I stood at Baaz’s feet and lined the front sight up on the space between the tip of his chin and his Adam’s apple. The shot would vaporize his cerebellum and sever his spinal cord. Instant. Painless. The mattress and the thickly furnished room would absorb most of the noise. If anyone heard anything, it would be as unremarkable as a distant slammed door. By turning up in Tel Aviv, Baaz had ensured that I’d be unable to operate freely – and, consequently, Rachel would remain beyond help.

But it was more than that. For days I’d wondered if Baaz was really all he seemed. From the expert way he navigated the catacombs to the casual way he’d rocked up in Israel: naive, maybe; intelligence agent, possibly; inconvenience – definitely. Because I’d needed him, I hadn’t interrogated him. A bullet to the brain would end the speculation. Permanently.

The Israelis would do nothing. A clean hit, no witnesses, their weapon. They knew I had the note, and needed me alive. The crook of my finger rested on the trigger. People who got in the way, people who didn’t get out of the way: any operator too squeamish to tidy up was not long for this world.

But this wasn’t a job. It was an obsession.

I heard my mother’s voice then, a distorted hum at the back of my head, asking me exactly what I thought I had become.

Baaz stirred and muttered something in Punjabi. I kept very still and he started snoring again. It was justifiable; I could justify it. In the morning I knew I could look in the mirror and still see Max and not a monster.

Baaz slumbered on, four and a half pounds of pressure from the grave. I raised my left hand, palm out, behind the pistol to shield my eyes from any blood or bone blown back towards my face.

I felt the pressure of the trigger and looked aside.

Goddamn it, Max. Just do it.

On the bed beside him I saw the numbers he’d been writing out, over and over again. It was the same number – reversed, multiplied, factored, divided against itself. Rows and rows of tiny scrawled digits. Perhaps a hundred or more times he had returned to the same eight-digit number. My finger crept on the steel. I focused on the number.

The number. I knew that number. I’d been staring at it for days. Staring through it.

Fuck.

I dropped my palm and picked up one of the sheets of paper. I turned it over. On the reverse he’d written, simply, Arkhangel!