The wounds hurt, but they weren’t disabling. I’d managed the twenty klicks on foot from Ballina via Knockmore to Doc’s place OK – all of it in the dark, most of it across country. I’d stopped only to buy a change of clothes and then pulled them on in a hedgerow. To the bullet holes and grazes I’d added a slash from a strand of razor wire hidden in a culvert and a mass of scratches on my left hand from a blackthorn bush. Doc was right, I was a mess – but I could walk, swim, run. My right hand and arm were uninjured. Besides, it wasn’t my wounds that concerned me, but time. Frank had told me to go dark. That meant no contact with the barracks at Raven Hill, or with London, until Frank figured out who’d been waiting for me at the cottage – and how they’d known that’s where Connor and I would collide.

He’d need to make sure he was in the clear with the Head Shed in Whitehall, too. It would take some deft footwork to explain why a job that no one had sanctioned had gone bang, and why I was no longer available to clean up any human mess that Her Majesty’s Government wanted rid of. DSF – Director Special Forces – an old-school major general called Sir Kristóf King, was not well disposed towards Frank’s bullshit at the best of times. Or mine.

No wonder Frank was pissed off. It could be weeks, months even, before I was back in business. And if I wasn’t in business, I was up shit creek. The unpalatable truth, when I cared to swallow it, was that I wasn’t Frank’s close protection detail. He was mine.

I took a crumpled packet of Marlboros from my jeans pocket, lit one of the bent white sticks and sucked down the blue smoke. My shoulder burned. My left arm throbbed. I exhaled. I felt OK. I smoked the cigarette slowly, carefully. And when I’d finished it, dropped the stub in the empty glass. I couldn’t put it off any longer.

Out of the ticket pocket in my jeans I took the hundred-dollar bill I’d plucked from Chappie Connor’s dead fingers. As I unfolded it my heart rate climbed. I took a deep breath, and opened it fully, half expecting that my eyes had deceived me.

They hadn’t.

Written in the thick, imprecise strokes of a permanent marker on the back of the note was a single Russian word:

Архангел.