Their plane was a purple twin-prop Flybe Bombardier. Ben hadn’t been in the air since the day he’d been approached by Saunders, and as they buzzed up into the air over London he reflected on how many things had happened in such a short space of time. The tables were beginning to turn on the enemy now. He wondered if they had any idea of what was coming to them. One thing he knew for sure – they’d be forming plans of their own, even at this moment as Ben and Wolf winged their way northwards to meet with their mysterious new contact.

It was a foggy crossing over the Irish Sea. As they neared their destination the mist parted and the Isle of Man’s rocky cliffs and hazy mountains came into view. It reminded Ben of his former home in Galway.

‘The guy’s obviously some kind of nutjob recluse,’ commented Wolf, the man who had wanted to disappear into the remotest reaches of Spain.

After exactly one hour and fifteen minutes in the air, the Bombardier touched down at Ronaldsway Airport. Vincent Eritas had told them to call when they reached the island. Ben and Wolf made their way outside into the fresh evening breeze and waited. It wasn’t long before a dark blue Mazda saloon appeared and pulled up beside them. The lone driver, a skinny bald guy in his late fifties with sharp features and pointy ears, stepped out to meet them. ‘You Hope and Wolf?’

Ben said, ‘Vincent Eritas?’ He hadn’t quite known what to expect, but somehow this man wasn’t it.

‘Dude looks like Nosferatu,’ Wolf muttered under his breath.

The bald guy shook his head. ‘I’m to take you to him.’ He motioned them into the back of the car, and they took off.

The airport was situated at the southern end of the island. The bald guy ignored his passengers and didn’t speak a word as he hustled due north along twisty rural roads, through scenery that to Ben’s eye looked exactly like Ireland, with patchwork fields and occasional isolated villages and farms with rickety fences and whitewashed stone outbuildings, the mist-shrouded mountains always in the background.