‘It does, rather.’ Finn absently stroked his beard.

  At first he thought the pilot’s spiky manner stemmed from his uninvited imposition on her space, but there was more beneath that. She doesn’t want to be here. She’s doing this under duress. He looked out of the canopy, finding her boss in conversation with one of the ground crew. Something had seemed off to Finn about Teller’s insistent assurances regarding Hood, and now he wondered what strings the man had pulled to get her to be here tonight. That could be useful to know.

  She flicked the switch to test the cockpit’s alert systems and enunciators, giving Finn an unexpected jolt as the yoke in front of him gave off a quick, loud vibration. The pilot took a little amusement from his surprise. ‘Don’t piss yourself. It’s a stall warning, it’s supposed to do that.’

  He refocused his attention and took a gamble, going for the direct approach. ‘What kind of aircraft did you fly? For the RAF, I mean?’

  The reply took a moment to come, and when it did it was sullen. ‘Fast ones.’

  ‘Then you’ve been combat deployed, of course.’ He considered Hood’s age and the possible postings she might have been a part of. ‘Operation Shader, in the Levant?’

  The pilot gripped the flight yoke a little tighter but didn’t answer directly. ‘Need to know,’ she replied, throwing his words back at him.

  ‘I can find out,’ he said, off-handed. The fact that she didn’t confirm it was another indicator. In Finn’s experience, military pilots made a point of having been in the thick of it, and Hood’s reticence spoke volumes. ‘I imagine Mr Teller hasn’t fully briefed you,’ he continued, ‘so let me fill in the pertinent details.’

  ‘Feel free,’ she said dryly.

  ‘This will be a low-profile flight. You will follow the route we have for you exactly. Keep radio communications to the absolute minimum requirements. You are not to engage in conversation with anyone who boards this aircraft for the duration of the outbound leg, unless directly spoken to. You will remain on the flight deck at all times with the security door partly open unless otherwise ordered, and when we reach our destination, you will not deplane.’

  She gave a sarcastic snort. ‘What if I need to pee?’

  ‘Hold it.’

  ‘Is that everything? Where exactly am I going to land?’

  ‘Your co-pilot has the relevant charts and paperwork. And if he gives you a command, you’re to follow it.’

  ‘So I’m not even in charge of my own aircraft?’ Hood bristled at that. ‘Why am I even here? Why don’t you get your own people to fly this trip? I imagine there’s no shortage of you spooks. That’s what you are, isn’t it?’

  ‘Plausible deniability,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think you’re an idiot, Ms Hood. You understand what is being done here.’

  ‘Oh, I understand, all right.’ Her reply was hard and judgmental. The pilot didn’t need to add that she thought it repugnant. That was laced into every syllable she spoke.

  Finn studied her. Hood was nothing like Price, who had made a virtue out of his incuriousness, and he had to consider that she might become a problem if he didn’t tackle her head-on.

  ‘Does it offend your sense of fair play?’ When she didn’t reply, he carried on. ‘How is what the Security Services does any different from what you did from the cockpit of a fighter jet? Each job has an objective, a target. In order to neutralise it, you do what is required. It’s not always neat and clean.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ She tried to be dismissive, but Finn could sense the woman was conflicted. Then she looked up, inclining her head toward the transport truck outside. ‘Who’s the guest of honour?’

  Despite her misgivings, and whatever moral code Katherine Hood adhered to, there was enough restraint still there to make her follow the orders she’d been given – even if she disliked them. Finn assumed that, as former military, she was used to the black-and-white binaries of ally and enemy. Presented in those terms, it might be possible to keep her on-mission when the time came.

  ‘You know I can’t tell you that,’ he said, rising back out of the seat. ‘But if you want a hint . . . well, you only have to watch the news.’

  SEVEN

  The truck rocked as Breeze climbed aboard, and she found a narrow gangway inside that led to a line of tiny holding cells. Knox stood sentinel in front of one cell’s door, those either side of it vacant.

  With a flick of her eyes, Breeze dismissed the big man, and Knox gave their prisoner one last warning look before stalking away. He pushed past her, hesitating by the door. ‘Be right outside.’

  Breeze waved him off with a nod. She didn’t anticipate any problems from the asset that would need a stone-hard son of a bitch like Knox at her shoulder, but one could not be too careful. She flipped open a fold-down seat opposite the occupied cell and settled carefully on to it.

  On the other side of the plastic door, Yusuf peered back through the scuffed transparent barrier. His eyes were wide as saucers and he had the sheen of a flop sweat over his dark brow where his hair receded. ‘Wh-where are you taking me? Will you please give me an answer?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll like it there,’ she told him. ‘Warm climate. Friendly people.’

  ‘You are American,’ he said, blinking nervously.

  ‘What gave it away?’ Breeze sniffed.

  ‘The men who kidnapped me, they were British.’

  ‘You haven’t been kidnapped,’ she corrected, with a terse chuckle. ‘You’re, ah, helping us with our investigations.’

  ‘Please.’ He put a lifetime of pain and fear into that one word. ‘I am begging you. Have mercy. I am not a bad person!’ He shook his head, wiping tears from his eyes with the heels of his hands, the wrists still fastened together with thick plastic strips. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ The question wasn’t for her, but an entreaty to cruel fate. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ He bowed his head, switching to Arabic, making a plea to his God.

  Breeze leaned forward and tapped hard on the plastic. ‘Hey. Hey!’ She pointed at her face. ‘Look at me. Don’t go asking for divine intervention, that’s a waste of everyone’s time. Allah can’t hear you. And he sure as shit isn’t going to see you where you’re going.’

  Yusuf’s jaw worked, but no words came out. He shrank back from her as far as he could go, until his back was pressed up to the far wall of the tiny cell.

  ‘I’m talking about a hole so dark, so deep . . . even the fucking ghosts are afraid to haunt it.’ Breeze shook her head, warming to her performance. ‘A man goes in there . . . he drops off the face of the world.’ She paused, making a show of listening. ‘You hear that sound?’ In the quiet, over Yusuf’s gasping breaths, the murmur of an idling jet engine reached them. ‘That’s your ride warming up, buddy boy. And it’s gonna be a one-way trip, unless you level with me.’

  ‘No.’ The word was a sob. ‘I do not know why this is happening! I do not know what you want me to say, I cannot tell you what I do not know! You think I am someone who does terrible things, is that it? But you are wrong!’ He stared at her with his wide, watery eyes. ‘Can you not be mistaken?’ Is it not possible that you have arrested the wrong man?’

  ‘Oh, we screw up all the time,’ Breeze said airily. She let out a bleak snort of gallows humour. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe! Finely oiled machine, my tits! This line of work is like running over a bridge that’s collapsing in slow motion – you gotta be able to stay one step ahead of it.’ She folded her arms across her chest. ‘But there are the good days. Like when your file came across my desk. I knew we had something important.’

  ‘I-I am nobody,’ said the prisoner, suddenly spent. ‘I am nothing. I know nothing.’ He gave a brittle laugh. ‘Just ask my wife.’

  ‘I don’t think you have a wife.’ Breeze shook her head again. ‘And you must know something, Yusuf. Everyone knows something, even if they don’t know they know it.’

  He blinked at her. ‘You speak in riddles.’

  ‘The place we’re taking you to,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t have an official name, just a military identification number. Location One-One. But the guys back at home have a nickname; they call it Snake Eyes.’ She made a casting motion with her hand. ‘Like with the dice in a craps game, right?’ Yusuf shook his head, not understanding the reference, and she went on. ‘Two ones, lowest score. Bad luck for you.’

  The captive stared at the floor and made a valiant attempt to push down his panic and find a manner approximating calmness. ‘My name is Yusuf al-Amal. I am a businessman from Jeddah. I work for a small company that exports sidr honey from Yemen.’

  ‘It’s a good cover,’ Breeze noted, and she meant it. The team of diggers the CIA had tasked with systematically dismantling the man’s life story had said so. Airtight, they had reported, perfect. ‘Very believable. Gives you good freedom of movement; covers up a multitude of sins. We might have missed you if we hadn’t been looking close enough.’

  Yusuf took in a breath, forcing himself not to be distracted. ‘We . . . I have no connection to the extremists you Americans are searching for.’

  Breeze spoke, as if she was having an entirely different conversation. ‘You know, some people . . . we both know the kind, right, bleeding hearts with their goddamn avocado toast and chai fucking lattes? Those people like to say, “Oh, enhanced interrogation, it doesn’t work, it’s not reliable.” And they’re right. Most of the time it is flaky as hell. Do it wrong and the asset will tell you anything just to make you stop hurting them. They’ll admit to everything, even if it isn’t even close to being accurate.’ She held up a hand. ‘But, see, that’s where the talent comes in. The skill of it. It’s about being able to apply exactly the right amount of pressure to a person – not too little, not too much – and finding the sweet spot.’ Breeze closed her fingers, like a snake’s jaws snapping shut. ‘That’s where the good content is, when you peel back the lie.’

  ‘You are going t-to torture me.’ Yusuf’s brief, careful calm began to fracture again.

  Breeze shook her head. ‘No. I’m going to watch someone else do that.’ The folding chair creaked as she sat back. ‘You ever get in trouble in the water, like nearly drown? Ever had an electric shock off something? Ever been so thirsty or so tired you thought your head would split? You know how that feels? Because you will.’

  Yusuf rocked back and forth, each breath coming faster than the last. ‘I . . . I have answered the questions the British asked me.’ He was working himself into an anxiety attack. ‘I promise you! I did not lie! If I could help, I would do that, but I swear to you on my life, I am not a criminal!’ His voice cracked and shuddered. ‘I am—’

  ‘Were you gonna say innocent?’ Breeze interrupted him. ‘We’ll find out for sure soon enough.’

  The door at the far end of the compartment clattered open and she shifted to see Marty Chester standing on the threshold, his ubiquitous tablet in one pale-fingered hand. He never put the device down, as if it was surgically attached to him. Marty’s expression was sheepish.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The, ah, the check on the Hood woman?’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the plane outside. ‘Acceptable, given the circumstances.’

  ‘Any red flags?’ Breeze stood up and turned her back on Yusuf, who had started to cry into his palms.

  Marty hesitated, reluctant to speak in front of the prisoner. At length, he held up his thumb and forefinger a short distance apart – the universal gesture for ‘a little bit’.

  Breeze sucked her teeth. ‘Figures.’ She marched down the truck, leaving Yusuf to his weeping, and climbed out. She slammed the door shut behind her and put a heavy hand on Marty’s shoulder. ‘Explain it to me,’ she demanded, ‘and you better not tell me she’s a card-carrying Communist.’

  ‘Blimey, you weren’t wrong about this place.’ Grace surveyed the homes passing by the police car on either side of the road. ‘Bit posh, innit?’

  ‘Yeah,’ noted Harris, driving them by a flower-adorned sign reading Welcome to Wethill. ‘Twinned with LeSnob Du Mer in the South of France, or some such bollocks.’

  ‘That’s not a real town,’ she replied, with a snort. ‘You’re making that up.’

  ‘The preservation society will be well miffed to hear you say that.’

  They drove past a perfectly manicured green and neighbouring duck pond, both swathes of shadow in the evening gloom. Soft amber light spilled out of a thatch-roofed pub called the Hen & Horseshoe, but there were few other signs of life aside from the odd twitching curtain as they drove through the village proper, away from the core of old fifteenth-century homes and out toward the sprawl of newer, post-war builds. The houses put up in the last hundred years were spread further apart; a mix of identical retiree bungalows alongside three-storey red-brick properties behind gates and low walls.

  One of the latter was listed as John Price’s residence, and Harris took the car up the short gravel drive to park in front of the place. ‘Lights are on,’ he noted, indicating an exterior lamp by the door and a glow through the windows. Their casual banter faded away, both of them becoming serious and watchful.

  He followed Grace, stepping carefully, trying to take in everything at once. From here, it didn’t seem like anything was awry. The evening was quiet, nothing more than a mutter of wind shifting the branches of nearby trees.

  ‘I’ll try them again.’ Grace dialled Price’s landline from her cell phone, and they both heard the jangle of the phone ringing inside the house. When no one picked up, she cut the call and sighed.

  Harris glanced in his colleague’s direction. He quietly hoped that the house was completely empty, and that it wasn’t just a matter of someone being in the bath with the radio on and missing the sound of the phone. Because if there was a resident here, it would be Price’s wife or his daughter; and then Harris and Grace would be in the unenviable position of having to give notification of a tragic death to a loved one.

  They had training for that sort of thing, of course, but it didn’t come easily to the policeman. No one liked doing notifications. It made Harris feel sad and useless, and he never really knew what to say when confronted with somebody bursting into tears. Angry people, those he could handle, but he found the other end of the emotional spectrum tough to parse.

  Grace was adept at it, though. She embodied the quality of her name whenever they had to deal with a MOP – member of the public – rendered distraught by some unpleasant news.

  ‘Knock, knock?’ she said, nodding at the door.

  ‘Look around first?’ Harris countered.

  Off a nod from Grace, he wandered to the detached garage and examined the sheet-metal door. An up-and-over affair, it had been made to be secured with a handle at the bottom, but there was a thick bar of shadow down there and the door wasn’t fully shut.

  Harris nudged it with the tip of his patrol boot and it moved freely with a metallic creaking. He imagined Price leaving in his car, coming back to close the door but not securing it. Who would do that? he thought. Not that Wethill was exactly a hotbed of crime, but it wasn’t smart to leave anything open, especially if it gave a potential offender open access into your property.

  ‘Jake.’ His train of thought pulled up sharply when Grace called out his name. He found her by the house’s bay window, up on tiptoe, her nose pressed to the glass. The tone of her voice said trouble. She leaned back and met his gaze. Her face had a stony cast to it, an expression he rarely saw on her and always dreaded.

  Grace didn’t have to say any more. Harris came up as she stepped away, and he peered in through a fractional gap between the closed curtains.

  ‘Tell me what you see in there,’ she said.

  ‘Living room,’ he began. ‘Sofa. Armchair. Coffee table.’ He turned his head, changing the angle, assembling a mental image of the space on the other side of the window through the thin vertical slices of it visible through the gap. The interior of the Price household was softly lit by a table lamp, mostly dark-coloured woods and faux Victorian in style, with bookshelves and pictures on the wall. ‘Don’t see anyone.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Harris was going to reply in the affirmative when his eye caught on something and he blinked, refocusing his attention. There was a door at the far end of the room, a grid of frosted glass squares, and beyond it probably a dining room or a kitchen. Close to the bottom of the door was a mark on the glass, streaks that looked fresh.

  That looked wet.

  As his gaze snapped to that spot, he saw something else. Visible through the gap between the edge of frame and the half-open door, on the floor of the other room there was a pale, curved object. It looked like a vase lying on its side, white like porcelain.

  Harris pulled his torch from the pouch on his belt and put a powerful beam of LED light into the room. His gut tightened. The streaks on the glass were rust red, and the shape on the floor wasn’t porcelain at all, but the pale pink of flesh.

  ‘Body?’ Grace asked gravely.

  ‘Body,’ he replied.

  ‘Going in, then.’ Grace snapped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and tossed another set to Harris, who mirrored her actions. ‘There’s a side gate here – use the kitchen door?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Harris’s heart beat faster as he gave the smaller woman a hand up and she rolled over the metal gate and into the back garden. Grace pulled the bolt from the other side to open it, and then they both circled up and around the house.

  ‘Police officers!’ She called out a warning as they approached. ‘We’re going to make a forcible entry! Anyone in the house, make yourself known!’

  ‘Back door’s already open.’ Harris pointed with a jut of his chin. As with the garage, the plastic-framed door had been left in a hurry without being secured.

  With a flick of her wrist, Grace snapped open her collapsible baton to its full length and used the tip to push the door open. Harris swung up his flashlight and bathed the kitchen in clinical white light.