Something, some ancient animal instinct, told him that he was not alone.

The hairs on the back of his neck vibrating, he turned.

In the doorway stood a man in dark clothes.

Big man, strongly built, scar on his chin.

Scar like an inverted crescent moon.

Latex gloves on his hands.

Pointing something at him.

Smiling.

Shishani realised what it was only as the 9mm round from the Welrod took him in the Adam’s apple.

The glass shattered as he fell to the floor, clutching his ruptured throat and drowning in his own hot blood.

He began thrashing around on the floor, his eyes wide and terrified.

John Carr closed the distance quickly, rechambering a round as he moved.

For a moment, he considered putting the Chechen down like an injured dog, but then an image came to him: children, murdered on a Spanish beach, on the orders of this fucker.

So instead he held the Welrod by his side and stood on the dying man’s ankles, to stop him kicking around and making a noise.

It took Argun Shishani ninety seconds to lapse into unconsciousness, and all the time he stared up in horror at John Carr, who smiled back down at him.

When the light had gone from the terrorist’s eyes, Carr recovered his daysack, took the Welrod apart and placed it inside.

Then he began what would, in his old life, have been called a Sensitive Site Exploitation, to provide Justin Nicholls with as much information as possible from the flat.

He quickly searched the bedside table and removed the three passports – British, French and Italian – and put them in the daysack.

In a bag under the bed he found two tight bundles of US dollars – twenty grand, easy, and all used notes.

Those went straight into his inside pocket: fuck handing that over, just so that the government could piss it up the wall.

Then he went back to the living room and looked at the laptop.

Standard Dell running MS Windows, which surprised him.

Still on, still connected.

The penny-sized black disc which he’d applied to the underside of the laptop earlier – a combined microprocessor and sensor – would have sucked up all Shishani’s keystrokes, so that his password was now known.

But to be on the safe side, he inserted a USB stick into one of the ports and followed Nicholls’ directions.

While he was downloading the contents of the computer, he opened up the Control Panel and – as a further countermeasure – switched the ‘Sleep’ option to ‘Never’.

The download finished, he ejected the USB stick and slipped it into the inside pocket of his black leather bomber jacket.

Then he placed the laptop in the daysack, fully opened out.

He spent the next ten minutes making as thorough a search of the apartment as he could, locating and bagging the router, a couple of other mobile phones, and numerous documents.