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wrists, then the other.
    That man will be the death of me, her mother had said of her father.
    The following week she died in a car crash.
    That man will—

7
     
    2222 hours.
     
    At its most south-easterly point Sir Herbert Road abruptly ended and the Rock became a sheer cliff, offering no passage along the south coast. Gardner knew he had no choice but to loop back north along the Devil’s Tower Road. With Terry Gill already en route to the King’s Hotel, Gardner needed to be there fucking yesterday. On foot wouldn’t cut it.
    A Ford Focus drifted towards him. The only car in sight. He hid the Sig behind his back and ambled into the middle of the road. The Focus came to a halt eight metres from Gardner, the headlights blinding him. Shielding his eyes with his left hand, he scoped the driver. Male, balding, forties. Beer gut threatening to burst out of his buttoned-up Hawaiian shirt. No threat.
    ‘Help you?’ the guy said as he stepped on to the road and approached Gardner.
    ‘Give me your car.’
    ‘Oh shit.’
    The man was determined to leg it. By the time he’d returned to the car and flung open the door, Gardner had whipped out the Sig. The gun snatched the guy’s attention. He paused, one foot inside the car, his body shivering with fear.
    ‘Don’t… don’t kill me. I have a wife and two daughters.’
    ‘Make yourself scarce then.’
    The man ran towards the beach faster than his fat body had ever run. Gardner hopped into the car and raced back up Devil’s Tower Road and down Winston Churchill Avenue. He dumped the wheels outside the King’s Hotel and scrambled up the steps.
    The automatic doors couldn’t open quickly enough. A woman at reception asked if she could help him.
    ‘Maintenance,’ he shouted back to her as he broke through the emergency doors to the right of reception, then bolted up the stairs. Screw this one up and you can wave goodbye to a future in the Regiment, he told himself.
    I won’t.
    Three flights up. His calves and quads had healed since the gruelling slog through the favela, muscle fibres enlarging as they repaired themselves. He scaled the treads effortlessly. His palms depressed the crash bar. The door obliged.
    He faced a wide corridor, musty and air-conned and flanked by a series of rooms. A sign on the beige wall indicated left for rooms 30–34 and straight ahead for 35–39. So, the fifth door. Forty metres, end of the corridor, next to the lift.
    Gill was standing outside room 39. His left hand rested on the door knob. In his right was a Glock 9mm pistol, a Gemtech Tundra suppressor fixed to the end of the barrel and a GTL-22 tactical light attached to the underside, shining a white-hot spotlight on the carpet. The bang of the crash bar had alerted him. His head shot up. His face did a flip book of emotions as Gardner unhooked the P228 from his jeans.
    Thirty-five metres and closing. Gill raised the Glock. Gardner knew he had to peel off a shot before the Glock was fully level: the tactical light acted as a powerful flashlight to disorientate targets, and would blind him when he fired.
    Twenty-five metres. Gardner went for the shot.
    Ca-rack!
    Clink!
    Gill hissed as the bullet pinged his Glock, knocking it from his hand. He gripped his wrist with his left hand.
    ‘What the fuck?’
    ‘Step away, Terry.’
    ‘Fuck it. Get it over with then.’
    Gardner would have happily pulled the trigger. But first he wanted to find out the link between Gill and Hands. Killen’s waffle about the blood-diamond gig didn’t ring true, because Hands had been blacklisted on the Circuit for a good few years. He was more likely to be down the bookies’ in Dagenham than in some African hell-hole.
    ‘How the fuck did you find me?’
    ‘I met Johnny and Eddie. On a fishing trip.’
    Gill grunted. Time hadn’t been kind to the ex-Para. His muscles were flabby, his pecs drooping halfway to man-boobs. Love handles sloped out at his sides. His ginger hair was thinning, the whites of his