Covering the small area of the barracks, she could see through the kitchen doorway, she moved forward, cautiously again, taking up a secure position just before the entrance to the office area. Once more, she used the mirror to scope out the room before entering; crouching down at first to take a view from about knee level, before slowly sliding back up and holding the mirror high, so as to look down on the space, hoping to catch the man if he’d hidden himself behind a desk.

Few things were more nerve-racking than trying to single-handedly clear a building of an enemy who knew you were coming, and who knew the ground on which you would have to fight. As important as it was not to just charge in and get your head blown off, Caitlin was aware that it could be fatal to hesitate. Having initiated the attack, she could very easily defeat herself now by giving in to uncertainty. ‘Divided energies’, they had called it back at Yoshinkan Hombu. A fatal tipping point between fight and flight where the unprepared so often died.

She mapped out the room in her head. To her front, a cluster of desks. On her right, the grimy windows overlooking the dirt road that ran in front of the building. The heavy wooden doors hanging open, with the reception counter just inside of them. Behind that counter lay a closed door, undoubtedly leading to the cells.

And like a chess master running through every possible combination of moves before committing their own piece to a new square on the board, Caitlin studied the line of attack from her opponent’s point of view. Which items of furniture would provide him with the best cover, which firing angles the greatest chance of taking her down. To all of the possibilities, she assigned a rough probability.

And then she moved – sweeping into the larger open space, terribly exposed to an attack that might or might not come.

Using the heavy wooden desks as cover, Caitlin advanced across the killing ground with her senses opened to the flood of stimuli pouring in. A fan turning slowly from a ceiling mount, the protests of the prisoners, the buzzing of flies around a plate of beans and sausages abandoned on a desk . . . But no sign of Facility 183’s deputy commander.

The Echelon agent took a few moments to make sure she hadn’t missed him. But the very fact that she was still breathing, that nobody had fired on her, told Caitlin he wasn’t in this part of the building.

The door to the prison cells stood firmly closed and mute in front of her. In her peripheral vision she could see the legs of a man she had shot down in the road, out front. The stench of his death, an animal stink of voided bowels, was much stronger over here by the main entrance.