Marc sat heavily, falling into a chair across from Lucy, and he gratefully accepted a bottle of water from Benjamin.

  The Frenchman jutted his chin towards Kara.

  ‘She’s trying to help. Keeping us informed as to the resource situation.’

  ‘We know the situation, mate,’ Marc noted. ‘We’re aware.’ Lucy watched him take a long pull on the bottle. ‘Before, we could have leaned on our support structure, called in specialised help, dialled up the right hardware or whatever . . . But now we’re using scraps.’ He gave a thin, humourless smile. ‘We’re travelling economy class.’

  ‘More like steerage.’

  Lucy couldn’t stop herself from casting a look over at a particular gear pack by the door, among their go-bags set there ready to grab if they had to bolt. Inside the pack were the remaining hard drives salvaged from a Rubicon off-site server, the only backups of an intelligence database called the Grey Record.

  Rubicon’s operatives had gathered that intelligence over many years, storing material on threat forces, terror groups, criminals and other international non-state actors. Lucy and the others had acted upon what they uncovered, quietly neutralising hazards by fair means and foul, following Ekko Solomon’s crusade to make the world a little safer. Small actions with large consequences, he had always said.

  But when the Combine plundered Rubicon, the Grey Record was the prize that glittered in the ashes – a trove of data and untraceable funds that men without conscience and ethics could have exploited for their own ends. Lucy, Marc and the others had ultimately destroyed all copies of the files except those in that pack. Some of what they had salvaged they traded for what they needed; some of it they used to get them to where they were now. Illegal hardware, smuggled guns and fake passports, the bribes and everything else – it cost money. Working without the deep pockets of a global megacorporation to back them up required a whole new way of operating.

  It hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the SCD team were now using the same tactics as the terror cells and criminal groups they’d once hunted. Lucy reflected on the irony of that.

  Part of the Combine’s gambit to obliterate Rubicon had first been to destroy any credibility the company’s private military contractors might have, by falsifying evidence of the SCD’s involvement in a bloody attack on a military base in Cyprus. The team had always operated on the margins, frequently over the limits of what was considered legal, but always within the bounds of a strict moral code. None of that changed the fact that the world at large now believed they were terrorists.

  Kara turned away from her keyboard and hesitated. Lucy knew what she was going to say next before she spoke. The hacker had a solution to their ills, if only they were willing to take it.

  ‘I can get us eight million dollars by sun-up,’ she told them.

  Lucy scowled. ‘You said six million last time.’

  ‘The offer has increased,’ she replied.

  Marc stood up, shaking his head. ‘We’ve had this conversation, Kara.’

  The hacker pressed on, ignoring the warning tone in his words.

  ‘There are Grey Record files we haven’t even touched. Actionable material that we could trade for serious money.’

  ‘Actionable material,’ echoed Benjamin. ‘You mean blackmail material.’

  ‘I know people willing to take it off our hands,’ Kara went on.

  In her former life as a mercenary hacker for the notorious Ghost5 collective, she had moved through the darkest parts of the dark web. Lucy had no doubt Kara could reach out to any of the unsavoury bottom-feeders lurking on the edges of the net.

  ‘And what do you think they’ll do with it?’ Lucy glared at the other woman. ‘Everything we’ve taken from Solomon’s files, we have managed. We know how it was handled, who it went to. We know what side of the line we stand on, Kara. Can you say the same thing for these people you’re talking about?’

  ‘Why does that matter?’ Kara didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘It’s a straightforward equation. We need resources. Those cost money. We have a tradable commodity and potential buyers—’

  ‘That commodity we’re talking about is people’s lives.’ Marc cut through her words. ‘Rubicon created the Grey Record to find bad actors out in the world and deal with them. It contains the names and details of whistle-blowers, covert sources and confidential informants. I’m not willing to give that to someone who might use it to ruin the lives of innocents. No matter what the cash value. I’ve said it before, and I meant it, I’ll chuck the lot in the sea before allowing it into the wrong hands.’

  Kara was quiet for a long moment. Dealing with real people as opposed to digital avatars wasn’t her best suit, and she took the time to frame her reply.

  ‘Marc, I understand your point. I understood it when Solomon said it. But he’s dead, and we’re running out of money. There is going to come a moment where we will need to decide where we draw the line.’ She looked briefly in Lucy’s direction, then away. ‘If we want to get back at the Combine, we may have to give up the luxury of the moral high ground.’

  ‘Give it up?’ Marc’s voice dropped. ‘Haven’t we’ve given up enough already?’ When the hacker didn’t reply, he shook his head again. ‘No. We are not doing this. End of.’ He looked around, taking in Benjamin’s and Lucy’s gazes. ‘Right?’

  They returned a nod, and Lucy lingered on him, wondering exactly when it was that the Brit had grown from being one of the team, to the man who called the shots.

  At the airstrip, she remembered. The day after we lost Solomon.

  They’d come out of that experience changed, but Marc more than anyone.

  Marc gestured at Kara’s monitor. ‘We got something back there, even if it’s fragments. So let’s get to work on what’s at hand, worry about the rest later.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Kara.

  With the subject closed, she set to bringing up the audio recording they had captured from the Combine assembly.

  *

  Saito kept low in the back seat of the battered Lada, the collar of his coat turned up and most of his face hidden behind the dark material of a shemagh around his throat. In the gloom of the hot, close night, he was invisible in the shadows.

  He felt the joins in the roadbed vibrate up through the car’s creaking suspension at they sped west along the Port Said highway, past the lines of warehouses near the river. He was still unsettled from his reception at Cairo International Airport, the Egyptian customs officers having decided to arbitrarily put him through an unnecessary secondary processing after his long flight from America.

  For a brief moment, he feared that this might be the work of Glovkonin, reaching out through a proxy. His greatest anxiety was that the Russian would uncover what Saito had been hiding here in Cairo, and take revenge for it.

  But it soon became clear that the officers were more interested in making sport of the weary foreigner, and Saito changed their minds by offering to pay an on-the-spot ‘fee’ to smooth his entry into the country. An hour later, he was here, minutes away from his destination.

  They left the highway and veered off through the El-Mazallat district, passing beneath the towering minarets of the Al-Rahman al-Rahim Mosque, reaching into the night sky like giant segmented fingers. The Lada navigated a maze of backstreets, and the temple seemed to move with them, turning in place, dominating the darkness from every angle no matter where they were.

  Saito looked blankly into the facades of the buildings they passed. He was trying to wall off his anxieties, but it was getting harder and harder to build the bricks high enough. The mental compartments in which the assassin stored the various parts of himself were breaking up.

  In the past, it would have been impossible for Hiroshi Saito to conceive of duplicity towards his masters in the Combine. He kept one mental silo for his duty and his mission, holding in there the soldier-assassin who could kill without hesitation. In another, there was the man bound by an oath to blood that could not be broken. And in the last, there was the truth of who he had once been, the dismal reflection of an old self he didn’t dare look at.

  That wasn’t working anymore. The barriers were crumbling. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter’s face. The memory hit him like a shock of cold water and he blinked it away. No. He could not dwell on her. He had to maintain focus. Stay in the present.

  If I allow myself to look inwards, I will see only the weakness. I must maintain the mask. Nothing else can be shown.

  Saito could not stop ruminating on what happened in the house in Cape Cod. The admission he had made to the man Harlow felt cathartic, inevitable.

  Why am I here, if not because of this? I have already committed myself!

  His daughter’s name ghosted on his lips, as he silently formed the shapes of the characters. He wanted to say it aloud again, to hear it out in the world.

  Deep inside himself, a distant scream echoed from the man he had once been.

  What have you done, Hiroshi? What have you let yourself become?

  The Lada jerked to a sudden stop, snapping Saito out of his reverie. The aging, grey-faced man in the driving seat glared at him in the rear-view mirror. They had arrived.

  Saito paid with a fold of notes and dragged his bag on to the street, the driver barely waiting for the door to close before the vehicle rumbled away. Along with the heavy fumes from the Lada’s exhaust, the night air smelled of marine diesel and stale river water.

  Wary of drawing attention from the clusters of men idling in nearby doorways, Saito walked stiffly towards a building that backed on to the Nile, a run-down three-storey thing of concrete slabs behind a courtyard and sheet-metal gates. Unlike the other constructions around it, a wall five metres high surrounded this place, and a sign atop the gate said the workshop within specialised in maritime engine repairs. So did a dozen other places within a stone’s throw; it was a cover, and everyone within a four-block radius knew. But they also knew enough not to say any more about it.

  A swarthy youth in the baggy shirt of a French football team opened an inset door in the gates at Saito’s approach, and he did little to conceal the Russian Bizon sub-machine gun hanging from a strap over his shoulder. Saito didn’t recognise him, but the youth beckoned him inside.

  They passed underneath makeshift covers that by day would cut the sun and by night, conceal activity in the courtyard from overhead drone flights or satellite cameras.

  The walk across the enclosure seemed to take an age. With each step Saito took, he drew closer to the point of no return. Up ahead, the youth in the football shirt held open the door into the building, and light flooded out. It was a daunting sight, for such a humble threshold, but it came to Saito that the doorway represented his last chance to step back from this.

  He could give the youth and his comrades the right word and they would deal with the captives inside the building, erasing Saito’s problems and dumping their remains in the river. He could turn around and leave, go back to the life he had surrendered himself to. No one would know. Glovkonin and the Combine would remain ignorant.

  Nothing would change. Except that the rot inside Hiroshi Saito’s soul would keep growing, and he would hate himself more and more each day.

  Saito took a breath and stepped inside.

  The building held the heat in its thick, unmoving air, and there was a dampness from the river that he could taste at the back of his throat. The youth led Saito past another guard, this one a surly older man who might have been the younger one’s father. The other man gave Saito a grim nod, then returned to the pages of a leather-bound book in his hands. He had another of the Bizon SMGs resting against his leg as an afterthought.

  Saito was taken to the woman first. She was, predictably, in the cell with the heaviest door. Saito heard her singing to herself, quietly mimicking the cadence of a famous American pop star and drumming her fingers on the walls.

  She had tried to kill a guard only two weeks earlier, by forcing a jagged fragment of brick into his throat. It was her fifth escape attempt, and the third man she had left with a permanent reminder not to underestimate her.

  Saito nodded to the youth, who unlocked the door and then took a step back, bringing up his gun to a ready position. The singing stopped with a flourish as Saito entered the cell.

  The small chamber had a high barred window that didn’t let in much of the night air, and an enclosed light behind a shatterproof dome spilling yellow illumination over the peeling walls. The woman crouched on the low cot that took up one side of the room, facing a stainless steel toilet and sink combination like those found in any supermax solitary. She gave Saito a wan smile and ran a hand through her hair, glancing at the youth.

  ‘He’s scared of me,’ she said. Her accent was bland and hard to place.

  She had dark hair and a fair complexion, and the kind of features that didn’t lend themselves to easy categorisation. Average but not unattractive, perhaps of Greek or Italian extraction. She could have been American, French, perhaps Eastern European at a push. Saito remembered how she had looked when he first met her, in a dingy taverna in Athens, and tried to find that woman in the face of this one.

  ‘I’ve heard him talking to his old man,’ she went on, enjoying the youth’s obvious discomfort. ‘He thinks I’m a monster. A Si’lat.’ She turned the last words into a long, silky snake-hiss, showing her teeth and playing into the role. ‘You know what those are?’

  Saito was aware of the young man at the corner of his vision, moving uncomfortably from foot to foot, gripping his gun tightly.

  ‘A demon from Arabic mythology. A shape-changing woman who steals the life from unwary men.’

  ‘He’s right.’ Her tone switched in an instant to demure and soft. Although she hadn’t actually physically altered in any way, the woman changed her posture, her expression and her mannerisms in the span of just two words. She gave off the impression of being someone totally different. Someone vulnerable and afraid. ‘Have you come to let me out? I’m ever so sorry. I’ll be a good little girl from now on.’

  Saito shook his head. ‘Stop with the games, Grace. It is tiresome.’

  Her persona switched again, and she mimicked Saito’s level diction and posture.

  ‘Stop with the games,’ she echoed. ‘And if we are speaking of what is tiresome, how about months locked up in this place?’

  He beckoned her to stand. ‘Come with me.’

  Saito’s information about the woman was thin. He knew only that she had once been a covert operative run by the American Central Intelligence Agency as a high-level infiltrator, trained to subsume herself into deep-cover identities and adopt other personas with a pathological level of dedication. By her own admission, Grace had become bored with that life and broken away to become a freelance chameleon-for-hire.

  The Combine had used her as a stalking horse against their enemies in the Rubicon group and the British intelligence services, having Grace double as the missing-presumed-dead lover of the Englishman, Marc Dane. She was eventually unmasked, and with her usefulness at an end, Glovkonin ordered her termination.

  Saito should have followed those orders. He was still uncertain as to why he had ultimately let her live.

  A monster has its uses, the assassin told himself, even one as amoral as her.

  ‘We’re going to see him?’ Grace followed as Saito walked up the stairs to the upper floors, with the youth trailing cautiously behind them. ‘They haven’t had the two of us in the same place for months, not since they dragged us up here from Mozambique.’ Her tone made it clear she was fishing for information, her manner shifting as she tried to find the right way to charm him into a reply. ‘I reckon they thought we’d collaborate on an escape plan.’

  ‘Believe me when I tell you that this confinement has been for your protection as much as mine,’ said Saito.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she snapped back. ‘You could’ve turned your back and let me walk away. Do it now. I’ll vanish. You know I can.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But I do not trust you to remain silent.’ Saito stopped and looked at her. ‘You are a transactional creature, Grace. Guided by only one thing. A single question.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘What will benefit me?’

  She paused, and then chuckled, her guard falling for a moment.

  ‘Damn. You got my number, don’t you?’

  Saito looked towards the youth.

  ‘Where is he?’

  The young man gestured at the ceiling with the Bizon, and the trio ascended the last flight of stairs to the top of the building.

  Up there, more sheets of white sailcloth-like material crackled in the breeze off the river, forming a canopy over the whole of the rooftop. Light spilling from the nearby Rod El Farag Axis Bridge boosted the weak amber illumination from a couple of battery lanterns.

  They came across two men on either side of a chessboard, careworn wooden pieces laid out in a complex late-game pattern. One of the men was rough-hewn and wiry, and he had the look of an ex-soldier about him. Like the youth and his father, this one also had a Russian sub-machine gun, but he kept it to hand on a leather strap over his shoulder. He scrutinised the board over a glass of dark tea cupped in his hands, lost in the plotting of potential stratagems.

  Saito saw immediately that the guard was wasting his time. His opponent had framed any future moves with the king and the pawn, building a trap that could snap shut no matter what course he took.

  The other player was the broken mirror of the man he had once been, splintered pieces reassembled in hopes of recovering what he had lost. Carved from weathered teak and tall, even as he sat, the African’s patrician face was marred by burn scarring and the eye he had lost on the right side. One of his arms, lying awkwardly across his lap, would never work properly again, and the damage to his leg was suggested by the wooden walking stick resting against his chair. Like Grace, he wore shabby clothes in the local style, but even in those he kept an air of composure at odds with his circumstances.