She watched as the Haitians reached the treeline. Three of them immediately disappeared into the dark, but the two carrying Asselin paused at the edge of the jungle, waiting for their leader. When he reached them, he raised his pistol.

Bennett started after him. But she felt a hand on her shoulder holding her back. It was Warren. All she could do was watch as Asselin was shot point-blank through the head. The sound of the single bullet smashing through skull filled the air. Then the two Macoutes pulled Asselin’s lifeless body into the trees, and their leader gave the Americans one last vicious grin before he vanished after them.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Knox wasn’t scheduled to leave Victoria until the next afternoon, in case he’d needed more than one chat with Northcott. He hadn’t.

He spent less than an hour at the errant knight’s house on the bluff, much to Furlock’s relief, then was driven back to The Empress in the Lincoln. He had an early dinner of steak and a Chilean Malbec in the hotel’s ostentatious restaurant, then retired to his room. Unfortunately, even though his body was still shattered, and he’d polished off the whole bottle of wine in under an hour, his sleep was brief and fitful.

In the morning, Knox wandered Victoria’s streets looking for something to fill his time. A few blocks from the hotel he stumbled on a cinema that was showing an early screening of the recent adaptation of John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Given the outside temperature was still hovering around freezing, he took the hint.

The auditorium was narrow, sloped, and empty. Knox had his pick of seats. He chose one in the middle of a row near the back and settled in.

The film was slow, meditative, and depressingly realistic. James Bond had been running round a technicolour world entertaining moviegoers for the last five years, but Richard Burton’s black and white Alec Leamas and le Carré’s story full of schemes and machinations that cost too many people their lives and achieved vanishingly little felt far more familiar to Knox.

On his short hop to Vancouver, Knox thought about Burton, slumped on the floor of a prison cell staring up at the man who had betrayed him and trying to work out exactly whose web he’d been caught in. Then on his Air Canada flight to Toronto he let his mind work through his long trip and brief encounter with Northcott.