As he tightened them, he thought about the two other men on the boat, how the apparently casual, even amateurish appearance both presented to the world hid huge reserves of courage, competence, and, when necessary, ruthlessness. He thought back to all the times they had given, taken, and passed on instructions, about the precision with which they were trained to recall and repeat what was said to them. They all knew the devastating effect that even tiny misunderstandings could create in times of war.

Carver went back over all that had been said and he knew that he had been betrayed. He wondered whether both of his old comrades had been in this together. One of them he knew now was an enemy; the other might yet be an innocent dupe. So what did that make him? A dupe, certainly, but hardly innocent. The pieces of a puzzle that had been jumbled in his mind began to fall into place and a picture emerged. It was a portrait of himself, but it was hardly flattering. It showed a man who had been fooled, not once but repeatedly, a man who had extended his trust to a tiny handful of people and chosen the wrong ones every time. One of these days, if he lived that long, he would go back over it all in his mind and work out, not where he had gone wrong – that was now obvious – but why. These men had been his friends, his brothers-in-arms. Once they had been willing to risk their lives for him. What had he done since then to make them want to betray him? Perhaps you didn’t have to do anything. His mother had given him up just for being born.

He’d dealt with that. He could deal with this.

So where would the battle take place? A yacht in a storm was a lousy place for a fight. It was cramped, it was constantly pitching and rolling, and everyone onboard was wearing wet, bulky clothing. Sticking a gun in a set of waterproof pants was no problem. Getting it out in a hurry was a lot trickier. And standing steady enough to take an accurate shot would be damn near impossible.

The key point was the hatch and the ladder between the cockpit up on deck and the cabin down below. Anyone caught there would be a sitting duck. The next few hours would consist of an unacknowledged jockeying for position in which two, maybe all three of the men onboard would silently compete to be in the right place when the moment finally came for one of them to show his hand. Meanwhile, Carver intended to stack the odds in his favor.

Stashed away in the same storage space as the weatherproof clothing, Carver found what he’d need later. For now, though, he was going to keep things nice and civil, as if he still thought they were all good friends. Them against the world, just like the good old days.

He walked back to the cockpit hatch and stuck his head through.

“Anyone fancy a cup of coffee?”

He took the orders and put the kettle on the galley’s gas stove. He filled three mugs, added milk and sugar, and went back up on deck. Now there was one last task.

The yacht’s mast was supported by ropes, or shrouds, that stretched up to its top from the side of the hull. They were kept taut, away from the side of the mast, by two horizontal spars, or spreaders. A white plastic pot, about eighteen inches high, had been hoisted up to the port-side spreader. The pot was a radar reflector, designed to ensure that the yacht’s position was known to passing vessels. It was secured by a line tied to a cleat at the bottom of the mast.

Carver made his way over to the cleat. He loosened the line, held it in his hand, and called back to the cockpit, “Sorry, Bobby, this has got to go.”

“What are you talking about?” shouted Faulkner.

“I can’t be on anyone’s radar screen.”

“Have you gone totally mad? We’re about to do a night crossing of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Five hundred ships sail along or across the Channel every day, and if any one of them so much as touches us, it’ll be like an elephant stepping on a matchbox. We’ll sink. And then you’ll never enter the bloody country at all. Nor will the rest of us.”

Carver gave an affable, who-cares grin. “Then we’ll just have to keep our eyes open, won’t we?”

Alix was alone in the darkness. They had treated her well enough so far. The first night, Yuri had let her sleep in peace. That had surprised her. It wasn’t his usual technique. During the day that followed, the questions were insistent but polite, even civilized. How did she meet the man? Why did she go with him? Why hadn’t she killed him? Had she even tried? Since she had let him live, what had she learned from him? Where was the computer? And what had she given away?

Only that last question had been asked with any undercurrent, Yuri barely bothering to disguise the implication that more than information was at stake. Still, she had not been mistreated. The chalet staff had treated her with a distant familiarity, more like an occasional guest than a prisoner. She had been served the same food as everyone else, been allowed to drink the same wine.

But all the while she’d known it couldn’t stay this way forever. Sooner or later, Yuri Zhukovski’s patience would run out. He’d want answers to darker, deeper questions and he wouldn’t care how much he had to do to her to get them. Sooner or later, he would grow bored of simple conversation and resort to the physical methods that would tell him what he needed to know.

Yuri was operating under intense pressure, that much was obvious. A crisis was brewing somewhere in the vast web of corporations that formed his business empire. He had spent hours shut away in his study calling his most senior associates and negotiating with clients, while Alix was left under Kursk’s icy supervision, his eyes following her every movement with an unbroken, implacable hatred, not just for her personally (though that was enough) but for everything she represented.

Whenever Yuri emerged to continue his interrogation, she could see the stress that gripped him in the grinding tension of his jaw and the obsessive clenching and releasing of his fists. She would pay for that tension, she was certain. He would let it loose on her.

Eventually she had been ordered upstairs and left by herself in a heavily shuttered room until he was ready to deal with her. She had little idea how long she had spent trying to prepare for what was bound to come. It might have been one hour, it might just as easily have been three. Time seemed to move at a different speed in that velvety darkness.

And then she heard footsteps in the hallway outside. She knew what they meant. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to stay calm, focusing on her pounding heart and slowing her pulse as she let her breath go. She must stay still now, stay silent. There would be screaming enough in the hours to come.