I stared up into his face and whispered, a bare breath in the cold night, “He lives.”

A shot in the dark, the single snap of a silenced pistol. I jerked, trying to work out where it had gone in. The hands that held me let go; I fell to my knees. So did Coyle. His face hovered an inch from mine, eyes wide, mouth shaping an O of surprise. I looked down at myself and saw no bullet wound. I looked up at him, and there was a shininess to his jacket, a growing patch of darkness that caught the torchlight and reflected it back crimson.

The crunch of the gunman’s boots behind me, and there’s only one him, it seems, just one man sent to kill two birds.

He looked past me into Coyle’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, raising the gun. “I have to follow orders.”

Overhead the clouds have cleared and the sky is sprawled with a thousand stars framing cliffs dug out by this busy little gorge. In daylight the place might have been beautiful: black stones washed with silver water. By torchlight strapped to the end of a silenced pistol it is a lonely place to die.

Coyle moved. In the dark I didn’t see his hand close around the gun, but I felt the movement, saw torchlight twist and turn, heard the double crack-crack of pistols firing, the ground briefly illuminated chemical-yellow, heard the smack of lead against bone. I looked up and saw the gunman, weapon held to fire. He took a step, and his foot slipped on the rocks. Took another, and his legs went out beneath him. He fell, head cracking open on the stony ground, arm slapping into the flow of the river.

Coyle fell. First onto his belly, then his face; twisted to one side, bounced on the wet stones.

The headlights of the van were high above us, and no one shouted, no one cried foul murder, no one came.

“Coyle!” I hissed, and he tried to raise his head at the name. “Cut me loose!” His head sank back on to the stones. “I can help you, I can help you! Cut me loose!”

I shuffled like an infant on my knees towards him, saw the light glisten on the blood where it was beginning to seep through his shirt. “Coyle!” His eyes were open, and he made no answer. I bent down towards his face. Only a thin pale line showed around his eyes, all other parts of his skin protected by layers of fabric, plastic and tape. But it was enough, so I bent down and kissed him on the softness of his eyes

pain

I bit back on a scream, stuffed my arm into my mouth to hold it in, shaking, shuddering pain rocking through my body. It ran through the tight muscles of my neck, through my locked-up belly, down to my knees and exited through the throbbing soles of my feet. It originated from a bullet, low calibre and slowed by a silencer, but still a bullet, wedged in my right shoulder, in a bundle of nerves that shrieked their distress, shredding thought and blurring all other sense. In front of me Samir Chayet swayed, blinking in the dark. I pushed myself up on my left arm, heard blood roar behind my ears as Samir began to whisper the usual refrain of what, where, how, his voice rising as the panic began to bite. I slid on to my knees, fumbled at my chest, my trousers, my belt, until I found a small blade. “Wait,” I whispered, and my voice was cracked, and as Samir spotted the rapidly cooling corpse to his left he began to shout, to cry out, to lament without much direction or sense.

“Wait,” I hissed again, pulling the balaclava from my face. “Stay still.”

He gasped in air as I rested the blade against his back, managed to pull down a sob. I turned the knife against the cable ties that bound his wrists and, with a jerk that nearly took me to the ground again, cut him free. He fell on to his hands and knees, shaking, and I rested the blade against his throat.

He froze, an animal locked in place. “Listen,” I hissed, first in Arabic, then in French, remembering that the Samir I had played was not the Samir I had been. “I’m losing a lot of blood here. Touch my skin.”

Terror, incomprehension in his eyes. I turned the knife a little with my wrist, letting him feel the scrape of it against his skin. “Touch my skin.”

I let the blade track his throat as he leaned into me, hands shaking, and as his skin brushed against the side of my face I threw the knife into the darkness of the river and

switched.

My heart was racing, piss in my pants, sweat on my back, eyes burning with tears wanting to be shed, but blessed relief! With a cry Coyle fell back on the ground, clutching the hole in his shoulder, and I rubbed blood back into my hands and hissed, “Coyle!” I scrambled over to him, felt the blood hot on his shirt. “Do you carry medical supplies?”

“The van,” he replied. “In the van.”

“How far are we from a town?”

“Four miles, five–five!” His face twisted, legs kicked back against nothing as he writhed beneath me. Sometimes people writhe to get away from a thing that scares them, sometimes to remind themselves that they have a body beyond the pain. This was both.

“I can help you! I can get you away from here. Your own people have betrayed you–are you listening to me?”

A half-nod, a wheeze of broken bloody breath.

“I can get you out of here, get you medical attention, but you need to trust me.”

“Kepler?” Not much of a question, but he asked it anyway.

“I can help you, but you need to give me your call sign.” A half-laugh that quickly dissolved into the pain. “Coyle!” I snarled. “Kestrel–whatever your name is–they are going to kill you. I can keep you alive. Tell me.”

“Aurelius,” he wheezed. “My… call sign is Aurelius.”

I pressed my bare hand against his cheek. “If you’re lying,” I whispered, “we’re both dead.”

“You find out.”

“I need your clothes,” I said, reaching for his belt. His bloody hand pressed against my own, stopping it before I could undo the buckle. “I’ve seen it all before.” His hand didn’t move. “I need to hide my face.”

His hand fell away, and I pulled his trousers free one leg at a time. His shirt crackled like Velcro as I peeled it away from him. Beneath it he wore blue Lycra, the blood glistening, moving like a living thing as it filled the fibres. His trousers were too short, his jacket too tight, and I felt almost surprised. I slipped his balaclava over my face, smelt his sweat within it. I picked up his gun, checked the magazine, pressed my own discarded shirt against his wound, felt him flinch.

“You’ll be OK,” I murmured, and was surprised at how level my own voice seemed. “You’re going to make it.”

“You don’t know that,” he replied.

I pulled the magazine from my gun, threw it aside, buried my hands in my pockets so that no man might see the bare skin. I began to climb back up the muddy path, the crooked riverside made more treacherous by the rain, towards the light of the truck on the road above.

Chapter 72

I had counted eleven men who went to Saint-Guillaume to kill a cripple by the name of Janus.

Only three were waiting by the truck, parked on the roadside above a stream, its headlights burning white. Two of them had even begun to relax, their balaclavas off to reveal one man, one woman, cigarettes glowing between their bare fingers. Hard to strike a light when your fingers are muffled by wool and silk; harder still to enjoy a gasp when your face is hidden from view.

Perhaps they didn’t know the events by the river.

Perhaps they were to have been told that Coyle’s death was accident, not execution.

Perhaps they were only following orders.

My hands were in my pockets, and my face was covered by wool, and I was a familiar shape on a darkened night, and I was alone.