‘I hope you’ve got the message,’ Weiss said as he opened the car door and climbed in. He shut the door and the window slid down. ‘Because there’s more where that came from if you didn’t, understand?’

The car slipped off almost silently as Silva pushed herself up from the ground. She walked up to the Hoe and sat on the bench in the exact same spot as before. In the fading light she looked out across the water to where a warship lay in Plymouth Sound, anchored to a huge buoy. At this distance the figures milling on the bow were the size of ants. Men and women just like herself, Silva thought. Willing to put their lives on the line for their country, to risk everything while doing their duty. Not like the politicians and the shadowy figures in London. Not like the people in the black car. They were playing with people, squishing them underfoot as if they were ants. She remembered back to Afghanistan and all the soldiers who’d been lost out there. For what? Like each and every one of them she’d signed up willingly, obeyed orders, but when the shit hit the fan she’d been dropped quicker than a live grenade.

A long, low horn echoed across the water. The warship had cast off from the buoy and was easing round, heading for the open sea and whatever dangers lay at its destination. Silva took a few moments to get her breath back and then she stood. The threat from Weiss had backfired. Rather than dissuade her, it had instead confirmed her mother’s story as true and flipped her intentions one hundred and eighty degrees. Her mind was made up. Tomorrow she’d phone Fairchild and tell him she would travel to Italy. And on the fifteenth of August she was going to kill Karen Hope.

Chapter Seventeen

Taher was at the window again. Morning. A rush of humanity struggling through gridlock to slave at jobs nobody wanted doing, to earn money to spend on things nobody needed. Except there was nothing human about the rush. These people were animals, never meeting each other’s gaze, living in a bubble. When their government bombed civilians, they chose to read headlines about celebrities dancing or eating slugs. While their government paid for hundreds of thousands of refugees to be corralled in vast camps where they had to fetch water from a standpipe, they complained about the cost of a cup of substandard coffee.

If only they knew true hardship.

After his family had been wiped out in the missile strike, Taher’s uncle had rescued him and taken him in. Cared for him. And each year on the day of Taher’s birth they’d prayed together. Asked that Taher could have a long life so that he might fully avenge the deaths of his parents and his siblings.