“Come on up out of there and into the light. I want to get a look at you.”

“If you like money, there’s plenty of it, believe me.”

“Get moving, up to the road.”

Grouse moved off toward the road. I tracked him with the H&K, then started walking after him.

I said, “You’re a soldier in Martaud’s little private army. Who’s the client?”

By then, Grouse was close enough to the road for a little residual moonlight to cut through the opening in the tree line. “That’s enough. You can stop there and turn around.” Grouse turned to face me. His nose was flattened, blood was still pouring out and down his face to a dark stain on his shirt. That made me feel pleased with myself. I said, “Who’s the client?”

“Go to hell.”

“You look bad, Grouse, you’ll look worse dead. Who’s the client?”

“Fuck you.”

I put a triple burst into the darkest and most solid part of his body mass. The H&K sounded sweet, like a really fast full-metal drum roll. Like chamber music for robots. Efficient and deadly. He went down. I stepped up and put a single round into his shiny head.

Then there was silence. I lay down on the ground and caught my breath. The sky looked lighter. I figured we had entered another version of nautical twilight before the sun came up. After a minute I got to my feet.

I had some cleaning up to do.

The back of the white Renault Trafic had a large roll of polythene sheeting and plenty of duct tape. Grouse was heavy. Not only was he dead, but he was wet. Wet, dead, and large is difficult to get a hold of. I got him into a fireman’s lift, staggered under the weight uphill for a while, and threw him into the back of the van.

I drove the van slowly up the drive to Brumaire. I showed myself to Daniel and he walked towards the house while I parked. Neither he, or I, or Nazari said much. We stripped off the weapons and gear from the corpses and loaded them onto wheelbarrows. Then we rolled them into the woods and dumped them next to the cavern entrance mound. Four bodies required two trips with two wheelbarrows.

I stood in the woods with Nazari looking at Grouse’s body.

He didn’t look at rest, he looked dead. She played the flashlight beam over his face, pale and puffy. “Dirty cops freelancing. You think it’s just him?”

“I don’t think they’re cops freelancing. They aren’t cops at all.”

“Who are they?”

I shrugged. “I figure Martaud and her crew aren’t cops, they’re corporate mercenaries. That accounts for the shell companies and weird corporate structures.”

“That’s a hell of a theory.”

“You got that right.”