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  ‘The next phase is being prepared,’ he told her, reciting the briefing he had been given. ‘Target selection has been made. You will go to a staging area and prepare to deploy. Details will be sent to you via the usual channels. The rest of your team will meet you later, on site.’

  ‘I get playmates?’ She made a face. ‘Who’s that, then?’

  ‘You do not know them, but they have worked for my employers on a number of occasions. They are very competent.’

  ‘I’m in charge, though?’

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘That is what you are being paid for.’

  ‘Just checking . . .’

  The hyena and the drinker came into the bar, moving as if they hadn’t seen Saito or the woman, and before either of them could react, the bald man deliberately shouldered into him. The drinker dropped his beer and it shattered on the cracked tile of the floor.

  Instantly, the man was yelling at him, stale breath washing over Saito’s face. In the mix of English swear words and rapid-fire Greek he guessed the gist of the argument. The drinker was accusing him of knocking the bottle from his hand. He wanted immediate recompense.

  The man in the vest put a hand on Saito’s shoulder and told him to come outside. His other hand had something sharp and shiny hidden in the palm. A push-dagger, probably.

  Grace switched seamlessly back to her drunken tourist performance and tried to laugh the whole thing off. The drinker shouted at her and slapped her hard enough to propel her face down to the bar top.

  The man in the vest pulled Saito off his stool. In the tiny little drinking pit, they were only two steps from the front door.

  Saito hit him across the face with the bottle and the man in the vest reeled away, snarling wildly. In the same instant, Grace punched the drinker hard in the belly, enough that he doubled over and vomited up some of the beer he had been imbibing.

  ‘Back way.’

  Grace stepped over the drinker and pushed to the rear of the bar, not waiting for Saito to follow. Tugging on his cap, he followed after her, down a constricted corridor and past reeking toilets, into a storeroom that opened out into an ill-lit alley.

  Two of the men from the group Saito had seen on the street were waiting there, and they brandished empty ouzo bottles stolen from crates by the door.

  Saito dodged the first blow aimed at his head, but the base of the bottle clipped the bill of his cap and peeled it off, sent it flying. He pivoted, and an old healed wound earned in Somalia jabbed him in his gut. There were fragments of a 7.62 mm round in there, stuck where the Combine’s doctors had been unable to remove them. At times like this, the wound liked to remind Saito of his shortcomings.

  Grace ran at the man threatening her and he didn’t expect it. Her attack, combined with a slick of stale beer slops pooling on the ground, sent him down on his backside. Then she was on him, landing blows in the soft tissues of his throat.

  Saito had no interest in engaging with these idiots, but the depressing inevitability of such an encounter could not be avoided. He resolved to end it quickly.

  Hidden by his shirt sleeve, strapped to the inside of his forearm was a custom-made leather scabbard, and in it was a thick stiletto blade. The weapon was called a misericorde, a type of dagger once used in medieval Europe to kill unhorsed knights, by stabbing them through gaps in their armour. Saito jammed the heavy needle tip into the joint of his attacker’s right knee, and the man’s scream echoed down the alleyway. It was a good hit, but still Saito wasn’t happy with it. His edge was growing dull.

  Grace climbed off her assailant, as the man coughed up blood and struggled to breathe. She appeared to have crushed his larynx. As he choked and sputtered, she rifled through his pockets and took his wallet. She stole the few euro notes folded in it, and tossed the rest away.

  Saito flicked blood off his dagger, eyeing her.

  ‘The card I gave you is worth a thousand times that amount.’

  ‘Old habits die hard,’ she offered, turning as the drinker and the man in the vest finally emerged from the doorway behind them.

  The face of the man in the vest was a mess of cuts and rage. The drinker, flushed pink and his eyes still watering, staggered to a halt as he saw the state of his two friends. He backed away, but Grace already had an empty ouzo bottle, and she clubbed him with it.

  The bottle didn’t break, but the drinker did. He fell on his knees, trying to block her rain of blows. Saito pointed his dagger at the man in the vest, whose own blade was far less formidable, and that was warning enough to stop him from intervening.

  Finally, the woman stood on the drinker’s right hand and broke two of his fingers. By that point he had lost control of his bladder and he began to cry.

  ‘Give me that,’ she said, holding out her hand, nodding at the misericorde. ‘I want to finish up.’

  Saito glanced to the end of the alleyway. No one had come to investigate the beating and the screams. He imagined they would be able to walk away and nothing more would come of this.

  ‘There is no need.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ said the woman. ‘I just want to.’

  ‘No,’ insisted Saito. He owed these opportunist thugs nothing, but Grace’s casually vicious manner disturbed him. ‘It will complicate matters,’ he concluded.

  She gave a theatrical sigh, like a child denied a favourite toy.

  ‘Fine.’

  She took the contents of the drinker’s wallet as well and walked away.

  At length, Saito sheathed his dagger and followed her, leaving the wide-eyed man in the vest to deal with the wreckage of his bad intentions.

  FIVE

  The icy porcelain at his back leached the heat from Marc’s body, and the hazy form of stark white surfaces enclosing him drew inwards. The last gasps of breath escaped his mouth in smooth, steely bubbles, and then there was no air left, only the chill of the water pressing down on him.

  Eyes open, staring at nothing, the wintry cold blurred his vision. It drew the life out of him, but it couldn’t dull the memories.

  He could remember a stinging impact ripping the air from his lungs and patches of burning oil on the surface.

  He could see Sam drifting in the dimness, her body falling away.

  Blood in a black haze. Like slow smoke.

  In the freezing depths, his hand twitched. He had tried to reach for her, their fingertips meeting briefly.

  Her face, ruined and blank, staring back at him. The currents took Sam from him and dragged her down.

  When he couldn’t hold on a moment longer, Marc bolted upright from beneath the water in the free-standing bath, throwing a cold wave over the edge. A small tide gushed out across the tiled floor of the bathroom, soaking a fallen towel where he had left it, swirling and pooling in front of the frosted glass door leading to the rest of the hotel suite.

  He sucked in ragged, shuddering gasps of air as a shadow appeared at the door, a hand tapping on the glass.

  ‘Hey,’ said Lucy. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Not really.’

  His voice was low and faraway. Dripping, fighting back shivers, Marc climbed out to find a dry towel and a dressing gown.

  As he slipped it on, Lucy slid the door open and gave him a wary look.

  ‘Whoa, it’s like a meat locker in here.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  She shook her head. ‘One close encounter with hypothermia was enough for me,’ she retorted. The two of them had survived a night in the polar chill of the Icelandic wilderness several months ago, and for Lucy the memory was still fresh. She changed tack as he followed her out into the suite proper. ‘Talk to me, Marc. You’ve barely said a word since we left Vauxhall Cross.’

  He padded out across the carpeted floor, making a motion at his ear to indicate they are listening, and halted at the floor-to-ceiling window.

  ‘I swept the place as soon as we arrived here,’ she noted, gesturing at the two bedrooms leading off from the adjoining central space. ‘And I
have a masker running in case.’

  Lucy pointed at her custom-model Rubicon-issue smartphone lying on the coffee table. Farrier had returned their kit on arrival in Britain, and every SCD operative in the field carried one of the so-called ‘spyPhone’ devices. Among its capabilities, it could generate a localised jamming field that interfered with most passive bugging devices.

  Marc was using the threat of MI6 surveillance as an excuse to stay silent. She knew him too well to let the lie sit unchallenged.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’

  ‘When I can’t get my head straight, I dive.’ He gestured at his face, where he would have worn a regulator mask and goggles. ‘Haven’t done it for a long time, though. The quiet in the water . . . gives me space to think.’ He nodded towards the bath. ‘That’s the next best thing.’

  ‘What, half-drowning yourself? Did it work?’

  ‘No.’ He stared morosely out of the window, looking without really seeing.

  They were on the upper floors of the Park Plaza Hotel, less than a mile down the South Bank from MI6 headquarters, and now the sun had set over London, the city was a network of lights and shadows stretching away into the evening. The Thames was a band of black obsidian, reflecting the glow from the Houses of Parliament on the far side, and the great wheel of the London Eye, the capsules around the giant Ferris wheel changing colour as they moved.

  Being home should have meant more to Marc, but there was nothing, no connection. Everything he should have felt was being dragged away, caught by the inexorable gravity of what he had seen in that conference room.

  Samantha Green was dead.

  Samantha Green was still alive.

  The binary certainty of the choice was inescapable. Marc knew what he had experienced when the Dunkirk operation came apart. But now a totally different reality was unfolding, a different truth taking its place. He’d hoped the ice cold would shock him into some kind of clarity, but it had done nothing but deepen his misgivings.

  ‘They could have falsified it,’ Lucy offered, seeing into his thoughts as if they were being projected on the wall. ‘I know you’re thinking that. After what we saw with Lion’s Roar in Brussels last year, I’m never going to take anything on video as true again.’

  The far-right extremist group she referred to had been part of a false flag attack, and one of the tools of their atrocity was something called a ‘deepfake’, a software suite that could manipulate video footage in such a way to seamlessly overlay the face of one person over existing imagery of another. The technology threw everything digital into doubt, and it was possible the British security services had access to something similar.

  ‘Yeah . . .’ Marc gave a wan nod. ‘But I reckon this is the real deal. There’s no angle on Six faking it. What do they gain?’

  ‘Just putting it out there,’ she noted. ‘Considering the potentials.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘the only person I really trust is in this room right now.’

  ‘Good to know.’ Lucy moved to stand by him. ‘You don’t have to be part of this, you know that, right? I mean, Farrier was the guy who recruited you back in the day, and maybe you feel like you owe him . . . Or maybe you want to show the people who kicked you out what you’re really made of? Both are bad reasons to get involved.’

  He shot her a look. Did she really believe that?

  ‘That’s not it,’ Marc snapped, and there was a distance between them once again. ‘Shit. I don’t know what I’m thinking here.’ He stared into the depths of the black river far below. ‘Sam and me, we had something strong, something good. And just when we were starting to figure it out, she was gone. I didn’t only lose a woman I cared about, Lucy. I lost friends and I lost trust . . . I lost who I was. I had a life and it was ripped right out of my hands.’

  The deaths of the Nomad team had been the bow of a destructive wave that left Marc Dane’s world in tatters. It almost claimed his life and that of his only living family, his sister Kate.

  ‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ Lucy began, ‘but I have to tell you, Marc. You’re stronger for having survived that. The person you were? The guy in the van who played it safe and stayed out of harm’s way? That’s not who you were meant to be.’ She prodded him in the chest. ‘This man? I see someone who lost a lot but didn’t let it break him. You let it remake you. I know that because I went through the same thing.’ She let him think on that, then added: ‘A lot of people are alive right now, me included, because of who you are. Not who you were.’

  ‘I’d like to believe that,’ he said, after a moment. ‘It’s taken me a while, and I really thought I was finding a way past the regret, the anger . . . But then that comes up.’ He jutted his chin at a military-spec computer tablet lying on the table near Lucy’s smartphone. On it were files Farrier had pulled from K Section on the woman called Grace. ‘And suddenly everything I thought was solid turns into sand.’ Marc shook his head. ‘Sam is dead. That’s been part of my truth for the past three years. But if she’s alive, I can’t be sure of anything.’

  Lucy put a hand on his arm. Her fingers were warm to the touch against his cold skin.

  ‘You can be sure of this,’ she told him. ‘I got your back.’

  He drew away. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘I mean no, I can see where you’re going with this.’ He walked over and picked up the tablet computer, tapping through some of the digitised files. ‘I’m going to do everything I can to help John and his team, even if Welles is still a wanker and Lane hates my guts. Because I need to know. You’re not a part of this, Lucy. This is my bloody baggage, not yours. You want to back me up, and I appreciate that, but you don’t have to get involved.’

  Her jaw set, and she was about to throw back a hot retort, but Lucy caught herself.

  ‘I figured I wouldn’t be able to talk you out of it, you Brits are pig-headed that way. So, be advised. I am a part of this, like it or not. Because you need me to keep you alive, Dane. One time, you told me that you have to put your trust in someone, or else you get lost. That someone is me.’ She shook her head. ‘You don’t get a say in it.’

  Some of the weight on him seemed to lift, and despite everything, Marc found a crooked smile for his friend.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Just don’t push your damn luck,’ she growled.

  *

  After sunset, when the gates were closed and the visitors were gone, quiet enveloped the elegant, tranquil spaces of the Hanbury Botanical Gardens. The wildlife in the trees would usually have the place to themselves as the evening drew in, the only sound rising from the waves below as they turned against the rocky beach at Capo Mortola, where the nature reserve met the sea.

  It was one of the most beautiful sites along Italy’s Ligurian coast, set a few kilometres between the border with southern France to the west and the city of Ventimiglia to the east. Built by a nineteenth-century English Quaker who had made a fortune in rebellion-era Shanghai, it was now a holding of the Italian government and a national treasure of the region.

  It wasn’t an easy matter to have a place like the Hanbury given over to a private meeting, but somehow the man Esther McFarlane had come to see managed it. That in itself spoke a great deal as to his influence, and as her car glided to a halt by the entrance, she took in the two white Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicles parked nearby. Well-built men in black jackets stood around them with the watchful manner of career bodyguards.

  McFarlane didn’t wait for the door to be opened for her – she never did, as a point of honour – and climbed out. Her assistant Finlay scrambled after her, but she waved him away.

  ‘You can wait here.’

  Finlay rocked on the balls of his feet. ‘Is that wise, ma’am?’ He nodded towards the darkened entrance portico. ‘Going alone?’

  She frowned. ‘A wee bit late to start having doubts now. I don’t reckon our mysterious friend would bring me out on a n
ight like this just to do me in.’

  Despite her flippant comment, McFarlane had GPS transmitters built into the brooch on her jacket and her wristwatch, and a vial of powerful capsicum spray disguised as a lipstick in her clutch purse. Experience had taught her that a single woman travelling without protection was courting danger, and trust was not something she gave easily.

  ‘Just keep your eyes open, eh?’ She patted him on the shoulder. ‘That’s what I pay you for.’

  McFarlane didn’t grace the bodyguards with a look, and set off down the long stone staircase leading into the gardens proper. The full site took up all of the small cape, but her contact was meeting her nearby, at a water feature called the Fontana Nirvana. Her flat shoes clacked against the steps, and under the cover of the dimness she reached into a pocket to activate a recording app on her cellular phone. Satisfied that nothing of the conversation to come would be lost, she proceeded downwards.

  The evening air was rich with heady scents from the perfumed gardens. Another time, she would have allowed herself the distraction of an enjoyable walk here. Right now, her thoughts were occupied by a torrent of questions.

  The intelligence her unexpected benefactor had provided – the file on the cartel accountant Mateo Garza, and Rubicon’s involvement in his disappearance – was exactly the sort of ammunition she needed to call time on Ekko Solomon’s risky ventures in vigilantism.

  Solomon gave little away, and for a long time McFarlane and the other members of the board of directors had chosen not to look too closely at what the African was doing. It was easy when the Rubicon Group’s fortunes were on the rise. But it was no longer possible to ignore what was happening under the company’s aegis.

  Among Rubicon’s holdings was an overt private military contractor, small but highly skilled, largely engaged in providing personal protection details, or kidnap-and-recovery operations in support of law enforcement. McFarlane had learned that PMC element was the cover for something else. Employees, hardware and resources were filtered through it to service Solomon’s Special Conditions Division – essentially, a privately funded black ops unit that answered only to the African.