The other option—the only one—was to deal with this himself. He couldn’t go further into the terminal; he had no ticket, so they wouldn’t let him pass through immigration, and besides, he wasn’t about to tell the authorities that he was here to meet a woman whom he knew to be carrying seven hundred grams of heroin inside her stomach.

He would need to regroup and consider his options. He turned on his heel and walked to the exit. Something had happened to Sakura, and he was concerned that the local police would get to her before he could.

There was no way he could let that happen.

15

Milton helped Sakura through the splintered fire door and out of the terminal building. She was barely conscious. He checked around him: although they were outside the terminal, they were still inside the perimeter wire of the airport. In front of them was a security fence, ten feet high and all business. Atop the fence, and angled away from the interior, was a concertina of razor wire. It was designed not to keep people inside the perimeter, but to keep people out. It didn’t matter. It would still be impossible to scale, especially with Sakura in such a bad way.

Milton knew that they had been spotted. He could not be sure how long it would take the authorities to mount a proper response, so he set off across the tarmac as quickly as he could manage. He saw the tall red-and-white metal air traffic control tower, a rotating semicircular dish atop it. In the tower’s shadow was a two-storey red-brick building, and beyond the fence to the left was a two-lane highway that was lined with black and white kerbstones.

He saw what he was looking for outside the red-brick building.

Vehicles.

There was a large white SUV with tinted windows and a bright orange Bajaj, a small three-wheeled vehicle that stood with its engine still running.