‘Yes. It’s an incapacitant. A knockout gas.’

‘Does it work?’ he asked.

‘In training, yes. Most of the time.’

‘Right,’ Luke said hesitantly. ‘It sounds like something the Russians used in the Moscow theatre siege.’

‘That was before my time, but something like that, yes.’

‘Which killed at least a hundred and thirty people, mostly hostages.’

‘Well, the Bravos had best give themselves up, hadn’t they?’ She shrugged and went back to her phone.

112

Battersea, London

Monday, 21 March, 0247hrs GMT

ELISE FELT AS if she was trapped in one of her dreams, a really, really bad one this time. This couldn’t be happening, could it? She had gone to bed three hours earlier feeling guilty on so many counts. She knew she should not have drunk all that Chardonnay with Susie, not with the baby growing quietly inside her, but she’d needed something to calm her nerves. Because Elise Mayhew knew she was not in a good place. The man she’d thought she would spend the rest of her life with had walked out of their flat, she was carrying another man’s child, and now the baby’s father wasn’t taking her calls. That was bad enough. But just before two thirty in the morning she’d been woken by a frantic buzzing at the door. It must be Hugo, she thought, come to make amends for his prolonged silence. Or maybe it was Luke, back to ask for a second chance. It was neither. It was a man and a woman with government security ID badges and, after only the briefest of apologies, they had asked her to get dressed as fast as possible while they waited in the living room.

In jeans, trainers and a pullover she sat on the edge of the armchair, a cushion hugged to her midriff, and listened, open-mouthed, as they told her what was going on, right now, on the other side of the capital. Elise hardly registered it when the woman, who had introduced herself as being ‘from the Foreign Office’, reached out and squeezed her hand as she, Elise, tried to take it all in. And she couldn’t: it was just too much. Hugo Squires? The harmless, cuddly banker with bushy eyebrows who had been her rock of support every time Luke was away, the man who had wined and dined her, been there for her when her mother died, the man who had fathered— no, sorry, she simply didn’t believe it. Okay, so he’d made some pretty offensive remarks from time to time, usually when he’d been drinking, and she’d had to pick him up on the stuff he was saying about the BLM movement, but Hugo, a bio-terrorist? Come on. Mixed up with a group of far-right extremists? No, sorry, she simply didn’t buy it.