The approaching two-tone scream sent relief rushing through him. He spun in the air, saw a fire engine speed round the corner, and felt his heart sink.

We need police, not firemen. This crowd isn’t going to be scared of firemen.

“Block it!” shouted a voice from near the house, as if reading his mind. “Block it out now!”

Jamie turned back towards the besieged house in time to see a middle-aged woman apply a lighter to a rag stuffed into a clear bottle, and hurl the Molotov cocktail through the big picture window at the front of the building. The glass shattered, before heat and flames exploded out of the empty space with a vast whoosh. Jamie recoiled as three men peeled away from the main crowd and sprinted to the kerb. They climbed into cars and screeched towards the approaching fire engine, smoke billowing from their tyres, then braked and turned the vehicles nose to nose, blocking the entire width of the road. The fire engine skidded to a halt, its horn blaring, but by the time the firemen were out of their cab and shouting for the cars to be moved, the drivers were already running back towards Jamie, who watched them, unsure of what to do; the situation was escalating so quickly, and it was like nothing he had ever had to deal with before.

Behind him, the burning living-room curtains billowed through the broken window, dripping lumps of flaming cloth on to the lawn beneath. Away to his left, Ellison was still retreating, her gun trained on her pursuers, and out in the middle of the road, Qiang was fighting for his life; he had managed to get hold of one of the crowd’s baseball bats and was swinging it almost indiscriminately, keeping the advancing mob just about at bay. In front of the house, the remainder of the men and women had abandoned trying to get through the front door, and had backed away from the increasing heat of the fire; they were screaming up at the windows of the house, chanting “NO MORE VAMPS” over and over again. Everywhere Jamie looked was violence, and flames, and hatred; it was like a suburban scene from Hell.

Then he heard it.

From somewhere inside the house, over the screams and shouts of the crowd, over the roar as the fire took hold of the thin walls and cheap furniture and began to burn in earnest, came the distant sounds of two voices screaming for help, and something smaller, and much worse.

It was the high-pitched wail of a baby.

The noise galvanised Jamie; the heat in his eyes rose to a temperature that was close to agonising, and he rocketed through the air towards the fire engine. He dropped to the ground in the middle of the road, and shouted for the firemen gathered round the blockade to get out of the way. They did as they were told, backing away with wide eyes as Jamie took hold of the front bumper of one of the cars. He threw it up and over on to its roof, took a millisecond to marvel at his own strength, then did the same to another car, creating a gap that was wide enough for the fire engine.

“Get moving!” he yelled. “There are people on the first floor!”

He didn’t waste time waiting for them; he leapt into the air and sped back towards the burning house. He spun to a halt above the lawn, dodged a volley of thrown stones and half-bricks, and assessed the situation. Qiang had moved almost thirty metres down the street, but a trail of groaning, semi-conscious men and women had been left in his wake, and he was now being pursued by only four.

He can handle them on his own, thought Jamie.

To his left, Ellison was still retreating from a crowd that was bigger than ever, now swollen by those who had lost interest in the burning house or lost their appetite for chasing Qiang. Her Glock was pointing steadily at them and, as Jamie watched, she twisted a dial on her belt.

“Get back now!” she shouted, her voice amplified and booming. “This is your last warning!”

A man at the front of the crowd, who was wearing a smart shirt and trousers and looked like he should have been at home checking his stock portfolio, bellowed something incoherent and leapt forward. Ellison swung the Glock towards him, and pulled the trigger. The shot was deafening; the crowd screamed as the bullet took the man in the stomach and exited through his back with a huge gout of blood that splashed across the rest of the crowd. The man fell to the ground, his hands clutching at his belly, and began to scream.

Half of the crowd scattered, stumbling and running across the road, disappearing down the narrow alleys between the houses. Those that remained, most of them splashed with blood that wasn’t theirs, stared down at the screaming man for a long moment, then turned on Ellison, their faces contorted with anger.

“Scum!” they screamed. “Dirty scum! Murdering bastards!”

But Ellison had not been remotely distracted by the wounded man; with the crowd’s attention diverted, she had holstered her Glock and drawn her MP7. The submachine gun was now resting steadily against her shoulder, its barrel tracking slowly back and forth across the crowd.

“Stay where you are,” she warned. “Nobody else needs to get hurt. Just stay right there until the police arrive.”

Her mention of the police proved the final straw; the remainder of the once seemingly untameable crowd turned tail and fled, leaving only the man screaming and bleeding on the lawn and the trail of prone figures that Qiang had managed to incapacitate as he retreated. The Chinese Operator now ran back towards his squad mate, and Jamie knew that they could handle the situation without him; he rose through the air, shot forward, and smashed through the first-floor window at the front of the house.

He landed in a bedroom thick with acrid smoke. The filters in his helmet shielded him from the worst of it, but he instantly began to cough as he searched the room, checking that there was nobody hiding underneath the bed or in the cupboard. When he was sure that it was empty, he took a deep breath and kicked the door off its hinges. A roaring ball of fire burst into the room, but he ducked beneath it and forced his way out into an inferno.

Flames had charged up the stairs, setting the walls and ceiling ablaze. The heat was overpowering, despite his uniform’s climate-control system, and for a terrible moment Jamie was transported back to another place, to a room full of burning petrol in which a man he had tried to help had been suspended, his guts spilled, his life ended at the point of a knife.

A fit of coughing cleared his mind, and he looked around the landing; there were three visible doors, one at the top of the stairs, and two more on the other side of the corridor. Jamie listened, trying to pick up the voices again, but could hear nothing over the roar of the fire; as he watched, it reached the carpet at the top of the stairs and began to spread. He flew forward, ducking his head as chunks of burning ceiling tiles rained down on him, and kicked open the first door he came to.

Screams rang out, and Jamie shoved his way into the room. The smoke inside seemed almost solid, so thick that he could not see more than a few centimetres beyond his visor. He dropped to his hands and knees, hacking and coughing, his chest wracked with pain, and crawled forward. The smoke was mercifully thinner near the floor, and in the corner of the room, seemingly as far away from the door as it was possible to be, he could make out two huddled figures clutching shapes wrapped in towels in their arms.

“Help!” cried one of the figures, its voice raw and choked. “Help us, please!”

Jamie crawled round the foot of a bed and along the wall towards them. When he was beneath the window, he held his breath, leapt up into the dense black cloud, and blindly smashed out the glass with his gloved hand. Smoke billowed out through the opening, but the change in pressure sucked flames into the room from the landing, and the two figures screamed again.