‘Wait … wait …’ said Fabel, hastily examining the lethally tight wire bond, completely at a loss as to where to begin extricating the Slav before he bled to death. ‘I’ll get you out …’

The Ukrainian shook his head violently, causing the wire to slice even deeper into his flesh, and something that should have been a scream struggled behind the tape. Fabel backed away, shocked.

‘For Christ’s sake, keep still …’ Fabel holstered his gun and started to ease the tape from the mouth. Again the Ukrainian reacted violently, jerking his head in a sideways and downwards nod. Fabel followed the direction of the green eyes.

Then he saw it.

Strapped to the pillar, next to the old man’s ankles, was a large, thick metal disc that Fabel recognised as some type of anti-tank charge. Clamped to the mine was a fist-sized, black electrical box with a flickering green light. Fabel’s terror tightened itself around him another notch as he realised that the two thick wires that snaked out from the box were the same wires that bound the Ukrainian to the pillar. His entire body was primed. And the flashing green light on the box suggested there was also some kind of timing device. Once more the bound man started to make urgent gestures with his head and eyes, as if trying to nudge Fabel back in the direction of the warehouse door.

Fabel’s voice cracked as he spoke. ‘I can’t … I can’t leave you here …’

Something approaching calm seemed to settle back into the Ukrainian’s green eyes, and with it a quiet, strong resignation. He closed his eyes and made the slightest nodding movement with his head. It was a gesture of release: he was releasing Fabel from all obligation, from death; he was releasing himself from a troubled life.

‘I’ll get help …’ said Fabel, although both men knew that the Ukranian was as far beyond anyone’s help as it was possible to be. Fabel backed away from him, holding his gaze for as long as he could before turning and quickening his pace into a run, then a flat sprint across the empty expanse of the warehouse. Towards the door. Towards life.

Fabel burst out onto the narrow pavement outside the warehouse with such force that his head-ward plunge into the canal beyond was prevented only by the railing he slammed into. His feet slid and scraped on the cobbles as he scrambled along the wall of the neighbouring warehouse. He sat on the cobbles, his back pressed against the red brickwork, braced for what he knew must come. And it did.

There was a thunderous, reverberating whump from deep within the warehouse, as if some giant fist had slammed into the building, and Fabel felt a shockwave pulse through the wall at his back and the ground beneath him. The heavy door of the warehouse was ripped from its frame and the windows at second-storey level burst into a shower of glittering fragments. Fabel fell onto his side and cradled his head in his hands, drawing his knees up to his chest in a foetal position. A billowing wave of white and red flame bloomed through the shattered doorway and windows and then retreated, like an angry animal returning, growling, to its lair. The air was filled with a choking powder of brick dust, smoke and grime. After the earth-shaking violence of the blast, it seemed as if the world had gone still and silent. Then the alarm of every adjacent warehouse began ringing or whining in pale urgency. Fabel pulled himself back upright and sat motionless for what seemed an age. He squeezed his eyes tight closed, but he could not extinguish the fire in the green eyes of a dead old man that burned in his brain. The same eyes that had locked with Fabel’s as he had had the consciousness squeezed from him in Angelika Blüm’s flat. The same eyes that had released Fabel from any obligation to remain with him. The same, sad father’s eyes that, nearly two decades before, had looked upon the horror of the handiwork of his own flesh and blood.