He stopped by the elevators, let go of her hand, and said, ‘Thanks. She’ll be traumatised.’

  ‘Glad I could be of service.’

  He loitered, waiting for her to leave.

  She looked him up and down. ‘Want my number?’

  He half-smiled. ‘No. It’s for your own good. I’m trouble.’

  He got into a waiting cable car and smacked the button for the eighth floor.

  The doors whispered closed in her face.

  63

  King stepped out into a quaint hallway made silent by thick carpet that silenced his footfalls.

  Good.

  He had reasonable expectations that no one knew he was here, so he made straight for Violetta’s apartment, recalling the words that had come through the phone at John Wayne Airport.

  One in the apartment next to mine.

  If he’d asked her to clarify whether that was left or right, it would have triggered all kinds of suspicion.

  So he simply walked up to the apartment to the left of hers, knocked sharply three times — rap-rap-rap — and stepped to the side, out of sight if anyone looked through the peephole.

  He waited fifteen long seconds.

  Nothing happened.

  He thought about moving on.

  Then the door opened.

  An elderly woman stood there, hunched over a walking frame, shorter than five feet. She was frail and confused. She craned her neck to look up at him, and it didn’t seem comfortable.

  He said, ‘Sorry, ma’am. Wrong apartment.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and left it at that.

  She closed the door in his face.

  He walked straight past Violetta’s apartment, to the door to the right of hers. He repeated the process — knocked three times and stepped aside.

  This time he only had to wait six seconds. The door opened halfway between the sixth and seventh second, revealing a huge man who looked like he’d spent most of the last few years of his life on the frontlines. He had a pockmarked, weathered face, with deep lines of stress etched into his forehead, and red ruddy cheeks. Iraq, maybe. He was serious business, and he had one hand behind his back, which no doubt clutched a handgun, but that didn’t matter because King was already pivoting as soon as he glimpsed the guy’s frame. After a ton of wind-up he ordinarily couldn’t afford, he slammed a perfectly placed right hook square into the centre of the guy’s face, causing a plethora of damage as it simultaneously sparked him out cold. Breaking his nose, maybe fracturing an orbital bone, maybe shattering one completely.

  Serious, serious damage.

  The clean punch would have shattered every bone in King’s hand if he was a novice combatant, but in much the same way Muay Thai fighters harden their shins by kicking poles, he’d hardened bone and tissue in his hands over a lifetime of use.

  Unhurt, he stepped over the threshold and shut the door behind him.

  Three minutes later he stepped back out, an entire roll of duct tape lighter.

  He went one apartment over, and knocked on Violetta’s door. Repeating the same process. An icy impenetrable calm had settled over him, before he’d even stepped foot in the building. He thought nothing of what he was about to do — the bridge he was about to cross. There was no point second-guessing. He’d made up his mind. This was his decision. He’d have to live with it for the rest of his life.

  She opened the door — probably because no one in the tier-one crew had alerted the guy in her apartment to any danger — and before recognition and confusion spread across her face he made sure to memorise every part of her features.

  The straight blonde hair, the kind blue eyes, the pale skin, the flawless complexion.

  She was beautiful, and he realised it might be the last time she’d look at him without hate in her eyes.

  As if on cue, recognition and confusion seized her.

  She managed a single, ‘What the—?’ before he filled the doorway with the Glock raised, sweeping the space over her shoulder.

  The final operator was there — a tall wiry athletic guy with sharp features and a pronounced jawline. He’d come out of the spare room, and he’d come prepared. In the snapshot King caught he saw a flustered man, probably aggravated by Violetta abandoning protocol. He must have demanded he be the one to answer the door each and every time. She likely considered it ridiculous, especially if there was a sniper’s nest across the street and a guy next door watching all the CCTV feeds in the building. So he was pissed at her disobedience, which meant he’d reacted fast. He had a Beretta in his hands and those hands were on an upward trajectory, and now there was primal recognition in his eyes as he acknowledged King’s presence.

  Suddenly King saw it all laid out before him.

  He saw it from the operator’s perspective.

  A rogue enemy of the state standing across the threshold. A handler between them, but not an important one. If it came to letting King escape with their country’s darkest secrets or taking out Violetta as unfortunate collateral, he’d go for the latter.

  He would have been given those instructions, too.

  Explicitly.

  Do not, under any circumstances, let King get his hands on her. If he shows up in New York, then he’s allied with Slater.

  Neutralise him.

  Whatever the cost.

  For milliseconds, King considered the possibility of a non-lethal response, then realised it was never going to work. He couldn’t be pure in this world if he wanted to exist in it.

  He forced Violetta aside and shot the operator in the forehead before the guy could get off a shot of his own.

  When he saw the trajectory of the operator’s barrel, and the closeness of the guy’s finger to the trigger, he knew the first shot would have blown through the back of Violetta’s head.

  The body fell back against the plasterboard, and its neck bent in a way necks shouldn’t bend, and it collapsed to the floor.

  She turned and stared at the corpse.

  She didn’t speak.

  A million questions played on her lips, but she settled on, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Saved your life.’

  She turned back, her pale face paler than usual. ‘What is this?’

  He was still frozen in place, Glock raised to head-height, aimed at the bloody patch of wall down the corridor, showered by the residue of the exit wound.

  Now, he drifted the barrel over and aimed it at the love of his life.

  He watched her finally realise, with a gut shot of clarity, what was happening.

  ‘No,’ she said, her face falling.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘And don’t say another word until I ask you to.’

  Fear and sadness rippled behind her eyes.

  He said, ‘And get your story straight. Because I need answers.’

  64

  Slater didn’t hail a cab right away.

  He walked, with his head down and his hands in his pockets. The sun was gone, replaced by thick cloud. Just for once he’d hoped for a few minutes of good weather — not that it would have achieved anything — but it seemed even that had been stripped from him. The sweatshirt under his leather jacket had a hood, and he pulled it up. The last thing he wanted was to get recognised as a person of interest, for the red-and-blue flashes of police lights and the wailing of sirens to ruin his last miserable moments of freedom.

  He wanted desperately to have an outburst, but didn’t allow himself to. Nor did he let himself curse his fate, or curse what was probably the abhorrent ending to his career and life. He walked past a park bench and planted himself down at it, staring at the pavement, wracking his brain for any potential solution to his woes.

  As he suspected, there was nothing.

  There were a million solutions if he was on his own, which was the reason he’d spent most of his life in solitude. No collateral, no responsibilities, no bait to dangle over his head. When he wanted to disappear, he disappeared. He’d thrown that all aside by introducing Alexis, and he should have known better. There was no fairytale ending. His skillset was useless if he was facing off against the entire shadow world, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to protect her entire extended family.

  There was no way around it.

  He had lost.

  He could run now. He could let them butcher everyone Alexis knew and loved in their desperation to get to him. Then they’d probably kill her, too, for her awareness of state secrets. Other than her, he had nothing, so vanishing would be effortless. He had as much freedom as he wanted, as long as he was comfortable taking the nightmares and shoving them deep in a vault inside his head.

  So that was that.

  Live as a monster.

  Or die with his soul intact.

  He already knew there was no reality where he’d ever choose the former. You could strip him of all his training, all his experience with pain, all the limits he’d forged simply by enduring longer than anyone else thought possible … you could get rid of everything, and he’d be the same man underneath. He’d have the same principles. He figured he was born with them.

  And he’d die with them.

  He stood up, probing his mental map for the closest busy street in Brooklyn. Wherever he could most easily hail a cab. Strangely, he felt nothing now. Maybe he’d experienced everything. Maybe by abandoning Alexis, by making the love of his life hate him, he’d ticked that final box on the checklist of the human emotional spectrum. Maybe, with that all wrapped up, all he was left with was emptiness.

  He spotted a cab, across the street in the distance, maybe a couple of hundred feet away.

  It was idle.

  If he got in, it would take him to the gravel hard shoulder off the bank of the Hudson River. He’d get out. He’d watch it drive away. As soon as there were no witnesses, a sniper would put a round through his skull.

  There weren’t any other options.

  That was his fate.

  So he made for the cab, but it was a two-minute walk, so before he threw his burner phone away forever he figured he’d make one final call. Perhaps she’d listen to him now. Now that she knew he was a dead man walking. Perhaps he could make her understand what she’d done to him.

  He pulled out the phone and dialled a number he knew off by heart.

  He didn’t expect her to answer.

  She did.

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Violetta,’ he said. ‘It’s me.’

  Silence.

  He said, ‘This is the endgame. You win. Will you listen to me now? Before I go.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ a male voice said. ‘Just tell me where you are.’

  A voice he knew.

  Slater froze.

  Literally stopped dead in his tracks, in the lee of a rundown tenement building. Somehow, the sky turned greyer. Uncertainty swelled. And his heart sank.

  He said, ‘You never went to California, did you?’

  Silence.

  Slater said, ‘That was all bullshit, wasn’t it? You’ve been working with her this whole time.’

  King said, ‘I went to California, alright. Now I’m back.’

  ‘I’m sure you did.’

  ‘She set me up, too.’

  Now it was Slater’s turn to fall silent.

  King said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How do you have her phone?’ He paused. ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘No. She’s with me.’

  ‘How can you trust her?’

  ‘I can’t,’ King said. ‘Which is why she’s not here with me voluntarily.’

  ‘Christ,’ Slater said, turning in a half-circle. ‘This is a mess.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘You’re burning bridges.’

  ‘Only the ones you’ve already burnt.’

  Slater went quiet.

  King said, ‘You think I’d just give up on you?’

  ‘What happened in California?’

  ‘It was a dummy lead. It led to nothing. They fed a bunch of small-time crooks some false information that’d keep me busy until tomorrow night.’

  ‘I’d be dead by then.’

  ‘Sounds like you would have been dead within the hour.’

  ‘Yeah. Probably.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ King reiterated. ‘I’m here. We’re going to fight this.’

  ‘How can we?’

  ‘We’ll figure it out.’

  ‘What’s she told you?’

  ‘Nothing yet. She’s here beside me. I’ve instructed her not to speak. I want us to talk to her together.’

  ‘I’m going to kill her.’

  King went quiet.

  Slater said, ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

  ‘We’ll see. Depends what we hear.’

  ‘Does she know I just threatened her life?’

  ‘No. I’m not on speaker.’

  Slater fed King the name of the street he was looking at, upon which rested the cab that would have sealed his fate.

  ‘Brooklyn?’ King said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sit tight.’

  King hung up.

  Slater kept the silent phone pressed against his ear.

  65

  After the throaty cough of the suppressed gunshot had well and truly faded, King took Violetta by the arm and led her out of her apartment.

  They went downstairs and covered the length of the lobby. He held her hand like they were an ordinary couple, and kept the Glock under his jacket, angled at her stomach. No one gave them so much as a second look. They stepped outside under an overcast sky and crossed the street, silent, looking straight ahead. King walked her a couple of hundred feet away from her building, and on the sidewalk he took her wrist in a firm grip to make sure she didn’t make a break for it.

  A shiny Land Rover was the first civilian car to materialise. It turned into the leafy street they were in and came trawling slowly toward them. King stepped out into the middle of the street, putting a frantic look on his face. The car slowed.

  He pulled the Glock and rounded to the driver’s side, pulling Violetta behind him.

  He tapped the window with the barrel.

  It came down, revealing a middle-aged woman with dyed blonde bangs and too much concealer makeup. She was scared out of her mind.

  He said, ‘Get out.’

  She nearly had a panic attack fumbling with her seatbelt. But she managed, and threw the door open, and stepped out of the car.

  ‘Thanks,’ King said. ‘You got insurance?’

  She nodded, clearly unsure if she was dreaming or not.

  He said, ‘You’ll be okay, then. Thanks again.’

  He guided Violetta into the driver’s seat, and then rounded the hood and slipped into the passenger’s.

  Leaning across the centre console, he said, ‘Apologies.’

  The woman said nothing.

  He nodded to Violetta. She drove off.

  Five seconds later, her phone rang.

  She instinctively reached for it, withdrawing it from her pocket.

  King saw the contact name: Will Slater.

  He took it off her hands, and answered with silence.

  Five minutes later, after a revelatory conversation, he hung up and put the phone in his lap.

  She said, ‘Can I talk now?’

  He said, ‘Not until we pick up Will.’

  ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Shoot me,’ she said. ‘I know you won’t. You wouldn’t dare. You’re a good man.’

  ‘I’m a morally rigid man — that’s what I am. If I’m convinced you’ve betrayed me and tried to aid the capture and execution of my best friend, I won’t hesitate to kill you. No matter how much you mean to me.’

  She didn’t respond.

  He said, ‘If you want to test that theory, by all means start talking.’

  She didn’t.

  She knew him.

  She knew it’d tear him apart, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. She knew, perhaps better than anyone, how he was willing to ruin his own life to preserve his integrity. He did it every operation, for Chrissakes. Got cut and shot and beaten to a pulp to protect others.

  He fed the address Slater had given him into the Land Rover’s GPS unit and told Violetta to follow it.

  He kept the Glock’s barrel aimed at her the whole time.

  He settled back and considered the timing. He figured he had at least a few hours before everything went ballistic. The tactical team would miss their next check-in, but that wasn’t automatically the end of the world. It’d take some time for reinforcements to be called out. The three operators still alive were trapped in their tape cocoons. It didn’t matter how strong or tough they were — they weren’t getting out of their restraints.

  So a few hours, at best.

  After that, he stopped thinking entirely. He found it best in times of maximal stress. His whole world had collapsed, he might have to kill the woman he loved, he and Slater had ostracised themselves once again. It was chaos. It’d tear him apart at the seams if he dwelled on it.

  He focused on the breath. In and out, in and out. That was all.

  Twenty minutes and one bridge crossing later, Violetta pulled up in a quiet, grungy section of Brooklyn. There were twenty-four hour pizza joints and diners and laundromats and pharmacies and bottle shops.

  She sat patiently, both hands on the wheel, unnaturally calm.

  She’d composed herself on the drive.

  Compartmentalising just as well as he could.

  Thirty seconds later, a man in a hooded sweatshirt and a leather jacket stepped out of a nearby alleyway.

  King had never seen a colder expression on Will Slater’s face. His eyes were ice. His mouth was a hard line. He made straight for the Land Rover, threw the rear driver’s door open, and got in behind Violetta so King could look back at him diagonally.