For the life of him, Ramón Lupérico could not see how his interests intersected with those of this American woman. At least he could take some satisfaction, some small sense of control, from having earlier recognised the broad American accent of her natural voice, even as she spoke in French and Spanish. But he could not place her within that much-reduced nation. She had neither the drawn-out cowboy twang of a southerner, nor the nasal drone of a couple of Americans he’d met from that region once known as New England. If anything, her voice sounded as though it had been scrubbed of any identifying inflections; as if she’d been taught to speak anew at some time. It was possible, he supposed, that she wasn’t American at all.

Whatever her origin, Lupérico had a very bad feeling about her. He didn’t fool himself for even a moment that he might get the better of her merely because she was a woman. A lifelong jailer, a professional custodian of the criminal classes and later of the political enemies of the state, he had encountered more than enough cruel and psychopathic females to disabuse himself of such a notion.

No, this woman was a hazard to life and limb. There was a terrible, machine-like quality to her movements. As they forced a passage through the forest and her arm raised and fell, blurring the arc of the machete, he could see not the slightest waste of effort. Where he had flagged simply trying to keep up with her, she appeared to have ocean-deep reserves of energy on which she could call. And he’d seen the carnage she had left in her wake back at the prison. Just one woman. It did not bear thinking about. The best he could hope for was to give her whatever she sought. Unlike his former captors, she was very obviously a professional, a state actor, and as long as he remained of use to her, he was certain she would do her best to preserve him.

But what use could he be?

She had surely not fought her way into the Federation, murdering all of his guards and the Sweet Virgin only knew who else, merely to question him about the invoices he had padded out for the prison kitchen – back when he’d paid a handful of suppliers grossly inflated prices for foodstuffs they never delivered, preparatory to splitting the profit with them, of course. Nor did he imagine that she was here to carry out an audit of his former workplace because of the unusually high turnover in expensive computer equipment. All nefarious deeds, yes, but hardly worthy of state-sanctioned murder. Not even by the Americans. Racking his memory for the details of every tawdry little scam he had run back then, he could come up with nothing to explain her presence.