Ben remembered everything about that occasion. He’d been mixing it up outside a nightclub with some Serbian heavies who worked for the gangster he was chasing; it just so happened that Madison was after the same people. Following a brief but bloody little street battle they’d been pursued through the city in her rental car, which had suffered the same bullet-riddled fate as so many rental cars Ben had ridden in over the years. Afterwards they’d retreated to a neon-lit late-night cafeteria, where they’d swapped stories and talked for hours while she smoked his cigarettes. He’d eaten a limp cheeseburger that might possibly have contained a severed human ear, though he’d been too hungry to care. She’d settled for coffee, strong and black, the way he liked it too. He could still recall the scene in perfect detail – the way she’d sat there with her elbows planted on the cafeteria table and the steaming cup in both hands, her black leather biker jacket hanging from the back of her chair with a laser-sighted Beretta nine in the pocket – the same one she’d saved his life with earlier that night. Under the jacket she’d been wearing a black T-shirt that showed her toned arms. Her hands were slim but strong. She had no rings or bracelets. She’d taken off the baseball cap she was wearing and let her thick, raven-black glossy gypsy ringlets tumble down over her shoulders. Always looking at him, always questioning, a twinkle in her eye and that way she had of raising one eyebrow, unnerving him with the impression she always knew what he was going to say before he said it. Madison had an easy manner about her that belied her sharp intelligence and the supreme self-confidence that had enabled her to shine in one of the roughest male-dominated professions going. That night in Belgrade she’d just shot three men and been through a violent high-speed car chase pursued by crooks with machine guns, but she appeared unruffled and fully in control.

Now, for the hundredth time, Ben told himself that if anyone could have made it out of Kabul and across all the miles of dangerous country to Zakara, it was Madison Cahill. She had to have made it. Didn’t she? He desperately needed it to be so. If he’d thought it would do him any good to pray, he’d have got down on his knees. The more he tried not to worry, the more his anxieties nibbled away at him like a shoal of hungry piranha fish. He might almost have wished for another encounter with enemy troops, just to give him something else to think about.