Bland,’ he answered it shortly but not impolitely.

‘It’s me, sir. Toby. I’ve brought Nicola Ledbury in. Interview room three. Would you like me to start asking questions?’

‘Ah…’ Bland made a pretence of considering the suggestion. ‘Perhaps I’ll come down and lend a hand,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll be with you shortly.’

He replaced the phone on its cradle and left the room with a swiftness that belied his advancing years. He took the lift to the basement of the building and stepped briskly along a corridor until he found the room in question. It was sparse and unfurnished. Just a table and a two chairs. Toby was sitting in one of them, and opposite him a woman. She was pretty, with blonde hair and a long, smooth neck. But she looked frightened.

They always looked frightened.

Toby stood up the moment Bland walked into the room, immediately offering him his chair. ‘Thank you, Toby,’ he murmured before sitting down and smiling impassively at the woman in front of him. ‘Detective Inspecter Ledbury,’ he said calmly. ‘How kind of you to come and see us.’

The woman’s frightened eyes flickered up towards Toby and her lips grew a little thinner.

Bland feigned concern. ‘I do hope Toby wasn’t brusque with you.’

‘He was bloody brusque,’ she replied hotly. ‘I’m a police officer, you know…’

Gabriel Bland continued as if she hadn’t even spoken. ‘I wonder, Miss Ledbury, if I might just ask you a few questions.’ He paused briefly, waiting for a response that was not forthcoming, before continuing. ‘Two nights ago, you requested a billing address for a mobile phone number belonging to a Miss Clare Corbett. Am I right?’

The woman’s expression changed. Wariness. ‘Should I have a solicitor here?’ she asked.

Bland raised an eyebrow. ‘Toby,’ he said, quite calmly, ‘be so good as to lock the door, would you?’

Toby did as he was told; the woman shuffled uncomfortably in her seat.

‘Shall I repeat the question, Miss Ledbury? Or would you just like to answer it now?’

The woman hesitated, but only briefly. ‘It’s common practice,’ she said uncertainly. ‘An easy way to find someone. I’ve done it a lot. Hundreds of times.’

Bland nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re a very conscientious officer, Miss Ledbury.’ His voice sounded a lot less encouraging than his words. ‘I’m not much interested in the hundreds of times. I’m interested in this time.’

Silence.

‘I want my solicitor.’

Bland suppressed a sudden surge of frustration. ‘Miss Ledbury,’ he intoned, ‘you’re not at Paddington Green now.’ He stared at her. Gabriel Bland knew that not many people could withstand that stare. Nicola Ledbury was no exception.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I asked for the billing address.’

‘I see. Would you care to tell me why?’

The woman glanced at the floor. ‘It was a favour,’ she said. ‘For a friend.’

Instantly the atmosphere in the room grew tense. Bland’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Which friend?’ He pronounced each word slowly and forcefully.

She closed her eyes. ‘His name is Sam Redman.’

‘I see. And what can you tell me about Sam Redman?’

‘He’s…’

‘Yes, Miss Ledbury.’

‘He’s military. SAS.’ She looked up at him, eyes appealing. ‘It was just a favour.’

But Bland no longer appeared interested in her. He did his best to look unmoved, but in truth a sinister knot had just tied its way round his stomach.

Bland got to his feet. ‘Keep her here,’ he instructed Toby. ‘Have somebody watch her. No phone calls. Then I think you and I need to pay Miss Corbett another visit.’

Ten minutes later Bland, Toby and a third man – an Asian by the name of Amir – were in a black cab. At least, it looked like a black cab, but the driver, an employee of the Firm, wouldn’t be stopping to pick up any fares. When, half an hour later, they parked in the quiet residential street in Acton where Clare Corbett lived, the driver pulled out a newspaper and started to read: the perfect image of a cabbie on his break. Bland and Toby approached the front door, while Amir headed round the back alleyway to the rear of the house. Bland looked at his watch: 10 p.m. He stretched out a gloved hand and rang the intercom.

They waited. A crackling noise came over the loudspeaker. Someone had picked it up, but they were declining to speak.

‘Please open the door, Miss Corbett,’ Bland replied. ‘Immediately.’

A pause. He spoke again. ‘We have somebody at the back entrance, Miss Corbett. I suggest you cooperate.’ Beside him, he was aware of Toby handling his firearm.

A buzz from the door. Toby went in first. Bland followed closely.

Clare Corbett stood framed in the entrance to her flat. Her face was white and Bland noticed her hand trembling. ‘May we come in?’ he asked.

‘Do I have much choice?’ she asked weakly.

He looked her in the eye. ‘We all have choices, Miss Corbett.’ She stepped aside and allowed them to enter. ‘I’m hoping that you’ve been making the right ones.’

In the kitchen, Bland indicated to the terrified woman that she should sit down. He remained standing, as did Toby Brookes who hovered threateningly by the kitchen door, making no attempt to hide his firearm.

‘I had hoped,’ he said smoothly, ‘not to have to burden you with our presence again, Miss Corbett.’

‘Yeah,’ she replied, avoiding his eye. ‘Me too.’

Bland sniffed. He waited a moment, then took the direct approach. ‘Tell me everything you know about Sam Redman.’

He watched her carefully, looking for the signs. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ she said, but he could immediately tell she was lying. The lack of eye contact. The way she stiffly touched her hand to her right ear.

A thick silence fell on the room. The woman’s face began to redden. He looked over at Brookes and nodded shortly. Brookes didn’t hesitate. He stepped over to where she was sitting and, with his free hand, grabbed a clump of her hair, twisting it tight so that she gasped with the sudden pain of it. With his other hand he pressed the butt of his firearm deeply into the soft flesh of her cheek. She looked faintly ridiculous, her eyes wide and short breaths of fear escaping from the O of her mouth. Ridiculous, but terrified.

Bland took a seat at the table opposite her. He placed his hands palm downwards on the top and looked straight at her. She wasn’t avoiding his stare any more.

‘He came here,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t know how he found me. I didn’t tell him anything.’

Bland glanced up at Toby; the younger man yanked her hair suddenly and pressed the gun further into her face.

‘Oh God!’ Clare breathed. ‘Please, don’t! I’ll tell you. Please, don’t hurt me!’

Bland nodded at Toby, who immediately let go of the woman. Her body seemed to crumple as she hid her face in her hands. For a moment the room was filled with the desolate sound of her heavy, petrified sobs.

‘He just turned up,’ she wailed. Her words started to tumble out, as though if she said it all quickly it wouldn’t make it so bad. ‘He knew about the article. He had a copy – it was all, you know, blacked out, censored. But he made me tell him. He said he was special forces, I don’t know which one. And that he was being sent to a training camp…’

At this point she removed the hands from her face. Her eyes were red and what little make-up she had been wearing was now streaked over her cheeks.

‘Carry on,’ Bland said.

‘He said his brother was there. And that he wasn’t going to let anyone kill him.’

Clare Corbett stared, wide-eyed. She appeared horrified that she had blurted out all these things. Bland barely noticed. He had pushed his chair back and was standing up. ‘Make the call,’ he told Brookes, his mind suddenly racing. ‘Tell them to pull the mission.’

Brookes hesitated, blinking at his boss.

‘NOW!’ Bland roared.

The man scurried away, leaving Bland and Clare in the room. Not a word was spoken. He didn’t even look at her. The only sound was of Brookes in the corridor, talking urgently into his mobile phone. When he reappeared, his expression was dark.

‘What?’ Bland demanded.

Brooke shook his head. ‘The unit’s been inserted,’ he replied. ‘They’ve already gone in. I’m sorry, sir. It’s too late.’

TEN

When you’re waiting to perform a HALO jump, two hours seem like two minutes. As the Hercules cruised northwards, Sam and the rest of the unit checked and rechecked their rigs more times than they could count, ensuring everything was packed correctly, nothing was frayed and the oxygen gear had been properly serviced. There was occasional banter above the noise of the engines. When Craven tugged at the straps of his pack for what must have been the twentieth time, Tyler was quick to pounce. ‘What’s wrong, Jack? Ain’t learned to fall stable yet?’

Craven looked up, one eyebrow raised. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I fall stable on your missus every Friday night.’

The company laughed, but soon they all went back to checking and rechecking their gear. Nobody wanted to leave anything to chance.

The loadmaster approached them. ‘Ten minutes!’ he shouted over the noise of the engines, holding up the gloved fingers of both hands so that there was no confusion.

The men started to get ready. Sam’s chute and weapon were already firmly strapped to his body, as was his GPS unit, but the rucksack was on the floor in front of him. He hooked his legs over it, then scraped it towards him so that it was under the bench. Once it was in position, he clipped the bag to the back of his legs and wound the straps round to his front, pulling them so they were firmly tightened. It would make walking to the tailgate difficult when the time came, but the bag needed to be attached to the back of his legs to balance his weight properly. He then turned his attention to the digital screen of his automatic opening device. Four thousand feet. If all went well they would open the chutes at four thousand five hundred; but if there was a problem the AOD would save his life.

‘Five minutes!’

Sam fitted the oxygen mask and helmet to his face. Up until now they had been breathing the oxygen from the aircraft’s mainframe, but now they needed to make sure their breathing apparatus was fully operational. As soon as he attached his oxygen mask, Sam’s breathing sounded much louder in his ears. It heightened his senses somewhat, even though the toughened black plastic of his mask had plunged the area around the tailgate into a deeper shade of darkness. The men around him looked more like cosmonauts now than soldiers. He breathed steadily and deeply. Everything was as it should be. The air was coming through. He got to his feet, as did the other seven members of his troop. The loadmaster approached to help them to the back of the plane.

Steve Davenport and Matt Andrews went first. Behind them were Tyler and Craven, then Webb and Cullen. Sam and Mac took the rear. In front of them a red light shone in the gloom of the Hercules’s belly. When it turned green, that would be the signal for the off.

A sudden rush of noise and with it a judder of turbulence. The tailgate was opening.

Sam was running on pure adrenaline now. Everything else that had been preoccupying him – Jacob, Mac and what the hell was going to happen when they hit land – took second place. Every cell in his brain was concentrating on the jump. Outside it was pitch black: from where he was standing he had the impression that he was about to dive into nothingness.

The loadmaster touched one hand to his headphones then held up a single finger. One minute. Sam and Mac looked at each other, but through their equipment the expressions on their faces were unknowable. They both faced forward again.

Green light.

There was no order. No hesitation. Davenport and Andrews jumped to the edge of the tailgate and fell out, their bodies arched and their arms spread out as though they were about to embrace the empty air. Tyler and Craven followed immediately.

A pause. Webb and Cullen waited for perhaps thirty seconds before they jumped. An eight-man unit freefalling in close proximity to each other could cause a splash on a radar; two four-man units were less likely to. Once Webb and Cullen had disappeared, Sam and Mac shuffled behind them. And then, the moment they reached the edge of the tailgate, they toppled forwards.

The wind hit Sam immediately, roaring in his ears and lashing against his body as if a powerful wave had just crashed over him. He fell belly downwards, his body arched and his palms outstretched. He was vaguely aware of the Hercules roaring away into the distance above him, but he didn’t concentrate on that. Instead he looked around to check the position of the others. They manoeuvred themselves so that they fell in a circular formation. It was possible to see them all perfectly clearly: the half moon provided plenty of light – it even glowed slightly on the helmets of the unit as they fell. Thirty thousand feet down, he could make out the twinkling of sparsely separated settlements. In a corner of his brain he wondered if any of these would be their target. It was impossible to tell from this height. They would have to wait until they were closer to the ground.

That wouldn’t be long.

They hurtled towards the earth, deafened by the rush, their senses keen with adrenaline. Terminal velocity, the maximum speed they could achieve. Thirty seconds passed.

A minute.

A minute and a half.

Everything was as it should be. Despite himself, Sam felt a surge of wild excitement. A thrill. As his altitude decreased, his view of the landscape below became less extensive; but those bits he could see became clearer. They were freefalling into a widely deserted area. In the distance he thought he saw the headlamps of a vehicle. But it was the only one. From what he could tell at this height, there were very few people around who might possibly notice the unit HALOing in.

The freefall suits of his troop ruffled in the fast-moving air, like a banner being whipped in a gale. Below and in the distance, Sam saw the chutes of the four men who had preceded him burst open. The others were under canopy. They intuitively adjusted the direction of their freefall to get closer to them. Any second now it would be their turn to open.

Four thousand five hundred feet. Cullen was the first to open his chute; the rest of them followed suit immediately. Sam tugged on his rip cord and felt the chute erupt into the air. There was a sharp jolt through his body as his velocity suddenly reduced; the rushing sound eased off and the unit started to float gently towards the earth.

Under canopy, it didn’t take long for them to see the band of forested area towards which they were headed. Currently they were a little too far east, so almost with a single mind they changed their course to bring them down safely in the area beyond the trees. Perhaps a mile to the north, Sam saw buildings. Three of them, set in a horseshoe shape.

The training camp.

His eyes narrowed as he gazed at it through the dark visor of his helmet. All thoughts of the thrill of the HALO jump dissolved away. He could think of nothing now but getting back down to earth.

The camp disappeared from his field of vision. All he could see below him now were the trees and the area of flat ground behind them where they were to land – and where the others already had. Unclipping the straps that bound his rucksack to his legs, he allowed the pack to fall to the ground, still attached to him by virtue of a long, tough lanyard rope. As the pack fell to earth, he prepared his body for the impact of landing.

Ten seconds.

Five.

He hit the ground running with that strange sense of regret that always follows a jump. Behind him the chute wafted silently to the ground. He quickly unstrapped the cords of the rucksack from around his legs, then unclipped the whole thing. Pulling off his helmet and removing the mask, he started tugging the chute towards him, bundling it up into a crumpled ball. All around him, the others were doing the same thing. They made hardly any sound.

Sam checked out his surroundings. The moon that had illuminated them in freefall now cast shadows on the ground and gave him surprisingly good vision. He was standing about thirty metres from the tree line in a field of stubble. South of him there appeared to be another field with a crop a good two metres high. Hemp, he reckoned. A lot of it. An acre of that would earn him more than a Regiment salary. Sam turned his back on it as the others started to congregate around him.

‘Get into the cover of the trees,’ Mac hissed. ‘We’ll dump our gear there, out of sight.’

The unit hauled their rucksacks onto their backs and ran towards the forest.

It was much darker under the canopy of the trees. No moonlight for them to see by. They removed their freefall rigs and piled them by a tree. Only then did Mac speak again. ‘All right, guys. Listen up. Two units. Jack, Luke, Cullen – you’re with Sam. Matt, Steve, Hill – you’re with me.’

Craven, Tyler and Cullen moved towards Sam. Mac addressed them as a group. ‘Head north through the forest,’ he told them. ‘Approach the camp from the west. We’ll hit it from the south. Let us know on comms when you’re in position.’ He shot Sam a sharp look.

They all nodded briefly, absorbing their instructions.

It took a minute or two for everyone to engage their comms kit and attach their NV. The moment he brought his goggles over his eyes, Sam felt that the whole forest had been illuminated in the familiar, hazy green. Gnarled tree branches spread out before him like witches’ fingers. It was eerily silent, apart from the sound of the men around him preparing themselves. He unclipped his Diemaco from the side of his body, then looked round. Everyone was ready. Sam gestured at Tyler, Craven and Cullen then pointed sharply in a northward direction before starting to run through the forest.

Sam moved quickly but with care. The NV allowed him to see where he was going, but it didn’t completely reveal the smaller possible hazards underfoot. As he ran, he scanned the area all around, his senses acute as he kept an eye out for anything suspicious. Behind him he heard the firm, steady footsteps of the other three. They were keeping close, but not too close so they didn’t present a bunched up target for any unseen enemy.

A patch of open ground – a kind of clearing. Sam upped his pace. He wanted the cover of the trees again. He felt exposed here.

Far too exposed. It was like a sixth sense.

Sam didn’t even hear the shot. The weapon that fired the round must have been suppressed. The first he knew about it was from the sudden, alarmed voice over the comms.

‘Man down!’

SOPs kicked in. He instantly threw himself to the ground, a horrible, sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. The comms was suddenly filled with voices, with panic. He heard Tyler ’s voice above it all, hissing, in an urgent whisper.

‘Craven. Craven’s down. Jack, can you hear me? Bollocks! Craven’s fucking down! We’re being dicked!’

Sam crawled round on all fours to look back the way they had run. There was no one standing: Tyler and Cullen had also gone to ground. In the distance, there was a flash of movement. He pulled up his Diemaco so that it was lying on the ground in front of him and aimed into the thick darkness of the trees up ahead.

There was barely any time to think. The figure had taken cover behind a tree, but even now was emerging from its protection and raising his weapon. Sam could see enough to be sure it wasn’t one of his troop, and that was all he needed to know.

He fired.

The suppressed round ripped from his Diemaco and the figure up ahead crumpled to the earth.

‘Sit rep, now.’ Mac’s voice. Angry. A bit panicked. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Enemy down,’ Sam hissed urgently into the comms. ‘ Tyler, do you copy?’

‘Roger that.’ Tyler ’s voice was tense.

‘Cover me. I’m going to make sure I don’t need to finish the job.’

Sam pushed himself to his feet and ran across the open ground to where the body of his target was lying. Bending down, he pulled the corpse back into the trees. Then he examined it.

The guy was dead, there was no doubt about that. It looked like Sam’s round had hit him directly in the left eye; most of one side of his skull seemed to have exploded. Sam wasn’t interested in the hole in his head, however. It was the clothes on his back and the weapon in his fist that caught his attention. The sniper was carrying some variant of the AK-47; an ops waistcoat contained a large quantity of ammo and other weaponry; but what really stood out was not the Kalashnikov or the other bells and whistles – it was the weapon strapped across the dead man’s back. Sam had only fired a GM-94 grenade launcher once, but once was enough to know that it was perhaps the most effective weapon he was ever likely to use. This wasn’t the kind of toy you expect to come across just anywhere.

In one of the man’s ears there was a comms earpiece, much like the one Sam was wearing. It was slightly bloodied as Sam pulled it out and put it to his own ear.

He listened carefully.

It was difficult to tell, but he thought he could discern three separate voices. They weren’t speaking English, however. Sam was no linguist, but he recognised the language.

Russian.

He looked down at the corpse again. This was no ordinary soldier. He was too well kitted out; his equipment was too good. Possibilities tumbled through his mind. Private security? Someone with cash to splash, enough to kit out a private army? In the darkness, he found himself shaking his head. He didn’t think so. The GM-94 was Russian-made, and standard issue for Russian special forces. The man Sam had just killed was no squaddie. He’d put money on it. But then…

‘What the fuck are Spetsnaz doing here?’ he murmured to himself.

‘Say again.’ Mac’s voice over the comms.

Sam quickly refocused himself.

‘We’ve got more company,’ he said. ‘I’ve nailed the shooter, but he’s got a comms system. I’ve listened in. Estimate three others in the vicinity. How’s Craven looking?’

A silence. And then, his voice strained, Tyler spoke.

‘Gone,’ he said.

A moment of silence in the comms.

‘Shit,’ Sam hissed as a surge of anger burned through him. How the hell had this happened? They’d only been on the ground five minutes. How the hell had it happened?

He didn’t get long to think about it. As he looked back across the clearing he saw more movement. ‘Tyler, Cullen – you still down?’ he demanded.

‘Roger that,’ they both breathed in unison.

‘Stay where you are. I’ve got a visual on another shooter.’

He raised his Diemaco once more. Looking through the sights he tried not to concentrate on the crumpled mound ahead of him that he knew to be Craven’s body. As he fired, the round exploded in the green light of his NV, like some kind of ghostly firework. His target fell immediately to the earth.

‘Did I say three others?’ he growled. ‘Make that two.’

‘We’re coming up from the south.’ Mac’s voice sounded as though he was running. ‘It sounds like they know where you are. You sure you only heard three others, Sam?’

‘Makes sense,’ Sam replied tersely. ‘Four-man unit. Tyler and Cullen are in open ground. I’m by the tree line. Guys, stay down. I’ll keep you covered from here.’

‘Wilco,’ came the grim reply.

Sam pressed his back against a tree, his weapon raised and ready to fire. His mind was in turmoil. He couldn’t make sense of it. These Spetsnaz guys – if indeed that’s what they were – seemed to be expecting them. But how? Nobody knew they were coming, did they?

Did they?

He stayed close to the ground. Occasionally over the comms he heard Mac hissing an instruction to Andrews, Davenport and Webb; other than that he could do nothing but scan the surrounding woodland, keeping his NV-enhanced eyes peeled for unexpected movement. Briefly he thought he saw something again; but whatever it was settled into stillness. Sam kept alert, watching over the prostrate forms of Tyler and Cullen, his finger twitching on the trigger, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

All around him, the silence of the night was broken by sudden, unexpected noises: the falling of a twig, the scurrying of an animal. His senses were heightened; everything seemed louder than it actually was. He could feel his own heart beat, hear his own breathing. He estimated that the others could be no more than two hundred metres behind them. How were they approaching? Had they spotted their enemy?

It must have been about two minutes before the kills came, and they came in quick succession. Sam heard the muted thud – surprisingly close-by – of one of his unit’s suppressed weapons; moments later, he heard another.

‘Two men down,’ Mac reported. ‘Let’s hope no one shows up to do a changing of the fucking guard.’

Sam edged back to the Russian’s body and listened in again on the bloodied comms earpiece. Nothing. Silence.

‘We’re clear,’ he stated flatly. ‘Damn it, what the hell happened there?’

In the clearing, Tyler and Cullen rose slowly from their lying-down position, looking for all the world in the eerie green hue of the night vision like corpses rising from the dead. ‘Came out of fucking nowhere,’ Tyler replied. From a distance, Sam watched as he went over to where Craven’s body was lying. And then, echoing the suspicion that had been buzzing around in Sam’s head: ‘Almost like they knew we were coming. Jack just caught one. Could have been me.’

As Tyler spoke, the others came into sight, running into the clearing with their weapons raised. Mac spoke, his voice terse. ‘Leave Craven there,’ he instructed, almost purposefully lacking in emotion. They were still in country; the mission might be going tits up, but it still had to be completed. ‘We’ll scoop him up when we extract.’

Tyler hesitated. ‘They were fucking waiting for us. We need to get out of here. What if the contact’s been reported?’

‘We’re carrying on,’ Mac overruled him. ‘Get to the edge of the tree line. Matt, Steve, Hill – retrace steps back to original attacking positions. We’ll reassess the situation when we’ve got a view on the camp. Quick, before anybody else decides to join the party.’

Sam looked at his watch. 03.27. They still had time before sunrise, but Tyler was right: they needed to watch their backs. It was never easy leaving the fallen behind; Sam had to break through a barrier of reluctance to make himself do it. But they had to keep moving. And he had to concentrate on the important stuff.

On Jacob.

As he ran towards the tree line, he found himself wondering what would happen if he found one of the guys about to put a bullet in his brother. It was an uncomfortable question and one which he quickly put from his mind.

The tree line, twenty metres ahead. And then, for the first time Sam laid eyes properly on the camp. It would take Mac and his team a couple more minutes to get back into their original positions, so in the meantime he could get his breath and gather his thoughts. Tyler and Cullen joined him, spaced out at ten-metre intervals, while Sam examined the training camp itself.

Just as the aerial map had suggested, there were three buildings. They started about twenty metres away from where Sam was standing. What they had originally been built for, he couldn’t tell. They were very simple concrete blocks, long and low, with corrugated iron roofs and rusting metal doors. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t look at twice; you’d probably think it was derelict. The buildings surrounded a courtyard, in which there was an old pick-up truck, as well as some oil drums and diesel canisters. Sam observed that one of the buildings was connected to an electricity pylon – this place might have been the arse end of nowhere, but there was power, which meant they could expect to be illuminated.

There was one other thing that caught his attention. In the gap between two of the buildings he saw the smaller, shedlike structure that he had observed on the map back at the briefing. And outside the shed, he noticed with a sharp intake of breath, a dog on a leash lay sleeping.

A vision hit his mind. Jacob, with a black Labrador at his side. He liked dogs more than he liked people, they used to say.

Was he alone, away from the others, in that little shed? Sam didn’t know, but it seemed likely.

Mac’s voice crackled over the comms. ‘You in position?’

‘Roger that,’ Sam replied.

‘Do you have a visual on the truck?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How far?’

‘About twenty-five metres.’ He felt his eyes narrowing. In an ideal world, the vehicle needed to be put out of action: in the frenzy that was about to occur, the last thing they wanted to do was have one of their targets making it to the pick-up and getting away. Exploding the tyres from this distance, however, was risky. Their weapons might be suppressed and next to noiseless, but a round going into one of those tyres was going to make a bang…

And then, slowly, Sam smiled, despite the events of the last few minutes. It wasn’t exactly standard operating procedures, but when the unit was debriefed he could concoct a perfectly reasonable operational excuse for taking out the truck; and the noise could just give Jacob the few seconds warning that he needed.

He raised his weapon, quickly before anyone could instruct him to do otherwise. The moment the tyre burst the unit would move in. Silently. Deadly.

Sam fired. His aim was good. Through the NV he saw the shredded remains of the tyre explode into the air.

A bang. The truck jolted and sank down on one corner.

‘Jesus!’ Tyler hissed over the comms. ‘Who was that?’

‘Me,’ Sam said. ‘Don’t want anyone doing a runner.’

‘You’ll wake the whole fucking camp…’

‘All right!’ Mac’s voice snapped over the comms. ‘Shut up, everyone.’

Sam felt a surge of gratitude towards his friend. ‘There’s a dog tied up to the north-west,’ he said quickly. ‘Don’t want the fucker barking. I’ll deal with it before we go in. Then we can hit the buildings.’

A pause.

‘My job, Mac,’ Sam continued cryptically into the comms.

More silence. And then, ‘Roger that.’

Sam nodded with satisfaction. He set his jaw and prepared to skirt around the edge of the camp.

Towards the dog.

Towards the shed.

And towards whatever was inside.

He awoke. Like a drowned man unnaturally brought to life, he splashed through the surface tension of his sleep, his senses suddenly alert.

He blinked in the darkness, sitting up in his simple bed and instinctively feeling for the handgun that he always kept by his side. He knew the noises of this place: the occasional screech of an owl, now and then a truck trundling down the nearby road – though these were few and far between. But the bang that had awoken him? That was unusual. And he had come to learn that unusual meant suspicious.

Silently, but quickly, he stood up and pulled on his clothes. To the side of his bed was a window. The mechanism was old and rusted up – just like everything else in this shit hole – and it took him several goes to loosen it.

He opened the window. It was small; but not so small that he couldn’t squeeze his way through. He wriggled through the opening, closed it again as best he could from the outside, then pressed his back to the wall and listened.

Listened hard.

His beard itched. He realised he was sweating.

He continued to listen, holding his breath so as to hear better.

Footsteps. He could definitely hear footsteps.

His eyes darted to and fro. He edged along the wall, reaching the corner where he stopped once more and held his breath. Firmly clutching his handgun, he raised it to shoulder height.

It had only ever been a matter of time before this happened. Somewhere deep down he had always suspected. Always suspected that they would send someone after him. But he wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.

Then he went tense.

Footsteps again.

There was someone approaching.

There was someone very close.

Sam ran towards the shed. When he was ten metres distant, he raised his weapon, aimed at the sleeping dog and fired. The suppressed round slammed silently into the animal’s body. It jolted, then lay still once more.

He ran up towards the shed. The door was closed. It was a wooden door, not visibly reinforced in any way with a locking system. No need to blow it off and risk a close-range shrapnel wound from the round ricocheting off the door. He shut his eyes and prepared to enter.

He didn’t get the chance. When the voice came, it came from nowhere, as did its owner.

‘Drop your weapon!’

Sam’s body tensed up. His head was not turned towards his assailant and he knew that if he made any sudden movement, it would be fatal.

‘I don’t want to kill you,’ the voice hissed. ‘But I will if you don’t drop the gun.’

Sam’s body went hot then cold. He recognised the voice, of course. How could he not?

He lowered his gun, but didn’t drop it.

And then he spoke. Quietly. Hoarsely. But firmly and with one hand over his comms mike.

‘It’s me, Jacob,’ he said. ‘It’s Sam.’

ELEVEN

A pause. It seemed to go on for ever.

‘Drop the fucking weapon,’ Jacob hissed. He nudged the butt of the handgun against Sam’s arm.

Slowly, Sam bent down and placed the Diemaco on the floor. He straightened up and removed the NV goggles from his face.

It took a moment for his natural night vision to adjust to the darkness as he turned round to face his assailant. A moment for his brother’s features to emerge from the blackness like a Polaroid slowly developing. He wore a scraggly beard and looked older. Leaner. Nothing could disguise those eyes, however – those dark, intense eyes that seemed to look right through you. He wore rough combat trousers, a pale T-shirt and a sturdy khaki jacket. His feet were clad in black leather boots.

‘Sam?’ his brother hissed incredulously. ‘What the hell…?’

‘You have to get out of here,’ Sam interrupted him. ‘Now, Jacob. There’s six other Regiment guys with me and we’ve got orders to kill everybody here. You included. Jacob, you have to go.’

No movement. Mac’s voice over the comms: ‘Sam, where are you?’

‘They’re going to come to find out what’s happened to me any second.’

His brother’s eyes were confused. Jacob stared hard at Sam, almost as though he hadn’t heard what his younger brother was saying.

‘Jacob!’

Jacob blinked, then looked around. He nodded and stepped back as Sam bent down to retrieve his gun. The two brothers looked at each other again. And then Jacob spoke. His voice was low.

‘They’ll tell you things, Sam,’ he said cryptically as he took a couple more steps back, retreating further into the inky night. ‘Things about me. Don’t forget that you’re my brother. Don’t believe them.’

‘What are you doing here, J.?’ Sam asked, words suddenly tumbling out despite the urgent need for his brother to get away quickly. ‘What’s going on? What are you doing with these people?’

The expression on Jacob’s face didn’t change. ‘Don’t let them trick you, Sam,’ he whispered. ‘It’s what they’re good at.’ Sam felt a sudden pang of loss. He was forcing Jacob away, but all he really wanted was to be with his brother. ‘Things aren’t what they seem, Sam,’ Jacob pressed. ‘I swear to you they’re not what they seem.’

And in an instant, disappearing as swiftly as he had appeared, Jacob’s dark features melted away into the night. Sam heard the heavy sound of his brother’s footsteps running away, westwards into the forest.

‘Sam!’ It was Mac’s voice on the comms. ‘Where the hell are you?’

Sam felt himself churning up, but he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of hesitation. He quickly pulled his NV goggles on, trying to readjust his mind to the job in hand. His brother had escaped; now he needed to make sure that nobody else did. ‘Job done,’ he replied. ‘I’m on my way back now.’

He hurried round the corner and emerged into the courtyard. The rest of them had advanced. Tyler and Cullen stood on either side of the door to the westernmost building. The others had also taken up their positions, two men to each of the other buildings. Cullen gave him a thumbs-up.

‘Mac? Do you copy?’ he spoke into the comms.

‘Roger that.’

‘We’re ready.’

A pause. The bloodbath was about to begin.

‘Go!’ Mac instructed.

Cullen held up three fingers. Two fingers. One finger. With all his force he kicked the door in and instantly they were inside.

The door itself was situated halfway along the building. It opened on to one long room, a dormitory of some description. There were eight beds, all positioned against one wall. By each bed was a low locker, a chair and very little else. The place had the bare, austere feeling of an army barracks. Sam indicated with a quick point of his finger that Cullen and Tyler should take the right-hand side, while he took the left. They split up and went about their work.

There was movement in the dormitory. Nothing much – just a few bodies drowsily stirring. Through the NV goggles, Sam could see a couple of the occupants sitting up in their simple beds, staring blindly into the darkness and groping sleepily. These were the targets he’d have to eliminate first, before they had the chance to start a panic. Sam raised his Diemaco and aimed directly at the head of one of the sluggish figures.

As he prepared to squeeze the trigger, however, an image flashed cross his mind. It was Clare Corbett, sitting at her kitchen table, her face stained with tears of terror as she recounted what she knew. The red-light runners. These young men, targeted and groomed by MI5.

Sam set his jaw. He wasn’t paid to think about the rights and wrongs of his orders. He was just paid to carry them out. What was more, if he was to cover his tracks, he had to do so without hesitation. Already he had heard the thump from Cullen’s weapon as he eliminated one of the targets.

He fired. The round slammed straight into his target’s neck. The young man was thrown back against the wall, by the force of the round. The bullet exited, tearing a huge hole in the flesh through which a neat, sickly pool of blood slowly poured out. He had slipped to the floor and was on his way over to the dark side. By that time, however, Sam’s sights were elsewhere. He strode down the room without moving his weapon from the firing position. His second target was also sitting upright before the round hit. Not for long. Numbers three and four were just lying there, asleep. They would never have known what hit them.

He turned and looked at Cullen who was already striding towards the door. ‘Then there were none,’ he announced into the comms.

Mac’s voice came crackling back. ‘And the same here,’ he stated grimly. ‘Job done, gentlemen. Let’s do the housekeeping and get the hell out of here.’

The unit retraced their footsteps around that silent training camp, checking that the targets were indeed dead – Sigs in hand in case they needed to administer a final, fatal headshot. They went about their work in a kind of grim silence – not out of respect for the guys they had just killed, but out of professional efficiency and because now that the operation was nearing its end, the reality of Craven’s death was beginning to sink in. It had happened so quickly. So randomly. It could easily have been any of them. It just happened to be Jack Craven who would be returning home in a body bag. It just happened to be his family who would be mourning their loss with scant knowledge about the circumstances of his death. Part of Sam thought, Fuck it, there’s no room for sentimental bullshit here. People died on ops. They all knew that. They all knew the risk. That didn’t make it any easier, though.

Despite all this, Sam couldn’t help feeling a faint surge of exhilaration. Jacob had escaped. He’d done what he came here to do. Nobody spoke as they briskly conducted their business, other than to give or acknowledge instructions. Certainly they didn’t discuss who had been waiting for them, or why. They just knew they had to get out quickly.

They split up. Davenport and Andrews were despatched to reclaim Craven’s body. Webb and Tyler went to retrieve the freefall rigs. Cullen was sent to the road. This was where the Hercules would come in to land, but they needed to ensure that no civilian vehicles would be on that stretch when the plane touched down. Perhaps the dope farmers who inhabited this part of the world would put their hallucinations down to overenthusiastic consumption of their own crop. But perhaps not. The tough little Scot took a supply of stinger spikes with him, sharp metal road blocks that would deflate the tyres of any car that went over them. He would use the spikes to cut off a stretch of road at both ends, while they waited to extract. The dope farmers would no doubt be distinctly miffed by the shredding of their tyres, but it was better than being crushed by the undercarriage of a Hercules.

Sam and Mac remained at the camp. Mac called the air team with instructions to prepare to extract, while Sam went through the buildings yet again with a small but powerful digital camera, taking a visual record of the deceased.

It was a grisly job. During the hit, Sam had not been aware of the rank smell of all these men living together with little in the way of facilities. Now that his senses had more time to absorb such things, he realised just how bad the stink was. But of course, there was another smell for his senses to deal with now. The smell of death. They had not been long dead, but already that familiar stench was leaching pungently into the air.

In all he counted eighteen of them. Eighteen young, British corpses, assassinated by their own government. Many of them had been hit in the face. Their faces had caved inwards from the impact of the round, noses sunk in, mouths collapsed. It was like someone had taken a giant hammer to their skulls. Sam took their pictures anyway. Some of them had been rolled onto their fronts by the force of the rounds. More than once, as he turned their still-warm bodies over, blood gushed out of their wounds like a fizzy drink foaming from a bottle. As they had been expecting, all the faces were Caucasian. White by race, white by death and white by the bleaching effect of the camera’s flash as he systematically recorded the gruesome evidence of their night’s work. In some corner of his mind he wondered if the dead men really were British, as they’d been led to believe. Why were they being protected by a Spetsnaz unit if that was the case? But on the wall by one of the men he came across a centrefold from a pornographic magazine. The model had her legs wide open and by her head there was some writing. He read enough of it to see that it was English before moving on, quickly, racing from bed to bed like some demonic paparazzo desperate to get to his next subject.

When all the photos were taken, Sam slipped away – checking first to make sure he hadn’t been observed – up to the shed. The dead dog lay outside in a pool of blood. Sam ignored it. He took a deep breath, opened the door and stepped inside.

It was a tiny space, just enough for a low camp bed and a few square metres of standing room. Although the bed was unmade, showing all the signs of having been abandoned in a tearing hurry, the rest of the bunk area displayed a military neatness, the few belongings tidily and precisely squared away. Sam looked over his shoulder to check that nobody had entered, then opened a small cabinet by the bed and rummaged inside.

There was very little there. A few clothes – it was difficult to tell what in the gloom – some chocolate and a bottle of water. He found what felt like a small piece of card; pulling it out, he realised it was a photograph. An old one. With a pang he recognised his mother and father in the early years of their marriage. It was surreal, seeing that image of his father out here, miles from home, when in fact he was wasting away in a Hereford hospital. He stuffed it in a pocket. Back in the locker, his fingertips came across something else. Something hard. Rectangular. He pulled it out and examined it. It was a laptop computer. Sam reached into his backpack and pulled out his torch so that he could look closer at it. The thing was well-worn and scuffed, though the case was hard and durable. He gave half a moment’s thought to opening it up and seeing what was inside, but he quickly decided against it. If any of the guys found him doing that, they’d start asking questions; and he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer them…

Sam stuffed the torch and the laptop into his pack, before hurriedly returning to the centre of the camp.

As he jogged back outside, to his surprise, he found himself thinking of Clare Corbett’s words. ‘Those people at the training camp. Are you really going to kill them, Sam?’ It crossed his mind that he should feel some sort of sympathy for these dead men. Pawns in some game they didn’t understand. But he didn’t. Or rather, he couldn’t. His mind was too preoccupied. There were too many things racing through it. The adrenaline rush of the mission. Craven, dead. The need to extract quickly.

And Jacob. Above all, Jacob. His brother’s perplexed, frightened face. His mysterious words. Sam pictured him even now racing away from the camp, not knowing if he was being followed or why the Regiment had been sent to kill him. Not knowing what the future held. It seemed wrong that Jacob should be so close to him and yet so far from Sam’s help now. What had Jacob meant? Things aren’t what they seem…

‘Damn it,’ he whispered to himself as he hurried back to the centre of the courtyard. ‘You can say that again.’

Mac was waiting for him, alone. He switched off his comms and indicated that Sam should do the same. ‘Well?’ he said finally when they knew none of the others could hear them.

‘Well what?’

His friend raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you find him?’

Sam avoided his eye. ‘No,’ he lied. He didn’t know why. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Mac cast him a level gaze that did nothing to hide his suspicion.

‘What?’ Sam demanded. He felt himself jutting out his chin, a sudden heat running through his veins. ‘Fucking what?’

‘Sounded like you went dark for a couple of minutes back there, Sam. Sure you didn’t see anything?’

He started squaring up to Mac. ‘What the hell are you saying?’

They had barely ever argued before, let alone fought; but Sam was seeing red and for a heated moment he didn’t know how long that record would last. If Mac felt threatened, though, he didn’t show it. On the contrary. He drew himself up to his full height and stared Sam out.

‘I’m not saying anything, Sam. Just remember how much I’m risking staying quiet about this, hey? Just remember that.’

Sam didn’t reply. His eyes continued to be locked with Sam’s for a few further uncomfortable seconds, then he turned and walked away.

Davenport and Andrews were the first to return. They carried Craven’s corpse with them in a field stretcher – little more than a body bag with poles along the side for ease of transport. Davenport had Craven’s weapon; Andrews his backpack. Moving quickly to the side of the truck where Sam and Mac were waiting, they gently eased Craven’s body down to the ground, then straightened themselves back up with the heaviness of men who had been carrying a mental load as well as a physical one.

‘It was a clean kill,’ Matt Andrews said quietly, the troop medic’s black skin shining with sweat in the moonlight. ‘He wouldn’t even have known what hit him.’

‘Suppressed AK-47 round, that’s what,’ Sam said. With everything else that had happened, he realised he hadn’t shared with the others his information about the welcoming party. ‘The shooters were Russian. One of the guys I nailed was packing a GM- 90.’

Davenport gave a low whistle. ‘Serious bit of kit for a stroll through the woods.’

‘Yeah,’ Andrews added. ‘Bit much for shooting pigeons.’

‘Spetsnaz?’ Mac suggested. He avoided Sam’s eye and it was clear that the tension between them had far from dissipated.

‘That’s my guess.’

An unsettling silence descended upon the four of them as they grappled with the implications, a silence made only deeper by the presence of their dead colleague. When Tyler and Webb returned with the freefall rigs, Mac brought them up to speed. Tyler listened to the news with an expression of increasing bitterness. ‘Fucking Russki bastards!’ he spat, walking away from them before suddenly and violently kicking the body of the pick-up truck. Craven had been his friend, and no amount of training could teach a man how to deal with losing his mate.

There was no time to stand around consoling him, though. 03.45. Dawn was approaching. ‘Get to the road,’ Mac ordered. ‘The bird’s on stand-by. Let’s get out of here.’

Nobody argued with that. They gathered up their gear and their fallen colleague and hurried away from the camp, towards the road which was about fifty metres to the north. Cullen was waiting for them, a solitary figure, short and squat. ‘You took your fucking time,’ he observed, before looking up and down the road and indicating the somewhat rickety-looking telegraph poles that lined both sides. If the Hercules tried to land along this stretch of road, its wings would be damaged by the poles and they’d be walking home. They would have to come down.

‘Det cord?’ Mac announced. ‘Who’s got it?’

It was Tyler. From his pack he pulled two reels of what looked for all the world like white washing line. Hang your clothes on this, though, and you’d get a nasty surprise. Tyler threw one of the reels to Sam, who quickly started to unfurl it. On the far side of the road he ran to the closest pole, wound the det cord five times around the wood, then trailed it on to the next pole and repeated the process. Tyler did the same on the other side of the road. They each had enough cord to wrap it around eight telegraph poles; they were widely spaced, however. It would give the Hercules enough space to land.

Sam and Tyler ran back to where the others were waiting for them. Tyler removed two detonators from his pack – small silver tubes, each about the size of a pencil – and a roll of tape. Expertly taping the detonators to the cord, he then fished out his clacker – a small, handheld electrical generator – and a roll of wire. He connected the clacker to the detonator, then turned round and nodded at the rest of them.

The team jogged back to a safe twenty-metre distance. Tyler held up one hand and they prepared themselves for the bang.

The det cord exploded with a ferocious, deafening crack, like a hundred rounds all being fired at the same time. It echoed in the air, an immense clap of thunder, and would have been heard, Sam reckoned, for miles around.

By Jacob, no doubt, wherever he was.

The very instant the noise of the exploding det cord slammed into their eardrums, the telegraph poles toppled, falling away from the road and turning it into a perfectly serviceable runway. Instantly Mac was on the radio, reading out their exact coordinates from his small GPS device and requesting immediate extraction. Then he turned to the men. ‘Five minutes!’ he shouted. ‘Get in position.’

Sam checked his watch. 03.56. Only minutes till dawn. It had been a long, dark night. One of the longest Sam could remember. The blackness, though, was just starting to give way to a faint glimmer of morning. It was only the vaguest hint of daylight, but it was enough to remind Sam of everything that had happened during the preceding hours of darkness. He suddenly felt exhausted, mentally and physically. But flagging now wasn’t an option. They were still on the ground and the operation was not yet completed. Not until they were safely back in the belly of the Hercules could he even think of letting the pace drop.

The unit divided into two, three on one side of the road, four on the other. The bird might have their coordinates, and they might have a clear landing space. But there was still something they could do to help guide it safely to earth. Each man removed his torch from his pack. They then lay on the ground, spaced out at regular intervals along either side of the road, and shone the torches upwards. From the air, it would mark their positions as clearly as the lights along an ordinary runway.

Sam lay there uncomfortably in the almost-darkness. They would get scant warning, he knew, about the plane’s arrival: the roar of its engines would only be audible to them when the Hercules had emerged from the dark sky and its wings were practically above them.

He waited. Waiting was always the worst. It somehow felt as though you weren’t in control. Five minutes ticked by, excruciatingly slowly.

Sure enough, the boom of the engines was sudden and thunderous. It seemed to come from nowhere. As the dark shadow of the wings passed over them, Sam felt his whole body tremble with the proximity of the aircraft. The landing wheels screeched as they hit firm ground. Sam heard an immediate change in the timbre of the engines as they were thrust into reverse to bring the bird to a sudden, abrupt halt. He pushed himself to his feet, as did the others. Half a mile down the road, the Hercules was already turning. They raced around and gathered up their gear and Craven’s body bag, waited for the aircraft to come to a standstill and then rushed towards it. The tailgate was lowered and, with the loadmaster ushering them on with urgent sweeps of his arms, they hurried up into the plane.

Craven’s body was strapped to a stretcher bed attached to the side of the plane; the rest of the gear was stowed underneath. As the men prepared for take-off, the tailgate was already closing. The aircraft had barely been on the ground a couple of minutes before it started to retrace its steps, accelerating quickly up the road. Once it was airborne, it started a sudden, steep incline, ferrying the unit speedily away from the location of their op and back to the relative safety – if safety it was – of the base back in Bagram.

And as the Hercules soared into the air, Sam’s mind was concentrated on only one thing. It was not the op – that was past history now, water under the bridge; it wasn’t the grisly collection of assassinated corpses they’d left in the training camp and on the twiggy floor of the surrounding woods; it wasn’t even Craven’s death, though he carried with him the same nagging sense of loss and anger that he knew they were all experiencing.

It was this: the image of one man, bearded and dark-eyed, running with fierce desperation through the unfamiliar surroundings of Kazakhstan. His blood would be pumping. Most likely he would be more than a little scared. His mind would be focussed on the road ahead; on surviving; but equally he would be keeping one eye behind him.

Because once somebody has been sent to kill you, you never stop looking over your shoulder.