Chris Ryan Extreme: Hard Target
Mission Three: Die Trying

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 Three: Die Trying

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

ISBN: 9781444708554

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

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

‘Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.’

Joseph Stalin

1

Europa Point, Gibraltar. 0800 hours.

Massimo Macca rubbed a hand over his jaw. He had a thin veil of stubble that ran black at the chin, flour-grey higher up the sides. His eyes scanned the foot of the cliff face. He was grizzled and fat and Joe Gardner doubted the guy had ever seen the inside of a gym, but he was sure he’d been in his fair share of scraps.

‘This is Signor Bald’s friend?’

‘He’s no friend of mine,’ snapped Gardner.

Macca suppressed a laugh. ‘Then maybe you are Bald’s consigliere?’ His voice was gruff. ‘You worked together, no?’

‘Not any more we don’t. Look, I don’t know who the hell you are, but I’m warning you.’

‘The signore is a man of violence. That’s good. Nowadays people are so sensitive. They don’t understand that some people are created bad, and bad people have to be crushed.’ He crumbled an imaginary rock in his fist.

‘If you say so.’

‘And which side are you on? Good, or bad?’

‘Massimo, please,’ Leo Land said. He rested a manicured hand on Macca’s shoulder. ‘Joe’s on our side. Lately he’s been of great help to our investigation. Indeed, if it wasn’t for Joe, Bald would be dead by now, along with any hopes we have of bringing some of these bastards to book.’

Macca yawned. He had nostrils so wide he could hide a tank up there.

‘Forgive me, signor. I am afraid trust does not come very easily to a man in my position.’

‘I’d say that depends,’ said Gardner.

‘On what?’

‘Whether your job title is Chief Dickhead.’

Macca shot Gardner a sour look. ‘The men I put behind bars would kill you for less.’

‘Massimo is a prosecutor for the region of Calabria in southern Italy,’ Land said. ‘He’s been chasing the mafia down in those parts for some twenty-five years. A tiring job, I imagine.’ Land frowned at the sun. ‘We should talk somewhere more private.’

Macca nodded. They gave Africa their backs and left Harding’s Observation Post. Gardner noticed that a navy-blue Mercedes CLK Coupé was parked up on the verge of Europa Road. Land offered to drive. Gardner sat in the back, Macca in the front passenger seat.

The car had a milky smell to it, which is to say it smelled exactly how Gardner imagined a car driven by Leo Land would. The dashboard was varnished walnut, the windows at least sixty per cent tinted.

Land fired up the Mercedes and reversed north out of Europa Road, tracing a route west then north on the same stretch of asphalt.

‘The old mafia – the Cosa Nostra – is history these days,’ said Macca. ‘Today the real danger comes from a new source. The ’Ndrangheta. “The Honoured Society”.’

‘Imagine an organization more powerful and secretive than anything in the history of the mafia,’ Land added.

‘The original ’Ndrangheta,’ Macca resumed, ‘was formed a hundred years ago by Calabrian peasants to protect themselves against the landed gentry. For many years they practised extortion and bribery. Then the leaders made a deal with the Colombians. Tonnes of cocaine poured into the docks at Gioia Tauro. Now they have soldiers across the world: Europe, America, Australia. Each picciotto d’onore – or foot soldier – is sworn to a blood oath. They control the cocaine. The heroin. Arms trading. Human trafficking. The construction business. It’s endless.’

Macca shook his head, then went on: ‘I lost my wife to the cancer two years ago. The tumours, they consumed her body. Until there was nothing left of her to give, you understand? This is what the ’Ndrangheta are. A tumour that does not stop.’

They rolled back up past the dockyard.

‘I still don’t see what this has to do with me.’

‘Your friend, Signor Bald—’

‘He’s not my friend.’

‘He will strike a deal with the ’Ndrangheta for his cocaine—’

‘Bully for him.’

‘And you are going to witness it.’

‘Yeah? And at what point did you became my fucking boss?’

Gardner then directed his rage at Land. ‘We had a deal, and I’ve more than fulfilled my end of the bargain.’

The MI6 man’s face crinkled in the rear-view mirror like a wet rag. ‘You brought this on yourself, Joe. The incident at the King’s Hotel, the business with Killen – because of you things got a tad too noisy. As a result Bald fears for his life, and he’s changing plans.’

Land nudged the Mercedes up Winston Churchill Avenue and into the parking lot next to the Victoria Stadium. The lot was empty.

‘Our original aim had been to simply detain Bald once he docked in Gioia Tauro in western Calabria – Massimo’s back yard. Now it appears Bald isn’t happy about meeting the Italians on their own soil. We’ve picked up communications which indicate that Bald is rearranging the venue for neutral turf.’

‘Communications? I thought all your systems were down?’

‘The land-based ones, yes. But we’ve had a Navy submarine tapping into the optic fibres running along the seabed. You know, the ones that carry all that internet and landline chitter-chatter back and forth. It’s more common than the public and media would have you believe. Our SIGINT chaps listened in to a conversation between Bald and a fellow he refers to as the Pallbearer. We believe this is code for Gianni Petruzzi. His nickname is known only to his immediate family – or so he thinks.’

‘This Petruzzi bloke – he’s ’Ndrangheta?’

‘A capo crimini,’ Macca said, passing Gardner a black-and-white snap of the man himself. Whatever ideas he had about the style of a mafia head honcho, the photograph quickly dispelled. Here was a bloated, flabby man, loose jowls and drooping eyelids. The only young thing about him was the twentysomething bimbo hanging from his arm.

‘He is the chief of a local clan. He and his brothers once carried a coffin through the streets of San Luca. A coffin filled with cocaine. That’s where his name comes from. Now it has an additional layer of meaning: when people owe him money, Petruzzi buries them alive.’

‘Bald said that he felt someone was watching him,’ said Land.

‘So where is he now?’

‘Currently making his way along the Alboran Sea heading east. He’s en route to Algeria. The ’Ndrangheta have contacts there, established through the human trafficking network. We believe a private jet awaits Bald in Algiers.’

Gardner nodded, soaking up the int. ‘And the jet’s taking him where?’

‘Belgrade,’ Land said, patting himself down for his cigarettes.

‘Serbia has strong links to the ’Ndrangheta,’ Macca put in.

‘So go to the fucking Serbs for help,’ Gardner said.

Macca shook his head. ‘You cannot ask rats to hunt other rats.’

‘Then ask Interpol. Or the fucking A-Team, I don’t care.’

‘We need someone who knows Bald, who can track him. Face it, Joe. You’re the man for the job.’

Gardner weighed it up. As much as he felt like taking a hot shower every time he spoke to Land, he had unfinished business with John. Gardner was the kind of guy who liked to see things through. He’d never been one for quitting halfway into a job.

‘My government,’ said Macca, ‘wishes to recognize your, how do you say, courage in waging war against the scum of the ’Ndrangheta. Anyone who helps to kill this cancer is a good friend of Italia.’

Land found his smokes, rolled down his window. He sucked on the unlit tab in the left corner of his mouth and spoke with his right. ‘What Massimo is saying is that you’ll be amply rewarded for the mission.’

‘Half a million euros,’ Macca said.

‘Fuck you.’

‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ Land said. ‘With that money you can buy all the women and lagers you want. Or spend it on whatever else you Regiment people do in your free time. Take the money, Joe.’

‘If I do this one last mission for you, I want my old job back – fucking end of.’

‘Stubborn as well as a fool, eh?’ Land lit his cigarette. The smoke tickled Gardner’s nostrils and settled like fog in his empty stomach. He suddenly felt painfully hungry.

Land unlocked the Merc’s doors.

‘Massimo, my dear chap. It is time for us to part.’

Macca climbed out of the car with difficulty, without another word. Back problems, old face, despairing eyes: that old bastard time hadn’t been kind to him. A Porsche pulled into the parking lot and drew up alongside the stooping Italian.

‘Fun guy,’ Gardner said as the Porsche gobbled Macca up.

‘He’s quite a nut in his own way. Legend has it he killed more than two hundred mafiosi.’ Land frowned. ‘Now, a quick word. My chiefs are very upset at the damage Bald has caused so far.’

‘Scared of any mud sticking?’

‘Not at all. But they feel it would be better if perhaps he wasn’t given any public exposure.’ Land spoke slowly, emphasizing each word like a primary school teacher. ‘If he were arrested, that might bring some unwanted coverage in the news. Not the kind of thing HMG needs at this point in time.’

‘You want him dead?’

‘Only if he actually makes the exchange. If he pulls out, even if it’s the last minute, then we’ll have to think of something else. But if Bald hands them the coke, and gets his prize in exchange, he’ll have gone too far, and you have permission to engage.’

‘To kill, you mean?’

‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Gardner thought about it. Revenge had been on his mind ever since Bald had double-crossed him in Rio. Sure as shit he wouldn’t hesitate to fill Gardner with lead if the chance presented.

‘None at all.’

‘Good man. I want you – the Firm wants you – to do whatever it takes.’

Land removed a cream envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt. Gardner wondered how an agent who spent his life living out of suitcases managed to keep his shirts and jackets so neatly ironed. Like the guy was a fucking walking steam press.

The envelope was unsealed. A flick of the thumb and forefinger and it popped open. Inside: ticket to Belgrade, one way; new passport, name of Gary Dutch; American Express, black, same name; pay-as-you-go mobile. He could be getting ready for his stag weekend.

‘You do right by us on this one, Joseph, and I can personally assure you that it will be worth your while.’

‘Let’s just get it over with.’

Land flicked his lights. The police car moved on and two minutes later the Mercedes exited the stadium lot. As it dropped Gardner at the airport, the same bobby in a fancy uniform was mincing about outside.

Gardner climbed out of the car.

‘When you get to Belgrade, call me. There’s a local contact who’ll sort you out,’ said Land, then fucked off.

Gardner was left standing there, wondering if he hadn’t just made the worst decision of his life.

2

Yakutsk, Russia. 1917 hours.

You can always spot a first-timer, thought Aleksandr Nikolai Sotov as he surveyed the private military airfield at Sobransk, some twenty kilometres south of Yakutsk, in north-east Siberia. However tough a man’s constitution, however thick his skin or thin his blood, nothing could prepare him for the cold.

Sotov recognized straight away the man climbing down the steps from the plane. The bug eyes, the bent nose. The swollen cheeks. As if his head had been compressed in a vice.

The man looked lost. The old saying of the English came to mind: like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Only you didn’t get rabbits in Siberia. Not in conditions up to minus fifty.

Sotov exited the black Lexus and approached the runway. The cold pierced his skin like salt in an open wound.

‘Maxim, Maxim, my good friend! So glad you could make it.’

‘What a miserable journey,’ replied Maxim Ledinsky, the chief of the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB). ‘The plane was held up for two hours at Moscow. Then we had the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. In the old days we would report back and have the pilot killed,’ he said, slitting his throat and winking in a manner which suggested to Sotov that he was only half-joking.

‘You are here now.’

‘And prepared!’ waving to his clothes. Padded jeans, Gore-Tex boots, woolly scarf, hat, gloves and winter coat. Concealing underneath, Sotov was certain, several layers of thermal garments.

‘That’s very good, Maxim. But please, take off your glasses.’

Ledinsky blinked his confusion.

‘In this weather the metal will stick to your skin and when you remove them you’ll tear off chunks of flesh.’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Ledinsky said, fumbling at the frames with his heavily gloved hands.

‘And the package?’

‘In the back of her,’ said Ledinsky, thumbing the Hercules.

‘Show me,’ Sotov said.

Ledinsky grumbled as he escorted Sotov around to the rear of the aircraft. The turbines whirled out streams of air so fast and so cold that to look directly ahead was like being jabbed in the eyes with cocktail sticks.

The ramp lowered. Sotov moved forward. The Herc’s cargo area was a tangle of cables and ropes. Crates were stacked to the rear. Emergency lights flashed.

‘Where is it?’

‘There,’ Ledinsky signalled to a wooden crate marked with the Red Cross symbol. The crate was a metre wide and about the same high.

‘Open it,’ Sotov said.

‘I can’t feel my fingers,’ Ledinsky protested.

‘Maxim, I need to see it.’

Ledinsky hollered at the crew. Two men in overalls scaled the ramp and used the stocks of their AK-47s to prise open the lid. It took them three tries before the crate began to split open.

‘Quickly, my nose hurts,’ Ledinsky urged them.

‘Be patient,’ he was told.

Sotov peered into the crate. It doesn’t look like much, he thought. No. It really seems like hardly anything at all. A lot of fuss for something so – he reached for the right word –ordinary. Yes, that was it.

‘You sure this is everything, Maxim?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘OK, I’m satisfied. Now we can leave.’

Sotov marched towards the Lexus, full of renewed vigour. Only Ledinsky’s constant bitching threatened to bring him down from his high. ‘Shit, this weather. They warned me in Moscow, but I didn’t think it would be this bad. I mean… I don’t know how you people survive.’

You people, Sotov thought. His parents had been part of the migration from the west, which is why he stood out from the native Siberians. Where they had dark features and ruddy cheeks, Sotov sported blue eyes, sandblasted hair and pale skin.

‘It’s warmer in the car,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, perhaps only minus ten.’ Sotov was smiling to himself.

His chauffeur, Denis Popov, six-two with a long, thin neck and silver hair the colour of a knife edge, manoeuvred around the Lexus and opened a door for Ledinsky. The Lexus was just one of a fleet of luxury cars. Sotov’s official title was the CEO of Russia’s leading diamond-mining outfit, Strelka Corporation. But Sotov was also mafya.

The engine was already running when Sotov and Ledinsky took their seats in the back of the Lexus.

‘I take it you’ve covered your tracks?’ said Sotov.

‘Of course,’ Ledinsky replied. ‘I’m taking a big risk too, you know. If this thing goes missing—’

‘It won’t.’

Sotov pointed to a black truck reversing towards the Herc’s ramp. Strelka guards stood either side of the truck. Overhead one of the Sikorsky helicopters belonging to Sotov’s private fleet patrolled the surrounding area.

‘I didn’t realize you had so many men,’ said Ledinsky.

‘Here, in Yakutsk, I’m the only law there is. The people around here joke that when Aleksandr Sotov shrugs, the whole of Siberia shakes.’

‘How many—?’

‘Men in my force? I forget the exact number. Eight thousand? Enough to get things done.’

‘What kind of—?’

‘Vodka?’ Sotov produced a bottle of Russian Standard and two shot glasses from a fold-away cabinet.

Ledinsky eyed the bottle suspiciously. ‘I don’t drink.’

‘Nonsense! A man cannot do business in Yakutsk without vodka warming his belly.’

Sotov poured Ledinsky a generous shot. Knocked back his own and aaahed.

Popov steered the Lexus out on to the highway. The icy road was flecked with black spots: frozen corpses of the millions of midges and mosquitoes that had swarmed over Yakutsk in the brief summer respite. Only three weeks ago temperatures had been a mild fifteen degrees. Seemed like history now.

‘What about my payment?’ said Ledinsky, looking down at his still-full glass.

‘I’ve decided to kill you instead.’

Ledinsky froze.

‘I’m joking, Maxim. We’re on our way to collect it now.’

They drove through what an outsider would have mistaken for a ghost town. No cars were on the roads, just a few trucks shipping in vital supplies of petrol and food. Streets devoid of people. Only the fish market showed any signs of activity. It was where, decades earlier, Sotov had set up his first business, crushing his competitors by poisoning their catches with diesel fuel.

The Lexus slowed to fifty kilometres and hour an hour as they headed north-west, Yakutsk in the rear-view mirror, the banks of the River Lena to their right. Now and then the car jumped and sank from the holes in the road.

Heading west, they passed a radar installation and a pyramid-roofed church. The chauffeur turned on to a gravel path and, half a kilometre down, stopped at a checkpoint. An imposing yellow sign warned that intruders would be shot. Guards, armed with A-91M bullpup assault rifles and with the company’s Siberian husky logo sewn to their lapels, peered inside and nodded sombrely at Sotov. The gates opened; the guards waved them through.

The road continued for another couple of kilometres until it reached the mouth of a low cave. Foot patrols with sniffer dogs cleared the Lexus to proceed. At the cave’s mouth four guards stood to attention, two on each side of a solid-lead vault door.

Golden statues of snow leopards were perched on the pillars either side of the door. Sotov exited the Lexus and took a keycard from his pocket. One of the guards also removed a keycard. They inserted their cards simultaneously into their slots. A series of clicks followed, then the door cranked open.

‘Come I have something to show you,’ said Sotov.

Ledinsky hesitated. ‘What’s inside?’

‘Why, your reward.’

‘Good. And please, let’s make it quick,’ Ledinsky said, the blood draining from his face. ‘I’m a busy man.’

‘Of course.’

The cave was cool and dark. Ledinsky took off his hat to reveal a comb-over. Steam wafted from his bald patch like cigar smoke. Another guard directed them towards a lift. They entered. The guard slammed the cage door shut, and the lift rattled as it descended three hundred feet below the surface. Ledinsky wiped sweat from his pate.

‘I was not aware you had another facility.’

‘We needed somewhere to store a few things.’

‘What things?’

‘Secrets, Maxim. Secrets.’

The lift screeched to a halt. Brilliant light flooded the black of the shaft. A guard cranked the door open. Sotov gestured for Ledinsky to exit first. The FSB chief scrunched up his eyes, as if staring directly at the sun. Sotov handed him a pair of sunglasses.

‘We’re in the only place in Siberia where a man needs these,’ he grinned.

Ledinsky’s jaw slackened.

‘In Yakutsk we like to say, there’s a lake or river for every person who lives here,’ Sotov said. ‘But the truth is that we have more diamonds than people. Here, comrade, diamonds are as common as snowflakes.’

‘It’s incredible… I’ve never seen—’

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’

They were standing in a dome-shaped underground mine. Searchlights fired powerful blue rays at the ceiling, fifty feet above. Sotov lowered his eyes to the ground, to an area the size of six football pitches. Filled with mountains of polished diamonds.

Ledinsky picked up a handful. Each gleaming stone hypnotized him. He managed to peel his eyes away. Looked quizzically at Sotov.

‘These must be worth billions.’

Sotov shrugged.

‘But… why are you hiding them underground?’

The mafya man kneeled beside a small mound of diamonds. A stone the size of his fist rested on top. Four times as large as the Cullinan diamond in the English Crown Jewels, the rock in front of him, he reckoned, was the largest rough diamond in the world. And it was kept underground, gathering dust.

‘Some things are more valuable when they are not seen,’ he said.

‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘Do you know that one diamond merchant controls fifty per cent of the global market? That’s an impressive figure, no? It means they have the power to raise the price of rough diamonds or lower it, however they see fit.’

Ledinsky frowned.

‘They say diamonds are rare,’ Sotov continued. ‘It’s a myth. We keep the stones down here, in the mine, because it benefits this particular merchant to have fewer organic diamonds on the market. They pay us not to supply them. It works for both of us. They keep the price of diamonds artificially high, and we get paid for doing nothing.’

‘That’s preposterous.’

Sotov rose to his feet. He scooped up the fist-sized diamond and offered it to Ledinsky.

‘Accept this as your payment,’ he said, lighting up a black Ziganov. ‘Take as many as you want, or need. Take some for your wife, your children. Take some as bribes for your colleagues. Take all you want, Maxim, but remember this: each diamond in your pocket is a promise from you to me. Cigarette?’

Ledinsky shook his head, rolled the sparkling stone in his hands like a ball. ‘What kind of a promise?’

‘Simply that we both agree to keep silent about our arrangement.’

Sotov waited for an answer that did not come. He turned to look at Ledinsky, and found the much-respected FSB director plunging his hands, joyously, into a pile of diamonds.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Sotov said.

3

Belgrade, Serbia. The next day. 1833 hours.

Gardner parked his rented Toyota Avensis two blocks from the Tiger Bar, slap bang in the heart of Silicon Valley. The district got its name from the number of artificially enhanced women who prowled its streets. A few days ago Gardner would have been tempted to check out the scenery. But he had come to Belgrade to settle a score and bury an old friendship. The Page Three girls of Silicon Valley would have to sit this one out.

Land had instructed him to hit the Tiger Bar at precisely six-forty the evening he arrived.

‘Who am I looking for?’ Gardner had asked.

‘Don’t worry, my boy – they’ll find you,’ Land had assured him.

Now Gardner’s eyelids felt heavy, as if someone had sewn hockey pucks into them. Just three hours’ sleep in more than forty-eight hours, and it had finally caught up with him. He’d taken a British Airways flight from Gibraltar to Heathrow. Passed the two hours waiting for his flight at a chain restaurant, drinking sugary coffee and grazing on a ham-and-cheese sandwich that gave him £2.50 change from a tenner. From there he boarded a Swiss Airlines plane bound for Zurich. He drank a pint of Guinness at a bar and watched Sky Sports News for an hour before taking an onward flight to Nikolai Tesla Airport.

Belgrade. It was twelve years since Gardner had set foot in the city. He felt like a murderer returning to the scene of the crime. A lot of fucked-up shit had gone down there during the Kosovo War, and the Regiment had played a right royal part. Dispatched to the capital, their mission had been to cripple the Milosevic state machinery by whatever means necessary.

As the troop’s designated demolitions expert, Gardner had been part of a four-man patrol charged with silencing Milosevic’s personal mouthpiece, the state radio. At sun-up he had rigged the station with enough plastique to tear the ozone a new arsehole. Intel had indicated the building was empty. But the int turned out to be wrong. At the moment Gardner pressed the clicker, twenty-eight civilians were inside. No one survived.

He never saw any bodies. Didn’t hear their screams above the explosion. But their shadows still haunted him, shadows without arms and legs, limp as rag dolls.

Twelve years later and the city had been given a fresh lick of paint. Snazzy new shopping centres, casinos and mobile-phone shops jostled for attention. Gardner saw that hints of the old Belgrade remained: the Communist architecture tucked away in dilapidated backstreets, and the frothing nationalist graffiti on underpasses and bridges.

It was cooler than Gibraltar, hovering around ten degrees. Gardner wore navy combats, a white V-neck T-shirt and a grey hoodie. He’d snapped up all three from a duty-free shop at Heathrow. And he had something else slapped around his wrist.

‘I’m concerned about your personal safety on this mission,’ Land had said in Gibraltar. ‘Now Bald’s more cautious than ever before and is working with some bad apples, there’s a fair chance they might suss you out. If that happens, you’re in trouble. Wear this.’ He’d given Gardner a red bracelet. The bracelet was fitted with a radio-frequency identification chip which sent out a signal on UHF passive frequency, triangulated via the Firm’s GIS computers to produce a real-time fix on the bracelet’s location.

‘If you press this button,’ Land had told him, tapping a small metal circle attached to the plastic, ‘it will send an emergency relay directly to MI6 HQ. That’s your signal that you’re in extreme danger and wish to be extracted. I can’t give any guarantees, but in normal circumstances we should be able to extract you within an hour of your pressing the button.’

Now, as Gardner approached the Tiger Bar, he clocked a photograph taped to the door. Some mean-looking guy in military uniform stood in front of a tank, surrounded by his militia mates. He had an AK-47 in his right hand but in his left was a curious thing: a baby tiger, held up by the scruff of its neck.

He pushed through the door. It was like crossing into another dimension, a place where smoking bans didn’t exist and Lady GaGa hadn’t yet been invented. Accordion music bleated out of a single speaker. About a dozen men huddled in groups of two and three at booze-soaked tables, drinking brandy, smoking foul-smelling tabs. They eyed him suspiciously as he made his way to the bar. He ordered a pint of the local lager from a barman with a face like a pig’s arse. Fuck me, he thought. It’s like I’m in Yates’s, minus the slappers.

Gardner pulled up a chair. He sipped his beer; it tasted watered down and glowed green beneath the bleary lights. His eyes adjusted and he realized there was a single female in the bar, a woman smiling a broad smile at him.

She had coffee-brown hair, brushed back behind small, elf-like ears, to fall in teasing strands at her neck. Her lips were delicate in the middle and curved up at the corners. She wore a three-quarter-sleeve flame top and a pair of indigo jeans, and had the kind of body that could look good in a shell suit.

She was by herself. Her eyes, black as a winter sky, searched his. I might be in here, Gardner decided. He glanced away, then stole another look at her figure, legs like a catwalk model. He had a strong urge to jump her bones.

The woman seemed to ignore him for several seconds. Then she stood up and walked over.

‘You must be Joe Gardner,’ she said in a soft and light voice that confused him. He’d assumed she was Serbian but the local women all seemed to have deep, full voices. He couldn’t quite place her accent.

She drew up the seat opposite him and placed a half-full glass of red on the metal table. Rested a black purse beside it.

‘And you are?’ he said.

The woman arched one of her elegant eyebrows at him. ‘You don’t need to know my name.’

‘No, but I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned like that.’

As a smile spread across her lips Gardner felt a hot wave of air push against the wall of his chest.

‘Leo warned me about you,’ she said.

‘Really? What—?’

‘Just that trouble follows you around like a bad smell and you’ve got some anger-management issues.’

Gardner drank some more cheap lager and reflected.

‘Pretty accurate, I’d say.’

The woman laughed, the smile full-on now, stars sparkling in her soft eyes. ‘Leo’s telling the truth for once?’

‘But I still don’t know your name.’

She sipped her wine, and the corners of her lips coloured dark red. ‘Aimée Milana,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Likewise, Aimée. I’m guessing you’re not local.’

She shook her head. ‘Strictly speaking, I’m only half-Serbian. My father’s from Belgrade, my mother’s from Paris. I grew up here but moved to France to study when the war broke out.’

‘And now you work for the Firm?’

Aimée’s eyebrows met at the bridge of her nose. They were arched and alluring. ‘Not for. With. If your government wants to stop people using my country as a drugs market, that is a good enough reason for me.’

‘You know why I’m here?’

‘Yes… back to business?’ Her smile crawled back into its hole.

He nodded. ‘Leo said you might be able to show me around.’

‘It seems your friend is mixed up with some very bad people,’ she said. ‘Come, I’ll take you there.’

Gladly leaving behind the filmy gunk in his glass, Gardner followed Aimée out of the bar. He was wondering what kind of shitstorm John Bald was stirring up on their old stomping ground.

4

1907 hours.

The Zira Hotel stood on Ruzveltova Street in old Belgrade, a concrete maze east of the River Sava. Gardner and Aimée were sitting in the Toyota on a sidestreet opposite the hotel. He could see all the way to the other side of the river, where the tall buildings of new Belgrade dominated the skyline.

‘This is where your friend is staying,’ Aimée said.

‘He likes to travel in comfort.’

Aimée popped a stick of chewing gum in her mouth. ‘He checked in under an assumed name. Let me see,’ she said, checking her phone. ‘Gary McAllister.’

Gardner laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Aimée demanded.

‘Too hard to explain,’ said Gardner, reflecting on the striking similarity between Bald and the old Liverpool midfielder.

At that moment Bald emerged from the hotel lobby. Gardner thought he looked tired. Bald climbed into a Mitsubishi Shogun 4x4 parked out front. The windscreen wipers swiped at drizzle as iron-grey skies leaked rain. Throw in a bunch of hoodies setting fire to a BT phone box, Gardner reckoned, and you could almost be in Moss Side.

The Shogun lunged forward.

‘Let’s follow him,’ said Aimée.

Gardner pulled out into traffic three vehicles behind the Shogun. Bald powered south-west down Ruzveltova for about a kilometre, then turned right into Aleksandra Boulevard. Gardner followed the Shogun past baroque libraries and museums. The old gave way to the new: porno shops and fast-food joints. Men slept on park benches in the mid-afternoon sun. The Shogun headed south. New apartment blocks lined the road: Belgrade was demolishing its old quarters, eager to join the twenty-first-century rat race.

Gardner gripped the wheel hard, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Been a hell of a ride, he told himself. Halfway across the fucking world. He dared to think he might be nearing the end of his mission. The thought dripped like acid in his stomach.

Less than ten kilometres south and the city receded like a politician’s hairline.

‘I know this place,’ Gardner said. ‘Belgrade’s slummy end.’

‘Used to be.’

They rolled past swish new penthouses. Parks, a gym, tennis courts, an outdoor swimming pool. Each of them carried the same bold message: Belgrade’s going places.

Bald parked up outside a two-storey villa. Gardner brought the Toyota to a rest a hundred metres back, next to a bus stop. He reached for his Nikon D3.

The digital camera was a specially modified unit courtesy of the Firm. Instead of Gardner saving images to a flash memory card, a secure network adapter transmitted the images in encoded format back to Vauxhall via a near-space satellite. The 12.1-megapixel snaps were hitting Land’s desk in the time it took to microwave a Pot Noodle. That way, if Gardner lost the camera or it was damaged, MI6 already had the photographs of everyone involved in the smuggling ring.

The front door of the villa opened and a man came out and shook Bald’s hand. His eyes scanned the street and, at one point, seemed to bore holes right through Gardner.

He had pockmarked cheeks like weathered marble. Pierced eyebrows and mangled ears that looked as if a Rottweiler had chewed on them. He was decked out in a tattered leather jacket with a Ferrari logo on the breast, turtleneck sweater and scuffed white sneakers.

‘Klint Valon,’ Gardner said.

‘You know him?’ Aimée asked. ‘He’s one of the most feared criminals in Belgrade.’

‘Fucking right I do. Albanian. He played both sides in the war, Albanian and Serbian. Eventually NATO got wise to him and he turned snitch. Actually helped the Regiment bust an arms-trafficking movement involving the Russian mafya and NATO soldiers.’

‘I had no idea he helped NATO.’

‘He gave Grade A int to hunt down the traffickers and put a stop to the ethnic cleansing. Trouble is, soon as the war was over Valon did a vanishing act. Probably shit-scared that the mates he’d dobbed in would be hungry for revenge.’

‘Never famous for his loyalty.’

‘The only loyalty Valon knows is to his wallet.’

Bald paced back to the Shogun, clutching a brown paper bag. Gardner figured it wasn’t a can of Special Brew in the bag – more likely a pistol for his personal protection.

Gardner revved up the Toyota once the Shogun had pulled off again.

‘Why would your friend be dealing with Valon?’

‘Maybe he’s looking for a little backup before he goes ahead with the exchange,’ said Gardner, waiting for a goat to cross the road.

‘Valon would perform such a service?’

Gardner nodded. ‘For a slice of the profits he’d whore out his gran and post the video on YouTube.’

Their conversation was interrupted by his squawking phone. He answered.

‘So you’ve met our local contact then?’ Land said. ‘Quite the siren, isn’t she?’

‘Helping me get the lowdown,’ Gardner said. He filled Land in on the presence of Klint Valon.

‘I suppose it makes sense. I’ve just got off the phone to Massimo. His undercover man in Calabria says that Petruzzi is going to arrive in Belgrade at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘Figure the deal’s not going to happen without Petruzzi present.’

‘Just to be on the safe side, we’ll have Bald’s hotel under surveillance. I’ll alert you the moment he leaves his room. But first we need to sort you out with some goodies ahead of the meeting. Aimée should come in handy, I think you’ll find.’

5

2007 hours.

The drive north to downtown Belgrade was a quiet one. Gardner thought about Valon. He recalled a story that did the rounds during the war. Rumours that Valon once drove a school bus through a village and offered to take the ethnic Albanians living there to a safehouse. The villagers were crammed on the bus. Men, women, children. Then Valon drove them straight into a Serbian militia camp. The militiamen paid him a handsome reward. Valon counted his money while the soldiers ordered the Albanians on to their knees and shot them in turn in the back of the head.

The Toyota crawled up Topcider Hill, south-east of the city centre. On the northern slope of the hill Gardner noted Hajd Park, named after Hyde Park. Down the other side of Topcider Hill, from where Aimée directed him towards a low-rise block of flats with a red-brick front, French windows and ornamental railings. The cars parked outside were all BMWs and Mercedes.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Gardner as Aimée searched for her keys. ‘The Firm obviously pay you good money.’

‘I do this work for my country. Not to buy myself a luxury sofa.’

They climbed wooden stairs, treads groaning like an old woman on her deathbed. On the third floor Aimée approached the door to flat 7 and twisted her keys in a series of locks. Inside, she had an alarm. This woman takes her security seriously, Gardner thought.

Aimée punched in a code number. The alarm cut short. She led him down a narrow hallway. Lino floors, framed newspaper articles that he noticed carried her name on the byline. He couldn’t read them, but he knew they were in French.

‘You used to be a journalist?’

The back of her head nodded. Gardner found himself staring at the smooth nape of her neck. ‘I worked as a crime reporter for Le Figaro for five years. It was fun, but crime in France is petty compared to what happens in Serbia.’

Past a kitchen on their left, a bathroom on their right, and at the end of the hallway she opened a door to the left, flicked a switch.

The room was bare. No furniture, no decorations. Just a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling like a burning fuse. Gardner wondered for a split second what he was supposed to be looking at. Then he ran his eyes across the walls and wondered no more.

Weapons were racked on the walls. Gardner recognized a bewildering variety of guns. Some he’d used many times before: Heckler & Koch Mark 23 semi-automatics, Benelli M4 Super 90 shotguns and Glock 9mms. Then there were the obscure guns procured from Russia and the Far East. A GM-94 grenade launcher and a PP-19 Bison 2 machine-gun. Weapons so rare that even the Regiment had a tough time getting hold of them.

‘Leo said for you to take what you need.’

‘Jesus,’ Gardner said, approaching one wall and understanding why Aimée needed so much security. He turned to her. ‘You’re an arms dealer?’

‘Nothing quite so grand. I’m just helping people fight the criminals who are trying to ruin Serbia. You’re welcome to whatever you want.’

Gardner selected a long, sleek black piece.

‘This is—’

‘The Sako TRG-22.’

‘You know your guns.’

‘In my family it was impossible to grow up and not know them.’

Gardner ran a hand over the sniper rifle. He’d used the TRG-22 on combat missions in the Regiment. While the rest of the Armed Forces swore by the Accuracy International L96, SAS operators had a degree of freedom when it came to selecting weapons and gear. Gardner favoured the TRG because it came with a muzzle break that reduced recoil and kickback, and the .308 Winchester rounds were lethally effective up to eight hundred metres. You couldn’t ask for more from a sniper rifle.

I’ll be targeting John from long range, Gardner reasoned. I need a gun that’s going to be surgical from distance. The TRG-22 fitted the bill perfectly.

‘I’ll take it,’ Gardner said.

‘What’s the business between you and the target?’ Aimée asked.

‘He used to be a good friend. Not any more.’

‘Are you going to kill him?’

‘What kind of a question is that?’ He kept a tight face. Her eyes hung on him. Gardner felt air freeze in his throat. They stood in silence for several seconds.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Aimée said.

‘That sounds good.’

She led him out to the hallway and into the bedroom opposite. There he sat on the edge of the bed while she popped into the kitchen. The knots in his leg muscles slackened. He heard the clinking of glass and the sticky shuffle of feet on lino.

Aimée returned clutching a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other. As she put the glasses on her bedside table and poured, Gardner studied her. Her eyes were soft and sharp at the same time, like teardrops on their sides. There were no hard lines on her face and she radiated a kind of inner strength.

‘Been a while since I had a glass of Serbian red,’ Gardner said. The wine tasted good. It uncorked the pressure building between his ears.

‘You’ve been here before?’ she asked him.

‘A long time ago.’ Images like talons dug deep in the sides of his skull. Burning houses, streets littered with shrapnel.

‘Many people have suffered,’ she said. ‘I have to help take the fight to the enemy. People think a war ends when the soldiers leave. They’re wrong.’

‘You’re preaching to the converted, Aimée.’

She sat on the bed, resting her back against the pillows, her long, smooth legs almost touching Gardner. He noticed the white strap of her bra low on her shoulder. As she adjusted herself the flame top tightened into a knot at her back, pulling the fabric over the curves of her chest.

Gardner drank more wine. Two gulps and he’d almost finished the glass. A pleasant mist settled behind his eyes.

‘So, how did you go from being a journalist to helping MI6?’

‘It’s complicated,’ she said, curling a rogue strand of hair around her index finger. ‘My father was part of the underground resistance to Milosevic’s rule. To begin with he fought with words: pamphlets, newspapers, that kind of thing. After Milosevic killed our mother he decided to carry on the struggle with guns.’

‘I always thought shoot first, ask later was the best policy.’

Aimée smiled.

‘My father had one rule for himself, another for everyone else. He was like you.’

She topped up Gardner’s glass. The logical part of his mind told him to refuse. He needed to stay alert. He was behind enemy lines. But Land had said the deal would be happening tomorrow noon, and he was grateful for a moment’s respite from the stress of his mission. He necked more wine. The alcohol burned cobwebs inside him.

‘My father killed many of Milosevic’s biggest, baddest thugs,’ Aimée went on. ‘He even tried to assassinate Milosevic himself. But they caught him, tore off his fingernails and toenails, cut off his nose and threw him over a cliff, leaving him for dead. I was seven years old.’ Her breath escaped in spurts. ‘My father’s friends made me see his body. So I could never forget, they told me.’ The smile took on worried curves. ‘It worked.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘It was many years ago now. But thank you.’

‘And you decided to follow in your father’s footsteps?’

‘Not exactly. I mean, I respected his work, and his devotion to the cause of a free and liberal Serbia. But, you know, times have changed. In this country there is a big divide between the older people and the young. Those who remember the war don’t want to forget or forgive, and their first choice is the gun. The rest of us, the young, all have an iPod. We live in a different world. Today wars are waged on TV screens and newspapers.’

‘But the weapons racks—?’

‘Yes, Joe?’

‘I’m not here to cause a riot, Aimée. I want to stop an old friend from doing bad things.’

Her smile evened out and her eyes sighed at him. ‘I think Leo was wrong. You’re a good man.’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘You are. I see it in your eyes.’

‘Sometimes I don’t think there are good people any more,’ Gardner said. ‘Just some people who do something and other people who do nothing.’

‘And what does that make you?’

He shrugged. ‘Guess I’ve never really been the type to sit back and let things happen.’

‘You’re always in control?’

‘I try to be.’

An awkward silence passed between them. Gardner fixed his eyes on his wine glass. Rain rapped on the windows.

‘And what about if you lost control?’

He raised his eyes and saw Aimée was sitting up straight. She let her gaze trace around the edges of Gardner’s face. She placed her glass on the floor next to the sofa. Licked her lips and pushed herself across the coffee table, wrapping her arms tight around his neck. He leaned in and let her kiss him across the divide. She kissed him hard. Gardner pulled her close and saw that her eyes were clamped shut, as if she was fighting not to wake up from a powerful dream.

6

2144 hours.

Sotov was carving a dollar sign into the whore’s face when the call came.

Bad fucking timing.

He paused, the knife point suspended above her left eyebrow. Blood trickled into a carmine river above her brow and streamed down her nose. Droplets fell from the tip and on to her trembling lips. Each drop made her shiver.

Sotov was torn between taking the call and telling the assistant to say he was busy. It had become increasingly hard for him to source good women. Russian girls were out of the question. They aroused too much suspicion. So he had resorted to flying them in from the old satellite states, and some from further afield. China, Venezuela, Vietnam. They were cheaper, and so was their silence.

You have to take the call, he was thinking. The girl can wait.

The Lithuanian prostitute gave a muted cry. Her eyes rested on the knife grip wrapped around his pale fingers. The two other prostitutes, a couple of black-haired Chinese, were being paid to watch. The Lithuanian was a redhead with such a perfectly symmetrical face that it almost felt scandalous to mark her in such a way. Almost.

His assistant handed him his mobile.

‘Someone’s watching Bald,’ the voice said.

‘Shit,’ Sotov growled. ‘Who? No one knows about this. I’ve paid the FSB off, for fuck’s sake.’

There was a pause at the other end of the line. Sotov knew the man used an iridium-powered satellite phone for security purposes. He found the time delay maddening.

‘Forgive me,’ the man said. ‘I’m not sure how he learned of Bald’s intentions.’ Another pause. ‘I think he might be an old friend.’

‘When I want your opinion,’ Sotov replied, ‘I’ll fucking well ask you for it.’ His rage shot down the line. ‘Do we even have a name for this cunt?’

‘Joe Gardner,’ the man’s voice quietening. ‘I understand he’s a former soldier.’

Sotov’s right hand twitched. The blade sank a quarter of an inch into the girl’s forehead and a scream pierced the walls.

He motioned for the two Chinese girls to suck each other’s tits. They climbed on to the ornamental four-poster bed once owned by the Romanovs, now enjoying pride of place in the private bedroom of Sotov’s twenty-room mansion in Moscow. He always came to the capital for this sort of thing. You couldn’t very well ask girls to fly to Siberia. And somehow it seemed more appropriate amid the decadence of Moscow, where the bankers paid to watch their wives fuck other men and the noble politicians of the Duma buried truths and people in equal abundance.

Sotov watched the Chinese girls as one nibbled at the other. The girls moaned, like they were genuinely having a good time.

‘What would you like me to do, Aleks?’

‘Kill him,’ Sotov said.

‘He’s with a girl. Kill her too?’

Sotov sipped from a glass of finest-grain Scotch malt whisky. ‘No. I want the girl.’

Call over, Sotov went back to work. Anger boiled in his veins. He wanted to make the redhead cry. She whimpered as he cleaned the blade on a napkin and pressed the serrated tip against the warm, doughy flesh of her breast. Her breathing was fitful. Forget this soldier: he’s a fucking small fish in a very big pond, he told himself.

7

0425 hours.

Gardner woke early. He watched the light from the streetlamp, crisp and bright as sulphur, decanting through the inch-wide gap between the curtains. The light coloured in the faces on the holiday and family snaps lining the wall. Every square millimetre of space was devoted to pictures and press cuttings, old birthday cards and poems. Gardner lived without a past and not much of a present. He didn’t have a Facebook profile or Twitter page and, as far as he knew, no photos of him existed since he was a teenager. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was the only way he knew. But, looking at Aimée’s wall of friends and fond memories, he felt a little hollow at his core.

He sensed the bracelet on his wrist. Hated the feel of the plastic against the hairs on his skin. Tagged like a fucking paedophile, he thought. Suddenly he hungered for freedom. Manoeuvring his body so he didn’t wake Aimée, he brought his wrist to his mouth. Snagged the lock between his teeth and yanked at the bracelet. Something snapped. It came loose. He tossed the bracelet to the floor. It landed somewhere amid the sea of clothes.

Aimée stirred. Her head rested on his chest, the flat of her nose using the curved ridge of his pectoral muscles as a pillow. When he peered down at her he saw only a head of ruffled hair. But Gardner felt her breath rise up his chest and stream on to his chin. She kissed his chest, then the side of his neck, working her way up muscle by muscle. Finally she kissed him on the lips and rubbed her nose against his stubbled cheek. Her face – fifty per cent sleepy and fifty per cent smiley – pronounced her happiness.

‘It’s early,’ she said.

‘You can go back to sleep.’

‘Are you kidding? I’m not sleepy at all.’

‘Me neither,’ said Gardner. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, rubbed sleep from his eyes. In the Regiment he got by on two or three hours’ sleep a night. These days it was more like five or six. He was getting slack.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Already?’ Aimée made a noise in the base of her throat, like a poorly dog. ‘Damn it, and there I was thinking you could wait just a few more hours before killing evil drug dealers.’

‘I might be persuaded to leave a few minutes late.’

‘Persuaded – how?’

‘Surprise me.’

The noise in her throat came again, now a note higher. She squeezed his right bicep. Her fingers traced the route of his bluish veins, visible on the surface like steel cables. ‘They’re so soft and smooth,’ she said. ‘I thought they’d be harder.’

Her left hand slid under the thin white sheet that covered them from the waist down. He felt her fingers against the inside of his leg. Her fingertips were warm and he felt a pang of electricity course through his body when she touched him.

‘People think muscle’s rock hard, but that’s not the truth.’

‘Every muscle?’ Aimée said.

‘Well, maybe one exception.’

Half an hour later Gardner was woken by the revving of an engine and the screech of wet brakes in the street below. He checked his watch. Not yet five. Now the violent slamming of car doors and the urgent pitter-patter of feet on the pavement made him suspicious.

Leaving Aimée to bury her head under the pillows, he slid out of bed, rushed across to the bedroom window, pulled the curtains a little way apart and stared down. He spied a black Land Rover behind his Toyota.

Three figures had debussed from the Land Rover. Two guys Gardner didn’t recognize. One was no more than five foot five and shaped like a giant testicle with arms. Gardner spotted a crucifix the size of a GI Joe hanging on the end of a necklace.

The second guy, a lot taller, had a mouthful of gold teeth and a shaved head covered in tattoos: swastikas, skulls, crucifixes. He was decked out in a dark-green puffer jacket, white vest and black trousers with toe-capped boots.

The third was Valon.

Son of a fucking bitch, Gardner thought.

‘What’s going on?’ Aimée was awake, arching her head up towards him, the outline of her face imprinted on the pillow.

Gardner spun around. ‘Grab some clothes. We’re leaving.’

‘Not before you tell me who’s outside.’

‘There’s no time. Trust me, Aimée. Get up.’

The urgency in his voice spooked her. She threw on a pair of tight jeans and a Nike T-shirt while Gardner went to grab the TRG-22.

A crash stole Gardner’s attention as he stepped across the hallway. The sound of wood splitting, metal buckling. He froze. The goons were at the periphery of his vision, the door busted open. Valon stood between them. He held up his hands. He was toting a gun. Testicles squeezed past Tattoo and marched down the hallway.

At three metres’ distance, Gardner dropped his right shoulder, faking to swing with his left. Then he dug his fingertips into his palm to form a sharp ridge with the first knuckle joints. Testicle moved to cover his face with his enormous arms, leaving his stomach exposed. Gardner set his sights on a gut shot, hoping to knock the wind out of his sails. He rammed his knuckles into the guy’s abdomen.

Pain gnawed at his hand. His fingers burned. What he’d figured was a fleshy gut was in fact a hard wall of muscle. Testicle’s abs were swollen up like sandbags.

The goon chuckled. His fat fingers clamped themselves tight around Gardner’s head and wrenched his neck back. Gardner’s chin was level with Testicle’s forehead.

As Testicle punched him on the jaw, Gardner felt his body defy gravity. He was on the ground one second, airborne the next. Testicle shrank from view as the force of the punch flung Gardner several metres down the hallway. His back smacked against the lino floor. Pain sprang up in clusters along his spine.

‘Fuck you, man,’ roared Testicle, shaking his wrist.

Tattoo trained the business end of a Sig Sauer P229 on Gardner. In his enormous hand the big fuck-off pistol looked like a joke gun-lighter.

‘Take her and you’ll fucking pay,’ Gardner said. ‘When I’m done with you, there won’t be anything left to identify you, except for your tiny fucking dick.’

‘Sure, man,’ said Tattoo, stepping closer to Gardner. ‘Whatever makes you feel better.’ On the last word he pistol-whipped Gardner in the face, stunning him. Gardner’s head rang with pain, and the next thing he knew, Tattoo had yanked his hands behind his back, restraining him.

Testicle walked into the bedroom. A moment later Gardner heard Aimée scream and the slap of a hand against flesh. ‘Fucking bitch,’ rasped Testicle as he dragged Aimée out into the hallway.

‘I’m sorry, Aimée,’ Gardner said.

‘Get this bastard off me!’

‘I’m going to get you free. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be OK.’

‘Yeah, listen to your boyfriend,’ said Testicle. ‘You remember his words while we’re raping the shit out of your pussy.’

Testicle manhandled Aimée out of the flat. Tattoo followed, nudged past Valon, Aimée’s squeals echoing up and down the stairwell. Valon said something that Gardner couldn’t quite catch. Next thing he knew, Valon was directing the pistol at his temple.

Gardner squinted at the black hole of the muzzle. Frost spread from his spine down to his hands and feet. He couldn’t move: the gun had him in a trance. So this is how it ends, he thought. Killed by a fucking chancer.

A flash, a sound so loud it seemed as if a grenade had kicked off inside his skull. Blood leaking from his nose, his eardrum throbbing. Taste of burnt gas on his lips, the smell of it in the air. To his left, a neat bullet hole burned into the lino floor.

And the realization that he wasn’t dead.

He looked up. Valon was running down the hallway.

How did he miss me from that range? Gardner wondered.

Petrol fumes stung his throat. He watched in a daze as Testicle slopped a jerry can of the stuff around the hallway. On the floor, over the walls. Petrol dripped from Aimée’s framed newspaper clippings. When he’d fully doused the hallway, Testicle paced to the front door, turned and removed a thick roll of paper from his back pocket. With his cigarette lighter he torched the end of the paper and chucked it towards the petrol.

The fire spread spontaneously, fast. Flames licked at the walls. Glass cracked. Plastic blackened. Smoke thick and grey as charcoal rapidly filled the hallway. Gardner’s eyes reddened.

He choked on the fumes.

Get out of here – before you die.

8

0518 hours.

Gardner ran to the end of the hallway and ducked into the room on his left, smoke and burning plastic stinging his throat. Slinging the TRG-22 sniper rifle over his shoulder and grabbing a Glock 9mm as a secondary firearm, he retraced his steps to the bedroom and made a beeline for the window looking down on to the street. Testicle was slamming the door of a black Land Rover, Tattoo jumping in the other side. Valon behind the wheel.

Flames hissed at the bedroom door. He felt the heat on his back, smelled the melting paint. Gardner yanked at the window. Fucking fastened shut! He tugged at the rusted brass lock. No dice.

Grabbing the butt of the TRG-22, he swung it like a baseball bat against the glass. He was grateful for single glazing as the two large panes smashed with one clean swing. He raked the remaining shards with the muzzle of the sniper rifle. Fresh air hit him and he sucked in hungry breaths. Then he climbed through the gap head-first, the balls of his feet balancing on the window ledge.

The drop to the pavement was about fifteen metres. High enough to be dangerous, low enough to be Gardner’s only realistic way of escaping the fire. He might break a leg, or he might walk away unharmed. The jump was a lottery. But with the fire eating up the hallway, he had to buy a ticket.

Gardner pushed himself off the ledge as the Land Rover raced off. He extended his arms at his sides like wings to balance his body as it dropped. The wind gushed over him. The pavement grew larger and larger until he could see nothing else.

He closed his eyes as he hit the concrete shoulder-first. A dull throb swam from his ankle joint right up to his shoulder blade. He felt as if someone had clubbed him on his right side.

Picking himself off the ground and checking himself for injuries, Gardner rifled through his pockets. My car keys. I can still stop them. They can’t have gone far.

The Toyota was ten metres away. As Gardner beat a path to it he hocked up cloying, blackened phlegm. He chucked the TRG-22 and the Glock in the passenger seat, shoved the key into the ignition and pulled out into the main street, swerving to avoid an approaching fire engine. Looking back, he saw the flames engulf the entire third floor of the apartment block.

Soon hitting 110 in a forty-kilometre zone, Gardner wrenched the steering wheel hard left. Matchsticks lit under his wrists. The Toyota slalomed left at the end of Gavrilo Principa. He’d studied the layout of Belgrade for months in advance of the Kosovo War and knew that Gavrilo Principa was one-way. The only way out was left.

At 0525 the roads were deserted. Gardner throttled the Toyota, reaching 130. He spotted the Land Rover sixty metres ahead as it banged a right. Gardner jerked the wheel to his right, the Toyota screeching under the pressure. He eased off and at the apex of the turn he hit the accelerator again and levelled out. He’d reduced the distance to the Land Rover to thirty metres.

Clink!

A bullet starred the windscreen. One, two, three rounds cracked the glass. Then Gardner heard the clunk of hot lead thwacking against hard leather as the rounds ripped into the passenger seat. He swerved left, then right, in a zigzag manoeuvre.

Sparks bounced off the bonnet. The shooter couldn’t get a fix, he reckoned, loosing off shots in the hope one would strike lucky.

Gardner urged the Toyota up to 145. He was gaining on the Land Rover. Fifteen metres now. Close enough to see Aimée’s tinted-grey outline in the back seat.

They were heading out of the city.

Crack!

Another round. This one missed the windscreen and the bonnet. Gardner thought the trajectory might have sent it high into the air. But an angry hiss set the record straight. The bullet had punched a hole in one of his tyres.

He had no time to react. No time to think. The Toyota wobbled. He was fucked. He felt the motor shudder under the pressure. Shudder, then slide. He wrestled with the wheel. No fucking use. He could feel the lack of friction. The Toyota swapped the road for the fence of a small park. The fence beckoned. Gardner applied maximum force to the brakes. Braced himself for impact.

The crash damn near threw him out of his seat, but his arms were locked tight around the wheel. G-force kicked his arse, smashing his forehead against the dashboard and unleashing waves of pain across his skull. His jawbone tremored, as if someone had taken a defibrillator to the sides of his face. Rat-rat-rat went the Toyota’s engine in its death throes. Steam fluttered out of the grille.

Gardner gathered his senses. He mopped blood from his nose and looked to his right. Forty metres ahead, the Land Rover had stopped at a deserted junction. A single lamppost gave the asphalt a spit and polish; a wire fence sealed off naked farmland. In the distance he could see a cottage, lights off.

A white Ford Transit pulled up smartly alongside the Land Rover, breaking the silence. Testicles and Tattoo bundled Aimée into the back of the van while Valon looked on approvingly. He watched the Transit head off into the distance, the two heavies and the girl with it.

Now Valon began to walk over to Gardner. He was wielding an AK-47.

Gardner kicked open the driver-side door. The TRG-22 was lying on the passenger seat, the Glock 9mm on the floor. Seizing both, he climbed out of the wreckage. He still felt disoriented. The world jarred. A shrill sound perforated his left eardrum, as if mice were crawling inside. Every muscle in his body ached.

Then came the shots. A maddening volley of them, metal shredding metal, the contorted Toyota shell lighting up like it was fucking bonfire night. Bullets whirred into the chassis. Gardner heard leather tear, the wheezing of tyres. Any one of the rounds could bounce off a hard metal front, deflect into the path of his brain like a squash ball. That’s all it would take, he thought, as he ducked for cover behind the chassis.

Valon’s going to finish you off.

No. I won’t let that happen.

He steadied himself. Christ, his body was in bad nick. But he had to forget about the pain. He closed his eyes and silenced it. Opened them and saw Valon, twenty metres away, inserting a fresh clip into the AK.

More bounds chopped up the Toyota. Gardner placed the TRG-22 on the ground and grabbed the Glock. It felt light and cold in his hands. He chambered a round of 9x19 Parabellum ammunition. He was counting Valon’s shots like a kid memorizing his times table.

Seven, eight, nine…

On the twentieth and final round, Gardner risked a peek over the Toyota. Valon was eight metres off, reaching for a third clip. The Toyota had more holes in it than a political manifesto. Gardner crept around to the boot. On a three-count he shot to his feet.

‘Drop it, or I’ll drop you like a fucking bad habit,’ he said, his voice firm and steady as the Glock pointed at Valon’s mug.

The guy’s right hand held the AK by the underside of the barrel. His left was suspended by his side, like a gunslinger in a shootout. Gardner had caught him about to reload. Valon beamed a bad-toothed smile, opening his arms in a bear hug.

‘The fucking rifle, Klint.’

Valon laid the AK on the ground like a mourner laying flowers at a memorial. ‘Shit, OK, bro. OK. See? I’m not armed now.’ He was still smiling. ‘What the fuck’s this, man? This is how you greet an old friend?’

Gardner edged out from the shelter of the Toyota. ‘Yeah, next time I see a mate I’ll lock him in a burning flat, then shoot the shit out of his car.’

‘We had to take the girl. Orders are orders. You’re a soldier. You know how this shit works.’

‘You’re no soldier, Klint.’

‘Harsh, bro. And after all we’ve been through.’

The sun crept above Valon’s back. Gardner didn’t fancy hanging about in the sticks. First law of any firefight – always displace. He waved the pistol towards the Land Rover. Valon got the message: move. When they reached the vehicle Gardner nudged Valon into the driver’s seat. Sat in the back himself, the Glock resting between his knees, eyeballing Valon’s seat.

‘Try any funny business and I’ll put one through your spine.’

Valon turned the engine on. The Land Rover growled.

‘Where to, man?’

‘Where’s the girl?’ asked Gardner.

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Think so?’ He tightened his face into a scowl. ‘You and me are gonna have a little chat.’

9

0702 hours.

Blame the synthetics, Sotov liked to say. Beautiful, man-made rocks produced using chemical vapour deposition in American laboratories, burning carbon at temperatures in excess of 800°C. They looked exactly like the real thing. Even to the expert eye, distinguishing synthetic from real diamonds was increasingly hard.

They flooded the market, the synthetic diamonds, lowering the cost of organically harvested rocks and eating into the profits of mining operations like Sotov’s. Then there were the arseholes in suits who demanded he line their pockets. The state officials, the meddling politicians in the Duma. Everyone took their cut.

To be sure, there was not much money in diamonds these days. Drugs were the real cash-spinner. Always had been. He could make more in a single drugs deal than in a month of dealings with the corrupt diamond merchants. Although it benefited Sotov to have a legitimate business empire – made him look respectable. If it wasn’t for that single benefit, he would have sold up the diamond business a long time ago.

The fifty kilos of cocaine he was acquiring was worth $30 million in America, but he intended to sell the coke on to contacts he’d acquired through his years of service in the mafya. Contacts that had taken a lifetime to build up, ever since his early days as a vor v zakone, a thief-in-law. Thanks to his influence, in less than twenty-four hours he’d be rich once more. Thirty million could buy a lot of hookers.

Sotov paused at the edge of the forest clearing and lit a Ziganov. He allowed his body a moment to acclimatize. Compared to Yakutsk, Serbia in the early autumn was positively tropical. Warm air swirled in his nostrils. His mouth was dry, a severe case of cotton mouth and the cigarette did not taste good. He took three drags on the cigarette before stubbing it out on a rock. Then he paced briskly back down towards the clearing, where a Lincoln Navigator was parked up.

A dirt track led from the clearing into the main road some two hundred metres away. Popov the chauffeur leaned against the hood of the Lincoln and ran a hand through his silver hair. The four-man team under Sotov’s command was equipped with OTS-33 automatic pistols he’d acquired by bribing an army officer. Popov himself was ex-Spetsnaz – Sotov considered it wise to travel with a guy who could shoot as well as drive – and had an AK-47 as his primary weapon, a virtually indestructible assault rifle that could be burned, frozen and buried and still work perfectly.

The greatest legacy of our Soviet Union, thought Sotov. A brutally effective gun.

These men – Popov and the other four – were Sotov’s finest soldiers, the ones he could rely on when he needed something done and done right. Popov watched as the others diligently performed last-minute checks on their firearms, going through their paces. Sotov knew there was no room for error. The exchange had to be quick and smooth, and he didn’t trust the Italians an inch.

Sotov checked his Rolex. Ten-fifteen.

Not long to go now.

He turned back to Popov.

‘It’s time.’

Popov nodded; his phone rang. He showed Sotov the text message. ‘We’re in place,’ it said. ‘Awaiting further orders.’

Popov looked at Sotov. ‘Something on your mind?’ he asked.

‘The first fireteam is already at the site,’ Sotov replied.

‘That’s good.’ Sensing that Sotov was still not satisfied, Popov added, ‘I have a good feeling about this operation, Aleks.’

‘I hear from Valon that Petruzzi – the man they call the Pallbearer – is a greedy fuck.’ He felt a laugh ripple in his lungs, didn’t quite make it to the surface.

‘When are the Italians ever anything else?’

Sotov laughed out loud now. ‘You’re right. As always, Denis.’ He smiled at Popov. ‘That’s why I trust you so much. Other vory v zakone are like crows. Their only interest is to line their own pockets. They speak of loyalty. Bullshit. They know nothing of the word. But you—’ Sotov patted Popov on the back. The chauffeur went to say something, cut himself short.

10

0800 hours.

They drove in silence for several minutes, due west along Route 19, until Gardner indicated for Valon to take a left turn. As they headed south the motorway corkscrewed past an old farm, its overgrown fields populated by mangy goats and starved sheep, an early nineties Nissan Firebird out front. A minute later they came to an abandoned depot west of the Makis freight station. Gardner ordered Valon to stop the car.

They got out, Gardner keeping the Glock on Valon. The earth was reclaiming the train tracks, grass shoots clawing at the old iron path. Three hundred metres to the north-east stood the functioning Lokomotiv depot. Just after eight o’clock in the morning and the mechanical grunts of trains stopping and starting carried on the chill air. Gardner and Valon were too far away for the rail workers to spot them. He led the Albanian towards the carcass of an old train carriage, its rusting frame dumped at the end of the line. Gardner recalled this spot from his operations here as a Blade. They’d settled on the disused depot as an RV point in the event of the op going tits up.

Once they reached the depot, Gardner got down to business.

He brought his pistol hand down hard on to the dip between Valon’s shoulders, heard the crunch of the grip connecting with bone. Valon dropped like shit out of a dog’s arse. His body made unnatural sounds as Gardner smothered him with body blows. The guy writhed this way and that. Gardner booted him in the ribcage, then the gut. Then the balls. He eased off, allowing Valon to catch his breath. The guy was on his hands and knees, scrambling to catch his breath. His mouth open, he sucked at the ground.

‘Where’d you take her?’

‘Fuck—’ Valon angled his head up at Gardner, his voice no more than a cancerous rasp.

‘Wrong answer, mate.’

Gardner raised the Glock level parallel with his elbow – then swung it in an arc. The pistol swept down and smashed into Valon’s face. His hands gave way; his knees buckled. The front of Gardner’s T-shirt was flecked with red dots. Something dark and sticky clung to the end of the Glock’s barrel.

Getting down on one knee, Gardner lifted Valon’s head. He was fucked. A three-inch dent stretched like an oversized leech from his ear to his jaw. His forehead and nose were freckled with blood, and snot around his mouth had mixed with dirt from the ground to form a sort of sandy paste covering his chin.

‘I fucking swear, mate, the next one is a bullet in your head. Do you understand?’ Valon gave a battered nod. ‘Now, where the fuck is Aimée?’

‘Is that her name? Very cute.’ He slurred his words. ‘Forget her, Joe. She’s better off dead. And she soon will be.’

The fury crescendoed from Gardner’s stomach to the small of his throat.

‘So where is she?’

Valon’s silence answered for him.

‘What are you doing working with John Bald?’

‘Fuck your mother.’

‘When’s the exchange happening?’

‘Shit, brother. You kill me and you’ll never see Bald or the girl again.’ Gardner pressed the Glock against Valon’s temple.

Do it, he was thinking. One shot. That’s all it’d take. Put a hole in his noggin that you could drive a cattle rod through.

No. I can’t kill him. Not with Aimée out there, not with Bald on the verge of making his deal.

He pulled the gun away.

‘Give me your hand, brother,’ he said.

Valon obeyed. Stubborn cunt, Gardner thought as he directed the muzzle at Valon’s balls. The Albanian offered up his left hand instead of his right. Gardner fished the red bracelet from his pocket and clicked it around his bony wrist.

‘Hey, what the fuck is this?’

‘This bracelet’s loaded with bang-bang powder,’ Gardner said, making up a spot of bullshit. This guy’s a sly cunt, he thought, but he ain’t exactly clever.

‘It operates on a remote-control detonator. One press of the clicker and you won’t be doing any hand shandies for a long time. Try and take it off, you’ll short the circuit – boom. See, you’re going to lead me to John Bald, mate. And I’m going to put the drop on him.’

Valon eyed the bracelet, his pupils bulging like white poker chips. He’d clearly bought Gardner’s line about the explosives. ‘You’re fucking crazy, brother. Bald will notice this.’

‘Then tell him you’re trying to make poverty history, I don’t give a fuck. But you’d better come clean, or I’ll blow your arm to fucking mush.’

‘Shit. OK, OK.’ Valon snatched at air. Sweat trickled down the sides of his head. ‘The meeting is at a place called the Presevo Valley. It’s about 320 kilometres south of Belgrade, maybe a bit further.’

‘I know it,’ Gardner said. The valley, near the border with Macedonia, had been a hotbed of ethnic violence in the war. In the years since then it had become the site of conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian security forces.

‘Where in the valley?’

‘On the E-75. Near the village of Brezovan.’

‘What time?’ Gardner said.

‘Noon today,’ Valon said back.

‘And you’re John’s bodyguard?’

‘Fuck no, man. Don’t insult me, I’m more important than that,’ Valon snorted, bringing up phlegm. ‘I’m here to make the introduction between Bald and the Russian.’

‘The Russian?’

‘A mafya guy, name of Sotov.’ He flashed a look at Gardner. ‘He’s the one who told me to kidnap the bitch. They call him the Grey Wolf.’

‘Some kind of a joke?’

‘Don’t you get it, bro? He’s mafya. He’s got this big diamond company, lots of money, and he’s a stone-cold killer. Fuck, man, you don’t mess with this guy. I’m fucking serious. He’s a real player.’

Daybreak announced itself in harsh, unforgiving rays. We’ll be visible to the depot workers if we stick around much longer, Gardner realized. He watched Valon wipe his nose with the sleeve of his coat, then ordered him to his feet.

‘Tell me about your plan,’ he said.

Valon struggled to stand up upright. His legs wobbled, he remained unsteady. ‘I’m supposed to rendezvous with Bald at nine o’clock on the dot. We run through a checklist, get our shit together and head out to the meet.’

‘At Presevo?’

Valon nodded, eyes on his sleeve.

‘In the car,’ Gardner said. ‘Head to your get-together with Bald. I want you to pretend like nothing’s happened. You go to the drug swap. When the deal’s done and dusted, you pretend you lost the car keys. Search the ground and stay the fuck away from Bald. And if you say a word about me, I’ll blow your bloody arm off.’

‘You’re gonna kill him, aren’t you?’ Valon ran his hands over the ugly wound on the side of his face. The flesh had coloured a kind of oily black, as if his cheeks were made out of rubber.

‘I’m here to bring him in, that’s all.’

‘Nah, brother. I see it in your eyes.’

‘Just get a fucking move on.’

After Valon left in the Land Rover, Gardner handrailed the road north, back to the 19 motorway. He kept fifteen metres between himself and the road, manoeuvring along a parallel path a metre lower than the road and blanketed by trees. He passed dead animals: rotting cats and rats. Took him twelve minutes to reach the same farm he’d passed on the trip down with Valon.

Gardner walked eighty metres beyond the farm, then turned around and retraced his route. His eyes were alert for any sign of movement or activity. The farm seemed to be empty, the road likewise. He unhooked the wooden gate at the front of the property. Goats chewed cud and blinked at him as he approached the old Nissan Firebird. It was a clapped-out motor, but easy to jack. No hi-tech alarms or locking mechanisms to piss about with.

He broke the driver’s window with the Glock and opened the door from the inside. Then he hotwired the engine and reversed out of the drive.

It was now 0840 hours, leaving Gardner barely enough time to hit Presevo Valley. He estimated the driving time at three hours clean if he kept his foot to the pedal. He’d rock up to the meeting point twenty minutes before the meeting.

But you can’t leave Aimée, he agonized.

Right now, I don’t have a fucking choice. I’m out of time.

His ultimate objective – the termination of John Bald – loomed in his mind. Unlike action heroes in the movies, Regiment operators took the business of killing seriously. Gardner liked to say that no man could understand the power of one man over another, the power to take his life, until he’d held a Glock 9mm in his hands and pointed it at another man’s head. Taking the life of a friend he’d known for fifteen years wasn’t something he relished. He reconciled himself to the fact that Bald had taken a path he himself couldn’t agree with. The drugs, the money, luring Gardner to Rio. He’d betrayed the Regiment code.

When he was about a hundred kilometres from his destination, Gardner put a call in to Land.

‘Christ, man,’ Land said. ‘I’ve been trying to contact you for hours. What the devil is going on down there?’

‘That streak of piss Valon. He ambushed Aimée’s apartment.’

‘Good God.’ A curious pause had followed. ‘What – what the hell were you doing at Aimée’s place all that time?’

Gardner ignored him. ‘Valon took Aimée hostage. Handed her over to some bloke called Sotov. He’s mafya.’

He waited for Land to say something, but the Firm man stayed silent.

‘You stitched me up,’ Gardner said, finally.

‘Nonsense,’ Land snapped. ‘I warned you that he was in with a bad crowd. You went into this mission with your eyes wide open, Joe. Just because it’s getting a bit uncomfortable doesn’t mean you can start bandying accusations about.’

‘Spare me the bollocks,’ Gardner said. ‘There’s more than the ’Ndrangheta and the Serbs involved here. You didn’t say anything about the fucking Russian mafya sticking their hands in the pie.’

Gardner heard people talking near to Land. ‘The Russians were a source,’ Land said. ‘But we couldn’t confirm their attachment to the deal one away or the other. Your work has proved that they are indeed involved.’ He sniffed. ‘You might think you’re one step ahead of the Firm, dear chap. But in truth you’re just another soldier doing exactly what we tell him to do. No more – and no less.’

‘There’s one thing you and your mate Macca definitely called wrong,’ Gardner said. ‘John Bald’s not selling to the Italians. He’s doing business with the Russians.’

‘Yes,’ said Land impatiently. ‘And the ’Ndrangheta are the protection for him, in return for receiving a cut of the profits. We know. The Firm’s been aware of this development since last night. That’s why I tried to call you. But from the sounds of it, you were… preoccupied?’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Now, now, Joe—’

‘I take John down, this cunt’s next on the list.’

‘You will do no such thing.’ Land sighed. ‘If you start taking down Russian mafya – particularly those with links to the government – then you’ll cause a diplomatic incident. And if that happens, you’re on your own.’

Gardner felt something scratch at his throat.

‘I’m not abandoning Aimée.’

‘And I’m not asking you to. Look, bring Valon in alive after you’ve killed Bald. He knows Sotov. I’m certain Valon can lead us to your woman friend, given a little encouragement.’

‘Fuck it,’ Gardner said. ‘I’m on my way to Presevo now. I can just make it ahead of time. Valon gave me the location. I’m going to get there before John—’

And then you’re going to kill him, he thought.

A pause.

‘Stop him, Joe,’ said Land quietly. ‘Whatever it takes.’

11

1133 hours.

The E-75 motorway cut through Europe like a scimitar. It ran from Vardo in Norway down to Sitia at the fag-end of Greece. It coursed like a river through the basin of the Presevo Valley, straddling the five-kilometre buffer zone separating Serbia from Kosovo. The land was harsh and fallow. Grey dew on the tips of the rotten-brown valley grass. The few towns dotted about the spruce-stippled slopes of the valley looked as if the NATO bombing campaign had taken place the previous night. If Belgrade was the modern face of Serbia, Presevo was an ugly reminder of its past.

The past, Gardner wondered. They say history’s written by the victors. Well, I’m going to write John Bald’s history. I’ll write it in fucking bullets and blood.

He noticed a sign indicating a turn-off eight kilometres ahead for the village of Brezovan.

Gardner had raced at 130 kilometres an hour almost the entire distance to Presevo and was arriving in good time. Along the way he’d stopped at a café, gorged himself on a fatty burek filled with hot cheese and spinach, and a generous serving of coffee. The caffeine was working its magic. Energy gushed through his body, like someone had turned on a tap inside him, and he could feel his lungs expand and compress in his chest.

Five kilometres now.

He ran through the plan one more time in his mind. Valon would lead John to the meeting point and the Italians as backup. The deal would take place. Once the Russians had fucked off, he would line Bald up in his sights and pop a round clean through his head. Valon wouldn’t back out of the plan. Mainly because he believed the bracelet attached to his wrist was riddled with explosive det cord.

But that still leaves Aimée, he realized.

The cynical part of his brain figured that she was just another in a long line of women who meant less and less the longer he spent with them. But another part asked, why was he so desperate to rescue her?

Because it’s your fault she got snatched in the first place. If you hadn’t got involved, she would never have been a target. But thinking about her isn’t going to help right now, he decided. I need to focus on the mission. I put Bald six feet under, then I worry about saving Aimée.

He flexed the muscles in his neck. They hardened.

Two kilometres.

Suddenly the valley plateaued. Traffic thinned. He came to the Brezovan turn-off, took the slip road. Gardner went easy on the pedal. Down to eighty, sixty, forty…

Gardner scanned the rest stop two hundred metres down the slip road. The road was vacant. The rest stop was a sixty-metre strip of rocky asphalt. A barbed-wire fence ran parallel to the stop on the valley side, backing on to a tired, weather-beaten field, home to a couple of diseased-looking cows.

The meeting point.

Perfect location, Gardner thought. No secret hiding places, right out in the open and with a quick avenue of escape – the E-75 – if things didn’t go according to plan.

That left him with the problem of where to ditch his wheels and observe unseen. The old banger had one advantage: it came with a worn atlas of Serbia. He studied the arterial roads and turn-offs on the motorway either side of the Brezovan exit and drew up a mental list of possible vantage points.

He took the slip road. There was no traffic in front or behind him. Brezovan wasn’t the kind of place people visited. More like escaped from. It was a village in the loosest possible sense of the word.

A hundred and fifty metres ahead of the rest stop, Gardner spotted a ramshackle petrol station. The map had marked out the station as closed since the Albanian insurgency in 2001. No shit, he thought. The forecourt concrete was split open with weeds, the pumps rusted and the signage AWOL.

Gardner brought the Nissan to a halt next to the station. He glanced in his rear-view mirror. Eleven forty-five and no sign of the Shogun.

Grabbing the TRG-22, Gardner hurried ten metres across the forecourt. He knelt by a crumbling, three-metre-high pillar to the south-west of the rest stop. The pillar, combined with the bank of old pumps, obscured him from passing vehicles. From here he had a good view of the asphalt strip. A horse chestnut tree towered over the scrubland beyond the rest stop, and behind it a bank of spruces helped muffle the noise from the motorway. A hundred metres west of the chestnut sloped a gentle hill scattered with rocks. Gardner had considered the hill as an alternative vantage point. But, unlike the petrol station, it lacked an easy access road, and eventually he’d decided against it.

Gardner assembled the bipod and rested the TRG-22 on top. He rested on his belly in a prone firing stance beside the pillar. He piled a few stray lumps of concrete around his position, further concealing his body. Then he adjusted the optics. And waited.

He didn’t have to wait long.

12

1152 hours.

The Shogun arrived bang on time. Gardner knew Bald would hit the meeting point a few minutes early. He figured that he had probably scouted out this area two or three times ahead of the meeting, assessing threat scenarios. Like the highly trained operator he was. Or once was, he thought.

The two men debussed. Bald scanned the horizon, Valon fighting to light a cigarette, the breeze blowing out the flame like a candle on a birthday cake. To Gardner’s eyes, Bald seemed tetchy. Gardner adjusted his shoulder muscles, and hoped that Valon had kept his fucking piehole shut.

A few minutes later the Italians rocked up.

Valon managed to light his cigarette as the Italians pulled up behind the Shogun at the rest stop. The amber end of his fag oozed smoke.

The ’Ndrangheta fronted in style, three ants disgorging from a silver Bentley Continental Flying Spur. Gardner pressed his eye to the TRG-22 optics and the ants became guys in black trim-cut suits and police shades. A fourth figure took a while longer to emerge. His flaccid cheeks, rotund belly and white hair told Gardner that the guy was the wrong side of seventy. He recalled the photograph Macca had shown him. There was no doubt in his mind that he was looking at the Pallbearer, Gianni Petruzzi.

The capo crimini embraced Bald. Brief handshake with Valon. His three goons scoped out the area. One of them was shaven-headed and his shades sat below the steep hill of his temple. He seemed to be in command of the other two men. Gardner caught his breath in his throat as the goon ran his eyes over the petrol station. Gardner was sure he wasn’t visible, but the human eye is prone to spot sudden or sharp movements, and the slightest twitch of an elbow, he knew, might alert the guy to his presence.

Finally the goon turned away.

Gardner parted his lips, exhaled.

Petruzzi nodded to the Bentley. The shaven-headed guy paced round to the rear doors, motioned for someone to come out. A figure emerged. Unsteady on his feet, his hands bound behind his back, his face badly fucked up.

At first Gardner didn’t recognize the figure staggering towards Bald. His features were swollen and bulged black and blue. His mouth was split open, the right side of his bottom lip sagging and bloody.

Something about his rickety gait buzzed Gardner’s memory.

Maston.

I’m looking at my old fucking Regiment Major.

The shaven-headed picciotto d’onore swung his boot at Maston. The ex-Blade stumbled and sank to his knees at the shadow of the horse chestnut. The tree suffered from bleeding cankers, its leaves prematurely shedding, the bark peeling away like orange skin. The spruce trees shivered like mourners at a funeral.

Gardner watched with a grim feeling in his guts. What the fuck are the Italians doing with Maston? He guessed he was just about to find out.

Maston maintained a look of defiance. He stared ahead and past his captors as Bald pointed an accusing finger at the ’Ndrangheta men. For a split second Gardner sympathized with his old mucker. No soldier deserved to be treated like a fucking dog, especially one who’d sacrificed so much for his country.

One of the goons produced a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol, beefy and cool as shit. Its stainless-steel barrel winked in the sun’s rays. The goon screwed on a suppressor. Coolly lifted the Beretta to the top of Maston’s skull. Bald tried to move forward to protect Maston but the three other goons forcibly restrained him.

Gardner couldn’t hear the shot, but Maston spasmed as the bullet speared the parietal section at the back of his skull. Blood sprayed out, like a spurt of hot lava. Then his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He keeled over and died.

Bald was ranting at the Italians. If they’d hoped to intimidate Bald by slotting Maston, their scheme had obviously backfired. He went into meltdown. Gardner could see the situation was getting out of control.

Petruzzi gave an order. The shaven-headed guy held his Beretta 92 to the roof of Bald’s skull – like he’d done with Maston – and shoved him towards Petruzzi. The cap crimini exchanged words with Bald, the Scotsman neither nodding nor shaking his head, his eyes rooted on the fallen body of his old Regiment Major. The Beretta was still aimed at his head.

It was clear what Petruzzi was telling him. Do as we say, or you’ll end up like your friend. Each second mixed with the sweat on Gardner’s back, running over his knotted muscles. Then the shaven-headed goon spotted something approaching from the slip road to the north and waved to his amici.

Gardner took a long draw of breath.

Two more vehicles pulled into the rest stop. A black Lincoln Town Car and, behind it, a Mercedes-Benz eighteen-tonne sleeper truck with a trailer hooked to the back. The trailer was small – Gardner put its capacity at four or five cubic metres, the truck at sixteen – and carried an advert for some sort of frozen-foods company. He recognized the words as Russian.

Italian leather shoes ground cigarette butts into the asphalt. Italian guns were stowed back inside jackets.

I’m ready, Gardner thought. He had plenty of experience using the TRG-22. Unlike most other so-called sniper rifles, the Finnish-designed TRG-22 was developed specifically for long-range target-acquisition ops. He tugged on the bolt and felt the heart of the weapon beat. Shifted his body weight to the right side, nestling the polyurethane stock against his shoulder. The barrel didn’t glisten; the last user had painted it black to mask the metallic sheen underneath.

Three men got out of the Lincoln, one from the sleeper truck. They were all dressed in sweaters and jeans instead of suits. But to Gardner’s eye they looked the real deal. Each man wore a bulletproof vest overlaying their sweater and rugged Gore-Tex boots. They moved with a swagger.

Gardner saw no weapons.

A fifth Russian, sporting a shock of silver hair and dressed in a grey suit, emerged from the driver’s side of the Lincoln. The chauffeur, Gardner figured. The man walked to the rear door while his three mates approached the Italians. They stood four metres from the ’Ndrangheta. No warm hugs or firm handshakes or backslapping. Gardner felt as if he was watching a Mexican standoff.

The rear window of the Lincoln lowered. The man with the silver hair bent forward, propped an elbow against the window frame and swapped words with a guy in the back seat. He was sitting on the left side, just out of Gardner’s view. Gardner saw an arm reclining on leather upholstery, thin and long.

Bald veered between edgy and pissed off. His fists clenched by his sides, he practically blanked the Russians, fixing his dead-eye gaze on Petruzzi. He’s no longer in control of the deal, Gardner figured. The Italians were using him to get the money from the Russians – and would waste the Scot for sure as soon as the mafya were out of sight.

On the word from old man Petruzzi, one of the ’Ndrangheta goons fetched a large black suitcase from the boot of the Bentley. The guy struggled with the weight of it. He dumped the suitcase on the ground, between the Italians and the Russians.

Silver Hair exchanged glances with his mates. He stooped down beside the suitcase gracefully, like he was bowing before royalty. Then he unzipped the suitcase. From Gardner’s position he couldn’t identify the contents. But Silver Hair’s big old smile gave the game away. The coke was all there.

Then Silver Hair clicked his fingers. Another of the Russians zipped up the case, started to lug it towards the back of the Lincoln. The Lincoln sagged a little with the weight of the cocaine. At the same time the driver of the sleeper truck tossed a set of car keys to Bald.

A sonic boom at Gardner’s nine o’clock, a shriek fast on its heels. He spotted a second Bentley, this one black, racing into view. An ambush! The car skidded to a halt by its silver cousin, tyres flinging dust clouds into the air. Four men launched out of the car, decked out in identical suits to the ’Ndrangheta. Except for one small detail – they were all brandishing their Beretta 92s in full view. On cue, the three original goons standing beside Petruzzi brandished their own Berettas.

Russian hands slowly pushed skywards in unison. Surrendering. And confirming Gardner’s guess that the Italians were making a play for the cash as well as relieving Bald of the cocaine. Sneaky bastards. He expected Silver Hair to be venting his spleen. But the Russian wore an intractable mask.

Petruzzi gestured angrily for Silver Hair to retrieve the suitcase from the Lincoln. Outnumbered, with seven guns trained on them, the Russian was left with little choice but to comply. He calmly relayed the order, and the Lincoln exhaled as another mafya guy removed the suitcase from the boot. Heaved it back towards the ’Ndrangheta. He dumped it beside Silver Hair’s feet.

Then Gardner clocked movement on the hill west of the spruce trees.

The shapes were indistinct at first, and an untrained eye would not have spotted them. They moved in a ragged line three-quarters of the way up the hill, so their silhouettes did not stand out against the smooth, undulating background. The spaces between the men – Gardner had counted a dozen of them – were irregular. They moved in among the shadows cast by the scattered rocks. Settled between several large rocks and propped the black-painted barrels of their guns on top.

Who the fuck are these guys? Gardner wondered. More ’Ndrangheta?

But the ’Ndrangheta were oblivious to the men on the hill. Petruzzi’s goons forced Bald to hand over the keys to the sleeper truck. Bald chucked them to the ground. Petruzzi bent to scoop them up and, when he stooped, Bald gobbed in his face. The Italian didn’t flinch. Instead he produced a spotless-white handkerchief, dabbed it on his forehead and motioned to his goons.

One of the ’Ndrangheta stepped forward and booted Bald in the crotch. The Scot yelped, grabbed his aching nuts and sank to his knees. Petruzzi made a beeline for the sleeper truck, his crippled, weary body carrying him as fast as it would allow.

Gardner turned his attention back to the hill. The twelve-man fireteam produced their weapons: fuck-off big FN F2000 bullpup assault rifles, sixty-four centimetres long, with telescopic sights and 40mm FN EGLM grenade launchers attached to the underslung Picatinny rail systems. The F2000 was a hi-tech piece of kit and Gardner had heard all about its lethal rate of fire – 850 rounds a minute – and its bullseye accuracy. The grenade launcher came with a single round of 40x46mm High-Explosive ammo. It packed a mean punch: the kind of grenade that could tear a target limb from limb and leave fuck-all for the vultures.

Gardner’s bowels constricted.

Then the throats of the F2000s barked.

13

1218 hours.

Vicious bursts of rimless brass bullets fractured the air. Through his optics, Gardner could see the cartridge cases ejecting out of a tube running along the side of the hammer-forged barrel. Cases tumbled; bodies soon imitated.

The ’Ndrangheta went over to the dark side. Their bodies jerked as each successive round yawed through their tissue. The F2000 used 5.56x45mm NATO ammo, bullets that fragmented on impact, creating wounds the size of glass tumblers. Chunks of flesh were torn from the goons. Ten seconds in and the seven goons had been razed. Petruzzi, the capo crimini, was the last to fall. Several rounds struck him in the back of the head, the cartridges making a strange tinny sound, brass bouncing off his crooked spine.

Beyond the punctured corpses, Silver Hair stood his ground impassively. The Russians weren’t fleeing. They weren’t targets. So the fireteam on the hill must be with Sotov and the mafya, Gardner figured. They’d planned on being backstabbed by the ’Ndrangheta the whole time, and prepared an ambush of their own accordingly.

At the first sound of gunfire, Bald looked to bug the fuck out. He picked up one of the goons’ Beretta 92s, forward-rolled towards the cover of the horse chestnut and dropped the nearest mafya guy. Silver Hair and the other two mafya retreated behind the sleeper truck.

Valon had broken into a sprint towards the fields. Bullets zipped around him, his legs breaking the long grass. His run was doomed. The only available cover was a ditch three hundred metres away.

No way he’s gonna make it, Gardner thought, then ran his scope over the men on the hills. He needed to protect Valon, because he was the only link to Sotov – and Aimée. He latched on to the nearest target in his optical sights. Breathed out. And…

Something inside him froze. He didn’t pull the trigger.

Start shooting now, his training voice lectured him, and the Russians will target you next. Eight armed-to-the-teeth mafya against you, in exposed territory? That’s a fucking suicide note.

Valon ran for his life. He made it halfway to the ditch, bullets slapping into the dirt around him, scything grass and mud. Finally one of the men on the hill switched tactics. He pressed a breech-release button on the left side of the launcher body and peered down the optics. Tilting the rifle upwards to align the grenade trajectory with the target, he then squeezed the grenade launcher’s trigger, located underneath the F2000’s standard trigger mechanism.

The EGLM launcher belched. The round whizzed through the air, crumped on impact, and Valon disappeared behind a hurricane swirl of smoke. Shrapnel and charred soil showered the grass in a fifteen-metre radius, splashes of blood in the mixer, and Gardner knew the Albanian was shredded.

The Italians are slotted. Valon is down. John’s the last man standing.

Swinging his rifle back to the rest stop, Gardner spotted him at the tree. The Scot emptied the last of the Beretta 92’s Parabellum rounds at the fireteam on the hill. He kept on firing even after the click-click of the empty chamber. Never John Bald’s way, to admit defeat. Not even in the face of insurmountable odds. Not even now, when he was cornered on both sides.

Seeing Bald was out of ammo, the team on the hill ceased fire. Silver Hair and his two mates edged out from behind the truck. Both groups began to march towards Bald’s position. The Scot was slumped against the horse chestnut’s trunk. He shot glances at his three o’clock and nine, then crawled around the tree. His eyes flicked towards the Shogun, as if he still believed there was a way out.

Gardner swallowed his spit. He wasn’t going to shoot Bald and give up his position. The thought briefly crossed his mind that he could take down the fireteam, save Bald’s arse. He dismissed it.

I’ve repaid what he did for me in Afghanistan ten times over.

Bald rested his head against the tree trunk’s bleeding cankers. His chest heaved, his head arched skywards, his eyes closed. The fireteam were fifty metres from him; Silver Hair and his mates less than half that distance. Bald seemed to whisper something to himself, but his lips hardly moved and Gardner couldn’t make out any of what he was saying.

Opening his eyes, Bald snarled at the pistol on his lap. Cast it aside, as if disgusted that it had let him down in his hour of need.

‘There’s nothing to save you now, John,’ Gardner found himself saying under his breath. Part of him wanted to be the one to kill Bald. Having come so far, and with the history they shared, it seemed only right that he should take Bald’s life. Instead some greasy Russian fucks were going to do the job for him.

End of the fucking line.

A few steps closer and Silver Hair was almost at the tree. To the west, the twelve angry men on the hill kept their F2000s directed at Bald. The rifles were intimidating in their size: each man looked like he was wrestling with a shark.

Bald reached for something at his ankle. A knife, strapped in place with black masking tape. He tore the four-inch blade free. Sprang to his feet. Charged at Silver Hair, one last act of defiance.

Got to within ten metres.

The F2000s boomed.

Bald jolted as rounds thrust into his torso. Bullets ripped out clods of flesh. Dozens of shots tore into him. His arms and legs twitched. After three or four seconds the shooting stopped. Bald raised an arm to his chest, trying to plug holes the size of coffee mugs dotted along his front. Blood fountained out of his wounds. He staggered for a moment, his arms hanging loose. The knife dropped from his hand, stabbed the soil.

Silver Hair placed a cigarette between his lips and flicked open a Zippo lighter. He took a long drag on the tab, eyes never veering from Bald. The Scot managed a limp step further towards the mafya man. Silver Hair spared him the effort by walking right up to Bald. Blew smoke in his face.

Bald collapsed, and Gardner was left looking at a bloody pile of clothes.

14

1227 hours.

Silver Hair smoked the rest of his cigarette while the fireteam dispersed beyond the crest of the hill. He heard the hoarse throttle of an engine some two hundred metres distant. He took the car keys from Petruzzi’s corpse. Done with his cigarette, he tossed the butt into the pool of blood laking around Bald, turned on his heels and strolled back to the Lincoln.

Gardner spied Silver Hair jumping into the front seat. He tossed the car keys to one of the mafya goons, who promptly stowed the suitcase in the boot and climbed into the sleeper truck’s driving seat. The engine sputtered. He reversed into the main road, the Lincoln following.

Gardner was alone. Just him, eleven corpses and the caustic stench of spent ammo.

When he was sure the Russians were out of sight, he picked himself up and made his way across the field towards the rest stop.

Bald was a smeared-red heap on the ground. His body was contorted, arms splayed to his left, legs to his right. There wasn’t much left of his limbs, and the bullets to his core had almost severed him in half. Gardner rested his eyes on his old mucker for a moment. This is what you get, John, he thought. Staring at the fag butts in the blood, the holes in his face, he experienced both hate and relief in his stomach. They mixed in his throat, formed a bitter taste in his mouth.

‘Stupid bastard,’ he said to the dead Scot.

The silence was broken by a faint dribbling noise to his nine o’clock. He glanced across his shoulder and spied a body lying in the field, fifty metres distant.

Surely not, he said to himself.

Valon was still alive when Gardner came upon him, his chest swelling and retracting in an erratic beat. Nearer to Valon, Gardner saw that his right arm was missing from the bicep down. Strips of flesh flapped against his bone. The HE grenade had mashed him up but failed to kill him. Gardner figured the round had landed a couple of metres short of the target. Anything inside a three-metre kill zone and Valon would have been dust.

Sad twists of his entrails seeped out of the guy’s abdomen. Flaps of skin, hard black chips, protruded from the wound. The stench of burned human flesh hit Gardner. He retched in the back of his throat. Knelt down beside Valon.

The Albanian spoke in childish gurgles. His one good lung fought to fill his body with air. The right side of his face looked as though someone had roasted it on a barbecue. Warts and boils on his skin crackled like pork fat. His eyes were scorched opaque.

Gardner spotted something red on his right wrist. Too bright and plasticky to be blood. He bent forward for a closer look.

And did a double-take.

Valon wore a bracelet identical to the one Gardner had been given by Land and had put on the Albanian’s left wrist. Not quite believing what he was seeing, Gardner reached for Valon’s left arm. The same fucking tag, and the same fucking question: what’s Valon doing with two MI6 bracelets?

‘I’m with the Firm,’ Valon said, answering Gardner’s curious face. ‘I work… have been for years… Since the war.’ His facial muscles convulsed. Valon took a deep breath.

‘Back at Aimée’s flat,’ Gardner said. ‘You deliberately missed your shot, didn’t you?’

Valon nodded, his mouth emitting a guttural murmur. Some new and hidden pain was making itself heard inside his mutilated body. ‘Jesus, I… couldn’t give up my cover. They wanted… you dead. I had to make it look like… you were.’

He examined his wounds, his mouth ajar in horror. The skin around the right eyeball had been blown away. Gardner could almost make out the connective cords at the back of his eye.

‘You must stop the Russians… They’re going to a rendezvous in… shit!’

Gardner closed his eyes for a second. He’d seen a lot of trauma wounds in his time, but nothing as messed up as Valon’s. His were gopping.

‘Drobny, on the border,’ Valon continued, drawing in breath and choking on it like glass. ‘The church. Two o’clock. It is very important you get to the truck. Before it continues its journey and—’

‘And Aimée? You told me she was nabbed by the Grey Wolf. Is that a lie?’

Valon was delirious. ‘Sotov. He has her.’ He gulped. Made a gargling noise in his throat.

The words gnawed at Gardner’s stomach. He pushed Aimée to the back of his mind.

‘What’s in the truck?’ he said.

He detected a soft, flopping sound inside the other man’s chest.

‘Talk to me, Klint. The fucking truck.’

But Valon was on the brink. His breath stilled like frost in his mouth.

Gardner watched him pass over.

He dug out his mobile, called Land. Needed to give him the heads-up on how the drug exchange had gone fubar.

Six rings, seven – and no fucking answer.

An automated female voice asked him to leave a message after the bleep.

Gardner declined. He knew that the Russians were transporting the truck and Sotov had followed directly behind it in the Lincoln. The odds on him accompanying the truck all the way to Drobny were more than reasonable.

So that’s what you’ll do. Get to the village of Drobny in the hour. That’ll give you just under thirty minutes to intercept whatever the fuck’s in the truck. Time-wise it’s tighter than a Jock at a Poundstretcher, but since when you did roll any other way?

He raced back towards the Nissan.

15

1253 hours.

‘That was crazy,’ Popov said, laughing, as he drove through the factory gates. The site had once been the pride of Serbian industry, building cars and motorbikes for the West. Now it was a barren pit, the machinery rusted brown, stockpiles of spare motor parts.

‘I mean, those Italian shitheads. They got what they had coming to them. But that Scottish guy was out of his fucking mind. Trying to run at you with a fucking knife, Aleks. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Popov beat his palms against the wheel, shaking his head.

‘The Scot used to be an SAS soldier,’ Sotov said. ‘They’re taught never to give up.’

They parked inside the excavated shell of a factory building. Sotov ordered his two surviving henchmen to leave the vehicle and perform a perimeter search. The Grey Wolf waited by the Lincoln, Popov next to him and staring in the direction of the two men.

‘The Englishman this morning,’ Popov said. ‘The one who died in the fire. He was SAS too?’

Sotov nodded.

‘Two SAS soldiers murdered in a single day.’ He laughed, but the sound came out like he was having a seizure.

A white Ford Transit shuttled into the factory entrance. Sotov watched the van draw up alongside the Lincoln. Two men, big as grizzly bears and equally as dumb, got out. One sported a tacky gold necklace. Bulgarians have no taste, Sotov thought. But at least they come cheap. The man with the necklace opened the Transit’s rear doors. Sotov smiled.

The bitch was inside.

‘In the boot,’ Sotov ordered the Bulgarians.

‘Let me go!’ the girl yelled, backing deep inside the van. ‘Please!’

Sotov watched her the way a visitor might look at a creature in the zoo. He lit a Ziganov, his nostrils venting smoke into the van. ‘Does she have a name?’

‘Aimée,’ said Necklace Guy.

He liked the name. Had a nice ring to it.

‘My sweet Aimée, there’s no point blaming me for the situation you find yourself in. We know you were with the English soldier. We know he told you certain things.’

Her face hardened. The Bulgarians disappeared out the front of the factory.

‘I believe,’ Sotov directed his gaze at Aimée, ‘his name was Joe Gardner.’

He waited for the words to sink in. Aimée paused for a beat.

‘He’ll make you pay for this, he’ll—’

‘But he’s dead, my dear.’

Aimée stared blankly back at Sotov. As though she didn’t understand – didn’t want to understand – the words coming out of his mouth.

‘The fire at your flat this morning. He was trapped inside.’ Sotov suppressed a laugh. It tried to push free at the corners of his lips. ‘Burning is a terrible way to go. The flames take a long time to kill a man. There is much suffering.’

Tears slipped down Aimée’s cheeks. Her lips trembled.

‘You’re lying,’ she said, her voice breaking, weak.

‘I’m afraid not. No one is coming to save you, Aimée. It’s just you and me.’ Sotov leaned into the van. He pinched her teary cheek. ‘You and me,’ he whispered, Sotov reeling in his finger. A teardrop plinked on to his fingertip. He tasted it. Salty, and yet somehow sweet.

‘Now, the problem with the SAS,’ he went on, ‘with people like Joe Gardner, is that they don’t give up very easy. A Russian man – you beat him once, he runs like a fucking dog. Not the same with the British. Gardner can’t have been operating by himself. There must be other soldiers working with him, yes?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Come on, my sweet. You slept with Gardner; you fucking stink of sex. And a man will tell a woman anything, even his most closely guarded secrets, to get her into bed. He will have said things to you. Plans, numbers, names.’

‘He didn’t, I swear!’

The cold light of day punctured Aimée’s beauty. She had a bruised eye, a bloodied nose. Some marks on her wrists. As if she’d been trapped in the van with a wild dog. Yet with a bit of work and a few days to let her wounds heal, she could be a model.

‘I do hope you’re not claustrophobic, my dear,’ Sotov said. ‘We’re going for a little ride.’

The Bulgarians had returned. Necklace Guy stashed a silencer pistol into his jacket pocket. Popov glared daggers at them, but they stared ahead, small eyes rooted to the van. They grappled with the bitch. She flailed. Necklace Guy wrapped his substantial arms around her chest and transported her to the Lincoln, his bloated legs waddling from side to side.

Popov went to the car and reached inside. Pushed a button on the dashboard. The boot yawned.

‘Joe’s still alive. I’m sure of it,’ Aimée said.

‘Yes, yes,’ Sotov chuckled. ‘Of course he is. Don’t worry. Soon the reality of your situation will hit you, and you’ll talk.’

‘I told you, I don’t know about any plans.’

Sotov considered the sky. ‘That’s too bad. Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll have to do things to you. Things that will make you cry. Things that will make you wish you had never been born.’ He turned to face her. ‘Think about it now, why don’t you?’

The Bulgarians chucked the girl in like she was a rolled-up carpet. Sotov heard a dull thump as the boot locked shut, the Lincoln rocking on its rear wheels. Her shouts seeped through the exterior, muffled and distant. Yes, she was a wild one all right. Sotov looked forward to having fun with her. It was so much more exciting when they fought back.

‘Thank you, Denis.’

Popov rubbed his hands. They were smeared with blood. ‘No problem.’

Sotov laughed with his mouth closed. ‘No, I mean – for everything.’

Popov’s hands abruptly stopped. He stared at something on the ground. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, Aleks.’

‘I’m afraid you do.’

Popov suddenly became aware of the Bulgarians closing in on him. He backed off, edging closer to his shadow cast against the wall. Popov’s eyes flicked from the two men to Sotov. The Grey Wolf and his chauffeur stared at each other for a brief moment.

‘Why—?’ Popov’s voice was ghostly, as if his soul had already left his body.

‘You know why, Denis. No more games.’

Popov was quiet. He stared at the pickaxe in Necklace Guy’s hand.

‘Make it slow,’ Sotov told the Bulgarian. Then he walked outside for a cigarette. Caught the squelching sound the pickaxe made as it gored Popov’s face. Sotov emerged from the factory, and the door shut on Popov’s feeble groans.

16

1334 hours.

Drobny was forty-five minutes’ drive along the border with Macedonia. Gardner gunned the accelerator. The speedometer on the Nissan hit 140. The chassis felt like it was stuck together with scotch tape. A question whizzed across the pulsing surface of his brain. What’s in the truck? And another question: did John know he wasn’t going to be paid in cash?

The road rose, then lulled, then flattened as he drove deeper into the Serbian badlands.

Gardner had been to Drobny once before. Back in 1999, he and John Bald had been given orders to man an observation post on a hill overlooking an Orthodox church. When the militia arrived they’d rounded up every ethnic Albanian suspected of collusion with the Kosovo Liberation Army and imprisoned them inside the school. They were being held captive there, and the NATO gin merchants wanted to verify reports about ethnic cleansing. Gardner and Bald were given strict instructions not to intervene.

They had moved in at night, tasked to recce what the head shed, in their fancy language, called ‘suspicious activity’. What the two of them found in Drobny wasn’t suspicious. It was paid-in-full murder.

A chilly November dawn, the cold scraping Gardner’s lungs. The fourth day of their mission. Bald had shaken him awake. They’d been on a hard stag routine, each man taking the watch in four-hour turns while the other ate ration packs, rested and operated the radio.

‘Look, Joe,’ Bald had whispered as ten militiamen frog-marched eighty civilians into the cemetery. He’d handed the binos to Gardner and he had looked on as the civilians were lined up against the church wall.

The sergeant counted to three. Then his men opened fire. Bald and Gardner gritted their teeth as they grimly watched the wall spatter with the guts and brains of innocent men, women and children. Smoke was still issuing from the militiamen’s overheating muzzles when Bald reported to the head shed asking for permission to engage. The request was denied.

‘Bloody cowards,’ Bald said on hearing the news. ‘Come on, Joe. What do you say we show these fuckers the meaning of a turkey shoot?’

They had loaded their Colt Commandos and put rounds down on the militia. Wiped out all ten of the evil cunts, filling their bodies with so much brass they could be sure they were dead. It was a blatant breach of orders, but it had felt the right thing to do and Major Maston, if he had ever known, had let it slide. It was hard for Gardner to believe that John Bald was now dead, a no-good criminal.

Modern-day Drobny wasn’t some sort of memorial to the massacre, more like an abandoned, lawless patch of shit that someone had forgotten to clear up. Gardner saw precious few people in the streets. The faces he did see had more lines than a Shakespeare play and the distant, glazed expressions of a people who’d lost everything. Burned-out windows stared back at him like black teeth. The roofs of most houses had caved in. Mangy dogs roaming the rutted roads, sniffing at dead birds and crushed Coca-Cola cans.

The church, Valon had said. That’s where he told Gardner he would find the sleeper truck. Gardner felt he was colliding with the past. Ghosts everywhere, the filmy residue of nightmares he’d tried to bury at the bottom of a pint glass.

He checked his watch. One forty-two. A little over fifteen minutes before, according to Valon, the truck would move on to a new, unknown location. You’ve got to get to the truck, he thought. Find out what the fuck’s inside. Then track down Sotov and find Aimée.

Gardner made a few turns west then south, the village seeming to disintegrate in front of him. He came to a particularly desolate place. Shabby homes, ragtag cars, roads that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a rally course. He passed a police station fallen into disrepair, the walls swamped with graffiti denouncing Milosevic, Arkan and Karadzic. Heard something up ahead. The low rumble of an engine. He killed the Nissan.

Land called him back. Took his fucking time, Gardner thought.

‘Christ, Joe,’ Land snapped, ‘where the—?’

‘You didn’t tell me Valon was working for you.’

Gardner heard Land cough down the line. ‘Klint Valon’s cover was on a strictly need-to-know basis. A man like Valon walks a tightrope. With every person who knows his true identity, his position becomes increasingly perilous. I can’t afford to lose him.’

‘You already have,’ Gardner said.

A pause stretched out, like rope tensing.

‘The meet was a colossal fuck-up,’ Gardner continued. ‘Valon’s dead. John too. The Italians tried to hijack the whole deal, take the coke and the money. Soon as they made their play, the Russians wiped the fucking floor with them. They spared no one.’

Another pause. ‘You mean—?’

‘No one,’ Gardner replied flatly. ‘They killed the Italians, then they went for Bald and Valon. They’re all fucking dead.’

Land muttered something; it came down the line as a static hiss. Three seconds of silence, then he regained his composure. ‘What about the cocaine? And the money?’

‘The Russians took both. But Valon said there was no money, the Russians were swapping something else for the drugs.’

‘And what—?’

The line crackled and fizzed. Land’s voice distorted like a badly tuned radio station. And suddenly he was gone. Gardner tried calling him back, but his mobile couldn’t get a signal. He checked the time again. One forty-seven.

This is it. Do – or fucking die.

He stepped out into the street, Glock in his hand, looking for trouble.

A couple of locals glowered at him, two knurled men with skin like worn sandpaper and greasy hair. An elderly woman trundled past, knuckle-joint nose and eyes the colour of dirty net curtains. Gardner had been on the receiving end of a million evil-eyes in Iraq and Afghanistan and he came to understand that the only language these people understood was made in a munitions factory. The men saw the Glock and swiftly looked in the other direction. No one else around to bother him.

Forty metres ahead he clocked the sleeper truck from the rest stop. The truck was in front of the old church gates. He crept forward, his knees bent, making sure he didn’t cause any noise.

To his nine a road peeled off between several vacant properties to the left and the ruins of a library church to the right. Thirty metres down the road Gardner noted three vehicles parked in a column. The front and rear ones were Toyota Hilux 4x4s, each with black canvas draped over the open section. The middle vehicle appeared to be a bulletproof van with blacked-out windows and a secure compartment with double doors at the back.

Three men came into view. Two looked like guards: tan tops, dark-green trousers, black boots, AK-47 straps tight around their chests. Their faces seemed too dark and smooth to hail from this neck of the woods. The third man was chubbier, older. He had a beard thick as a clenched fist.

The third man shouted at the guards. Gardner hid behind the police station. The guards heaved something out of the sleeper truck’s trailer. The third man was shouting at them. Gardner thought he sounded Arabic. Carrying their load as if it were an expensive piece of furniture, one man gripping it at either end, they headed west down the street. Gardner followed, stopping behind a wrecked Skoda ditched next to a stone house at the eastern edge of the street. Weeds had reclaimed the car’s tyres and much of its shell. The two guards flipped open the doors of the secure van and wheezed as they placed the object on its floor.

The doors slammed. The third man headed up the road in the opposite direction to Gardner. The two guards walked towards Gardner, but they hadn’t seen him. They were thirty metres from his position. Then twenty. One of the guards, a lanky teenager with a bumfluff moustache, then made a right and walked south down an adjacent street, out of sight. The other, a short and stocky guy with teak skin, was now ten metres away.

Sweat percolated down Gardner’s spine.

Five metres.

He hoped the guy would walk straight past and continue on his patrol.

Gardner hunkered behind the Skoda. As the guard’s shadow loomed, he caught his breath in the back of his mouth.

The guard was now a metre beyond the Skoda.

The shadow stopped. Hovered over Gardner.

The guard spun around. Clocked Gardner. His mouth opened wide. Poised to sound the alarm.

Gardner leapt to his feet and in one smooth movement fastened his arms around the guard’s neck, fixing him in a headlock. He slapped his right hand tight over the guy’s mouth. The kid with the tache was out of sight, but Gardner had to assume he’d return soon. He dragged the guard out of sight and pushed his elbows out until he could feel the rubbery tunnel of the guy’s air passage crushing from the force. The man kicked at the dirt with his feet, hands pawing at Gardner’s face. Gardner squeezed harder. Then something warm and chunky seeped through his fingers. The guy had vomited.

Gardner didn’t let go. He held and held, squeezed and squeezed. After two minutes the legs stopped thrashing about. Gardner dragged the body to the side of the Skoda and filched a set of keys from the guy’s pocket. Checking that the coast was clear of other guards, he moved diagonally forward until he was behind the rear Hilux. The black canvas seemed to be covering some kind of a mini-gun.

Peering over the pickup, Gardner scanned the streets to his nine, six and one o’clock. A guard was patrolling away from him to the left. Twenty metres away now, Gardner broke out from behind the Hilux and scrambled towards the van. Reached it in eight quick strides. He inserted the key in the lock. A red light glared above the locking mechanism. He heard the shifting of cogs within. Then the light turned green, and the doors at the rear were open.

A single object was lying on the floor of the van. It was half a metre tall and half as wide and its cylindrical shape reminded Gardner of a forty-gallon drum. Sealed inside a protective camouflaged case, it looked like the kind of thing a guy could carry as a backpack. A rectangular grey box was strapped to the object’s waist. Between loose rope ends at the top of the object, Gardner noted a battery cell, an LCD display and a key-operated panel.

Jesus fucking Christ, he whispered to himself.

He had seen pictures of this thing before. It was a miniature armed warhead – what they called a suitcase or backpack nuke – modelled on the Special Atomic Demolition Munitions system developed by the US and the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. Devices of this kind were designed to be parachuted into Soviet territory if the Russians ever invaded the West. They had, Gardner knew, a yield equivalent to several kilotons of TNT, and packed enough radioactive uranium to make Chernobyl look like fucking Disneyland.

Jesus, John, Gardner thought. What the fuck were you going to do with a backpack nuke?

Cold spread across Gardner’s back. Then he realized it was coming from a muzzle tip digging into the top of his spinal column.

‘Drop the weapon.’

Gardner released the Glock from his hand.

‘So finally you arrived,’ a voice said. ‘That is good. Now I can do what I couldn’t do before.’

Gardner didn’t turn around. He knew who was holding the gun to his neck. Could tell by the way his voice jolted and jarred, an accent that sounded like no other.

Shai Golan.

17

1418 hours.

‘I knew you would come,’ Golan said as he jabbed Gardner with the tip of his pistol.

‘Don’t tell me,’ Gardner said. ‘You’re a mind-reader as well as a cunt.’

‘Instinct,’ Golan answered, ignoring the jibe. ‘You strike me as the type of man who cannot resist the big prize. This way,’ he said, tilting his head towards the church. ‘And please, no noise. If you alert the guards, they’ll only kill us both. Neither of us wants that now, do we?’

Gardner didn’t respond. The coast was clear. Golan led him through the imposing wooden doors of the church. The building was empty and retained little of its former splendour. The pews were layered in decades-thick dust, the altar was naked and muddy light filtered through the cracks in the stained-glass windows.

‘Bald’s dead,’ Gardner’s voice echoed.

‘I know.’

Golan was behind him, but Gardner could feel the Israeli’s finger tugging back on the trigger. He imagined the gases primed to flood the chamber and propel the hollow-cased bullet out of the muzzle and into his head.

‘Now you’ve seen the bomb, I will have to kill you,’ said Golan.

‘You can’t kill me,’ Gardner said. He felt the pressure of the muzzle, as if it was drilling through to his brain.

‘Give me one good reason.’

‘Right now, there’s a dozen other MI6 agents in this area alone. Many more in Belgrade. If you kill me, they’ll fucking hunt you down like a dog.’

Golan didn’t reply.

He believes me, Gardner thought. I’ve bought myself some time—

He felt a shockwave of pain as Golan bashed the pistol butt against his temple. Gardner dropped to his knees, screams inside his head.

‘Son of a bitch!’

‘On your feet,’ Golan said. ‘This way.’

Gardner stood. His hair was sticky and warm.

He staggered into a dim room behind the altar, eight metres by six. The room was sparsely furnished: a wooden table on the left, a bricked-up fireplace at the far wall, a small statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. A wooden chair in the middle of the room, a length of parachute cord on the floor by the chair legs.

Gardner went to open his mouth, then felt a boot connect with the small of his back. Golan grabbed him by the arms, dragged his knackered body to the chair, then bound his arms behind his back with the nylon cord. He stood in front of Gardner, wiping the lenses of his glasses with his shirt sleeve.

‘Those fucking idiots at MI6’ – he spat out the last word like mouthwash – ‘are they aware of the nuclear weapon too? Or is their so-called intelligence as inadequate as ever?’

‘You knew about the nuke?’ Gardner’s mouth was dry as sawdust.

‘Of course. Since the very beginning.’

The upper part of Gardner’s chest was tight like a belt. His head suddenly felt heavy as Golan approached the table. On it Gardner could see a number of implements. Screwdrivers, hammers, scalpels, ice-picks, crocodile clips. Golan inspected them.

‘You’re fucking insane,’ Gardner said.

‘Insanity means to be illogical,’ Golan replied. ‘But I’m perfectly logical.’

He picked up a scalpel, examined its sharp blade in the harsh light.

‘So, how about you begin by telling me where these agent friends of yours are?’

‘Fuck you!’

‘If you knew who I worked for, you wouldn’t say that.’

‘You’re not Mossad, I know that much.’

‘I work for a special division of Mossad that is secret even to the rest of the organization. Our codename is Shiloh. We draw out men from Mossad’s Collections and Research Departments. Only the top men and women are recruited. They have to be willing to kill, poison, maim and terrorize the enemies of Israel. No one is aware of our activities,’ he said, by now laughing heartily, ‘especially not MI6.’

His long hands settled on a pair of crocodile clips. Gardner felt his guts twist.

‘Shiloh learned of a plot by your friend to trade cocaine with the Russians for an easily transportable nuclear weapon. Some call it a suitcase nuke. According to ex-KGB chiefs, hundreds of these devices have gone missing in Russia. Some in old depots. Others on the black market. Your friend John Bald intended to sell this weapon on for a substantial profit.’ Golan paused. ‘To Mahmoud Reza.’

Gardner remembered the third man at the convoy. A memory hit him like a rush of blood to the head. That man was Reza, the outlawed Iranian general!

Golan went on, ‘The media reported he was killed. In Afghanistan, they said. They are fools. The Americans killed a lookalike. Reza is alive and well, and as we speak Reza is preparing the convoy for its journey. He does so with the blessing of the Iranian state.’

‘You stood back and let a nuke get into the hands of your worst enemy?’

‘Madness, yes. On the surface. But in Shiloh we look at the bigger picture. How to turn our enemies’ actions to our advantage. Most people would try to stop this deal from ever taking place. We are not most people.’

Golan brought the crocodile clips and a power unit over to Gardner. Plugged the clips into the unit and flicked a switch.

‘Give me one name,’ he said. ‘Just to begin with. One name, and then I’ll go easy on you. I promise.’

Gardner swallowed his fear. It tasted sickly in his throat.

‘Suck a dick.’

The pain’s coming, pal, he said to himself. You need to think of an exit strategy, and you need to do it fucking yesterday.

Golan shrugged, as if he expected nothing more from the man.

‘Why let the ragheads get their grubby mitts on the nuke?’ Gardner asked.

‘The Iranians are celebrating because they have a nuclear power plant,’ Golan said. ‘The truth is, the station at Bushehr is nothing. The technology is old, the uranium barely enriched, the parts supplied by the Russians, who themselves are unreliable. If Israel’s government perceived the station to be a threat, they would have bombed it long ago. As we did in Syria.’

Golan attached the clips to Gardner’s pecs. Gardner concentrated on steeling his body for the pain. He took deep breaths, trying to fill his red blood cells with as much oxygen as possible. He felt the cold bite of the clips as their teeth pinched his muscles.

‘What is most important,’ Golan went on, ‘is that the Iranians do not proceed further with an enrichment programme. For that to happen, we need more than mere sanctions and tough words from your Prime Minister and the United States. We need a catastrophe.’

Gardner squirmed in the chair. The air in the room was muggy. Oily sweat slithered down his chin and on to his groin like a dripping tap. Better rustle up a plan quick, soldier. Because Golan’s in the mood to fucking kill me.

‘You mean… an accident?’

Golan snorted. ‘I think you read my mind, friend.’

He held the power unit in his hands, his fingers skimming along the bank of dials.

‘If Iran was caught trying to acquire nuclear weapons of a much higher grade of uranium, and there was to be a tragic accident in, say, Istanbul, well. That would shock the world into action. International pressure from the UN and NATO would force Iran’s hand. Russia would have to dismantle the Bushehr plant, and a blanket ban on nuclear materials to Iran would soon follow. Its ability to develop nuclear weapons destroyed for ever.’

‘So you were going to let the nuke get as far as Istanbul—?’

‘And detonate the device early? Yes.’

‘But for that you’d need to set the timer, the codes—’

‘Obtained from the Russians.’

Gardner’s head throbbed. He felt fluid draining from his brain. His mind was filled with noise. Questions, anger, denial. He shut his eyes, trying to blot everything out.

‘Why would Bald do something like that?’ Gardner asked. ‘We launched incursions into Iran during the Iraq War. And suddenly he does business with them?’

‘Your friend was interested in profit, nothing else. One hundred million dollars,’ Golan said, and Gardner’s heart skipped a beat. ‘That’s why the ’Ndrangheta tried to hijack the deal. They knew the price Bald had received from Mahmoud Reza. Hard for any man to resist that kind of money, especially Italian mafia.’

‘But why Istanbul? Why not Tehran, or anywhere else?’ Gardner figured that the longer he could keep Golan boasting about his masterplan, the more he could delay his torture. In the dark recesses of his mind he busied himself with his escape. The table presented several weapons. Get free of the ropes and you’ve got a fighting chance, he told himself.

‘Relations with Turkey are very low,’ Golan said. ‘Because of the embargo, and the fact that the ruling Turkish AK Party is run by a pro-Islamist who freely admits he wishes for Turkey to usurp Egypt as the leader of the Muslim world. We used to be close to the Turks. They were a moderating force in our negotiations with the Palestinians. Politics and the embargo changed that for ever.’

‘When Bald died,’ said Gardner, recalling the chaotic aftermath of Brezovan, ‘the Russian mafya took the nuke. Why didn’t they just deal directly with the Iranians, rather than selling it at a cut-price figure to Bald?’

‘The mafya have close links to the Russian government. Senior figures advised them not to sell directly to Reza. If anyone did link them to the nuke, the international outcry would turn Russia into a pariah state. But the mafya couldn’t leave the nuke at the exchange, not once they’d killed everyone else. They had no choice but to deliver it here, to Reza.’

This is crazy, Gardner thought. I’ve got to warn Land. Before it’s too late.

‘They know about the plan to detonate it?’ he asked.

Golan shook his head.

‘It’s a secret. Until eight o’clock tonight, at the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, when the whole world will get a chance to see nuclear horror with their own eyes.’

He stepped back until he was four metres from Gardner.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘This is your last chance. Where are the other agents?’

In a flash Golan’s right hand rotated the voltage dial clockwise, and Gardner felt his bones jump out of his skin. The pain was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It started on his skin and burned through to his inside, like acid. The first jolt was light. The second fried his stomach, as if someone was pulling out stitches. Then the jolt abruptly stopped, and his stomach was sewn up.

‘I appreciate American innovations,’ Golan said. ‘They turned execution into an art form. The electric chair is my favourite. Such a long and painful way to die. They say the average victim takes five minutes to expire. Sometimes the current cooks their body to a temperature that melts their eyeballs.’

‘Fuck you,’ Gardner wanted to say. But his jaw felt loose, as if it was hanging on by a thread.

A third charge, this one more intense than the last. The screams inside him grated, like a saw cutting metal. The hairs on his arms and chest began to burn. The smell was bitter. He felt as if he was being skinned alive.

‘Tell me,’ said Golan. ‘How long do you think it will be before you die?’

Fighting the pain was hopeless. His training in the Regiment simulated torture, but nothing had prepared him for this. The tactical part of his brain told him that Golan was a psychotic fuck who took pleasure in seeing him writhe in agony. So there’s going to be breaks between the shocks. You can use those—

The fourth wave hit. Pain ricocheted beneath his skin. Needles stabbed his bones. He clenched his jaw.

‘Come on, friend. Give me a little yell. It must hurt, no?’

A smell drifted to Gardner’s nose. Burning latex. He wondered what the hell it was. A second later he understood that he had a way out.

My prosthetic hand. It’s come loose.

He glanced up at Golan. The Israeli hadn’t latched on. Gardner hunched up his shoulders. The join between the nub of his forearm and his artificial hand was melting. Half of the lower limb had detached. He shook his elbow. Golan went to administer a fifth charge.

The next charge is the killer, Gardner thought. He buzzes you again, there’s no way back.

Then he caught a snap, and the thud of his hand against the floor.

He was free.

18

1503 hours.

Gardner went in fast, and he went in hard. He’d learned his lesson from his previous dust-up with Golan. The Israeli was an expert in Krav Maga. And the only way to fuck up someone trained in the world’s dirtiest and most effective martial art, was to beat them at their own game.

He raised his left thigh until his knee crunched against Golan’s balls. Air gusted out of the Israeli’s mouth as he lowered his hands to his squashed gonads. Gardner exploited his shoddy defence with a palm-strike to the bridge of his nose. The flat of his hand shattered the frame and lenses of Golan’s glasses, and the man howled as plastic splinters darted into the corners of his eyes.

With just the one functioning hand, Gardner was fucked if Golan unleashed a torrent of blows upon him. His muscles were zapped, fried, distended. But the taste of freedom and the early scores against Golan gave him a second wind. Energy flowed through his veins.

Gardner kicked Golan in the knee. The same right foot then swung down like a hammer on Golan’s left foot. The Israeli faltered. Gardner dealt him a two-fingered jab in the eyes. The jab became a combo attack as he followed through with an elbow to his ear and smashed his face into his left knee. Golan’s legs caved in.

Golan fell to the floor. Fucking poleaxed. Gardner delivered a succession of boots that swung into every crevice of Golan’s crumpled body. His legs, back, face, arms.

Then Golan was still. Gardner saw the pistol grip in the back of his trousers. He dug it out. A Sig Sauer P228. The stainless-steel handgun felt good in his hand. Catching his breath, Gardner drilled the muzzle against Golan’s dazed skull.

‘I know where Aimée is,’ Golan said.

Gardner felt something catch fire within his chest. ‘Don’t fuck with me, pal.’

‘I know… because Shiloh have been tracking Sotov’s every move.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘It’s the truth,’ Golan said. ‘Israel has a lot of friends in Russia. We have a man on the inside. Denis Popov, he… he works as Sotov’s chauffeur. He’s the one who originally alerted us to the sale of the nuke.’

‘Where’s Sotov now?’

Golan shook his head and chuckled wearily. ‘It does not work like that. If I tell you now, you’ll kill me.’

Gardner lowered the Sig.

‘What do you want?’

Golan tended his sore balls. ‘Immunity. And safe passage back to Tel Aviv – tonight.’

‘Forget it, mate. The Firm will never agree to your demands.’

‘Time is ticking, my friend. The convoy has already left. Check outside if you don’t believe me. If you want to stop the bomb, you need to play by my rules.’

Gardner shoved Golan to one side and drew up Land’s number on his mobile. One, two, three rings. Pick up, pick up! Land answered on the fifth ring. He was breathless.

‘Where are you? Did you find the nuke?’

‘Yeah—’

‘Great work, old chap, there’s a real future for you—’

‘The convoy’s already left.’

Land went quiet.

‘It’s headed for the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul,’ Gardner said, then heard a flurry of swear words rasping down the line.

He caught a bang and pictured Land thumping his desk. For several seconds the connection was quiet. Then Land said, ‘Right. This is what we’re going to do. I’ll alert the Turks. Get them to set up a blockade at the bridge. A Black Hawk will transport you onward to Istanbul.’

‘Fuck off,’ Gardner said. ‘Send a specialist team to disarm the nuke.’

‘There isn’t one. We’d have to locate engineers, call them back from operations, brief them, transport them… There’s not the time. You’re only a couple of hours away by helicopter. And I do recall’ – Gardner heard the rustling of paper – ‘that you have experience in detonations.’

The radio station in Belgrade. The shadows, and the bodies.

‘Golan says the suitcase bomb is due to detonate at eight o’clock tonight, yes?’ Land continued. ‘So that leaves us with a shade over four hours to get you on-site and deactivate it. You’re the best man for the job, Joe.’

‘What about Aimée? She doesn’t deserve to die.’

‘She won’t. Soon as Golan calls his informant she’ll be granted a stay of execution.’

Gardner sighed. Each passing minute revealed strange new pains along the crescent of his chest. This one last step. Then it’s over.

For ever.

‘Just make sure you get Aimée away from the fucking Russians,’ he said.

‘You worry about your job, old boy, and I’ll worry about mine,’ Land replied, then hung up.

‘OK,’ Gardner told Golan. ‘You’ll get your safe passage. But first you give us Sotov’s location.’

‘How do I know you won’t backtrack on your promise after finding her?’

‘If Aimée is where you say she is, you’ll be sent home. You have my word.’

Golan chewed on it for several seconds.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘We have a deal.’

The word spiked Gardner’s stomach. The nausea returned.

‘Get a fucking move on,’ he said to Golan.

They made their way down the aisle and out of the church. The sun had packed its bags and pissed off, replaced by a continuous grey curtain that seethed rain. Puddles plopped with raindrops in the pitted streets. Gardner felt the rain on his head, cool and refreshing. He let Golan walk in front as they passed around the side of the church.

The rain washed wet heat into Gardner’s mouth. He tasted salt on his tongue; felt his stomach unstitching again. He’d asked a lot of his body the past seven days. There wasn’t much left in the tank.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

The sky blackened. Steel-grey clouds seemed to oscillate like the vibrations of heavy machinery. Gardner peered into the distance. A fleet of eight UH-60 Black Hawks surfaced on the horizon, their four main rotor blades flickering above the long main profiles of the choppers. They were small as distant birds. The vibrating intensified and the Black Hawks grew and grew until they blocked out the clouds. Two of them hovered over a clearing to the south of the church, a field that had perhaps once belonged to a farm but now stood neglected. The wild grass and weeds parted like waves, shimmering as the two helicopters began their descent.

The choppers set down. Soldiers immediately debussed from both Black Hawks. Six men raced over to Golan and dragged him to the chopper to the right. Last I’ll ever see of that cunt, thought Gardner.

Two men approached Gardner from the other Black Hawk. The nearest man offered his hand. A face Gardner didn’t recognize, but the cold stare and grizzled expression told Gardner that he had yomped up the Pen-y-Fan mountain more than once in his life.

‘Let’s go,’ the man said. He had a Brummie accent thick as old boots, bulbous nose, brown eyes and ears that were doing a good impression of cauliflower buds. Gardner approached the Black Hawk with the two men, climbed inside and strapped himself into a seat. The second guy sat opposite him. Gardner studied him. He was scraggy, with a curly black beard that covered his jaw like webbing. His face had the hard lines and gritty texture of a man who lived his life in hard terrain. His muscles were toned rather than large. Gardner noted the CAR-15 Colt Commando assault rifle between his legs, the Benelli shotgun and spare 5.56x45mm NATO ammo clips on the spare passenger seat.

‘Name’s Weston,’ said the Brummie as the Black Hawk lifted off. It was a bumpy ride and Gardner felt his guts lurch. ‘This is Dooley,’ the pilot said, nodding at the bearded guy.

‘Gardner. You lads are Regiment?’

‘Twenty-three SAS, G Squadron,’ replied Dooley. The whirr of the rotor blades, like rolling thunder, meant he had to shout to be heard. ‘I’m told you used to be a Blade?’

‘Discharged two years ago.’

Dooley glanced at the nub where Gardner’s fake hand used to be.

‘Fucking hard luck, mate,’ he said in a Cockney accent. He grinned, revealing the worst teeth in Britain. A lot of Regiment lads sported awful gnashers, a result of months spent in the field with only basic hygiene. ‘But you’re back on the frontline now.’

Gardner’s heart pulsed. He felt the tension winding up in his spine as his body overdosed on adrenalin.

‘You picked a bad day for it.’

Too fucking right. Gardner kept the thought to himself.

They flew on to Istanbul.

19

1930 hours.

The Bosporus Bridge lit up like a glowstick across the sea. On the European side, glass-fronted towers clustered together in the Levent financial quarter. Sleek, shiny wet pebbles that looked down on the other side of the bridge. The Asian side was a tapestry of shabby mosques, slum dwellings and rickety roads.

The size of the city left Gardner breathless. It seemed to unfold into the horizon.

No time to enjoy the view. He ran his right hand over the newly attached prosthetic limb attached to his left arm. An on-board medic had patched up Gardner’s wounds and fitted him with a temporary limb, but it lacked the nerve-sensors and control of his old hand. Nothing more than a fancy-looking club.

At a cruising speed of 150 knots, equivalent to 173 mph, the Black Hawk had taken a little over two and a half hours to clear the 650 kilometres to Istanbul, flying at an altitude of 8,000 metres.

Seven thirty-four and Gardner was first to rappel down from the Black Hawk, using a Marlow rope connected to a figure-eight descender to slow his fall. He couldn’t fast-rope, not while he was essentially one-handed – he’d slam into the ground at speed and fuck his legs up.

His stomach muscles cramped on the drop. Twenty-four hours ago his V-neck shirt had been pristine white. Now it was grubby, black and brown-red. It chafed against his chest.

He dropped on to Camlica Hill, the highest point in Istanbul. Touched down on a clipped grass plain criss-crossed with several walking paths and hemmed in by pine forests and beds of tulips. A smattering of tea gardens and restaurants stood empty, cleared by the army to provide a suitable LZ. The hill stood some 250 metres above sea level and afforded Gardner an excellent view of the Bosporus Bridge in the distance.

Dooley and Weston were next to touch down. The Black Hawk scuttled away into the skyline. A man approached Gardner. From his Turkish military colours, Gardner placed him as an NCO. Narrow black eyes, pallid lips and bronzed skin. Gardner couldn’t make up his mind which bits of him hailed from the Mediterranean and which had fallen off Genghis Khan’s family tree.

‘Colonel Deniz Sahin, Ozel Jandarma Komando,’ said the Colonel, referring to the elite Turkish Special Forces unit. He didn’t offer his hand. ‘You’re the Brits who are going to stop the bomb?’

‘Something like that,’ Gardner replied. He got the impression that Colonel Sahin wasn’t exactly thrilled about a bunch of foreigners coming to save the day.

‘Do your fucking job, Englishmen. Then get out of my country.’

Sahin waved Gardner, Dooley and Weston towards a waiting army Jeep.

‘Get in,’ Sahin said. ‘The convoy is almost at the bridge. My men have set up an ambush. We will take care of the Iranians. When we have finished annihilating the enemy, we’ll give you a signal to come forward and disarm the bomb.’ Sahin glared at all three men. ‘You are not to take part in the engagement unless I give permission.’

‘We understand,’ Weston said. Fair play, Gardner thought. This was Sahin’s turf. He’d feel exactly the same if a bunch of Turkish operators rocked up in London in the middle of a crisis.

Weston and Dooley sat in the back of the Jeep. Gardner rode shotgun alongside Sahin. They raced out of Camlica Hill and skidded through the chaotic traffic linking the sideroads to the four-lane O-1 motorway, which ran across the bridge and continued on the Asian side of the city.

The Jeep shuddered as Sahin cut up a motorbike. The Bosporus Bridge loomed, its huge zigzagging steel cables spanning the river. A bottleneck of traffic had formed on the bridge, and any other day and Gardner would have stopped to admire the stylish towers brightly lit in shades of purple, green and red at intervals along its fifteen-hundred-metre length.

‘We’ve shut down the toll-booth computers,’ Sahin explained. ‘To stop anyone getting through.’

Gardner spotted the van, in the outside lane, a hundred metres from the bridge itself. Identical silver Toyota Hiluxes were positioned to its immediate front and rear. It was the convoy from Drobny.

‘Our assault team is ready,’ Sahin said.

No more needed to be said. Hard men getting ready to do a hard job. They didn’t have time for fucking dinner-party conversation.

A clock on the Jeep dashboard read 19.45. A little further on and Sahin slammed on the brakes, stopping the Jeep fifty metres from the convoy. Traffic, clogged thicker than a smoker’s arteries, prevented them from getting any closer.

‘Wait for the signal,’ Sahin said.

Gardner snatched at his breath. His right hand was shaking.

Seven forty-eight.

A shot cracked. A tyre burst.

‘That’s it!’

At the signal, Sahin flew out of the car, M16 assault rifle in his hands. Up ahead the doors on a lorry sixty metres ahead of the furthest Toyota Hilux swung open and dozens of Turkish soldiers and attack dogs poured out. More sprang out from nearby cars and vans. Must have been a hundred in total. Enough firepower to start a fucking war, Gardner was thinking as he looked on.

Sahin was twenty-five metres from the convoy when the shooter in the first Hilux returned fire. The NCO hit the ground, bullets cracking the tarmac around him. More shots rang out. Electric ca-racks of sniper fire filled the air. Gardner counted sixteen Turkish snipers based on the rooftops of the flanking apartment blocks. They rained down rounds, their bullets streaking the Hilux. A soldier on a loudspeaker ordered civilians to remain in their cars, but most didn’t listen and legged it. Amateur mistake, Gardner thought. They should have sealed off the road a couple of kilometres in either direction, made sure no innocents got zapped in the crossfire.

Another ca-rack and this one hit the jackpot. The shooter gasped as a round put a hole through his throat the size of a two-pence coin.

Meanwhile two figures emerged from the rear Hilux. Thirty Turkish soldiers beat a path towards them. They worked in a fire-and-move formation in pairs, one man putting rounds down while the other shifted forward. Faced with a continuous stream of bullets, the two men who’d debussed from the Hilux didn’t stand a fucking chance. The Turks slotted them both at close range, fifteen metres. The second guy took so many rounds in his guts that his legs were severed from his torso.

Mahmoud Reza was the last to emerge, from the van between the Hiluxes. He looked more emaciated than ever, and his thick beard glistened with the blood of his fallen comrades. Clutching an Uzi, he sprayed rounds at the soldiers in a wild arc, forcing them to take cover behind the rear Hilux. Stray rounds struck a middle-aged woman in a white suit as she fled from her Ford Focus. The poor woman didn’t make a sound. Just crumbled in the middle of the road. Her right leg trembled. Then it stopped.

Reza made a run for it, heading for the bridge. Sahin lined up the retreating Iranian from a distance of fifty metres and unloaded four rounds into his back. Reza dropped. The Komando containment team, thirty men decked out in fireproof riot gear, surrounded Reza. Ten or more attack dogs snarled on their leashes.

Sahin motioned to Gardner and his mates to hurry up.

Climbing out of the Jeep, Gardner moved towards the van. Spent cartridges littered the road twenty-five metres from both the front and rear Hilux. The windows were starred, the rubber on the tyres peeled off the rims. He saw two dead guys at the back of the rear vehicle. Their heads were obliterated, brain matter speckled along the greasy tarmac in a starburst pattern.

‘Good fucking work,’ he said, impressed.

‘They got what they deserved,’ Sahin said coldly.

Gardner glanced over Sahin’s shoulder and saw the attack dogs hungrily biting off flaps of flesh from Reza’s corpse.

Turning back to Sahin, he said, ‘I thought you were best friends with the Iranians these days?’

Sahin shook his head, tucked his thumbs between his utility belt and his army-issue combats. ‘We don’t trust anybody.’

Gardner eyed the van. Swore he could hear the faint tick-tock of a timer device. His muscles were sapped of energy. He bit his bottom lip, drier than a fig leaf, and tried to shut out the background noise.

‘Got the hazmat suit?’ he asked Weston.

Dooley sprinted to the Jeep. Returned with a Level A reflective suit. He helped ease Gardner into it, then slipped the glove over his right hand. Popped an earpiece into his right ear and put the helmet over his head.

‘Toolbox?’ Gardner’s breath steamed on the helmet visor.

Dooley handed him a metal box. Gardner gripped its handle.

‘Good luck,’ Dooley said.

Gardner turned and took the long walk towards the van. The suit constricted his movements and after forty metres he’d worked up a sweat that poured down his forehead and on to his eyelids. The heat and discomfort seemed to reflect the grinding in his skull.

You’ve got one shot at this, he told himself. Get it wrong, Istanbul gets vapourized.

He tried not to think about what would happen if the nuke detonated. The first explosion was the conventional one. That would fry him, turn him to dust. The explosion would in turn activate a neutron trigger, a small disc of highly radioactive material that would cause widespread damage with a death toll of anything between thirty and fifty thousand. And that wouldn’t be the end of it. A nuclear cloud would drift across the fallout zone, endangering hundreds of thousands of people with exposure to massively high doses of radiation poisoning.

Gardner stopped at the van. He looked towards the Bosporus, dark and slick as a whale’s back. Might be the last thing you ever see, he thought.

Static crackled in his right ear.

‘Joe, can you hear me?’ Land said.

‘Loud and clear.’

‘This is a three-way line with Lieutenant Steve White. Steve’s an engineer on the Trident submarine the HSM Vigilant. He’s going to talk you through the disarming process.’

‘Don’t worry about a thing, mate,’ White said in an accent so Welsh you could bottle it and sell it as Taff Valley water. ‘This is a bloody tough gig, but Leo here tells me you’ve got demolitions experience, so you’ve got the basic skill set in place. It’s just a matter of guiding you through the interesting bit.’

‘I’ll be fine, mate. Let’s get this over with and then we can share a pint in Hereford. First round’s on me.’

The doors of the van were open. Gardner placed the toolbox just inside on its floor. He prised it open and removed a torch. The van lit up like a cave. Placing his right hand on the floor, he slid up into the van.

Inside, the heat rose again. Gardner felt his clothes clinging to his legs and torso. He was soaked through.

Once again an image of the radio station flashed across the surface of his mind. The way the building toppled, the smoke plume billowing into the bright blue sky, a dozen small fires breaking out among the mountain of concrete and steel, slab and cable. All that death, all of it unseen in the fury of the explosion. He thought about how the nuke would be like that – except a million times bigger.

‘Can you see the top of the device?’ White asked him.

‘Looking at it now.’

‘What’s the timer say?’

Gardner angled his head. The LCD display was a blur through the steam and sweat. ‘Zero-zero-three.’ Three fucking minutes.

‘OKaaay,’ said White. He sounded like he was talking more to himself than Gardner. ‘This type of nuke should be battery-operated. You should see a red or black cable connecting the timer to the battery attached to the side of the actual nuke.’

‘I see it,’ Gardner said. ‘It’s a red wire.’ The glossy wire was a quarter of an inch thick and ran from the timer to the canvas box strapped to the back of the nuke.

‘I’m going to need you to cut that wire.’

Gardner fumbled inside the toolbox for the wire cutters. He secured the wire between its teeth.

‘But…’ – White’s voice was rushed, unsteady – ‘before you cut it. These types of nuke aren’t highly evolved, but the Soviets liked to booby-trap their devices.’

Fuck! Gardner thought. He held the cutters in place, his hand a second away from plunging Istanbul into a nuclear holocaust.

‘I want you to look down the back of the device,’ White said.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Something beneath the battery. It will have been concealed from view.’

Gardner ran his eyes up and down the battery. He was feeling dizzy. The heat, the exhaustion, the dehydration – a perfect physiological storm. Spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. He thought about that cold pint in Hereford.

He found a small black box taped to the underside of the battery. Gardner described it to White, who said, ‘Here’s what you’ve got to do – what’s the timer read, Joe?’

‘One minute.’

‘Plenty, plenty of time.’ White’s voice sounded artificially calm. ‘You need to cut the booby-trap.’

Gardner paused with the wire cutters. He didn’t want any more nasty surprises from White. ‘And then?’

‘Once the trap is cut, it will automatically short-circuit the timer. There’s nothing you can do to prevent that. Soon as you cut the booby-trap, you’ll have about three seconds to cut the red wire.’

’What do you mean, “about three seconds”?’

‘Well, it depends how efficiently the lads have wired the trap.’

Thirty seconds.

Gardner reached down with the wire cutters to the booby-trap. A single grey wire snaked up from the grey box and fed into the timer. The awkward angle and the dim lighting made it difficult for him to get at the cable.

Twenty seconds.

Sweat dripped on to his visor. His vision was deteriorating. He felt his heart pulse, and his hand spasmed. He dropped the wire cutters on the floor.

‘Shit!’

‘What is it?’

Gardner fumbled on the dark floor for the cutters. His hand touched something bumpy. He found them. He straightened his back – and could barely see a thing. His visor misted up and the booby-trap was no more than a blur underneath a much bigger grey blur.

Ten.

He felt the wire cutters grip something hard. The cable.

A deep breath. The visor cleared.

Gardner squeezed the handles.

He heard a light click as the cutters sliced through the wire of the booby-trap.

A fraction of a second behind it came a buzzing noise, followed by an incessant beeping. The lights on the LCD panel flashed, illuminating the van. Gardner rushed up to the screen. He searched for the red wire. One second had gone, he knew that much. Got to find it, got to—

His eyes located the red wire. He brought the cutters to the wire. Squeezed again.

The red lights continued to go batshit. The LCD presented a single word: ‘ARMED’.

Fuck!

Gardner closed his eyes and waited for the world to swallow him up.

After a second, the beeping and buzzing noises stopped.

Nothing happened.

He opened his eyes.

‘What’s going on, Joe?’ White asked.

‘I cut the wire, but the timer kept going,’ Gardner said.

‘Yeah, it’ll do that. But without the battery pack to activate the neutron trigger of the bomb, the nuke can’t initiate the conventional explosion. Or the uranium isotopes. You’ve done it, mate.’

On hearing the words Gardner crawled out of the van. He wasn’t euphoric. He didn’t feel a sense of victory. He just ripped off the helmet and felt like a drowning man coming up for air. He breathed, and his whole body sighed. Dooley and Weston came running over, grinning like the fucking Chuckle Brothers. Sahin tossed him a begrudging nod.

‘Water,’ Gardner said.

Weston produced a canteen. Gardner thought about drinking it. Instead he poured it over his head. Felt the cool shower of it washing away the thick heat. He let the water rinse the salty taste out of his mouth. And dear God, it was finally over.

Dooley handed him a mobile.

‘That pen-pushing wanker at the Firm wants to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Probably got a gerbil shoved up his arse that he needs unplugging.’

Gardner laughed. It felt good to be back among Blades. He loved the sense of brotherhood, a special bond that some jumped-up posh prick like Leo Land would never understand.

‘Bloody good work, Joe,’ said Land. ‘Really, I’m speechless. I thought we were done for.’

‘We?’ Gardner sputtered. ‘If I’d fucked up, you’d still be sitting in your ivory tower.’

‘The consequences would have reached much further than the atom cloud,’ Land replied sternly.

‘I don’t give a shit. Where’s Aimée?’

‘Golan’s providing us with her location now. He promises that she won’t have come to any harm.’

‘He’d best not be lying.’

‘Relax. It’s under control.’

But Gardner wasn’t listening. He looked around for Dooley and Weston, hoping to shoot the shit with them for a while. Nowhere to be seen.

They’d already bugged out.

20

2111 hours.

Maxim Ledinsky watched the news and sipped his mineral water. His office was frugal and lacked the furnishings of his peers. Not because of any firmly held Communist dogma, but simply because he hadn’t yet shared the affluence of the others at the FSB. He was relatively young, thirty-eight, and had come to the game late. By the time he’d entered the organization his peers had already rubbed shoulders with the plutocrats and the oligarchs. They’d acquired shares in oil and gas companies, forged links with the mafya.

All that was about to change.

On the TV, the journalist excitedly pointed to the van. The camera zoomed in on it. The van was bathed in spotlights, a security cordon establishing a ten-metre perimeter around it. Ledinsky spoke good English and preferred the BBC to the Russian channels. You learned more and, ridiculously, they even told the truth. The man on his screen, fat and wavy-haired, seemed pleased with himself.

‘Nuclear engineers on their way… to dispose—’

‘Fools,’ Ledinsky muttered under his breath. He glanced at his watch. His soon-to-be-replaced watch. He’d get a Rolex, studded with diamonds.

Any second now.

Each nuke came with a killswitch code. A timer override.

Ledinsky walked over to his window. His mind was lost for a moment. Then he snapped out of it and returned to his desk. He propped himself on the corner of it and sipped more water. He liked the dink of ice against the glass.

The killswitch was in place. The orders were simple.

His phone rang. Ledinsky blanked it. He watched the screen whiten as the nuke detonated, then faded to black. Finally the TV returned to the BBC news desk and two presenters with quizzical expressions on their faces, wondering why their colleagues’ reports had cut out.

Why indeed? Ledinsky thought, and afforded himself a smile. It was so good when things went according to plan.

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

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