‘It’s not only Grace. I have a sister, Ruth. Saunders knew all about her, too. No specific threats, but there didn’t have to be. They know all the weak points they can use to make me their puppet. Sooner or later, if I refused to go on doing their dirty work for them, the people I care about would be made to suffer. The only way out of it, for me and for them, would be to put a pistol in my mouth and blow my own brains out. That’s not an option for me, not yet.’

‘Looks like you need to find another option, then,’ Wolf said.

Ben looked at him. ‘Not just me, Jaden. You too. Because this doesn’t stop with me. You’re not safe here.’

Wolf shook his head. ‘Screw that. They won’t find me.’

‘I found you,’ Ben said.

‘Yeah, but you’re you. Who else is that good?’

‘That’s an assumption you can’t afford to make,’ Ben said. ‘Just like I can’t afford to assume that the men watching Grace aren’t every bit as skilled as the likes of you and me.’

Wolf fell silent. Thinking. Measuring Ben’s words, and frowning as though something was deeply troubling him.

Finally he said, ‘You asked me what I’d done to piss them off so badly. The answer is that I screwed up a hit. It happens sometimes. Not to me, not before this. But there are contingency protocols just in case. They could either assign it to someone else, or they could give me a second chance at it. Doesn’t do your track record any favours, but it’s not the end of the world.’

Ben said, ‘Okay then, so why are they so keen for you to be dead?’

Wolf replied, ‘It’s what I know, Ben. It’s what I saw.’

Chapter 16

Ben stared at Wolf, not understanding. Here was a stone-hard former Special Forces warrior and self-confessed professional assassin, a man Ben had seen maintain total calmness and composure in the most intense heat of battle when everyone else was losing their mind, a man who must have committed all manner of terrible actions during his post-military career, looking positively freaked out by whatever secret he was holding onto.

Ben said, ‘What you saw.’

Wolf nodded hesitantly. He swallowed. Tried to smile, but it came out as a twisted, nervous grimace. ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

Ben said, ‘You’ve watched your friends and comrades get torn to pieces and their body parts scattered over the ground. You’ve been into raided villages where every single man, woman and child had been hacked to pieces by the troops of crazy warlords. Witnessed things that most people couldn’t dream up in their worst nightmares. What could be worse than that?’