They wouldn’t come charging through the door, guns out, the minute their colleagues were overdue. Facility 183 did not impress as a model of world’s best practice for secret detention and torture camps. Unless the tobacco or pornography supply had run out, it would probably be thirty or forty minutes before anyone even noticed the men she had killed hadn’t returned.

Caitlin sought a meditative frame of mind she had learned in Japan, during her eleven months of intensive aikido training on the Senshusei course, at the Yoshinkan Hombu Dojo. It had been an unusual time in her early career. Strangely restful, yet gruelling. Every day of that short year she had spent in pain of one form or another. Not only from combat training, in which broken bones, concussions and voluminous bloodshed were a common occurrence, but also from the insanely repetitive and punishing minutiae of dojo life. The agonies of suwari-waza, for instance – kneeling techniques in which she spent hours of her first weeks dizzy with suffering as the skin peeled from her knees, followed by the thin mantle of flesh over her kneecaps. Those wounds would scab over at night, only to crack open with exquisite pain the next morning as she bent to the tatami mat again.

The dojo was life itself. Unyielding, unforgiving and inescapable.

Lying prone in decaying leaf matter, with insects crawling all over her and slick with sweat, Caitlin reached now for the lesson of Yoshinkan Hombu. It was something she’d learned only at the very end of her training, when her technique, her jutsu, or art, had been honed to a cutting edge as dangerous as a Sengo Muramasa blade, a weapon forged by the infamous Muromachi-period swordsmith and reputedly imbued with his violent madness. It was said that the steel of a Muramasa katana was ‘hungry’ . . .

After eleven months of shit kicking, shit eating and having the shit kicked out of her by remote and often witlessly vindictive sensei and uki, Caitlin Monroe too, was hungry. Chosen to fight in a closed tournament, to test herself against some of the instructors before an audience of invited masters from other schools, she stepped onto the tatami, where she had spilled so much blood and sweat and, yes, even tears. She felt herself to be the most dangerous woman in the world.

I am become death, she thought.

Her first opponent, a potbellied man with only half his teeth and toe-curling halitosis, took her apart as perfectly as a fugu chef removing the poisonous liver from a puffer fish. Before she could initiate her opening attack, she had been punched in the face and taken two shuddering elbow strikes in her rib cage. As the injury exploded through her nervous system with white-hot shock, her opponent swept her leading leg out from underneath her and drove a kick into her sternum when she dropped to the mat.