Shah’s man took the stairs, leading upwards, two or three steps at a time. Julianne’s body was seizing up, her muscles clenching and stiffening painfully after the shock of the crash. She had trouble even raising her head to follow his progress. Nonetheless, she charged after him without hesitation. For the first time in months she felt like she was finally ahead of the play. If they could just lay hands on these fuckers . . .

An automatic weapon coughed in the dark, and her escort lifted off his feet before crashing into the wall and sliding to the floor, leaving a dark organic smear behind. Another man stepped out of a doorway and jumped when he saw her.

Jules dived for cover, pumping rounds down the hallway while ducking through a door into a red-lit room full of candles.

The man roared in pain. ‘Bitch! I’m gonna fuck you up!’

American, she thought. Jules heard his footsteps. Scrambling back to the inside corner of the room, she waited for the asshole to step inside.

The muzzle of his weapon came through first as he charged in without sweeping the area. Jules took her time to line the front of her SIG Sauer up with the side of the bastard’s head and squeezed off a double tap that dropped him like a sack of shit.

She flinched and shuddered as blowback splattered her with skull chips and small gobs of grey matter. Biting down on her revulsion, she scrambled out past the body and checked on the man Shah had left behind to look after her, but his sightless eyes could see her no more. She swore, once, and picked up his G-36 to supplement her handgun.

The confidence she had felt rushing in behind him had evaporated entirely. She’d expected they would sweep in behind a trail of dead men left by Shah and Birendra and their comrades. Where had the guy she’d just killed come from? He was a white male, American. And that’s all she knew. He could have been one of Cesky’s men, a hitter who’d hidden himself to ambush stragglers like her, before doubling back to take Shah from behind. Or he could have been some unfortunate punter, or an employee of this ‘fight club’, who was simply defending his place of business from a pack of murderous buggers who had just invaded it.

Oh, bloody hell, she thought. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

The deeper she pushed into the building, the louder the crowd noise from downstairs grew. She stepped over two more bodies as she worked her way around a corner, and another one on a stairway leading down to what she assumed was the second floor. This building really seemed to have no coherence or logic to its internal design. Corridors branched off to nowhere. Sometimes doors stood open or closed down these dead ends. Sometimes the hallways literally led nowhere, for no reason.