‘Or something like that. It’s snowing like a bugger here and the tracks ain’t got more than a sprinkling on them. I’d say they were made less than twenty minutes before we showed up.’

‘Can you follow them?’

‘No point,’ Graham said. ‘Easy enough to see which way they headed out of the village. But by the time you get onto the main road you ain’t gonna see shit.’

The picture was clear to Hacker. The cottage must be Hope’s local base, most likely rented like the Mercedes he was driving. Kirk was with him, and the two of them were obviously up to something. More bad news for the boss, on top of what Macleod had revealed about Hope’s military background.

‘What do we do now?’ Graham asked.

‘Get inside the cottage. If there’s anything more you can find out, call me. Then I need you to stay there until he comes back.’

‘And when he does?’

‘The boss wants him alive.’

‘Not going to be easy.’

‘Are you scared of one guy on his own?’

‘One SAS guy.’

Hacker snorted. ‘Fuck the SAS. The Pathfinders could eat them for breakfast.’

‘Then maybe you ought to be here, instead of us mere fucking rear-echelon mortals,’ Graham said.

‘Get in the damn house and call me back if you find anything.’

Hacker got off the phone and steeled himself for the prospect of breaking the latest news to the boss. Stuart had stormed off in a rage after Macleod’s call earlier on, and Hacker hadn’t seen him since, presuming he was somewhere within the castle.

Hacker dialled the mobile number, but there was no answer. He wondered where the boss might have gone off to.

Right at that moment, the boss was speeding towards Fort William. The roads were terrible, but the Rolls Royce Cullinan with its four-wheel-drive transmission could munch up the most difficult conditions with ridiculous ease, its engine as smooth and quiet as an electric turbine.

He’d just had to turn off his phone and get out of the house before the frustration drove him insane. Nothing seemed to be going his way. The prisoner still wasn’t talking. The sizeable investment he’d made into hiring Hacker’s associates wasn’t producing the returns he’d hoped for. And now he’d had the aggravating confirmation that this maniac Ben Hope was not only a former military comrade of Boonzie McCulloch’s but some kind of super-soldier with a war record apparently so extensive and classified that even regular Ministry officials could only view a fraction of it. How much more bad luck could a man bear?