‘Call them now,’ Stuart said. ‘Get five, ten, twenty, whatever it takes. I want a regiment here, with all the weapons and ammunition you can scrape together out of the pits of the criminal underworld. I’ve had enough of this Hope meddling in my affairs. I don’t want him dead. I want him obliterated, vaporised and erased from the face of the earth as if he’d never existed. And then I want what’s rightfully mine. DO YOU HEAR ME?’

Meanwhile, deep below them, Boonzie McCulloch was sitting very still but wide awake, resting with his back to the cold, dank dungeon wall. After days of confinement his vision had adjusted to the near-total darkness of his surroundings, to the point where he imagined he could make out a single photon of light. In his experience you could get used to just about anything. But the stone floor that was all he had to sleep on wasn’t getting any softer, and the damp felt as though it was creeping a little more into his bones with every passing hour. He was raw with fear and anger, and hunger pangs gnawed fiercely at his belly. The food dish his captors had brought him earlier was empty. Cold rice and beans, and a plastic teaspoon to eat them with in the darkness. The bitter aftertaste of the ground-up heart pill they’d mixed up into his food was still on his lips.

Boonzie understood why these men were keeping him alive. What they wanted from him was the same thing they’d thought Ewan had. Something that Boonzie simply couldn’t give them, even if he’d wanted to. And that wasn’t good.

Boonzie also understood that things weren’t going well for his enemies. Day on day, he could sense the change in their manner. They were beginning to panic. Their plans were falling apart. Something new was happening that they weren’t telling him about, but it was frightening them. Boonzie knew the smell of fear and he could smell it on these men. Which intrigued him, but also worried him deeply, because it meant that the danger to Mirella was no idle threat.

Something had to be done.

And Boonzie was working on it.

He’d been working on it for the last three days, ever since he’d thought he could hear the sound of water gushing somewhere behind the wall of his prison and had figured out where it was coming from. His fingertips were ragged and bleeding from his efforts, but the soreness in his hands mattered no more to him than the jolts of pain that now and then shot through his chest as he worked. He’d rest a while, then keep at it until the aching tiredness washed over him, then rest again. All around the clock. Day and night were the same down here.