Home sweet home. Warm, welcoming light spilled from the windows of the farmhouse kitchen into the yard. Ben could see his friends Jeff and Tuesday having dinner in their usual places at the old oak table. The kitchen was the hub of the house, the common room and command centre where the core members of the Le Val team spent most evenings drinking, smoking, relaxing and sharing a laugh after a long day’s work teaching good guys with guns how to better protect and serve the innocent citizens who depended on them. A delegation of cops from the BRI-BRAC anti-terror brigade in Paris had just finished up a two-day Hostage Rescue Team refresher course in which Jeff had put them through their paces in Le Val’s killing house, where the live-fire combat exercises were fast and furious, bad-guy targets lurked behind every doorway and the simulation of a real-life HRT raid was made to be as realistic as possible.

In short, life at the compound was just the same as ever. Stepping back into that comforting, familiar environment, Ben might almost have believed that the episode on board the plane earlier that day had been nothing more than some weird dream that he could just shrug off, forget and move on from.

But it hadn’t been a dream. Ben’s predicament was as real as the threat hanging over Grace Kirk, and he could no more afford to ignore it than he could disregard Saunders’ rules. The first of which was tell no one. And that, Ben knew, was going to be his first tough challenge.

As he stepped inside the house and put his head around the kitchen door he was met with the sound of laughter and the aroma of the big pot of beef stew that sat on the range.

‘Dead on time. Welcome home, lover boy,’ was Jeff’s boisterous greeting. The wine had been flowing that evening, judging by the empty bottles on the dinner table and the flush in Jeff’s cheeks. Jeff was in a happier mood these days, after going through the grinder following the collapse of his relationship with a French woman called Chantal. Some months earlier he’d celebrated his rediscovered bachelor status by throwing himself into learning to fly. Since getting his pilot’s licence just weeks ago, he’d spent a chunk of his hard-earned cash on a 1967 Cessna 172 Skyhawk and could talk of little else. A stack of light aircraft magazines, service manuals and pilot licensing literature lay heaped on the sideboard.

‘How was your trip?’ Tuesday asked, grinning his dazzling trademark grin that could light up all but the darkest of spaces. Jeff grabbed a third glass from the cupboard, set it down for Ben in his usual place at the head of the table, and swilled wine into it. ‘Come and have a drink, mate. Plenty of stew left in the pot, too.’