Cover

One

One

At eight o’clock in the morning, on a damp grey Saturday in late March, Josh Bowman felt the pain flooding through his system.

It came on suddenly, without warning, as he waited in the lobby of the Broxbury Hall Hotel, a swanky five-star establishment located just across the road from Hyde Park. The pain started as a sharp scraping inside his head, clawing along the surface of his brain and quickly migrating through his bones, pricking his skin. It would only get worse, Bowman knew. Twelve hours since his last pill, and he could already feel the first pangs of nausea in his guts. Soon the stomach cramps and the sweats would kick in. Then the hallucinations. Like the flu, but a million times worse. A few hours from now, he would be a pale, shivering wreck.

You know what you need to do, the voice at the back of his head told him. The one that had hijacked his brain, rewiring his pathways. The voice was always there nowadays, invading his every waking moment.

You need another hit.

Just one pill, that’s all.

Something to get you back on the level. Make the pain go away.

Bowman shoved the voice aside, forced himself to concentrate on the sleek TV mounted on the wall opposite. On the news, vast crowds lined the streets around Westminster Abbey, ahead of the day’s wedding between Princess Amelia and her investment banker fiancé, Lucas Wentworth. Bowman saw a huge cheering mass of people dressed in red-and-blue hats or jackets, many of them waving Union Jack flags. There was a definite buzz in the air, despite the crap weather. The biggest live audience for a royal wedding ever, the commentator said. A clock in the bottom corner counted down the time until the ceremony began. Three hours twenty-nine minutes.

Christ, Bowman thought. I’m supposed to be preparing for a mission.

Instead, I’m getting the bloody shakes.

The pain briefly faded. Dave Kember glanced at his watch and cursed.

‘What’s taking these idiots so long?’ the SAS sergeant snapped. ‘They were supposed to be here by now, for Chrissakes.’

Bowman glanced at his colleague. With his pitted skin and slab-like forehead, Dave Kember was one of the ugliest guys in the Regiment. The lads had nicknamed him ‘Toxic’ on account of his bad breath. A teetotal clean-eating fanatic, he also had a reputation as a world-class moaner. The kind of bloke who could have a Virginia ham tucked under his arm and still complain that there wasn’t any food to be had. Bowman couldn’t decide which was worse. The withdrawal pains, or the prospect of spending the next sixteen hours working with Kember.