“If you say so.” They picked up the speed that they had lost. “Where do you want to take him?” he asked.

“Keep going. Somewhere no one will see us.”

She stared out the window. She concentrated on her breathing, keeping it even, focussing on it, trying to detect anything that was out of the ordinary. Any new symptoms.

The terrain dipped down between sand dunes, and the lights of Pope’s car winked in and out and then finally they disappeared.

They drove for an hour. It was two in the morning when they eventually arrived at a wide-open stretch of desert that offered views of the road in both directions for several miles. There would be no chance of anything coming across them unexpectedly.

“Here,” Beatrix said.

Faulkner slowed and drew up to a halt on the margin of the road.

He took the FN F2000 from the passenger seat, stepped out and opened the back. Duffy was crammed into the compartment, his feet resting on one of the wheel arches. Beatrix prodded him with the Sig, and he rolled out, stumbling a little as he did. She took her knife and sliced through the tape around his ankles. She pushed him into motion, setting him off into the dunes.

The three of them walked for five minutes until they were about two hundred yards from the Freelander.

They stumbled down into a shallow depression, the sand rippling down after them.

“Far enough,” she said.

He stopped.

She pulled the hessian sack over his head, tore the tape from his mouth and pulled out the rag that was stuffed inside.

He gasped.

“On your knees,” she said.

“Rose. Let’s talk about this.”

“On your knees.”

“Come on, Rose. I didn’t do anything.”

“Really?”

“I was there, sure, but . . .”

“You’re all culpable.”

“Control said you’d gone over to the other side. He said we had to bring you in and search your place. That’s it. What happened when we got there . . . fuck, I swear, I had no idea that was going to go down. It’s Chisholm. She was in charge. It’s . . .”

“I don’t really care, Duffy. It doesn’t make any difference to me what you say. You and the others ended my life. You killed my husband. You made sure I missed my daughter growing up. Instead of happy memories, all I have is bitterness and anger. What do you expect me to do? Give you a free pass? That’s right, Duffy, it was all a great big misunderstanding. Right? You were just following orders.”

“I was Number Eleven. I was green. I didn’t know the first thing about the Group, and I didn’t know what Control was planning to do.”

“So we should just let bygones be bygones. That’s right, yes?”

“I don’t expect you to . . .”

She struck him across the face with the barrel of the pistol. “Shut up.”