In addition to Dempsey and Dai, the team was made up of Adama Jabari, a slim, quiet Ethiopian of Dempsey’s height who looked like he could have been aged anywhere from thirty to fifty. Dylan Wrixon, the hard, wiry Appalachian Dempsey had spotted on the street. And Kate Silver, a fierce-looking blonde in her early thirties who, at almost six feet tall and with the build of an Olympian, looked like a physical match for any man there.

Except, perhaps, for the big one. Salvatore Gallo, the team’s near giant.

Gallo had thrown the sports coat aside, revealing the M90 CAWS shotgun that had been so obviously beneath. Like every member of Dempsey’s hand-picked ISB team, Gallo was ready.

All six were dressed in casual, baggy sportswear. The clothing served as street camouflage, as well as concealing the firearms, ammunition and kevlar that were strapped across their bodies.

Those firearms were now in each agent’s hands. Small close-quarters assault rifles for everyone but Gallo.

Dempsey indicated to the lowered fire escape. He spoke quickly.

‘As you were briefed: entry via the empty sixth floor apartment, then up one floor. All three seventh-floor apartments are supposed to be unoccupied. One of them won’t be. That’s where the hostage will be but we won’t know which apartment it is until we breach. Or how many hostiles there’ll be. Understood?’

All five agents nodded as one.

‘We breach from the inside. Beta will be covering the rear via the roof. We go in hard. Anyone we don’t hit, we herd towards Beta. Clear?’

Another five head movements.

‘Silent all the way up,’ Dempsey continued, ‘then every apartment cleared in sixty seconds. I want you fast and fatal. Other than us, only one person is leaving that seventh floor alive. Understood?’

Four nods. Dempsey looked up towards Gallo, who had remained motionless.

‘Think you can manage that, Sal?’

‘Guardami e basta.’

Dempsey had picked up enough of Gallo’s native Italian to know the meaning.

Just watch me.

It was all he needed to hear.

THREE

The six ISB agents had climbed the tenement’s fire escape slowly and – in spite of the age and underuse of its metal frame – without a sound. Their movement once inside the building, as they made their way from the sixth floor to the seventh, had been just as silent.

Dempsey stepped up to the last of three closed apartments in the corridor. He looked to his left. Dai and Jabari were perhaps ten yards away, in front of the second apartment. Wrixon and Silver another ten, poised by the first.

Gallo was with Dempsey. Each apartment would be a two-man job.

Their intelligence could only take them this far. The building was old, its windows small and shrouded in years of grime. Its interior was all but invisible from the outside

Probably why the building was chosen in the first place, Dempsey surmised.

Even SWAT and Dempsey’s Beta Unit – both positioned on adjacent buildings – had no clear view inside. It left them blind as to which apartment was holding the hostage; all they could be sure of was that two would be empty and one would offer resistance.