The little stream beside which she’d laid up ran through the centre of the dimly illuminated screen. Her own position was marked with a blue dot. She hoped to follow the stream up-slope for at least three klicks before it began to veer away from her intended destination, one of Roberto’s many detention facilities, this one tucked away in an old police station about ten kilometres inland. The best intelligence they had, placed her target there. Wales had called it a ‘memory hole’: a dark place where the regime stuffed away its mistakes, embarrassments and occasional secrets. Caitlin wondered if they understood the nature of the secret they had stashed down here in the back forty of the former Uruguayan Republic.

She picked up the 417, resettled her pack a little more comfortably, and took a mouthful of chilled Gatorade from the camel-back bladder woven into it. The brush reappeared in eldritch green as she snapped the PVS-14 back down over her dominant eye. The potbellied beast (was it a tapir – was that what they were called?) scuttled into the undergrowth as she began to move.

You’re a long way south, Caitlin thought of the tapir. Maybe it had got loose from a zoo or something.

Time to move on herself. Quickly setting the GPS unit to vibrate when she had covered two-and-a-half kilometres, Caitlin carefully stepped down onto the sandy creek bank from the small grassy bend on which she’d been resting.

She was her own point and cover, responsible for her flanks and rearguard. She was alone; her natural state of being. Consciously pushing away thoughts of her husband and baby back at the safe house in Scotland, wilfully forgetting the life they had tried to make for themselves on the farm in Wiltshire, Caitlin Monroe, Echelon’s senior surviving field agent, let her true nature take over. A predator, she stalked through the primordial heat – teeth out, fangs ready, all of her senses twitching and straining, searching for prey.

It didn’t matter to her that this part of the country, thinly populated before the Disappearance, was even more sparsely peopled now. She had been trained to assume the worst, to prepare for ill chance and disaster as a certainty. There were no large townships within thirty kilometres, and the terrain between here and the objective was undoubtedly deserted. La colapso had emptied it, and Roberto Morales’ regime kept it that way. But still, she would move forward as though snares blocked her path at every turn.