She played with the phone, a model she’d never seen before. It had no keypad, an obvious omission that had thrown her for a second while trying to open the text. Apparently, the screen itself was the keyboard. Gadgets and widgets had never much interested this daughter of English nobility, and mobile phones in particular set her teeth on edge. She assumed the government could probably track you via your SIM card or the phone’s chip, or whatever, which meant she rarely carried a mobile. On those rare occasions, she’d use a throw-down, a cheap prepaid or stolen handset, and always kept the thing switched off until the very moment it was needed, after which she’d toss it immediately.

There were three numbers saved in the phone Pappas had given her. One for the burly SAS veteran, one for Shah and the last for their lawyer friend. A little more fiddling around brought up an electronic map of the city, with the location of the Coonawarra Base Hospital highlighted by a ridiculous cartoon paperclip that jumped up and down while pointing at the relevant location.

‘Right, right, I fucking get it, okay?’ she muttered at the annoying screen icon. ‘Jesus, how do you turn the stupid thing off . . .’

Before she could work it out, the pedicab had pulled up in front of the Banyan View Lodge. Jules thanked the driver, who was slick with sweat, but breathing normally. She paid him with a plastic ten-dollar banknote, and checked to see whether they’d been followed, before hurrying inside.

As she had expected, the room was stifling. She flicked on the primitive air-con, which rumbled into life without much promise of relief. For a few seconds, it felt as though the temperature actually increased, before blessed cool air started to fall from the ceiling vents.

Jules unclipped the holster and began undressing. When she was down to her underwear, she stopped, bleeding off heat as the climate control system laboured heroically to dump a little arctic goodness into her room. She had no idea what time it was in the American Midwest, but found herself pondering on something else about Pappas’s text. He’d located Miguel in Kansas City . . . Now, that was odd. The way Julianne understood it, Miguel had taken Mariela, Sofia, little Maya, Grandma Ana and all the others over to the US after qualifying for the resettlement scheme, or homestead thingy, or whatever the hell the Yanks called it. So why would he be in Kansas City now and not out on a farm somewhere in Texas?

She remembered KC vaguely, having stopped there with Rhino early in the year to arrange transport to New York City. They never made it into the city itself, staying instead at some mouldy hostel a block away from the airport. A joyous time spent trying to sleep through the sound of planes, trains and Rhino’s titanic snoring before getting the hell out for points east.