I sat up in bed fully awake. I’d been disconnected from the drip, but the three pads of the ECG trace were still stuck to my chest and abdomen, and the sats probe was still attached to my left middle finger. I couldn’t move away from the bed without triggering an alarm: where it would sound was a risk I wasn’t yet prepared to take. I rolled my shoulders and stretched my legs out. The consultant was right: although I looked a mess, I was in reasonable shape. My thigh was stitched; my left shoulder packed and wrapped. If I wanted, I could get up and run, albeit painfully. But to, or from, whom? Kent wasn’t exactly home turf, either, although a decade earlier I’d spent a week at the Shorncliffe base outside Folkestone with the Gurkhas. The William Harvey hospital was in Ashford – which was twenty miles from the barracks, and two miles from the Eurostar station to Paris.

Frank had told me to go dark. UKN was already dark. What he meant was ‘go darker’. And the only way I could do that was to vanish again – and so completely that not even my own side could find me. I could do that. But if I did, I asked myself, what incentive would there be for me to come back? The work would never have any closure, except death. The only way out was to force an ending. If I could make it across the Channel, I would be free. Even if I just stayed put in France, the options were almost endless. Never mind a few months or weeks – up in the Pyrenees or the Massif Central the odds were that I could survive indefinitely: undetected, untraceable, unknown. I had nothing to lose. My mind ran away with itself. If I could stomach it, there was even the Marseilles mafia. As every mercenary knows, warriors aren’t trained to retire.

I thought about that for a moment – that kind of killing.

But I couldn’t do it. In twenty-four years I’d never even drawn a salary – much less murdered for money. I owned, and owed, nothing. The person I saw looking back at me in the bathroom mirrors of the hotels I called home was not a sicario, as Frank had once called me. I carried out hits. But I wasn’t a hitman. True, I’d never sold out. But I’d had nothing to sell, and I had no pockets for pieces of silver, either.