Well, the ones that are left anyway, he thought, as his prize rolled and thumped around in his backpack.

Despite Roth’s tiredness, his enthusiasm remained. He had walked from Harpenden to Floor A without even sitting down along the fifteen-mile journey, kept on his feet by the thought of later boasting about the achievement, and his allies awaited him behind the next door for a meeting that apparently couldn’t be delayed any longer. Rather than being demotivated, Roth was consumed with excitement.

Through the glass wall of the office, he could see Marshall and Pearce sitting at opposite sides of the long table, predictably distant from each other. At the front of the room, a large screen displayed the same countdown as every other spare screen on Floor A at that moment.

34:01 :21

3 4 :0 1 :20

34:01 :19

The numbers were digital-shaped and bright red, like the countdowns on those bombs from the movies. It seemed a childish choice, but nobody was going to offer that feedback to Nicholas Grant. Certainly not the dull-mannered duo sitting at the elongated table.

At one end, Iain Marshall sat hunched in his seat with a face like a smacked arse. At the opposite end, Nathaniel Pearce was tucking in to his brunch, his little-too-happy smile visible even with his mouth full. The sight of cheese and jalapeños forced an involuntary rolling of Roth’s eyes: there could have been a whole food laboratory growing those jalapeño peppers for Pearce, and Roth didn’t trust the common sense of a man who guzzled spicy food before midday.

Then again, of all the reasons we have to distrust Nat, his jalape ñ os are pretty bloody far down the list.

Marshall had told him everything. Back in Roth’s training days, when Marshall hadn’t seen his twelve-year-old apprentice as a possible future threat, the man had spent a lot of time ranting about his colleague and former best friend.

After a dozen years in the armed forces and eight as an international arms dealer, Marshall had thought it better to quit the latter profession while he was still alive. He had told Roth that it was a sensible, calculated decision, like every decision that needed to be made during combat. But Roth had seen through him, and he knew that weak arms dealers didn’t merely lose money when their influence started to wane. Marshall had left his exciting war zones and fled back to regular boring Britain, got himself married to a regular boring woman, and started a regular boring job at a private defence contractor with a regular boring name: ‘Marshall Contractors’.