Ben walked slowly towards the cubicle where Nazim lay curled up and bleeding heavily. Just then the radio fizzed into life. Jeff’s voice crackled, ‘All clear here. Target secured, seven combatants down. Repeat, seven combatants down. No casualties on our side. Talk to me, Ben. Over.’

With intense relief flooding through him Ben thumbed the talk button and radioed back, ‘Copy that. Be with you in a minute. Out.’

He stepped closer to Nazim. The man was alive, just about. His breath was coming in gasps and the pool of blood around him was spreading fast and thick, reflecting the flickering lights.

Nazim raised his head and tried to prop himself up as Ben crouched near him. Ben spoke in Arabic. ‘The great Nazim al-Kassar, dying alone in a toilet. Not exactly the glorious end you’d envisioned for yourself.’

Nazim coughed blood. Mortally wounded, but not quite dead yet. In a croak he asked again, ‘Who are you?’

‘Someone from your past,’ Ben replied. ‘You remembered me, didn’t you?’

‘All these years. You still had to come after me. Your kind will always hate my kind.’

‘I don’t hate you, Nazim. We’re all locked in a war that nobody can ever really win. That just makes me sad.’

Nazim’s eyes were beginning to cloud with death, but a flicker of surprise passed through them. ‘Then why did you risk your life to stop me? Have you any idea what we would have done to you, if we had caught you?’

Ben was surprised, too. ‘You’re asking me this, now?’

Nazim spluttered up more blood. He managed a nod. ‘I need to understand what drives a man like you.’

Ben had nothing against indulging a dying man’s final wishes. He replied, ‘I do what I do so that more innocent people don’t have to suffer and die. People like Salim Youssef. People like Romy Juneau and Françoise Schell and the Simonots. People like Samara.’

Nazim blinked, trying to remember even as his life ebbed away. ‘Samara?’ His voice had faded to little more than a whisper.

Ben’s mind flashed back once again to the woman in his dream. The same dream he’d had so many times. He saw the Iraqi dusty roadside checkpoint from sixteen years ago. The young woman in black, clutching her pregnant stomach as she approached the unsuspecting group of Coalition soldiers. The sudden white flash and deafening percussive blast of the explosion. The grisly aftermath of the suicide bombing. Her poor dead face looking up at him.