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face in the dirt, arms spread wide, the pistol discarded in the road some distance away. There was some blood. The round must have gone straight through him before ricocheting off the rocks behind. The girl was over by some trees at the side of the track, on her backside, cowering, staring at him.
    ‘Did he hit you?’ Carl shouted over. ‘Are you OK?’ She didn’t reply, but he couldn’t go to her yet. He had to check the man, be sure.
    He walked over to him with the gun still ready. But from five metres back he could see enough to lower it. It was a clean headshot, though a lucky one. He had been going for the torso. The limbs were still twitching, but not with life. He turned away from it, ran back to the girl.
    ‘He tried to kill me,’ she blurted out, indignant. ‘He shot at me …’
    ‘Did he hit you? Are you hurt?’
    She shook her head. She was trembling like she was freezing. That was mild shock. He could see her looking past him at the body, her eyes very wide, her face very white.
    ‘You’re safe,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about him.’
    She stared at him, her expression aghast, then said, ‘I was running. He fired at me. I think he tried to shoot me …’
    ‘He did try to shoot you, but those guns are inaccurate. It’s almost impossible to hit a moving target, so you did well to run …’ He put the gun down and helped her stand up, checked her front, just in case. He had seen her on the ground. Her clothes were dusty. Had she been hit without realising it? Her pupils were a little dilated, like she was full of adrenalin, but there was no blood on her.
    ‘I fell over,’ she stammered. She looked confused. ‘I fell over when he started firing. He was pointing it at me and shooting …’
    ‘He was trying to kill you. And he wasn’t alone. We need to get out of here. Right now.’

 
    8
    Carl moved quickly and deliberately up the hillside, stooping low, taking a route that led from cover to cover, stopping periodic­ally to raise the rifle and hunt the ground within small arms range, to either side and above. There were broken rocks strewn all over, easy to gash your leg on if you fell, so he couldn’t move as quickly as he would like, not with the girl in tow. She was behind him a little and he had to repeatedly slow and hurry her along. She was still stunned, he thought, automatically obeying him because something frightening had happened and he was the nearest adult. She stumbled from rock to rock, less out of breath than he was, but saying nothing. It wouldn’t be long before that changed though – then she would start to ask the questions he was fearing. Like what had happened to her parents? What was he going to tell her?
    Mostly, he kept his eyes on this side of the valley. That was what he was most worried about. If they were over the other side of the valley – where he had seen Jones’s man – then they would need to have another sniper to pose a threat, and he thought they wouldn’t have hired more than one sniper. He was having difficulty understanding why they had hired even one. If they had gone to the trouble of planting a device then why not simply wait until all the targets were in the house? When Jones had told him they were using him as a kind of humane killer he had bought it only because he had imagined that the other targets were to be brutalised in some way, perhaps questioned before being executed, or worse. But a device didn’t do that. A device was haphazard – it could kill effectively, maim people, or leave them untouched. Which meant that, by using him instead, they must have really wanted a certainty that this girl was dead, and that wasn’t how Jones had explained it. And if that was the case, why detonate the device before she reached the house? That had to have been a cock-up. It was impossible to think it through clearly now, though. Right now he had to keep his concentration focused on the threat.
    He paused for breath. He still had the sterile