Milton was beside him.

“John?”

“You’ve been shot.”

“She did it,” he said, angling his head in the direction of La Bruja. “Got lucky.”

“Well,” Milton said, “looks like it was the last thing she did.”

“Big guy,” Chase said, finding the words difficult to speak. “He did it.”

The big man protested.

Chase felt as if he were drifting down beneath the surface of the water, unable to make out what he had said. Asking about how Milton had found him, and then Milton answering that he had dropped a little something into his pocket? It didn’t make sense. Chase felt a firm grip on his shoulder and surfaced, heard the squelch of static from a radio, and noticed there were more people in the room—men in uniforms—and that red and white lights strobed through the dusty windows, and sirens were loud in the street outside.

“Hold on,” Milton said. “We’re going to get you to a hospital.”

Epilogue

The warehouse was in Amsterdam’s Westport industrial district. The area was near the docks and was dedicated to the storage of cargo unloaded from ships that had arrived from all around the world. A series of large prefabricated buildings had been constructed on either side of a tree-lined road. This particular warehouse was smaller than some of the other units, located in a small complex behind a metal gate. It was sandwiched between a business that imported kitchen goods and another that dealt in garden furniture.

A single man, dressed all in black, emerged from the entrance to the building and made his way to the gate. Smoke was pouring out from beneath the door now, and he could hear the sound of the flames inside. He dropped the empty jerrycan over the fence and climbed after it, picked it up again and then jogged over to the car that he had left on the main road.

Alex Hicks put the empty jerrycan in the trunk, opened the door and dropped into the driver’s seat. He took off his balaclava and gloves and dumped them on the seat next to him. It had gone as well as might have been hoped. Ziggy had directed him to the building that Chase had identified as the hiding place of Juan Pablo López’s stock of cocaine. It was very conveniently located for the purpose it served. The drugs would be unloaded at the docks, hidden in the warehouse and then distributed around Europe. Hicks had not stayed inside the building for long enough to scope it out properly, save to confirm that the cartel’s product was in situ. There was a lot of it; Hicks guessed that the value must have been in the tens of millions.

It was all on fire now.

He started the engine, put the car in gear and pulled away.

He called Ziggy. “It’s done.”

* * *