Luke fought to clear his senses and recover his balance. He was aware of someone else sneaking behind him and suddenly a man had his hands around his waist and was scrabbling to undo the buckle of Luke’s belt. This time he didn’t need to look down. He could sense exactly where the man was, his head just behind and below Luke’s elbow. Keeping his eyes trained on the first man, who had adopted a boxer’s stance and looked poised to deliver a second blow, Luke cupped his right fist inside his left hand then slammed his elbow vertically down on to the back of the other man’s neck. A couple of centimetres further to one side and he could have severed his spinal cord. As it was, the man let out a howl of pain and dropped to the floor. One down. The next blow came in fast and Luke just had time to deflect it, twisting his left forearm up and to the side in a classic martial-arts block, before stepping in and headbutting the large man between the eyes. But instead of going down as Luke had expected him to, the man shook his head clear, laughed, and said something in Lithuanian. At the same moment Luke sustained a crippling blow to his left kidney. Christ, that hurt. Had he been stabbed? It felt like it. The pain was so explosive it was almost overwhelming, threatening to rob him of all his strength when he needed it most. He could see the blow had come from the third man in the cell and now Luke caught a glint of metal in his hand. It wasn’t a blade, he realized, but a knuckle-duster, the curved metal brackets ringing the man’s clenched fist. He was about to take a second swing with it, this time aiming for Luke’s jaw. A fleeting thought flashed through his head: How had these thugs managed to smuggle a knuckle-duster into this cell? The answer was obvious. It would have been supplied by one of the guards. No point calling out to them. Even if they could hear him down here in this dangerous cell they wouldn’t come to his aid. No, he decided, the guards were part of the problem.