The gunshot had torn a chunk of flesh from her thigh about the size of half a tennis ball. She could see bone lying white in a crater of shredded muscle and meat. Dark, swirling whirlpools tugged at her consciousness, trying to drag her under, but Caitlin swore under her breath and poured all of her will into not passing out as she tended to the wound. She was intimate with pain and fear in a way that most human beings were not. She held the moment close to her, controlled it. She was pain. She would become death. This was life in the raw. Existence itself. Unyielding, unforgiving and inescapable. She knew that endurance was a matter of degrees, of inches, of pushing herself for a few more breaths, or heartbeats. All would pass.

‘Outstanding!’ cried Blackstone, clapping loudly in approval. ‘By God, that’s the spirit! Honestly, Caitlin, if only we had more Americans like you.’

‘There’d be fewer Americans like you,’ she said through clenched teeth, continuing to bind her wound, staunching the blood flow.

His laughter was rich and generous.

‘Maybe so, maybe so. But that’s not how this is going to be. You’ll leave in a few minutes with our other guest. Frankly, I’ll be glad to see the back of you both. Mr Baumer has had me at a significant disadvantage since he and Ozal duped us into supporting what I thought was a perfectly reasonable chance to inconvenience Kipper in New York. As far as I knew, Ozal was an honest pirate. He promised to tie up Kipper while we consolidated during a difficult interlude down here. I’m afraid I am as much a victim of Mr Baumer as you.’

‘So why don’t you just shoot him and do us all a favour?’ Caitlin seethed. She was shivering and sweating as she tightened the bandage on her wounded leg. ‘Or even better, give me the gun and I’ll do it. Promise.’

She levelled a glare at Baumer loaded with almost as much violence as the kick that shattered his cheekbone. His face was swelling, one eye socket disappearing behind a mound of bruised flesh. Like her, however, he was regrouping and found it within himself to sneer back. She could tell from the way his eyes twitched that the gesture hurt him.

Blackstone chuckled indulgently. ‘I’m sure you would. And don’t believe that part of me wouldn’t enjoy watching you. Right before you turned the gun on me. But I need Mr Baumer alive. Unlike you, he has proven himself to be competent. Not so much at running a holy war, but certainly at covering his ass afterwards. I’m afraid he has a small mountain of incriminating documents, unlike you, and they are protected by a dead man switch. If he should expire, the documents would be released into the wild. And we couldn’t have that. It would prove fatally embarrassing.’