He was about to move on when something caught his eye at the end of the bed. When he shone his torch on it he realized it was an overnight bag. The pattern on the fabric was Louis Vuitton. It was open and half-filled with women’s clothes. Nearby was a small, shiny Chanel carrier bag. A pair of white jeans had been thrown on the bedspread next to a short denim jacket. Two slip-on Keds sneakers, in matching white, were lying on the floor next to the bed. Carver walked around the bed and over to another door that led into the en suite bathroom. On the shelf above the basin there were a couple of bags, one filled with makeup, the other, bigger one stuffed with shampoo, body lotions, and other bath-time paraphernalia.

The discovery jolted Carver out of his smooth, complacent routine. Max hadn’t told him that Narwaz had a girlfriend in town. She’d obviously arrived, changed, and then gone out again. If she was with Narwaz now, she was going to die with him tonight. Carver pulled out his phone and dialed a UK-based mobile line.

“You didn’t tell me about the woman.”

“Why would I? Makes no difference to the mission.”

“It makes a difference to me. I came here to eliminate a serious terrorist. The girlfriend’s a civilian. You know I don’t hit civilians, Max.”

Carver heard a laugh come down the line.

“Course you do. You just don’t like to admit it. That Albanian – you think his helicopter flew itself? He had a pilot, Carver.”

“The pilot knew what he was doing. He was getting paid.”

“Oh what, and the bird isn’t? Look, it doesn’t matter if the target has a girlfriend, a driver, a bodyguard, or his entire family with him. I don’t care if he invites the Dagenham Diamonds drum majorettes around to his place for a party and we blow them all to smithereens. This mad bastard wants to start a holy war. There could be millions of lives at risk. So he has to go. The collateral damage is not our problem.”

Carver said nothing. He’d spent his military service fighting blood-soaked dictators who lost wars but stayed in power. He’d gone after psychopathic terrorists who somehow morphed into peace-loving politicians, greeted with handshakes at Number 10, and smiles on the White House lawn. He and his men had seized countless old freighters and fishing boats filled with drugs or guns. But it never made a damn bit of difference. No one ever paid for what they’d done. No government ever stopped them from doing it in the first place.

Now he was able to trade with the bad guys in their own currency. He believed he made the world a better, safer place. Sometimes people got caught in the crossfire. That was the price of doing business. He forced his doubts out of his conscious mind, locking them up in the same mental dungeon where so many of his scruples, fears, and emotions had been shut away.

Max broke the silence. “You still with me there, mate? ’Cause if you’re not up for this job, just tell me now. I can’t have anyone screwing this up.”

“Tell you what, Max. Why don’t you come down here? Walk through the front door and wait sixty seconds. Find out if I’m up for it yourself.”

“That’s more like it. For a moment there, I thought you might have lost it. You’re not losing it, are you, Carver? I’m starting to worry about you.”

“Piss off, Max.”

Carver’s tone was aggressively self-confident. Inside, though, he asked himself whether Max might be right. Was he losing it? In terms of straightforward competence, he was certain the answer was no. He kept himself in good shape; he didn’t throw away his money on drugs or divorces; he wasn’t one of those military relics who hung around the pubs of Hereford and Poole telling pathetically exaggerated war stories to other old soldiers as lost and purposeless as themselves. So no, he hadn’t lost his ability to do the job. But maybe he was losing the taste for it.

He’d long ago concluded that his strength had nothing to do with muscles, guns, or explosives. It lay in his mind and his eyes, in the force of his will and the certainty of his purpose. Somewhere inside him, there was a well of barely acknowledged anger and loss that had always driven him on. But if that fuel ran dry, if that strength of will should ever be diminished, well, what then?

This really might be his last contract, after all. So he’d better make it a good one. And come out of it alive.

The third bomb went in the bedroom, taped to the wall at the head of the bed and covered up with pillows. The woman’s bag was right next to Carver as he worked. He caught a faint trace of her scent, rising from her clothes. He wondered whether she knew the truth about her lover. Did she follow the same cause? Or was she just a pretty girl about to die because she let a wealthy man seduce her?

“For Chrissakes!” he muttered to himself. “Focus.” He still had another three devices to put in place – the freezer bags filled with explosive putty. He taped one inside the cistern of the toilet, then stuck a tiny radio detonator into it. A second bag and another detonator went inside one of the eye-level kitchen cupboards. The Claymores should penetrate the room, but he wasn’t going to count on it. Too many targets had survived assassination attempts because bombs turned out to be less deadly than their users had planned. You needed to kill them twice, just to make sure.

A final bag and detonator were secured beneath a console table in the hall. Every room in the apartment had been turned into a killing field. Now he just had to make all his bombs go off.

He returned to the pack and removed a small plastic box the size of a miniradio. Two wires protruded from the bottom of the box, and on the top were an extendable aerial, an on-off switch, and a tiny red power light. He went back to the coat closet, opened up the main alarm-system box, and wired his little box into the same terminals as the door sensor. Then he switched it on. The red light at the top of the box began to pulse. The unit was on standby.

When the apartment’s alarm system was activated, the unit would be fully switched on. Any break in the alarm circuit, such as the opening of a door, would trigger a switch inside it, setting off a sixty-second timer. But unlike the alarm, it couldn’t be turned off. Tapping the code into the control panel made no difference. The timer just kept counting down the seconds till it reached zero and sent its deadly signal to the explosives hidden around the apartment.

The trap was set. Carver removed the torch and put it back in the pack, along with the rest of his equipment. He retraced his steps around the apartment, making sure that everything was exactly as he had found it and nothing had been left behind, then moved back out the way he had come in, resetting the alarm as he went. The next time anyone came in through the front door, the whole place would blow.

At the bottom of the stairs, Carver turned toward the back door and went out into the courtyard. He took off his pack and extracted everything he’d need for the rest of the operation, along with the black garbage bag. He opened it up and put the pack and its remaining contents inside, then walked down the street to an alley beside a local bistro, where he slung it into a huge metal bin, burying it beneath a layer of restaurant trash.

As Carver made his way back to his bike, he called Max.

“The apartment’s fixed. Where do you want me now?”

He received his instructions, making sure that he was absolutely clear about every stage of the operation. For now, at any rate, those moments of weakness in the apartment had passed.