Bowman swung back into the corridor and made for the door at the far end. The last room to check. The president’s private library. Which also housed the palace broadcasting equipment. Bowman remembered something from the briefing about Seguma’s family issuing hourly radio broadcasts from the same room. Imploring the soldiers to stay loyal to their great leader.

He crashed through the door, stumbled and almost tripped over the corpse of a palace guard. The man lay on the floor, his dead eyes as wide as golf balls. His lower jaw had been completely blown away. Bowman stepped around the slotted guard, dread flooding his guts as he pushed into the room. He looked up. Turned to his left.

Then he saw the bodies.

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Three

Bowman stopped cold just inside the room. He was looking at a tangled mass of limbs and torsos. Five guys and two women. Two other victims, dressed in the uniform of the Presidential Guard, were sprawled on the carpet beside a desk. There was a presidential seal on the wall behind the desk and a cluster of lighting equipment and camera tripods and cables. The other seven corpses all wore civilian clothing. Dark suits for the men, skirts and blouses and heels for the women. There was blood everywhere.

Bowman lowered his weapon and approached the victims. The hot stink of gunsmoke and blood clung to the air, thickening in his nostrils. He dropped down beside the dead civilians. Some of them appeared to have been mutilated beyond recognition. One guy had been shot in the face, seemingly at point-blank range. The killers had taken their time. Bowman saw a woman with her eyes gouged out. A man with his throat slashed open. A yawning gash of cartilage and tissue glistened beneath his slackened jaw.

The second time in his life he’d walked into a murder scene.

‘It’s the family,’ Loader said between ragged draws of breath. ‘They’ve been murdered.’

Bowman stared at them in silence, his jaw tightly clenched. He didn’t immediately recognise any of the victims from the photographs in the Shed. But it was hard to be sure. He’d only glanced at the snaps on the wall for a few seconds. The early hours of yesterday morning. Another lifetime. And some of the faces were horribly disfigured.

‘I don’t know, mate,’ he said. ‘It might be them.’

‘Who else could it be? The family are the only civvies we’re expecting to find here. We’re too fucking late.’

Bowman ran his eyes over the corpses. Something about the scene didn’t make sense. ‘I don’t see any kids.’

‘So what?’

‘The president said we’d find his wife and children here. His youngest kid is only a few months old. His brother has a couple of twin girls. If this lot are his relatives, where are the children?’

‘What difference does it make?’ Loader said. ‘The family has been massacred.’