Raf’s voice reached them. ‘OK,’ he announced. ‘Here’s the deal. The fake Martinezes take a step backwards on the count of three. Otherwise, I kill the lot of you before we leave.’

  Cruz hissed, so Zak bent down and put the gun to his head. ‘I mean it, Cruz. Just one word . . .’

  ‘One . . .’ Raf shouted.

  Zak’s mind turned over. He knew the kind of fear the body doubles had for Martinez. He knew they wouldn’t betray him, even now.

  ‘Two . . .’

  When Raf counted to three, he’d have played all his cards. The real Martinez would be feeling confident, but that might make him more vulnerable . . .

  ‘Three . . .’

  A pause.

  ‘Damn it, Gabs!’ Raf’s voice was full of frustration. ‘Where are you?’

  Now was the time to move. Zak grabbed Cruz by his shirt collar and quickly pulled him to his feet. He dragged him the three or four metres to the top of the staircase and pushed him so he staggered down the steps. Raf turned to look at him. ‘What are you doing?’ he bellowed, but Zak ignored him.

  Zak trotted down the steps, aiming his gun at Cruz. ‘Say bye-bye to your son!’ he shouted.

  There was no doubting the real Martinez. He was three from the left and the moment he saw his son in danger, he stepped forward. With a sudden, sharp movement, he whacked Raf on the shoulder. The guardian angel crumpled, dropping his gun, which Martinez picked up and – with obvious skill – aimed directly at Zak.

  He fired. A burst of fire, and a single round caught Zak on the side of his right arm. A flash of red, and his gun went spinning. Zak collapsed onto the stairs, blood gushing from his arm, wincing with the sudden, sharp pain.

  Martinez was shouting. ‘You dare to threaten my son? You dare to threaten my son?’ All the body doubles scrambled and so did Raul, leaving Martinez alone at the bottom of the stairs with Raf unconscious at his feet and Cruz escaping towards him.

  He turned back to Zak. ‘And now, Agent 21, whoever you are, you will pay the price for your arrogance! You will pay the price for crossing Cesar Martinez Toledo!’

  Martinez fixed Zak with his mad eyes.

  He dug the butt of the assault rifle into his shoulder, ready to fire.

  But the sound that filled the atrium was not the burst of automatic fire. It was a dead, wooden noise – a single shot from a suppressed weapon, and it came from the first floor. The round hit Martinez in the chest and threw him onto his back.

  Zak looked up. There was Gabs. She had Cruz’s M16 in her hands and her blue eyes blazed fiercely.

  ‘Father!’ Cruz’s ran towards Martinez’s fallen body. He knelt down beside him and put two fingers to his jugular.

  Silence in the room.

  Blood oozed into Martinez’s shirt; red foam seeped from his mouth. It was a horrible sight, and yet Zak couldn’t help feeling a wild flash of triumph that the man who had ordered the death of his parents had paid the price for his crime. Was there even a twinge of regret that the gun which had killed Martinez had not been in his own hand? He put that thought in check. There were too many other things to think about right now . . .

  Cruz dropped his head. ‘You killed my father,’ he shouted. ‘You killed my father!’

  He stretched out his hand, reaching for the rifle Martinez had let fall. ‘Don’t even think about it, Cruz,’ Gabs shouted. ‘I didn’t want to kill your father but I was prepared to, and I’m prepared to kill you too.’

  Cruz shrank back.

  Seconds later, Gabs was beside Zak. She checked his wound. ‘Can you walk?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so. Blimey, Gabs, I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Body armour, sweetie. But do me a favour and save the emotional reunion for later, huh.’

  Zak nodded. ‘The Mexican police are overhead. Martinez has them in his pocket . . .’

  ‘We need to get out of here. Cruz, put your hands behind your head and lie on the floor.’

  Martinez’s son did what he was told as Zak and Gabs ran down into the atrium. Zak clutched his bad arm with his good hand, but he couldn’t stop the blood pumping through his fingers.

  ‘We need to get Raf to the chopper,’ Gabs shouted. ‘Can you help me carry him?’

  Zak nodded. ‘Just give me one second,’ he said. He walked over to Cruz, leaving a little trail of blood as he went. He stood above him. ‘I would never have shot you, you know.’ For some reason it seemed important to say it.

  Cruz turned his head. ‘You should have,’ he said, his voice filled with tears and hate.

  ‘I lost a father too, Cruz. I know how you’re feeling.’

  ‘You will never know how I’m feeling. You should kill me now because you are responsible for my father’s death, Harry Gold. And I swear that as long as I am alive, I won’t rest until I have hunted you down and killed you myself.’

  Zak looked down at him. ‘Save yourself the trouble,’ he said. ‘You’ll never find me.’

  ‘Believe that if you want to,’ replied Cruz. And then he spat at Zak’s feet.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Gabs shouted. She was bending down beside Raf and lifting one of his arms over her shoulders. ‘Help me.’

  Zak nodded. He grabbed Martinez’s assault rifle to stop Cruz from using it. Ignoring the pain in his bleeding wound, he slung Raf’s other arm over his shoulder. Between them, they lifted him to his feet and dragged him towards the exit. Zak only looked back once. Cruz was still lying on the floor, his hands on his head and his dead father right beside him.

  He put Cruz from his mind. They had to concentrate on getting to the chopper. The moment they stepped outside, however, it was clear this was going to be a problem.

  The four commandos were in front of the house, kneeling in the firing position. The Black Hawk was still waiting for them by the main gate. But between them and their aircraft was the Mexican police helicopter. It hovered twenty metres in the air, lighting them up with its spotlight. Zak could just see police snipers leaning out of the doors and above the thunder of the rotary blades, a voice rang out in Spanish from some kind of loudspeaker: ‘DROP YOUR WEAPONS. IF YOU DO NOT DROP YOUR WEAPONS, WE WILL OPEN FIRE . . .’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ screamed Zak. His wound was shrieking at him now, and he was feeling weaker and weaker. ‘They’re police – we can’t fire on them!’

  Gabs’s eyes were wild and she desperately looked around. ‘We need another exit!’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  Gabs shouted into her comms system. ‘We need immediate exfiltration. Now!’

  That one instruction was all it took. The Black Hawk immediately took flight. It raised above the level of the perimeter wall and swooped around the larger helicopter before turning to face it.

  The choppers hovered in mid-air, nose to nose.

  A moment of standoff. ‘DROP YOUR WEAPONS. IF YOU DO NOT DROP YOUR WEAPONS, WE WILL OPEN FIRE . . .’

  The Black Hawk answered with its Miniguns, operated by the two commandos they had left with the aircraft. They let out a burst of fire – not directly at the police chopper, but just below it. Bright orange tracer fire curved like tiny meteors towards the ground and an immense, mechanical chugging filled the air. The pilot of the police chopper clearly understood the threat: the Miniguns had missed them on purpose; next time they wouldn’t be so lucky. It swerved away, out of the Black Hawk’s line of fire.

  The special forces chopper didn’t mess around. It lowered itself to the ground in front of the house.

  A shout from one of the commandos. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

  Zak and Gabs hauled Raf down the front steps. The four commandos made a corridor for them as they sprinted to the Black Hawk. Zak was feeling faint from blood loss, but as they reached the chopper he knew he had to find a final reserve of strength to get the unconscious Raf up into the bird. He heaved and his knees threatened to buckle; but they got Raf in.

  Zak forced himself up into the Black Hawk, smothered by nausea and weakness. As the four commandos jumped in, Gabs was removing her jacket and tying the arm of it around Zak’s wound to stem the bleeding.

  They left the ground, suddenly and sharply. Zak felt the world spinning. ‘Stay with me,’ Gabs shouted. ‘Stay with me!’ But he knew he was about to lose consciousness, and his head lolled. He looked out of the side of the Black Hawk. Down below, there was a figure, thin and gangly, standing at the front of the house.

  Even in his state of near delirium, Zak could tell it was Cruz. His supposed friend was looking up, watching the Black Hawk as it disappeared into the night sky. Watching it take Zak away from the scene where Cruz’s father lay dead.

  It was the last thing Agent 21 saw before he passed out, high in the night sky of central Mexico, as the Black Hawk and his guardian angels ferried him to safety.

  EPILOGUE

  Two days later

  Zak Darke awoke to the smell of cherry tobacco.

  He was in a stark bright room. No windows and no furniture. Just a bed and a drip stand, with a bag of saline solution feeding through a tube into the back of his hand. The wound on his arm was tightly bandaged. His vision was blurred, and as he looked round it took a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone. There were three other figures standing in the room.

  ‘Nice of you to join us, sweetie,’ Gabs’s voice said. ‘We thought you were going to sleep for a week.’ She walked round to the side of the bed and put a hand tenderly on his shoulder.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked in a croaky voice.

  ‘London. We airlifted you out two nights ago. You’re a lucky boy – there aren’t many people who get a C-17 Globemaster chartered just for them, you know.’

  ‘Where’s Raf?’ Zak asked. ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘I’m fine, Zak.’ Zak’s vision was clearing now and he saw Raf’s distinctive, flat-nosed features. ‘But next time you want to pull a trick like that, you might like to give me a couple of seconds warning.’ Maybe Zak was still a bit concussed, but he could have sworn that Raf was almost smiling.

  Which left the third figure. He was standing at the end of the bed and he had a thin black cigarette between his fingers.

  ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to smoke in hospital,’ Zak said.

  Michael inclined his head. ‘I believe you’re right, Zak. But this isn’t quite an ordinary hospital.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Let’s just say you’re not being cared for by the NHS.’ Michael looked at Gabs and Raf. ‘Gabriella, Raphael, I’m sure you’re as glad as I am to see Zak awake, but perhaps you would excuse us. Zak and I have a few things to discuss.’

  Gabs rolled her eyes. ‘All these secrets,’ she said. ‘What’s a girl to think?’ But she and Raf quickly left the room.

  ‘That’s quite a hole you had in your arm,’ Michael said.

  ‘M16s have a habit of doing that.’

  ‘Quite. You’ll be glad to know the doctors have been able to save the limb. Raphael and Gabriella told me what happened in Martinez’s compound. It was a good idea of yours – to get Martinez to show himself by threatening Cruz. You might have discussed it with them first, though.’

  ‘As far as I can remember,’ Zak said, thinking back to the events of that night, ‘we didn’t have much time to chat.’ There was a silence as Zak lay back in his bed and briefly closed his eyes. ‘You knew all along, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘About Martinez and my parents, I mean.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

  Michael took a suck on his cigarette. ‘If you had known the truth, do you really think you’d have been able to look Martinez in the eye and pretend to be Harry Gold?’

  Zak thought about that. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘By a happy coincidence, that’s what I supposed too.’

  Another silence as something occurred to Zak. ‘You didn’t really want Martinez because he’s a drug lord, did you?’

  Michael’s eyes gleamed with approval. ‘Not really, Zak. Not really.’

  ‘Then why did you want him?’

  The older man started to pace the room. ‘It all started a year ago in a hotel in Lagos. You don’t need me to tell you what happened then. There were a number of British citizens killed in that attack. Thirteen in all, of which your parents were two. We knew Martinez was responsible, but we couldn’t prove it. Naturally we couldn’t let the murder of these thirteen people go unpunished, but we needed a pretext under which to detain Martinez. That was why the evidence you gathered was so important. Even with Martinez dead, though, the evidence is still useful. We’ll be passing it on to the Mexican authorities. I’m sure that little processing plant in the jungle will be wiped out in the next few weeks.’

  ‘Was Gabs supposed to kill him?’ Zak asked.

  Michael looked mildly surprised. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘She only shot him to protect you. I have the impression, Zak, that young Gabriella would do almost anything to keep you safe. In that, she and Raphael are not unalike. No, our plan was very much to take Martinez alive, even though there are plenty who will not mourn his death.’

  Zak remembered Martinez’s body, dead on the floor, with Cruz kneeling beside it. ‘And some who will,’ he said. He felt himself frown.

  ‘What is it?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zak replied. ‘I guess it’s just . . . When my parents died, I knew it wasn’t food poisoning like they said. Sometimes I wondered if they were killed, and I dreamed about going after the person who did it. And now . . .’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘And now,’ Michael continued, ‘it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would.’

  Zak shook his head.

  ‘Revenge never does. People think it will solve everything, but life is more complicated than that.’ He gave Zak a serious look. ‘I had hoped to make it easier for you,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I had hoped to be able to tell you the truth once your evidence had put Martinez behind bars. My plan was to give you the opportunity to avenge your parents by bringing Martinez to justice. You have the makings of a remarkably good operator, Zak. As time passes, you will become better and better. I would not have been able to stop you from going after your parents’ murderer yourself, and you are a little young to have blood on your hands, don’t you think?’

  Zak thought about the surge of triumph he had felt at the sight of Martinez’s dead body, and he nodded.

  ‘I think I told you once before that too much knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. I hope you understand that now. Perhaps you feel angry with me for the way things have turned out, but I will not apologize for trying to keep you safe. In the future, Zak, you’ll have to get used to not knowing the whole story.’ He looked away for a moment. ‘Assuming,’ he added, ‘that there is a future for Agent 21.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Well, is there?’ Michael asked.

  Zak closed his eyes. He thought about the last six months. About Raf and Gabs and the training. About the Martinez operation. About how much his life had changed in the past few months . . .

  And then he spoke. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I guess there is.’

  Michael smiled. ‘I hoped you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few matters to attend to.’ He made his way towards the door, but stopped at the last minute and turned round. ‘Oh, and well done, Zak,’ he said. ‘You did better than even I could have expected.’

  Michael winked at him, then left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Six thousand miles away, a young man sat behind his father’s desk. He was thin and gangly, but in the last two days he had developed a look of steel.

  On the other side of the desk stood a man with one eye, wearing a green Mexico football shirt. He didn’t look like he wanted to take orders from this person; he also looked like he didn’t have a choice.

  ‘How much did my father pay you, Adan?’ asked Cruz Martinez.

  Calaca told him.

  ‘From today, you earn double.’

  Calaca looked surprised. ‘That is very generous, señor,’ he said.

  ‘Generosity has nothing to do with it,’ Cruz replied. ‘I am buying your loyalty. If I suspect you are shortchanging me, I will ask for more than my money back. You will serve me as you served my father. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, señor.’

  ‘The other cartels, do they know of his death?’

  ‘By now, señor, all of Mexico knows it. Your position is dangerous. The other cartels will move in on your business very quickly – more quickly, even, than the authorities will destroy the processing plant your father took the boy to.’

  Cruz considered that for a moment. ‘Every government official we are bribing, and every police officer, they too are to have their payments doubled.’

  ‘Yes, señor. But you will have to do more than that. You will have to show that you have the stomach to stand up to your enemies, and to crush them when necessary.’

  Cruz shook his head slowly. ‘You still have Raul in custody?’

  ‘As you instructed, señor.’

  ‘Good. Take him away and kill him. Leave his body on the doorstep of a police station. Let it be known that he had a problem with me taking over the family business. That will show that I’m not to be trifled with.’

  An unpleasant sneer crossed Calaca’s face, as though he very much approved of the suggestion.’

  ‘Yes, señor.’

  He turned to leave.

  ‘One more thing before you go, Adan.’

  Calaca turned and Cruz gave him a flat, dead stare. ‘Harry Gold. Agent 21. Whatever you want to call him. Find out who he is. Find out where he is. Find out who he works for. Then find him. And when you have found him, bring him to me.’

  ‘Dead or alive, señor?’

  Cruz raised an eyebrow. ‘Alive, Adan. Very much alive. Because when I have Agent 21 in front of me, I will require the pleasure of killing him myself. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes, Señor Cruz. It is understood.’

  And with that, Adan Ramirez walked out of the room, closing the door behind him and leaving his new boss alone with his thoughts.