The assassin gasped in fury, like a child denied a packet of sweets.

‘Yes, sir,’ the boy snarled. ‘Will be there in ten.’

Grant called him ‘ Oliver ’ . And while the lights were on, I noticed he wa s a young redhead.

T he others are in grave danger and they don’t even know it .

With the assassin’s rifle barrel pointed to his face, McCormick raised his arms and let out a surprised gasp.

‘You’re Oliver Roth,’ he breathed.

The boy nodded.

‘Alive and well.’

Chapter 23

In one short radio conversation, Ewan had lost five years’ worth of behaviour management lessons. He screamed and swore at the top of his voice, not caring how many clones heard and came running, thrusting his assault rifle through every window he passed in the darkness. He hit the tears away from his face instead of wiping them, and kicked against the walls as if trying to tear New London to the ground piece by piece.

He had wasted his second-to-last clip of ammunition on a dead clone, who lay at his feet with eight handgun bullets to his chest.

‘What the hell just happened?’ shouted Alex through his radio.

‘What the hell do you think?’ Ewan spat in response. ‘McCormick took out the backup place and died anyway! He came to New London to babysit us and got himself bloody killed!’

The words sounded unbelievable, even though they came from his own mouth. The great Joseph McCormick, father of the Underdogs, the head of Britain’s last army, and Ewan’s surrogate grandfather, was almost certain to be dead.

If felt so wrong, the thought of outliving McCormick. He was supposed to survive the longest. He deserved to.

Out of the thousand thoughts that raced through Ewan’s head, there was one that made him inconsolably guilty: the hope that McCormick really had died rather than get himself captured. If Grant made McCormick talk, the war was over.

The corridor around him was pitch black. How McCormick had thought a power cut would help them reach Floor B, he would never know. He had been halfway to a stairwell up to Floor D when the lights had gone out and rendered the map in his head useless.

‘I shouldn’t have left him alone,’ Kate wailed through the radio, ‘it’s my fault! This all happened because of me!’

Ewan wanted to tell her she was right. He wanted Kate to blame herself, but he knew it would only be to reduce his own guilt. Besides, he only had three quarters of his team left. And one way or another, a computer still needed destroying.

‘Kate,’ he snarled reluctantly, ‘you left him so you could kill a border point and buy us more time. If you’d stayed with McCormick we’d have lost the war already.’

There was no response through the radio, except the faint crackle of sobbing.