Marsh was surprised by how well the kid took it. He swung like a bat out of hell when the boys let him go – Bluey had to knock him out again – but he copped the hard part sweet. He was a tough little cunt, no doubt about it, Marsh thought. He’d never had anyone fight this long or this hard. And he still hadn’t broken the kid. He could see the fight in his eyes before Bluey knocked him out. But that was okay. He still had his ace.

Her name was Nikki.

CHAPTER 17

Birmingham, Alabama, USA

THE 16th. Street Baptist Church had been reduced to rubble. The two toppled three-storey towers with their arched windows and pyramidal roofs, which had once proudly bookended the steepled entrance, were now obstacles for the swarm of rescuers wearing yellow hazmat suits. Under towers of light that had turned the night into day, cutting bright arcs in the dark, humid August night, they sifted through the shattered stones, singed wood and smashed tiles, looking for flesh and bone. For bodies.

Hudson Sami, a hulking, bear-like man with black hair and olive skin, dressed in a smart suit, stood back, well away from the heavily guarded yellow tape, and watched.

‘Here,’ yelled one of the yellow-clad figures. ‘Got one.’

Three men, one carting a pneumatic cutting tool dubbed the ‘jaws of life’, rushed towards the animated worker.

‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘Quick.’

There was no need to rush. This was a recovery, not a rescue. Sami knew the person under the rubble was dead. They all were. No one had survived any of the other three church bombings: 67 dead in Normandy, 164 dead in St Petersburg and 123 dead in Milan. Doors locked and no way out. Anyone not killed by the explosions had been crushed by the collapsing building.

The 16th Street Baptist Church was tiny compared to the Milan Cathedral or the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg. But Sami was sure it was part of the same series of attacks.

The head of the CIA’s Office of Russian and European Analysis (OREA), Sami had sent two agents to Normandy after the first bombing, suspecting it was another lone wolf attack sponsored by ISIS. The initial reports from the French authorities had agreed with that assessment: a home-made ammonium-nitrate-based IED, between one and three attackers, and a Christian target. Unlike Al-Qaeda, which sponsored elaborate high-value attacks that were meticulously planned and coordinated by a tightly regimented command structure, ISIS was more opportunistic. It encouraged anyone and everyone to attack whenever and wherever, using whatever means they had, whether it be a bomb, a gun, a car or a knife.