Predator: A Crossbow Novel (Hector Cross Book 3)
Predator: Chapter 1

Hector Cross woke with a sense of dread and lay for a moment, trying to orientate himself. Then he reluctantly opened his eyes, not knowing what to expect, and he saw it through the open double doors of the bedroom coming down the veranda toward him. The moonlight glinted in shifting patterns of silver over the ridges of its wet scales. It waddled toward him with its claws scraping softly over the concrete floor. The brute’s tail swung from side to side with every ponderous pace. Its yellow fangs overlapped its lower lip in a cold humorless grin. Hector’s throat constricted and his chest tightened as a wave of panic swept over him. The crocodile thrust its head through the open doors and paused. Its gaze focused upon him. Its eyes were yellow as those of a lion, with black slits for pupils. Only then did Hector realize how massive the creature was. It blocked the doorway completely and towered above Hector as he lay on the bed, cutting off any chance of his escape.

Hector recovered swiftly from the shock and rolled off the mattress. He seized the handle of the drawer of the bedside table in which he kept his 9-mm Heckler & Koch pistol and yanked it open. His fingernails scrabbled frantically over the woodwork as he groped for the weapon, but it was gone. The drawer was empty. He was defenseless.

He rolled back to face the gigantic reptile, coming up into a sitting position with his legs folded under him and his back pressed to the headboard of the bed. His hands were crossed at the wrists in front of his face in a defensive karate posture. “Yah! Get away from me!” he yelled, but the beast showed no sign of fear. Instead its jaws gaped wide, exposing the rows of jagged yellow fangs, as long and as thick as Hector’s own forefingers. Between them were packed the shreds of rotten meat from the prey it had devoured. The stench of its breath filled the room with a choking miasma. He was trapped. There was no escape. His fate was inevitable.

Then the head of the crocodile changed shape again and began to assume a monstrous human form that was even more horrifying than the reptilian image had been. It was mutilated and decomposing. Its eyes were blind and milky. But Hector recognized it instantly. It was the head of the man who had murdered his wife.

“Bannock!” Hector hissed as he drew back from the hated image. “Carl Bannock! No, it can’t be you! You’re dead. I killed you and fed your filthy corpse to the crocodiles. Leave me and go back into the depths of Hell where you belong.” He was gabbling hysterical nonsense but he could not prevent himself.

Then he felt disembodied hands reach out from the darkness of the room to seize his shoulders and begin to shake him.

“Hector, darling! Wake up! Please wake up.”

He tried to resist the sweet, feminine voice and the pull of the hands but they were insistent. Then with burgeoning relief he began to untangle himself from the coils of the nightmare which had enmeshed him. At last he came fully awake.

“Is it you, Jo? Tell me it’s you.” Desperately Hector groped for her in the darkness of the bedroom.

“Yes, my darling. It’s me. Hush now. It’s all right now. I am here.”

“The lights,” he blurted. “Switch on the lights!”

She wriggled out of his arms and reached for the light switch above the headboard. The room was flooded with light, and he recognized it and remembered where they were and why.

They were guests in a medieval castle in Scotland on the banks of the River Tay on a chilly night in autumn.

Hector picked up his wristwatch from the table on his side of the bed and glanced at the dial. His hands were still shaking. “My God, it’s almost three in the morning!” He reached for Jo Stanley and held her to his naked chest. After a while his breathing settled. With the reflexes of a trained warrior he had shaken off the debilitating effects of the nightmare, and he whispered to her, “I do apologize for the alarums and excursions, my love. However, the damage is done. We are both awake, so we might as well take full advantage of the moment.”

“You are incorrigible and indefatigable, Hector Cross,” she told him primly, but made no effort to resist his hands; rather she clung to him and sought out his lips with hers.

“You know that I don’t understand big words,” he told her and they were silent again. But after a moment she mumbled into his mouth without pulling away from him.

“You frightened me, darling.”

He kissed her harder, as if to silence her, and she acquiesced as she felt his manhood stiffening and swelling against her belly. She was still lubricious with their earlier lovemaking and almost at once she wanted him as much as he did her. She rolled on to her back with her arms locked about his neck and as she pulled him over on top of her she let her thighs fall apart and reached up for him with her hips, gasping as she felt him slide deeply into her.

It was far too intense to last long. They mounted together swiftly and irresistibly to the giddy summit of their arousal; then, still joined, they plunged over it into the abyss. They returned slowly from the far-off places where passion had carried them and neither of them could speak until their breathing had calmed. At last she thought that he had fallen asleep in her arms until he spoke softly, in almost a whisper: “I didn’t say anything, did I?”

She was ready with the lie. “Nothing coherent. Only some wild gibberish that didn’t make any sense.” She felt him relax against her and she carried on with the charade: “What were you dreaming about, anyway?”

“It was terrifying,” he replied solemnly, his laughter almost hidden beneath his serious tone. “I dreamed that I pulled the hook out of the mouth of a fifty-pound salmon.”

It was an unspoken understanding between them. They had come to it as the only way they could keep the fragile light of their love for one another burning. Jo Stanley had been with Hector during the hunt for the two men who had murdered his wife. When at last they had succeeded in capturing them in the Arabian castle they had built for themselves in the depths of the jungles of central Africa, Jo had expected that Hector would hand the two killers over to the United States authorities for trial and punishment.

Jo was a lawyer and she believed implicitly in the rule of law. On the other hand Hector made his own rules. He lived in a world of violence wherein wrongs were avenged with biblical ruthlessness: an eye for an eye and a life for a life.

Hector had executed the first of the two murderers of his wife without recourse to the law. This was a man named Carl Bannock. Hector had fed him to his own pet crocodiles in the grounds of the Arabian castle where Hector had apprehended him. The great reptiles had torn Bannock’s living body to shreds and devoured it. Fortuitously Jo had not been present to witness the capture and execution of Carl Bannock. So afterward she had been able to feign ignorance of the deed.

However, she had been with Hector when he had captured the second killer. This was a thug who used the alias Johnny Congo. He was already under sentence of death by the Texas court, but he had escaped. Jo had intervened fiercely to prevent Hector Cross taking the law into his own hands for a second time. Ultimately she had threatened to end their own relationship if Hector refused to hand Congo over to the law enforcement agencies of the state of Texas.

Reluctantly Hector had complied with her demands. It had taken several months but in the end the Texan court had confirmed the original sentence of death on Johnny Congo and had also found him guilty of further multiple murders committed since his escape from detention. They had set the date for his execution for 15 November, which was only two weeks ahead.

Jesus Christ, Johnny, what happened to your face?”

Shelby Weiss, senior partner of the Houston law firm of Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett—or Hebrew, Wetback and WASP as their less successful rivals liked to call them—was sitting in a small cubicle in Building 12 of the Allen B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, Texas, otherwise known as Death Row. The walls to either side of him were painted a faded, tatty lime green, and he was speaking into an old-fashioned black telephone handset, held in his left hand. In front of him he had a yellow legal pad and a line of sharpened pencils. On the other side of the glass in front of Weiss, in a cubicle of exactly similar dimensions but painted white, stood Johnny Congo, his client.

Congo had just been repatriated to the United States, having been rearrested in the Gulf State of Abu Zara several years after breaking out of the Walls Unit, as the Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, was known. He had spent most of that time when he was on the run in Africa, carving out a personal kingdom in the tiny nation of Kazundu on the shores of Lake Tanganyika with his former prison-bitch, turned business associate and life partner, Carl Bannock. That was Weiss’s connection. His firm had represented Bannock in his dealings with the family trust set up by his late adoptive father, Henry Bannock. The work had been entirely legitimate and extremely lucrative, for Carl Bannock and Shelby Weiss alike. Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett also represented Bannock in his role as an exporter of coltan, the ore from which tantalum, a metal more valuable than gold that is an essential element in a huge array of electrical products, was refined. Since the ore originated in the eastern Congo and could thus be considered a conflict mineral, no different from blood diamonds, this aspect of Carl Bannock’s affairs was more morally debatable. But even so, he was still entitled to the best representation money could buy. If Shelby Weiss had reason to suspect that Bannock was living with an escaped felon with whom he engaged in a variety of distasteful and even illegal activities, from drug-taking to sex-trafficking, he had no actual proof of any wrongdoing. Besides, Kazundu had no extradition treaty with the U.S., so the point was moot.

But then Johnny Congo had turned up in the Middle East, captured by an ex-British Special Forces officer called Hector Cross, who had been married to Henry Bannock’s widow, Hazel. So that, Weiss figured, made him Carl Bannock’s brother-in law, except that there didn’t seem to be much brotherly love in this family. Hazel had been murdered. Cross had blamed Carl Bannock and had set out to get his revenge. Now Bannock had vanished from the face of the earth.

However, Hector Cross had seized Johnny Congo and handed him over to U.S. Marshals in Abu Zara, which did have an extradition treaty with the United States. So here he was, back on Death Row, and Congo wasn’t a pretty sight. He had obviously been badly beaten.

Johnny Congo was crammed into his cubicle like a cannonball in a matchbox. He was a huge man, six foot six tall, and built to match. He was wearing a prisoner’s uniform of a white, short-sleeved cotton polo shirt, tucked into elasticized, pyjama-style pants, also white. There were two large black capital letters on his back—“DR”—signifying that he was a Death Row inmate. The uniform was designed to be loose, but on Johnny Congo it was as tight as a sausage skin and the buttons strained to contain the knotted muscles of his chest, shoulders and upper arms, which gave him the look of a Minotaur: the half-man, half-bull monster of Greek mythology. Years of decadence and self-indulgence had made Congo run to fat, but he wore his gut like a weapon, just one more way to barge and bully his way through life. His wrists and ankles were manacled and chained. But the aspects of his appearance that had caught his attorney’s attention were the white splint crudely placed over his splayed and mangled nose; the distended flesh and swollen skin around his battered mouth; and the way his rich, dark West African skin had been given the red and purple sheen of over-ripe plums.

“Guess I must have walked into a door, or had some kind of accident,” Congo mumbled into his handset.

“Did the Marshals do this to you?” asked Weiss, trying to sound concerned but barely able to conceal the excitement in his voice. “If they did, I can use it in court. I mean, I read the report and it clearly states that you were already in restraints when they took you into custody in Abu Zara. Point is, if you posed no threat to them and couldn’t defend yourself, they had no grounds to use physical force against you. It’s not much, but it’s something. And we need all the help we can get. The execution’s set for November the fifteenth. That’s less than three weeks away.”

Congo shook his massive, shaven head. “Weren’t no Marshal did this to me. It was that white sonofabitch Hector Cross. I said something to him. Guess he took exception to it.”

“What did you say?”

Congo’s shoulders quivered as he gave a low, rumbling laugh, as menacing as the sound of distant thunder. “I told him it was me gave the order to kill, and I quote, ‘your fucking whore wife.’”

“Oh man . . .” Weiss ran the back of his right hand across his forehead, then put the handset back to his mouth. “Did anyone else hear you?”

“Oh yeah, everyone else heard me. I shouted it real loud.”

“Dammit, Johnny, you’re not making it any easier for yourself.”

Congo stepped forward and leaned down, placing his elbows on the shelf in front of him. He stared through the glass with eyes that held such fury in them that Weiss flinched. “I had grounds, man, I had grounds,” Congo growled. “That sonofabitch Cross took the only person I ever cared about in my whole fricking life and fed him to the goddamn crocodiles. They ate him alive. Did you hear me? Those scaly-assed mothers ate Carl alive! But Cross was dumb. He made two mistakes.”

“Yeah, what kind of mistakes?”

“First, he didn’t feed me to the crocodiles also. I wouldn’t have known anything about it if he had. I was out, man, pumped full of some kind of sedative, wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

Weiss lifted his right hand, still holding the pencil, with his palm toward the glass. “Whoa! Hold up. How do you know about these crocodiles if you were unconscious at the time they were eating your buddy?”

“Heard Cross’s men mouthing off about it on the plane, laughing their asses off about the jaws crunching, Carl screaming for mercy. Lucky for them I was all tied up to a chair, wrapped in a cargo net. If I could have moved I’d have ripped their heads off and shoved them up their butts.”

“But you don’t have any proof that Carl is dead, right? I mean, you didn’t see a body?”

“How could I see a body?” Congo cried, his voice rising indignantly. “I was out cold; Carl was in the crocodile’s guts! Why do you wanna ask me a stupid question like that?”

“Because of the Bannock Trust,” said Weiss quietly. “As long as there is no proof that Carl Bannock is dead, and Hector Cross sure won’t produce any proof, because that would make him a murderer, then the trust will be obliged to keep paying Carl his share of company profits. And anyone who, hypothetically, had access to Carl’s bank accounts would therefore benefit from that money. So, let me ask you again, for the record: do you have any direct, personal proof that Carl Bannock is dead?”

“No, sir,” said Johnny emphatically. “All I heard was people talking, never saw nothing, ’cause of being sedated at the time. And, come to think of it, I was still kinda spacey from the drugs when I was in the airplane. Could have been imagining what I heard, maybe dreaming, something like that.”

“I agree. Sedative drugs can certainly create an effect akin to intoxication. It’s entirely possible that you never actually heard any conversation like the one you initially reported. Now, you said Cross made two mistakes. What was the second one?”

“He didn’t dump me out the back of the plane. All he had to do was open the ramp at the back of the plane, slide me down it and just watch me fall . . .” Johnny Congo whistled like the sound of a dropping weight. “. . . all the way down, twenty-five thousand feet till—bam!” He slammed a sledgehammer fist into his palm.

“You would’ve made a helluva crater,” Weiss observed drily.

“Yeah, I would that.” Congo laughed and nodded his great bald head. “And if it’d been Cross in that chair and me lookin’ at him, I’ve have tossed him outta there like a human Frisbee. Wouldn’t think twice about it. He wanted to do it, too. Woulda done, weren’t for that dumbass bitch of his shooting her mouth off.”

Weiss looked back down at his notepad, frowning as he leafed back to what he’d written on an earlier page. “I’m sorry, I thought you said she was deceased.”

“I said I had his wife killed, don’t be shy about it. But this was a different bitch, the one he started up with after the wife was dead. She’s an attorney, jus’ like you. Anyway, Cross called her Jo. This bitch started up whining at Cross about how he shouldn’t have killed Carl. How he’d gone far beyond the law of America . . . yeah, ‘the law that I practice and hold dear,’ that’s what she called it. And what it came right down to was if Cross offed me too, same as he’d done Carl, he wasn’t getting no more of her sweet pussy ever again.” Congo shrugged his shoulders. “Dunno why Cross let her whip him like that. I wouldna took it, some stupid slut running off her mouth, lecturing me about right and wrong. I’d have told her, ‘Your pussy belongs to me, bitch.’ Teach her a lesson so she don’t make the same mistake twice, you know what I’m saying?”

“I get the picture, yeah,” said Weiss. “But do you? Let me paint it for you, just in case. When you broke out of the Walls Unit—”

Congo nodded. “Long time ago, now.”

“Yes it was, but the law doesn’t care about that, because when you broke out, you were two weeks away from your execution date. You’d been found guilty of multiple homicides, not to mention all the ones carried out at your command during the period of your incarceration. You’d exhausted every possible avenue of appeal. They were going to strap you to a gurney, stick a needle in your arm and just watch until you died. And here’s your problem, Johnny. That’s what’s going to happen now. You were a fugitive. You were reapprehended. Now you’re right back where you were, the day you climbed into a laundry sack, got thrown in the back of a truck and drove right out through the main gates and on to the Interstate.”

If Weiss had been trying to impress Congo with the gravity of his situation, he failed. The big man’s face twisted into a ghastly, wounded parody of a smile. “Man, that was a sweet operation, though, wasn’t it?” he said.

Weiss kept his expression impassive. “I’m an officer of the law, Johnny, I can’t congratulate you on what was obviously a criminal activity. But, yes, speaking objectively I can see that both the planning and the execution of the escape were carried out to a high standard of efficiency.”

“Right. So how efficient you gonna be for me now?”

Shelby Weiss was wearing a $5,000 pair of hand-tooled Black Cabaret Deluxe boots from Tres Outlaws in El Paso. His suit came from Gieves and Hawkes at No. 1 Savile Row, London. His shirts were made for him in Rome. He ran his hand down the lapel of his jacket and said quietly, “I didn’t get to be dressed this way by being bad at my job. I’ll tell you what I’m going to attempt—the impossible. I’ll call in every favor I’m owed, use every connection I possess, have my smartest associates go through every case they can think of with a fine-toothed comb, see if I can replace some grounds for an appeal. I’ll work my ass off, right up to the very last second. But I like to be totally honest with my clients, which is why I’ve got to tell you, I don’t hold out much hope.”

“Huh,” Congo grunted. “All right, I’m on your wavelength . . .” He stood up straight, sighed and lifted his chained wrists so he could scratch the back of his neck. Then he spoke calmly, dropping the tough-guy, gangster attitude, almost as if he was talking to himself as much as Weiss. “All my life I’ve had people look at me and I know they’re thinking: He’s just a big, dumb nigger. The amount of times I’ve been called a gorilla—sometimes, they even think it’s a compliment. Like in High School, playing left tackle for the Nacogdoches Golden Dragons, Coach Freeney, he would say, ‘You played like a rampaging gorilla today, Congo,’ meaning I’d busted up the sons of bitches in the other team’s defense, so some pretty-boy cracker quarterback could make his fancy throws and get all the cheerleaders wet. And I’d say, ‘Thank you, Coach,’ practically calling him ‘Massa.’”

Now Congo’s intensity started building up again. “But inside, I knew I wasn’t dumb. Inside I knew I was better than them. And inside, right now, I understand exactly where I stand. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to contact a kid I used to know, D’Shonn Brown.”

Weiss looked surprised: “What, the D’Shonn Brown?”

“What you mean? Only one guy I’ve ever heard of by that name.”

“Just that D’Shonn Brown is kind of a prodigy. A kid from the projects, not even thirty yet and he’s already on his way to his first billion. Good-looking as hell, got a great story, all the pretty ladies lining up outside his bedroom. That’s some friend you got there.”

“Well, tell the truth, it’s been a while since I saw him, so I ain’t fully up to date with his situation, but he’ll know exactly who I am. Tell him the date they’re taking me up to Huntsville for the execution. Then say I’d really like to see him, you know, maybe for a visit or something, before they put me on that gurney and give me the needle. Me and his brother Aleutian were real tight. Loot got killed in London, England, and it was Cross that done it. So we got that personal issue in common, losing a loved one to the same killer. I’d like to express my sympathies to D’Shonn, shake his hand, maybe give him a bear hug so he knows we’re tight too.”

“You know that won’t be possible,” Weiss pointed out. “The state of Texas no longer allows Death Row prisoners to have any form of physical contact with anyone. The best he can do is pay his respects to your body, when you are gone.”

“Well, tell him anyhow. Let him know what I’d like. Now, I can give you a power of attorney over a bank account, right, to pay for legal expenses and suchlike?”

“Yes, that’s possible.”

“OK, so I have an account at a private bank, Wertmuller-Maier in Geneva. I’m gonna give you the account number and all the codes you’ll need. First thing I want you to do is get someone to empty my safe-deposit box there and send it back to you, express delivery. I want the box unlocked and then sealed, with wax or some shit like that, so it can’t be tampered with. Then withdraw three million dollars from my account. Two mill’s for you, like a down payment on account. The other mill’s for D’Shonn. Give him the deposit box too; he can open it. Tell him it’s personal memorabilia, shit that means a lot to me, and I want it buried with me in my coffin. I’m talking about my coffin, ’cause I want D’Shonn to organize my funeral service and the wake afterward, make it a real event folks ain’t ever gonna forget. Ask him from me to get all the folks from back in the day, when we was all boys in the hood, to come along and see me off, pay their respects. Tell him I’d really appreciate it. Can you do that?”

“A million dollars, just for a funeral and a wake?” Weiss asked.

“Hell, yeah, I want a procession of hearses and limos, a service in, like, a cathedral or something, and a slap-up party, celebrate my time here on earth: caviar and prime ribs to eat, Cristal and Grey Goose at the bar, all that good shit. Listen, a million’s nothing. I read that geeky little mother started up Facebook spent ten mill on his wedding. Come to think of it, Shelby, make it two mill for D’Shonn. Tell him to lay it on real thick.”

“If that’s what you want, sure, I can do that.”

“Yeah, that’s what I want, and impress upon him that this is the wish of a dying man. That’s some serious shit, right?”

“Yes it is.”

“Well, you make sure he understands that.”

“Absolutely.”

“OK, so here’s what you’ll need to get into that account.” Congo recited an account number, a name and then a long series of apparently random letters and numbers. Shelby Weiss wrote it down meticulously in his notebook, and then looked up.

“OK, I have got all that down. Is there anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.

“Nothing else.” Johnny shook his head. “Just come back when you have done everything I told you.”

Aleutian Brown had been a gangbanger. He ran with the Maalik Angels, who liked to present themselves as warriors of Allah, though most of them would have struggled to read a comic book, let alone the Koran. But Aleutian’s kid brother D’Shonn was a very different proposition. He’d had it just as tough as Aleutian growing up, he was just as angry at the world, and was just as mean an individual. The difference was, he hid it a whole lot better and was smart enough to learn from what happened to his brother and all the homies he’d hung out with. Most of them were in jail or in the ground.

So D’Shonn worked hard, stayed out of trouble and made it into Baylor on an academic scholarship. On graduating, he won another full scholarship to Stanford Law School, where he took a particular interest in criminal law. Having graduated with honors, and breezed through the California state bar exam, D’Shonn Brown was perfectly placed to choose a stellar career path, either as a defense attorney, or a hotshot young prosecutor in a DA’s office. But his purpose in studying the law had always been to better equip himself to break it. He saw himself as a twenty-first-century Godfather. So in public he presented himself as a rising star in the business community, with a strong interest in charitable activities: “I just want to give back,” as he used to say to admiring reporters. And in private, he pursued his interests in drug-dealing, extortion, human-trafficking and prostitution.

D’Shonn understood at once that there was a clear subtext to Johnny Congo’s message. He was certain Shelby Weiss could see it too, but there was a game to be played so that both men could deny, on oath, that their conversation had been about anything other than a condemned man’s desire for a fancy funeral. But just the way Johnny had emphasized that he wanted D’Shonn to see him and to hug him before he died, the way he’d talked about all the vehicles he wanted to be in the procession—well, you didn’t need to be an A-grade student to see what that was all about.

Still, if Johnny Congo wanted the world to think D’Shonn’d been asked to organize a funeral and wake, well, that’s what he was going to do. Having accessed the full $2 million allocated to him from Johnny Congo’s Geneva account he decided that an event on the scale Johnny had in mind couldn’t be held in his home town of Nacogdoches. So he made inquiries at a number of Houston’s most prestigious cemeteries before securing a lakeside plot at a place called Sunset Oaks, where the grass was as immaculate as a fairway at Augusta and gently rippling waters sparkled in the sun. A fine marble headstone was ordered. Several of the city’s most prestigious and expensive florists, caterers and party venues, including a number of five-star hotels, were then presented with lavish specifications and invited to tender for contracts.

All these inquiries were accompanied by supporting emails and phone calls. When deals were agreed, printed contracts were hand-delivered by messengers so that there could be no doubt that they reached their destinations and were received. Deposits were paid and properly accounted for. More than 200 invitations were sent. Anyone who wanted to see evidence of a genuine intention to fulfil the stated wishes of Johnny Congo would be presented with more than they could handle.

But while all this was going on, D’Shonn was also having private, unrecorded conversations about very different matters connected to Jonnny Congo as he played around at the Golf Club of Houston, where he had a Junior Executive membership; lunched on flounder sashimi and jar-jar duck at Uchi; or dined on filet mignon Brazilian-style at Chama Gaúcha. Leaving no written record whatever, he handed over large amounts of cash to intermediaries who passed the thick wads of dead presidents on to the kind of men whose only interest in funerals lies in supplying the dead bodies. These individuals were then told to coordinate their activities via Rashad Trevain, a club-owner whose House of Rashad holding company was 30 percent owned by the DSB Investment Trust, registered in the Cayman Islands.

D’Shonn Brown was known to take no active part in the running of Rashad’s business. When he was photographed at the opening of yet another new joint, he’d tell reporters, “I’ve been tight with Rashad since we were skinny-ass little kids in first grade. When he came to me with his concepts for a new approach to upscale entertainment it was my pleasure to invest. It’s always good to help a friend, right? Turned out my man is about as good at his job as I am at mine. He’s doing great, all his customers are guaranteed a good time, and I’m getting a great return on my money. Everyone’s happy.”

Except for anyone who crossed D’Shonn or Rashad, of course. They weren’t happy at all.

Engines to neutral. Anchors away!” In the Atlantic Ocean, 100 miles off the northern coast of Angola, Captain Cy Stamford brought the FPSO Bannock A to rest in 4,000 feet of water. Of all the vessels in the Bannock Oil fleet, this one had the least imaginative or evocative name, and she didn’t look any better than she sounded. A mighty supertanker may not possess the elegance of an America’s Cup racing yacht, but there is something undeniably magnificent about its awesome size and presence, something majestic about its progress across the world’s mightiest oceans. Bannock A was certainly built to supertanker scale. Her hull was long and wide enough to accommodate three stadium-sized professional soccer pitches laid end-to-end. Her tanks could hold around 100 million gallons of oil, weighing in at over 300,000 imperial tons. But she was as graceless as a hippo in a tutu.

The day he took command, Stamford had Skyped his wife, back home in Norfolk, Virginia. “How long’ve I been doing this, Mary?” he asked.

“Longer than either of us care to think about, dear,” she replied.

“Exactly. And in all that time I don’t think I ever set to sea in an uglier tub than this one. Even her mother couldn’t love her.”

The veteran skipper, who had spent more than forty years in the U.S. Navy and the Merchant Marine, was speaking no more than the truth. With her blunt, shorn-off bows and box-like hull Bannock A resembled nothing more than a cross between a gigantic barge and a grossly oversized container. To make matters worse, her decks were covered from end to end with a massive superstructure of steel pipes, tanks, columns, boilers, cranes and cracking units, with what looked like a chimney, well over 100 feet tall and surrounded by a web of supporting girders, painted red and white, rising from the stern.

Yet there was a reason that the board of Bannock Oil had sanctioned the expenditure of more than $1 billion to have this huge floating eyesore constructed at the Hyundai shipyards in Ulsan, South Korea, and then appointed their most experienced captain to command her on a maiden voyage of more than 12,000 miles. As FPSO Bannock A made her slow, cumbersome way through the Korean Straits and into the Yellow Sea, then on across the South China Sea; past Singapore and through the Malacca Straits to the Indian Ocean; all the way to the Cape of Good Hope and then around into the Atlantic and up the west coast of Africa, the moneymen in Houston had been counting down the days to payback time. For the initials FPSO stood for “floating production, storage and offloading” and they described a kind of alchemy. Very soon Bannock A would start taking up the oil produced by the rig that stood about three miles north of where she now lay at anchor; the first to come into operation on the Magna Grande oilfield that Bannock Oil had discovered more than two years earlier. Up to 80,000 barrels a day would be piped to Bannock A’s onboard refinery, which would distil the thick, black crude into a variety of highly saleable substances from lubricating oil to gasoline. Then she would store the various products in her tanks ready for Bannock Oil tankers to take them on to the final destinations. The total anticipated production of the Magna Grande field was in excess of 200 million barrels. Unless the world suddenly lost its taste for petrochemicals, Bannock Oil could expect a total return in excess of $20 billion.

So Bannock A was going to earn her keep many, many times over. And it wouldn’t be long now before she got right down to work.

Hector Cross unclipped the leather top of the Thermos hip flask, removed the stainless steel stirrup cup contained within it, unscrewed the stopper, poured the steaming hot Bullshot into the cup, and drank. He gave a deep sigh of pleasure. The rain had stayed away, which always had to be considered a mercy in Scotland, and there had even been a few glorious shafts of sunlight, slicing through the clouds and illuminating the trees that clustered along the riverbank, creating a glorious mosaic of leaves, some still holding on to the greens of summer, while others were already glowing with the reds, oranges and yellow of autumn.

It had been a good morning. Cross had only caught a couple of the Atlantic salmon that accumulated in the Tay’s lower reaches during the late summer and early autumn, one of them a respectable but by no means spectacular thirteen-pounder, but that hardly mattered. He had been out in the open, out on the water, surrounded by the glorious Perthshire landscape, with nothing to trouble his mind but the business of replaceing the spots where the salmon were resting, and the looping rhythm of the Spey casts that sent his fly out to the precise point where he thought the fish might best be lured into a bite. All morning he’d been filled with the sheer joy of life, chasing the dark demons of the night away, but now, as he took a bite from the sandwich the castle cook had provided for him, Cross found his mind drifting back to his nightmare.

It was the fear he had felt that astonished him: the kind of terror that liquefies a man’s limbs and tightens his throat so that he can barely move or even breathe. Only once in his life had he known anything like it: the day when, as a lad of sixteen, he had joined the hunting party of young Maasai boys, sent out to prove their manhood by hunting down an old lion that had been driven out of his pride by a younger, stronger male. Naked but for a black goatskin cloak and armed with nothing more than a rawhide shield and a short stabbing spear, Cross had stood in the center of the line of boys as they confronted the great beast, whose huge, erect mane burned gold in the light of the African sun. Perhaps because of his position, or because his pale skin caught the lion’s eye more easily than the black limbs to either side, Cross had been the one whom the lion charged. Though dread had almost overwhelmed him, Cross had not just stood his ground, but stepped forward to meet the lion’s final, roaring leap with the razor point of his spear.

Though he had been given his first gun when he was still a small boy and hunted from that moment on, the lion had been Cross’s first true kill. He could still feel and smell the heart blood that had gushed on to his body from the mortally wounded lion’s mouth, could still remember the elation that came from confronting death and overcoming it. That moment had made him the warrior he had always dreamed of being, and he had pursued the calling ever since, first as an officer in the SAS and then as the boss of Cross Bow Security.

There had been times when his actions had been called into question. His military career had come to an abrupt halt after he had shot three Iraqi insurgents who had just detonated a roadside bomb that had killed half a dozen of Cross’s troopers. He and his surviving men had tracked the bombers down, captured them and forced them to surrender. The motley trio were just emerging from their hideout with their hands in the air when one of them reached inside his robe. Cross had no idea what the insurgent might have in there: a knife, a gun, or even a suicide vest whose detonation would blow them all to kingdom come. He had a fraction of a second in which to make a decision. His first thought was for the safety of his own men, so he fired his Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and blew all three Iraqis away. When he examined their still-warm bodies, all of them were unarmed.

At the subsequent court martial, the court had accepted that Cross had acted in his own defense and that of his men. He was found not guilty. But the experience had not been a pleasant one and though he had no trouble ignoring the taunts and smears of reporters, politicians and activists who had never in their lives faced a decision more brutal than whether to have full or semi-skimmed milk in their morning cappuccinos, still he couldn’t abide the thought that the reputation of the regiment he loved might have suffered because of his actions.

So Cross requested and was given an honorable discharge. Since then, the fighting had continued, albeit no longer in Her Majesty’s service. Working almost exclusively for Bannock Oil, Cross had defended the company’s installations in the Middle East against terrorist attempts at sabotage. That was where he met Hazel Bannock, widow of the company’s founder Henry Bannock, who had taken over the business and, through sheer determination and force of will, made it bigger and more profitable than ever before. She and Cross were equally headstrong, equally proud, equally egotistic. Neither had been willing to give an inch to the other, but the combative antagonism with which their relationship began was, perhaps, the source of its strength. Each had tested the other and found that they were not wanting; from that mutual respect, not to mention a burning mutual lust, had come a deep and passionate love.

Marriage to Hazel Bannock had introduced Cross to a world unlike any he had ever known, in which millions were counted by the hundred, and the numbers in an address book belonged to presidents, monarchs and billionaires. But no amount of money or power altered the fundamentals of human life: you were no more immune to disease, no less vulnerable to a bullet or bomb, and your heart could still be torn in two by loss. And just as money could buy new friends, so it also brought new enemies with it.

Hazel was an African, like Cross, and like him she understood and accepted the law of the jungle. When Cross had captured Adam Tippoo Tip, the man who had kidnapped and later murdered Hazel’s daughter Cayla and her mother Grace, Hazel had executed him herself. “It is my duty to God, my mother and my daughter,” she had said before she dried her tears, lifted a pistol to the back of Adam’s neck and, with a rock-steady grip on the gun, put a bullet through his brain.

But death had begotten death. Hazel had been killed. Cross had killed Carl Bannock, one of the two men responsible for her murder. Now the other, Johnny Congo, was awaiting execution in an American jail. He would die, just as the others had done, but in the way Jo Stanley preferred: from a lethal injection, in an execution chamber, on the order of a court. Maybe that would end all the dying. For the first time in his life, Cross was prepared to consider the possibility that the time had come to walk away from the battlefield before he was carried away in a body bag. His life was different now. He had a daughter who had already lost a mother. He couldn’t let her lose her father too. And he had Jo. She brought peace to his life and the promise of another, better, happier way of living.

“You’re not as young as you used to be, Heck,” Cross told himself as he got up from the folding canvas stool on which he’d sat to eat his lunch with a crack of his knee joints. Though his muscles were still as strong as ever, they seemed to ache just a little more than they used to. Perhaps it was time to let his right-hand men, Dave Imbiss and Paddy O’Quinn, take charge of Cross Bow’s active operations. God only knew they were up to the task. So was Paddy’s blonde Russian wife Nastiya, who was as ruthlessly dangerous as she was magnificently beautiful.

Hector picked up his rod and waded back into the waters of the Tay for his afternoon’s fishing. But before he settled to the task a thought flashed into his mind: that he was almost ready to give Jo the news that she longed to hear; that he was ready to settle down. For once Johnny Congo was dead, that would be the last of his enemies gone. Maybe that would allow him to enjoy a quiet, peaceful life at last.

Just maybe, he thought as he prepared to cast his fly across the river, and just maybe salmon will learn to take a fly.

As befitted his status as one of the young pillars of Houston society, D’Shonn Brown had a luxury suite at Reliant Stadium, home of the city’s NFL franchise, the Houston Texans. He had invited his corporate security consultant Clint Harding, a former field lieutenant in the Texas Rangers, the state’s elite law enforcement agency, to join him as the Texans took on their divisional rivals the Indianapolis Colts. Harding’s wife Maggie and their three teenage kids came along, too, as did D’Shonn’s current girlfriend, a ravishing blonde real-estate heiress called Kimberley Mattson, who looked kooky but hot in an insanely expensive pair of old-fashioned five-pocket jeans by Brunello Cucinelli, rolled up at the ankle to show off her new rose-garland tattoo. The party was completed by Rashad Trevain, his wife Shonelle and their 9-year-old son Ahmad. In total, then, there were ten affluent, respectable Houstonians: young and old, male and female, black and white, all cheerfully socializing at a football game. An attendant was on hand to serve them from a private buffet of hot and cold gourmet foods. Ice buckets held bottles of Budweiser, white wine and soft drinks for the kids. A bank of TV screens showed live every other game being played that Sunday. A cheerleader dressed in shiny red boots, microscopic blue hotpants and a low-cut stretchy crop-top popped in for the personal visit granted to every luxury suite. All in all, what better image could there be of twenty-first-century America?

Midway through the second quarter, the Texans scored a touchdown. As the stadium rocked to the roar of the crowd, D’Shonn leaned over, gently pushed Kimberley’s hair away from her ear, which he then kissed and, while she was still smiling, said, “Excuse me, baby. Got to talk some business and nothing is gonna happen in the game for a while.”

“Anything I should know about?” asked Kimberley, who had powerful entrepreneurial instincts herself.

“Nah, Rashad’s got a problem at one of his joints. He thinks some of the bar staff are ripping him off. He can turn a blind eye to a free drink from time to time, but he draws the line at cases of champagne.”

D’Shonn got up from his seat and made his way to the back of the box, where Harding and Rashad were already waiting for him. “Got a solution for that pilfering issue?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Harding said. “I’ll put one of my boys in there undercover, have him work as a waiter. Anything’s going on, he’ll replace out what it is and who’s doing it.”

“Glad you got that sorted. Now, tell me about what’s going to happen to Johnny Congo. It’s a funny thing. I could write you a dissertation about capital punishment from a legal standpoint, but I know a lot less about the specific practicalities. For example: how do they get a guy like Johnny from Polunsky to the Death House?”

“Real carefully,” said Harding, drily. He was a tall, lean man, as tanned and tough as pemmican, and he’d been a damn good cop, proud of it, too, before he came to work for D’Shonn Brown. The security job for which he’d been hired was a genuine one, but as time had gone by he’d become progressively more aware of the dirty truths that lay hidden behind D’Shonn Brown’s shiny, corporate façade. He’d not witnessed any actual crimes, but he could smell the lingering stench of criminality. His problem, however, lay in a second discovery: just how much he, and more importantly his family, enjoyed the extra money he was making since he’d quit the Rangers. There was no way he could go back to a government pay check, so Harding appeased his conscience the same way Shelby Weiss did, by never doing anything overtly illegal, or knowingly aiding in the commission of such activity.

Right now, for example, his old cop instincts were telling him that Brown and Rashad were up to something, but as long as nothing specific was said, and all the information he provided was in the public domain, he could honestly say that he had no knowledge of any actual felony being planned or committed.

On that basis he continued, “So, Polunsky’s about a mile east of Lake Livingston, and there’s nothing around it but grass and a few trees. Anyone gets out of that place, which is an impossible dream, there’s nowhere for them to hide. Now, the Walls Unit is different. It’s pretty much right in the middle of Huntsville.”

“What happens in between?” D’Shonn asked.

“Well, it’s about forty miles, I guess, as the crow flies between the two units. And the lake is right between ’em, so you got three basic routes you can take: go around the south of the lake, or around the north, or ride right across the middle on the Trinity Bridge. Now the Offender Transportation Office has a standard protocol for the operation. The prisoner always travels in the middle vehicle of a three-vehicle convoy, with state trooper patrol cars back and front. The only people who know the precise time of the departure from Polunsky are the prison warders, police and Offender Transportation staff involved in the transfer, and the route to be taken is not made public.”

“But it’s one of three, right? North, south or middle?” Rashad Trevain chipped in.

“Yessir, those are the basic routes. But, see, they got ways to vary them all. I mean you got two roads out of the Polunsky Unit, just to start with. Then there’s a road along the west shore of the lake, from Cold Spring up to Point Blank, and that kind of links up the south route and the middle route, so you can move from one to the other.”

“Multiple variables,” said D’Shonn.

“Right, which is the whole idea, makes it impossible for anyone to try and guess the route in advance. Plus, when you’ve got three vehicles, all carrying armed officers, that’s a lot of firepower. Listen, Mr. Brown, I don’t know if this is good news for you or not, but your buddy Johnny Congo is going to make it safe and sound to his appointment.”

“Certainly sounds like it,” said D’Shonn. There was a roar from the stadium and a shout of “Turnover!” from J. J. Harding. “Time we got back to the game,” D’Shonn added, but as they were heading back to their seats, he tapped Rashad on the shoulder and said, “You and me need to talk.”

Modern technology abounds with unintended consequences. The pin-sharp satellite imagery of Google Earth gives anyone with a Wi-Fi connection a capacity for intelligence-gathering once reserved for global superpowers. Likewise, anyone who opens a Snapchat message immediately starts a ten-second clock ticking down to its destruction. And the moment it’s gone, it’s totally untraceable. That works perfectly for teens who want to swap selfies and sex-talk without their parents having a clue, and equally well for someone planning a criminal operation who doesn’t want to leave a trail of his communications.

D’Shonn Brown had connections. One of them was to a specialist arms dealer, who liked to boast of his ability to source anything from a regular handgun to military-grade ordnance. He and D’Shonn exchanged Snapchat messages. A problem was defined. A series of possible solutions was proposed. In the end, the whole thing came down to three words: Krakatoa, Atchissons, FIM-92.

While that debate was proceeding, a handful of high-end SUVs were stolen from shopping mall parking lots, city streets and upscale suburban neighborhoods. They were all luxury imported models, and all were built for speed: a couple of Range Rover Sports with five-litre supercharged engines, a Porsche Cayenne, an Audi Q7 and a tuned-up Mercedes ML63 AMG that could do nought to sixty in a shade over four seconds. Within hours of being taken, the cars had all had any tracking devices removed, before being driven to different workshops to be resprayed and given new license plates. Meanwhile, police officers were telling the cars’ owners that they’d do their best to replace their precious vehicles, but the chances weren’t good.

“I hate to say it, but models like that get stolen to order,” one very upset oil executive’s wife was told. “Chances are, that Porsche of yours is already over the border, making someone in Reynosa or Monterrey feel real good about life.”

Rashad Trevain, meanwhile, had one of his people spend a few hours online, scouring every truck dealership from the Louisiana state line clear across to Montgomery, Alabama, looking for four-axle dumper trucks, built after 2005, with less than 300,000 miles on the clock, available for under $80,000. By the end of the morning they’d located a couple of Kenworth T800s and a 2008 Peterbilt 357, with an extra-long trailer that fitted those specifications. The trucks were bought for their full asking price from an underworld dealer who sold only for cash, didn’t bother with paperwork and suffered instant amnesia about his customers’ names and faces, then driven west to a repair yard in Port Arthur, Texas. There they were given the best service they’d ever had. The mechanics fitted bigger carburettors and new cylinder heads, pistons and tires. Every single component was checked, cleaned, replaced, or whatever it took to make these well-used machines move like spring chickens on speed. The day before Johnny Congo was due to go to the Death House, the trucks headed over to Galveston and picked up forty tons apiece of hardcore rubble—smashed up concrete, bricks, paving and large stones—in each of the Kenworths and fifty tons in the Peterbilt. Now they were loaded, locked and ready to go. One final touch: a plastic five-gallon jerrycan was tucked behind the driver’s seat in every cab, with a timer fuse attached.

Cross was half an hour into his final afternoon’s fishing when the iPhone in the top pocket of his Rivermaster vest started ringing, ruining the peace of a world in which the loudest sounds had been the burbling of the waters of the Tay and the rustle of the wind in the trees.

“Dammit!” he muttered. The ringtone was one he reserved for calls from Bannock Oil head office in Houston. Since his marriage to Hazel Bannock, Hector Cross had been a director of the company that bore her first husband’s name. He was thus powerful enough to have left instructions that he was not to be disturbed unless it was absolutely essential, but with that power came the responsibility to be on call at any time, anywhere, if need arose. Cross took out the phone, looked at the screen and saw the word “Bigelow.”

“Hi, John,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

John Bigelow was a former U.S. Senator who had taken over the role of President and CEO of Bannock Oil after Hazel’s death. “Hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time, Heck,” he said with all the affability of a born politician.

“You caught me in the middle of a river in Scotland, where I was trying to catch salmon.”

“Well, I sure hate to disturb a man when he’s fishing, so I’ll keep it brief. I just had a call from a State Department official I regard very highly . . .” There was a burst of static on the line, Cross missed the next few words and then Bigelow’s voice could be heard saying, “. . . called Bobby Franklin. Evidently Washington’s getting a lot of intel about possible terrorist activity aimed at oil installations in West Africa and off the African coast.”

“I’m familiar with the problems they’ve had in Nigeria,” Cross replied, forgetting all thought of Atlantic salmon as his mind snapped back to business. “There have been lots of threats against onshore installations and a couple of years ago pirates stormed a supply vessel called C-Retriever that was servicing some offshore rigs—took a couple of hostages as I recall. But no one’s ever gone after anything as far out to sea as we’re going to be at Magna Grande. Was your State Department friend saying that’s about to change?”

“Not exactly. It was more a case of giving us a heads-up and making sure we were well prepared for any eventuality. Look, Heck, we all know you’ve had to go through a helluva lot in the past few months, but if you could talk to Franklin and then figure out how we should respond, security-wise, I’d be very grateful.”

“Do I have time to finish my fishing?”

Bigelow laughed. “Yeah, I can just about let you have that! Some time in the next few days would be fine. And one more thing . . . We all heard how you handed that bastard Congo over to the U.S. Marshals and, speaking as a former legislator, I just want you to know how much I respect you for that. No one would’ve blamed you for taking the law into your hands, knowing that he was responsible for your tragic loss, and our tragic loss, too. You know how much all of us here loved and respected Hazel. But you did the right thing and now, I promise you, we in Texas are going to do the right thing. You can count on that.”

“Thanks, John, I appreciate it,” Cross said. “Have your secretary send me the contact details and I’ll set up a Skype call as soon as I’m back in London. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve just spotted what looks like twenty pounds of prime salmon and I want to put a fly in its mouth before it disappears.”

Cross dropped his fly on to the water downstream of where he was standing; then he lifted his rod up and back and into a perfect single Spey cast that sent his line and lure out to a point on the water where it was perfectly positioned to tempt and tantalize his prey. But though his concentration on the fish was absolute, still there was a part of his subconscious that was already looking forward to the task that Bigelow had set him.

It seemed to Cross like the perfect assignment to get him back into the swing of working life. His military expertise, and his ability to plan, supply, train for and execute an interesting, important task would all be utilized to the full. But the work, though challenging, would essentially be precautionary. Just like all the soldiers, sailors and airmen who had spent the Cold War decades training for a Third World War that had thankfully never come, so he would be preparing for a terrorist threat that might be very real in theory but was surely unlikely in practice. If he was really going to lead a less blood-soaked life, but didn’t want to die of boredom, this seemed a pretty good way to start.

It was half past eight in the morning of 15 November and all the morning news shows in Houston were leading with stories about the upcoming execution of the notorious killer and prison-breaker Johnny Congo. But if that was the greatest drama of the day, other tragedies, no less powerful to those caught up in them, were still playing themselves out. And one of them was unfolding in a doctor’s consulting room in River Oaks, one of the richest residential communities in the entire United States, where Dr. Frank Wilkinson was casting a shrewd but kindly eye over the three people lined up in chairs opposite his desk.

To Wilkinson’s right was his long-time patient and friend Ronald Bunter, senior partner of the law firm of Bunter and Theobald. He was a small, neat, silver-haired man, whose normally impeccable, even fussy appearance was marred by the deep shadows under his eyes, the gray tinge to his skin and—something Wilkinson had never seen on him before—the heavy creases in his dark gray suit. When Bunter said “Good morning” there was a quaver in his thin, precise voice. He was obviously exhausted and under enormous strain. But he was not the patient Wilkinson was due to be seeing today.

On the left of the line sat a tall, strongly built, altogether more forceful-looking man in his early forties: Ronald Bunter’s son Bradley. He had thick black hair, swept back from his temples and gelled into a layered, picture-ready perfection that made him look like someone running for office. His eyes were a clear blue and they looked at Dr. Wilkinson with a challenging directness, as if Brad Bunter were forever spoiling for a fight. Even so, the doctor could see that he, too, was suffering considerable fatigue, even if he was more able to hide it than his father. There was, however, nothing wrong with Brad Bunter that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure.

The patient whose condition was the reason for the Bunters’ visit to Frank Wilkinson’s office sat between the two men: Ronald’s wife and Bradley’s mother Elizabeth, who was known to everyone as Betty. As a young woman Betty had been an exceptionally beautiful, Grace Kelly blonde, with brains to match. She’d met Ronnie when they were both freshmen at the University of Texas; they had married in their junior year and they’d been together ever since.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve her,” Ronnie used to say. “Not only is she far too pretty for a guy like me, but she’s far too smart as well. Her grades were way better than mine all the way through U. T. Law. If she hadn’t given it up to marry me, she’d have been the one running the firm.”

Now, though, she was a shrunken, hunched-up figure. Her hair was disheveled and her immaculate everyday uniform of slim-cut, ankle-length chinos, white blouse, pearls and pastel cashmere cardigans had been replaced by an old purple polo shirt, tucked into baggy gray elasticated slacks over a pair of cheap sneakers. She was holding her purse on her lap and she kept opening it, taking out a tightly folded piece of paper, unfolding it, staring blankly at the handwritten words scrawled across it, folding it up again and putting it back in the bag.

Dr. Wilkinson watched her go through one complete cycle of the ritual before very gently inquiring, “Do you know why you’re here, Betty?”

She looked up at him suspiciously. “No, no I don’t,” she said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“No, you haven’t done anything wrong, Betty.”

She looked at him with a desperate expression of anguish and bafflement in her eyes. “I just . . . I . . . I . . . I can’t sort it all out . . . all these things. I don’t know . . .” Her voice tailed away as she opened her purse and pulled out the paper again.

“You are merely suffering from a period of confusion.” Dr. Wilkinson said kindly, trying to cloak the awful truth with the gentlest possible tone of voice. “Do you remember we talked about your diagnosis?”

“We did no such thing! I don’t remember that at all. And I’m a grown woman in her fifties.” Betty was in fact three weeks shy of her seventy-third birthday. She continued forcefully, “I know what’s what and I remember all the things I need to know, I can assure you of that!”

“And I believe you,” Dr. Wilkinson said, knowing that it was pointless arguing with an Alzheimer’s patient, or attempting to drag them from their personal reality back into the real world. He looked at her husband: “Now, perhaps you can tell me what happened, Ronnie.”

“Yes, well, Betty’s been having a lot of trouble sleeping,” Bunter started. He looked at his wife, whose full attention had now reverted to the piece of paper, and went on, his voice tentative and his words very obviously skirting around the full truth: “She became a little confused last night, you know, and she was . . . overwrought, I guess you might say.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Dad!” Brad Bunter exclaimed with an anger born of frustration. “Why don’t you tell Dr. Wilkinson what really happened?”

His father said nothing.

“So what do you think happened, Brad?” Dr. Wilkinson asked.

“OK.” Brad gave a heavy sigh, collected his thoughts and then began, “Seven o’clock yesterday evening, I’m still at the office and I get a call from Dad. He’s at home—these days he likes to be home by five, to look after Mom—and he needs help because Mom’s packed a case and she’s trying to get out of the house. See, she doesn’t believe it actually is her house any more. And Dad’s on the ragged edge because she’s been shouting at him, and kicking and punching him . . .”

Ronald Bunter winced as if the words had hurt him more than his wife’s fists or feet ever could. Betty still seemed oblivious to what was being said.

Brad kept going. “And she’s having crying jags. I mean, I can hear her sobbing in the background as I’m talking to him. So I go over and I try to get her calm enough to at least eat something, right? Because she doesn’t eat any more, doctor, not unless you make her. Then I get home about quarter of nine, to see my own wife and kids, except Brianne’s already put the kids to bed, so we watch some TV, go to bed.”

“Uh-huh,” Wilkinson murmured. He wrote a couple of words on his notes. “Was that the final disturbance last night?”

“Hell no. Two o’clock in the morning the phone goes again. It’s Dad. Same thing. Can I come over? Mom’s out of control. I’ll be honest, I felt like saying, you want help in the middle of the night, call an ambulance. But, you know, she is my mom, so I go over again, same story, except this time—and I’m sorry, Dad, but Dr. Wilkinson needs to know this, she’s walking around stark naked, babbling God knows what nonsense . . . and she’s got no modesty or embarrassment at all about it.”

“There’s nothing embarrassing about the human body, Brad,” Wilkinson said.

“Well, just you remember that the next time one of your parents turns your home into a nudist colony.”

“Excuse Brad please, Dr. Wilkinson. You know that he can be a little abrupt sometimes,” said Ronald with exaggerated politeness that failed to hide his anger.

“No, Dad, I just tell it like it is. This can’t go on, doctor. My parents need help. Even if they say they don’t want it, they need it.”

“Hmm . . .” Wilkinson nodded thoughtfully. “From what you say, it certainly sounds like we’re reaching a crisis point. But I don’t want to rush to any conclusions. Sometimes there’s a physiological cause for a series of episodes like the one you describe. I have to say, I doubt that in this case, but it pays to make sure, just in case there’s a little infection or something going on. So, Betty, if you don’t mind I’m going to do a few tests.”

Now she perked up again. “I’m certainly not sick. I know I’m not sick. Never felt better in my life.”

“Well, that’s great to hear, Betty. And don’t you worry, I won’t be doing anything too serious at all, just checking your blood pressure, listening to your chest, simple stuff like that. Are you happy for me to do that, Betty?”

“I suppose so.”

Ronald patted her arm. “You’ll be fine, Betsy-Boo. I’ll be right here watching over you.”

From nowhere, like a sudden ray of sunshine on a cloudy day, Betty Bunter produced a dazzling smile that just for a moment brought all the life and beauty back to her face. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.

It took Wilkinson less than five minutes to go through his tests. When he’d finished he sat back in his chair and said, “OK, well, as I suspected, there are no physiological problems to report. So what I’m going to do is prescribe something for Betty to help calm her at moments of particularly acute anxiety. Ron, if you or Brad can make sure Betty takes half of one of these pills whenever you feel things are taking a turn for the worse that should help a lot, but no more than two of those halves in any one day.”

He looked around to make sure that the two Bunter men had taken in what he’d just said, then he continued, “We have an established crisis-management procedure for cases like this, to make sure we can get our patients effective care. I’m going to make a few calls this morning and try to work out something for you guys by the end of the day. Brad, I wonder if you could take Betty out to the waiting room for a moment. I just want a quick word with your dad . . . because he’s my patient too, after all.”

“That sounds alarming. Should I be worried?” Ronnie asked.

Wilkinson gave the kind of chuckle that’s intended to reassure, though seldom does. “No, I simply want a chance to talk, on a doctor–patient basis.”

No more words were exchanged until Brad had led his mother out of the room; then Ronnie Bunter asked, “So, what’s this all about, Frank?”

“It’s about the fact that Betty isn’t the only one I’m worried about,” Wilkinson replied. “You’re exhausted, Ron. You’ve got to get more help. At this stage, Betty really needs around-the-clock care.”

“And I’m doing my damnedest to give it to her. I swore an oath, Frank: ‘in sickness and in health.’ And in my business, oaths matter. You don’t break ’em.”

“Nor in my business, either, but you’re not being a smart husband to Betty if you make yourself sick trying to look after her. Caring for someone with a severe psychological and neurological condition like Alzheimer’s is a tough, tough job. It’s non-stop. You look exhausted, Ron, and you’ve lost weight, too. Are you eating properly?”

“When I can,” Bunter said. “It’s not like we’re sitting down at the dinner table for a three-course meal. That’s for sure.”

“How about work?”

“Well, I try to go into the office most days, and my staff all know I’m always on call, my clients too.”

Wilkinson laid down his pen, leaned back in his chair with his arms folded and looked his old friend straight in the eye. “So you’re trying to look after Betty, day and night, and the phone keeps ringing with people asking for legal advice. Tell me, do you think you’re giving your clients the best counsel they could get for their money? Because I know for sure I couldn’t treat my patients properly if I were going through the same things as you are now.”

Bunter’s shoulders sagged a little. “It’s hard, I’ll give you that. And yeah, there are times I put the phone down and think, Shoot! I just forgot something, or I realize I got a point of law wrong. And it’s not because I don’t know the right answer, I’m just so darn tired.”

“Right, so now I’m going to give you a prescription, and you’re not going to like it.”

“Do I have to take it?”

“If you’ve got any sense left in you at all, buddy, yeah, you do.”

“OK then, doc, tell it to me straight,” Bunter said, making Wilkinson smile with his attempt at portraying a character in an old cowboy movie.

“Right, first thing I’m telling you is that you have to get Betty the best around-the-clock care that you and your insurance plan can afford.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Ron . . .” Wilkinson insisted.

“OK, OK, I’ll do it. Anything else?”

“Yes. I want you to cut right back on your work. You’ve got good people at your firm, right?”

“The best.”

“Then they can take over your clients. And Brad can run the business day-to-day. If you want to call yourself by some fancy title that means you’re still the top dog, even though you don’t bark any more, that’s fine by me. But I don’t want you setting foot in the office more than once a week, preferably once a month. Let Brad do all the heavy lifting.”

“I’m just not sure he’s ready for it.”

“Bet that’s what your old man said about you, too, but you showed him.”

“And there’s . . .” Bunter grimaced. “Well, I hate to say this about my own son, but there are character issues. You heard Brad today. He can be abrasive sometimes, confrontational.”

“So are many of the world’s greatest litigators.”

“But it’s not the style I like to encourage at Bunter and Theobald. The best deals, the ones that last and don’t end in bitterness and acrimony, are the ones where both sides feel like they did OK. That means we get what our client wants, or at least what he needs, while still respecting the other side and acknowledging the merits of their position, not beating them into the ground.”

“Well, Ronnie, I’m not going to tell you how to run your firm, but I didn’t hear a son who was abrasive or confrontational today. I heard a son who’s very aware of how bad things have gotten, who’s worried, just like I am, about the both of you, and who wants to get the situation, if not fixed—because there is no fix for Alzheimer’s—then at least made as tolerable as it can possibly be.”

Bunter frowned anxiously. “You really think I need to get help, leave work, huh?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So then what am I going to do?”

“Take it easy. Spend quality time with Betty while you still can. Listen, Ronnie, it won’t be long—less than a year, maybe less than six months—before Betty’s reached the point where she doesn’t recognize you, can’t hold any kind of a conversation, not even a rambling one, and there’s no trace left of the woman you fell in love with.”

Bunter’s face crumpled: “Don’t . . . that’s awful . . .”

“But it’s true. So make the best of the time you have. Look after yourself so you can still look after her. Promise me you’ll think about that, at least.”

“Yeah, OK, I’ll promise you that.”

“You’re a good man, Ron, one of the very best. Betty’s lucky to have you.”

“Not half as lucky as I’ve been to have her. And now I’m losing her . . .”

“I know . . .” Dr. Wilkinson said. “I know.”

For decades the state of Texas has carried out its executions in the Texas Death House at the Walls Unit, Huntsville. Right up to 1998, that’s where Death Row was located, too. But then condemned men, Johnny Congo included, started replaceing ways to escape and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice determined that a more secure unit was required. Death Row was moved across to the Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, a supermax, ultra-high-security facility. No one escaped from there. The nigh-on 300 prisoners were held in solitary confinement and ate in their cells from a plate shoved through a “bean slot” in the door. They exercised alone in a caged recreation area. The only physical contact they received was the strip searches they underwent whenever they left their cells. The regime was enough to drive a man crazy and there were some who chose to waive appeal opportunities and face execution early, just to escape from it.

Johnny Congo’s execution process began at three in the afternoon of 15 November. He was not offered the choice of a condemned man’s final meal, nor would he be at Huntsville: that luxury had long since been abandoned. There was just a hammering on his cell door and a warder shouting, “Time to go, Johnny! Hands through the bean slot.”

Every aspect of life at the Polunsky Unit was calculated to degrade and dehumanize the inmates. The procedure for leaving a cell was no exception. Johnny walked to the door. He got down on his knees. Then he shuffled around so that he had his back to the door and stretched his arms backward till his hands pushed through the bean slot and emerged into the corridor outside. A pair of handcuffs was slapped around his wrists; then he pulled his arms back through the slot and got to his feet.

“Step away from the door!” the voice commanded.

Obediently, Johnny walked back into the middle of the room with his hands now cuffed behind his back. Then he turned around again to face the door as it opened.

Two warders came into the sixty-square-foot cell. One of them was white and almost as big as Johnny, with crew-cut ginger hair and sunburned skin on his face and forearms. He was carrying a Mossburger shotgun and there was a tense, jumpy look on his face that suggested he was just looking for a chance to use it.

Johnny smiled at him. “What’s the point of pointing a gun at me today, ya dumb cracker? I’m already a dead man walking. Blow me away now, you’ll be doing me a favor.”

Johnny turned his face toward the second warden, a portly, middle-aged African-American, his hair dusted with silver. “Afternoon, Uncle,” he said.

“Good afternoon to you, too, Johnny,” Uncle said. “This is a hard time for you, I know that. But the calmer we can make it, the easier it will go, y’hear?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“OK then, what I’m going to do is prepare you for transit to Huntsville. So first I want you to stand with your feet about eighteen inches apart. You were in the service, right?”

“Damn right, was a gunny sergeant in the Corps.”

“A Marine, huh? Well, then I guess you know how to stand at ease.”

Johnny obediently snapped into the position.

“Thanks, man,” Uncle said. “Now just stand still a minute while I fix these around your ankles.”

Johnny did as he was told and was equally compliant as a belly chain was secured around his waist. Then his hands were released from their original cuffs and resecured in cuffs that hung from the chain. He was now restricted to the short, shuffling steps that the leg irons allowed and the minimal hand movements afforded him by the links between the handcuffs and the belly chain. As massive, as powerful and as intimidating as he was, Johnny Congo was now entirely helpless. The two warders who had come to his cell were now joined by more of their colleagues as they led him through the Polunsky Unit to the loading bay where his transport awaited him.

All those years previously when Johnny had escaped from Huntsville, his associate Aleutian Brown had shot a warder called Lucas Heller in cold blood, with a bullet through the back of his skull. Johnny assumed that the warders around him now knew that. He waited for the first punch, or billy-club blow to hit him, knowing that they could do exactly what they wanted with him and he’d be completely unable to resist. But Uncle’s peaceful, civilizing presence must have been enough to inhibit any desire for violent retribution because they got to the loading bay without any disturbance. There wasn’t even any outcry from the other prisoners, giving a final send-off to a fellow inmate who was heading for the Death House. They were all alone in their silent cells, shut away behind the blank steel doors that lined the corridors. They had no idea that Johnny had ever even been in the unit, let alone that he was being taken away to die.

Johnny Congo was placed in the back of an unmarked, white minivan belonging to the Offender Transportation Office and ordered to sit on one of the two gray, upholstered benches that ran along either side of what would normally be the passenger compartment. Then his ankles were chained to the floor.

There were steel grilles on the windows and a more substantial one separating the passenger compartment from the driver’s seat. An armed guard sat opposite Johnny, dressed in tan slacks, a white shirt and a black protective vest. The guard didn’t say anything. He looked alert but at the same time relaxed, like a man who was good at his job, and trusted the other warders around him to do theirs, even in the presence of a known multiple killer. Johnny Congo didn’t say anything either, just looked at the guard, staring him down, determined to establish himself as the alpha male, even on the day he was to die.

The details of Johnny Congo’s execution had been discussed all the way to the top of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. They fully realized that he was an extremely dangerous criminal who had already proved that he could escape from a maximum-security unit. His case had received a lot of media coverage and the closer the time came to his execution, the larger that would grow. Even as he left the Polunsky Unit there were a couple of TV news crews by each gate and a chopper was buzzing overhead. Another, much bigger media pack was clustered around the back gate of the Walls Unit, through which execution convoys were always admitted.

The one thing they all wanted was a picture—any picture at all, no matter how blurred or grainy—of Congo as he looked now. The only portraits anyone had of him were the official mug shots taken when he’d got off the plane from Abu Zara, looking like someone had run a truck over his face, or old archive photographs from his first burst of notoriety, way back when. The great American public wanted and needed to see the man their legal system was killing on their behalf on his very last day on earth. But the authorities weren’t making it easy for anyone, including the media, to get anywhere near the condemned man.

Bearing in mind both the wickedness of Johnny Congo and the very public embarrassment that the entire Texas criminal justice establishment would suffer if he should get away from them a second time, there had been a change in the standard convoy format. There were, as always, three vehicles. But on this occasion the third in line was not another patrol car, as it would normally be, but a Lenco BearCat armored personnel carrier, loaded with a heavily armed, ten-man SWAT team. The BearCat was a big, black, menacing war-machine and the men inside it were the police equivalent of Special Forces. Against their firepower nothing short of a full-scale military assault would stand a chance of succeeding.

On the day of Johnny Congo’s execution, everyone who saw D’Shonn Brown reported that he seemed withdrawn, subdued and, in a quiet, understated way, very obviously distressed. The execution was set for six o’clock in the evening. Huntsville is only about seventy miles north of Houston, right up Highway 45, and doesn’t take much above an hour if the traffic is light. But D’Shonn wanted to be sure of missing the rush hour, and so, at the same time as the convoy taking Johnny Congo to his execution left the Polunsky Unit, D’Shonn’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom purred out of the underground garage beneath his downtown Houston HQ. D’Shonn was sitting in the back. Clint Harding was up front next to the driver. A black Suburban followed the Rolls out of the garage. In it were another four of Harding’s men, whose job would be to get D’Shonn through the mob outside the prison gates on his way to the viewing room that looked on to the execution chamber.

D’Shonn was watching the TV on his iPad. “They got Johnny live on TV, following him from the sky like he’s another OJ.”

“I hate the way they are making this into a circus,” said Harding, tilting his head back toward D’Shonn. “Look, I know he was your brother’s buddy, or whatever, but Johnny Congo was a dangerous man. Now he’s getting the most dire punishment our society can deliver. It shouldn’t be turned into a TV reality show.”

D’Shonn’s phone rang. He took the call, listened for a moment and then said, “Yo, Rashad, my man . . . Yeah, I’m watching it too. I guess I knew this might happen, but still . . . Crazy to think, the next time I’m due to see Johnny is when they wheel him into the chamber. I’m not looking forward to that, don’t mind admitting.”

Harding had turned his head back to the front and was staring right out the windscreen, down Interstate 45, so as to respect his boss’s privacy. He didn’t see D’Shonn pick up a second phone and flash a Snapchat message: “Perfect. Go ahead. Get the chopper and the jet ready to roll.”

Ten seconds after it was received, the message vanished into thin air, leaving no trace that it had ever existed.

For two weeks Rashad Trevain had been trying to figure out ways of tracking Johnny Congo’s prison convoy without attracting any attention from the cops. The obvious answer was just to tail it on the road, but if one car stayed right behind the convoy all the way, it was bound to be spotted and forced to stop. They could have a relay system, handing over from one car to another, but with three routes of up to fifty-five miles to cover, that would mean three long chains of drivers, waiting to take up the surveillance if the convoy happened to come their way, which was more manpower than he wanted to use. The more guys there were on the job, the less likely he was to know them all well and, it followed, the less he could trust them to keep their mouths shut.

Rashad’s next idea was to buy a spotter drone of the kind police forces use for crowd control: a couple of feet across, with three miniature helicopter-style horizontal rotors and a camera that can send back images in real time to a base-station. But that would require skilled technicians to operate, plus there were range limitations for both the drone itself and the signal it was sending. So then Rashad went back to basics. He decided to scatter half-a-dozen spotters at key turning points along the first few miles of road: places where the convoy would be forced to make a choice that would determine its route.

But when he put the problem to D’Shonn Brown as they were looking across the water to the eighth green at the Golf Club of Houston’s Member Course, D’Shonn Brown had straightened up from the chip he was about to play, looked at Rashad and asked, “You reckon they’ll have a helicopter following that convoy?”

“You mean a police chopper, like an eye in the sky?” Rashad replied.

“That or a TV station, taking a break from following traffic to check out the badass nigger murderer taking his final ride. Give it the OJ treatment.”

“Guess so. It’s possible. Why?”

“Well, if someone was tracking the motorcade that would sure make our lives easier . . .”

D’Shonn interrupted himself for a few seconds to hit the ball about ten yards beyond the hole, only for it to halve the distance as the backspin kicked in and rolled it back toward the pin.

“Whoa, lucky bounce, bro!” Rashad laughed.

“Luck didn’t come into it, I played for the spin,” said D’Shonn coldly. He turned to replace his club in his bag, which was mounted on a trolley since they’d decided to play without caddies: no need for anyone else to hear what they were discussing. “But anyway, about that chopper, it would sure be handy if there was one up there,” he went on. “Only problem is, we’d have to get rid of it afterward. Some things we don’t want getting caught on camera.”

“Yeah, I follow you, man.”

“So you’d better see to that. If we want to get this job done, we’d best think of every eventuality.”

All Johnny Congo’s roads led to Huntsville. So that was where the ambush crew were waiting. The three heavily laden dumper trucks and the five stolen SUVs were all parked up on the cracked and dusty ribbon of road that led from Martin Luther King Drive up to the Northside Cemetery. There were no funerals planned for that day, no passers-by to look at the line of vehicles. The Maalik Angel in charge of the crew was a scrawny, light-skinned brother with a goatee beard called Janoris Hall. Like all the men who would be working under him today, Janoris was wearing a hooded white Tyvek disposable boiler suit, with fine latex gloves and flimsy polypropylene overshoes covering his Nike sneakers. Plenty of crime scene investigators dress in virtually identical work-gear. They don’t want to contaminate a crime scene they’re investigating. The Angels didn’t want to contaminate a crime scene they were about to create. They also didn’t want to be identified, which was why each of the Angels had already been issued with a hockey goalkeeper’s face mask.

Janoris didn’t have his mask on right now. He was watching the TV news on his iPad and the moment the prison convoy turned left off Farm to Market Road 350, on to Route 190, he turned to his second-in-command Donny Razak and said, “They headed north.”

Razak had a shaven head, a thick, bushy beard and deep, gravelly voice that came from somewhere down in his barrel chest. “You want us to get going, meet ’em on the one-ninety?”

Janoris thought for a moment. It was tempting to head right out there now and get in position early. The less they were rushed, the smaller the chance of making a dumbass mistake somewhere along the line. But what if the convoy took the scenic route, up around the top of the lake and on into Huntsville on Texas 19? He didn’t want to be waiting in the wrong place with his dick in his hand while Johnny Congo was being taken to the Death House on another route.

“No, man, we are going to wait a while. See what happens when they get to the bridge. Soon as we know if they’s gonna cross it or not, that’s when we make our move.”

At the Walls Unit, one of the administrative offices had been taken over for use as a command post for the Congo operation. Now the only question was, who was in command? There were three possible candidates for the job: Hiram B. Johnson III, the prison governor, who was responsible for everything that would happen from the moment Johnny Congo entered the Walls Unit alive, to the time his body was taken from it, stone dead; Tad Bridgeman, the head of the Offender Transportation Office, whose own HQ was at the James “Jay” H. Byrd Jr Unit, a mile north of Downtown Huntsville and who was himself responsible for getting Johnny Congo from one prison unit to the other; and finally, this being Texas, there was a man in a white Stetson hat.

This last man also wore a pair of plain tan cowboy boots, stone-colored denim jeans, a crisply laundered white shirt and a dark tie. His gun was holstered high on his hip, making it easy to draw if he were on horseback, and there was a Star of Texas badge on his chest, stamped from fifty-peso Mexican coins. Officially, in recognition of their roughneck, cowboy origins, the officers of the Texas Rangers Division have no uniform other than their badge and their hat. Unofficially, however, jeans and a white shirt are expected, and the man wearing these was Major Robert “Bobby” Malinga, commander of the Rangers’ Company A.

He was the one who had co-ordinated the security precautions for the transport with the other two officials and would be responsible for reapprehending Johnny Congo if, by some terrible misfortune, he happened to escape captivity somewhere between West Livingston and Huntsville. The situation was further complicated by the addition of a fourth person, Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy. An immaculately groomed, impeccably mannered but laser-eyed redhead, Chantelle was Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of Texas. Her role was to observe and advise on the various political and public relations aspects of the execution and all the events and tasks surrounding it. She had no right to give direct orders to any of the various representatives of the state’s criminal justice system. But she was the eyes, ears and voice of the Governor. And he certainly could give orders.

Right now, as the Congo convoy headed north up the 190 toward the lakeside developments at Cedar Point, the four key players in the command post were all doing the same as everyone else . . . watching the convoy’s progress on TV.

“I don’t like those pictures,” Bobby Malinga growled. “If we can see ’em so can every gangbanger in Texas. I don’t want anyone thinking they can pull some crazy stunt, make a name for themselves as the guy who freed Johnny Congo. Or the guy who killed Johnny Congo before the state could do the job. It’s just as bad either way. I want that bird grounded.”

“That’s not going to happen, Major,” Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy said softly. “This isn’t Russia. We have a First Amendment here. We can’t just go around telling TV stations they can’t film an event of genuine significance to the people of Texas.”

“You ever heard of homeland security? Johnny Congo is a notorious killer. He spent years as a fugitive in Africa, led a personal militia there from what I understand, may still do for all I know. He represents a clear and present danger to national security. You want to help our enemies, Ms. Pomeroy?”

“No, I don’t, Major,” the Deputy Chief of Staff said, sliding a spike of iced steel into her honeyed voice. “And if he was an Islamic terrorist, I’m sure the Governor would be as concerned as you are. But what we have here, when you get right down to it, is a garden-variety killer. Justice will be done and the Governor wants the people of Texas to see, with their own eyes, that we have the finest police officers and prison staff in the nation.”

“Can you at least call the Governor’s office to ask if he’ll approve a no-fly order?” Malinga wheedled.

“Sure I can, but I don’t need to. I have absolutely no doubt about the Governor’s wishes. Sorry, Major, but the helicopter stays.”

The Trinity River flows into the northern end of Lake Livingston by the small waterside community of Onalaska. The mouth of the river is almost three miles wide and it’s spanned by the Trinity Bridge. As the minivan containing Johnny Congo drove along Route 190, through what passed for the center of Onalaska, Congo turned his head to look out of the window behind him. He saw a low-slung shed that contained a barbershop, an insurance office and a store that sold carpets and floor tiles. Just beyond it there was a Subway.

“Man, what I’d give right now for a foot-long Italian B.M.T.,” the guard sitting opposite him said. “Italian herb’n’cheese bread, extra provolone, plenty of mayo, mmm . . . What’s your favorite sub?”

“Huh?” Johnny Congo stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Subway, man, what kinda sandwich do you like?”

“Dunno. Never been.”

“You’re kidding me! You never once ate at Subway?”

“Nope, never heard of the place.” Johnny Congo looked blankly at the guard, then sighed, as if abandoning the policy of being deliberately non-communicative. “I was in Iraq, in the service, killin’ ragheads. Then I came home, caught a multiple homicide beef and was in jail, too many years, nothing but prison food. Then I was in Africa. No frickin’ Subways in Africa. So no, I ain’t never had no subs.”

“Huh?” The guard looked nonplussed, as though this was genuinely new and unusual information. At a crossroads opposite a Shell gas station they stopped at traffic lights. Now they had a choice to make: carry straight on up the road, or go past the gas station on to Farm to Market 356.

Neither Johnny nor the guard knew it but there were eyes glued to an iPad screen in Huntsville, waiting to see if the convoy took that turn. If it did, then Congo was being taken on the scenic route, up to the junction with Highway 19, then taking 19 all the way south-west into Huntsville. But when the lights turned green the patrol car leading the convoy kept going on along Route 190 toward the Trinity Bridge until it was heading out on the earthworks that carried the highway most of the way across the lake, just a few feet above the water, toward the high, white concrete swoop of the bridge itself.

“Guess you’ll never get to have a Subway now,” the guard said. “No offense, but . . . you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Congo. “Question is: do you?”

Thirty miles away, on the northern edge of Hunstville, right by the cemetery, Janoris Hall pumped his fist. “Yeah!” he shouted. “We got you now!” He looked around at the other Maalik Angels who were waiting for the signal to start the operation. “We are in business. They have taken the 190, now we’re gonna meet them along the way, have ourselves a rendezvous. All right, now, gather around . . .”

The Angels all clustered around Janoris Hall and Donny Razak like footballers in a pre-game huddle. Janoris paced around the tight little circle in the middle of the huddle, with Donny shadowing him like a boxer in the ring. “We got an opportunity right here, today!” Janoris shouted, throwing a punch at Razak as the other Angels cheered. There were more punches, more cheers as Janoris went on, “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! An opportunity to make history! We gonna do something ain’t never been done before. We gonna do it . . .”

“Do it!” the other Angels shouted back, getting into the tribal rhythm of call-and-response that had come over on the slave ships from the barracoons of West Africa to the cotton fields and gospel churches of the American South.

Janoris pumped his fist. “And again . . .”

“Do it!”

“And again . . .”

“Do it!”

“Gimme Congo on three . . . and a one!”

“One!”

“Two!”

“Two!”

“Three!”

“Congo!”

They all leaped as one into the air toward the center of the circle and slapped their outstretched hands together. Then Janoris Hall looked around at the faces that surrounded him and said, “Let’s go get this sucker.”

A minute later the road to the cemetery was deserted. The trucks and the SUVs were on the road, heading for the intersection with Interstate 190.

On the TV screens, the overhead images of the convoy were giving way to shots of the crowds gathering outside the Walls Unit. There were human rights campaigners protesting against the death penalty, and victims’ groups and law-and-order hardliners shouting, “Die, Johnny, die!”

Network reporters flown in from New York and LA were checking their hair and make-up before they went onscreen, and that was just the men. The women remained virtually shrink-wrapped to preserve their doll-like appearance right up to the moment they went live on camera and pretended that they’d been reporting the story for the past several hours. Traders had set up food trucks selling gourmet ribs and chilli. And for every individual who had a professional reason to be standing outside the walls of a state penitentiary in Texas, there were a hundred more who were just rubbernecking, waiting for the chance to say they’d been there, the night they stuck the needle into big, bad Johnny Congo.

In the command center, Tad Bridgeman, boss of the Offender Transportation Office, was talking to one of his officers, who was riding shotgun in the passenger seat of Johnny Congo’s minivan.

“How’s the prisoner? Any trouble?” Bridgeman asked.

“No, sir,” came the reply, “good as gold. Last I heard, he “n” Frank were having a conversation about sandwiches, if you can believe that.”

“Won’t be no sandwiches where that boy’s going,” said Bridgeman. “Except grilled ones, maybe. They’ll grill Johnny Congo too.”

“Ain’t that the truth!”

“Well, you keep me posted, son. Anything happens, I want to be the first to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

Major Bobby Malinga of the Texas Rangers was growling at the television screens. “Jesus H. Christ, can we just get away from all the nonsense outside the gates? I want to see where the convoy’s at.”

Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy laughed sweetly. “Why, Major, that wasn’t what you were saying a few minutes ago when you were begging me to take that helicopter right out of the sky.”

“Yeah, well, if it’s gotta be up there, I want to see what it’s seeing.”

There was a knock on the door and a uniformed police officer came in. His eyes darted around the command center till he saw Chantelle. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but there’s a heap of reporters’d like to speak to you, get the Governor’s opinion on what’s going on here today. What do you want me to tell them?”

“That I’ll be right out.” She picked up her phone and had a thirty-second conference with the Chief of Staff in Austin, hardly saying a word beyond, “’K, ’K, I hear you, got it,” before a final, definitive, “Ooh-Kay.” Then she put the phone back in her handbag and took a small folding mirror out. She checked her face, checked for any stray auburn hairs and then snapped the mirror shut again. As she slipped it back in her bag, she looked at Bobby Malinga and gave a little shrug. “Girl’s gotta look her best,” she said. Then she headed out of the command room to spread the word from the Governor of Texas.

Just as she was about to say her piece, the media sped away, like a flock of starlings suddenly flying up from a telephone wire. D’Shonn Brown had just arrived at the Walls Unit. He was the only friend or relative of the condemned man who’d be witnessing the execution. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say about it, even in preference to the Governor of Texas.

About eight miles out of Huntsville, at the junction with Farm to Market 405, Route 190 bends right, and on that bend there’s a big open parking lot with a Valero gas station and an eatery called Bubba’s, catering for local folk and anyone who needs a break from the road. Janoris Hall, in the passenger seat of the Merc ML63, led four of the SUVs and all three trucks into the lot. Just like Bobby Malinga, Janoris had been frustrated by the lack of overhead TV pictures from the helicopter cam, but in the last couple of minutes the news show’s director had evidently tired of the scenes outside the Walls Unit and cut back to the Congo convoy. Janoris had been cursing and banging his hand in frustration against the black leather trim around the satnav as his vehicles were stuck behind one slow-moving truck or RV after another. Though they’d blazed along the highway whenever the road was clear, the obstructions kept coming and he was terrified that they’d see the patrol car, the minivan and the BearCat cruising by them on the other side of the road with nothing they could do to stop them. But the moment he saw the pictures, and the map the TV news station kindly provided in the corner of the screen, he realized that they were going to make it. But it was going to be close.

As they were pulling into the lot around Bubba’s, the convoy was only two or three miles away, heading toward them at an even seventy miles per hour. Janoris had numbered all the SUVs, calling them Congo 1 to 5. Naturally he was in Congo 1 and now he sent Congo 2, which was one of the Range Rover Sports, up the road, with instructions to radio in whenever they saw the convoy, then to turn around as soon as possible and follow it back toward the rest of the waiting Maalik Angels. “But don’t go past the Peterbilt,” he added.

Janoris barely got all his remaining vehicles formed up in the correct order when his phone rang and he heard a voice say, “We seen ’em. No more’n a mile away, be with you in less’n a minute. We can see the chopper, too.”

Janoris looked in the direction from which the convoy would be approaching. The road ran dead straight up to the brow of a low ridge about a quarter of a mile away. The moment the convoy appeared over that ridge, that’s when the action would begin.

“First two trucks to your starting position. Congo 3 slip in right behind ’em,” Janoris ordered. “Congo 5, Bobby Z, do your thing, my man.”

The two massive Kenworth T800s rolled up to the exit that led on to the right-hand lane of Route 190 and came to a stop, side by side, their fenders hanging over the edge of the blacktop, with the second Range Rover Sport on their tail. Anyone else who wanted to get out was going to have to wait.

Congo 5, the Audi Q7, had parked around the back of Bubba’s. Now a man got out of it, carrying a heavy black tube about five feet long. He positioned himself on the far side of the Q7’s bulky nose, went down on one knee and hefted the tube on to his shoulder. Then he pointed it east and raised it up to the sky.

In Houston a bored director cut away from the overhead shot. There was only so much screen time anyone could give to a shot of three motor vehicles driving along an unexciting stretch of highway. His last instructions to the cameraman were, “Let me know if you see anything interesting.”

At that moment, Janoris Hall saw the patrol car crest the brow of the hill. Traffic was light and there were no vehicles between him and them. That was perfect. “Wagons roll!” Janoris called into his phone mike and the two dumper trucks eased out of the lot. They started lumbering down Route 190, one in either lane, barely doing thirty and completely blocking the westbound side of the highway. Congo 3, the Range Rover, moved forward and took its slot in the middle of the exit, right by the side of the road.

Now Janoris leaned down low and peered upward through the windscreen. Yeah, there the helicopter was, hovering over the cars like a mama bird watching over her fledglings. “You see that, Bobby?” he asked.

“Yeah, man, just lining her up,” came the reply.

“Don’t go too soon, bro. Gotta let the dumpsters do their thing.” Janoris looked up the road. The convoy was practically opposite him now. “Go Congo 3.” The Range Rover slipped on to Route 190, staying in the outside lane, not going too fast. Behind it, the driver of the police patrol car signaled left and led the convoy into the inside lane. Congo 3 sped up to maintain position right next to the patrol car.

“Go Congo 4, go Peterbilt,” said Janoris, and the Porsche led the truck out on to the highway.

The helicopter was right above them now.

The patrol car driver had realized that the trucks up ahead were blocking his way. He turned on the flashing lights on his roof and hit the siren. The trucks didn’t budge. He was going to be right up their rear ends any second, so he slowed a little, forcing the minivan and the BearCat to lose momen-tum, too.

Up above, the cameraman’s eyes had been caught by the flashing light. He patched a message through to the TV news studio. “We got something happening here, coupla dump trucks blocking the way. The state troopers must be pissed, ’cause they’ve turned on the lights.”

“OK, keep tabs on it, we’ll cut to you if anything happens.”

Then something happened. The cameraman muttered, “What the hell . . . ?” as the two trucks veered left, one behind the other. Then he shouted, “Are you getting this?” as the lead Kenworth crossed the yellow center line and stopped right across the oncoming, eastbound lanes. The second Kenworth curved around the far side of the lead truck, stopped, then began reversing back the way it had come to block the westbound carriageway on which the prison convoy was travelling.

Down behind Bubba’s, Bobby Z pulled the trigger on the FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missile launcher that was resting on his right shoulder, launching a 22-pound missile that shot into the sky at more than twice the speed of sound. Its sensors locked into the exhaust pipes placed just above and to the rear of the chopper’s passenger compartment. Impact was less than a second later.

No one aboard the helicopter even knew that anyone had fired at them. They were all blown to pieces: alive and well one second, dead and gone the next.

The feed to Houston went dead. So no one in the studio or watching on TV ever saw what happened down on Route 190.

The patrol car driver figured he could lead the convoy past the trucks by slewing right and going down the grass verge. He assumed that the Range Rover driver was bound to hit the brakes when he saw a cop screaming across his front. But the Range Rover didn’t slow down. It stayed right where it was as the patrol car slammed against it and stayed there as sparks flew, metal ground against metal and the front panels of both vehicles crumpled.

Now both trucks were lined up diagonally across the highway, parallel with one another, but slightly apart.

The dumpsters began to lift, the tailgates swung open and rock-hard, abrasive rubble crashed down on to the road, forming an impenetrable roadblock and behind it a killing ground.

Congo 3’s driver, knowing what was about to happen, timed his move perfectly. He swung right, skimming past the Kenworth blocking his carriageway with inches—and milliseconds—to spare. The patrol car, trying to follow him, was hit by an avalanche of concrete, brick and stone and was sent spinning off the blacktop and smashing into the pine trees that grew just beyond the highway’s edge.

The driver of the minivan containing Johnny Congo was suddenly faced with a choice. He could crash into the truck, or the rubble. He slammed on the brakes, yanked the wheel to the right and went skidding broadsides into the raised, emptied trailer.

Inside the back of the minivan, the impact of the crash sent the guard hurtling across the compartment, just missing Johnny Congo as various parts of his anatomy smashed into the bench, the steel sides of the minivan and the metal grating across the windows.

Congo himself, not knowing what the snatch-plan was, but seeing that whatever was going to happen was happening now, had braced himself for the impact. His hands were gripping the chain that held him to the floor and his huge biceps were tensed. Even so, his arms were nearly ripped from their socket as the crash happened and if his head hadn’t been tucked down by his knees it would have been knocked off by the guard’s flying body.

When the minivan finally came to rest, the guard was lying like a discarded toy, his limbs all askew on the minivan floor, still just breathing but completely helpless. As for Johnny Congo, he felt bruised, battered and almost torn in two. But that aside, he was fine.

Then he smelled gas vapors seeping into the back of the van and suddenly he was screaming, “Get me outta here!” and shuffling across the compartment, away from the side that had hit the dumper truck. He was planning to holler as loud as he could and batter against the side of the van. But as he got to the side window and peered through it, his shouts stopped dead in his throat as he saw what was happening outside.

Burning debris from the helicopter had fallen to the earth like fiery boulders from a volcano. The main rotor assembly had cut a swathe through the pines. A severed head was bouncing along the road like a bowling ball. Small fires had broken out in half a dozen places and something big and very heavy had pretty well flattened the cabin of a massive truck that was blocking the highway behind the convoy, just like the two in front had done.

The BearCat had come to a halt with its flat, black fender and armor-plated nose almost touching the minivan. Behind it Congo could see a fancy white Porsche SUV. Someone was getting out of it carrying what looked like about eight inches of gray plastic piping, attached to four short, skinny legs. Behind the first guy, two more brothers were emerging from the Porsche. They were carrying mean-looking guns, with rotating drum magazines slung beneath them like old-fashioned Tommy guns. Yeah! thought Johnny Congo, that is more like it.

The Krakatoa is a very simple but brutally effective weapon. It consists of a short length of tubing, closed at one end by a plastic disc, held by a locking ring and filled with high-explosive RDX powder. A fuse wire runs through the plastic disc into the explosive powder.

At the other end of the tube, another locking ring holds a shallow copper cone, shaped like a Chinese coolie’s hat, whose point faces inwards, toward the RDX powder.

One of these weapons was placed on the ground, directly opposite the rear of the BearCat. The man who’d put it there stepped back a couple of paces, taking care not to stand directly behind the Krakatoa. He was holding a switch attached to the other end of the fuse wire. He pressed the switch. The Krakatoa erupted and the heat and force of the explosion turned the copper disc into a molten projectile that rocketed forward and smashed into the BearCat with the force of an anti-tank missile. The rear end of the armored personnel carrier disintegrated. It was impossible to believe that anyone, even if they were wearing body armor, could possibly be left alive inside it, but just to make sure the gunmen opened up.

They were holding the Atchisson Assault Shotguns, otherwise known in their present-day form as AA-12s, which may just be the deadliest, most destructive infantry weapon on earth. The AA-12 holds up to thirty-two rounds of 12-gauge ammunition, which it fires at a rate of 300 rounds a minute. Emptying two magazines into a confined space filled with human beings has the same effect on them as throwing them into a gigantic Magimix. They aren’t just killed. They’re obliterated.

The gunmen slammed new drums into their weapons and strode toward the minivan. The man who’d operated the Krakatoa ran back toward the Porsche and caught a long set of bolt cutters someone threw to him from the car.

The leading gunman was right up alongside the van now. He slammed the palm of his hand on the door panel. “You in there, Johnny?” he shouted.

“Damn straight, now get me out!”

“You all right?”

“I won’t be, you keep jabbering on like that.”

“You’d better get away from the door, bro.”

A second later the entire lock assembly was smashed to pieces by a single burst of fire from the AA-12. The doors flew open and a great, predatory grin spread across Johnny’s face as he saw the bolt cutters in the hands of the Maalik Angel who was climbing up into the minivan. It took just seconds for the cutters to break apart the leg irons hobbling Johnny’s feet, the chain attaching him to the floor of the van, the belly chain around his waist and the links from that to his wrists. Johnny stretched his arms wide, both hands touching the sides of the minivan. He rolled his head to loosen up his neck and shoulder muscles. Then he called out through the door of the van, “Now gimme that gun.”

Johnny caught the AA-12 with one hand as it was thrown to him. Then he turned to confront the agony-racked and whimpering Offender Transportation Office guard who lay huddled on the floor behind him. “How d’ya like this sandwich, you motherf—”

The rest of the word was lost as the shotgun blast echoed around the confined space of the minivan. Johnny took a look at the smashed red mess that used to be the guard’s face, chuckled to himself, then climbed out of the van and on to the burning highway.

“Car’s waiting for you up ahead, man,” the chain-cutter Angel said.

“Gimme a moment,” Johnny replied. He walked around to the front of the van. As he got there, the guard in the passenger seat was trying to get the door open.

“Here, let me give you a hand with that,” Johnny said.

He opened the minivan door. The dazed guard fell through it on to the road. Johnny watched him trying to get to his feet for a couple of seconds, then he blew him away: three shots in less than a second that picked up the guard and threw him against the minivan like a doll being hurled aside by a spoiled child.

Johnny looked into the cabin. He couldn’t decide if the driver was dead or merely unconscious. So he fired another three more rounds into him just to put an end to any doubts.

Then he let the Angels lead him to the Range Rover that was waiting on the far side of the trucks. It raced a mile back down the road and then veered off into an open field where another helicopter was coming in to land. Johnny was bundled into it and it took off again immediately, swooping low over the highway battle zone, where the Angels had set off the timers attached to the Jerrycans in the truck cabins, so now the trucks were all ablaze, belching flames and smoke.

Traffic had begun to pile up on either side of the barricades formed by the trucks and the rubble they’d been carrying. Customers were running out of Bubba’s to stare at the mayhem. In the confusion the Angels piled into Congos 1, 2 and 5 and speed away eastwards.

About five miles out of Beaumont Congo 5 in which Johnny was riding turned into a field where a short field take-off and landing Cessna 172 was waiting for him with its engine ticking over. Johnny transferred into it and the pilot immediately gunned the engine and took off. As soon as they were airborne Johnny made a request of the pilot who gave him a puzzled frown; then he grinned and said, “Sure, why not? I guess you must be real hungry,” and radioed ahead.

Back at the Walls Unit, a nervous prison governor was explaining to Johnny Congo’s attorney Shelby Weiss and his family friend, the well-known entrepreneur and philanthropist D’Shonn Brown, that the execution was being postponed. It appeared that the convoy carrying Johnny Congo to Hunstville had been ambushed. Congo himself had disappeared. There was no trace of him, alive or dead, at the ambush site. Nor was it clear what the exact purpose of the ambush had been.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Weiss impatiently.

“I guess it means that we don’t know if Congo was taken by friendly gangbangers who wanted to free him, or enemies who wanted to kill him.”

“I want to speak to the governor,” said D’Shonn Brown.

“I am the governor.”

“No, I mean the Governor of Texas. I want to speak to him now. I want to know what’s happening here and what he plans to do about it.”

So did the entire national and regional media, who were besieging the operational command post, demanding that Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy come out and explain how the Texas judicial system had so catastrophically failed to deliver a condemned man to his execution.

“Do you even know where Johnny Congo is?” one reporter demanded.

A look of panic flashed across Chantelle’s face before she recovered her usual self-possession. “I’m afraid that is sensitive information and I can’t speak to that point at this time.”

“There’s nothing sensitive about a simple yes or no. Do you know where he is?”

“Ah . . . I can’t . . . that’s to say it’s not appropriate . . .”

“You don’t know, do you? The most wanted man in Texas has missed his own execution and you have no idea at all where he might be. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way at all,” blustered Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy.

But she didn’t have to put it any way. It was obvious to everyone holding a mike, or aiming a camera, or watching at home on TV: Johnny Congo had got clean away.

When the Cessna 172 carrying Johnny Congo landed at the private aviation terminal of Jack Brooks Regional Airport, it immediately taxied to where a silver Citation X jet waited on the hardstand to receive him, with all its engines warming up.

Johnny climbed on board and an elegantly uniformed blonde stewardess was waiting for him at the top of the boarding ladder. She led him to the rear cabin where an impeccable dark gray suit, white shirt and deep blue silk tie, with black silk socks, shoes and belt were laid out on the bunk.

Showing no emotion whatsoever, the stewardess helped him out of his prison garb, which was emblazoned with the Death Row “DR.” She carried it away discreetly and left him to change into the suit.

When he was fully attired Johnny checked the contents of the crocodile-skin briefcase that lay on the opposite bunk. He hummed with satisfaction as he counted the wads of $100 bills, which totalled $50,000, and the bearer bonds to the value of $5 million. There was also a smartphone untraceable to him and a number of passports, including a diplomatic one from the state of Kazundu in the name of His Majesty King John Kikuu Tembo.

Johnny made a regal figure as he emerged from the rear cabin and went forward to the lounge of the Citation. Having been given the statutory two hours’ notice of the Citation’s flight plans the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service had sent an officer to process the flight and His Majesty King John graciously allowed her to stamp his passport with an exit visa.

Johnny had stipulated the hire of a Citation X for the reason that it was the fastest commercial jet in the skies. The aircrew had been told to expect African royalty as the passenger and they were suitably respectful. Shortly after take-off, as the Citation was speeding south across the Gulf of Mexico, the pretty brunette who was a member of the cabin crew giggled as she plucked up the courage to speak directly to him, “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but we were informed that you had a special request for your in-flight meal this evening.”

Then with a flourish she set before him a bone-china plate on which lay a long sandwich, filled with meat and cheese and oozing mayonnaise.

Johnny Congo gave the girl a smile that pleased, excited and terrified her in just about equal proportions. “Right on!” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to my first Subway ever.”

He took a rapacious bite, and beamed contentedly as his cheeks bulged and his mouth filled to overflowing. Then he lay back in the cream leather chair and chewed contentedly.

He was free and now he could concentrate every ounce of his strength and every cent of his enormous wealth on the complete and utter destruction of Hector Cross.

As they left U.S. airspace, Johnny Congo mused aloud, “Not Hector Cross alone. I am going to get that skinny bitch Jo Stanley who he’s been screwing and also his itty-bitty baby girl. I am going to make Cross watch as I off them slowly, with tender loving care. Only then will I start working on him.”

Night had fallen and Route 190 was no longer a war zone. But if anything the chaos had only increased in the aftermath of Johnny Congo’s escape. Banks of floodlights lit up the road all the way from the gas station to the two burned-out dumper trucks, surrounded by their discharged cargoes of rubble that marked the point where the trap that caught the prison convoy had sprung shut. In truth though there was little need for any additional illumination: not with the headlights and multicolored roof lights of ambulances, fire trucks, tow trucks and a host of police vehicles all attending the scene.

Every cop from Polk, Walker and San Jacinto counties had been called in to marshal the traffic that had piled up on either side of the blockage. Drivers were being directed away to a hastily arranged set of diversion routes, but not before every single one of them had been told to show their driver’s license, provide contact details and describe anything that they had seen, or even better recorded during the brief, bloody, one-sided battle. Everybody who’d been at the Shell gas station or Bubba’s was also processed. As a result, more than two dozen witnesses had been asked to stay behind to be interviewed at greater length by the detectives, and numerous phones and tablets containing still photographs and video footage had been collected.

Pretty much every image they contained had been already uploaded on to one social media platform or another by the time the first squad car arrived at the scene—this was the twenty-first century, after all—and the best footage was already being played on TV stations across the nation. The entire media corps that had been gathered in Huntsville for the execution had decamped to Route 190 to report on the events that had prevented it, and other news organizations had still more personnel and equipment hurrying to this stretch of the East Texas highway.

To add to the hullabaloo, the number of law enforcement agencies present at the scene was multiplying like viruses in a petri dish. The Governor had requested assistance from the FBI and called out the Texas State Guard, but no clear chain of command had yet been established and so the usual turkey-cocking was taking place between representatives of the various local, state and national organizations, all jostling to make sure that they took any credit that was going for any shred of success, while avoiding the looming shitstorm of criticism and blame that would pound down on anyone deemed in any way responsible for the afternoon’s disaster. Anyone like Major Robert Malinga of the Texas Rangers, for example.

“My God, Connie, did you ever in your life see anything like this?” he asked as he picked his way between the charred remnants of the shot-down helicopter toward the wreckage of the BearCat. A few yards away a young cop, not much more than a kid, was slumped on his knees by the side of the road, throwing up into the grass. Just beyond him a dismembered head, still wearing the headphones of a helicopter pilot, was wedged between the branches of a pine, like a kid’s soccer ball in a suburban garden.

“I did a tour in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan,” the woman walking alongside Malinga said. “Things got real kinetic there. Saw buses hit by IEDs, markets after T-men had blown themselves up. This is right up there with the best of them.”

Lieutenant Consuela Hernandez was Malinga’s second-in-command. Every time she went home, every other woman in the family—her sisters, mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, all of them—would tell her how pretty she would be if she only made an effort. But making an effort, just so she could replace some slob to spend the rest of her life with, the way all those other women had done, was not Connie’s style. She had served six years as a Criminal Investigations Special Agent in the U.S. Military Police Corps before joining the Rangers. Within a week of arriving at A Company, she’d already convinced Malinga that she was a good cop. The one thing he couldn’t understand was why she was a Ranger. “The MPs have always been a great place for a woman to get ahead. But I hate to say this, the Rangers haven’t had the greatest reputation when it comes to gender equality.”

“I know,” Hernandez said. “That’s why I’m here. Just wanted the chance to piss you all off.”

For a fraction of a second, Malinga had feared that he’d been landed with a professional ball-breaker, the kind who was only ever one off-color joke away from a sex-discrimination suit. Then he noticed the sly smile playing around the corners of Hernandez’s mouth, realized she was yanking his chain and burst out laughing. From that moment on they’d got along just fine.

“Now I really do feel back in the Pech,” Hernandez said, looking at the BearCat.

The back of the armored personnel carrier had been obliterated. The rear axle had collapsed so that the whole vehicle had slumped toward the ground. A couple of crime scene investigators were working their way through the vehicle. In the light from their torches, Malinga could see the blackened corpses of the SWAT personnel who’d been sitting in the back of the carrier when it had been attacked. Every one of them had been wearing helmets and body armor, but their bodies had been ripped apart by the sheer ferocity of the assault.

“What the hell hit them?” Malinga asked one of the CSIs.

“Everything,” the investigator replied. “First, there was some kind of projectile that was powerful enough to blow through the armor on the rear of the vehicle like it wasn’t any thicker than a tin can. Then someone just let rip with an unbelievable barrage of shotgun fire from no more than twenty feet. We’ve counted almost sixty twelve-gauge cartridges on the road and they must’ve been fired unbelievably fast. No one inside had time to fire a single round.”

“They weren’t in any condition to shoot,” Hernandez said. “Even if the blast hadn’t killed them, they’d have been totally stunned and disoriented. Talk about a flash-bang.”

“Any trace of the perpetrators anywhere? Fingerprints, DNA, anything?” Malinga asked.

The investigator shook his head. “Not that we’ve found. There’s a limit to what we can do here, so we’ll take the vehicles away for examination. But my bet is we’ll be lucky to replace anything at all. They torched the trucks they rode in on. Whoever they were, they sure knew what they were doing.”

“That they did,” Malinga agreed. Walking away from the BearCat, he spoke to Hernandez. “You know the single most common denominator among convicted criminals? Stupidity. Sure, they’re sociopathic, liable to have substance-abuse issues, have an exceptionally high rate of clinical depression, all that good stuff. But above all, they’re dumb. Not these guys, though. They were real smart, or the guy in charge of them was. And they had money. They had trucks, getaway vehicles, automatic weapons, ground-to-air missiles, for Chrissakes.”

“That’s some serious coin,” Hernandez agreed.

“So the question becomes, was Johnny Congo rich and smart enough to put this together from jail, or was there someone else who did it for him?”

“Smart and rich, huh?” Hernandez mused. “I don’t know whether to arrest this paragon or marry him.”

Jo Stanley was lying asleep next to Hector Cross in the master bedroom of his London home, a charming old mews house, impeccably decorated in a restrained, masculine style, just a stone’s throw from Hyde Park Corner, when she was woken by the buzz of her phone against her bedside cabinet. She rubbed her eyes as she blearily made out Ronnie Bunter’s name on the screen. “Hey, Ronnie,” she murmured, trying not to wake Cross. He stirred and for a moment she was worried, but then he grunted and rolled over, taking half the duvet with him as he fell back to sleep.

“Hi, look, I’m sorry to be calling you now,” Bunter was saying. “I guess it must be pretty early in England.”

“Quarter to five in the morning.”

“Oh, maybe I should call back later . . .”

“No, it’s OK, I’m awake now. Hold on, I’m just going somewhere I can talk.” Jo got out of bed and tiptoed across to her bathroom. She closed the door behind her, turned on the light, groaned at her pallid, un-made-up, early-morning face in the bathroom mirror and said, “So, how are you?”

“Oh, you know, getting by.”

Obviously, he wasn’t. “And how’s Betty?” Jo asked.

“Not so good,” Bunter said sadly. “Her condition’s gotten a lot worse. That’s kind of why I called you.”

Jo frowned, concerned as much by the exhaustion she could hear in her old boss’s voice as the news he was bringing her: “How do you mean?”

“Well, I guess I’m going to have to take a step back, away from the firm, so I can spend more time with Betty, whatever time she has left . . .”

“Oh, Ronnie, that’s such a beautiful thing to do,” said Jo, “putting Betty first like that. God, I think you’ve got me shedding a tear!”

She reached for a face towel and dabbed it against her eyes as Bunter said, “I guess that means that Brad will be taking over.”

Jo forgot all about her tears as she absorbed the thought of such a radical, unexpected changing of the guard. “OK-ay-ay . . .”

“You sound kinda skeptical about that idea.”

“No, not at all, Brad’s a great attorney.”

“But he’s not the right person, I get it. And I don’t necessarily disagree. Maybe I should make someone else senior partner . . .”

“But, Ronnie, you can’t do that. I mean, this is a family business. Your daddy started it. You took it on. If Brad didn’t take over from you, that’s basically telling everyone in Texas law that you don’t think your boy is any good. Brad would never forgive you till the day he died. You’d lose him as a son. He has to get the job.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Bunter without much enthusiasm. “Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned. I guess the way Brad practices law is more in tune with the way the whole world is these days.”

“I guess.”

“But, Jo, there’s something else I have to tell you, and you’re not going to like it.”

Jo was struck by an icy feeling of dread as she realized that whatever Bunter was about to tell her was the real reason he had called now, rather than waiting for a more sociable time of day. “Go ahead . . .” she said.

“Johnny Congo’s escaped. I just saw it on the TV news. Someone—they don’t know who just yet—ambushed the convoy taking him to Huntsville for the execution.”

“Oh God, no . . .” Jo leaned her back against the wall and slid slowly down till she came to rest on the marble tiles of the bathroom floor. She could hear the sound of footsteps outside the bathroom. Hector must have woken up. Jo held her head in one hand, her eyes screwed shut as she lowered her voice and asked, “What happened? Does anyone know where he is right now?”

“No, they don’t even know for sure that he’s alive. But in the absence of a body, we have to assume he is.”

Jo said nothing. Bunter broke the silence. “I’m so sorry, Jo, I know what a shock this must be to you.”

Her voice was cracking as she said, “It’s my fault.”

“No, don’t you go thinking that. How could you possibly be to blame for what happened today?”

“Because it wouldn’t have happened if I’d let Heck kill Johnny, when he had the chance. He wanted to do it, but I said no.”

“Of course you did. You believe in the rule of law, as you should.”

“But what good is the rule of law if people like Johnny Congo can defy it, and get away with their crimes?” Jo asked, feeling as though all her most cherished beliefs suddenly counted for nothing. “I was the one who wanted to play by the rules and now that monster is out there . . .”

“Listen, Hector’s beaten Congo once, he can do it again. He’d never blame you, either. He’s a better man than that.”

“He’d never blame me out loud, no. But deep down inside, he’ll know that he was right, and that Catherine Cayla’s in jeopardy because I wouldn’t let him trust his own instincts.”

Jo was crying again now. She cursed under her breath, looked around for something to wipe her face and pulled some toilet paper from the roll as she heard Bunter saying, “Listen, Jo, I know how tough it must be for you right now, but sweetheart, take some advice from an old man who’s seen a lot in his time. Don’t rush into anything. Take your time to process what I’ve just told you, and give Hector time to do the same thing too. Believe me, things’ll work out better that way. You’ll be a lot stronger facing up to this as a couple than as two individuals.”

Jo shook her head, as if Bunter could see her. “No, I can’t . . . I have to leave. Being with Heck is like living beneath a volcano. When the volcano’s quiet and the sun’s shining, life is wonderful. But you know that the volcano’s going to erupt some day, and when it does, your whole world will be destroyed. I thought I could deal with that, but now Congo’s free and I feel so scared . . . I can’t live like that any more.”

At the very moment she was talking about leaving Cross, the one thing Jo suddenly wanted more than anything else in the world was to feel his arms around her and to lean her head against his chest. There was a pause before Bunter said, “Well, if that’s really how you feel, you’d better come on back to the firm. If you and Heck are meant to be together, you’ll replace your way to each other again. But until you do, come back to Houston, back to the office. It’ll be good for you, and good for us too.”

“But I already quit.”

“Did you? I don’t recall getting a formal letter of resignation from you. And I damn sure never fired you.”

“I guess not,” Jo admitted. “But if you’re not going to be there, what am I going to do?”

She got up and examined herself in the mirror again. Her complexion still looked just as pale as it had before and her hair was a mess, but now she had red, watery eyes as well. She resolved that she wasn’t going to leave the bathroom until she’d made herself look a hell of a lot more presentable. If she was going to leave Hector, she didn’t want him to remember her looking anything at all like this.

“Be my eyes and ears,” Bunter was saying. “The doc wants me to stay away as much as I can, but that’s going to be impossible unless I know for sure what’s going on.”

“You want me to spy for you? I can’t see that being too popular.”

“No, I don’t want you to spy for me. But you can represent me, like an ambassador, making my views known, and at the same time relaying back other people’s opinions to me. And of course, you can continue your work as a legal assistant. You’re damn good at the job, Jo. Folks’ll be glad to have you around.”

“Thanks, Ronnie, I really appreciate that. And I guess I’m going to hold you to it, too. I’m coming home to Houston. I wish more than anything else in the world that I weren’t. But I’ve got to leave Hector . . .” She gave a deep, despairing sigh. “And now I’ve got to replace a way to tell him.”

Their lovemaking that night had been especially intense and satisfying for both Hector and Jo Stanley. Afterward he fell into such a deep and dreamless sleep that he did not hear Jo leave the bed or the bedroom. When he woke again he heard her in her bathroom. He checked the bedside clock and found the time was not yet five in the morning. He roused himself and went through to his own bathroom.

On his way back he paused by her closed door and heard her busy on the telephone. He smiled and thought that she was probably calling her mother in Abilene. Sometimes he wondered what they still had to talk about after phoning each other almost every night. He returned to the bed and soon drifted off into sleep once more.

When he woke again it was seven o’clock and Jo was sequestered in her dressing room. Hector slipped on his dressing gown and went through to the nursery. He returned to the bed with Catherine in his arms wearing a fresh diaper and clutching her morning bottle. He propped himself on the pillows and cradled Catherine in his lap.

He studied her face as she drank. It seemed to him that she was growing more beautiful and more like her dead mother Hazel with every passing day.

At last he heard the door to Jo’s dressing room open. As he looked up the smile melted from his face. Jo was fully dressed and she carried her small travelling valise. Her expression was somber.

“Where are you going?” he asked, but she ignored the question.

“Johnny Congo has escaped from prison,” she said. Hector felt the ice forming around his heart.

He shook his head in denial. “How do you know this?” he whispered.

“Ronnie Bunter told me. I have been on the phone with him half the night, discussing it.” She broke off to cough and clear her throat, and then she looked up at him again and her eyes were swimming with misery. She went on, “You will blame me for this, won’t you, Hector?”

He shook his head, trying to replace the words to deny it.

“You will go after Johnny Congo again,” she said with quiet certainty.

“Do I have any choice?” he asked, but the question was rhetorical.

“I have to leave you,” Jo said.

“If you truly love me you will stay.”

“No. Because I truly love you I must go.”

“Where to?”

“Ronnie Bunter has offered me my old job back at Bunter and Theobald. At least there I can do something to protect Catherine’s interests in the trust.”

“Will you ever come back to me?”

“I doubt it.” She began to weep openly, but went on speaking through her tears: “I never imagined there could be any other man like you. But being with you is like living on the slopes of a volcano. One slope faces the sun. It is warm, fertile, beautiful and safe there. It is filled with love and laughter.” She broke off to choke back a sob, before she went on. “The other slope of you is full of shadows and dark frightening things, like hatred and revenge; like anger and death. I would never know when the mountain would erupt and destroy itself and me.”

“If I can’t stop you from going, then at least kiss me once more before you go,” he said, and she shook her head.

“No, if I kiss you it will weaken my resolve, and we will be stuck with each other forever. That must not happen. We were never meant for each other, Hector. We would destroy each other.” She looked deeply into his eyes and went on softly, “I believe in the law, while you believe you are the law. I have to go, Hector. Goodbye, my love.”

She turned her back on him and went out through the door, closing it softly behind her.

There were two people Major Bobby Malinga wanted to talk to right away: the only two people outside the prison system who he knew for sure had been in contact with Johnny Congo after his arrival at the Polunsky Unit. And both fitted the description of “smart and rich.” The first of the pair to fit Malinga into his busy schedule was D’Shonn Brown. Malinga went to his private office. It was large, decorated with the kind of minimal, modern, tasteful understatement that screamed serious money far more cleverly than a gaudy display of lurid marble and gold ever could. The personal assistant who led Malinga in was an impeccably mannered woman whose plain, knee-length charcoal skirt suit and white silk blouse were both tailored to fit her trim figure perfectly, but without the remotest hint of titillation.

Though Brown had met a great many celebrities, business leaders and senior politicians, he did not display any photographs of those encounters on his walls. His diplomas for his undergraduate degree from Baylor, his master’s from Stanford Law and the state bar exams of both California and Texas, framed behind his desk, were the only overt sign of ego. And they were there for a very obvious and even necessary purpose. Several academic studies have shown that even the most liberal Caucasians harbor unconscious assumptions about the intellectual abilities of young African-American males. This was just a way of reminding visitors to D’Shonn Brown’s office that however smart they were, he was almost certainly smarter.

Malinga took off his hat. He was of the opinion that a man’s office was as personal to him as his house and courtesy demanded the removal of headgear in both places. There was no hat stand, so he placed the hat on the desk, sat down opposite Brown and looked at the impressive display behind him. “You sure spent a lot more time in school than I ever did,” he said, going the self-deprecating, Columbo route.

Brown shrugged noncommittally, then asked, “What can I do for you, Major?”

“You came to Huntsville for Johnny Congo’s execution,” replied Malinga, getting out his notebook and pen. “How come?”

“He reached out to me, through his attorney Shelby Weiss, and asked me to be there.” Brown sounded relaxed, open, like an honest citizen with nothing to hide, doing his best to assist the police with their investigation.

“So you’re a close friend of Congo’s?”

“Not really. I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid. But he was tight with my brother Aleutian, who was killed last year. As far as I’m aware, Johnny Congo doesn’t have any family. So I guess I was the only person he could think of.”

“Did he ask you to do anything else, aside from come to his execution?”

“Johnny didn’t ask me anything directly. But Mr. Weiss told me that he had expressed a wish for me to organize his funeral and also a memorial party in his honor.”

“And you did this?”

“Of course. I found a plot for Johnny’s grave, arranged flowers, a mortician and so on for the funeral and made preparations for the party, too. My assistant can give you all the details.”

“Even though you hardly knew the man?”

“I knew my brother and he knew Johnny. That was good enough for me.”

“Who was paying for all this?”

“Johnny paid. He arranged for me to be given money through Mr. Weiss.”

“How much money?”

“Two million dollars,” said Brown, without missing a beat, letting Malinga know that a sum like that was no big deal to him.

Malinga wasn’t nearly so cool about it. “Two million . . . for a funeral . . . you gotta be kidding me!”

“Why?” Brown asked. “Whatever you or I might think of Johnny Congo’s crimes, and I don’t deny that they were heinous, he was a very wealthy man. As I understand it, his lifestyle in Africa was extremely lavish. So he wanted to go out in style.”

“And for that he needed two million dollars?”

“It’s not a question of need, Major Malinga. No one needs to drop a million bucks on a wedding, or a birthday party, or a bar mitzvah, but there are plenty of people right here in this city who would do that without blinking. Hell, I’ve been to parties where Beyoncé was the cabaret, and there’s your two million, just for her. Johnny had the money. He wasn’t going to be spending it where he was going. Why not use it to give his guests a good time?”

“OK . . . OK,” said Malinga, just about accepting Brown’s logic. “So what happened to this money?”

“I opened a special account, just for Johnny’s events. Some of it I spent, and again I can provide you with any receipts or documentation you require. The rest is still in the account, untouched.”

“And you knew nothing about Congo’s escape plans?”

“No, I knew about his plans for his funeral. And I had two million very good reasons for believing they were serious.”

“So this all came as a total surprise to you?”

“Yes, it did. I drove up to Huntsville, steeling myself for the experience of seeing a man die before my eyes—not something I’ve ever seen before, thank God. First I knew about any escape was a reporter sticking a mike in front of my face and asking me what I thought about it, live on TV. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Felt like a damn fool, if you really want to know.”

“And none of that two million was used to buy the weapons, transportation or personnel used to free a convicted murderer and kill fifteen police officers and state officials?”

Brown looked Malinga straight in the eye. “No, absolutely not.”

“Did Mr. Weiss say anything to you that indicated the money should be used for such a purpose?”

“What?” For the first time Brown raised his voice. “Are you seriously suggesting that one of the state’s most respected criminal attorneys, together with a prominent businessman who is himself qualified to practice law, would have a conversation about the illegal seizure of a convicted killer?”

Malinga did not raise his. “I’m not making any suggestions, Mr. Brown, I’m asking you a question.”

“Well, the answer is an absolute, categorical ‘no.’”

“OK then, here’s another. Did you have any communication with Johnny Congo, aside from what you heard from Mr. Weiss?”

“Again no. How could I have done? Prisoners awaiting execution have a very limited ability to communicate with anyone. And if Johnny had ever tried to speak or write to me, I imagine they’d have a record of it at the Polunsky Unit. Do they have such a record, Major Malinga?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go.” Brown exhaled, letting the tension out. In his previously calm but authoritative style he said, “I think we’re done, don’t you? I appreciate that you’ve got a job to do, Major Malinga. So I’ll make this as simple and straightforward as I can. I had nothing whatever to do with Johnny Congo’s escape. I had no knowledge of any plans for such an escape. I was not involved in financing any illegal activities or purchases on Johnny Congo’s behalf. None of the money given to me to fund Johnny Congo’s funeral and memorial event has been used for anything other than the purpose for which it was intended. Are we clear on that?”

“Guess so.”

“Then I wish you good luck with your ongoing investigation. My assistant will show you out.”

Cross had a way of dealing with the pain that could hit a man when a woman had ripped his heart out through his chest, thrown it to the floor and then harpooned it with a single stab of her stiletto heel. First he sealed it up inside an imaginary thick lead box; then he dropped it, like radioactive waste, into the deepest, darkest recesses of his mind. Once that was done, he got back to work.

Cross was already bearing down hard on his emotions and turning his thoughts to the two issues that would be dominating his life for the foreseeable future: the security of Bannock Oil’s Angolan operations, and the hunt for Johnny Congo. Now that his arch-enemy was at large once again, Cross knew that he would have to go back to war. Sooner or later, Congo would come after him, and when he did, there could only be one winner, one survivor.

He called Agatha, the personal assistant who’d been a secretary, confidante and unfailing ally to Hazel for years before transferring her allegiance to him. “John Bigelow wants me to talk to some State Department official called Bobby Franklin, but he never gave me a contact number. Call John’s office to get it, then call Franklin to set up a Skype meeting in the next couple of days.”

“Of course,” Agatha replied with her usual unflappable efficiency.

“Thanks. And then I need to talk to Imbiss and the O’Quinns, but in person. So please track them down and wherever they are in the world, tell them they need to be in London by lunchtime tomorrow.”

“What if there aren’t any flights?”

“Send a plane. Send one for each of them if you have to. But they have to be here.”

“Don’t worry, sir, they will be.”

“Thank you, Agatha. If anyone else said that, I’d think they were probably bluffing. But I can absolutely count on you getting my people here. None of them would dare say no to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The thought of having his best people around him raised Cross’s spirits. Dave Imbiss didn’t look like a man you’d want beside you in the heat of battle. No matter how hard he worked at his fitness, he still had a plump, fresh-faced demeanour. But that appearance was deceptive. Imbiss’s bulk was all muscle, not fat. He’d been awarded a Bronze Star for heroism in combat when serving as a U.S. Infantry captain in Afghanistan and he had brains as well as brawn. Imbiss was Cross Bow’s resident techie, a master in the dark arts of cyber-warfare, surveillance, hacking and all-purpose gadgetry. Paddy O’Quinn was leaner, edgier, a quick-witted, hot-tempered Irishman who’d served under Cross in the SAS until he’d punched a junior officer whose decisions under fire were threatening to cost his entire fifteen-man troop their lives. That mutinous blow saved those soldiers’ lives, cost O’Quinn his military career and made him the first name on Cross’s list when he began recruiting for Cross Bow.

Paddy O’Quinn was as tough as they came, but he had met his match—and more—in his wife. Anastasia Voronova O’Quinn was a beautiful blonde who looked like a supermodel, fought like a demon and could drink any man under the table. Nastiya, as her friends were allowed to call her, had been trained in the arts of subterfuge and deceit by the FSB, the Russian security agency that was the post-Communist successor to the KGB, while the Spetsnaz—Russian Special Forces—had taught her how to inflict pain and, if necessary, death in a myriad different ways. As good as his men were, Cross believed that he could still more than match them. But even he would think twice before picking a fight with Nastiya.

Together they had already beaten Johnny Congo once. Now they would do it a second time. And then they’d never have to do it again.

D’Shonn Brown had said nothing remotely incriminating. There was as yet no evidence whatever to suggest that he had done anything wrong. On that basis, any suggestion that he had been involved in Johnny Congo’s escape could reasonably be taken as unjustified and even racially biased. But Malinga couldn’t shake a feeling that hung around the back of his mind like an itch that needed scratching: a cop’s intuition that he had just witnessed a slick, proficient, shameless display of lying. He wasn’t going to voice that suspicion publicly just yet. He wasn’t that dumb. But still, it meant that he could approach his interview with Shelby Weiss primed for any hint that Johnny Congo’s attorney had something to hide.

If Brown’s working environment was an exercise in contemporary design, Weiss’s was far more traditional: wood panelling on the walls; bookshelves full of august legal tomes; all the vanity portraits that Brown had conspicuously avoided. The one thing they had in common was the framed diplomas. But whereas D’Shonn Brown’s education had been as close to Ivy League as you could get west of the Appalachians; Weiss took a perverse pride in the fact that he had studied his law in the relatively humble surroundings of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, a public college right in the heart of Houston on Cleburne Street. He wanted people to know that however slick he might look now, he’d started out as a blue-collar kid, working his way up from nothing by ability, determination and damned hard work. Juries lapped it up. Malinga had seen the Shelby Weiss Show enough times in enough courtrooms not to give a damn, one way or the other.

“This is a change,” Weiss said as he shook Malinga’s hand. “I’ve cross-examined you enough times, Bobby. Don’t recall that you’ve ever asked questions of me.”

“First time for everything,” Malinga said, settling into a padded leather chair that was a lot more comfortable than the ones in front of D’Shonn Brown’s desk. “So, Mr. Weiss,” he went on, “can you confirm that you visited Johnny Congo at the Allen B. Polunsky Unit on the twenty-seventh of October?”

“I can.”

“And what was the substance of your discussion with Congo?”

Weiss grinned. “Oh, come on, you know perfectly well that client–attorney privilege prevents me from answering that question.”

“But you discussed his legal situation in general?”

“Of course! I’m a lawyer. That’s what we do.”

“So how would you characterize his legal situation at that point? I mean, were you confident of being able to delay his execution?”

“Well, the man was a convicted killer, who’d used up all his appeals on his original charge before absconding from the State Penitentiary, spending several years on the run and then being apprehended. What would you say his chances were of a stay of execution?”

“Worse than zero.”

“Precisely. Anyone can figure that out, including Johnny Congo. Nevertheless, anyone is entitled to the best defense, again including Johnny Congo. So I assured him that I would use my very best endeavors to keep him out of the chamber.”

“And did you use those endeavors?”

“Absolutely. I made every call I could think of, right up to the Governor and beyond. Burned a lot of favors and, believe me, I’m not exactly Mr. Popular right now, not after someone turned Route 190 into a war zone.”

“Did Congo pay you for doing that work on his behalf?”

“Sure he paid me. I don’t represent a man like that pro bono.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“I don’t have to tell you that.” There was a glass jar of brightly colored jelly beans standing on Weiss’s desk. He unscrewed the lid and tilted the open jar in Malinga’s direction: “Want one?”

“Nope.”

“Suit yourself. So, where were we?”

“You were explaining how you couldn’t tell me how much Johnny Congo paid you.”

“Oh yeah . . .”

“But you can confirm that you paid two million dollars on Johnny Congo’s behalf to D’Shonn Brown, and don’t tell me that’s privileged because I know it ain’t. D’Shonn Brown is not your client. Any conversation with him or payment to him constitutes admissible evidence.”

Weiss popped a couple of jelly beans into his mouth. “I wouldn’t insult an experienced senior officer like you by pretending otherwise. Yes, I gave Mr. Brown the money. You can ask him what he did with it.”

“Already have. I’m more interested in what you said when you gave it to him.”

“I just passed on Mr. Congo’s instructions.”

“Which were?”

“Let me see . . .” Weiss leaned back and gazed upward as if Johnny Congo’s words might be written or even projected on to the ceiling. Then he focused back on Malinga. “As I recall, Mr. Congo wanted Mr. Brown to gather up all the people he used to hang out with back in the day, so that they could pay their respects to him and see him off.” Weiss chuckled to himself.

“What’s so funny?” Malinga asked.

“D’Shonn Brown’s a sharp kid. He told me that Johnny’s buddies wouldn’t be able to see him go, but they’d sure see him coming, seeing as most of them were already dead. I could see his point. But that didn’t alter Mr. Congo’s wishes. He basically wanted to have a lavish funeral, with a service in a cathedral and a long line of hearses and limousines, followed by a party with Cristal champagne and Grey Goose vodka—he specified those brands.”

“And this was going to cost two million dollars?”

“Evidently. Congo wanted Mr. Brown to, quote, ‘lay it on real thick’ and he wanted to ‘impress upon him’—and that’s another direct quote, I remember being struck by the formality—that this was all the wish of a dying man.”

“And what conclusion did you draw from these instructions?”

“That they were exactly what they appeared: a convicted criminal with a lot of money wanting to give society the finger one last time.”

“You had no reason to doubt that Johnny Congo was planning to attend his own funeral?”

“Well, he was laying out a fortune on it, and the state of Texas was absolutely determined to execute him, so no, why would I?”

“He’d got away before.”

“All the more reason that people like you were going to make sure he didn’t again. Are we done?” Shelby Weiss had suddenly lost his carefully worked air of relaxed bonhomie, just the way D’Shonn Brown had done.

“Almost,” said Malinga, more than ever certain that there was something both of them were hiding. “Just one last thing I want to clear up. How come Johnny Congo called you?”

“Because I’m a good lawyer.”

“Yeah, sure, but how would he know that? He’d been out of the country for years.”

“I guess word gets around. And I was already a successful attorney when he was originally locked up in Huntsville, you know, before his first escape.” Weiss put an emphasis on “first,” just to remind Malinga about the second one. Then he said, “I didn’t act for him at that point, but I certainly defended other guys on Death Row. No reason he couldn’t have known about me.”

“Have you ever, at any time prior to these past few weeks, represented Jonny Congo?” Bobby Malinga asked.

All the question needed was a one-word answer. It wouldn’t have taken a second. But Weiss paused. He was about to say something, Malinga could see it, but then had second thoughts. Finally he spoke. “The first time in my life that I represented a man called Johnny Congo was when I was asked to come and meet him at the Allen B. Polunsky Unit on the twenty-seventh of September. There, is that specific enough for you?”

“Thank you,” said Malinga. “That’ll do just fine.” He smiled as he got up. He shook Weiss’s hand again and thanked him for his co-operation. And as he left the offices of Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett he felt more certain than ever that D’Shonn Brown and Shelby Weiss had played some part in Johnny Congo’s escape.

You know, if someone had tossed a grenade into that bowl, it couldn’t have spread the mess wider than Missy Catherine here managed,” said Cross, sounding genuinely impressed at the havoc Catherine had brought to the simple business of eating her supper. There were spatterings of her chopped-up spaghetti and bolognese sauce all over the walls and the floor of the Cross Roads’ compact kitchen, the table in front of Catherine’s high chair, the chair itself and the tray that slotted on to it; not to mention her onesie, her plastic bib and, most impressively, her face, whose most noticeable feature was a huge, gummy grin, ringed by a magnificent spread of orangey-red sauce covering her chin, nose and chubby cheeks.

“She was putting on a special show for you,” said Bonnie Hepworth, the nanny. She had known Catherine since the day she was born: she had been the maternity nurse on duty on that day of overwhelming joy, mixed with unbearable sorrow, when a baby had entered the world and her mother, fatally wounded by an assassin’s bullet, had left it. Cross had been touched by Bonnie’s warm heart, her kind smile and her unfailing combination of patience, efficiency and sound common sense. He’d made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. The patients of a Hampshire hospital had lost a first-rate nurse. Catherine Cayla Cross had gained a nanny who would never let this bereaved little girl lack a single moment of love and care.

“If that was the show, I dread to think what she’s planning for the encore,” Cross said.

“Chocolate pudding. Wait till that starts flying. You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Cross laughed, gazing in wonder at his daughter, his darling Kitty-Cross. How had she done it, he wondered? How could a tiny little person who had only just learned to say her first words fill his heart with so much love? He was helpless in her presence, yet the tenderness of his love for her was equalled by the fierceness of his determination to keep her safe.

Now that Johnny Congo was at large once again, Cross knew that he would have to go back to war. Sooner or later, Congo would come after him, and when he did, there could only be one winner, one survivor. This time, though, Cross would be alone on the battlefield. Jo’s decision to leave had ripped open the emotional wound that she herself had helped heal. Cross wondered if there would ever be another chance to replace someone new. One of the reasons Jo had left was that she thought he would blame her for Congo’s escape. The truth was, he blamed himself much more for exposing her to the death, the pain and the harsh cruelties that were his inescapable companions.

“Mr. Cross . . . Mr. Cross!” His reverie was broken by Bonnie’s voice. “There’s a Skype call for you . . . from America.”

Cross looked at his watch. In all the fussing over Catherine’s dinner, he’d completely lost track of the time. “Snap out of it, man!” he told himself. “Work!”

He went into his study, sat down in front of the monitor and did a double-take. Bobby Franklin was not the middle-aged white male he had been expecting but an elegant African-American woman, whose fine features and lovely hazel eyes were given a scholarly touch by her tortoiseshell spectacles. That must have been the information that went missing when he’d lost contact with Bigelow, that afternoon on the Tay. To judge by the grainy image on the screen in front of him, Franklin was in her early to mid-thirties. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Hector Cross.”

A smile crossed her face. Cross frowned uncertainly. Had he said something amusing?

“Excuse me, Mr. Cross,” Franklin said, “but there’s something on your face and it looks a little like spaghetti sauce.”

Now it was Cross’s turn to grin, more from embarrassment than amusement. “That’s my daughter’s supper. I was crazy enough to try feeding her this evening. Where is it, exactly?”

“On your cheek and chin . . .” She paused as he dabbed at his face. “No, the other side . . . there you go!”

“Thanks. Hope that hasn’t totally destroyed my credibility as a security expert.”

“Not at all. And it’s made you much more interesting as a man.”

Cross felt the electrical charge of that first contact between a man and a woman. How strange to experience it through a pair of screens, thousands of miles apart. Pleased that the loss of Jo Stanley hadn’t completely beaten him down, Cross looked at Franklin for a moment, just to let her know that he’d heard her.

“Speaking of interesting, you don’t look much like an average Bob,” he said.

She smiled again. “It’s Bobbi, with an ‘i,’ short for Roberta.”

“Well, I’m glad we’ve sorted that out,” said Cross. “Now we should get down to business . . .”

“Good idea . . . so, do you know much about Africa, Mr. Cross?”

“Well, I was born in Kenya, spent the first eighteen years of my life there and the only reason I’m not a full Morani warrior of the Maasai tribe is that although I’ve undergone all the initiation rites, I’ve not been circumcised. So yes, I know a bit.”

“Oh . . .” Franklin said, wincing. “Sounds like I should have done my homework before we met.”

“Don’t worry. It’s quite a relief that Uncle Sam doesn’t know everything about me.”

She smiled. “Oh, I’m sure he does. I just hadn’t asked his archives the right questions. But I’m glad to hear about your past because it makes my job today a whole lot easier. You’ll understand the first thing I want to say, which is this: Africa isn’t poor. The great mass of Africans is still very poor. But Africa itself is very rich. Or, at least, it could be.”

“You mean if corrupt leaders didn’t keep all their people’s wealth for themselves and siphon off most of the aid given to them by guilt-ridden suckers in the West?” said Cross, who liked the way Bobbi Franklin thought almost as much as the way she looked.

“Well, I’d put it a little more diplomatically, but, yes. Let me give you some examples to illustrate the point: stop me if I’m telling you things you already know. You’re going to be operating off the coast of Angola, so would you care to estimate how much oil those offshore fields produce, in total, per day?”

“Hmm . . .” Cross thought, his mind now fully focused on his job. “Our rig at Magna Grande will produce around eighty thousand barrels a day when it’s going flat out. There are lots of other rigs like it. So I guess the total would be, what, twenty times as much?

“Not bad, Mr. Cross, not bad at all. Angola produces one point eight million barrels of oil a day: so yes, just over twenty times your rig’s production. The nation’s oil exports are currently running at about seventy-two billion dollars a year. And there’s about three hundred billion cubic meters of natural gas down there too.”

“That sounds like they have around a trillion dollars of reserves.”

“And that’s why I say that Africa’s rich. Granted, Angola’s not as blessed with oil reserves as Nigeria, and it doesn’t have the incredible mineral wealth of the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it’s got Africa’s first female billionaire, who just happens to be the President’s daughter. And I hope Bannock Oil gives you a decent expense account when you’re out there because a couple of years ago the Angolan capital, Luanda, was named the most expensive city on earth. A hamburger’ll cost you fifty bucks. Go to a beach club and order a bottle of champagne—that’ll be four hundred. If you decide you like it and want to rent a single-bedroom apartment, the best ones go for ten grand a month.”

“And I thought London was expensive.”

“Here’s the biggest sign that things have changed. Forty years ago, Angola was just declaring its independence from Portugal. Three years ago, the Portuguese Prime Minister paid a visit to Luanda. He wasn’t coming to give Angola aid. He couldn’t afford to. Portugal was bust. So the Prime Minister wanted aid from Angola.”

Cross gave a low whistle. He’d always thought there was something condescending, even racist, about the western liberal assumption that black Africa was a helpless basket case of a continent, pathetically grateful for a few crumbs from the white man’s table. Now those tables had turned. But there was one vital element missing from Bobbi Franklin’s account.

“Just out of curiosity, how rich is the average Angolan?” Cross asked. “I’m assuming they don’t eat too many fifty-dollar hamburgers.”

“You assume correctly. More than a third of Angola’s population, which is roughly twenty million people—no one knows the exact figure—live below the poverty line. Less than half of them have access to electricity. So even though they’re sitting on gigantic energy reserves most of them depend on a mix of wood, charcoal, crop residues and animal manure for their cooking fires. This is a classic case of a rich African country filled with dirt-poor African people.”

Now they were getting to the heart of the discussion. “How angry are these people?” Cross asked. “Are they ready to take violent action against the government or foreign businesses? They do in Nigeria, after all.”

“Yes, they certainly do.” Franklin nodded, and Cross was momentarily distracted by how sexy she looked pushing her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. He tried to snap his mind back to what she was saying.

“Nigerian oil production can drop by up to five million barrels a day because of terrorist and criminal activity. As I’m sure you know, there are regular attacks on the oil industry’s infrastructure. There’s also a major problem with ‘bunkering.’ That’s the local name for cutting a pipe and stealing the oil it’s carrying, kind of like siphoning gas from a car, but on a much larger scale. Add to that the bitter religious conflict between the Muslim and Christian populations and the presence of powerful terrorist groups like Boko Haram and you can see that the danger of large-scale civil unrest in Nigeria is extremely high. It’s no wonder, really, that several of the major oil companies have either already pulled back from their Nigerian operations or are seriously considering doing so.”

“So could the same happen in Angola?”

“Not as easily, for a number of reasons,” Bobbi Franklin said. “Angola was torn apart by war for more than forty years: first a struggle for independence against the Portuguese that ended with independence in 1975, and then a civil war that didn’t end until 2002, having killed about one and a half million Angolans. The ruling party, the MPLA, has been in power since independence and the President, José Eduardo dos Santos, has held office since 1979.”

“Must be a popular guy,” said Cross.

Franklin picked up on his sarcasm and ran with it. “You know how it is: African leaders have a way of staying in office a lot longer than your average western leader. At the last elections, the MPLA won seventy-two percent of the vote and one hundred and seventy-five of the two hundred and twenty seats in parliament. Folks in Angola just can’t get enough of ’em.”

“That’s because the MPLA is doing such a terrific job of giving them money and food, and electrical power.”

“Or it could be because the elections are a long way from fair and the government spends a higher proportion of its budget on defense than any other state in sub-Saharan Africa. And there’s not going to be a military coup, either, because President dos Santos is head of the armed forces. There’s no religious dimension to worry about because, bluntly, Islam is not an issue in Angola. Just over half the population is Christian, the rest follow traditional African religions.”

“So Angola’s relatively peaceful?”

“These days, sure, and the other advantage you have operating there is that your installations are way out to sea. A lot of the Nigerian ones are in the waters of the Niger Delta, much closer to the mainland, so they’re a helluva lot easier for the bad guys to attack.”

Cross frowned. He’d been told to expect a warning, but all he was getting was good news. “So what’s the problem?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Franklin.

You’re a cool operator, aren’t you? thought Cross, feeling increasingly annoyed with himself for not getting on a flight to DC and conducting the meeting in person. But now she was talking again. “You see, there’s one last hangover from the civil war: the province of Cabinda. It’s separated from the rest of Angola by the narrow strip of territory that links the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Atlantic Ocean. Cabinda still has a rebel movement that calls itself—wait for it—‘The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda—Forças Armadas de Cabinda,’ or FLEC-FAC for short.”

“I’m tempted to put another vowel between the ‘F’ and the ‘C’ there.”

Franklin laughed, a deliciously feminine giggle that delighted Cross. Gotcha! he thought triumphantly.

The State Department analyst swiftly recovered her professional poise. “The rebels have offices in Paris and in Pointe-Noire, which is in the Republic of Congo—”

“Which is not the same as the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Cross interrupted.

“Exactly. The Republic is much smaller and used to be ruled by the French. The Democratic Republic is massive and used to be ruled by the Belgians. Cabinda’s squeezed in-between the two of them. But here’s the thing: almost half of all Angola’s oil is situated in what would be the territorial waters of Cabinda if it were ever an independent state. And the entire population of Cabinda is less than four hundred thousand people. So it could, potentially, be a very, very rich little territory.”

“Sounds like a place worth fighting over,” said Cross.

“You got it. Now, how closely have you been involved in the Bannock Oil operations in Angola?”

“Not at all closely. My wife, Hazel Bannock Cross, was murdered last year. She died giving birth to our daughter. As you can imagine, I’ve had other issues to deal with.”

“I quite understand. I’m very sorry for your loss,” Franklin said, sounding as though she meant it.

“Thank you. So, you were going to talk about Bannock’s Angolan operations?”

“Indeed. You see, the Magna Grande field where your colleagues have just struck oil is actually located in Cabindan waters, and it will add more than ten percent to Cabinda’s daily production of oil. As it is, all that money goes to Angola. But if Cabinda were independent, fields like Magna Grande would be making this hypothetical small nation even richer. Our concern at the State Department is this: sooner or later someone is going to figure that backing the rebels in Cabinda in exchange for a share of future oil revenues could be a very smart investment. Cabinda is vulnerable because it’s really small. You could fit it into the state of Texas ninety times over. To put it in British terms, it’s about the size of your county of North Yorkshire.”

“So unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s not a large area for an army to seize or to hold.”

“Exactly. And because it’s separated from the rest of Angola, the only way that the Angolans can get men and supplies into Cabinda is to fly them in, through Congolese airspace, or to ship them up the coast. Which would make it hard for President dos Santos to respond to a take-over bid. The National Air Force of Angola has a maximum of five Russian-built Ilyushin-76 Candid transport jets, though we doubt that more than two or three of them are currently airworthy.”

“I know the Candid,” said Cross. “The Soviets used them as their main transports in Afghanistan. Typical Russian kit: simple but tough. Easy to hit with missiles and guns but damn hard to bring down.”

“But if you’re a Cabindan rebel leader, you only have to bring down a handful of planes and the Angolans are screwed,” Franklin pointed out. “And if you’ve got powerful backing, who’s to say you won’t have better missiles than the ones we gave the Taliban, back in the day?”

“You make it sound like the U.S. is getting back in the business of funding insurgency operations.”

“No we’re not, and certainly not this one. But other people soon might be because FLEC-FAC has just got itself a hotshot new leader called Mateus da Cunha. He is of Portuguese extraction but was born in Paris, France, on the twenty-eighth of March 1987. His father, Paulo da Cunha, went into exile there, along with other Cabindan rebel leaders. His mother, Cécile Duchêne da Cunha, is French. Her family are all wealthy left-wing intellectuals. Très chic, but très communiste, if you know what I mean.”

“Typical bloody Frogs!” huffed Cross.

“Typical Brit to say so,” Franklin parried.

“Typical Kenyan, if you don’t mind.”

Franklin’s brows knitted in puzzlement. “You know, it’s a little weird for me, an African-American, to be talking to you, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, and replace myself wondering: Is he more African than I am?”

“I may well be,” Cross replied. “And we may both be more African than Monsieur Mateus da Cunha. Tell me about him.”

“Well, he had about the most elite education any French citizen can receive. He got his bachelor’s degree at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, then mastered at the National School of Administration in Strasbourg.”

“Makes a change from all the revolutionaries who were educated at the London School of Economics.”

“Yes, and the result is that this kid is connected. He’s part of the French and European Union establishment. He knows how to carry himself in the smartest salons of Paris. And he is actively looking for people to invest in Cabinda. He’s very slick, very persuasive. He never even suggests that what his investors are really paying for is the means to help him win a war. He simply describes the untapped potential of this pocket-sized piece of Africa. His favorite line is that Cabinda could be Africa’s Dubai: a tax-free playground, funded by oil, fringed with beaches and basking in the tropical sun.”

“You sound like one of his sales team.”

“Anything but! My point is, Mateus da Cunha’s determined to do what his father never could and create an independent Cabinda.”

“With him as President-for-Life.”

“You got it.”

“And a large chunk of the oil revenues siphoned into his bank account.”

“There you go.”

“But before he can do that,” said Cross, seeing where this was all heading, “he has to start some kind of uprising. And the best way to let the world know that he’s serious would be to blow the hell out of some fancy new oil rig, way out there in the Atlantic.”

“That’s right, but it’s a delicate balance. He wouldn’t want to wreck too many of them, because oil is the source of his money, long-term, and he doesn’t want to scare people away. One way it might play out is an attack takes place and da Cunha blames it on rogue elements within the independence movement. He tells everyone not to worry, he can deal with these hotheads, but it would sure help if he could tell them that the world is listening to them and respecting their need for freedom and independence.”

“This sounds like an old-fashioned protection racket.”

“Exactly. Then, da Cunha hopes, the world gets the message and tells Angola to let Cabinda go.”

“At this point huge amounts of money appear in a bunch of Swiss bank accounts, held by senior Angolan politicians and military commanders, just to make sure they sign on the dotted line.”

“That’s a possibility. And then Mateus da Cunha’s got himself his own private African kingdom.”

“Which can be done,” Cross said. “I’ve seen it. So are you telling me that there’s a clear and present danger of this happening any time soon?”

Franklin gave a shake of her head. “No, I wouldn’t go that far. But there’s a real possibility of unrest that might affect oil installations off the Angolan coast. So I’m advising you, as the Bannock Oil director with responsibility for security, that it would be sensible to take precautions.”

“Anything specific you have in mind?”

“Well, any threat you face is going to come in by sea or by air. I’m not aware of any terrorist attack anywhere involving helos. But there are many, many instances of pirate and terrorist attacks made by boat—from the attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in October 2000, to all the Somali pirates who are still operating to this day.”

“I’ve seen that, too.” Cross was tempted to add: I’ve led a raid on the coast of Somalia that wiped out a nest of pirates, destroyed their base and freed two billion dollars’ worth of captured shipping, but thought better of it. Instead he said, “I think I’ve got a rough idea of what we’re going to need, in terms of personnel, equipment and training. Thanks for giving me the heads-up on what we can expect out there, Ms. Franklin.”

“Please,” she said sweetly, “call me . . .” She paused teasingly and then said, “Dr. Franklin. I have a PhD, after all.”

Cross laughed. “It’s been a pleasure, Doctor Franklin. And, if you don’t mind, you can call me Major Cross. Until we meet in less formal circumstances, that is.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” she said, and then the screen went blank.

Hector Cross leaned back in his office chair. “Well,” he said to himself, “that was more interesting than I’d expected.” He looked at the monitor, and even though the lovely Dr. Franklin could no longer see or hear him he added, “And I’ll look forward to meeting you very much, too.”

It was something Weiss said,” Malinga told Connie Hernandez when they were going over the interviews, back at Company A headquarters. “I asked him if he’d ever previously represented Johnny Congo, prior to now, and he thought awhile then said . . .” Malinga looked at his notes to get the phrasing absolutely correct, “OK, here it is. He said this was ‘the first time in my life that I represented a man called Johnny Congo.’ Doesn’t it strike you as odd, the way he said that?”

“You know lawyers,” Hernandez replied. “Always trying to twist words.”

“Yeah, they do. But only when there’s a reason for not giving the straight answer. He didn’t say he’d never represented Johnny Congo. It was ‘a man called Johnny Congo.’ Not even ‘the man called Johnny Congo.’ It was ‘a man.’”

“A man, the man, what’s the diff?”

“Because ‘a man’ could be called something else. Don’t you get it? He didn’t represent a man called Johnny Congo. But he did represent a guy with another name . . .”

“Who was actually Johnny Congo.”

“Maybe.”

“But how would he not know that the two people were the same guy? He was his lawyer.”

“What if he never actually met the first guy? What if it was all done by phone calls and emails? Think about it. Congo was out of the country, in Africa or wherever. He couldn’t come back, couldn’t even use his real name. But he hires Weiss, Mendoza and Burnett to work for him, using an alias.”

“OK,” said Hernandez, starting to become a little more convinced. “So we go back to Weiss, ask him what the deal was.”

Mendoza shook his head. “No. I don’t want to alert him. But here’s what you can do for me. Call the Marshals. See if you can speak to anyone who was on the crew that brought Congo back from Abu Zara. Find out anything they know about where he’d been before that, any aliases he might have used. See, if Congo used another name to deal with Weiss, he might have used it to get out of the country, too. And if we know how he got out, we might just be able to figure out where he’s gone. And then maybe we’ll catch the son of a bitch.”

Hernandez had once dated a guy who’d been on the U.S. Marshals Gulf Coast Offender and Violent Fugitive Task Force. It hadn’t ended well. If she’d never said another word to him in her life she wouldn’t have complained. But needs must, so she gave him a call.

Her old date wasn’t any happier to hear from Connie Hernandez than she was to speak to him. He couldn’t help her directly, but just to get out of the conversation he put her on to someone else who might, and three more degrees of law enforcement separation later she found herself talking to one of the men who’d lifted Congo out of Abu Zara.

“This is off the record, right?” the Marshal insisted.

“Sure, whatever, I’m just looking for a lead. Where I get it isn’t an issue.”

“OK, so this whole Abu Zara thing was just weird. I mean, there was no formal extradition. We just get the call that an escaped murderer who’s been wanted, like, forever is sitting in a cell somewhere no one has ever heard of. But the Sultan who runs the place is happy to let us have the killer as a favor to his good buddy, some Limey dude who caught him.”

“Caught him where?”

“We weren’t told. Africa somewhere was all we heard.”

“How about the Limey? Did they tell you anything about him?”

“The man could throw a punch, I can tell you that much. Knocked Congo out cold with one shot, and that evil bastard was a beast.”

“What? A civilian hit a prisoner in your custody and you just let him?”

“Wasn’t that simple. We flew into Abu Zara and were told to go to the Sultan’s private hangar. Man, it was vast. The guy basically has his own personal airline. Anyway, we get there and the Limey has this team with him, guarding Congo—all high-end mercenary Joes, ex-Special Forces. So they hand Congo over and suddenly Congo goes apeshit, starts trash-talking the Limey, cussing him out, real filthy language, and we’re trying to restrain him but it’s like trying to tie down Godzilla. Then Congo says he killed the Limey’s wife, says she was a whore and the next thing we know—bam!—Congo’s out, I mean stone cold out, right there on the hangar floor. Unbe-frickin-lievable.”

The Marshal started laughing at the memory. Hernandez was just about to butt in, but before she could he suddenly said, “Wait! I just remembered something. While Congo was screaming, he said the guy’s name, the Limey.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“Wait, it’s just coming to me. Began with ‘C.’ Like, ah . . .” The Marshal tried to bring the name back to his mind: “C-C-C . . .”

“Christ . . .” sighed Hernandez frustratedly.

“That’s it!” the Marshal exclaimed. “Cross, his name was Cross! Guess that word-association thing really does work, huh?”

“Thank you,” said Hernandez, with a whole new tone of genuine gratitude. “You’ve been a very, very great help.”

“Well, I guess I’m glad to have been of service,” the Marshal said, sounding a little surprised by the sudden change in her attitude.

Hernandez hung up. It sounded like the Marshal hadn’t followed the story of the murder of Hazel Bannock Cross. Well, that wasn’t surprising. Plenty of cops didn’t have time to worry about other people’s cases and Bannock Oil’s PR people had done everything they could to minimize coverage of the tragedy. But even if Hernandez was hardly the girly type, she still needed to go to the hairdresser, just like any other woman. And one time she’d sat waiting for her stylist to start work, reading a trashy glossy weekly that happened to have a story headlined: “Tragic Death of Hazel Bannock . . . and Miracle Birth of Her Billionaire Baby.” So she knew exactly who Cross was. Now she just had to replace him.

Cross was in his office, just getting ready for his afternoon meeting with Dave Imbiss and the O’Quinns, when the phone rang. “I’ve got a Tom Nocerino from Bannock Oil Corporate Communications, in Houston, holding for you,” Agatha informed him. “He says he needs a quote from you about your role in the Angolan project. He said it was for the investors’ newsletter.”

“I’ve not heard of that before.”

“It’s new apparently. Would you like to speak to him, or shall I ask him to call back?”

“Might as well get it over and done with. Put him through.”

“Thank you so much, sir, for sparing me your time,” Nocerino began in a voice sticky with sycophancy.

“So this is just for a newsletter, right? I’m not going to see it on my newsfeed one morning because someone’s stuck it in a press release and the whole world’s been treated to my opinions?”

“Absolutely not, Mr. Cross. I can assure you, sir, this is purely private and in-house. It’s a way of keeping valued investors in the loop, making them feel they’ve got a relationship with Bannock Oil that’s more than just financial.”

“I’ve not heard of this before.”

“No, sir, it’s a very new concept. In fact, this will be the first edition. But the idea came right from the top.”

“From John Bigelow?” Cross asked, thinking to himself how typical it was of the veteran politician to be more concerned with the appearance of things than the practicalities of them.

“Yes, sir,” Nocerino replied. “Senator Bigelow believes very strongly in the importance of reaching out to the people and institutions that have put their faith and their trust in Bannock Oil.”

“And their money . . .”