Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission Four: Fallout

Also by Chris Ryan

Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target

Mission One: Redeemer

Mission Two: The Rock

Mission Three: Die Trying

Mission Four: Fallout

Non-fiction

The One That Got Away

Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book

Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide

Fight to Win

Fiction

Stand By, Stand By

Zero Option

The Kremlin Device

Tenth Man Down

Hit List

The Watchman

Land of Fire

Greed

The Increment

Blackout

Ultimate Weapon

Strike Back

Firefight

Who Dares Wins

The Kill Zone

Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission Four: Fallout

Chris Ryan

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Coronet

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

1

Copyright © Chris Ryan 2010

The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Enhanched ebook ISBN 9781444726657

Ebook ISBN 9781444708561

Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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Contents

Also by Chris Ryan

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, you should first dig two graves.’

Confucius

1

Istanbul, Turkey. 2111 hours.

Colonel Deniz Sahin looked on as the medics zipped up the last of the body bags. The black plastic sheet consumed the bullet-riddled body of Mahmoud Reza like a snake devouring its victim. Eight bodies. They were running out of body bags and had squeezed two of the five Iranians into a single bag. The death toll also included a single Turkish civilian. The other two, his own men.

There was still a lot of blood on the road, still a swirl of gun smoke that stung his eyes. Still a ringing in his ears. The sound amplified when he closed his eyes. But Sahin didn’t want to leave the scene of the shootout. At the security cordon perimeter a clutch of politicians were lapping up the attention. Sahin had never been one for the limelight. He preferred to stay in the shadows.

Besides, the deaths of two of his men gnawed at him. Sahin, commanding officer of the Ozel Jandarma Komando, ran a tight ship and he felt their loss keenly. The feeling was familiar yet cold, like gathered dust.

Lieutenant Colonel Umit Bulent, Sahin’s 2iC, drew up alongside him. Bulent’s face was locked in a permanently blank expression. Never happy, never sad. Except today. Except now. He wore a smile so wide it that could outrun the Bosporus. He lit a cigarette. The brand, Sahin noted, was Russian. Sobranie.

‘That was close, boss,’ Bulent said.

‘I thought you gave up.’

Bulent made a big-deal gesture. ‘I’m celebrating. We’re allowed to celebrate, boss. We just stopped the fucking city from being blown to pieces.’ He sighed smoke. ‘Something on your mind?’

Sahin shook his head. ‘Look at these idiots,’ he growled, nodding at the politicians. ‘Acting as if they saved the day.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Someone will pay for this,’ Sahin said.

Bulent tilted his head at the departing ambulance. ‘Someone already did, boss.’

The 2iC stubbed out his cigarette and left to join in the revelry with the rest of the soldiers. A group of them shook hands and slapped each other on the back. Sahin wished he could share their happiness. That sense of satisfaction. Of a job well done.

Sahin spat on the ground and turned away. Found himself staring at the van containing the nuke fifty metres away, framed by the smooth expanse of the Bosporus Bridge and the blackness of the Strait beneath. Lights crackled and popped on the banks of the Asian side of Istanbul.

Half a dozen forensic experts were scouring the van. Sahin stood still for a moment, then decided he would have a look at this suitcase bomb for himself. After all, it wasn’t every day a man got to see a nuclear weapon and lived to tell the story.

Helicopters zipped overhead as he approached. In the distance he could make out the damp blare of car horns. Istanbul was already itching to get moving again. Sahin liked that resilience. He was looking forward to going home to Izmir. To his wife and his two surviving sons.

That was his last-but-one thought.

He was twenty-five metres away when the van seemed to rock. White heat gushed out of the rear doors in an angry torrent. Something rumbled. In a split second the heat was overwhelming Sahin. And his last thought, as the heat peeled off his skin and burned his hair and nails, was simply: God, no.

2

Sea of Marmara. 2115 hours.

The cabin shuddered. At first Gardner thought it was turbulence. Then he remembered that the Black Hawk was cruising at 6000 feet – well below its service ceiling of 19,000. Too high up to be affected by wind turbulence from the ground. Too low for mountain turbulence to come into play. Gardner looked out of the open fuselage door and clocked a rinsed-blue basin. Cloudless, which ruled out storm turbulence.

Then Gardner saw something in the distance. Ballooning up from the ground, like a bubble rising to the surface of a body of water.

The bubble burst over the Istanbul skyline fifty miles away. Opaque rings rippled out from the bubble’s nucleus and spread across the Bosporus Strait. The rings broke free from the Strait and hit the Sea of Marmara.

The rings kept coming. The waves kept rising. Then the centre of the bubble erupted. Blinding light. Gardner screwed his eyes up. The other guys in the helicopter, the support team of seven MI6 field agents who’d travelled to Istanbul, shielded their faces. Then came a powerful high-pitched note that pealed like a hummingbird inside his skull.

First a fireball rose from the bubble like a gas flare on a giant oil rig, its surface swirling violently as it soared. A stem of smoke pushed the fireball higher into the sky until it hit 3000 feet. At that point the fireball seemed to pause. Then it pulsed a wave of white-hot energy. Gardner braced himself for impact.

The wave moved at a supersonic pace. It blasted everything on the horizon: planes, helicopters, birds – all were blown aside like snowflakes in a blizzard.

Shit. It’s coming right this way, Gardner thought. He felt as if he was rocketing towards the belly of an angry volcano. The wave was less than ten miles away. Another second and a half and it would be on top of them. If it hits, he was thinking, it’s going to put the chopper into a deadly spin.

The other guys on board should have been burying their heads between their thighs and holding onto their straps for dear life. But every man was transfixed.

A mile away now and the wave turned almost translucent. It was burning up, rapidly losing more energy. He figured that since the wave was dying, maybe the contact wouldn’t be so bad.

Then the wave hit, and he knew he’d figured wrong.

Christ, the heat. It blazed his facial hair, seared his eyelids.

The Black Hawk shook violently, lurching this way and that. Gardner felt the G-force of 7000 kg of out-of-control melted steel yank his head from side to side. He could feel the pilot wrestling with the controls, trying to keep the chopper on an even keel. It didn’t seem to be fucking working. The Black Hawk spun into a swift descent. Gardner heard the chopper’s engine grunt. The extra power and pitch the pilot was applying only forced them down faster. The chopper descended through its downwash. The view out of the fuselage door was sky and sea. Then it was just sea. Charred black water.

Gardner felt his stomach jump, his kidney and liver and bowels playing musical chairs. They were at 3000 feet. Now 2000. Now 1000. The sea became a grid of surging waves. The Black Hawk was so close that Gardner could make out individual dead birds, white petals on the surface.

Less than 500 feet from the sea, and the descent slowed. At 300 Gardner reckoned it was touch and go. At 200 he thought it was just go. One of the agents leaned forward, puked up milky white shit. Around the 150-feet mark the Black Hawk snarled, wobbled and – a breakthrough. It began to lurch forward rather than down. The pilot was fighting hard against the downwash. The chopper bounced like a truck racing over speed bumps.

The engine stopped screaming. Meaning, Gardner knew, the pilot had regained control. Sure enough they began a slow ascent, the men silent, not even able to look each other in the eye. Lost in their thoughts. Only one guy gave the thoughts a voice.

‘That was fucking close,’ he said.

And then Gardner looked out of the door as the Black Hawk climbed to 2000 feet, and he saw Istanbul. Or rather, what was left of it. Which wasn’t much – a shredded landscape. As far as Gardner could see, not a single building was left standing.

‘No,’ Gardner replied. ‘That was fucking close.’

He watched the mushroom cloud frozen in the sky. He’d seen a lot of shit in his time. A lot. Seen men maimed, others tortured, still others shot so many times there was literally nothing left but rags and bones. But nothing prepared him for the sight of a nuke totalling a fucking city. He closed his eyes. It must be fucking hell on earth down there, he thought.

‘Get us out of here,’ he told the pilot. ‘Before that big fuck-off radiation cloud starts blowing in our direction.’

The pilot banked right, and right was west. West was Canakkale, and the Strait feeding into the Aegean Sea. West was away from the nuclear holocaust currently taking place in downtown Istanbul. West sounded fucking good to Gardner.

They left the Sea of Marmara behind them. The mushroom cloud shrank. The agents stared back at it. Gardner realized he was actually fucking praying.

They skated south down the Aegean, breezing low past the island of Kos. A signal finally kicked in on Gardner’s mobile. He figured the nuke’s radioactive rays had interfered with nearby comms systems. He put a call in to Land.

‘Jesus, did you see that?’ Land’s voice was stripped and raw like he had never heard it.

‘See? We had fucking front-row seats.’

‘It’s chaos here, Joe…’ – the line fizzed with static – ‘. . . absolute pandemonium.’

‘Suitcase nukes were designed for remote detonation,’ Gardner replied. Land said nothing, so he went on: ‘One guy plants the nuke on foot. Then he retreats to a safe distance and activates it. The idea is they can work even without timers. Think of it as an override. Even after the timer’s been disabled, the right person, with access to the right equipment, can still trigger the bomb.’

‘Yes, yes, I know all this. What’s your point?’

‘So who pushed the red button?’

He heard Land scratching something, then say, ‘Most likely the Israelis. Publicly they’re pinning the blame on the Iranians.’

Gardner took a deep breath. The air circulated around the cave of his chest. ‘How many?’

Land was quiet for a beat. Gardner wondered if he’d lost his signal.

‘I asked, how many?’

‘Heard you the first time, old boy. Best-case scenario is ten thousand dead, twice that number wounded. Factor in those affected by radiation in the medium term and God knows.’

Gardner felt the cold air rise in his chest. He found it difficult to speak. ‘And the worst?’

‘Fifty thousand. Two hundred thousand wounded.’ Land sniffed. ‘There was no way you, or I, or anyone could know that someone else was waiting to activate the bomb.’

‘Maybe.’

Land was right. But Gardner knew the nightmares would be waiting for him all the same. The women with no legs, the kids burned to charcoal skeletons. He already saw their accusing stares. Asking him why he didn’t save them.

Gardner gripped the overhead rails as the Black Hawk pitched to the left. The waves on the Aegean glinted like a million knife edges in the sun. He refocused his mind.

‘Where’s Aimée?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We had a deal,’ Gardner said.

Land laughed bitterly. ‘In case you didn’t notice, Joe, a bomb has just gone off. A nuclear bomb. If you’re asking me to commit valuable men and resources to picking her up, forget it.’

‘But you know where she is?’

‘I really don’t have time for this,’ fumed Land. ‘Of course I bloody well know. Thanks to your chum Shai Golan.’

‘And?’

‘And what, Joe? The base is an old meat-packing factory in the industrial part of Athens. That city’s a stinking mess. Worse than bloody Naples.’

Gardner had never been to Naples, or Athens. But he’d operated in some of the most dangerous corners of the earth and ignored Land’s bitching. The MI6 man struck Gardner as the kind of guy who’d have a panic attack if he flew economy class.

All Gardner wanted to do was find Aimée and give Land and the Firm his middle finger. He was of a mind to tell Land to shove his job offer up his fucking arsehole. Then again, he figured it was already pretty crammed up there.

‘The factory’s on Sissi Street in the Votanikos neighbourhood,’ Land continued. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me. Half of Istanbul’s blown to smithereens.’

Land hung up.

Gardner was left looking out of the fuselage door. Greece rolled out to the west, parched and rocky. Seven days since I flew to Rio. Feels like a lifetime ago.

3

Athens, Greece. 2231 hours.

The corn-yellow taxi was stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Sweat on Gardner’s palms. Not the sweat of perspiration, but of anticipation. He looked at his palms and realized he was looking forward to seeing Aimée again more than he’d thought. Her face had taken root in his mind. Her voice too. Once we’re out of Athens, he decided, we’ll go travelling. Mauritius maybe. Or Bali.

Land was right, Gardner reflected as the taxi coughed him up on the corner of Patsi Street and Aigaleo. Athens was a dump. The bits that were old were falling apart, and the bits that were new were falling apart. Gardner had the sense of being caught in a Greenpeacenik’s worst nightmare. Every building was crumbling, every street lined with rubbish. A thin, greasy smog wafted through the city. It covered cars, window sills and pavements in soot.

He took €40 from a roll of €700 he’d withdrawn on the Firm’s credit card, pressed the notes into the driver’s wrinkled palm. Twenty for the fare and twenty for forgetting his face. The driver grunted his agreement.

To the east worn-down neo-classical houses were squeezed between peeling apartment blocks. Stray cats and dogs knocked about the streets, sniffing at bins overflowing with rubbish. Two hundred metres to his north stood the Agricultural University of Athens. Its blocks, white and flat as cake icing, stared out at the Iera Odos road jammed with restless traffic. Westwards the houses were replaced by a sweeping industrial landscape of creaking factories and warehouses.

Gardner took the left from Patsi Street and walked up Aigaleo for a hundred and forty metres, then hit Agiou Polykarpou Street and paced north-west for five hundred metres. He passed milk-processing plants. It was dark – a few dim streetlamps seemed to have been added as an afterthought.

Sissi Street was a left midway down Agiou Polykarpou. The factories carried some security deterrents. Fat padlocks wrapped around the gates, CCTV cameras mounted to the fence posts and Rottweilers snarling and yapping the other side of the chain-link. He found the meat-packing factory; hanging from the gates was an old metal sign with a jokey image of a pig giving a thumbs-up painted on it.

Gardner inspected the gates. No padlock. The place must have been disused for a while, he figured. Then he prised them apart, the metal frame scraping against the tarmac. He made his way across the empty car park towards the factory doors fifty metres away. The windows revealed a neon-blue light humming inside, radiating like a fly trap.

The padlock on the double doors to the building was nothing more than a gesture and covered in ginger-coloured rust. Gardner targeted it with the butt of the Glock 17 9mm pistol he’d retained from the Presevo Valley. Had a full clip, seventeen rounds, felt fucking good to be going in armed. A single swing followed by a satisfying clank and the padlock broke loose. He gave the metal door a tug. It gave way without a fight.

This is fucking easy, he thought.

Too easy.

He found himself facing a huge room some forty metres wide and fourteen high. It was maybe sixty metres long, but so dark inside that he could make out less than nothing at the far end. Metal hooks on a looping rail system hung from the ceiling, spaced at eight-metre intervals. The tips of each hook were coated in dried blood from where slabs of cow and pig meat had once hung. Gardner could taste pig fat in the air. In between the rails were long, thin pipes. Lightbulbs dangled from the pipes. They were all dead.

Gardner took a step inside. Needles of cold air pricked his skin and bored down all the way to his bones. He shivered and looked at his feet. The ground was covered in a generation of caked blood and cow shit mixed into an dried, oily-brown paste. I’m in what used to be the meat-processing facility, he thought. Now it was barren.

Except when he looked up, he saw that it wasn’t.

In roughly the middle of the room he made out a pair of blue lights fixed to the overhead pipes, glowing softly. The light Gardner had seen outside. They spotlighted something on the floor below. A silhouette of a standing man. Gardner took a few steps deeper into the room and, still some twenty-five metres away, the lights picked out the features on the silhouette’s face.

The man’s face was pale as a pint of milk, and he had wide, arctic-blue eyes that bulged in their socket. His face displayed the hungry grin of a guy at a dog fight.

‘You must be the one with the pretty girlfriend,’ he called out.

Fucking Sotov, Gardner realized.

‘Where is she?’

‘I was quite disappointed to learn you didn’t die in the fire in Belgrade,’ Sotov said. ‘But then I always believe in looking on the bright side. And the bright side is – now I get to kill you myself.’

Gardner’s right hand gripped the Glock 17. He felt the spring pressure on the trigger mechanism.

‘It’s Aimée, isn’t it? A nice name. And a very attractive face, to go with it, you know.’ His lower lip jutted out in agreement. ‘A good choice, if I may say so.’

‘If you’ve fucking hurt her, I swear—’

‘Please, spare me your machismo.’ Sotov waved a hand dismissively. ‘Anyway you should try to forget her, my friend. You have far more important things to worry about.’

The sound of boots scraping against the floor made Gardner spin round. He’d been half-expecting an ambush. Two figures were powering towards him from the doorway. T-shirts two sizes too small or biceps two sizes too big, he couldn’t quite decide. Eyes grey and blank as rivets nailed into their sockets. The guy on the left had a scar that ran from his upper lip to his eye. The other one had a chinstrap goatee and plasticky skin. Serious-looking, probably ex-Spetsnaz.

And both were packing weapons. Scarface wielded an aluminium baseball bat. Goatee had a Remington Model 870 pump-action shotgun, the barrel sawn down from half a metre to a quarter. Scarface charged ahead of his mate. The tip of the bat was ten metres from Gardner, Scarface storming forward, angling his shoulder muscles, the bat in a two-handed grip. Winding up for a powerful swing.

Seven metres.

The Glock 17 was by Gardner’s side. The average human running speed is about four metres per second and he figured Scarface’s bulky frame put him a little bit slower than that. So he had just over two seconds to react. Enough time to raise the Glock, but not to aim his shot. By the time he’d centred his sights, Gardner’s head would be winging its way to Beijing.

Five metres, and he had his counterattack ready.

At four metres Scarface locked his elbows and flexed his forearms and the bat came crashing down, then horizontally in a swiping manoeuvre. Gardner observed its arc unfolding. Less than a second till it connected with his jaw.

Scarface is a big fucker, Gardner thought. Big – and slow. He had signposted his attack, and Gardner was going to make him pay.

Midway through the guy’s swing, with the bat’s sweet spot an arm’s length from his skull, Gardner dropped his shoulders, bent forward and tucked his chin tight to the base of his neck so that his ears were level with his shoulder blades. He felt the hairs on the back of his head flutter as the bat breezed millimetres overhead.

A half-second and the bat completed its arc. Gardner’s eyes centred on Scarface’s feet. They were lurching to the left, thrown off balance by the momentum of the swing. One second, maybe two, Gardner told himself. That’s all you’ve got.

It’s all I need.

Now he sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, launched himself at Scarface. He wrapped his left arm around the guy’s head and pulled it tight against his chest. Scarface was caught unawares; he still had both hands clasped around the handle and couldn’t free himself from the headlock. Gardner raised the Glock 17. Drove the muzzle into Scarface’s left ear. The big guy saw what was coming and ditched the bat. Too little too fucking late. Gardner depressed the trigger. No safety switch on the Glock. It used a triple integrated safety mechanism. The mechanism was automatically deactivated when the right pressure was applied to the trigger.

Gardner applied the pressure. The trigger clicked.

A bright flash followed by a hollow ca-rack bouncing off the factory walls. Scarface howled. His ear was blackened with burn marks from the discharge. Gardner felt blood and brain drenching his left arm. He had to engage all his core and leg muscles to hold Scarface up. Gardner figured he weighed north of twenty stone. But he fought to keep him vertical, because ten metres away Goatee was targeting him with the sawn-off Remington.

The shotgun’s muzzle roared. Scarface’s body spasmed, the 12-gauge cartridge slamming into his back with such force that Gardner nearly toppled over. His calf muscles burned with the effort. As he fought to regain his balance, blood slopped out of Scarface’s lower back and drip-dripped to the floor. Past the dead guy’s shoulder Gardner spotted Goatee’s left arm sliding the tube magazine beneath the barrel and unloading one, two, three, four rounds of 12-gauge ammo. Each round tore lumps out of Scarface’s back and skull. Gardner was thankful that Scarface was so fucking big. He absorbed each bullet like a HESCO block.

On the fifth round, as he grew accustomed to absorbing the shock of the blasts, Gardner managed to nudge the Glock over Scarface’s shoulder and direct it at Goatee. He put down three rounds in quick succession. Tap-tap-tap. On the first shot Goatee howled and dropped the shotgun. Blood squirted out of his bulging forearm. On the second shot he pawed at the gaping hole torn into his cheek, bits of his teeth blown out of the cavity. Then the third dropped him like a bomb over Baghdad.

Gardner let go of Scarface. Then he spun around, Glock level with his shoulders, primed to finish Sotov. His finger was halfway depressed on the trigger.

Sotov wasn’t there.

Gardner became dimly aware of a door at the southern wall. He paced towards it. Twenty metres off he saw it was a metal thing. The door was ajar.

Then he heard the voice. Muffled and frantic. Like someone being smothered with a pillow. Gardner broke into a jog. Scarface’s blood ran down his left arm and onto his prosthetic hand. Ten metres to the door and the scream became even more high-pitched. A woman’s voice.

Gardner aimed a boot at the rusted lock and kicked it hard. It smashed apart and the door buckled on its hinges and swung open. A battery of ceiling panel lights glared at him. He scrunched up his eyes, shielded his face and scoped his surroundings. He was in some kind of a storage room. Metal shelf units ran for twenty metres to the other end of the room, and between them a column of storage boxes, more than thirty in total. On the shelves were stacks of computers and hard disks.

Lying amid the boxes was Aimée.

She was bound at the ankles and wrists with nylon cord. A gag was tied around her mouth. The gag was tight; it dug deep into the corners of her mouth. Aimée’s eyes widened at the sight of Gardner. She shook her head furiously. She was drenched in sweat. He ran his eyes over her body for injuries. No bloodstains on her shirt or jeans.

Gardner knelt beside Aimée and unknotted the gag.

‘It’s a trap,’ she gasped.

Her eyes were fixed at a spot beyond Gardner’s left shoulder. He followed her gaze and saw a small black box the size of a webcam at waist height on the left shelf. A red laser beam projected from the black eye of the box. It cut a path across the room – until it hit Gardner’s left shoulder.

A network of wires ran out of the box and coiled up the wall and along the length of the ceiling. At the far end they descended into bulky plastic packets, each the size of a brick and off-white in colour, fixed to the walls. C4 plastique, Gardner realized.

Factory’s primed with enough of the stuff to flatten a fucking village.

The dread set in a fraction of a second later.

Gardner hoisted Aimée to her feet. She grabbed his shoulders. Her soft fingertips pressed against his muscles and sparked up something warm inside the cave of his chest. The warmth trickled down to his stomach. He blocked it out.

‘We have to get out of here,’ he said.

Aimée was on her feet, hesitating.

‘Right the fuck now!’

In Gardner’s experience sensor-trigged explosives had a time delay of around twelve seconds from the shorting of the circuit to the ignition of the primary detonator. Gardner put them at ninety metres from the factory doors.

‘Wait,’ Aimée said. She lunged at the shelf on the right and scooped up an Apple MacBook Pro laptop and two USB flash drives, each attached to a loop of cord.

‘We don’t have time!’

‘That’s it,’ she said, putting the loops over her head like a couple of necklaces. Gardner was already at the door leading into the processing room. He seized her hand and hauled her through the doorway, her feet lifting half an inch off the ground. Eight seconds.

They sprinted down the meat-processing room, Gardner’s eyes unsettled by the shift from light to dark. He stumbled once, twice; regained his balance. Thirty metres from the door, he figured they had four seconds at a push. Aimée was straggling behind him. Her breathing had more ups and downs in it than a Wall Street stock graph. Ten metres from the door and her breathing stopped altogether. Gardner turned. Aimée had tripped up. He grabbed her. Three seconds.

Pushed Aimée through the doors.

Two seconds.

‘The laptop!’ she shouted.

One.

Gardner burst through the opening. He had the laptop in his right hand. He felt the ground buckle and grind. A rush of hot wind whipped his back, a wind that bent metal and blasted mortar and broke glass, the mass of it swirling out from the epicentre, unstoppable. Debris rained over him. He was three metres outside the building, then five. Aimée was still running ahead. He increased his running speed, fighting hard not to lose his balance, and reached Aimée as she pushed through the chain-link gates. Behind them, the factory was crumbling, great fists of smoke pounding on its roof.

‘I thought… ’ – Aimée’s hands were on her knees – ‘you were dead.’

Gardner wiped smoke from his eyes. ‘You OK?’

Aimée nodded.

‘Come on,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘it’s not safe here.’

Not with Sotov still on the loose.

4

2352 hours.

They fled down Iera Odos and hailed a taxi. Gardner told the driver to take them to any hotel where they could get a room at a quarter to midnight. The driver was slow and had a lazy manner. Gardner told him to step on it. He ferried them down the road, fire engines and police cars speeding down the opposite lane. Then he took a left at the end of the road and after six hundred metres a right at the Acropolis. Another six hundred south and they came to the Palace Hotel on Constitution Square.

The receptionist was a guy in his forties with a permanently arched left eyebrow. One look at Gardner and Aimée, head to toe in dust, blood and bruises, and the right eyebrow was soon challenging the left for top spot. But he said nothing as Gardner parted with the better part of €400, cash, for one of the better rooms, then slipped another €100 into the receptionist’s breast pocket.

‘Anyone asks after us – you don’t have to lie,’ he said. ‘Just call our room and give us a warning.’

The receptionist thought about it for a long second. His eyes drifted to his breast pocket. Drifted to Gardner’s chest. He nodded.

The room was luxurious in the old European style. King-size bed with Egyptian silk covers, an antique wooden dresser, overhead fan and a view overlooking a courtyard. In other circumstances Gardner would have been tempted to jump Aimée’s bones. But now he was curious about the items she’d insisted on recovering from the factory. Aimée paced over to the dresser, cleared away the welcome packs and tourist maps and fired up the MacBook Pro. Removing the flash drives from around her neck, she inserted them in the slots on the side of the laptop. Gardner went into the bathroom. He ran the taps and scrubbed off Scarface’s blood.

‘Mind telling me what’s on the memory sticks?’ he called from the bathroom. No answer. He sloshed more cold water over his face. Wiped his hands and face with a towel soft as a Aimée’s arse.

‘Aimée?’

‘I don’t know.’

He stepped back into the bedroom. A knock at the door. He frowned at Aimée, gestured for her to stay put. The Glock was lying on the bed. Gardner grabbed it and slipped it behind his back. He peered through the spyhole. Spied a Greek guy in his late fifties to early sixties, dressed in a butler’s outfit. Not the assassin type. He rested his hands on a dining tray in front of him. The old man looked dog-tired.

Gardner opened the door.

‘Wine and canapés,’ said the butler, wheeling the trolley in, Gardner rotating so that the Glock remained hidden from view. ‘Compliments of the hotel.’

The butler parked the trolley in the centre of the room. Tucking the Glock into the waistband of his combats, Gardner gave the butler a €10 tip. Guy didn’t even bother to smile or say thanks as he left.

‘Our lucky night,’ Gardner said.

Aimée returned to the MacBook. She double-clicked on the flash drive’s icon and a series of twelve folders displayed. They seemed to be in some kind of sequence. The first folder was labelled ML_0001, the second ML_0002, and so on, with the last folder labelled ML_0012.

‘I overhead Sotov talking on the phone,’ Aimée explained. ‘He shouted for a long time. When the call was over he ordered his men to rig explosives up to the whole building. I remember him saying to one of the men, “Nothing must survive.” Then he looked at me with this… this grin on his face. “That includes you,” he said.’ Aimée turned back to the screen.

Gardner turned to the canapés. The tray was filled with asparagus spears layered with Parma ham, smoked salmon roulades and mozzarella, cherry tomato and basil skewers. He poured two glasses of Katnook Estate 2002. He gulped some of the fruity red as Aimée opened the first folder.

It held several Word documents. Gardner leaned in while Aimée opened the first file.

Reams of seemingly random characters ran across the screen. Like hieroglyphics. Aimée scrolled down. Two pages in, the gibberish turned into some kind of a script. Gardner ran his eyes down the text. It was in Cyrillic.

‘Transcripts of mobile-phone conversations,’ Aimée said. She pointed to a row of numbers above the first line of dialogue. ‘This is the encrypted GPRS data being transmitted from the mobile to the carrier.’ Gardner studied the numbers.

‘They all begin with a seven,’ he said.

‘The international dialling code for Russia,’ Aimée said.

‘Do you speak Russian?’

She feigned surprise. ‘I investigate the mafya. In Serbia. Both of which have strong links to Russia. Seriously, what do you think?’

Shrugging, he said, ‘Just asking.’

‘I need a few minutes to read through and get my head around what we’re looking at.’

Gardner left Aimée to it. He munched on a couple more canapés and decided that finger food was fucking overrated. The grub hadn’t filled a divot, let alone the hole, in his stomach. He ditched the wine glass and scoped the courtyard. It looked quiet outside. More than quiet: dead. The air was hot, but a mild breeze blew through the cypresses lining the courtyard. His mind wandered back to Aimée and the way their breaths mixed in the warm space between her lips and his. He liked the thought.

‘OK,’ Aimée said, her breath shaking. ‘I think I got it.’

Gardner stared away from the window. ‘What does it say?’

‘It’s a conversation between two men. One of them is Aleksandr Sotov—’

‘The mafya guy.’

‘The other’s Maxim Ledinsky.’ Seeing Gardner’s blank expression, she went on, ‘Ledinsky heads up the Military Counterintelligence office at the FSB.’

Gardner sat down on the edge of the bed. His muscles ached for a time-out. FSB. Federal Security Services in Russia. Shit was getting deep. ‘What are they talking about?’

Aimée scanned the lines again, mouthing strange words. ‘They’re discussing the delivery of a package. Here, this conversation is from three weeks ago. Ledinsky says, “Everything is under control, but it will have to be a suitcase device rather than something bigger.” Sotov says, “Why? The Iranians expect a full-sized delivery. We give them something this small, they’ll think we’re fobbing them off.” Ledinsky says, “If something that big goes missing, it makes us all look stupid. A suitcase device – anyone can lose one of those. Besides, Reza will be glad just to get his hands on anything.”’ Aimée scrolled down.

‘They’re talking about the nuke,’ Gardner said. ‘Mahmoud Reza was the army guy trying to smuggle the suitcase bomb across the border to Iran.’ He rubbed his brow. ‘Who is this Ledinsky guy again? FSB?’

Aimée nodded. She opened another file and browsed through it. ‘There must be fifty transcripts here,’ she said. ‘Maybe more.’

‘All between Ledinsky and Sotov?’

‘Some are encrypted. I can’t decode them.’ She smiled apologetically at Gardner. ‘My skills don’t extend to decrypting stuff, I’m afraid.’

‘We’ll find someone,’ Gardner said. He ran a hand over his stubble. It felt greasy. ‘From what you’ve just told me, it sounds like Sotov and Ledinsky – the Russian mafya and government – knew.’

‘I’d go further than “sounds”. I’d say “one hundred per cent proves”.’

‘But Russia’s a close ally of Iran,’ Gardner said. ‘It built their nuclear power station, for fuck’s sake. Screwing them over doesn’t make sense.’

Aimée gently rested her fingers on the keyboard. ‘You know, these files might be the only evidence of Russia actively taking part in the attack.’ She opened another file and furrowed her brow. ‘Look!’

‘What is it?’

‘There are some pictures on the drives too.’

Gardner knelt beside Aimée for a closer look. His hand brushed against her thigh and felt something warm expand and contract in his chest.

‘They don’t exactly look like Sotov’s holiday snaps,’ he said, looking at the thumbnails of a dozen pixellated images in the folder. Aimée blew one up to full-screen. Just a mess of colours, kind of thing a five-year-old would bring home from school.

‘They don’t look like anything at all,’ Aimée said.

‘Whatever they are, someone doesn’t want other people looking.’

Gardner stood up and dug out his mobile. He hit dial on Land’s contact details.

Athens was an hour behind London, which made it 23.19 wherever the fuck Land was. Probably still in his office, Gardner guessed from the sound of his voice. ‘Yes?’ He croaked his words. They were strung out like guitar strings.

‘You’ll want to hear this,’ Gardner said.

A pause. ‘Make it quick.’

Gardner told Land about the factory, about the mafya lying in wait for him and the explosion. When he was finished, Land said simply, ‘Is that it? You’ve got Aimée.’

‘There’s one other thing,’ Gardner said. ‘We pulled some files out of the factory right before it turned into a giant fucking firework.’

‘Oh yes? What kind of files?’

‘Transcripts, mainly. Some of them are encrypted, but the general picture is clear enough. The Russians knew about the Israeli plot. In fact, it seems like they even helped make it happen.’

‘Impossible,’ Land chuckled.

‘I’m looking at the transcripts right now,’ Gardner told him. If it hadn’t been for Aimée, these would’ve been destroyed back at the factory. They don’t want this information to get out.’

Land was quiet for a long while. Gardner heard the gaslight crackle of a cigarette end lighting up.

‘Right,’ he said finally. ‘Where are you right now?’

‘The Palace Hotel.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Land exhaled smoke. ‘I’m coming to get you.’

5

0034 hours.

Fifty-four minutes later Gardner’s phone sparked into life. Land.

‘I’ve got you a way out of there,’ he said.

‘Go on.’

Aimée was lying asleep on the bed. Gardner stayed awake. One of them had to. But he wouldn’t have slept anyway. His mind was jumping through hoops, trying to figure out what the Russians’ fucking game was. Tension tied his back muscles into figure-of-eight knots. He paced up and down, intermittently sitting on the desk chair opposite the bed. Red Bull from the mini-bar on the desk, Glock 17 in his lap, eyes on the door.

‘There’s an airstrip just outside Malakassa, about forty kilometres north-east of Athens. Be there in an hour. I’ve arranged for one of our private planes to escort you both back to London.’

Land killed the call. Gardner placed his right hand on Aimée’s shoulder, gently nudged her. She moaned. Her breath tickled the locks of her hair lying across her lips. He rubbed her arm. This time she woke up.

‘Time to bug out.’

‘If you’re going to wake a girl up at this time, you really should have a cup of hot chocolate ready,’ she said, rubbing her eyes.

‘Sorry, love, no time. You’ll have to make do with cold water.’

‘The attractions of your lifestyle are endless.’

Aimée carried the MacBook and flash drives, Gardner stuffing the Glock under his shirt. He’d weighed up their exit strategy and decided not to risk leaving through the front door. The same receptionist was likely to be on duty and if anyone came asking questions, he’d have the exact time of Gardner and Aimée’s departure noted on the computer system. So at the end of the corridor they turned right instead of left and down a marble staircase that led into the courtyard. From their room Gardner had spotted at the other end of the courtyard an ornamental gate which led to an alleyway adorned with overhanging vines and murals. At the far end the alley opened onto a busy main street. They headed towards a 24/7 car-rental joint. It was dark in the streets, save for the Parthenon lit up on top of the Acropolis.

The rental place was a local business. Gardner parted with €90 for a black BMW E46 sedan, 325i model, 2.5-litre engine. He was left with the short end of €60. Aimée kept the laptop and flash drives with her in the front seat. Gardner whacked the air-con on full blast.

Four kilometres north of the Acropolis, Gardner hit the toll road onto the same E75 motorway he’d driven on from Belgrade to Brezovan. In Serbia the road had been fairly busy, but, in Greece at nearly one in the morning, their BMW was the only vehicle on the road. Aimée checked more files on the second flash drive.

Gardner chewed up thirty-three kilometres of motorway flanked by half-constructed villas and rundown hotels, cordoned-off ruins and ramshackle farms. He spotted the Malakassa turn-off and felt a band tighten around his core.

Malakassa was a dot-on-a-map kind of place and had a half-arsed feel to it, as if the builders had given up partway through. They entered from the south, which seemed to be the centre of town. A couple of kilometres north and the bare-knuckle range of Mount Parnitha loomed. Gardner felt the knots on his back begin to loosen. At fucking last. We’ll get home and be done with the Firm. Gardner wasn’t exactly a romantic type of guy, but he imagined spending the night with Aimée in a cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds, wrapped up on a sofa, flames crackling in the fireplace while droplets of rain tap-tapped on the old window panes.

The airstrip was a ribbon of smoothed-out clay about two kilometres long in the middle of a grassy field. A farmhouse to the east of the airstrip looked abandoned. A Gulfstream 100 private jet was waiting at the strip’s southern edge.

Gardner switched off the headlights and hit the brakes. The BMW halted a hundred metres from the airstrip.

‘What are we waiting for?’ Aimée asked.

‘Something’s not right.’

Aimée scrunched her eyes up.

‘The soil on the airstrip,’ Gardner said. ‘It’s undisturbed. And the whole place is dead. This look like a plane that just landed to you?’

‘Maybe the plane was already waiting here.’

‘A luxury jet just happens to be lying dormant a kilometre north of nowheresville in Greece?’ Gardner reached for the Glock he’d dumped in the side pocket of the door. Thirteen rounds left and no spare clips.

‘I’m going ahead on foot. Wait here till I signal,’ he said, stepping out into the night. The Glock felt cold in his hand. The full moon cast a thin wash of light over the landscape.

Sixty metres from the airstrip Gardner checked out the terrain around the Gulfstream. Christ’s-thorn bushes and bundles of rocks were scattered parallel to the airstrip. The farmhouse looked abandoned: black holes for windows and worn car tyres dumped by the front door. A Grand Cherokee Jeep was parked by the farmhouse. Tinted windows, engine off.

So where the fuck’s everyone?

He looked back to the BMW. Saw the faint glow of the MacBook screen reflecting Aimée’s face.

Ca-rack!

The first shot seemed to come from nowhere, like a quake rolling under the valley floor. Soil burst up a few inches ahead of Gardner. Dirt sprayed his face. He couldn’t place the shot. His first instinct was to hit the ground, but his training told him that he had to reach proper cover, fucking immediately.

A second shot, this one ripping into the ground an inch from his feet. Now he had a bearing on the sound. He looked to his west. Towards the farmhouse. The Jeep. The headlights pushed out tubes of light, and between the rifle cracks the bass note of its engine revving up.

A third flash now. The round whizzed past Gardner close enough he could feel the heat coming off the cartridge. There was fifty metres separating him from the BMW. Too far to go back.

The Gulfstream’s wheels, he thought. At ten metres, that was the closest protection. He broke into a low run, scrambling forward on the rugged surface. White flashes from the Jeep, one after the other.

Five urgent strides and Gardner was at the wheels, midway down the underside of the jet and directly beneath the wing canopies. Each wheel was about half a metre wide and half as tall. He hunkered behind the wheel. A triple volley of rounds slammed into the rubber. The Jeep picked up speed and headed away from the Gulfstream and towards the BMW. Gardner knew that if he stayed behind cover, Aimée would be exposed. But he didn’t have a choice; if he broke free from cover now, he’d be fucking toast.

Cursing, he hustled round the side of the wheel to avoid the Jeep’s shifting line of fire. The shots came in a staccato rush which made him think there was more than one shooter in the Jeep. Semi-automatic weapons had a smooth rate of fire, and the space between discharges on a single-shot trigger selector tended to be even. Some of the shots came on top of each other. Definitely more than one shooter, he figured.

Gardner returned fire, putting four rounds down in quick succession. The maximum effective range for the 9x19mm Luger rounds chambered in his Glock 17 was about a hundred metres. In the hazy blur of daylight he’d halve that number, but on a crisp night like this the rounds travelled clean and they travelled true. Each round lit up the Gulfstream’s bodywork.

Nine rounds left.

Sixty metres from the airstrip the Jeep slowed next to the BMW.

A shadow emerged from the Jeep’s front passenger door and approached the car. He could see Aimée inside the BMW. She was shutting the MacBook and reaching for the door lock selector. Gardner shaped to race out from behind his cover. The shooters inside the Jeep had other ideas. Bullets sounded and pinned him down. He crawled around to the rear of the wheel, his body heavy with sweat and failure.

A break in the gunfire and the growl of the engine. Gardner rolled out from the wheel and adopted a kneeling firing position, Glock held in a sturdy firing position, his fake left hand bent at a ninety-degree angle at the elbow and across his chest to act as a firing platform beneath the tensile wrist of his right hand. He saw the shadow dragging Aimée back into the Jeep. Now the Jeep was growling again, ready to race away.

Ninety metres, he reckoned. Nearly a hundred. Nearly out of range.

He took a deep breath, relaxed his shoulder muscles, tensed his wrist. Put down two rounds at the shadow, who was now trying to shoot up the BMW’s tyres. The bullets cracked both ways through the cold sky. He missed the shadow each time but as he was about to loose a third round, two brilliant-white flashes spat out the rear of the Jeep. The first slapped into the Gulfstream’s wheel, puncturing the rubber. The second hit Gardner’s right arm. He recoiled. The shadow was back inside the Jeep. The Glock fell away from Gardner’s hand.

When he looked up, the Jeep was gone.

Gardner dragged himself to the BMW. He slumped in the driver’s seat and felt the searing hot pain screaming on his right arm. Aimée’s scent was still in the air. Then it was overwhelmed by the cordite on his body.

He put a call in to Land. The line stammered with a series of clicks as it struggled to establish a connection. Then he got a shrill beeping tone. He hung up, waited a minute and dialled again. Still engaged, so he turned his attention to his wound.

A graze ran the length of Gardner’s good arm. Up close it was worse than he’d first assumed. A five-millimetre-deep trench of necrotic tissue began just below the short head of his bicep, carved up into his rotator cuff and signed off at the clavicle bone at his shoulder. There was blackened skin at the frayed edges of the trench. It looked like he’d grown impatient with a slow-healing wound and ripped out the stitches.

Still, could’ve been worse, Gardner told himself. If the bullet had penetrated the flesh, you’d be haemorrhaging blood and miles from the nearest doctor.

Gardner U-turned the BMW and headed back to Athens.

I need to speak to Land. I need answers.

And I need to find out who the fuck’s snatched Aimée.

6

Hamburg, Germany. 0512 hours.

The Panthers Gym was located down a nothing backstreet in the fashionable quarter of Hamburg’s Schanzenviertel. Spitting distance from the boutique shops and the free-trade coffee houses and the students in tight jeans and scruffy haircuts, it was open twenty-four hours a day, which indicated that the manager knew his customers well. Specifically, career-minded guys in their mid-thirties to early fifties who needed to cram in forty minutes of stress-busting weights and cardio whenever their schedules permitted. So, 24/7 opening hours. But no staff at the desk at five-fifteen in the morning, to save money.

So it was easy for Charles Kruger II to enter the place and locate the target.

Kruger didn’t do gyms any more. He had the overall definition to show for twenty-five years of crunching abs and hacking squats, the classic X-shaped figure. But his chiselled body was offset by his face. Untrimmed beard that looked like a rat had laid down and died on his jaw. Roman nose that lost its way halfway down his face and wound up somewhere approximate to his right cheek. About the only thing that was perfect about Kruger’s face was his teeth.

The gym was practically empty. He made his way past the rows of dormant treadmills and exercise bikes and hit the weights area. Dumb-bells were lined up on a rack to his right. In front of him several exercise benches and a cable-crossover machine.

The target was to the left.

Kruger had spent the past seven days monitoring the guy, looking for a pattern. Like most guys in his position, the target tried to avoid having any semblance of a routine. He took a different route to his workplace each morning, slept in a different hotel every night of the week. He was careful, Kruger conceded.

But not careful enough.

The target was grunting his way through a set of wide-grip bench presses. His back was arched against the bench and his feet planted firmly on the floor as he strained to push up the bar. Kruger counted three 20kg weight plates and a 10kg plate on each side. The bar counted for another 20kg by itself. The guy was pressing a total 160 kg, or twice the weight of the average man. That was another thing, Kruger thought: his employers had told him that the target was a big guy and would present a formidable opponent. Big as an ox and twice as fucking dumb, they said.

Didn’t bother Kruger none.

After all, the bigger they come… Well, let’s just say you ain’t met the guy who could beat you, Kruger told himself.

‘Need a spot?’ he said.

‘I got it,’ the target grunted. Then his elbows seemed to lock and his grip on the barbell wavered. The guy shut his eyes and gave it everything he had.

‘Here, let me help you out,’ Kruger said. The guy couldn’t talk. His disc-shaped face bloated like a pig’s bladder as he fought to keep the barbell suspended eight inches from his chest.

Kruger paced around to the back of the bench press. The only other gym user, a wafer-thin strip of a guy busting out 10kg dumb-bell curls in front of the mirror, glanced over. Kruger shot him a nod that said, Get the fuck out of here. The guy ditched the weights. Bugged out. Kruger tended to have that effect on people.

‘OK, I got it,’ Kruger said to the target.

The target breathed a sigh of relief as Kruger clasped his hands around the grip.

Then the target opened his eyes, and the relief washed away.

‘What the fuck—?’

He eyeballed Kruger’s right arm. The entire lower portion of his arm beneath the elbow was prosthetic.

Kruger released his left hand. He held the barbell’s full weight in his right hand but despite the heavy burden, he displayed no sign of stress. Indeed the opposite was true. Kruger seemed as if he could hold onto that barbell all day long.

‘Your name is Stefan Margitz, correct?’ said Kruger, his voice finally betraying his Texan drawl.

‘I don’t understand—’

Kruger eased his grip on the barbell a little. It dropped five centimetres, fifteen from the target’s chest.

‘Fuck. OK, I’m Margitz,’ the guy said. He stared at the barbell. His eyes leaked pure, unfiltered fear.

‘I have a message from a mutual friend. Dmitri wants his money.’

‘I don’t have it with me.’

Kruger dropped the bar two more inches. Margitz’s lungs filled with terror.

‘Choose your words carefully, pal.’

Snatching at air, the target said, ‘Please, just give me two more days.’

‘You got two more seconds.’

‘Shit, shit…’

Kruger shook his head. ‘Last chance.’

Margitz’s face tightened up like a screw in a hole. He seemed to find courage from somewhere. ‘Fuck it, I don’t have it. I’m warning you, asshole. You’d better lose the fucking weight.’

‘Or what?’

‘I’ll grab that hand of yours and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be tickling your fucking tongue.’

This last comment made Kruger laugh. Not because it was funny, but because Margitz had made the mistake of so many others. He saw a false limb and assumed weakness. Whereas the opposite was true.

Kruger’s was no ordinary limb. While the standard-issue prosthetic was designed to look like and perform the tasks of the one that had originally been lost – essentially a replacement – Kruger’s arm actually enhanced his capabilities.

Three years earlier he’d been the subject of a cutting-edge Pentagon programme. Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR) involved connecting his prosthetic limb directly to the nervous system and motor cortex of his brain, using a cyberware gateway implanted in his spinal column. This cyberware allowed Kruger to control any network or machine that used a computer processor. He could remotely operate machinery, drive cars from a kilometre away and even access the internet just by thinking about it.

The geeks at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) didn’t stop there. They built him an arm that was practically indestructible. His arm was bulletproof, flameproof and fitted with special bionic muscles that had fifty times the force and stopping power of a human arm. Kruger could crush a man’s neck with one quick clip.

So Kruger laughed, because really, Margitz didn’t know shit.

‘What’s so funny?’ Margitz asked.

‘This,’ Kruger said.

He let go of the barbell.

The barbell crashed down ten centimetres onto Margitz’s chest. Then it drove several more into his pectorals. His ribs cracked, splintered, snapped. His diaphragm made a dull squelching sound as the bar squashed it. Kruger heard the hiss of air escaping. Which was appropriate, he reckoned, because his chest looked like a fucking punctured American football. Blood gurgled in Margitz’s mouth as he pawed at the barbell.

His face turned a shade of frozen blue.

Then he stopped pawing.

Kruger quit the gym.

Out on the backstreet, he lit a cigarillo. Kruger wasn’t a cigar kind of guy. Used to be. Until the ban. But fucked if he was going to spend thirty minutes outside working his way through a Cohiba. Cigarillos were smaller, lighter, quicker to smoke.

He was tapping through his contacts list when the guy called him. Not the guy on the Margitz assignment; someone else. A job he was sitting on. Kruger smiled. He liked these periods when work was easy to come by.

‘We have the girl,’ said the voice. He spoke slowly and mauled his words. They all did. It was a Russian thing.

‘Sweet,’ Kruger said.

‘She will be at the premises in three hours.’

He checked his watch. It was five-thirty, exactly an hour behind Greece. ‘Sweet.’

‘The soldier – the Englishman,’ the Russian sneered, ‘he thinks he can save the bitch.’

‘Aww,’ said Kruger, puffing on his cigarillo. ‘Sweet.’

7

Athens. 0556 hours.

Four hours and no fucking word from Land. Gardner tried getting through for the fourth time in forty minutes. Engaged. Again. He threw the phone against the dashboard and swore at the windshield.

Back to Athens. Back to streets of unfinished buildings and empty store units, a legacy of the tanked economy.

Gardner rested the BMW on a sidestreet in the Plaka district, in the centre of the city. While driving he’d thought about renting a cheap hotel room but decided against it. He was down to his last €60. He might need that money for an emergency. And whoever had waited in ambush at the airstrip would surely be looking for him. Besides, it was a hell of a lot easier to ring around hotels and get a name than chase a guy in a car.

He had to clean his wound. Regiment operators were required to have a better understanding of treatment and medicine than the average squaddie. They were expected to survive months in hostile terrain with no recourse to professional medical care, with the result that Gardner knew pretty much everything there was to know about bullets and the damage they caused. For a start, bullets were not sterilized, nor were the guns they were fired from. Ditto the air they travelled through. Which meant they carried bacteria into the flesh. Clothing fabric was also riddled with bacteria. And Gardner’s flesh had been exposed to a large dose of both.

He rooted around the BMW. Found what he was looking for in the glove compartment. A bottle of fresh mineral water. Gardner unscrewed the cap on the bottle with his right hand. Then he gripped the bottle in his fake left, awkwardly tipping the contents over the open wound. The water was lukewarm. It flowed through the gouge of his wound, carrying bits of grit and dirt with it. When he was done, Gardner chucked the bottle and tried moving his arm. Stung like fuck, and the smell was rotten. But at least he could flex it.

Then he tried Land again.

This time he answered.

‘Call you back,’ he said before Gardner could get a word out.

Gardner waited for several minutes. His heart was beating fast. He felt its beat fluttering at the top of his throat. Whoever’s snatched Aimée, he swore to himself, they’re going to pay. With their fucking lives.

Ten minutes later his phone sparked into life.

‘Yes?’ Land said.

‘It was an ambush. We got attacked at the plane, we—’

‘I heard. The pilots have both turned up dead in a hotel room in Kalamos. Had their throats slit.’

‘Someone was waiting there for us,’ Gardner replied. ‘They shot at me and nabbed Aimée.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Spare me the bullshit, Land. Who the fuck were those people?’

‘Calm down, Joe.’ Land’s voice was steadying now. ‘And listen carefully. I’ve this very moment come out of a meeting with our top field agents. You say they took Aimée?’

‘I couldn’t get to her.’

‘It was the Russians.’

‘Sotov?’

‘This goes higher than Sotov. The Russian government is involved.’

‘What about Aimée?’

‘One of our agents in Moscow says two particularly unpleasant individuals have been hired to take care of her.’

Matchsticks lit under Gardner’s chin.

‘Who are they?’

‘They’re called the Kazan Twins. A man and a woman; brother and sister, allegedly. They specialize in torture for the mafya and the federal security services. The man skins people alive.’

Gardner’s world shrank. You promised, he reminded himself. You said you’d protect her.

And now this.

‘But what do they need to torture Aimée for?’ Gardner wondered aloud. ‘They’ve got the laptop and the flash drives.’

‘That’s not the way Russians think, Joe.’

Gardner rang his tongue over his teeth. They were stained with dirt. ‘Where is she?’

‘An apartment block on Kapsis Square, in the Marousi district. About twenty minutes from your present location.’

‘How long until these fucking torturers get there?’

‘Spot of bad news for you, I’m sorry to say,’ Land said, his voice now sibilating with stress. ‘Our agent says the Kazan Twins boarded a private flight to Athens nearly three hours ago. It takes around three hours from Moscow by plane. Say another thirty minutes to reach Aimée.’ Land paused. ‘If you hurry, you can just about make it. You have to stop them, Joe—’

The mobile lost its signal. Gardner removed the battery pack, gave it ten seconds and reinserted it. When he turned the phone on, he had a weak signal. One measly bar. But he also had a new message. A brief video clip. No more than five seconds. It was grainy and heavily pixellated. A face was set against a grey-brown background. The expression was fear. The person’s lip was cut and one eye bruised.

Aimée.

8

0609 hours.

Gardner thundered east down Alexandras Avenue for five kilometres, then banged a left on the dual-lane and shuttled north along Kifisalas Avenue and past the graffitied shell of the old Panathinaikos football stadium. The fuel gauge indicated that the tank was half empty. The tachometer needle was in the red zone. Gardner put the BMW into fourth gear and watched the speedometer climb to ninety-five.

The Marousi neighbourhood was moneyed up and extravagant. It housed the financial district and the Olympic Stadium was visible in the distance. Kapsis Square was sandwiched between two small hills. Gardner pulled into the side of the road, killed the engine and rested his hands on the wheel. Daybreak in Athens and the wild dogs were retreating.

He double-checked the address Land had given him: 10 Kapsis Square. He scoped the square. Hotel to the right, a three-star job trying to front up as a five-star and falling way short. High-rise building on the left, apartments stacked on top of each other, each floor smaller than the one below it, like a mountain of shot glasses. Half the apartments had ‘For Sale’ signs tacked to the balconies. The road was slick from a burst of rainfall at three o’clock that morning. Gardner’s eyes settled on the offices at the bottom of the apartment block.

That’s where they are, he thought. His pulse quickened. Torture was a fucking speciality dish in Russia, and the Kazan Twins were about to make Aimée the main course.

Gardner climbed out of the BMW. The grain of the Glock 17’s stippled-surface grip pressed into the small of his back. The square was deserted. He noticed a Mercedes-Benz E550, arsenic black, outside the apartments. A car that swish looked out of place here. Raindrops on the bonnet and windshield told Gardner the car had been sat there since at least three that morning.

He paced the thirty metres to the building, scanning his peripheral vision. At the main door he pressed the handyman button. There was a buzzing, then a click. He was in.

The corridor was empty. Gardner dug the Glock 17 out of his jeans, gripped it by his side. The lino floor smelled of bleach. His footsteps echoed in the cool corridor.

He climbed two flights of stairs, his shoes squeaking on the polished lino treads. At the door to apartment 10, Gardner raised his right leg, dragged his foot back and delivered a front-kick directly onto the lock. People only shot door locks in the movies. In real life the shooter was more likely to blind himself from the metal splinters flying off the lock plate, or even have the round rebound on him, than actually bust it open. A simple kick was twice as effective and half as loud.

The lock cracked. The door swung open. Gardner hoisted the Glock to shoulder level and edged into the hallway. Three doors ahead. Two on the left, one on the right. Doors on the left closed, door on the right open, sunlight spilling like honey into the hallway from an unseen window. He felt his bowels constricting. His breathing was fast and light.

Gardner smelled cigarette smoke.

He heard the slam of a door and the shudder of a wall. Coming from your ten o’clock. From beyond the open doorway, twelve metres away.

Now he was inside the room, Glock nosing ahead of him. He was hyper-alert. The room was L-shaped. He arced the pistol in a clockwise direction. The room was bare. Totally fucking spartan. No furniture to speak of – just an ashtray on the floor, thin smoke rising from a dozen filter tips. Next to the ashtray was a box of crumpled Mayfairs. Who the fuck smokes Mayfairs in Greece?

Then he spied movement at his three o’clock.

At the far wall.

The wall had a door that led out onto the northern face of the apartment block. As Gardner walked towards it he caught the hurried clank-clank of shoes treading on metal. He burst through the door and found himself on the platform of a fire escape. He scanned the area below. A metal staircase spiralled down into an alleyway a universal shade of brown. Two figures were sprinting out of the alley and into the square. A man and a woman. Too far away and too grainy still to make out their faces. All he could see was that the woman’s hair was ginger. The guy was scrawny, had a bald patch and wore a grey suit.

The fucking Kazans.

He thought about firing off a shot. Decided against it. The twins didn’t have Aimée with them. He needed to capture them alive and find out where she was being held.

He cleared the bottom step of the fire escape five seconds after the pair had disappeared from view.

Back in the square, he clocked his BMW. The chassis was sitting a few inches lower than normal. They’d slashed his fucking tyres before hightailing it. Gardner figured they could have only gone one way out of the square, and thundered into a street backing on to an American-style mall. And there was the woman, the guy just ahead, both sprinting hard.

Gardner’s own running style was pretty solid. He had a lot of calf and quad muscles to compensate for his average stride, and his lungs put the average guy’s to shame. But the Kazans were tall and skinny, with long legs, and for every stride they took Gardner needed to take two to stop them widening the gap.

If I can just get to her, he thought. He was thirty metres from her. Thirty-five to the guy. He felt an elevator of pain shoot up from his right oblique to his ribcage. Don’t lose the pace, he urged himself. Beads of sweat dripped into his eyes, salting his vision.

The street ended where the mall ended, and there the twins took a right into a narrow sidestreet that served the backs of restaurants on both sides. Outdoor chairs and tables were stacked up against the walls on either side of the road. Waste food formed a sludge river that flowed from one end of the street to the other.

Twenty metres to the woman.

Then she tripped on her ankle.

Gardner dug deeper. The pain took a return route down his left side, but now he was just ten metres from the woman. She was scraping herself off the pavement. He glanced ahead towards the man as he hit the end of the street. The guy paused, head darting back and forth, uncertain whether to leave her or come back.

The woman spared him the choice. She shot to her feet with a renewed agility that caught Gardner off guard. She grabbed the leg of the bottom chair in a tall column and pulled hard on it. The chairs toppled, their metal frames clattering against the ground. Then she ran off. Gardner kicked the chairs aside.

The man, then the woman, catching up with him, spun left, out of view.

Gardner hit the corner and saw them racing down a gentle slope. Pigeons squawked and flapped as they fled. The road flattened out forty metres down and led into a junction. Gardner saw the nose of a car shoot out like a spear across the junction, thought it was going to slam into the twins.

The car, a Focus, stopped dead, but the bumper hit the man’s legs and he fell onto the bonnet. The woman grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright and they took off again.

Gardner sprinted down the slope. He passed the junction, where drivers were yelling at the guy in the Focus for braking so hard. He chased the twins as they ran past a row of kebab houses and souvenir shops and up a set of concrete steps.

The steps led into a ticket office, and Gardner saw a sign on the outside: they were heading into a suburban railway station.

He was just ten metres from them now, his superior stamina and strength kicking in. In a sprint, Gardner didn’t have the pace, but put him in for the long haul and he’d hunt down anyone, eventually.

The twins vaulted over the ticket barriers. Gardner likewise. A train pulled into the adjacent platform, shining grey, all moulded plastic and futuristic design. An announcement on the Tannoy. A dozen people got off; plenty more boarded. Gardner searched among the throng for the pair. Couldn’t fucking see either of them. Maybe they’re not on the train, he thought.

The doors beeped. They were about to close.

You need to call it. On or off?

Gardner ducked into the corridor of the nearest carriage. He scanned the platform through the window as the train gently eased forward, got a long, hard look at the faces bobbing towards the station exit. There were twenty humdrum faces, bored faces, angry faces, the kind he’d seen on the Tube a million fucking times. Commuters who looked like their lives needed a reboot. Twenty faces, but none of them matched the man or the woman.

That means they’re on this train.

The platform shrank from view.

An automatic door slid open and he dipped his head and steamed through the doorway into the carriage itself.

9

0700 hours.

Cool air greeted Gardner as he made his way along the carriage. The train was packed. Men and women, most of them middle-aged and stressed, sat and fiddled with their BlackBerrys and iPhones. Others stared out of the window at the ticker-tape landscape: trees, roads, cars, houses, fusing into a granite blur.

At each seat Gardner checked out the faces. The commuters either ignored him or eyed him suspiciously. Hardly surprising: he looked like shit. His T-shirt was torn at the sleeve and his right arm emitted a pungent aroma. He didn’t exactly blend in. At least my Glock’s hidden away, he thought. He’d stuffed it back into his jeans, covering the pistol grip with the bottom of his T-shirt.

He cleared the first carriage. No luck. He paused at the next sliding door separating the carriages. A soft female voice made a pre-recorded announcement just before the train slowed and pulled into the next station.

Gardner peered through the window of the automatic door. Saw a couple of guys dragging themselves out of their seats, going through the same rituals as workers the world over: straightening the tie, pin-locking the mobile, reaching for the briefcase from the overhead storage rack.

One of the guys shuffled down the aisle.

Gardner spotted a knot of ginger hair at the next seat.

He hung by the door, waiting for the right moment. The train eased into the platform. Some place called Pallini. Then the train stopped. As soon as the lights blinked and the doors slid back like some kind of robotic curtain call, Gardner stepped through the automatic door and used the departing crowd to obscure his profile from the Kazans. The ginger-haired woman remained seated. They weren’t getting off. The guy was on his feet and making his way to the toilet at Gardner’s end of the carriage. He hadn’t spotted him in the throng.

Gardner retreated into the previous carriage and peered back through the window. The man slipped into the toilet. Now Gardner rushed back into the next carriage and in a second he was blocking the closing toilet door with his left arm and using the force in his shoulder muscles to push it back. The door whirred, clicked, conceded defeat.

The guy was standing at the toilet, primed to take a leak. He’d heard the whirring and was turning around to see what the fuck was going on behind him. Gardner raised his right leg at the knee and put his foot level with the lower part of the guy’s back.

Knocked forward by the blow, the guy seized hold of the cistern just as the door closed. There was piss all over the floor. Gardner grabbed him by his hair. The guy yelped. Then Gardner smashed his face into the mirror above the basin, and the yelp fizzled out to a low wheeze. But Gardner didn’t stop. He drove the guy’s head repeatedly into the mirror. Spiderweb cracks formed with every impact. Blood spots painted the glass.

Now he smashed the guy’s head against the porcelain edge of the basin. Gooey blood and snot streamed out of his nose. Now he wasn’t making any sound at all. His arms hung limply by his side.

Gardner spun him around and shoved him onto the toilet seat. The toilet stank of piss and sweat. The guy’s dick dangled out of his zip. The ash grey of his trousers was a much darker colour on the inside thigh of both legs. The guy cupped his nose between his hands. Tiny shards of glass were embedded in his forehead. Before he had a chance to react, Gardner whipped out the Glock and nestled the cold muzzle between his balls.

‘Tell me where Aimée is.’

‘Please—’ the guy said.

Gardner swiped the guy’s hands away from his face. His nose was purple and swollen. His lips were purple and swollen. His whole face was a mass of purple putty.

‘Please, don’t—’

The voice hit Gardner like a piece of two by four.

‘What did you just say?’

The guy stammered, ‘Please, please, don’t kill me.’

Each syllable throbbed inside Gardner’s skull. Not because Gardner recognized the voice. He didn’t. But the accent was unmistakable. The guy spoke with a London accent. He swallowed his Ts and made his double Ls a W.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘We’re on your side,’ the man said.

‘Your fucking name,’ Gardner shoving the Glock harder into his groin. The man squirmed.

‘Peter Stokes.’

‘You were on your way to kill Aimée.’

‘No, I swear.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I don’t know anyone called that!’

‘Then who the fuck are you?’

The guy’s face twisted with pain. Snot dribbled down his nose and formed a slithery tache around his mouth. He stared at the broken mirror for the longest while, then directed his gaze at Gardner.

‘I’m with MI6,’ he said.

10

0721 hours.

Gardner kept the Glock pressed against Stokes’s balls. His first reaction was that the guy was full of shit. But then he considered the accent. It was as English as beating the shit out of someone in the town centre on a Friday night. And undercover spies, even ones who practised the accent for years with such discipline that they avoided ever talking in their native tones, still betrayed occasional traces of an accent. Especially when someone had a Glock in their face.

And then he thought about Stokes’s appearance. The guy looked more like an accountant than a crazed killer. He had a doughy jawline and the slack body shape of someone who spent their nine-to-five hunched in front of a computer. He probably moisturized first thing in the morning and ironed his shirts last thing at night.

But part of Gardner didn’t want to believe Stokes.

Because if he really was MI6, then he had no lead on Aimée.

The silence lasted for several seconds. Then Stokes broke it.

‘I’m telling you the truth. My colleague’s name is Rachel Salvago. We’re agents with the counterintelligence division at the Ministry.’ He frowned at the Glock. ‘Look, why don’t you put the gun away and we can talk about this?’

‘The gun stays where it is,’ Gardner said. ‘Who’s your boss?’

‘Leo Land.’

‘Land sent me to kill you.’

‘How well do you know Land? And who the hell are you anyway?’ said Stokes, eyeing Gardner’s frame.

‘Don’t worry about me, mate,’ Gardner said. ‘Tell me your story.’

‘All this is about Istanbul.’

Gardner loosened the grip on the pistol. ‘I’m listening.’

‘Land knows,’ Stokes said.

‘Knows what?’

Stokes shook his head at the piss-streaked floor. He took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, me and Salvago work for Land. We just get on with our jobs and look the other way. But—’

Gardner was staring hard at Stokes. What the fuck he was talking about? Every minute without a lead made it less and less likely he’d find Aimée.

Stokes went on: ‘About a month ago Salvago picked up a string of mobile calls made between Moscow and the Firm. They were made late at night, and always to the same number in Russia. We did some digging, and found out that the Russian number belonged to a guy in the mafya. His name was Aleksandr Sotov.’

Gardner felt invisible hands Chinese-burn his neck. He knew what was coming next, but he had to ask the question. ‘Who was he talking to at the Firm?’

Stokes’s face hardened. ‘Take a wild guess.’

‘Shit!’ Gardner said.

The train slowed once more. The doped-up female voice informed them they were pulling into the next stop: Kantza.

‘What were they talking about?’ Gardner asked.

Someone rapped their knuckles on the toilet door and shouted angrily in Greek. Once, twice, three times.

‘Be out in a minute,’ Gardner called out. He looked back to Stokes and gestured for him to answer.

‘Land knew that the Russians intended to sell a nuke to somebody and blow it up in Turkey. And not only that, he played his part too.’

‘How so?’

‘Land recruited an ex-SAS soldier to take delivery of the bomb.’

Gardner felt his guts stretch, like someone was pulling him in either direction. ‘Land made me track Bald.’

Stokes just looked blank. He clearly had no idea who the fuck Bald was.

‘Did you try and confront Land?’ Gardner asked.

‘You’re kidding? Land is one of the most powerful mandarins in Whitehall.’

Stokes touched his jaw and winced. ‘We didn’t say anything, but somehow Land must have cottoned on that we knew.’

‘How?’

The train was now gathering speed again.

‘Because the day before the bomb exploded, he suddenly dispatched both me and Salvago to Athens. I mean, like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘Told us to head to an address and await further instructions.’

‘Number ten Kapsis Square.’

‘Then we heard about the bomb.’

‘And then you saw me coming.’

‘And we knew he wanted us out of the way for good. So we ran.’

Gardner tore a fistful of paper towels out of the dispenser and chucked them at Stokes.

‘Clean yourself up. Then you’re going to introduce me to Salvago.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to see if her story matches yours. If it does, maybe I’ll start believing what you’re saying.’

‘There’s something you should know,’ said Stokes, dabbing at his bleeding nose. He pulled the towel away and examined the red splodges. ‘A friend inside the building sent me a message last night. Our offices were ransacked. Computers taken away. Mobiles too.’

Gardner thought back to Aimée. She was carrying the MacBook and the flash drives. ‘All right, let’s meet Salvago,’ he said.

One hand holding a tissue under his nose, Stokes unlocked the toilet door and walked down the aisle. The carriage was mostly empty now. The ginger girl was at a table seat. Steam wafted from a cup of coffee in front of her. She took one look at Stokes’s face and made to stand up, but he put her at her ease. She slid back down into her seat. Gardner thought he saw something in her eyes when she looked at Stokes. Something that said they were maybe more than just colleagues.

There were two seats either side of the table. Stokes sat next to Salvago, Gardner opposite them.

‘Who are you?’ Salvago said in a warm and husky voice. Gardner didn’t much rate redheads but a bit more time spent around her might make him change his mind. She had eyes the colour of summer grass, high cheekbones and a ten-out-of-ten rack. She had left two buttons undone on her white blouse, revealing cleavage that would make a grown man punch a hole in a wall. If Salvago and Stokes were getting it on, fair play to the lad.

Gardner looked at her and told her, ‘Land sent me to kill you.’

‘It’s true,’ Stokes said. The bruises on his face said the rest.

The woman leaned as far back from Gardner as the seat allowed and exchanged a look with Stokes.

‘It’s OK,’ Stokes said.

‘Land told me you were a couple of Russian torturers,’ Gardner went on. ‘He said you were holding a friend of mine hostage.’

Salvago arched an eyebrow. ‘What friend?’

‘Her name’s Aimée. We worked together in Serbia. She was freelancing for the Firm.’

Salvago bit her lower lip. ‘This Aimée, does she know stuff?’

‘She knows all right. Transcripts of conversations between Sotov and a guy by the name of Maxim Ledinsky, a director in the FSB.’ Salvago nodded on hearing the guy’s name. ‘Other files were encrypted. We didn’t have time to crack them.’

Salvago said, ‘I’ll bet my mortgage those files name and shame Leo bloody Land. Where’d you find them?’

‘Pulled them from a factory the other side of the city. Sotov had some kind of a storage facility there.’

‘What happened to the rest?’

‘Up in smoke.’

‘Damn,’ Salvago muttered. She struck Gardner as the sort of girl whose swear-scale stopped at ‘bloody hell’. ‘Then we can’t prove the link between Land and the Russians.’

‘Aimée had some of the files with her.’

‘Where is she?’ Stokes asked.

‘I don’t know. Land arranged a flight home for us. It was an ambush. They took her,’ said Gardner, then fished out his mobile and played them the clip. Salvago and Stokes squinted at the grainy images.

‘Jesus,’ said Stokes. Salvago was quiet. Gardner was left alone with his thoughts. If Land was involved with the nuke, that would explain why Land had asked him to kill Bald only after the exchange had been made.

‘Give me your phone,’ Salvago said. Gardner pressed it into her palm. She dug out an outdated Nokia notebook from the front pocket of her jeans and tapped away on a few keys. ‘My expertise is e-crime and communications,’ she said. ‘The Nokia is a specially modified handset. It bypasses the security encryptions and protocols on networks and gives me the raw data direct from the satellite. Basically I can track the GPS details of any mobile, anywhere in the world, just by plugging this into it. Like so.’

‘Fucking hell.’ Despite himself, Gardner was impressed.

Salvago tapped some more. Then she unplugged the Nokia from Gardner’s mobile and took a sip of her coffee.

‘I know where your friend is,’ she said.

Gardner and Stokes flashed quizzical looks.

‘Rotterdam.’

11

Rotterdam, Holland. 0930 hours.

It was exactly nine-thirty in the morning in Hamburg, an hour behind Athens, and Kruger debarked from a VLM plane splayed on the gun-metal runway at Rotterdam Airport. Kruger hated flying but his employers insisted he come to Holland immediately. They explained that the Brit and his two friends would be in-country soon. Kruger had checked out the train route, his preferred mode of transport. It would have taken him something like twelve hours and five stopovers: Hamburg to Bremen, Bremen to Leer on the Dutch border, Leer to Groningen, yada fucking yada. The journey was just over an hour by plane, so he bit the bullet and flew.

Kruger had no baggage. In his opinion a man needed only three things in the world: protein, water and the ability to hunt and kill.

She’ll be at the premises in three hours, the Russian had said. That was at five o’clock. The woman would be there already. Knowing the Russians, she probably wouldn’t be in mint condition. No big deal. She was fucking dead either way.

The Chevrolet Avalanche was nestled among the people carriers and the Golfs in the long-stay car park. Kruger hit the A13 south towards Rotterdam and curled his lip at the flat skyline. He hated Holland. Despised the fucking place. Dirty, grey, flat as day-old Cola.

Fuck it, he told himself as he neared the premises.

The targets will be here in a couple of hours. Deal with them, you could be out of the country by nightfall. He lit a cigarillo and tightened his grip on the wheel.

12

1029 hours.

Fifty-nine minutes after Kruger’s VLM touched down, a Boeing 737-700 landed at Rotterdam and taxied into the same parking spot the VLM craft had occupied. Gardner, Stokes and Salvago briskly moved through passport control and made their way through arrivals. The airport was a ghost town. Ditto the flight. The nuke seemed to have put a lot of people off flying.

Salvago checked something on the Nokia.

‘How accurate is that thing?’ Gardner asked her.

‘It picks up on the broadcast signals from satellites, the same ones that phones link with to get a reading on their longitude, latitude and altitude. Normally a phone receives radio signals from at least three satellites. This thing,’ Salvago said, ‘receives its signals from twenty-four. So yeah, pretty damn accurate.’

Salvago turned her attention back to the Nokia. Stokes and Gardner had ditched their phones in Athens in case Land tried to trace their signals. Once word reached Land that Salvago and Stokes were still alive, he’d do everything in his power to track them down and slot them. Gardner was sure of it. He’d also had to dump his gun. Somehow he figured airport security wouldn’t approve.

‘Stop,’ Salvago said as Gardner reached the main doors. ‘Step outside those doors and Land will see you.’

Gardner frowned. ‘How come?’

‘Latest satellite tracking technology.’

‘Spies in the sky?’

‘Years ago satellites were pretty poor at tracking human beings. All you could see from space was a head of hair. Not exactly a lot to go on when you’re looking for one person among six billion. But there’s new software that maps out someone’s gait. See, everybody has their own way of walking. The software matches your shadow, gets an instant lock on you wherever you are.’

‘So how do we get out of here?’

‘We wait for a black spot.’

‘Like when the satellite’s not over us?’

‘Exactly. You see, there’s only a few satellites that have this software installed. So there are periods when the sky is clear. Twenty minutes at a time. And the next one is in’ – she consulted the Nokia – ‘fifteen minutes.’

To pass the time they sat at a café in the arrivals area. Stokes took a coffee, black. Salvago ordered a decaf. Gardner went with a Diet Coke, sipping at it as he watched Sky News on a big plasma TV hooked to the wall. The he-and-she presenter team looked stern-faced. The camera cut to a shot of a guy in a dark-grey suit. He was standing in front of a lectern, a bank of microphones in front of him.

‘This was the damning response to last night’s atrocity from the Israeli Prime Minister Lev Yalom,’ a reporter announced over the images. Yalom spoke aggressively, his right hand formed into a chubby fist. He thumped the lectern, disrupting his notes. ‘No more broken promises,’ Yalom said. The voice-over said, ‘Here in Jerusalem it’s become increasingly clear that Israel sees the Iranians’ attempt to smuggle nuclear arms into Tehran as a declaration of war.’

There was footage of an Israeli F-15l Ra’am fighter plane, followed by a shot of the Knesset. The chamber was packed.

‘This morning Prime Minister Yalom issued an ultimatum to Tehran: either Iran unconditionally agrees to dismantle its nuclear programme within the next twenty-four hours, or Israel will do it for them. Even as he spoke, the Israeli Air Force was making preparations for retaliatory attacks against key military and civilian targets in Iran, believed to include the civilian Bushehr nuclear facility.’

The report cut back to the news desk. Breaking news scrolled across the bottom of the screen. A defence expert was introduced. Gardner had seen dozens of these experts on TV and never rated their opinions. They were all retired ruperts or Whitehall pen-pushers. He looked away.

‘It’s starting,’ he said.

Stokes tore open a sachet and tipped sugar into his cup. ‘Israel’s bluffing. They won’t dare bomb Iran.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Joe’s right,’ Salvago said.

‘They want this to happen,’ said Gardner. ‘Blaming the Iranians for the nuke gives them licence to shoot up whoever they please for the sake of national security. They’ll bomb Iran back into the fucking stone age.’

Gardner finished his Coke and licked his lips. He felt the sugar and caffeine ease the pressure behind his temples. A bus pulled up outside the airport. Salvago took a last gulp of coffee.

‘It’s time,’ Gardner said. ‘We need to go.’

They shuffled through the exit and ran the twenty metres to the bus stop. Hopped on board the number 33 bus and purchased three one-way tickets to Rotterdam Centraal station.

‘Where exactly are we headed?’ asked Gardner, sitting opposite the other two.

‘An address on Van Brakelstraat,’ Salvago told him.

‘Any idea what kind of place?’

‘Nope.’

Great, Gardner thought. We’re going in half-cocked to face an enemy we know nothing about. He prayed that Aimée was there. He prayed she was OK. He hoped the guys who snatched her were saying their prayers too. Because when Gardner came face to face with them, they were going to the dark side.

All of them.

13

1111 hours.

Van Brakelstraat was a narrow street off the arterial road snaking its way alongside Rotterdam’s docks. The turning was signposted by a Russian Orthodox church on the left, a crucifix planted like a flag atop the cupola, its golden surface turned a muddy bronze by the clouds.

They walked down the street, sticking to the shadows cast by the three-storey buildings, hunched and Gothic. After two hundred metres they came to a residential block with a brown façade like someone had coated it in old carpet. It had rusting gates and neo-Nazi graffiti sprayed over the walls. Some kind of shop occupied the ground floor. There was no sign, just a paper notice taped to the reverse of the glass upper part of the door that read: ‘DISCREET SHOP. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.’

Stokes finished reading the notice and said, ‘Weird.’

‘No,’ Gardner said. ‘It’s a porn store.’

Stokes lifted his hand to his forehead and peered through the grime-coated glass. ‘Well, whatever it is, there’s nobody home. Maybe those GPS coordinates weren’t spot-on.’

‘No, it’s definitely here,’ Salvago said, irritated.

Gardner settled the lovers’ tiff with a boot to the door. The glass pane shattered. Then he raked away the remaining shards with his prosthetic hand. At least there’s one use for this fucking thing, he thought, reaching through the hole with his left hand and unhooking the latch. He twisted the doorknob and gestured to Salvago and Stokes.

The shop was dingy and dark. A musty, stale aroma hung in the air. There were rows of ancient DVDs, porn titles ranging from softcore to extreme. Most of the covers were coated with greying dust. Gardner clocked security cameras fixed to each corner of the ceiling. He headed past a rack of sex dolls and plastic vaginas towards the counter, to the top of which were taped faded posters advertising local prostitutes and massage parlours. There was no cash register. Behind the counter was an unlocked door, and Gardner opened it. Fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling flashed on like paparazzi. They lit up a staircase leading into a basement. Gardner started down the stairs, trying to get a bearing on the room below. Stokes and Salvago followed close behind. Gardner felt the temperature drop with every step. It was cooler and felt damp in the basement. By the time he’d reached the bottom step, the bristles on his right forearm were standing on end.

His first thought was that it didn’t look like a standard basement. The walls were lined with metal sheets, the floor tiled. The ceiling was divided into solid-looking panels. Overall it resembled an underground bunker.

The space was also a lot bigger than he expected. It stretched for forty metres, was roughly the same width and seemed to be divided into three distinct areas. This place is fucking huge, Gardner thought. It must stretch underneath several buildings. He’d seen smaller underground car parks back home.

In the nearest section stood a group of metal drums marked with hazard labels and giving off a toxic smell.

‘Piperonyl methyl ketone,’ Salvago said at his shoulder. ‘PMK. It’s synthesized from sassafras tree. They use it in perfumes.’

‘In porn-shop basements?’

‘They also use it to make something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Take a look,’ Salvago said, nodding towards the next section.

Four benches almost filled the basement’s middle area. They were cluttered with portable heaters, fans, distillation flasks and funnels, packets of surgical gloves and breathing masks, plus a large waste pipe that ran the length of the place. A tablet-pressing machine was connected to a mobile power generator to the left. The machine had a wide metal base shaped like a tree trunk with a sequence of punches aligned above and below the die plate that chemical compounds were fed into. Rotating turrets were screwed like shoulders to each side of the unit and at the top a piston connected the turrets along its horizontal plane. A solid-metal punch was suspended above the die at the top of the machine. The head of the punch was about ten centimetres across and the sharp tip about a centimetre. At the bottom of the machine a silver slide collected the pills as the die spat them out. A few lay in the bottom of the tray and Gardner picked one up. They were eggshell white with a blue smiley face on them.

Gardner looked to the far end of the room, where a third area had been established. Clear plastic bin liners were filled with tens of thousands of the same small white pills. A ladder on the back wall led up to a metal cellar hatch that opened upwards in the middle, like horizontal double doors. Gardner figured they fed the pills up the ladder and into the street, where they were loaded into a disguised lorry.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Stokes said.

‘There must be fifty thousand pills in those bags,’ Gardner said.

Salvago examined the table apparatus. ‘At least. And it’s not surprising. The Russian mafya play a major role in ecstasy production. The chemicals are smuggled in from China to Russia, then shipped here where they make the pills and then put them into lorry containers to ship via the North Sea to England.’

‘I thought Amsterdam was where the drug action is?’ Stokes said.

‘Amsterdam has the rep, but Rotterdam is the real drug capital of Europe. About six thousand people are employed by the drugs industry round here.’

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Gardner said. ‘The mafya don’t use big developments like this to produce drugs. It’s too clunky. Nowadays they have mobile vans for that kind of stuff. And you can practically turn a toilet cubicle into an ecstasy factory. Why go to the risk of having such a large processing plant – and then have no kind of security on the door? It makes no sense.’

‘And I don’t see Sotov anywhere,’ Salvago said.

Gardner was drawn to a light coming from the far end of the basement. It glowed green and bright, like a cathode ray. As he neared it, Gardner realized the light was coming from a separate room, a laboratory of some kind. He signalled for Salvago and Stokes to stay back. He stepped inside and ran his eyes over the equipment. Computer servers, scales, navigation charts, what appeared to be a radar monitor, and a pile of chunky old mobiles with aerials sticking out of them. Cables snaked from the devices along the ground to the generator.

Gardner didn’t see anyone. But he heard rapid, shallow breathing. At his four o’clock.

He stilled.

‘Joe? Is that you?’

She was hiding the other side of the doorway. She held a spanner in both hands. She had a look in her eyes – not fear, Gardner thought. More like anger. But that look drained from her face as she dropped the spanner and pounced on Gardner and hugged him and held him tight.

‘You’re warm,’ Aimée said. ‘Your hands are warm.’

Gardner felt a bubble rise in his stomach and burst in his chest.

‘What happened to you?’

Aimée sighed into his shoulder. ‘They put a bag over my head. We were in a car, then on a plane. Then they took me here.’ She paused. ‘I heard other voices with you—’

Salvago and Stokes stood in the doorway. He introduced them to Aimée and said, ‘They believe Land is involved in the nuke plot.’

Aimée said nothing. She peeled away from Gardner and made her way to the computers. ‘They trashed the MacBook, but they weren’t clever enough to find the flash drives.’

She tapped away at the keyboard. Gardner noticed that one of the memory sticks was plugged into the front of the computer tower. Aimée drew up several Word files on the screen.

‘I still can’t break the encryptions,’ she said.

Salvago stepped forward. ‘Mind if I have a go?’

Aimée waved a hand at the screen, as if to say, Be my guest. Salvago took Aimée’s place and typed ultra-fast while she looked on beside her. Gardner left them to it. He went to check on the basement. He was mindful that the owners of the ecstasy plant might return at any moment. The presser drew his attention. It was a large-scale industrial machine and Gardner reckoned the mafya must be pumping out a million pills a day using it. Enough to keep London happy for a weekend. Fresh chemical dust covered the floor around the presser. It’s been used recently, Gardner thought. So where the hell did the mafya fuckers go? He was no closer to answering that question when Salvago announced that she had cracked the encryptions.

‘Already?’ Gardner asked, returning to the lab.

‘Told you she was good,’ Stokes said, crossing his arms and nodding at the computer.

Gardner, Aimée and Stokes drew close to the screen. Gardner read the transcript. Aleksandr Sotov was explicitly talking about and the plan to blow it up in Istanbul.

Except Sotov wasn’t shooting the shit with some FSB bigwig.

He was talking to Leo Land.

Stokes flashed an I-told-you-so look at Gardner. Salvago gave him a slight nod and said, ‘We need to get these files public.’

The pressure behind Gardner’s eyes was red-hot. From the neck down his body tightened up, like a rope bearing a heavy load. Land had betrayed the Firm. He’d participated in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. And he’d betrayed Gardner too.

No, he corrected himself. He played me like a fucking drum kit.

‘Land is going to fucking pay,’ Gardner said.

‘Pay how?’ Salvago asked.

‘The old-fashioned way. With a bullet.’

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said Aimée.

‘Which is?’

‘We gather the media at Parliament Square and tell them the truth.’

‘And Israel will have to call off its attack,’ said Salvago.

‘Then we’ll need to act quickly,’ said Stokes. ‘Yalom was saying the bombings would start in twenty-four hours.’

If that happens, Gardner thought, there won’t be any going back. He made a silent promise to himself. Once the truth is exposed, Land is mine. And I won’t show that cunt a grain of mercy.

‘OK, let’s get a move on,’ he said.

Aimée unplugged the flash drives from the computer and tucked them into her knickers. So that’s her secret place, Gardner told himself. Aimée gave him a dirty look as they followed Salvago and Stokes up the stairs and out of the basement. They lingered at the shop door, Stokes scoping out the street.

Salvago glanced at her Nokia. ‘We’re in a black spot. OK, let’s go.’

Gardner was first outside. He glanced across his shoulders in both directions. Force of habit. He could see no movement to his right. A white-diamond Chevrolet Avalanche was parked up eighty metres to the left. Gardner noticed the windows weren’t tinted. He had a clear view of the interior. He saw the leather seats and the dark cashmere dash. No one behind the wheel.

Satisfied the coast was clear, Gardner began pacing down the street. Movement the other side of the road. He glanced over his left shoulder, saw a figure standing opposite. The guy was built like a tank and dressed like a wrestler. He wore a threadbare army-green vest beneath a mid-length trench coat and black combats. The guy’s right arm was tucked into his coat pocket. And he was wearing heavily tinted shades. But Gardner sensed the guy was eyeballing him.

Then the guy called out to him. ‘Hey, buddy.’ His accent was thick and slow as roofing tar. American, Gardner figured. From the South.

Gardner walked on.

‘I fucking said, hey buddy.’

Gardner stopped.

‘Come get some,’ the guy said.

Gardner stood by the side of the road and asked himself who the fuck this guy was. But then he countered that it didn’t matter. The chances of some random guy heckling them in the street were low. This guy has something to do with the basement, Gardner thought. He was of a mind to ask the Yank a few questions.

‘Yo, I’ll fuck you up,’ the guy said.

Gardner was quiet. But he began to pace across the street.

The guy opened his mouth again, lips like a knife-slit beneath the thickness of his beard. A sound came out like a swarm of angry bees.

Then Gardner realized the sound was coming from up the street. A motor being gunned. He angled his head and saw the Avalanche bombing forward.

Heading straight for him.

14

1203 hours.

The car hit him like a fist, and he felt ribs crack as the front bumper knuckled his midriff. His entire front was a wall of pain. His arm thumped against the bonnet and dented the aluminium base. Then the Avalanche braked, the chassis rocked on its wheelbase and Gardner fell to the ground, face smacking against the tarmac. Between the bulbs of pain behind his eyes, a distant voice in his head asked, Who the fuck is driving the thing? Because he hadn’t seen a driver behind the wheel.

His thought was interrupted by the growl of the Avalanche revving for round two.

It had reversed twenty metres back from Gardner’s position, building itself up for another run at him. He tried to pick himself up off the floor. It hurt like fuck but he willed himself to raise himself to a knee. Couldn’t stand. He spat blood and heard a kind of garbled laugh from his three o’clock. The Yank.

‘Fucking idiot,’ the guy said.

The Avalanche thundered towards Gardner.

He was bang in the middle of the road. The Avalanche was almost on him.

At five metres, the car suddenly swerved to his left. Stokes was making a run for it down the street. Salvago was in tow, Aimée further behind, her outline shaded by the interior of the porn shop. Gardner realized the Avalanche was beating a direct route towards Stokes. It slammed into him and crushed his body beneath the tyres. Gardner heard something snap, like an axe splitting hardwood. He glimpsed arms and legs beneath the tyres’ grinding weight.

Salvago shrieked. The Avalanche continued on up the street. Gardner was sure it was going to turn round up ahead and hurtle back down the street to finish them off. But Salvago seemed oblivious. She was rushing over to Stokes.

Gardner couldn’t see Aimée. He sprinted after the Avalanche.

The car slowed as it came to the end of the street, then skidded into a U-turn. As it cleared the apex of the turn, Gardner reached the driver’s door. He flung it open as the vehicle completed the turn and began to pick up speed again. Gardner had a clear view of the street. He couldn’t see the Yank anywhere.

With the door open and his feet off the ground, Gardner planted his left foot on the driver’s seat. The sudden forward motion acted like a wind against the open door and began to swing it shut. Gardner grabbed hold of the doorframe and felt the door bang against his back.

The impact pushed him inside head-first. Gardner landed on his front, the gear-shift winding him, but he looked up and saw Salvago six metres from the windscreen, her face bewitched by the onrushing Avalanche.

It was heading straight for her.

Gardner clasped his right hand on the wheel. It didn’t roll easy, not like a steering wheel ought to. There was a counterforce working to keep the wheel straight. But Gardner had strength and muscle mass to burn. He broke the pressure and the wheel loosened like a defeated contestant in an arm-wrestle. Gardner yanked it all the way to the right.

He saw Salvago’s face sweep past the driver-side window, and relief washed down his back. The Avalanche had narrowly avoided her.

And crashed straight into a parked VW Passat.

Gardner jolted in his seat. His wrist muscles absorbed the shock of the crash, stayed clamped around the wheel, but he reeled and banged the back of his head against the headrest. The pain echoed around his skull, mixing with the Passat’s alarm, its scream blotting out every other sound. The Passat went through a symphony of alarm sounds, each one more annoying than the last.

A banging sound on the Avalanche’s roof. Its body rocked, as if it was caught up in the middle of a real fucking avalanche. What the fuck’s that? Gardner wondered. He moved a hand to the door…

The roof above his head was ripped open, the metal torn apart like wet paper. Gardner’s eyes flicked up. He saw the downward plunge of a balled fist, knuckles forming a jagged line that was on a trajectory straight for his face, fast and deadly.

Gardner was faster. His reactions engaged in a split second. He dodged the hand and shifted all his weight to his left and forward, reached across and shunted the shift into reverse. Then he accelerated and jerked the wheel clockwise, the Avalanche quickly gaining speed. But now the hand gripped Gardner’s neck. The fingers seemed unnatural. Cold and plastic.

Like my own.

When he’d reversed about twenty metres, Gardner stamped on the brakes. Now he shifted into first gear and trod down, making the Avalanche lurch forward. Gardner watched the arm shoot up through the hole in the roof like an upside-down periscope. Next thing he knew, a figure was tumbling down the windscreen and rolling across the bonnet before disappearing behind the front bumper.

The Yank.

Gardner scrambled out after him.

The guy was already up and charged at him.

Gardner was knocked off his feet and landed on his back. The guy was on top of him and shaped to punch with his right hand. Gardner clenched both his hands around the guy’s wrists. They were locked in a stalemate on the ground. That fucking arm.

The Yank’s strength overwhelmed Gardner. His forearms burned. The guy was halfway to pinning him down when Gardner got a second wind. He headbutted the guy on the slope of his nose. The guy winced and the force on Gardner lessened. Now Gardner slammed his left hand against the Avalanche’s open door, sandwiching the Yank’s head between the door and the frame. He felt the head being pulped, and the Yank dropped. Gardner shot to his feet and called to Salvago.

‘Where’s Aimée?’

‘I… I don’t…’

Salvago’s big, moist eyes glanced towards the porn shop. Aimée was back inside.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Gardner said, offering Salvago his hand. She looked at it, then back at Stokes.

Fuck this, Gardner thought. He hauled Salvago with him back into the shop, and found Aimée crouched behind the counter.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said.

‘That guy… he’s still out there.’

‘He’s finished.’

Aimée nodded and stood up. Her eyes were warm and bright. Then they clouded grey and rested on a spot past his right shoulder. Gardner slowly turned around and saw the Yank. He was alive. His face looked like someone had worked on him with a mallet, purple blotches on his forehead, his nose bloody. But he was most definitely fucking alive.

Pounding down the street. Towards the shop.

The Yank was a few metres from the door when the shop’s windows rattled. Inside, daylight dimmed as a hefty metal shutter tumbled down over the front of the shop. Gardner glimpsed the Yank standing out in the street, the top half of his body cut off from view. There was a terrific clattering as the shutter sealed up the shop, like a million snare drums sounding at once. Light crept in between gaps in the metal. The only exit route was blocked.

‘We’re trapped,’ Aimée said.

Gardner had an idea. ‘Maybe not.’

Aimée asked what he meant. Gardner didn’t reply. He was heading down into the basement, beckoning the two women to follow him.

15

1210 hours.

The fluorescent lights guided them down the stairs. Gardner’s left hand trailed and Aimée held on to it. He couldn’t feel her fingers on the plastic, but he felt her breath, warm packets of it stroking his shoulder blade. Salvago was a couple of paces further behind. When he reached the bottom, Gardner’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom. They focused on the hatch in the ceiling at the far end of the basement.

‘We’ll use those overhead doors to get out to the street,’ he said.

‘But he’ll be waiting for us—’ said Aimée.

‘I’m going to take care of this guy.’

‘His arm—’

‘I’ve read about them,’ Gardner said. ‘They were designed to help people with wasting diseases, so they could control their limbs. Give them their quality of life back. Then the Pentagon got hold of the idea and decided to test them on wounded US soldiers. Used them as fucking guinea pigs.’

‘That’s how he was controlling the car?’ The question was from Salvago.

Gardner didn’t reply because the basement suddenly sank into a smothering darkness. Like a Hessian sack pulled over his head. Everything switched off: the fluorescent lights, the computers, the lamps on the work tables. Tiny hammers seemed to tap against the generator as it powered down. Gardner couldn’t see a metre ahead of him.

The blackness was silent and cold.

‘I can’t see you,’ Aimée said.

‘Keep a hold of my hand,’ Gardner said, then to Salvago, ‘Hold onto Aimée.’

Neither replied. Gardner pushed forward. His steps had to be cautious, had to be slow. He had no way of orientating himself. Walking in a straight line in the pitch-darkness was easier said than done. He heard an electrical whirring sound which lasted for several seconds. It ended with a deliberate, dull thud at his eight o’clock.

He saw something in the blackness. Nothing distinct. A soft patch of light lingered at ceiling height. What little there was of it came from the porn shop. One of the panels in the ceiling was lowering. Atop the panel was a lift, and as it touched the basement floor the Yank stepped quickly out of it and into the shadows.

Gardner froze.

‘What is it?’ Aimée whispered.

Gardner steered Aimée and Salvago in the direction where he imagined the cellar hatch in the ceiling to be. ‘Walk that way and don’t stop. When you hit the ladder, open the doors if you can and get the hell out of here.’

‘I’m not leaving you,’ Aimée said.

‘No one’s leaving anybody. I’ll see you outside. Now go.’

Aimée’s breathing grew fainter as she and Salvago made their way through the basement.

Listening to the Yank’s footsteps, Gardner braced himself.

The footsteps stopped.

Gardner cocked his ears and held his breath in his throat. He suddenly felt very vulnerable.

A gust of wind whooshed over Gardner’s face.

At the end of the gust was a fist.

The fist drove hard into his solar plexus. Gardner felt the knuckles connect with his flesh, each one digging in like the handle head of a screwdriver. His bowels spasmed. He couldn’t breathe. He still made an effort to fight back, slugged his right arm into the blackness in front of him even as he doubled up in agony. He punched cold air.

The wind swirled around him. Then it seemed to settle at his back and drop-kicked his lower spine. Gardner dropped to his hands and knees. He felt a string of spit dangling from his lower lip.

He’s fucking found me. Even though it’s pitch-black.

Gardner was powerless to stop the onslaught. The blows kept on coming, a three-sixty melee attack that left his senses scattered like marbles on the floor. He tried to push himself to his feet and felt the hard surface of a rubber sole stamp on him. The underside of a tactical boot crushed his right fingers. The joints cracked and grated. The pain went through the fucking roof. He was dragged this way and that, until he had no idea which way was up or down.

The lights flickered on. The overhead panels cast shadows on the sheet-metal walls. Gardner squinted. The guy was standing over him.

They were next to the tablet presser.

The Yank appeared to turn it on just by looking at it. A hundred moving parts clanked and whirred inside the machine. Gardner saw the punch come to life. It began to stamp up and down on the die plate, up and down, up and down. The Yank gripped Gardner’s right arm, his good one, and thrust it towards the die hole. Gardner struggled but his body had taken a fuck of a beating and he had nothing left to give.

His fingertips were under the punch. He imagined it piercing holes in his hand like it was a fucking power drill. Could feel the punch driving through his flesh and bone.

He tensed.

The machine stopped suddenly. Then it started again suddenly. The grip around Gardner’s fist weakened. He was able to shake his arm free. The Yank’s arm was level with Gardner’s face. He shaped to block, but knew that if the arm was anywhere near as powerful as he reckoned, no amount of blocking would save his arse. His face would be reduced to pulp.

The guy’s fist drove forward. And down instead of straight. Eight inches from Gardner’s face, the hand curled sharply inward and smacked clean into the Yank’s own knee. He gasped.

Gardner rolled onto his side and sprang to his feet. He saw Salvago sitting at a computer, typing furiously. Aimée was next to her. Aimée ran towards Gardner. She shouted to Salvago to hurry up.

The building was going haywire. The lights flicked on and off like the basement was having an epileptic fit. The double doors at the top of the stairs opened and slammed. The lift jerked two-thirds of the way up to the ceiling, then crashed back to the floor. Everything seemed beyond Kruger’s control. His arm punched the wall, leaving a giant fucking crater in a metal panel. Kruger himself looked unconscious, as if the arm was the only part of him alive.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ said Gardner.

The three of them ran towards the ladder. They could see the heavy double doors flapping open and shut, seemingly of their own accord. First to the top of the ladder, Gardner applied maximum force to the doors, pushing them apart. Aimée squeezed past him and hauled herself out into the street.

Salvago was still on the first rung. She raised her hand for a gimme. Gardner stretched down as far as he could with his good hand.

‘Come on, you can make it,’ he said.

She clasped his hand with both of hers.

Gardner clocked Kruger charging up behind her.

‘Get up!’ he yelled.

He was having one fuck of a job holding the heavy doors open with his left arm.

Salvago was halfway up the ladder when Kruger grabbed at her. He tore her from Gardner’s grip, spun her round and hit her full in the face.

The punch was hard and true. Like a torpedo.

There wasn’t much of a head left.

With a last huge shove Gardner pushed the doors back far enough to be able to climb out through the opening. He let them slam behind him. The last thing he saw was the Yank furiously staring up from the bottom of the ladder.

Aimée was waiting for Gardner. They had emerged onto a backstreet. Pubs with dark windows. Tatty apartment blocks with darker ones. A North African family of six – mum, dad, four kids in traditional garb except for the teenage daughter – across the narrow street eyeballing him. Gardner held Aimée’s hand and walked up the street fast, eyes forward.

‘What did Salvago do back there?’ he asked.

‘She figured the man had to be controlling the car and the lights with a type of neural interface.’

‘Which is why the Avalanche was unmanned.’

‘He has to have control over the network using his arm. But networks work two ways. You control them but they leave you exposed to attack from the outside.’

Gardner said, ‘You got a phone on you?’

Aimée shook her head.

‘Then our next job is to find a payphone and put calls into those media pals of yours,’ Gardner said.

‘I hope you’ve got lots of change. When this breaks, it’s going to be a hell of a story.’

16

London, UK. 1510 hours.

St James’s Park in the autumn was preferable to the summer months, Leo Land reflected as he drew up on a bench and crossed his legs. Summer meant tourists, all manner of unpleasant types with their curry smells and loud voices and cameras clicking. He sat with his hands in his lap and watched the ducks bobbing along the lead-coloured lake, listened to the songbirds chirping in the shrubbery. Up from the lake was a children’s playground. Autumn sun flicked sparks off the metal swing bars and slide. A dozen or so children, newly liberated from school, ran around in circles and screamed notes of excitement that even the songbirds were at a loss to match. Parents looked on, their faces etched with caution. Caution about paedophiles, the fear uppermost in the minds of every parent in the country these days, Land thought. One young girl hung back from the throng and tugged pleadingly at her mother’s leg.

Land realized his hands were shaking. He was used to the shakes. Had them for years. To begin with they’d come and gone. There was no rhyme or reason to them. But for the past two weeks he’d suffered from them every single day. He extended his left hand, palm down. He tried to still his hand. It didn’t work.

Stress, Land told himself. He looked at the children and felt a pang of relief. It did not last for long.

Another man was approaching the bench, a few sad streaks of white hair brushed across his liver-spotted pate. He wore a classic navy-blue single-breasted suit that had Savile Row written all over it. White shirt, conservative-blue tie. As he sat down Land noticed tufts of hair in the man’s ears. He had never studied the man’s profile side-on before.

The man unfolded his copy of the Evening Standard, browsed through the news section and harrumphed. Then he too looked at the children. Seemed a bit preoccupied with them.

‘Leo,’ he said.

‘Milton,’ Leo answered.

Sir Milton Pierce, the Foreign Secretary, went to speak. But somewhere between his throat and his mouth he changed his mind, and there was only a short intake of breath. Then he lowered his head, his brow furrowed, and Land felt the onus was on him to talk first.

‘Someone is mounting a smear campaign against me,’ he said.

Again Pierce said nothing.

‘They’re preparing to spread lies about me, Pierce. Outright, blatant and scandalous lies.’

Pierce said nothing.

‘They have friends in the media. They’ll print these lies and bury me.’

‘Do they have “evidence” to support these rumours?’ Pierce asked.

Land shifted uncomfortably on the bench. ‘You know how it is. Technology these days means people create whatever truth they damn well please.’

‘Indeed.’ Pierce shook his head. Land suddenly felt sick. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Leo. My hands are fully tied trying to keep our European chums onside. The bomb’s ruffled a few feathers.’

Bastard, Land thought. ‘This isn’t my problem exclusively,’ he said.

Pierce shrugged with his lower lip.

Land stood up from the bench. Pierce continued to stare at the children.

‘I’m not the only person they will spread rumours about,’ Land said.

Cracks appeared at the corners of Pierce’s eyes.

Land said, ‘These people have access to all sorts of nonsense.’ He smiled. ‘All unsubstantiated, of course.’

‘What do you need?’ Pierce said through gritted teeth.

Land sat down again and leaned towards Pierce. ‘A Europe-wide alert on these individuals. A man and a woman. Domestic forces on high alert too. I know that’s not technically your ground, but you have the Home Secretary’s ear.’

Pierce said nothing more. Spent two minutes looking at the playground, sharing the silence with Land. Then he stood up and left the bench. No goodbye or even a look. Land didn’t care if they never spoke again.

He checked his watch. Three-thirty. In less than eighteen hours the Middle East would be thrown into conflict once more.

17

Rotterdam. 1757 hours.

They spent forty minutes working their way through the streets before reaching Rotterdam Centraal. There Gardner took to patrolling the station’s platforms and exits, looking out for anything suspicious, while Aimée spent the last of their euros in the public phone box. On his third circuit Gardner grabbed a Mars Duo and a Diet Coke from a vendor. The soft drink and the chocolate woke him up a little.

With the last of the euros gone, they were out of cash and in need of a way home. Land would have blocked the credit card, and Aimée didn’t have a penny on her. Gardner ran through options for getting hold of some quick cash.

Aimée hung up the phone and returned.

‘It’s ready,’ she said. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Parliament Square. Everyone’s going to be there.’

Gardner wasn’t listening. He was staring past Aimée at a giant TV screen next to the live timetable. A photofit of a man and then one of a woman filled the screen. The woman’s face was like a blown-up version of Aimée’s. There was no sound from the TV, but the breaking news along the bottom of the screen read, in English: ‘MURDERS IN ROTTERDAM: MAN AND WOMAN WANTED FOR QUESTIONING BY INTERPOL.’

‘Joe?’

Aimée noticed the screen. She put a hand to her gaping mouth.

‘Land,’ Gardner said. He grabbed Aimée and they took a less busy side exit out of the station, emerging into a narrow street.

‘They’re going to arrest us,’ Aimée said.

‘No they’re not. We’re still going to make it to London.’

‘But how? The news said the police are looking for us. We can’t take a plane or a ferry. Maybe we can drive?’

Gardner shook his head. ‘Land’s a cunning fucker. He’ll have thought of that. The minute we give our details to the rental company, he’ll know about it.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Snakehead,’ said Gardner.

‘Sorry?’

‘Smuggling people to England’s big business here. The Chinese and the Africans are all at it. We find a snakehead, pay them and hitch a ride back home.’

‘And where do you find… snakeheads?’

‘They’ll have friends and family working on the inside of the port, giving them the heads up.’

‘So we just turn up and say, Hi, can you get us to London?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘And what if they report us to the police?’

‘These are human traffickers. They don’t speak to the cops.’

They took a roundabout route to the port, sticking to backstreets. The port was a bewildering network of piers, red and yellow and green shipping containers stacked like giant metal bricks. Ships of all shapes and sizes chugged in and out of each pier. Cargo ships, tankers, fishing trawlers, barges and lighter vessels jostled for space. It took Gardner forty-five minutes to find the right person.

A group of five Chinese workers were huddling from the wind in a semicircle, smoking roll-ups and wearing sombre faces. Gardner approached the guy he took to be the ringleader. He was taller than the others and a little older and podgier. He was hostile at first. Gardner explained his predicament. The guy listened impassively, brushing greasy black hair away from his face. When Gardner was done, the guy turned away and conferred with the others.

‘My brother say he see you on TV,’ the guy said, making a throat-slitting gesture. It was difficult to understand whether he disapproved.

‘Then you know I’m not bullshitting,’ Gardner replied.

‘Pay first, then ride later.’

‘I lost my credit card. I’ll sort you out when we get there,’ Gardner said.

The guy snorted. ‘Very funny. You funny man. You fucking pay now, or you no go.’

That’s us screwed, Gardner thought.

Then Aimée stepped forward. She was holding a plastic baggie filled with pills. In fact the baggie was stuffed. Gardner reckoned there must have been 1000 pills in the bag, street value £6000. The Chinese guy eyed the bag hungrily.

‘This enough?’

He nodded and snatched the bag in the same instant. Gardner looked on, stunned.

‘Come back here nine o’clock,’ the guy said. The others leaned in for a closer look at the bag’s contents. He waved their prying faces away.

‘You don’t understand,’ Gardner said. ‘We need somewhere to hide out. Otherwise we’ll never survive that long.’

The guy finished his roll-up and blew smoke into the air. ‘Come with me.’

They followed him into a warehouse. It was big and cold and mostly empty, though a few containers were scattered about the place. The smell of industrial chemicals soured the air. The guy led Gardner and Aimée to an empty container; the doors were shut, a crowbar shoved through the handles. He removed the crowbar and pulled the doors open, the scrape of metal against concrete echoing through the cavernous warehouse. Dull light penetrated the container and Gardner counted nine pairs of desperate eyes attached to nine grubby, pale faces.

‘You stay here,’ the guy said, spitting on the ground. ‘I call you when time is come.’

18

2113 hours.

Three hours later Gardner and Aimée were summoned by the Chinese guy banging on the door. They were escorted out of the container. The other hopeful migrants began to get up at the sight of the man, but he snapped at them. Something Gardner took to mean, Sit the fuck down, because that’s what they all did. Gardner and Aimée emerged into the night. The air was crisp and quiet. Searchlights illuminated patches of ground amid an otherwise solid darkness. Aimée yawned; she’d spent the past three hours asleep on his chest, the beat of his heart matching her breathing pattern. Gardner had craved forty winks himself, but he didn’t trust the other people in the container. Sleep would have to wait.

‘Quick, quick,’ the guy said. He ushered them across the pier. They came to the end of the pier. A barge was docked. Next to the barge was a small boat covered in black tarpaulin. The guy glanced across his shoulders at another Chinese man standing watch at the pier entrance. The man gave a thumbs-up. The first guy leaned over the edge of the pier and ripped off the tarpaulin.

‘You didn’t tell me you took the pills,’ Gardner said.

Aimée shrugged. ‘Well, I guessed that I had to have some money to pay my way if I escaped and, well, there they were. It seemed kind of stupid not to. Given the circumstances.’

‘Without them,’ Gardner said, ‘we’d be screwed.’

Gardner wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see underneath the tarp – maybe a piece-of-shit vessel with a leaking hull and a pair of oars for a motor. Instead he was confronted with a mean-looking speedboat. Twelve metres long and shaped like a traffic cone, the stern four times wider than the bow. The hull was made from glass-reinforced plastic – durable but lightweight. A two-metre-tall wheelhouse stood in the middle of the deck, the size of a Portakabin. It was painted black, like the rest of the boat. Eight 250-horsepower engines were fixed to the stern. That’s a fuck of a lot of motors, Gardner told himself. Evidently a bag full of pills bought a great deal more than a spot in a lorry container and a small air vent.

‘You go now,’ the guy said, shooing them like they were pests at a restaurant. ‘No time, no time!’

Another man bounded up the pier and joined them. He was middle-aged, dusty face, rust-belt beard with a greying pony-tail tied at the back of his head and a pair of wraparound Ray-Bans sitting on a peeling nose. He introduced himself as the pilot. Said his name was Peterson. He had a southern US drawl. Peterson didn’t ask after Aimée or their reasons for wanting covert entry into the UK. On a trip like this, the less crew and passengers knew about each other the better.

‘This thing will get us to the shore?’ Gardner asked.

‘Depend on it,’ said Peterson, gobbing over the side of the pier. ‘We do three or four runs a week with this baby, but not usually with human cargo, if you get my drift. You must’ve paid Chang here a good service fee?’

Gardner said nothing. He helped Aimée onto the boat. She wobbled, almost lost her balance. One look at her and Gardner realized she wasn’t a big fan of the sea.

Peterson said, ‘Anyways, we’ll be doing sixty knots or thereabouts the whole crossing.’

‘Is that fast?’ asked Aimée, holding tightly onto the hull with both hands.

‘About seventy miles an hour, land terms,’ Peterson replied. ‘But then you gotta remember we ain’t travelling on no flat surface.’

Gardner surveyed the boat. ‘Low profile, dark colours, sixty knots… You can probably outrun the navy in this.’

‘Some fool looks at his radar, I’m just a fucking blur.’

They set off into a night black as a mine shaft, engines chugging as they cut through the dark water. The distance to the English coast from the port of Rotterdam was 132 miles, or 115 nautical miles. At sixty knots they’d reach Felixstowe in two hours. Factor in the time to land undetected and gather their shit, and Gardner was looking at an ETA of midnight, leaving him and Aimée with nine hours to hit the road and wing it down to London. He noticed the deck was scattered with the leftovers from the last drug shipment: spare rope, plastic sheets and buoy markers for dumping product overboard, and Very flare guns used to alert their contacts ashore of their arrival. The flare guns were bright orange, breech-loaded with a single twelve-gauge round.

Twenty minutes into their trip and the speedboat was bouncing up and down like a cork in a pan of boiling water. Stars dotted the dome of the sky, brilliant and raw. The smell of diesel fuel and sea salt corralled in Gardner’s nose. He saw the lights of ferries and tankers blinking miles away. Reds, greens and yellows strung along the horizon like Christmas tree decorations.

‘Wind’s picking up,’ Peterson said. ‘It’s gonna get bumpy.’

‘And this isn’t?’ Aimée asked. She was ashen-faced already.

‘Try to focus on the horizon,’ Gardner said.

‘What horizon?’

Something zipped through the air. Unseen. Like an invisible dart. Peterson grunted and flopped to the deck. Aimée screamed. Blood squirted out of a hole in the American’s neck. His legs twitched. Then Gardner made out a distinctive noise above the loud whirr of the engines. He killed them to steady the boat and turned to face the stern.

The guy with the prosthetic arm was riding on their coat-tails.

19

2155 hours.

Kruger burned the engine on the Zodiac rubber raiding craft and drew alongside the Brit and his fucking bitch. It had taken two hours to debug the virus she’d downloaded to the cyberware network. He was looking forward to making that whore pay.

He had chopped down the pilot with a single shot from the Stoner Rifle-25. The rifle was chambered for 7.62x51mm calibre ammunition and accurate up to a distance of 1500 metres. The detachable sound suppressor did its job as the round propelled out of the muzzle. The SR-25 was mounted on top of a Harris bipod. The bipod was connected to the underside of the rifle’s barrel along the length of its Picatinny rail system via a hardened aluminium adapter. Inserted into the SR-25 was a small computer chip which allowed Kruger to control the weapon through his arm. Fuck, he only had to think about pulling the trigger and the SR-25 obeyed.

Kruger’s employers usually asked for zero collateral damage, but the Zodiac had a max speed of around thirty-five knots and only half a tank of fuel, so killing the pilot had been the only way to catch up.

When the Zodiac was parallel with the speedboat, Kruger stopped the engine and leapt over the void onto its deck. Gardner saw him coming. But Kruger’s arm was superhumanly fast, capable of delivering a hundred-mile-per-hour uppercut before he had even finished thinking about it.

But the Brit wasn’t slow. He was fucking fast. Slugged a solid fist into Kruger’s chest. He had a strong punch on him. But not nearly enough to put Kruger down. He staggered on the deck and mentally directed the SR-25 at Gardner’s chest.

But the Brit was now diving at Kruger’s legs. The SR-25 kicked up a little as the round was fired and the jacket ejected. There was a half-second’s silence, then a raging hiss. Bullet striking the inflatable hull.

This time Kruger was knocked backwards by the Brit. He didn’t panic. His arm gave him the tactical advantage and, when it came down to shit, the Brit was going to be on the losing team. Gardner’s fingers were searching for Kruger’s eye sockets. He wants to fucking gouge me, Kruger thought.

In your dreams, buddy.

Kruger accessed the Zodiac through his mind and fired up the engines. Then he steered it into the speedboat. The bow piled into the hull and rocked the vessel. It felt like the whole world was sliding this way and that. Like they were sitting on top of an angry whale.

The bitch lost her balance.

Woman overboard.

‘Aimée!’ shouted Gardner.

Kruger thrust his right arm up and clamped his fingers around the Brit’s neck. His face blew up like a blowfish as air became trapped in his throat, depriving his brain of vital oxygen. Kruger imagined all those red blood cells inside his skull desperately competing for air. Credit to him, the Brit fought hard. Both of his hands were trying to force apart Kruger’s prosthetic digits. But it was a futile act.

Another forty-five seconds and the guy would be dead. That’s all it would take. Kruger could hear the girl splashing and screaming in the water, but figured he’d leave her to drown, or freeze. Whichever happened first, he was easy.

Thirty seconds.

The Brit stopped pawing at Kruger’s fingers. Looks like he’s given up already, he thought. I figured he was a pussy. Came down to it, the SEALs had the beating of the SAS any day of the week.

Twenty seconds.

Then Kruger noticed the Brit dropping his right hand down and to his rear, scrabbling for something on the deck. Kruger tightened his grip and told him to hurry the fuck up and die.

Ten seconds.

Gardner lifted something up in his right hand. Kruger couldn’t immediately make it out. It was bright red and clunky. Then, when Gardner brought it level with Kruger’s face, he realized he was eyeball-to-eyeball with a Very flare gun.

‘Son of a fucking bitch!’

Gardner pulled the trigger.

The flare set fire to Kruger’s upper right arm. The part that was real, not fake. The part that could feel pain.

The flare’s magnesium and nitrate mix ate into him like acid, burning away skin and flesh. Sparks rained down on his face, scorched his beard and melted the cartilage in his ear lobe. Kruger couldn’t see shit. His world was doused a pyrotechnic green. His arm loosened from the Brit’s neck as the pain overwhelmed him. Nerve endings fried and sent signals to his brain. It felt as if he was overheating at his core. He reached across with his left hand, trying to pat out the flare. But the heat, sweet Jesus. Too fucking much.

Then he felt movement. Gardner was dragging him across the deck. Kruger went to lunge at his legs, but the flare had turned the whole right side of him into a goddamn spitroast. The smell of burned flesh took him back to Afghanistan. A smell nobody ever forgot. When he lashed out at Gardner, the nerve endings were screwed and the power drained from his arm. If anything, the prosthetic felt super-heavy now.

Still he fought. Because he knew what the Brit was doing.

Because Kruger would do exactly the same.

Gardner shoved him halfway overboard. His legs on the deck, his body doubled over the hull, his head pushed just beneath the surface of the water. And in a weird way he was relieved to be underwater, because the flare was extinguished and the chill North Sea cooled the wounds on his face, shoulder and arm.

Then he saw the propellers spinning furiously either side of him, slicing through the water, and he wasn’t so relieved.

The Brit was going to start the engines.

Turn my head into fucking chop suey.

He tried to lift his head above the water. Fought and fought and fought. He yelled into the water, ‘Fuck you, you fucking English bastard… sack of shit,’ but the words just came out as bubbles of air that floated to the surface and burst.

The engines sputtered into life.

‘Fucking son of a fucking bitch, cunt ass—’

20

Felixstowe, UK. 0031 hours.

Gardner rowed the last five hundred metres to the port. By switching off the engines he could keep the noise to a minimum. He didn’t want to disturb anybody. Least of all some over-zealous copper. Not with his and Aimée’s faces splashed all over the evening news.

Aimée sat in the wheelhouse, shivering from her plunge into the sea. Gardner had wrapped her in two thick woollen blankets he discovered in an emergency compartment in the cabin. She’d only been exposed to the water for less than a minute. Get her a brew and a new set of clothes and she’d be OK.

Gardner pulled ashore two hundred metres from the private harbour where the sailing yachts and gin ships slept. He escorted Aimée onto the beach. His mind was on Land and the final act of revenge.

Nine hours to go.

21

London. 0839 hours.

Leo Land paced up and down the Foreign Secretary’s office. The room was a tasteless clash of the old and new. Fusty portraits on the walls, antique timepieces and ergonomic sofas, glass coffee tables and an HD TV. Pierce sat in his executive leather chair. The more relaxed he seemed the more Land’s mood darkened.

‘Try again,’ Land said, stopping in front of an antique floor-standing globe carved from solid beechwood. As he ran his eyes over the exotic place names – Niger, Mauritania, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan – he could feel the opportunity slipping away from him. ‘I said, why don’t you try them again?’

Pierce sighed. ‘Because the answer will be the same. If the police had found them, we’ll be the first to know about it, and… for God’s sake, Leo, you can’t smoke in here!’

Land left the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Understand what?’

Land didn’t reply. He was turning over scenarios in his head. If they come out with the truth now, he thought, I’m done for. I’ll be fed to the bloody dogs.

Think, man, he told himself. There’s got to be a way out of this.

‘We should talk to the Israelis,’ he said.

Pierce raised one of his unruly eyebrows and the liver spots on his forehead were pushed together in a sort of polka-dot pattern. ‘Oh, and do tell, Leo, what good would that serve?’

‘We could encourage them to strike early. Before these idiots have a chance to sabotage all the hard work.’

‘And you really think the Israelis aren’t going to suspect foul play, when we come knocking on their door and asking if they wouldn’t terribly mind getting stuck into the Iranians?’ Pierce tut-tutted.

Land took a deep breath. The smell of polished mahogany filled his nostrils.

‘Wherever they are, they can’t go far. If they’d made it to the UK, we would’ve picked them up by now.’

Pierce somehow frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘The Border Agency’s under dreadful pressure,’ he said. ‘Thousands of people arrive undetected in Britain every week, you know. And if this chap is ex-Regiment… What the hell—?’ Pierce was staring out of his window at the street below. The Secretary’s Office backed onto Parliament Street and the Cenotaph. Land paced to the window and cast an eye over proceedings. A media scrum was making its way down Parliament Street heading south, towards the House of Lords, the Treasury and Parliament Square. Land counted satellite vans from all the major news outlets, some reporters in cars, others on foot. They seemed to be in a frightful hurry. Sound booms and video cameras and digital recorders weaved amid the scrum.

‘Bloody hundreds of the buggers.’

‘I wonder what they’re here for?’ said Pierce.

‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ said Land. The trembling in his hands had returned.

Pierce called in his assistant and asked him to operate the forty-two-inch flatscreen TV which stood on a stand next to the coffee table. The assistant flicked to Sky News. The feed was live. From Parliament Square. Land saw the figures on screen. He vomited a little in his mouth. Swallowed it. He scooped up his jacket.

‘Where the hell are you going, man?’

Land stopped, turned, stared daggers at Pierce. ‘I won’t let them do this, Milton. There’s too much at stake here. For you as well as me.’ Pierce’s eyes sank to the floor, but he said nothing.

Land stormed out of the room.

22

London. 0856 hours.

They stood on a sodden patch of earth at the eastern tip of Parliament Square. The ground was mulch from the peace protesters whose tents and placards had occupied the square for years.

Gardner and Aimée were side by side and felt their hands brush against each other. The morning was overcast, the sky a patchwork of dirty white sheets. To Gardner’s right was the grand fortress of HM Treasury, and to his left the Purbeck marble and flying buttresses of Westminster Abbey. The two buildings stood on opposite sides of the square, like chesspieces on a board. Gardner and Aimée were poised to make their move.

Aimée was back in her comfort zone. She’d spent the two-hour train ride from Felixstowe planning her address. It was short, simple and to the point. She waited for the scrum to settle down, gave time for the photographers to set themselves up and then she spoke.

When she mentioned the involvement of foreign agents in the nuclear disaster at Istanbul, the reporters shouted questions at her ten at a time, left, right and centre. She paused. The voices simmered down.

‘We have evidence,’ she said, her tone measured and confident, ‘that a person within the British establishment was aware of collusion between the Russian and Israeli authorities to detonate the suitcase nuke during its transit to Iran.’

This girl knows how to play a crowd, Gardner thought. He scanned the rooftops and the slow-moving traffic encircling Parliament Square. They were in an area that afforded no protection, and Gardner had to remain vigilant. He had three fears. One was that the police would arrive at the scene and detain Aimée before the truth could out.

The morning was ugly and brought with it a blustery wind that stabbed his cheeks and made his eyes water. When this is over, he thought, maybe I’ll move abroad. Maybe with Aimée. Somewhere warm and sunny.

‘This person may or may not have been acting alone. What we can say is that he not only neglected to inform the government of the plan, but he actively encouraged that plan to succeed. This man’s name is Leo Land.’

His second fear was that one of the reporters might be an undercover agent doing Land’s dirty work. He ran his eyes constantly over the journalists. They didn’t necessarily have to be carrying a gun on their body. He’d heard of pistols being concealed inside the hollowed-out frames of video cameras.

His third fear was Land himself.

‘He is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands—’

Aimée cut herself short. A group of reporters were shouting at somebody deep in the scrum. Gardner stepped forward. Someone was trying to push to the front.

‘Out of my way!’

The voice was unmistakable. Gardner’s third fear was being realized.

Leo Land barged through the crowd. He looked flustered. Crumpled shirt, his normally immaculate head of hair ruffled. He cast withering looks at the reporters, smoothed out his tie and pointed a finger at Aimée.

‘Stop this nonsense at once,’ he said.

Aimée had a look in her eyes that Gardner couldn’t place. Somewhere on the road between pity and loathing. ‘We have the evidence,’ she replied in a flat voice.

Land walked right up to Aimée. Gardner put a hand between them. Land lashed out at him. ‘Get the hell away from me!’

Gardner held his position and said, ‘If I were you, I’d be on the phone to a lawyer.’

‘You’re the one who needs a lawyer.’

Gardner stepped towards Land until he was almost in his face.

‘Get the fuck out of here. You’re history.’

Land chuckled. ‘Who are they going to believe, old boy?’

Land gave Gardner his back and marched to a spot just in front of Aimée, facing the massed cameras and microphones. He tended to his hair, then folded his hands in front of him in a pose of sincerity. ‘These two are wanted by Interpol in connection with two murders in Rotterdam,’ he said.

‘You framed us,’ Aimée shouted.

Land toyed with her, half-turning his head. ‘Oh, you’re innocent, are you? If you didn’t kill them, why are you on the run?’ He turned back to the reporters. Fucking unbelievable, thought Gardner. They’re actually listening to this prick.

‘We have the documents to prove it,’ Aimée said quietly.

‘Yes, my dear, you have some transcripts which have obviously been doctored. Well done.’

Gardner moved forward to lamp Land. Aimée held him back. He shot her a quizzical look. As if to say, So we’re just going to let him get away with this?

‘These people are traitors to the British government,’ Land was lecturing.

‘There’s more than just transcripts,’ Aimée said.

Land stopped. His arms were spread-eagled like a preacher reading from the Bible. ‘Oh really? Don’t tell me, more fake documents and doctored scripts, my dear?’

‘Photographs, actually.’ Then Aimée whispered to Gardner, ‘I managed to decrypt the rest of the files.’

Land was speechless for a moment. His arms drooped. ‘What kind of photographs?’

‘I think I’ll just show people and let them make up their own minds.’

Gardner wondered what the fuck Aimée was banging on about.

‘You little…’ – Land’s lips quivered – ‘bitch.’

Aimée blanked him. She held up a flash drive and looked at the reporters. ‘Someone got a laptop we can use? Then we’ll see who is really telling the truth.’

Someone approached Aimée and handed over his Dell Inspiron. She plugged the drive in and brought up the file. Reporters huddled around the screen.

‘You’ll pay for this,’ Land said.

Gardner looked up. The clouded sky was clearing, like tide peeling back from a sandy beach. Sunlight poked through the clearing. Spots of it landed on the square.

Something glinted on the rooftop of Westminster Abbey.

Gardner frowned.

Then he froze.

The glint was from a rifle barrel. From a hundred metres away, Gardner was able to pick out individual details on the shooter’s face. He clocked a handlebar moustache and pasty complexion. Clocked the greasy hair.

No.

No fucking way!

Dave Hands was aiming down at him.

Gardner shot a look across to Aimée. She was triumphant as she blew up the first of the photographs. She stepped back, almost presenting herself as a target. A red mil-dot traced its way up her back.

Rested on the back of her head.

Faster, Grittier, Darker, Deadlier… Chris Ryan Extreme

Mission 1: REDEEMER

When an old friend makes a desperate call for help, former SAS Warrant Officer Joe Gardner is thrust back into the line of fire. His journey leads him into the deadliest favela in Brazil, where violent gangs, crazed hitmen and trigger-happy paramilitaries lurk. Gardner’s only hope of staying alive is through his supreme survival skills and warrior’s instinct.

Mission 2: THE ROCK

A chance encounter with an agent from MI6 leads Joe Gardner into a perilous mission in Gibraltar. His objective: bust a major cocaine-smuggling ring involving former a Regiment operator and the Royal Navy. But Gardner isn’t alone. A mysterious killer with expert martial arts skills is shadowing his every move. And it’s about to get noisy.

Mission 3: DIE TRYING

Dispatched to a postwar Belgrade crawling with criminals and bad memories, Joe Gardner is on a collision course with his one-time Regiment friend John Bald. Gardner plans to put a stop to Bald once and for all. But with the Russian mafya and Italian mob closing in, is Gardner too late? If he fails, tens of thousands will die.

Mission 4: FALLOUT

In the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack, Joe Gardner discovers a terrifying secret. In order to protect the truth, he must escort special agent Aimee Milana to safety, all the while hunted by government agents and a former Navy SEAL operator equipped with a lethal weapon. The race is on to reach Parliament Square before the clock runs out – and the world descends into all-out war.

All available in exclusive ebook edition.
For more information go to www.hodder.co.uk

Table of Contents

Also by Chris Ryan

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22