Milton composed himself; he knew that what was likely to happen was going to be unpleasant. His captors would suspect that he was connected to the raid on the laboratory, and they would want to know exactly what that meant. They would suspect that he had been responsible for passing on the location of the camp to the SEALs and would want him to tell them what might come next. Milton anticipated all of that and steeled himself to it. He had been tortured before. There had been training in the Regiment to prepare himself for what might be expected, and that training had been augmented by deeper sessions when he had joined the Group. He had been locked in dark, soundproof rooms for days on end. He had been blasted with the same song on repeat, again and again and again. He had been beaten. He had been thrown into icy pools and left to hover on the brink of hypothermia. Dealing with it was simple enough, he reminded himself, at least in theory. He would distance himself from the experience, lock himself away in his mind, and do his best to ignore what they did to his body.

He had little choice; he could tell them that he wasn’t John Smith, but he doubted that they would believe the truth any more than his fiction. They would suspect he was an intelligence asset. It was a reasonable suggestion in the circumstances. The truth of it, though? That he was a single man on a mission, going up against the vast evil of the cartel to right a single wrong? That was a fanciful suggestion. And so, suspecting that he was stringing them along, they would increase the discomfort until they killed him.

Milton could live with that. He might not have met his objective, but at least he had made the attempt. He had lived his life in accordance with the Steps, right up until the end.

The door was unlocked and opened. A shaft of light from the floor above shone through the doorway, silhouetting the figure of a large man. It was the Scandinavian.

He stepped deeper into the room. “Hello, John.”

Milton didn’t respond.

The man reached for a light switch and flicked it. A bulb above Milton filled the room with a sickly sodium glow.

“I know who you are,” the Scandinavian said.

“Because I told you.”

“Yes, you did. But you were lying.”

“Again?” Milton said. “We’re doing this again?”

“There’s no point in pretending. I know the truth. It’s Milton, isn’t it—not Smith? John Milton.”