She glanced over Smith’s shoulder at the rest of the room. She couldn’t be here. She had to follow through on what she had promised and deliver the packages. Katsuro was waiting. Yamato needed her to do it. Perhaps it wasn’t too late.

Smith got to his feet and excused himself. He walked into the small bathroom and closed the door behind him. Sakura heard the taps being turned on and the splash of water. Knowing that she had only moments, she looked around the small hotel room for her things. There was a single chair in the corner with her clutch bag lying atop it. Her phone would be in the bag; she could just leave and find somewhere else to hide until Katsuro could come and get her.

She got to her feet, careful not to bump the cannula, stood unsteadily for a few seconds until the room stopped spinning, and then picked up the bag. She opened it to confirm that her phone was still inside, and then, with a glance over her shoulder at the closed bathroom door, she crossed the room and opened the door as quietly as she could.

24

The bathroom was a tiny room, with a shower cubicle, a toilet and a sink. There was a narrow window with a cracked pane of glass and, as Milton looked through it, he saw that it offered an uninspiring view of the roof of the building beneath, together with a collection of wheezing air-conditioning units. There was an alley between the two buildings that looked as if it was used as a place to smoke and chat by members of the hotel staff. A man in chef’s whites was leaning against the wall while a porter emptied a trash can of rotten food waste into a large industrial bin.

He looked at his reflection in the mirror, a jagged crack in the glass almost lining up with the scar on his face, and breathed out. What a day. He would have said that he was surprised that trouble had found him again, but he was not. It always did. It made no difference where he was or what he was doing; it always found him. He stared at his reflection and wondered whether that was right. Did it find him, or did he find it? It didn’t matter. He’d been presented with a problem, with someone out of her depth and in need of his help, and he would do what he could to bring her justice. It was his penance for the blood in his past, his own debt, one that he could service but never truly repay. He had grown to accept that, and almost found comfort in the certainty that this would be his life until he found a problem that even he could not fix.

Perhaps it would be this one.

He opened the door and went back into the bedroom.

Sakura wasn’t there.