He and Isaac were enjoying a bottle of very expensive wine. Isaac’s colleagues were partying with the women. They were gross Americanos. Both were drunk. No style or class. Que te den por el culo, he thought. He had no respect for them, none at all, but he put on a wide smile and played the generous host. Business was business, after all, and they stood to make him a lot of money.

“Are you happy, Isaac?” Felipe asked.

“Yes, El Patrón.”

“Our arrangement is satisfactory to you?”

“Are you kidding? It’s perfect.”

They had discussed the arrangement for a couple of hours. Felipe would deliver his product across the border in a number of different ways: by truck and car through Juárez, by ultralight into the fields of New Mexico and Texas, and through the tunnel that he was in the process of building. Isaac owned several commercial ranches across the south-west and had a fleet of trucks to deliver the slaughtered cows and sheep to market. The product would be hidden inside the carcasses of the animals and distributed to a network of dealers that the two would arrange together.

Yes, he thought. It was satisfactory. Business came first, but there would come a time when another means of distribution was available to him and, when that happened, he would not forget the way that Isaac had spoken to him in the desert. The impudence. The unspoken threat: we will return north without speaking to you if you do not give us the reassurances that we want. Felipe had a long memory and he bore a grudge. There would be an accounting.

“I’m looking forward to seeing your new facility,” Isaac said.

“Ah, yes. The lab. It is nearly finished.”

“When will it be ready?”

“By the end of the week. Twenty pounds of meth every day. Excellent quality, too. I will show you.”

“Who is your cook?”

“An American. He used to work for a pharmaceutical company. Blue chip.”

“How’d you find him?”

“I keep my eyes open, Isaac.”

The man grinned at him. “When can we go see it?”

“Tomorrow. We will fly.”

He was interrupted by Pablo. The man was scared. “El Patrón,” he said, his face bleached of colour. “Please — may I have a word with you?”

“What is it?” he said mildly.

The man looked agonised. “In private, El Patrón, por favor.”

“Excuse me,” he said with an easy smile even as his temper was bubbling. He moved to the side, out of earshot, and glared at Pablo. “What is it?”

“Your son. It is Adolfo. He has been abducted.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“There is a gringo bounty hunter in town.”

“Working for who?”

“The Lucianos. There is a price on your son’s head — the killings in the desert.”

“And this man — he has him?”

“Yes — him and another. Adolfo had surprised the bounty hunter. We were going to take him out into the desert and kill him but, as they left the place where they had met, he was stopped by a second man. We think he was the man at the restaurant on Monday night.”

“And who is he?”

“We don’t know, El Patrón.”

His temper flared. “Do we know anything?”

“He’s been protecting the journalist from the restaurant. Adolfo visited her this morning to finish her off and this man was there. He is English. There is some connection between them.”

“Then if we cannot find him, we must find her and then we will find him.” He put down his glass of wine. Isaac was looking at him quizzically; he replaced the angry mask that had fallen across his face with a warm and reassuring smile. “Call the police,” he said quietly to Pablo. “They are to put roadblocks on every road out of Juárez. No-one leaves without the car being checked. And put the word out: a million dollars to whoever can bring me her. A million dollars if anyone can bring me him. Tell all our falcons. I want them found.”

39

Anna had been picked up from her two-bedroom flat in Cheltenham High Street at four in the morning. The car was a black BMW with tinted windows and a uniformed driver. She wasn’t used to being chauffeured and she felt a little out of place, her grubby Doc Martins against the spotless cream carpet inside the car. The man said very little as they headed west, following the A40 until it became the M40. That suited her well. She slept for the first half hour and then, roused as the sun rose into a sky of wispy low clouds, she took out her laptop and reviewed — for the hundredth time — the report she had made on John Milton.

She was excited. It wasn’t unheard of for an analyst to be sent out into the field, but it was the first time that it had happened to her. The rationale was obvious and made sense: if Milton slipped beneath the surface again, it was best to have an expert in situ to help track him down again.

And they were right: she knew him as well as anyone.

The trip also promised to furnish her with a much better idea of how Group 15 worked. They had always been unable to find out much about them, save the rumour and gossip that occasionally reached the ears of the Federal Security Service; they had certainly never been on actual operations with them. That, she knew, would stand her in excellent stead with Colonel Shcherbakov.

The driver turned into Ickenham and then, after a further few minutes, turned and slowed to a stop outside the armed guards stationed at the entrance of RAF Northolt. He showed his credentials and drove onto the base, following a route that brought him straight onto the main runway. A Gulfstream G280 was being readied for flight. It was painted gleaming white, the sunlight sparking off the fuselage. The driver took her luggage from the boot and added it to the pile of gear that two technicians were loading into the hold. Anna got out and stared at them. A large black fabric bag was open, the contents being checked. Anna saw automatic rifles, the metal glinting black and icy in the early light.

She paused at the steps to the cabin.

The pilot, performing a final external check, smiled at her. “Miss Thackeray?”

“Yes.”

“Good morning, ma’am. Up you go. They’re waiting inside.”

Anna climbed the steps and entered the jet. The cabin was plush. Decadent. Eight handcrafted leather seats, a workstation and a three-person sofa. Large porthole windows. Proper cutlery on the tables. Pewter crockery. Crystal glasses. One of the portholes faced the door and she glimpsed her reflection: the boots, the ripped jeans and the faded and frayed t-shirt looked completely out of place. She swallowed, daunted, her usual confidence knocked just a little. She almost wished that she had worn something more — well, something more appropriate.

Five men and a woman were arranging themselves around the cabin.

She felt self-conscious. “Hello,” she said.

Captain Pope turned to her. “Good morning, Miss Thackeray.”

“Morning.”

He looked at her and frowned. It was quizzical — perhaps even amused — and not disapproving. “Get yourself settled. We’ll be taking off soon.”

“Introductions first?”

He smiled patiently. “You know who I am. Lance-Corporal Hammond’s over there with the headphones. That’s Lance-Corporal Callan. Corporal Spenser and Corporal Blake are playing cards. And Sergeant Underwood is sleeping.”

Anna looked the others over.

The woman, Hammond, looked to be in her early thirties. Five eight, black hair, cut severely. Compact and powerful. Callan was tall and slender. Strikingly handsome. Hair in tight curls, so blond as to almost be white. Skin was white, too, like alabaster. A cruelty to his thin lips and unfeeling eyes that Anna found unsettling. Alien. Spenser was shorter, bald and heavily muscled. Blake was darker skinned. Something about him was a little exotic. Foreign, perhaps. Underwood had a sleeping mask over his face, obscuring his features.