# A Risk Worth Taking

Brynn Kelly

He can’t outrun himself…Legionnaire Jamie Armstrong lives in the shadows. A medic haunted by his mistakes, he knows better than to hope for redemption. But his latest mission brings a threat he doesn’t see coming—an attraction as irresistible as it is dangerous. Hacker Samira Desta is a woman he swore to forget, but as a key witness to a deadly conspiracy, Samira is his to protect.But the woman he rescues might be the one who saves himAfter a year in hiding, Samira’s worst fears come true when her cover is blown and the unlikeliest of allies comes to her aid—the secretive Scot with whom she shared one unforgettable night. Hunted by lethal forces and losing the battle against their desire, Jamie and Samira make a desperate play to take the fight to their enemy—but those at greatest risk of ruin may be themselves…

He can’t outrun himself…

Legionnaire Jamie Armstrong lives in the shadows. A medic haunted by his mistakes, he knows better than to hope for redemption. But his latest mission brings a threat he doesn’t see coming—an attraction as irresistible as it is dangerous. Hacker Samira Desta is a woman he swore to forget, but as a key witness to a deadly conspiracy, Samira is his to protect.

But the woman he rescues might be the one who saves him

After a year in hiding, Samira’s worst fears come true when her cover is blown and the unlikeliest of allies comes to her aid—the secretive Scot with whom she shared one unforgettable night. Hunted by lethal forces and losing the battle against their desire, Jamie and Samira make a desperate play to take the fight to their enemy—but those at greatest risk of ruin may be themselves...

Also By Brynn Kelly

Deception Island

Edge of Truth

Forbidden River (ebook novella)

A Risk Worth Taking

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

A Risk Worth Taking

Brynn Kelly


www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08329-4

A RISK WORTH TAKING

© 2018 Bronwyn Sell

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Rave reviews for Brynn Kelly’s Edge of Truth

“Edge of Truth has it all—danger, desire, and heart-pounding action. Brynn Kelly captures you on page one and doesn’t let go!”

—Laura Griffin, New York Times bestselling author

“Brynn Kelly will capture your heart and leave you breathless in this passionate, harrowing novel of romantic suspense. A must-read!”

—Brenda Novak, New York Times bestselling author

“Dark and deep—a twisting romantic suspense that will grab you and never let go.”

—Cynthia Eden, New York Times bestselling author

“Edge of Truth is a breathtaking romantic thriller. The characters are so real they leap off the page, the love story is hot and the action never lets up. I couldn’t put it down.”

—Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author

“Kelly is rapidly demonstrating that she is highly skilled at developing intricate stories that are packed with intrigue and jeopardy, while also rich with human emotion. This book is a nonstop thrill ride....Kelly is proving to be a gift to the romantic suspense genre!”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick!

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

Tuscany

A DOZEN TINY spiders tiptoed up Samira Desta’s nape. She planted a placeholder finger on her file of evidence and blinked as her focus adjusted over the rolling red and gold fields, their folds in charcoal shadow like an unshaken quilt. Cypress trees: check. Cows: check. Paranoia: check. She rubbed her neck. Nothing there, of course. Not a Sangiovese grape out of place in paradise.

The buzz of a motor curled in on the breeze, echoing off the hills. Her breath stalled. Vehicle? Helicopter? Drone strike? What did a drone strike even sound like?

She tsked. A droning, presumably. And by the time you noticed it, would it be too late, like seeing a tsunami or hearing the rumble of an earthquake?

A red motor scooter bobbed up over a distant rise and ducked away under the next, appeared again, disappeared, appeared...rising and falling from view like a surfer in a swell. The rider wore a high-vis jacket. Il postino. Samira exhaled. Stand down, Sherlock.

Or could it be a mercenary masquerading as a postal worker? That would be a great cover.

Yes, she was losing it. Too much time alone.

Low morning sun bathed the courtyard but the air channeling down the neighbor’s vines was cool around the edges, sending leaves rattling and scratching across the terra-cotta tiles. From the speakers inside the rented cottage, Carole King and her piano were working through their problems. “It’s Going to Take Some Time.”

No kidding, Carole.

Coffee fumes wove into the decaying earthy scent of fall. Autunno, here. The world didn’t get more breathtaking but the beauty didn’t hit Samira in her chest as it might once have. One day, when all this was over, maybe that little skip would return.

With a sigh she tightened her ponytail and returned to the document. The letters seemed to float off the page and rearrange, like they were trying to edit themselves. Ah, who was she kidding? She’d memorized every word of her evidence for the special counsel investigating Senator Tristan Hyland’s terrorist links. No matter how often she revised, it got no stronger than circumstantial and hearsay. And no wonder people weren’t believing it. A wildly popular war hero orders a terror attack in Los Angeles that kills thousands, for political and financial gain? Preposterous. He could still wriggle out, proclaim it was a conspiracy to end his presidential ambitions—if Samira even got to testify before suffering a conveniently fatal accident, like her fiancé had.

Note to self: Google the sound of a drone strike.

Or would that send an alert to a gray-faced analyst in a monitoring center in some industrial park in America? A company with an ominously banal name—Tactical Security Associates or Virtual Monitoring Solutions. She wants to hear a drone strike? We’ll give her a drone strike.

No, she really wasn’t winning the concentration battle. She heaved the document shut, the echoing slap sending a cow thundering across a neighboring field. Scraping the chair backward, she pressed her knuckles into the middle of her back and arched. For many months it’d felt like a bubble of air was trapped there. She’d writhed and wriggled, twisted and stretched, bent backward over innumerable sofas and chairs in a blur of rented cottages and apartments, but the satisfying pop just wouldn’t come. If Latif were alive he’d gather her in his arms and yank her tight around the ribs. Just the right spot, just the right angle, just the right pressure. Her back would crack, the tension would release, she’d take a deep breath, they’d kiss...

She gave up on the back crack. Wishful thinking. The bubble had been wedged there since she’d read the newsflash about “collateral damage” in a drone strike in Somalia and known by the snap in her heart what it meant.

Nineteen months since his death. Thirteen months since she’d become a witness in the case against Hyland and disappeared underground on a self-imposed protection program. Thirteen months of fleeing from hiding place to hiding place, living under a series of assumed names, rarely reaching more length or depth in her conversations than “un cappuccino, per favore,” “un café crème, s’il vous plaît,” “ich möchte etwas kaffee.” Her Continental grand tour, from Africa to France, then Switzerland, Slovakia, Croatia... She traced a finger around the lip of the coffee cup. Where had she gone after that? The Milan apartment? The former monastery near Barcelona? All private, secluded rentals that didn’t require ID. Cash up front to cover a couple of months’ rent for a “writing retreat.” All the time with that bubble lodged in her spine, that prickly sensation of being watched. She shuddered.

Still, she had no right to complain—about anything. How much would Latif love to come back for this one day, as hollow as it was? Sunshine, countryside, starlings... It would all be pretty cool to a dead person.

She shook a twig off her foot and hunkered into her scarf. La couleur de minuit. A memory triggered—crunching through leaves alongside the River Loire, the scarf around her neck, hand in hand with a man she shouldn’t have been hand in hand with. But his palm was dry and warm and rough, and his voice was deep and mellow, and her grief was raw, and his kiss was...

A man who shouldn’t return to her thoughts as often as he did. Like right now, virtually pulling up a chair alongside her and nuzzling her nape, murmuring phrases that hadn’t been covered by her French tutors, his Scottish lilt blending with his throaty French R.

She tugged the scarf free and twisted its smooth cotton length through one loose fist, silver threads flashing in the deep violet. Memory or fantasy? She’d been living in her head so long...

Either way, it was unfair to force Latif’s fading ghost to compete with the all-too-vivid memory of Jamie. And futile. Both were entombed in her past and would stay there. She hadn’t replaced Latif with Jamie. Jamie had been a...what? Fling? Escape? Lapse of judgment? All of the above? It might as well have happened in her imagination, except for the scarf he’d bought her from the market below the Château de Langeais and the voice in her head, and the very real confusion twisting beneath her ribs. If it wasn’t grief over Latif, it was guilt over what she’d felt for Jamie. Still felt.

Was that really a year ago?

Her phone alarm trilled through the Bluetooth speakers. The A-Team theme. She caught the phone as it vibrated off the wrought iron table, and swiped it silent, her heart skipping. The music restarted. The scooter had turned onto her road—a dead end she shared with a boutique family vineyard and an organic farm—triggering the first of her motion sensors. She threaded the scarf around her neck and knotted it. The engine tapered from a hum to a chug as it neared her long driveway. Probably nothing, but she gathered up the file and the coffee cup.

The scooter disappeared behind a strip of strutting cypresses, its engine slowing, the sound sharpening as it turned. Samira’s pocket jumped. The second alarm—MacGyver. The scooter was in her driveway. With a few more swipes, she muted the alarm and Carole, midclimax of “It’s Too Late.” She grabbed her backpack from where it leaned against a whitewashed wall just inside the French doors—packed, always packed. She hadn’t left as much as a toothbrush out in a year. The scooter whined as it climbed the gravel drive. Breath catching, she drew the doors closed from the outside, coaxing them flat with her fingernails, and stole behind the fat trunk of an oak across the courtyard.

Probably just mail for a previous tenant, but the fewer locals she encountered, the better. The only people who could feasibly mail her anything—and only through a trusted, off-the-radar intermediary—were her parents and the journalist who’d broken the story a year ago about Hyland’s connection to the LA attacks, Tess Newell. Her friend Tess Newell. Because she was seriously short of those. And they knew not to contact her unless it was vital. Too many ways to tip off the enemy.

She leaned against the trunk, tracking the scooter’s progress by its noise as it rolled into the turning bay and idled. Over the fence, several white cows stopped chewing and stared at Samira. She made a face but they didn’t get the hint. Footsteps crunched. A knock on the thin door frame, rattling the glass inserts. A pause. Another rap. More footsteps. The hiss of the rider reclaiming the seat, and then the scooter decrescendoed down the drive. Samira waited several minutes then pushed off the trunk, strands of her hair pinching as they caught on the bark. A white stamped envelope lay beside the door.

The alarms triggered in the opposite order as the scooter resumed its rounds. Oh, for a life that simple. Deliver the mail in the morning, idle away the afternoon and evening eating panzanella and drinking Chianti...

Huh. Was any life really like that, or was this a case of greener grass in the other field—or whatever that English saying was? Her English was getting rusty. Heck, her native Amharic was rusty. Even her Italian wasn’t getting a workout.

The letter was addressed to her—at least, to one of her aliases. She scraped her teeth over one side of her lower lip as she crouched over the plain business envelope. Typewritten label, Helsinki postmark. Her shoulders settled. The trusted friend of her mother who was acting as her emergency contact—a retired former diplomat who had no sympathy for Samira’s enemies but was comfortably off their radar. Samira sent the woman a breezy postcard in a fake name every time she changed address. Laughably old school, but the irony of the twenty-first century was that every government, agency and criminal organization was too busy tracking electronic communication to bother with opening people’s mail. If it didn’t require a cryptographic exchange, who gave a damn?

Samira perched on a courtyard chair and tore open the envelope. Inside was another envelope, plain and brown. Inside that, like a nest of matryoshka dolls, a thick postcard and an unaddressed and unsigned note in her mother’s handwriting, in Italian, for good measure. Always thinking of you. Kisses. It would have killed her mother to leave it at that but Hyland would be a fool not to have her parents under surveillance, even at the Ethiopian Embassy in Ottawa, and their diplomatic protection went only so far. Her mother would have had an aide drop it in a distant mailbox. Sudbury, according to the postmark. Samira had been there once—it had to be a five-hour drive from Ottawa. She ran her thumb over the familiar looped handwriting, the bonded paper thick and rough.

The postcard showed a gleaming Arc de Triomphe. Who did she know in Paris? She flipped it. It was also unsigned, the handwriting unfamiliar, addressed to her mother at the embassy.

Hey, Janis, it began. Samira frowned. She hadn’t used that avatar since grad student days at Brown. Three scrawled lines followed. I have a gift that will change your life. Just what Jagger was looking for. Can’t wait to see your face when I give it to you. A good excuse for you to visit—soon! Luv, Vespa.

Samira tapped the edge of the postcard on the table. Vespa was the avatar of Charlotte Liu, her English university roommate from Brown—the Latin name for her favorite British football team. Jagger was Latif. The aliases they’d used playing “Cosmos” during all the late nights they should have spent studying.

It could only be Charlotte. No one else knew those names. Samira’s mother must have guessed the postcard was for Samira, that it was important enough to forward.

When had she last heard from Charlotte? Not since Latif had turned whistle-blower and the two of them had dropped off the earth, but Charlotte had to know he was dead—she worked for Britain’s biggest spy agency. Why contact Samira now? And why the secrecy?

The oxygen seemed to thin. Only one “gift” would change Samira’s life for the better—the elusive evidence that would secure Hyland’s prosecution. Then he’d have nothing to gain from her death—the cat would be out of the cage. Box. Crate. Whatever. Just what Jagger was looking for. The additional evidence Latif was chasing when he died? If anyone could get access to damning evidence, a GCHQ surveillance analyst could, but she’d have to be very careful how she shared it.

The card was postmarked in Paris two months ago. The white envelope was stamped a week later in Helsinki. It’d probably spent the seven weeks since stacked in some postal holding center in Italy. Charlotte could have delivered it on foot in that time—though when she’d mailed it Samira had been holed up in... Denmark? Had Charlotte crossed the Channel from London just to post it, assuming that Samira’s parents would know her whereabouts?

Whatever she’d found, it had to be big. Charlotte could be jeopardizing her job—and her life—and she was as cautious as Samira. Latif had been the risk-taker of their geeky trio.

Samira rubbed her thumb over the glossy Paris street and leaned back. The scooter was out of sight, its engine a faint hum. Suddenly that view looked a whole lot less suffocating. Can’t wait to see your face when I give it to you. A good excuse for you to visit... Meaning, Samira had to collect it in person from Charlotte’s London flat. But going to London meant crossing a border—with an untested fake passport. Having it as a precaution for an emergency was one thing. Using it to break into Fortress Britain?

Could Samira get Tess to collect the “gift,” seeing as Samira would only be handing it along, assuming it was the evidence they needed? Charlotte would know who Tess was, after all the coverage about her scoop on Hyland. Tess would know what to do. She was in contact with the special counsel investigating Hyland, she had the media at her bidding, she was a folk hero in certain circles in the United States—and public enemy number one in others—and she had ten times Samira’s courage. Like that was hard.

Not forgetting that Tess had a bulletproof French Foreign Legion boyfriend backed up by a squad of Legionnaire friends who’d do anything for each other. Like escort a stranger into hiding. And look after her a little too well.

Guilt poked Samira in the ribs.

Calm down, Conscience. It’d been an error of judgment at a stressful time that’d rightfully ended, abruptly and awkwardly.

So why had she thought about him every day since?

She hissed in a breath through her teeth. Because she had too much time to think.

Anyway. Small steps, and none of them involved Jamie... Jamie... Hell, she didn’t even know his surname. The others had just called him “Doc.”

Anyway. First, she had to break comms silence and contact Tess. Tess would come up with a plan that bypassed Samira, hopefully. She fished her Italy guidebook from her backpack—because pages read in a book couldn’t be tracked like pages on the web—and chose an internet café in Perugia, a two-hour drive in the opposite direction from the last one she’d used to contact Tess. Though they were communicating rarely and via a secure, coded system, they’d defaulted to extreme precautions after Samira’s carelessness had revealed Latif’s location to Hyland.

She pulled out her wallet and counted her shrinking pile of euros. The last of the money she’d saved for her wedding and a deposit on an apartment in San Francisco. A long-dead dream from a long-dead life.

From a distant field, a bull bellowed. She flinched. At least a lengthy drive would give her a break from the hell that was paradise.

* * *

BY THE TIME Samira returned, the hillside glowed amber in midafternoon sun. She parked her little white Fiat, as usual, between an overgrown olive grove and a derelict barn beside the neighbor’s vineyard, tucked back from the main road. It meant a cross-country hike through a steep field to the cottage, but better that than being stuck in her dead-end driveway when the shit spun in the—when the fan turned the sh—

Whatever.

She locked the car and pushed through the olive branches. At least paranoia gave her something to do with her many spare hours.

From the ridge, the cottage looked as lifeless as she’d left it. Such peace and beauty, yet the thought of locking herself away for another night... In the field the cows’ great heads nudged the scorched grass. They bolted if she as much as sneezed, so if they were calm, she was calm. They wouldn’t appreciate it when she got to the cottage and fired up the four Js on the speakers—Janis, Joni and the two Joans. You could bring the culture to the cow... She screwed up her face. No, that wasn’t nearly the expression.

She checked the motion-sensor data on her phone’s security app. With one bar of Wi-Fi coverage from the cottage, it took its time loading. Several cars had passed along the road in her absence but none had entered the driveway and there’d been no movement in or around the cottage. She tapped the phone, tempted to check for a reply from Tess, but...no. The phone was only to control her security system—and play her music, because otherwise she’d go insane. No network connection, no calls, no data, no browsing.

She squeezed through the rickety wire fence, the sunshine a balm on her nape. After sending the message to Tess, she’d waited at the internet café as long as she could without raising eyebrows but there’d been no reply. She’d checked a couple of media sites, via an incognito connection. Hyland was still proclaiming his innocence. “Why the heck would I be involved in a ludicrous plot to kill American citizens in order to orchestrate a war? This is an outrageous conspiracy that robbed me of the chance to lead the country I love, and continues to haunt me and my daughter, who stands with me through this difficult time. Patriotic Americans everywhere should be alarmed about this threat to our democracy. I am confident that the special counsel will find no evidence of wrongdoing on my part, justice will be served to those who slander me and I will be free to continue doing what I’ve spent my entire adult life doing, as a marine, a CIA agent and now a senator—serving and protecting this great nation.”

Creep. As Samira followed the fence line, a rhino-sized cow jerked its head up and eyed her, freezing, as if she wouldn’t notice it if it didn’t move. One by one its sisters followed until half a dozen black-lashed brown eyes tracked her progress. “Va tutto bene,” she said, quiet and warm. “Non aver paura.” Right—because Tuscan cows were more likely to understand It’s all right, don’t be scared in Italian? The rhino’s head twitched and a smaller cow sprang sideways, but for a change they didn’t bolt en masse. Maybe they were getting used to her. Which had to be Fate’s way of warning her it was time to move on.

* * *

WELL AFTER DARK, Samira jerked awake. The A-Team theme tune was squeaking out of her phone. She swiped it off, her chest tight. Definitely engine noise, but low. She swallowed. A car in the night was unusual but not unheard of.

Another alarm. The A-Team again. A second car on the road. She silenced it, shot out of bed, slipped on her waiting boots and coat and grabbed her backpack. Two cars on her little road at this hour? One hell of a coinciden—

The alarm shrilled again, followed immediately by the MacGyver tune. Shit. Three vehicles, one already on the driveway. Working on feel, she pulled up the bedcover, restored the pillows, scattered cushions over top and let herself out of the cottage, as she’d practiced a dozen times, keeping out of scope of her sensor lights. MacGyver started over. Multiple engines purred. Modern, expensive cars—two on the driveway now.

By the next repeat of MacGyver, she was ankle deep in pasture, cows scattering before her. The cold whipped her bare legs. Her heart thumped with the shock of being slingshot out of warmth and sleep. With fumbling fingers, she set the phone to vibrate, blinking fast to force her eyes to adjust. Damn, she should have practiced her evacuation at night. The first engine muted. A car door clicked open. Her breath skittered as she stumbled uphill, looking over her shoulder. Her security lights burst on, flooding the courtyard and driveway, and setting her phone shaking again. A big black SUV had pulled up in the turning bay, headlights doused. Four darkly clad figures silently fanned out, their arms locked straight and pointed downward. Handguns. An identical vehicle pulled up alongside, leaving one more engine approaching. More people spilled out. Her phone kept vibrating. Or was that just her hand?

A crack, a smash—wood, and glass. Hooves thundered, shaking the earth, the cows’ glow-in-the-dark flanks flashing past. Hell, they wouldn’t stampede her, would they? Between their flying bodies she made out the figures of two men down at the French doors, looking like they were pulling up from a shoulder charge. White-blond hair gleamed from one guy’s head. He braced for another go. She upped her pace but her foot shot into a hole. Her ankle buckled, pain flashing through it, and she sprawled onto the grass, her cry muffled by a crash as the door gave. She pushed herself up and tested the ankle. Just a strain. Cold dew coated her leg. Focus on what’s right in front. Small steps. If she didn’t capitalize on her scant head start, she was—what? Dead? Despite her efforts to make the cottage look deserted and as pristine as if a cleaner had just left, the goons might feel her body heat in the small bedroom. If they pulled back the covers, they’d discover the sheets were warm...

Her chest pinched. The world tipped, and she planted her feet wide. No. Not now. She squeezed her eyes tight. Don’t do this to me, Brain. I know we’re in danger. Small steps, okay? One foot. Another foot. Another.

Fighting for every breath, she reached the fence to the olive grove, squeezed between the wires and scraped through the trees. Below, they’d switched on one set of headlights, aimed outward. Another set clicked on, directed into the field she’d just left. The cows bolted again.

Yep, use those lights, people. They’d be blind to anything outside the reach of the beams.

She pitched forward, groping in her coat pocket for the Fiat key. It rasped as it went in the lock. She eased the door open. The interior light flicked on. Shit. She scrabbled to disable it, panting. She threw the backpack on the passenger seat and her butt on the driver’s seat. Her hand shook as she jabbed the key at the ignition. Come on, come on. After a few wild misses, it slid in.

She froze. Oh God, she couldn’t start the car—they’d hear it. She covered her nose and mouth with both hands, which only amplified her struggling, squeaking breath. Her airways felt like they were narrowing. No. Why screw this up for yourself? Her assailants had to be fanning out. They’d find her in minutes. Her phone was still vibrating. She snatched it from her pocket and switched off the alarm. She was well alarmed.

She stilled, staring at the screen. She forced her trembling hands to navigate the unlock pattern. The Bluetooth signal was faint but it might be just enough. Lights zigzagged across her vision as she scrolled her playlist.

“I Knew You Were Waiting.”

“She Works Hard for the Money.”

“Because the Night.”

No, no, no, no.

Oh. She paused, scrolled back up a few tracks. Yes.

Swiping quickly, she hooked into the cottage speakers, slid them to full volume and pressed Play. From downhill, a snare drum hammered. She tapped along on the steering wheel—eight quick counts—and shakily started the engine as the drum and bass guitar joined, followed by the rhythm.

She automatically went for the headlights, stopping herself a second short of stupidity, and navigated out of the rutted driveway and onto the road, eyes open so wide they hurt. Joan Jett launched into her lyrics, echoed by half a dozen ghostly Joans glancing off the surrounding hills, half a second off the beat. The connection would cut out at the end of the track. Two minutes and fifty-five seconds. One song. One chance.

“I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” the hillsides sang.

“So do I, Joan,” Samira muttered. “But now what do we do?”

After a couple of minutes of driving, the tinny phone speaker kicked in, as the next song on the playlist uploaded. Out of range. The cottage would have silenced. Advantage over. Was it enough? She was in the next valley, so the car sound would be difficult to pinpoint. No movement or lights in the rear-vision mirror, and her preplanned escape route had enough twists and turns they couldn’t easily track her. First chance she got, she’d contact Tess, nail down a new plan.

“Time Has Come Today,” squeaked out of the phone.

Indeed. Time to come out of hiding and end this, whether she liked it or not—and she definitely did not. But Hyland had just made her decision for her.

“Yes, Joan,” Samira said, swinging into a side road. “The time has come.”

CHAPTER TWO

London

IT WASN’T PARANOIA. Samira was being followed. A tall, brittle man with crisp blond hair fading to white. Jeans, a brown leather jacket, a burgundy overnight bag. The guy who’d shoulder-charged the French doors the night before last?

In Paris that morning he’d been one of the few other patrons at the café two blocks from the Gare du Nord, apparently engrossed in the weekend Le Monde. At the station, she’d bought her ticket to London minutes before the cutoff for the 8:13 a.m. train—but as she’d crossed the concourse she’d glanced back to see him scurrying into the Eurostar ticket office. If he had time to read the newspaper and drink a café latte, why wait until the last moment? She should have kept walking, waited for the next train, aborted the whole lunatic mission. Midway through the Channel tunnel, he’d strolled into her carriage and slipped into a vacant aisle seat three rows behind. He’d hung back as the train emptied at St Pancras and lingered among the seats, tapping on a phone. She’d ducked into the bathroom, willing him to disappear, hissing to her sunken-eyed mirror image that she was being irrational. More than one man in Europe had white-blond hair. When she emerged, he was still there.

Now he was trailing her down the travellator to border control. Coincidence? She dragged her tongue over her teeth. She didn’t do coincidences anymore.

She looked around for a clock. Tess and Flynn should be waiting at Pancras Square near the station, after landing at Heathrow overnight, as they’d hurriedly planned. Very soon, if the passport worked, Samira could sponge off their confidence. Just having people to talk to would be a novelty, if she was even capable of carrying a conversation.

After the hushed voices and hum of the train, the station boomed with white noise that filled the air like a gas, curving up to its soaring glass dome and sweeping back down. Pearly light hung in the air. As she pulled up at the back of the immigration queue, she adjusted the plastic shopping bag on her shoulder. Inside, the polystyrene-wrapped champagne bottles whispered and clunked. Somewhere among the thick-coated passengers a newborn baby yelled, long beyond the reach of comfort, its shuddering mews swelling, ebbing, swelling, ebbing. Her blood pressure was playing that song, too.

She tightened her scarf and pulled her necklace over top of it, fingering the small gold cross. The queue was moving slower than she’d bargained for. There blew the theory that fooling UK border control at the Gare du Nord was enough, that the check at this end would be cursory. She shuffled to her right. Ahead, at a counter hung with a sagging string of red tinsel, a blue-shirted officer studied a passenger’s passport and ticket. Did they suspect something or were these checks standard? She’d only ever entered Britain with her parents, through diplomatic checkpoints.

Not that she always got a free pass into the United States, either, despite her green card. Carrying alcohol was a ruse Latif had adopted for their many flights in and out of JFK, when foreign students with names and faces like his had begun to draw suspicion.

They see the whiskey and figure you’re not some extremist jihadist, he’d once said at duty-free, picking up a bottle of Jim Beam he’d later donated to Charlotte.

She’d laughed. Or they conclude it’s an elaborate ruse to make you look less like a jihadist and pin you down for a cavity search.

She’d called him paranoid.

She shut her eyes tight until the burn eased. Not paranoid enough, in the end. Really, she needed to stop reliving their every conversation. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was having imaginary new ones. Sometimes imaginary arguments, sometimes aloud, pausing for his answers as they ran through her head. Day by day his image faded but his voice still curled through her.

Great, so she had two voices in her head—Latif’s and Jamie’s. Way too much time alone.

She pulled down the edge of the champagne bag to better reveal its contents. Doubling down on the paranoia because today it was her friend—and racial profiling wasn’t.

On the pretense of cricking her neck, which really did need a crick after a night sleeping in her car, she glanced over her shoulder. The blond man was two people behind. She swallowed past a prickly lump in her throat. Subterfuge was way beyond her comfort zone. Sure, she’d done shady things—hacked into secure systems, cracked passwords, unleashed harmless viruses—but only from behind a keyboard and monitor and only to prove she could or to test her clients’ systems. It was Latif who’d got off on this spy stuff, Latif who’d dragged her into this world of shadows, Latif who’d got killed and left her to finish this.

She spun her backpack to her front and removed the passport. Her hand trembled. Pretending to be engrossed in fiddling with a zip, she shuffled forward with the crowd.

Here she was in strolling distance of Regent’s Park but not yet officially in the country. No-man’s-land. In front, a toddler peeped over his mother’s shoulder, eyeing Samira through thick black curls. She gave what she hoped was an indulgent smile. The tot ducked. After a few seconds he peeped one hazel eye up. She winked and the boy buried his face, wrapping fat arms around his mother’s neck. The game continued until they moved off—and didn’t do a thing to settle Samira’s nerves. From somewhere the newborn was still wailing. Samira’s breath was getting shorter. Her chest stung.

Not now. Not ever but not now. But when did a panic attack ever come at a convenient time? She forced a deep inhalation.

“Next!” An officer beckoned Samira—young, light brown hair tied back, expression set to don’t-fuck-with-me. “Ticket and passport.”

The woman flattened Samira’s passport at the photo page, wincing. “This is a very old passport. Not machine-readable.”

Heat rolled up Samira’s face. “Yes, I need to get a new one soon.” She’d checked it was legally valid for entry, despite its looming expiry date. The forger had sworn that everything about the passport was legit except the photo, which had been swapped for hers, and that it hadn’t been reported stolen. Its owner had sold it to him and he’d repurposed it for Samira—for a gagging price.

The woman made a ticking noise. “What is the purpose of your visit?”

“A wedding, of a university friend.” Samira had been confidently faking an Italian accent all morning but suddenly she felt like a bad actor.

“Where is this wedding?”

“In Cornwall.”

“Where in Cornwall?”

Samira frowned. “Ah, it’s in...” She riffled through her backpack and pulled out a gilt-edged invitation on heavy matte card, created yesterday at a self-serve print shop on the outskirts of Paris. “Mousehole?” She held out the card, deliberately mispronouncing the town’s name. According to the forger, the passport’s former owner—real owner—had never visited Britain.

The woman smirked. “Mow-zul. Wait here.” She left her post, with Samira’s documents. Damn. Why?

Behind Samira, a man groaned. One thing she wished she hadn’t double-checked: using a fake passport at the border could get her ten years in prison or—once they figured out her real identity—deportation, probably to Ethiopia, though she’d spent only a few years of her life there. Either way, assassins would be waiting. And questions would be asked of her parents. The Ivy League–educated daughter of career diplomats busted for identity fraud? She pulled a water bottle from her bag and worked a sip down her throat. Maybe she should have taken the risk with her real passport.

No. It could have taken weeks to get a visa, raising too many flags in too many systems and giving her enemies ample notice to arrange a welcoming party. And she’d already lost time with the postcard delay. This plan was imperfect but it was the best she had. In risk versus risk, risk had won out.

The woman approached a man in the same blue uniform, who was surveying the queue with his arms crossed. He bent his head to one side to catch her words, his pale forehead creasing. Both faces turned to Samira. Here we go. She forced her expression to neutral, channeling the psychology journal article she’d read online yesterday. “The Physical Manifestations of Guilt.” She’d converted it into a list of takeaways and memorized them—because she was that much of a geek—then set fire to her list in a Dumpster in a deserted alley, followed by every page of her evidence. Tess had a copy, for what it was (not) worth.

Look unconcerned but not wide-eyed. Not flustered but not cocky. And, most challenging of all: don’t try too hard.

The man sauntered toward Samira, unfolding his arms. A master of the neutral face she’d practiced in her car mirror. Her vision swam until he looked like he’d turned to jelly and was dancing. She tightened her hand around the liquor bag, as if that’d keep her upright. Hold it together. She’d made it this far. Now it was either freedom and a chance at reclaiming her life, or prison. Or worse.

“Good morning, ma’am. If you wouldn’t mind coming with me a minute...” He spoke quietly, stepping aside to let her by as if it were the gentlemanly thing to do.

They can’t see the nerves in your belly, so don’t let them show in your face.

He led her to a high metal table and leaned an elbow back on it, as if settling in for a leisurely chat-up at a bar. Deliberately keeping this low-key, for now?

“Dove vive, Signorina...” He peered at the passport, clicking and unclicking a cheap ballpoint. “...Moretti?” he asked. A confident Italian speaker but not a native one.

“Certaldo,” she replied. “In una piccola città vicino Firenze.” Bravo, Samira. Six weeks in Tuscany had been just long enough to take her Italian from rough back to smooth, though it might not fool a real Italiano.

“I know it,” he said. “È una bellissima città.” Click. Unclick. Click. Unclick.

“Si,” she said, forcing a proud smile. “The most beautiful place in Italy.”

“Big call.” Click. Unclick. “Che lavoro fa?”

“I have my own web design company.” She reached for her side pocket, where she’d slipped her freshly printed fake business cards—and froze. Not yet. Be accommodating but not too forthcoming. She’d loaded herself with layers of deception, to be revealed gradually and only as necessary.

Click. Unclick. Click. Unclick.

She’d even found a genuine wedding she could claim to be attending, harvesting the details from a bride’s blog. Everyday people put too much on the web—people who thought they had nothing to hide, who thought the world had only benign intentions. People who weren’t being hunted by one of the world’s most powerful people.

Not if I catch you first, Senator.

The officer pulled out a cell phone, held it where they could both see it and typed into the browser her fake name and “web design.” Her breath stalled.

“This one?” he asked, pointing to the top hit.

She nodded, not trusting her voice. The SEO had worked but any second he’d notice the search had netted suspiciously few results—because the site was less than twenty-four hours old.

He clicked the link and the site loaded. “It’s in English.”

“Awo.” She bit her lip. She’d used the Ethiopian word for yes. Old habits... “Pardon me,” she said, patting her upper chest, as if she’d hiccuped. “Si, that version is. Most of my clients are in English-speaking countries. I also have an Italian site.” She pointed to the green, white and red flag icon in a corner of the home page. She’d be almost disappointed if he didn’t open it, after the effort it’d taken to translate.

He studied her as if he could see right through to her Ethiopian DNA sequence. “How much do you charge for a simple e-commerce site?”

“Scusi, signore?” Damn. She had no idea of the going rates.

“My wife and I are thinking about setting up an online...” The other officer signaled him and he raised a pointer finger—one minute. The ambient noise crescendoed, as though it’d been silenced for their conversation and someone had just pressed the unmute button. “Never mind.” He handed back Samira’s documents. “When you return to Certaldo I suggest you update your passport. You’d be surprised how much ID fraud we’re seeing these days. Desperate people out there.” He swept a hand toward the thinning queue. “Hence the extra checks.”

He moved on to his next target, leaving Samira’s “Grazie” hanging—and her way clear to the exit. She zipped the documents into her bag and let her chest fill. It’d gone almost concave. She walked—not too fast—boots clicking on the floor, heartbeat thumping along in her ears in double time.

There was something to be said for paranoia. But her delay had given the blond man time to clear the checkpoint. Leaning on a white column ahead, bag at his feet, he swiped at his phone. He caught her eye and quickly looked away. Too quickly? Dear God. She skirted behind a tribe of tracksuit-clad teenagers—some lanky, overgrown sports team—and strode toward the border control exit. The border itself, technically. Once she left the station, once she found Tess, her nerves would settle. She took note of the area’s security cameras then angled herself away, bunching her hair around her face. She pulled a beanie from her bag and tugged it down to her eyebrows. Facial recognition software wasn’t as easily fooled as human eyes. She slipped on the Audrey Hepburn–style sunglasses she’d picked up in Paris.

Tension fell from her shoulders as she emerged into a soaring atrium—an arcade, with shimmering glass shopfronts over Victorian brick arches. A massive Christmas tree circled up to the dome, so laden with ornaments she could almost hear it groan. She adjusted her backpack. Her shoulders were beginning to ache under its weight, coupled with the champagne. She’d used precious euros to buy a dress, coat and heels at a Parisian outlet store, suitable for a fall wedding, and had gift wrapped some of her spare tech gear. It seemed absurd now to have spent all that money. Or maybe the knowledge that she had proof to back up her ruse had warded off the panic attack. Either way, what was done was done. Very soon, she and Tess would be toasting their breakthrough with the champagne.

She walked faster. Every step got her closer to Tess, Charlotte’s flat and the evidence. A sign ahead pointed to the overland trains. Wait—that wasn’t the right exit. She needed to find the pedestrian tunnel linking St Pancras to the square Tess was waiting in. This was the opposite direction. She stopped and looked around as if she were waiting for someone, picturing the station map she’d studied online. Discordant piano chords plinked out a toe-curling tune. Which way was she supposed to have turned out of border control? The blond guy emerged from the crowd, looked up at the signs and headed toward a taxi rank, without a glance her way.

She closed her eyes a second. She never used to be paranoid. She used to trust that the world was a good place, that nothing bad would happen to a thoroughly ordinary woman. She used to have complete faith in the digital age, in its promise to connect cultures and minds, blur borders between the developing and developed worlds, make information and education accessible for all. She clicked her tongue. At some point the limitless possibilities had become limitless threats. Emails, phone calls, databases, servers, web searches...nothing was private, nothing was truly secure, everything could be traced and hacked in an ever-accelerating spiral of cat and mouse between the security analysts and the hackers—in her case, sometimes one and the same person. Once, she’d been contracted to infiltrate a system she’d previously been hired to secure, and that remained the only one that’d eluded her. She still didn’t know whether to be proud of that or embarrassed.

She blew out a breath. One step at a time. First, find the tunnel. After hours enclosed in a capsule, the thought of fresh air and freedom tugged her toward daylight like a magnet was clamped to her chest. Freedom would come when this was done. Freedom from danger and—just maybe, just a little—freedom from grief and guilt?

A large man in a navy suit pushed past. She snapped out a hand to catch the champagne, and patted her bag’s zip pocket, checking for the outline of her wallet—the fictional Italian signorina’s wallet, rounded out by a fake driver’s license and fake credit card, and the remainder of Samira’s real euros. Getting pickpocketed would be a disaster.

Ignoring her clenching stomach muscles, she followed the signs toward the far end of the long station, white columns marching along beside her. The blond guy couldn’t be the one from the cottage. Her enemy couldn’t know she was here. Nothing would go wrong. She’d passed the biggest challenge—getting into Britain. Maybe the evidence would be damning enough that she wouldn’t need to testify. She could wait out the storm at a cozy flat in an English seaside village where she didn’t see a threat in every shaking leaf or heavy footfall. Then maybe she’d be able to breathe without forcing every inhalation. Since Latif’s death, her every breath had seemed like a conscious effort, as if it were her instinct to die, not live. She’d had the sense she was viewing the world from afar, hardly feeling the ground under her feet.

With the exception of that one day—and night—last fall...

Which she shouldn’t be thinking about.

And today was real. Stomach-curlingly real. Despite the fear, it was empowering to do something that wasn’t sitting around lurching between anger and sorrow and frustration and regret. She would finish the mission Latif died for. If she died, too, so be it, so long as she avenged his death and made his sacrifice worth something.

She passed a TV on the wall of a café, tuned to a news channel, just as it flicked to...something familiar. Someone. She backtracked. Tess. Tess was on the screen, walking between two black-uniformed cops. Handcuffed. Samira’s throat dried. Whistle-blowing reporter arrested, read the scroll at the bottom. Then, Sen. Tristan Hyland cleared.

Feet operating automatically, she stepped inside the café, hardly able to absorb the words. The special counsel had announced there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Hyland, and had instead charged Tess with obstruction of justice for her sworn testimony. She’d been hauled off a plane on the tarmac at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, “caught trying to flee the country,” according to the voice-over. The picture changed. Tess’s Legionnaire boyfriend, Flynn, surged through a churn of journalists, his face thunderous. “How the [bleep] do you think I feel?” he mumbled. “This is bullshit.”

Samira pulled her scarf away from her throat.

A family bustled into the café, speaking loud German, drowning out the news report. Suddenly another familiar face was staring out from the TV. Shit. Shit. Samira’s green-card photo—she looked so young. Warrant issued for arrest of Newell accomplice.

Samira yanked her beanie lower. The senator appeared on the screen, speaking to reporters in front of a plane. His daughter, Laura, rested a hand on his shoulder, almost protectively. As the German family retreated into the back of the café, his words became audible.

“...would like to thank the many loyal Americans who’ve supported us through these baseless and incredibly hurtful allegations. It’s been a long and tough road but we always had faith that the truth would prevail and the real villains would be exposed—those people in the media and my political opposition who would manufacture lies to destroy me, my family and my career, solely for ratings and profit and political point scoring.” He eyeballed the TV camera, as if he could see Samira standing there. “Today, the scales of justice rebalanced. For that I am grateful, if not surprised. God bless you, America.”

Applause.

Samira clenched her fists as the senator hushed the cheers and listened to a question. It was inaudible but a smile relaxed his face. Laura wiped away tears—real tears, going by the smudges in her heavy black makeup. The audio faded out and the network’s presenters began speaking over the footage, lamenting the millions “squandered on this witch hunt” and predicting Hyland would revive his presidential ambitions. The senator adjusted his tie and rolled his shoulders, drawing attention to his broad frame. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing tanned, muscular forearms and his Marines tattoo. He laughed, like he was sharing a joke with the reporters.

How the hell had Tess and Latif ever thought they could take him on and win? The darling of American politics, with his boyish grin and blue eyes and square face and thick salt-and-pepper hair and insane popularity—JFK and Reagan rolled into one physically and politically attractive package. When he wasn’t being declared the sitter for America’s next president, he was being hailed the country’s most eligible bachelor. The next silver fox–in-chief. Heck, Samira had once thought him hot. Latif had teased her about it but she wasn’t alone. A meme cult had grown out of his good looks. And the senator knew just what he was doing when he brought his chic environmental crusader of a daughter to press conferences and functions—a reminder that he was a grieving widower and devoted father, and there was an opening for a future First Lady.

Teflon Tristan. When Tess and Latif had uncovered evidence that the military contractor he’d founded had orchestrated the LA terror attack, Hyland had argued it’d gone bad long after he’d sold it—successfully, it now appeared. Somehow he’d swum clear of the maelstrom that’d dragged down his former pals. But Latif, who’d worked for the contractor, had sworn that Hyland had still been calling the shots at the time of the attack, desperate to save the foundering company from liquidation and legal scrutiny by securing more war contracts. Latif had died searching for evidence to skewer his former boss.

The screen switched to the presenters, who moved on to another story. Eyes on the white tiled floor, Samira walked out robotically, hollow from her stomach to her toes. She no longer had anyone to meet. At a newsstand she picked up the Guardian. Nothing yet about Tess—or Samira. But on page three, a story about Hyland announcing a UK visit. Shit, he was coming here? She scanned the story. The secretary of state had fallen ill overnight, so Hyland was on his way to Edinburgh for a NATO meeting, and to observe a joint military exercise in Scotland.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. Was he coming to supervise Samira’s capture and extradition? He always kept a private security team around him and Laura—was this an excuse to bring them to Britain? Had he known Samira was heading to London when she fled Tuscany? Did he know about Charlotte? What the hell did any of this mean?

Below the main story, another article zeroed in on controversy that Laura was traveling with him, having hurriedly arranged a book signing in Edinburgh for her memoir, which reportedly painted her father as a saint. A quote from the minority House leader: “This is yet another clear case of the Hylands profiting from the senator’s—”

“No free reads,” belted a voice from the stand.

Samira jumped, nearly ripping the paper. She shut it abruptly and tossed it back on the pile.

Tess wasn’t in London, wasn’t waiting in the square with Flynn. And Samira was officially a wanted woman. Thank God she’d turned down the special counsel’s offer of witness protection in the United States, or they’d have her now, too. Thank God she hadn’t used her own passport. Thank God she no longer looked like the naive, optimistic ingenue in her green-card photo. But the UK probably had a swift extradition agreement with the United States—if she survived long enough to fight a legal battle. What now?

Small steps. First, get out of the station. Fresh air. She needed fresh air. She slipped out of the atrium into a brick-walled space with a low industrial ceiling. Where was the damn tunnel to the square? Icy fingers from an invisible draft brushed her cheeks. Her camel coat was so thick it could stand up by itself, but the dry cold rushed into her lungs, chilling her from the inside.

Behind her, a man shouted. Indecipherable but panicked. She straightened, her spine prickling. Border guards, coming for her? More shouts. A clunk. Clattering. Hissing. Ahead, people began turning. People began running.

She swiveled, wheezing. Blue smoke gushed and fizzed from dozens of tin cans rolling along the floor. This was no arrest. It was an ambush. Urgent beeping bounced around the room. The smoke billowed, boiling across the low ceiling and pouring back down like a dozen waterfalls, lit by a strobing white emergency light. Screams, shouts. Shadowy figures darted through the thickening mist. Someone slammed into her arm, knocking her sideways. Her shoulder struck the floor first, then the side of her skull. The champagne bag swung out and smashed behind her. Coughing, she pushed to her feet. Bitter chemicals stung the back of her throat. Tear gas? She stumbled across the floor, her feet swallowed by a blue snowdrift. An alarm wailed. Dark smudges shunted her like a pin in a bowling alley.

“Attention, please.” A male voice, over a loudspeaker. “Due to a reported emergency, would all passengers leave the station immediately?”

Sure—if she could figure out where the exit was. She staggered like a zombie, one arm flailing in front of her. Wasn’t tear gas supposed to burn? Her hand scraped something rough. A brick wall. She swiveled and leaned back on it. She had to return to the atrium. If she just walked straight...or was it left...?

But if the smoke was cover for Hyland’s people to capture her, wouldn’t they be waiting for her to stumble out? Should she head for the Tube, try her luck in the maze of tunnels?

Yes. She pulled up her scarf, breathing into it as she inched along the wall, panic clamping her chest. Her arm fell through space. A doorway? Smoke cocooned her. Her head spun like she’d been spit from a carousel. A clonk, nearby, and a man’s head and shoulders loomed out of the fog, a green-and-yellow jacket zipped to his chin, his face hidden under a gas mask and beanie. She sidestepped but he caught her arms, kicked her legs out from under her and lifted.

She bucked but he was too strong, too solid. Her backpack was snatched away. Her spine hit something soft and flat—a gurney? A second man, in matching jacket and gas mask, leaned over the other side. A white patch was stamped on his chest pocket: AMBULANCE.

Her lungs pinched. She wrenched away but the first guy trapped her upper arms. Something yanked her stomach into the gurney. A strap. One by one her wrists and ankles were pinned, too. A creature from the deep catching her in its tentacles. The trolley began to roll. The first guy shoved a hat over her beanie and a mask over her face. They were sedating her? She lashed her head side to side but he pushed the mask’s straps on. A few tugs and her head was locked down like the rest of her, the arms of her sunglasses digging into her temples. She resisted inhaling until her chest rebelled and sucked in a desperate breath. It came out again as a Darth Vader wheeze. The world narrowed to the visor in front of her eyes—blue smoke, the men’s bent heads. The first guy laid a hand on her belly. A warning.

She didn’t flake out—it wasn’t a sedation mask; it was a gas mask like those the men wore. The blue haze dissolved into white light. Columns, brickwork and glinting glass sheets flashed by. Back in the atrium. The alarm sharpened, the dome swelling the panicked uproar. Anxious faces rushed past, people swerved out of the speeding gurney’s path.

Samira shouted for help but the mask muffled her. She was being kidnapped in front of hundreds of people and all she could do was squeak.

CHAPTER THREE

SAMIRA JAMMED HER fingernails into her palms—about the only body part she could move. Would they kill her straightaway or interrogate her first? She wouldn’t give up Charlotte or further incriminate Tess, if that was what they were after. She’d be as fearless as Latif was. You hear me, Samira? Fearless.

The gurney spun ninety degrees. The wheels on one side lifted, lurching her stomach into weightlessness. Shops and cafés rushed by. Her kidnappers kept their heads bowed as they plowed through the panicked foot traffic and rattled under an arch into a cloudy gray world. A redbrick facade rose up, curving in the visor’s distortion. They were taking her out a side entrance? A firefighter flashed past, in a yellow helmet. She cried out. He didn’t even slow. The gurney rattled and bumped over rougher ground, jolting her vision. Beside her, blue lights flashed against a red blur—a fire truck. Her breath hissed in fast pants, the mask heating. The sharp scent of warming rubber curled up her nose, itching the back of her throat. A siren screamed and waned, screamed and waned, louder and louder. Voices faded. The world took a dive.

The gurney slowed and the second paramedic—or whatever he really was—jogged out of her field of vision. She strained her head as far as the restraints and mask allowed. Where had he gone? Diagonal red and yellow stripes, flashing blue lights—the rear double doors of an ambulance, its number plate coated in mud, though the chassis gleamed.

This was well planned. Who would stop two paramedics loading a prone woman into an ambulance? She shouted but it came out a whimper. The double doors swung open. The men lifted the gurney and it clattered into the back of the vehicle, the first guy jumping in alongside. A bump, and the rear doors slammed, one by one. The driver’s door opened and shut, and beneath her the ambulance shuddered and rumbled. Her breath rasped like an asthmatic’s. Her arms tingled. Black spots dotted her vision.

No. Fight it off. Or let it go. Or whatever the hell she was supposed to do. The solution always seemed so logical when she wasn’t having an attack.

A siren bleeped and the ambulance moved. The guy guarding her fiddled with something beside her ear, his head angled to look out the rear window. Pressure lifted from her forehead, leaving a floating sensation.

“Bravo Victor Control, Bravo Victor Control, Bravo Victor niner-one, over.” The driver, speaking into a radio, in a northern English accent. Wait—was this a real ambulance? Tess had warned her that Hyland’s conspiracy had sucked people in from everywhere—but the London Ambulance Service?

As the ambulance rolled out, the guy guarding her drew away her mask, knocking her sunglasses off with it. She gasped cold air and went to scream. His hand clamped over her mouth, rough and dry.

On the radio, a reply crackled back. “Bravo Victor niner-one, Bravo Victor Control. Go ahead. Over.”

Her lungs caved. No need for torture—she was suffocating herself. She retched, her body shaking against the bonds like she was having a fit. Bravery? Who was she kidding? With his free hand, her assailant pulled his mask and beanie off and drew in a breath. Close-cropped brown hair glistened with sweat.

Jamie.

The blue strobe illuminated uneasy cobalt eyes as he bent over her, releasing her mouth and sweeping his hand down her arm to push up her coat sleeve.

Jamie.

He encircled her wrist with his fingers for a few moments, then deftly released her hands from the bonds. “Samira, you’re having a panic attack. We’ll get through it together, okay? Just like before.”

Before. Yes, last year, when they were escaping from Ethiopia.

“You want nitroglycerin?” the driver called. “I have tablets.”

“No need,” Jamie replied, his gaze pinning hers. He laid a hand on her upper chest, and another on her belly, over her coat. “Breathe out, Samira, every last puff of air.”

She widened her eyes. She didn’t have any air—that was the problem.

He patted her belly. “Okay, now let this fill, nice and slow.” He patted her upper chest. “Keep this still.”

Sure. Like breathing was that easy. She scraped in a breath, hyperaware of the slight pressure of his hands.

“Now, let it out, slowly—all of it, until there’s nothing left. I’ll breathe with you.”

She concentrated on his eyes—the flecks of brown in the blue, the creases in the corners, the way they angled down like teardrops—and focused on matching his breaths, calm and even, pushing his hand away with her belly, then letting it drop. Jamie? Here?

What did it matter how? Just—thank God. Pressure lifted from her chest. Her vision cleared. She sank back on the gurney, letting go of effort, crisp oxygen swirling in her mouth.

He touched the back of his hand to her cheek. “Okay now?”

“Yes and no.” Mostly, she felt like an idiot.

“They were onto you,” he said, quietly, his focus darting from window to window as he unstrapped her head. “I had to create a diversion, extract you before they could figure out what was happening. I’d forgotten about your panic attacks.”

Her stomach flipped in time with the rises and falls of his accent, taking her mind back to their last morning together, when she’d told him to leave—and he’d wasted no time or breath complying.

It hardly mattered now. “Was this Tess’s idea? She’s been arrested—I saw it on TV.”

“It was Flynn’s. We had to move quickly. Tess was tipped off that Hyland’s mercenaries were planning to have St Pancras surrounded. But then she got arrested, so we had no way of contacting you. I flew straight here from France. One of the other guys in my unit flew to Paris but he got held up and you’d already left—Texas, you remember him?”

“Awo—I mean, yes, the American... So, the smoke—that was you?”

“It was the best plan I could come up with at short notice. We use smoke grenades on exercises, for cover, so...”

“But won’t the police—?”

“As far as the authorities are concerned, the grenades will be dismissed as a prank by a couple of student protesters who escaped without detection behind a rather convenient smoke screen. A harmless gag, except for one poor tourist who had to be treated for...breathing problems.”

She patted her head, and pulled off the “hat” Jamie had forced on her—a brown wig. Hearing his voice again was unnerving after it’d been trapped in her head for so long. “I think that’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. You couldn’t have warned me?”

“No time, and no channel. I couldn’t just walk in and lead you out, with them watching. We used the masks for disguises and parked the ambulance in a security camera black spot.” He unzipped his jacket and tossed it on the front passenger seat. Underneath he wore a short-sleeved green shirt with epaulets, a coat of arms on the chest pocket. A real paramedic uniform? A tendril of a tattoo curled out from under a sleeve. Her pulse seemed to glitch as her memory filled in the rest of the mark. “It’ll take Hyland’s goons a while to put all that together, no matter what resources they have.”

She swallowed. “They have access to all the resources, according to Tess. Has something gone wrong, I mean, apart from the arrest? Charlotte...?”

“Is that your London contact? I don’t know.” He moved to the straps on her feet and began releasing them. Deciphering his thick accent was taking concentration, though just the timbre of it rolled through her chest and eased her breathing. “All I know is that I was the only one who could get here this quickly, so I was it.” It sounded like an apology, like he assumed he was the last man she’d want to see again. How wrong he was. “Flynn was sparing on details and obviously we’re needing to keep this operation contained, so...”

“This operation?” she said. “You’re making it sound even more terrifying.”

“Oh no, this is commonplace. We’re just couriers, yeah? Here to collect and deliver. Operation UPS. Angelito and Holly are trying to get away from some unpronounceable town in Eastern Europe but that’ll take a while. And Texas is waiting for a seat to come free on the Eurostar.”

Angelito. Flynn and Jamie’s capitaine, who’d helped her escape Ethiopia. “Holly...?”

“Angelito’s girlfriend.”

“She can be trusted?”

“She could come in pretty handy.” His brow creased. “I’ve been wondering how you were, where you were. Tess and Flynn assured me you were safe but wouldn’t say more.”

She inwardly winced. Was that censure in his voice? He’d made her promise to keep in touch. She’d crossed her fingers behind her back.

Call if you need me, he’d said, scrawling down his number as he’d stepped onto his train in a French town she could no longer name, to return to his base on Corsica. If you want me. I’ll come straightaway.

So many times she’d nearly relented, even once picking up a pay phone and dialing all but the last digit.

“They didn’t know where I was—it was safer for everyone that way,” she said. “I moved around a lot. And Hyland still caught up with me.” More than a year of being careful and it had very nearly been for nothing. “At least I assume the ambush in Tuscany was his doing?”

“Yes. You did well to get away.”

She sat up, blinking rapidly. “Does Hyland know why I’m in London, where I’m headed?”

“We’re certainly hoping not. But then, until a few hours ago we hadn’t expected all this, either. You might need to fill me in on the details of what we’re going to be doing. We’re picking up something?”

She liked the sound of “we.” But if Hyland’s thugs had her in their sights, what about Charlotte? “Awo, from Putney. I mean, yes. You might as well know everything.” She gave him a breathless rundown. God, there was a lot to explain—Tuscany, Charlotte, the postcard...

“Wow,” Jamie said, when she’d finished. “I hope this ‘gift’ will exonerate Tess and bring down Hyland.”

“So do I, but I honestly don’t know. This could all be for nothing.”

“Flynn seems to think it’s the only chance we have.”

“Dear God, don’t say that.”

The ambulance swerved. She grabbed the sides of the gurney. Jamie caught a yellow metal handhold.

“The ambulance,” she said. “How did you—?”

“Called in a...favor from a...friend.” He glanced at the driver, who was still on the radio. One hell of a favor. She caught the words assessing, respiratory and SOB.

“Did he just call you a son of a bitch?” she said.

A grin flickered across Jamie’s face. “SOB. Shortness of breath. But probably the other thing, too.”

“This is a real ambulance?”

“On a real callout. I used to be a paramedic in London, in another lifetime. Somebody—” His voice deepened with mock conspiracy, his pupils melodramatically shifting left and right. “Somebody called nine-nine-nine on a burner phone to report that a woman had stopped breathing at St Pancras. By...chance, this was the closest ambulance. A lone officer, as far as Ambulance Control was concerned, returning the vehicle to his station after a repair.” The ambulance slowed. “A happy coincidence all around, wouldn’t you say?”

“We’re going to a hospital? Jamie, that’s not a good idea. If anyone saw paramedics take me from the station, they’ll assume that’s where we’re headed. And there’ll be security cameras. My photo is—”

“Everywhere, I know. You’re an overnight sensation. But that photo does you no justice. And don’t worry—the patient is about to have a remarkable recovery and refuse transportation.” Jamie grinned, wrinkling the suntanned skin beside his eyes. God, that was a beautiful sight.

The siren bleeped and the driver accelerated.

“Recovery?” She rested a hand on her chest and swiveled, her legs dangling over the side of the gurney. Her backpack was by her feet. “I don’t know if we can be sure of that yet.”

“Happy to perform any medical procedure you need. Cutting people open is my favorite pastime.”

She smiled up at him. It was a relief to smile for real. To talk to someone. To not be alone. To be with...him. “You are joking, yes?”

He shrugged, his eyes not leaving hers.

Of course he was joking. He was ninety-five percent tease and flirt. It was the five percent that intrigued her, those flashes of frustration or concern that broke through the facade, like a solitary boom of thunder from a clear sky that left you wondering if you’d imagined it. “I didn’t know you were a paramedic.”

His eyebrows angled up. “To be fair, you don’t really know me at all.”

Ouch. “I...guess not.”

She did know for sure that he’d hold eye contact as long as she was game, like it was a challenge—or he was drilling into her mind and amused by what he found.

Deliberately, she turned toward the windscreen. You don’t really know me at all. The exact words she’d thrown at him that fall morning after he’d offered to stay. I know you want me to, he’d said. Coincidence, or did he remember that hideous conversation as clearly as she did?

The driver navigated onto a narrow street flanked by stone-and-brick buildings with sash windows and brave balcony gardens, all shrouded in a gaseous gray light. Near-leafless trees stretched up like clawed skeleton hands. Her breath had shallowed out. With everything that was going on, with everything she was processing, she didn’t need the kind of confusion that came from looking a charming, magnetic man in the eye for too long.

A branch scraped the ambulance roof. She shivered. Winter had set in prematurely here. Even after all her years living in North America and Europe—through most of her childhood, her teens, her college and university years, her twenties—the sight of bare-limbed trees chilled her. From the corner of her eye, she registered Jamie unbuttoning his uniform shirt.

More reason to look elsewhere. In the last year she’d assured herself that her memory was exaggerating the connection she’d felt with him. Right now, her mind and her belly and even her skin weren’t so sure.

He was right—despite one fateful week, ending with one fateful night, and one hideous morning—she knew very little about him. He was Scottish, a medic in the French Foreign Legion and in his early thirties, a little older than she was. And now she knew he’d been a paramedic, which wasn’t hugely revealing—in Ethiopia she’d watched him stitch a head wound with the precision of a master tailor. Maybe he was one of those friendly people you thought you knew when you really didn’t, a flirt you thought singled you out when he treated every woman like the only one in the room. As a medic and soldier, he was paid to be protective and observant. He was probably assessing her mental health when he looked into her soul like that—with good cause.

Her peripheral vision reported that he was down to a khaki tank. Don’t look. She caught a fresh scent, somewhere between mint and pine, weighed down with something spicier, like cinnamon. Had he smelled that way in France? Something tweaked low in her belly, like her body remembered even if her mind didn’t.

She shook her head slightly. She had bigger things to think about. Like mercenaries. Mercenaries. Wow. She was trained to deal with virtual problems, not real ones. If Jamie hadn’t got to her first...

“Mate,” called the driver, looking in his side mirror. “Know anyone who drives a white Peugeot hatchback? I’m taking back streets, as you said, but he’s making every turn we are—and he just followed us through a red.”

Sure enough, a car was hugging their rear, with two people in the front—including a wiry blond man, talking on a cell phone.

“Oh no,” Samira whispered.

“You recognize them?”

“The passenger—he was on my train. And there was a guy with hair like that in Tuscany the other night but I didn’t get a close look. He seemed to be following me at the station. I told myself I was imagining it.”

“Looks like your instinct was right.” Jamie pulled out a chunky gray handgun. A holster was strapped to his side, over his tank.

“Oh my God. Where did you get that?” He couldn’t have flown into London with it.

He clicked something into place. “An acquaintance. Get down.” He raised his voice. “We need to lose him, Andy.”

The driver swore. “You’re still as much of a shit magnet as ever, I see.” He flicked a switch and the siren wailed. “Hold tight.”

Jamie stooped to read a street sign. Samira followed his gaze. King’s Cross Road. “Keep away from the markets. We get caught up in those and we’ll be stuck tight, siren or no.”

“Mate, you’re talking to the guy who didn’t run off and join the fucking Foreign Legion. I know every road cone this side of the Thames. I’ll loop round, head east.”

Jamie hauled a backpack from a cubbyhole and pulled something out of the front pocket. A phone.

Gripping the gurney with one hand, Samira caught his forearm. “We can’t make any calls. Tess said—”

“Tess is the world’s most paranoid woman. It’s a brand-new phone and I’m not making a call, just doing some Googling. I have an idea of how we could lose them.” He glanced at the car. “Besides, I think Hyland’s already onto us.”

The ambulance swung onto another street. She slid sideways, into air. With his spare arm, Jamie caught her around the waist and steered her onto a fold-down seat. The sight of his bare arms made her shiver all over again. Why was she the one breaking out in goose bumps?

“You might want to buckle up, Samira,” he said.

He swayed to the narrow gap between the front seats and spoke to the driver, swiping the phone. She dived for the seat belt. Between the siren, the straining engine and the thick accents, she couldn’t follow the conversation. Something about bridges and gates.

Behind them the blond man was still on his phone, his gaze fixed on the back of the ambulance as if he could see her through the one-way glass. Calling reinforcements? How many thugs did Hyland have in London? The Peugeot driver wore a cap low and a scarf high, with sunglasses bridging the gap. The car stuck to the ambulance like a water-skier behind a boat, skidding left and right as they weaved. The man nestled the phone between his shoulder and his ear and made swift hand movements in his lap. He lifted something, its black outline obvious for a second before it disappeared behind the dash.

“Jamie, they have a gun.”

“They what?” yelled the driver. The ambulance lurched sideways. “Shit.”

Jamie swiveled. “Flat on the floor, Samira.”

Gladly. She unclipped, and crawled onto the gray vinyl, Jamie crouching beside her, gun aimed down. His London acquaintances evidently occupied different social circles from her family’s. Through the windows, the tops of stripped trees and squat buildings flashed by—red brick, black brick, blackened stone, dirty concrete, steel and glass. The ambulance turned, tossing her against a row of cupboards. With one hand, she clung to the track anchoring the gurney. She cradled her other arm over her head—like that would stop a bullet. The ambulance jolted left and right, braking and accelerating like it was tossing in the surf. She swallowed nausea. At least there was no panic attack.

Don’t say “panic attack.”

The London she knew was a sedate place—dim lamps in hushed private libraries, leather back seats in purring black embassy cars, silver calligraphy on heavy card. Until now, her scariest experience was getting separated from her father in Madame Tussauds when she was eight.

Jamie checked his watch. “Eleven minutes,” he called to the driver.

“Until what?” Her words dissolved in the noise.

“GPS says there’s congestion on the one-way loop from Whitechapel,” the driver yelled. “If we approach from there, they should get neatly stuck.”

“Good,” said Jamie, planting a hand on Samira’s back as the ambulance swerved again. “Time it right and we can squeeze in just before the gates close.”

Gates? He was planning to hole up somewhere?

“And if we arrive a minute later we’ll be trapped,” the driver shouted.

“Well, don’t get there late.”

“What’s to stop them slipping in behind us?”

“Selfish bastard London drivers. Who’s going to let them through?” Jamie winked at Samira—like she had any idea what they were talking about.

“You’re assuming those same bastards will part for an ambulance.”

Doubt flicked across Jamie’s face, and vanished.

“Mate, can’t you just call in an air strike or tank assault or something?” said the driver.

“That’s plan B.”

The floor shuddered as the ambulance picked up speed. They were on a wider road, passing the blurred tops of trucks and double-decker buses. The siren wailed and waned. If the driver switched it off, it would surely continue in Samira’s head.

Jamie popped up to check the windows then knelt again. He thrust his phone at Samira. “Keep an eye on this. Tell me when you see the traffic stop.”

She juggled it, struggling to focus on the screen while avoiding sliding into Jamie. A live webcam was trained on Tower Bridge, its castle-like twin towers straddling a gray river. Cars and trucks stuttered across it as the stream buffered.

Outside, the gray light dimmed to charcoal—they’d driven into a tunnel, an underpass maybe. Fighting nausea, she pulled up to a sitting position, bracing her back against cupboards and her feet on the gurney, focusing on the traffic on the little screen. Everyday people going to everyday Sunday places—markets, churches, Christmas shopping, visiting a friend to collect evidence that would take down the future American president... Jamie crept between her and the blond’s gun. Had he deliberately given her a menial task to keep her from panicking?

The driver leaned on his horn. “I can’t lose this bastard. He’s careering like a maniac at Le Mans.”

“She,” Jamie corrected.

“What?”

“The driver’s a woman.”

“Whatever. Still a maniac.”

“That’s because she’s following you and you’re the worst driver in London.” Jamie dropped to a whisper and leaned toward Samira. “He’s the best, really. Totally mental.”

If Jamie’s humor was meant to keep her from freaking out, it wasn’t working—though at least her lungs were no longer panicking. Just her brain.

“I heard you, you know,” the driver called.

“They’re not firing at us,” she said to Jamie, sounding like a child needing reassurance.

“They’ll be waiting to corner us, waiting for reinforcements. If they create too much chaos we could slip away into it. Their job is to keep eyes on us while their team regroups and closes in—but don’t worry,” he added, quickly. “We’ll slip away, very soon.”

She tapped a fingernail on the screen. “Traffic’s stopped in one direction.”

“A couple of minutes,” Jamie called, rising a little to look out the windscreen.

“It’ll be tight,” the driver shouted. “Hold on!”

A stout cruise ship appeared on the screen, downstream of the bridge. Samira frowned. Tower Bridge...it was a drawbridge, yes? “Jamie, I think the bridge is about to lift.”

“That’s the general idea.”

She blinked twice. “You’re planning to jump it?”

“Now, there’s a plan.”

“Oh God,” she said. “All traffic’s stopped now.”

The driver slowed, honking and bleeping the siren. Her limited vision told her they were nudging through traffic across to the right-hand side of the road—the wrong side, here. The driver floored it. The engine whined like it was gunning for takeoff. What the hell? Through the windscreen, the crown of the nearest bridge tower came into view. Her quads burned with the effort of bracing against the gurney. To their right was a beige stone wall, studded with...arrow slits. Above it rose spires, circular towers, a Union Jack. The Tower of London. She’d been there once, with her mother. A very different trip.

“The gate’s closing,” the driver yelled. Underneath the wailing siren, another alarm sounded, high-pitched and wavering.

“Keep going,” Jamie said. “We have to get past. The Peugeot’s through the traffic but fifty meters behind.”

“It’s still closing!”

“They’ll open it,” Jamie called. Samira caught a slight movement at his side. He’d crossed his fingers.

“James? A few seconds and I won’t be able to stop in time.”

“Keep going,” Jamie said. “Trust me.”

The driver tooted again. “The Peugeot’s gaining.” Sure enough, the engine behind them was straining to a new pitch. More horns sounded.

Samira pulled herself onto the flip-down seat. She couldn’t not watch. Ahead, on the bridge, under a stone archway, a pair of pale blue gates spanned the road. The left-hand one was closed, traffic queued before it. The other was at a forty-five-degree angle and drifting shut. The ambulance wail morphed into a panicked shrill squeal. She hugged the back of the seat.

“Hold tight,” said the driver. “This’ll be close.”

Her eyes burned but she couldn’t blink. Behind, the Peugeot was keeping pace. Jamie crouched, clinging to a handhold, muscles tight from his hands to his neck. Shouts filtered in from outside, over the alarms and horns and engines. The tourists were getting a show. The ambulance lurched sideways. The driver yelled. Jamie’s gaze flicked to hers, as steady and calm as his jaw was tense. This was one time she wouldn’t break eye contact. He winked. Winked.

A thump. Her stomach lurched. A metal-on-metal screech—the side of the ambulance scraping against...the gate? But they were through. Behind them, the gate had stalled, almost closed. The Peugeot gunned it, its driver hunched. The gate lurched then swung shut. She winced, bracing for a crunch. The car fishtailed and pulled up sideways in a screech of brakes, smoke puffing from its wheels, maybe an inch short of crashing. The blond man whacked the back of his driver’s head, who spun toward him, evidently shouting, her arms flailing.

Samira leaned back in her seat. Blue and white cables streaked past the windows, then another stone archway like the yawning ribs of a whale, then the Thames, its concrete waters rippling around the prow of the cruise ship, which looked three times bigger than it had on the screen. On they sped, still with the alarm wailing, passing the second tower, more cables, another archway, a line of traffic... The exit gate was open. Tourists crowded against a barrier, a dozen phone cameras trained on the ambulance. A woman in a high-vis raincoat holding a walkie-talkie shook her head pointedly at the driver.

Jamie eased to standing. “They might have to dock that wee scrape from your pay.”

“Fuck you, James.” The driver flicked a switch and the siren stopped.

The silence washed through Samira’s head. She swallowed, trying to equalize.

“Can’t believe you’re still getting me in the shit,” the driver continued. “Thought I was well rid of you.”

Jamie grinned, meeting Samira’s eye and shrugging, as if he’d been given an embarrassing compliment. “Have you seen the bridge lift before, Samira? It’s an awesome sight.” He nodded at the view behind.

The road they’d just driven along was angling up, obscuring their view of the Peugeot on the far side of the bridge. The towers stood like rooks on a chessboard, closing in to protect their king. Was that her—the king on the chessboard, the defenseless target, able only to shuffle while the enemy swooped from all angles? What did that make Jamie? Certainly not a bishop. Too lithe for a rook, and he was no pawn. Which left a knight. Yes, the most agile of the pieces. He moved always with a liquid athleticism, at once at ease and on guard, both blasé about the possibility of a threat and capable of sidestepping it with a microsecond’s notice.

“We got away,” Samira said, breathlessly.

“Not quite yet. We bought ourselves a seven-minute lead but we’ll have to use it wisely.”

Her stomach dropped. “Only seven?”

“Should be enough. The streets are quieter this side of the Thames, on a Sunday. Once we get some miles between us and grab a black cab—out of view of the CCTV cameras—we’ll be gold. And my friend here will be on his way, indistinguishable from all the other ambulances working central London. As far as our enemy is concerned, we’ll have donned invisibility cloaks.”

She swallowed. “I’m glad you’re coming with me.”

He fished in his backpack and pulled out a pale green sweater. “Why not? Could be fun. And the Legion is nipping my hide about my unused leave, so...”

“This is not my thing, this James Bond stuff.”

“To be fair, it’s not mine either. I’m a medic.”

“You’re a soldier, too.”

“Sure, but I try to do as little fighting as possible. I prefer fixing people to shooting them. Sometimes these days I end up doing both. Just making work for myself because that’s the secret to job satisfaction, right—digging holes and filling them in?”

She couldn’t help smiling. He really was her polar opposite. Still, a man composed enough to make jokes while fleeing bad guys was a man she wanted on her team.

“James,” she said, trying the name on for size.

As he shrugged the sweater on, a frown crossed his face. It was gone by the time his head emerged from the neckline. The joker in him, the charmer, the flirt—that part was a Jamie. But the hidden part that made his eyes look twice the age of the rest of him—that shouldered too many secrets for a Jamie. That was the James. Serious and aloof, with shifting depths.

“I haven’t heard you being called anything but Doc.” He hadn’t told her his real name until they’d kissed, that day by the river—and even then it didn’t come with a surname.

“It’s been a long time since I got called anything else.”

“What does your family call you?”

That flash of darkness. “All sorts of interesting names, I imagine.”

“But what do they call you to your face?”

“Probably the same things they’d call me behind my back, which is why I’m not game to find out.”

She couldn’t imagine anyone disliking him. She mentally replayed their first meeting in Ethiopia—when he’d arrived with his commando team to rescue Flynn from terrorists, and ended up rescuing Samira—their escape to Europe, their week in France. Had he told her nothing about his family? She would have remembered. “You’re not in contact with them?”

The side of his mouth twitched—and not in jest. “Haven’t seen them for three years.”

A dull thudding beat the sky above. His forehead creased.

“Ah, James?” The driver leaned forward, squinting up through the windscreen. “You know any good reason for a military helicopter to be circling us?”

Jamie swore under his breath.

“I’m thinking we might need your plan B after all, mate,” the driver said.

By the look on Jamie’s face, Samira guessed he didn’t have one.

CHAPTER FOUR

JAMIE SCRAMBLED ONTO the front passenger seat and peered up. The helo was an MH-6 Little Bird—not here for sightseeing. Shite. Must have been on standby. Hired from a local military contractor? Hyland had to be desperate to throw that kind of resource at Samira.

He clapped a hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Change of plans. Go straight to Saint Jude’s A&E, on blue. Make it look like a real emergency.”

“It will be unless you take your hand off me.” Andy flicked on the siren.

“And radio into the hospital. See if anybody I’d know is on duty.”

“You mean someone you have dirt on?”

“Preferably.”

“Great. So I just casually ask, ‘Oh, and is there anyone there who’s been fucked over by James Armstrong?’ and see how many dozens of hands go up?”

Shut it, Andy. Not in front of her. “Maybe a touch more subtle.” He gave Andy’s shoulder a double pat and pushed back between the seats. Andy got on the radio, the siren wailing.

Jamie had been gone five years. Most of his med school and hospital friends—not that they would use the word friends anymore, if they ever had—would have moved on, moved up. Even if they hadn’t forgiven him, they’d surely have forgotten.

Samira was staring at the roof of the ambulance as if she had X-ray vision. “On blue?” She lowered her wide brown eyes to meet his gaze.

“Lights on, top speed.”

She clicked her seat belt on. “You’re planning to outrun a helicopter?”

“Just the vehicles they’ll be directing. When you’re the bug about to go under the boot, best you can do is slip between the floorboards. Even they wouldn’t risk opening fire on a London Ambulance, not this close to Westminster, no matter how deep their contacts go here. They’ll want to keep it relatively low-key. We can play that to our advantage.” If the enemy knew the city, the Peugeot would already be backtracking to London Bridge to cross the Thames rather than waiting for the drawbridge.

“Vehicles. There are more than one?”

The ambulance swerved. He clutched an overhead handrail.

“Jamie, don’t think you have to keep anything from me, because of the...because of earlier. It’s the surprises that throw me.”

Her knuckles blanched where they gripped the seat belt. But she was right. She was tougher than her panic attacks might suggest. “I counted three cars when I was setting up to pull you out. We should assume there are more.” He made a point of keeping his tone casual and confident, like he had it all under control. And he did so far. More or less.

“I thought we were avoiding the hospital?”

“Just passing through. The place is a maze. We’ll lose them there and come up with another plan to get to your friend’s place.” He dropped volume and nodded toward Andy, who was straining to decipher the voice at the other end of the radio. “To the authorities, to Hyland, this all has to look authentic for Andy’s sake, like a real response to a nine-nine-nine call, like you just cleverly hoodwinked the system.”

“So he’s an innocent pawn?”

“A pawn, aye. Innocent, no.” Even so, Jamie wouldn’t leave his former crewmate in the shit again. Last time it’d been merely a lucky escape from unemployment—or worse. “As long as we keep ahead of the ground troops between here and the hospital, we’ll be fine.”

She nodded, buying his attempt at reassurance. He sure was good at sounding confident when really he had no idea. Maybe all that medical training was useful for something.

He checked his watch. The wave of Saturday night drunks and pill-poppers would have passed through the emergency department and the advance guard of sports injuries would be limping in. Not peak time but there’d be a few ambulances coming and going. If they timed it right, the chopper wouldn’t know which Merc to follow out of the ambulance bay—or know if Samira was still in it.

“Harriet Davies is the consultant on,” Andy said, ending his call. “You remember her?”

Jamie smiled. “Perfect.”

“Ah, shit, not her, too. Is there anyone you didn’t fuck over?”

Samira’s eyebrows shot up.

“He’s joking,” Jamie whispered.

They drove on, the engine alternating between a whine and a roar as Andy slowed and accelerated. Jamie watched for enemy vehicles as the landmarks flashed by, so familiar he could be stuck in a dream about his past—a Tesco’s supermarket, a redbrick church, squat terraced houses and dreary office blocks, graffitied rail bridges, the Shard jutting up like a great glass splinter. Still the same South London in the same grimy brick and concrete. But he no longer belonged.

Samira clutched the sides of her seat, evidently concentrating on regulating her breathing. In for four, out for four, in for four, out for four. For one all-too-short day—and night—he’d glimpsed the woman underneath that tight self-control, that reserve. Her speech was so precise she always seemed to be mentally scanning a dictionary. She held herself so straight—neck long, chin level—she might have been brought up under a ballet instructor’s whip. The kind of well-brought-up woman his mother would have approved of.

Huh. These days he was the man mothers warned their daughters about.

“We’re coming up to Waterloo,” Andy called. “We could try to lose them in the railway underpasses?”

Jamie narrowed his eyes, picturing the snaking street layout. “No, keep going. We wouldn’t be able to stay undercover long enough to fool them—we’re not exactly stealth in this thing.” From above, the ambulance roof was a high-vis yellow target. “If anything, it’ll just delay us while their ground forces catch up.”

Andy tsked. “Ground forces,” he muttered.

“We’re close enough to the hospital now—head straight there.”

“Yes, sir, Sergeant Major, sir!” Andy blasted the horn. “Do you have sergeant majors in your weirdo army, Jamie?”

“We just call them arseholes. You should join up—you’d fit right in.”

Jamie opened his rucksack. “Here,” he said, pulling out a black cap and passing it to Samira. “Keep it pulled d—”

“Down low, I get it,” she said, putting the wig back on and ramming the cap over top. She arranged the hair to frame her face.

He grabbed another cap from his bag and yanked it on. Tess had them all paranoid about who could be watching any CCTV feeds, legally or not. And no city did security cameras like London. Paranoia capital of the world.

But then, Samira would know more than most about surveillance, given her job. Former job. What had she called it? A forward-deployed infrastructure security engineer. It means I get paid to set up the most secure systems in the world and then get paid to hack into them. I have to constantly keep ten steps ahead of myself.

Aye, he’d always had a thing for the smartest woman in the room. They made his brain light up, among other parts, they made life interesting, they got him in trouble—good trouble and bad trouble. Next time he ran away to join a mercenary force he’d check first that it was unisex. Not that five years ago he’d had the luxury of options.

Samira retrieved her mirrored sunglasses from the floor and jammed them on under her cap.

“Are those sunglasses or hubcaps?” he said, shrugging on his bomber jacket. He left it unzipped for quicker access to his Glock.

A laugh, white teeth against plum lips and brown skin. He could almost feel a click in his brain as the reward center—the nucleus accumbens—lit up and the dopamine released. The rat getting the cheese. He frowned. Weird. That feeling—the warm, sweet buzz in his veins. It was the sensation he used to get when...

“You’re looking at me strangely,” she said, dabbing her nose and chin as if expecting to find the remains of breakfast.

He directed his gaze out the window, swallowing. The evidence might not pass peer review, but there it was, clear as an fMRI scan. The day he and Samira had given in to their insane attraction had left its mark on his brain, laid down a pathway of memories that were right this second tugging at him to seek that pleasure again, promising that if he just drew her to him and...

Resist.

“We’re nearly there,” he said, blinking rapidly. “Let’s swap rucksacks. Mine’s lighter.”

They rolled into the ambulance bay and pulled up alongside two other identical Mercs. Andy was home free. Now for Samira. The sooner Jamie got her to safety and left town, the better for all involved. Giving in to impulse was not something he did, not anymore.

“Cheers, pal,” Jamie called as he reached for the door handle.

“My pleasure,” Andy replied, sounding like he’d stepped in dog shit. “And do me a favor, James?”

“A favor? Thought we were even and you wanted to keep it that way.”

“Never contact me again.”

“Ah, still so fickle, Andy.” He pulled Samira’s rucksack on. “Okay, Samira. Stick close and let me do the talking.”

A glint of white on the road alongside drew his eye. His hand froze on the handle. The Peugeot, slowing, the blond guy looking from Merc to Merc. Shite.

“Jamie?” Samira had followed his gaze. Her breath shuddered. Crap. A panic attack now could be the death of them both.

The car rolled past and pulled up on the roadside, the passenger door swinging open before the wheels stopped. The angles of the parked Mercs would protect them from view but only for a few seconds.

Jamie pushed open the rear door and grabbed her hand. It was icy. “Out. Quick.” He slammed the door behind them and drew her to his side, his right hand hovering over his weapon. They skirted the bonnet of another Merc, dodged a paramedic holding a crying, struggling toddler and scooted in through the first of a double set of mirrored glass doors. They backpedaled a second while the second set opened. Behind them the blond goon’s head bobbed across the forecourt. Andy drove straight at him, forcing him to lurch backward, briefly cutting him off. They were definitely even.

Inside, the waiting room had been upgraded to something resembling a posh airport lounge. In the middle was a circular reception desk in a bubble of light. Jamie adjusted his path, scanning the faces of the staff.

“Jamie,” Samira whispered, tightening the straps of the rucksack on her back, “there’s a woman staring swords right at you.”

So there was. A tall, trim figure in a white shirt, a tablet in her hands, leaning back against the reception desk, looking noticeably less accommodating than the junior doctor he remembered. As they approached, he glanced behind. Beyond the mirrored glass, Blondie was checking the back of an ambulance.

“Looking well, Harriet,” he said.

“That’s because you’re no longer around.” Her gaze dropped to where his hand joined Samira’s and then rose to Samira’s face. What was that—pity? Whatever happened to jealousy? She clutched the tablet like it was a ballistic chest plate. “I assume you want something.”

“I need to borrow your security pass, just for five minutes. And quite quickly.”

She raised thin eyebrows. “And that doesn’t sound at all dodgy.”

“We’re passing straight through—I won’t touch a thing, I promise. There’s a guy following us. We have to lose him.”

“Is he a cop?”

“No.”

“What did you do to him? Maybe I should let him catch up.”

“Harriet...” He sharpened his tone. She needed to think he still posed a threat.

“You know I could lose my job? I’ve only just recovered from the last time we—” She glanced at Samira. “Traded favors.”

“Only if somebody finds out. And you know I don’t share secrets.”

Her mouth tightened, a pucker of smoker’s fissures. They both knew he had her at “secrets.” Blondie was nearing the automatic doors.

“Seriously, we’re in a bit of a hurry,” he said. “I don’t have time to explain.”

“Good. I don’t want to hear it.”

She exhaled in disgust and swiveled. They followed her around the circular desk until they were shielded from view of the entrance. He squeezed Samira’s hand, which hadn’t defrosted one degree. Harriet swiped at a security check and pushed a door open, ushering them into a deserted hallway—leading to the acute ward, if that hadn’t changed. The door swished closed and the lock clicked. He pulled Samira away from a window set into the door.

Harriet hugged the tablet again. “Did you ever stop running, James, this whole time?”

“Nope. That’s why I’m so square-jawed and fit.”

“Oh, please don’t think I’m going to go all weak-kneed from one smile. I’m immune to you. I’ve developed antibodies against the virus that is James Armstrong. We’re even now, right?”

He held out his palm. “Card.”

“Which gate are you heading to?”

“We’ll go out the west staff entrance to the Thames Path.”

She yanked her lanyard over her ponytail and shoved it into his hand. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Straight through. Keep it out of sight. Don’t talk to anyone.”

He closed his fingers around it. “Didn’t plan to.”

“Mariya’s charge nurse in the Princess Alice wing today. Leave it with her—no one else. I take it you remember her.”

Mariya. His luck was holding. “I do, as a matter of fact.”

“Don’t let the bosses see you, and for God’s sake, restrain yourself from operating on anyone on your way through. We can all do without your ‘help.’”

“Ah, you know me so well, Harriet.”

“To my eternal regret.” She drummed trimmed fingernails on the back of the tablet. “This makes us even, right?”

“Guess so.”

“Good. I look forward to never seeing you again.”

“Nice catching up, Harriet. And you might want to call the cops to pick up the tall blond guy who has just walked into the A&E. Blue jeans, brown leather jacket. He has a gun.”

She swore, raising a palm, dismissively. “Oh God. It never ends with you, does it?”

“I’m serious, about the guy.”

“Just. Go.”

The department’s renovations evidently hadn’t progressed further than the waiting area. A two-star hotel with a gleaming false advertisement of a lobby. He pulled Samira into a dingy corridor toward radiology, the hospital layout coming back to him like a blueprint overlaid onto his vision. His life had forged a new path but the corridors hadn’t. Still the same industrial-strength disinfectants failing to mask the stench of urine and decay. No number of interior-design consultants could disguise that. Still the same artificial lighting, so white it made even the healthy look gray and sick. Hell, it probably made people sick. And no matter what chirpy color hospitals painted their walls, how did it always end up some shade of mucus?

Beside him, Samira looked like an incognito movie star on a surprise visit to cheer up sick children. He realized he was still holding her hand. Ah, well, couldn’t hurt. Physical contact—proven to produce oxytocin, lower blood pressure and reduce stress and anxiety. Ergo, ward off panic attacks.

And just you keep kidding yourself it’s for her benefit.

At the double doors into the back of cardiology, he scanned Harriet’s card over the reader. The light went red and it bleeped. Damn. He’d assumed she’d have access everywhere. They must have tightened security. He’d have to reconfigure his route.

The doors opened and a tall bald guy in a short-sleeved white shirt and bow tie strode out, speaking to a staff nurse in a Belfast accent. Crap. Jamie spun to the handwashing station and bent over it as they passed. Samira took the hint and blocked the side view. That smarmy idiot had made consultant? God help the good people of South London. And the only excuse for a bow tie on a Sunday was if you’d got lucky at a black-tie do the night before.

Jamie caught the door before it closed, and ushered Samira through, reluctantly dropping her hand. Best to look like colleagues catching up with paperwork on their day off.

“You know this place well,” Samira said, quietly. “From when you were a paramedic?”

“Aye,” he said, a mite too eagerly, “that’s why I brought us here.”

Their enemy couldn’t watch every exit from the ever-spreading octopus of a complex. And the exit he planned to use was so obscure that only the longest-serving staff smokers knew about it—or, in his case, those who wanted to come and go without being observed or clocked. The sooner they got away, the less chance of being surrounded. Once out, they’d catch the first black cab or bus they saw. Melt into London.

It’d be quicker if they could cut through the courtyard to the Princess Alice wing, rather than navigate the horseshoe of corridors and departments encircling it, but they needed air cover. Back at St Pancras he’d got a reasonable look at the ground enemy. Four men, three women, including Blondie and his driver. He’d committed their faces to memory—though an amped-up mercenary should be easy to spot among the glassy-eyed zombies who haunted the hospital on a Sunday morning. Then again, Samira stood out, too, in style alone.

She looked healthier than when his train had pulled out of the Gare de Blois, leaving her standing motionless on a deserted platform, staring after his carriage. In his mind’s eye, she’d been there ever since—until he’d spotted her at St Pancras. A little curvier, her face less gaunt, her hair longer. Perhaps grief had started to release its stranglehold.

In that week they’d spent together, unwrapping her had become a game—one he’d taken too far too fast, and paid the price. Every now and then he’d succeeded in drawing out a piece of the real Samira. Like a rat in a lab, he’d learned to steer the conversation to subjects that would engage or amuse her or—when that didn’t work—enrage her. When he’d played it right and lit her up, he’d lit up, too—and not much accomplished that these days. Boy, had she lit up. Her eyes sparked, her spine straightened, breath quickened, voice sharpened. Even her skin seemed to change, turning mahogany like a flame was warming it from beneath. Watching that was the reward for his persistence. He’d like to see that side of her again. Maybe he should have sucked up his pride and tried harder to convince her to let him stay. A year together in hiding. Nothing to do but—

Stop. Nothing to do but hit on a grieving woman under the pretense of protecting her? Nothing to do but give her a chance to get to know and loathe the real him? To give in to his impulses and let them control him? She’d made the right call, for both of them.

The best he could do for her now was help to complete her whistle-blower fiancé’s mission. Seeing her find peace would be his only reward.

At the cardiology reception desk, a nurse was handing a form to a bear of a man clutching a brown paper bag. “Do you not have anyone who could pick you up?” she said. Her lilac scrubs marked her as an agency nurse, not a permanent employee.

“The ferry’s fine,” the bear replied. “Pretty much door to door. And no bloody traffic.”

“You’ve just had a heart attack. You really should have someone to—”

“Will the NHS pay for a black cab?”

“No, that’s not in—”

“Thought not.”

Another security door loomed, into neurology. Would Harriet have access there?

“Yes, that was the fascinating thing,” Jamie said to Samira in an imperious public-school English accent. He gave the nurse a cursory nod as they passed, and hovered Harriet’s card over the sensor. “The MRI clearly showed an isodense intramedullary spinal cord tumor at C3 but it’d been misdiagnosed as a glioma, would you believe?” Red light on the sensor. Damn.

“Excuse me,” he said to the nurse in his best impatient-yet-condescendingly-polite consultant tone. “Terribly sorry, but would you mind...?” He gestured to the card reader, shrugging in a would-you-believe-it’s-still-not-working way, and turned back to Samira. “Bloody thing. I did ask Charlie to order me a new card. What was I saying...?”

“The glioma...” Samira said, her head bowed as if deep in concentration. Or prayer. Heck, he’d take any help they could get.

In his peripheral vision, he registered the nurse scrambling to the door, still arguing over her shoulder with the patient. With a bomber jacket and rucksack, Jamie didn’t look doctorish, but perhaps he could pull off aging consultant trying to pass for cool young hipster. “Ah, yes, so naturally I recommended we use immunostaining to rule out a neuronal tumor, and you can imagine Caroline’s reaction...”

He kept up the monologue as the nurse scanned her card and opened the door. He walked through with a distracted nod of thanks, Samira murmuring in sympathy with his fictitious neurological predicament. The door clunked shut. He trailed off a few meters down the corridor.

“Nearly there,” he said to Samira. “You holding up?”

“Awo,” she said, looking at him with more respect than he deserved—the way people used to look at him back when he wore scrubs and a stethoscope. He’d got off on that look a little too much. But, hey, if his bullshit made Samira confident, he wasn’t about to burst her bubble.

Ahead, at a nurse’s station, a woman in pale blue scrubs leaned over a clipboard. From a patient bay to his left a TV droned. Few patients would be unlucky enough to remain under observation over the weekend. His chest tightened in the same cocktail of nerves and adrenaline he’d felt the first time he’d walked in here as a senior house officer on his first rotation, knowing that people were relying on him to get out of here alive. He, Jamie Armstrong, who’d been playing schoolboy rugby not that long before.

Really, he should be living that Irish numbskull’s life by now. Wife and little kids. Heavily mortgaged semidetached Victorian villa in Ealing. Sweaty-palmed first-year doctors gazing at him with fear and adoration. He could send money to his sister and her kids, rather than emptying his military pay packet into the crevasse of his mother’s private nursing-home upkeep. His dad might still be alive if he’d been there to recognize the danger signs instead of ankle-deep in mud or dust in Mali or Afghanistan or Guyana. Or maybe the old man’s heart wouldn’t have given out in the first place.

Not now, Dad.

They strode silently through the east and north wings, the circuitous route zapping his nerves. Finally, he pushed open the doors into the west wing. A curvy blonde in red scrubs looked up from the reception desk, her green eyes widening.

He nodded. “Mariya.”

“Doctor Armstr... I mean—”

“James,” he said, quickly.

“What are you doing h—?”

“Give this to Harriet, would you?” He slapped the pass on the counter. “And only Harriet. You didn’t see me.”

Mariya screwed up her face. “Does...this mean we’re square?”

“You’re returning an ID pass. As favors go, it’s not a biggie.”

“I’ll have to walk to the other side of the building.”

He pointed to a fitness monitor on her wrist. “It’ll keep up your steps. Besides, that hardly makes up for...” In his peripheral vision he caught Samira tipping her head, assessing the conversation. “Whatever. We’re square.”

“And I won’t ever have to see—?”

“No, you won’t,” he snapped.

Did she have to look so relieved?

He opened an unassuming side door onto the smoker’s porch, ignoring the ALARM WILL SOUND sign. He’d been gone only five years—it probably hadn’t been fixed. By the smell of it, the staff still weren’t respecting the smoke-free rules. Same broken brick to hold the door open while they sucked in the very poison they lectured patients about. He shoved it into position, in case their exit was compromised. Drizzle tapped on the mildewed corrugated plastic awning.

“Where next?” Samira said.

“See that wee gate in the wall, across the car park? It leads to the Thames Path. Easily the most obscure of the hospital’s exits.” Over the solid stone, the broad gray river rolled south. Across it, the houses of parliament and Big Ben were coated in a hazy gold film. Once on the Thames Path they could cross to Westminster. Or, better still, follow the current south to Lambeth Bridge, to avoid doubling back past the hospital walls.

“Do you think they’ll be watching it?”

“Anything’s possible, but they’ll prioritize the other twenty or so exits. They wouldn’t have a big resource out there, at any rate. Come here. Your hair is showing.”

He tucked a black lock under her wig and pulled down her cap. Under the sunglasses, about the only visible parts of her were her chin and nose, already pinking up in the cold air. He resisted the urge to touch.

“Perfect,” he said.

“Peerrrfect,” she repeated, to herself.

“Are you mimicking my accent, Samira?”

She bit one corner of her lip. “Sorry, it’s just...”

“Indecipherable, I know. Sometimes even I have trouble understanding myself. I wonder if we could...borrow another coat for you. The enemy will have seen you in that one. Or maybe you could take it off? What do you have on underneath?”

“A black dress. I have another coat, in my backpack. It’s thinner, but...”

A thumping noise. “Shite, the chopper.” He pushed her back inside. “Change the coat, just in case...” He raised his voice. “You have a brolly, Mariya?”

“Course I do,” she said, in an are-you-still-here voice.

“Can I borrow it?”

“Borrow, as in...?”

“As in, I probably won’t be passing back this way but I’ll think of you every time it rains.”

“I thought we were square.”

“I’m unsquaring us.” He held out a hand. “Come on. It’s just a fucking umbrella.”

“Fine.” She whacked it into his palm. “Whatever. I’ll just catch pneumonia.”

“A small price, Mariya. Lovely catching up.” He nodded sharply and turned. “Wow.” Samira was belting a bright blue coat that wrapped up her curves like a Christmas present. But not one with your name on it.

“I can change my footwear, too,” she said.

“Sure.”

She unzipped her boots and slid on a pair of heels to match the coat, over her black stockings. He imagined himself slipping the shoes off in the nearest hotel bedroom. Rolling the stockings down, slowly. Running his hands back up her legs to—

“Jamie?”

“Sorry, what?”

She’d been speaking? Mariya caught his eye, raising her eyebrows. Samira retied her purple scarf with a convoluted series of twists, then pulled on cream leather gloves.

The scarf—it was the one he’d bought her, the one that made her eyes breathtaking. “La couleur de minuit,” he murmured, clenching the umbrella in both hands so as not to reach out and touch the fabric.

“The color of midnight,” she whispered, her mouth softening. Just the way it had that day beside the river in the moment his self-control had deserted him.

He cleared his throat. “They’ll have seen your rucksack. We’ll pack your things into mine,” he said, loosening the straps to expand his pack. “There’s plenty of room.”

A few minutes later they stepped outside. He tucked in a label jutting from her coat collar. On her nape, above the scarf, a sliver of skin goose pimpled. Don’t go doing that to me now. He opened the umbrella.

“Jesus, I’ve seen dinner plates bigger than this,” he said, looking up. “Can you hold it while I keep an eye out?” He swung her to his left, anchored his arm around her waist and pulled their hips flush, gratified by her tiny gasp. “We’ll walk to that gate, nice and smooth.”

They set off, awkwardly, given their height difference, Jamie hunching to fit under the umbrella. It always took a while for a couple to settle into a stride. Not that he remembered what it was like to be in a relationship where you strolled arm in arm. And not that he and Samira were a couple or ever would be—he’d broken enough hearts attempting a regular life, and hers was scarred enough already. Even through her coat he could feel her suppleness, his fingers moving as her hips swayed. Wasn’t often he missed relationships...

He pushed open the gate into a northwesterly blast and ushered Samira out. The bear with the paper bag lumbered past, head bent against the drizzle, breath labored, face as gray as the pavement. A jogger approached from the other direction. The path was otherwise deserted. As the gate locked behind them, Jamie coaxed Samira around to head south. They were channeled in by the wall but a canopy of trees still clinging to amber leaves provided air cover, and the shower gave them an excuse to huddle close and walk fast. A cluster of tourists in raincoats rounded a bend, some taking photos of Westminster. He clutched her tighter, skirting to one side of them. Fat drops of rain unleashed, blurring everything into gray.

A stout dark-haired man pushed through the tourists, scanning from person to person, hand inside his coat. Shit. One of the goons who’d been waiting for Samira’s train. He’d paid no heed to Jamie at the station but he’d know Samira’s face.

Jamie angled her to face him, planted a hand on each of her cheeks and drew her close, laughing as if she’d whispered something suggestive. As he sensed the enemy glancing their way, he lowered his head and did the only logical thing. He kissed her.

She went rigid.

Don’t pull away. Trust me. Between his hands and his lips, he was covering the only identifiable part of her. All the guy would see was a brunette in heels and a blue coat.

She took the hint and relaxed against him, pulling the umbrella low over their heads and sliding her free hand under his bomber jacket to the side of his waist. He bore down to stop from flinching. Oh man, he shouldn’t be getting a full-body reaction from that but there it was, as strong as a year ago—the nerves firing from his lips to his toes and back up...

The tourists passed and he released her lips, keeping his hands in place and touching his forehead to hers while taking a read from the corner of his eye—and catching his breath because...damn. The goon had moved away with the group, toward Westminster Bridge. The bear was lumbering the other way. Jamie dropped his hands.

“Oh my God,” Samira breathed.

“I’m sorry. There was a guy, from the station. It was the only thing I could think of.”

“Eshi. I mean, don’t apolog—” She touched her lips with two fingers. He yearned to do the same. “It’s fine.”

Fine.

Fine.

Fine wasn’t the reaction he normally shot for when he kissed a woman. Goddamn, those lips were just as smooth as he remembered. And insistent. And he’d remembered her a lot since—

Movement, to the south. The bear had tripped and was falling like a tree. No, not a trip—he was clutching his chest. He landed with a smack, his arm bouncing lifelessly on flagstones.

“Shite,” Jamie said, taking a step. The goon had turned, watching. “Samira, I can’t not...”

“Of course. Go.”

“Come with me.”

Jamie sprinted to the guy and shoved two fingers to his throat. Rain peppered his gray face. No carotid pulse. Fuck. Not breathing, either. He laid the guy flat, unzipped his coat and pulled it aside. His sternum was still.

“Has he been shot?” Samira said as she caught up.

“No. He’s a heart patient. Went down clutching his chest, grimacing. Has to be a heart attack.”

“CPR?” Samira said, holding the umbrella over them, her voice tight.

“I can go one better.”

“What do you mean?”

“A precordial thump. Jump-start his heart. Not standard hospital procedure but the indications...” Jamie clenched his right fist and held it above the guy’s chest, mentally measuring the gap. Twenty centimeters, right? “Okay,” he whispered to himself. “Go.” He smacked the side of his fist onto the guy’s lower sternum then snatched it away. The guy jumped, twitched—and lurched up, eyes wide, like a dead man coming out of the grave. Which he pretty much was. He scraped in a breath and clutched Jamie’s arm.

“Fuck,” Jamie said. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

Shite, now what? They couldn’t get him back into the hospital through a locked gate. They couldn’t leave him. They’d have to wait for a passerby they could send for help.

“Jamie, that thug,” Samira murmured. “He’s coming.”

He was coming, all right, and at a fair clip. No gun drawn but his eyes were narrowed at Samira. Crap. It’d confirm his suspicions if Jamie and Samira took off. And a shoot-out was best avoided. The priority was to get Samira out of there. Then deal with the goon. Then the bear. Triage, basically.

“Quick, Sa—s—sweetheart,” he shouted. “You’ll have to go for help. This guy needs a resus team, quick. I’ll boost you over the wall.” He lowered his voice. “Go straight to Mariya. Hide somewhere near her desk and I’ll come for you when I’ve sorted out this goon.”

Before she had time to think, he pulled her to the wall and linked his hands in front of him, ready for her foot. Rain sluiced his face. He blinked hard. Behind him, the bear groaned.

“Now, sweetheart!” he shouted. “Go!”

Samira puffed out her cheeks and put the ball of her shoe into his hand. “I don’t know how to do this—jump like this.”

“It’s easy. I’ll hoist you to the top. Just be careful jumping down—bend your knees. One, two, three.”

He heaved, and she caught the edge of the wall and pulled herself up. One of her heels fell, and Jamie caught the shoe before it took out his eye. She slipped the other shoe off and disappeared, grunting as she landed on the other side. It felt wrong to let her out of sight, even for a minute.

He swiveled, hand hovering by his holster. The goon had gone. Shit. The bear hoisted himself to a sitting position.

“What happened to that guy who was running for us?” Jamie said. “Did you see?”

“Nah, sorry. Bloody hell. What just...? Did I...? Are you a doctor?”

“Your heart stopped.” Jamie ran to the low wall separating the path from the river and looked over. Stones, rubbish, water... The goon had to have gone after Samira.

Gunfire rang out—muffled potshots from a pistol, over the wall. Then the echoing whine of an approaching helicopter.

Shit. Samira.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE HELICOPTER SWUNG out over the wall, to the north. Gunfire popped. Beside Jamie, the glass dome of a streetlamp smashed. Bullets plinked along flagstones. He sprinted for the hospital wall, sheltered from view by the spindly canopy.

“Sorry,” he yelled to the bear. “I gotta draw their fire away.”

“Might be an idea,” the guy said, shakily. He had to be wondering what alternative world he’d been resurrected into. Just keep breathing, pal.

“I’ll send help. Just...take it easy, relax.”

“Relax. Sure.”

The shooters weren’t door gunners, just guys with assault rifles. Not as precise.

More ground fire, over the wall. An alarm wailed, echoed by another, farther off.

Jamie found a foothold and launched over the wall, under tree cover. As he landed, he skidded on wet leaves. No sign of Samira or the gunman. He’d royally fucked that up. Once in a while the first idea wasn’t the best idea... The smokers’ door was banging in the breeze. Don’t latch. Don’t latch. He peered up through the branches. He’d have to cross open ground but better that than the chopper spraying the trees and taking out the bear.

He launched into a sprint, pumping his arms, dodging cars, breathing hard. Gunfire plinked into steel, punched asphalt. As he bounded up the concrete steps, a gust swept the door. It latched. Shit. He hammered on it, turned, flattened, drawing his weapon—not that a Glock would take out a helicopter. The chopper veered toward him. He released the slide. A dozen alarms and sirens clashed.

The door fell away behind him. He stumbled back.

“Fuck me.” Mariya stood, hands on hips. “Is that a gun?”

Gunfire hammered the porch, tearing through the awning. Jamie pulled the door shut and shoved Mariya farther inside.

She shook him off. “Are you a good guy here or—?”

“Where’s Sa—?” he said. “Where’s my friend?”

“She ran down the corridor.” Mariya pointed. “Some guy followed her. He fired a fucking gun. I called security but they’re not here yet.”

Shit. Without an access card Samira would have run into a dead end. Jamie grabbed Harriet’s pass from the counter and looped it around his neck.

“Get out of sight and stay down,” he ordered. “Away from windows.”

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” Mariya called as he rounded the corner of her desk and scoped out the corridor. Long and empty. At the far end, one of the double doors into Occupational Therapy hung open. He ran silently along the wall, gun down, pulse cranking, checking the empty bays either side. At the double doors, the security panel had been shot to pieces. A crackly voice sounded over the hospital loudspeaker. “The hospital is on full lockdown. Proceed directly to a refuge, as indicated by staff. Do not enter or leave the premises. This is not a drill.”

From ahead, a man’s voice trickled in over the recording and the alarms. A one-sided conversation, though Jamie couldn’t make out the words. On the phone?

He peeped between the doors. Nobody in view. Occupational Therapy would be empty on a Sunday. He took a longer look. The admin station was in an alcove halfway down the narrow wing, opposite a deserted waiting room. The guy had to be in there. With Samira? Jamie edged through the doors.

“...no idea where the fuck I am,” the guy was saying, in an American accent. “Place is a fucking maze. There are treadmills and shit in here—some hospital gym? I’m looking out a window at a courtyard with a tree in it... Yeah, I know that’s not very fucking helpful. Can’t you track me from the GPS on the phone or some shit?”

A window blind rattled. Jamie quietly lowered the rucksack to the floor.

“Why don’t I just shoot her and then the problem’s solved?”

Jamie’s forehead prickled. As he inched closer, he heard—or imagined—Samira’s breath wheezing in time with the ebb of the siren. He ran his gaze around the ceiling. No security cameras. He couldn’t count on help being forthcoming—and even if it was, Jamie could well end up taking a bullet.

“Hang on, man. She’s having a fucking fit or something.”

A clatter. Gasping.

“Lady, this better not be some trick... Nah, serious, man, she’s going purple. She ain’t breathing. What do I do? Well, someone’s gotta make a decision here! Where’s Fitz?”

Jamie exhaled and inhaled, like he was trying to do it for Samira. She would be fine. Terrified, of course, but nobody died from a panic attack. He pictured the goon’s position from his voice—looking down at Samira on the floor, facing the window? Gun in right hand, phone in the other? Doubly distracted.

“If Fitz is gonna interrogate her he better get here quick... No, I don’t fucking know CPR. Hang on. I gotta put the phone down a sec.”

Jamie launched around the corner. The guy looked up, fumbling to adjust his grip on a pistol. Jamie leaped, shoved the gun aside, wheeled and smacked his elbow into the guy’s forehead. The goon staggered back but gathered control of his weapon, swiveled and aimed it at Jamie’s forehead. Not so smooth, caporal.

Something blue flew across the alcove and clocked the side of the goon’s head. The impact rippled through him. He tipped sideways into a desk and crumpled onto the floor. What the fuck? A hand weight rolled off the desk and thudded onto the guy’s side.

“Oh my God, is he alive?” Samira’s voice, to Jamie’s right, barely audible over the alarms. She was kneeling in a corner, gray-faced, eyes huge. Over the loudspeaker, the recorded message repeated.

Jamie kicked the guy’s weapon across the floor. “You threw that weight?”

“It was sitting right there. It looked like he was going to... I didn’t think. Is he...? Did I...?”

Jamie checked the guy’s vitals. “Little groggy but okay. What happened to your panic attack? Were you faking?”

“No. But then I saw you and then the weight, and somehow I pushed through it.”

A tinny voice sounded. Merde. Jamie held a finger to his lips, and located the goon’s phone on an office chair. Still on. He picked it up, settling his breath.

“Nah, I’m okay. I’m fine,” he shouted, in his best imitation of the guy’s accent, muffling his voice with his hand. “Just some fucking security guard. Knocked him out cold. Listen, there’s some paperwork sitting here, says I’m in the...” Jamie stared at a concrete courtyard. What was on the far side of the building? “The...gynecology outpatient clinic. Shit, someone’s coming. I gotta go. You better get here, quick.”

Jamie hung up. The goon groaned. Jamie retrieved his rucksack, and drew out a syringe and vial from his white box of goodies.

“What is that?” Samira said, grabbing her sunglasses from the floor beside her.

“A sedative. Keep him in a happy place a while longer.” The guy wouldn’t be able to give much of a description of Jamie, especially with a concussion, but the longer they kept him quiet, the better.

“Where did you get it?”

“Would you believe a prescription?”

“No.”

He laughed.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You have a contact?”

“Traditional weapons are a little harder to come by here and a few people owed me—”

“Favors. I’m beginning to see a pattern.”

Not that this favor had come cheaply. Andy had charged him top dollar. But at short notice, with limited access to real firepower, Jamie needed every advantage he could think of. And if there was one weapon he knew how to wield...

After injecting the guy, Jamie tucked him into a bed in a private room in the evacuated orthopedics ward next door. Samira relieved him of a clip of pounds in his pocket.

“I wish they’d shut off that fucking siren,” Jamie said as they left the room, closing the door. “We’d better get out of here before security arrives—or this guy’s buddies. I’m afraid we’ve lost your shoes, Cinderella. You might want to put your boots back on.”

“I have an idea how we can get away,” Samira said a minute later, as she zipped up the boots.

“All ears.”

She led him back to Occupational Therapy. “There,” she said, pointing to a display box fixed to a wall. Inside, two dozen keys hung on nails. A sign read OT Pool Cars. Sign the log BEFORE you take a key. Return with a FULL TANK. NO exceptions.

“Crumbs, Samira! Are you suggesting we steal a car?”

“Just...borrow.” She stepped back, abruptly. “You’re right. What am I thinking? It’s a terrible idea.”

He caught her shoulders. “It’s a great idea. You’re more easily corruptible than I’d thought.”

The box was locked but he found the key in a drawer. They tidied up the nurse’s station. He took the logbook and buried it in a paper recycling bin two wards north.

Now for the staff car park. As they approached a blind corner in the corridor, Samira grabbed his arm. Footsteps. He pushed her through a door into a bathroom and drew his weapon. The footsteps passed.

“Good timing,” he said. “I’m needing to use the facilities.”

As they emerged, they nearly collided with a trio of local police, packing Glocks.

“Shit, you gave me a hell of a fright,” Jamie chided in his best Scouse, tucking his weapon into the back of his waistband and pulling his jacket over top, hoping it looked like he was adjusting his jeans after a bathroom break. He leaned slightly to make Harriet’s ID spin facedown on his chest. Hopefully they were searching for a chubby guy with black hair, from the description Mariya would have given. “Know where we’re supposed to be going for this bloody lockdown? I skived off to the pub in the last drill.”

They listened intently to the bobbies’ directions, and set off accordingly, Jamie loudly grumbling that this was the last time he was coming in on his day off. When they were clear, they doubled back and crept through corridors and tunnels to the parking building, skirting security cameras wherever possible, hunkering into their clothing when not. He might be a rat in a maze, but this was his maze.

They found the car in its allotted space. “There she is,” Jamie said. “Saint Jude’s finest piece-of-shit hatchback.”

He tipped his rucksack into the car’s boot, nudging aside a collapsed wheelchair. Samira checked the car for a GPS unit or tracker.

“You’re giving the NHS credit for a bigger budget than they have,” Jamie said.

“Can’t be too careful when you’re committing a felony.”

“It’s just a regular old crime, over here.”

“That makes me feel so much better.”

Samira hid in the footwell of the rear seat, covered in her brown coat. Jamie wrapped himself up in a football scarf and the cap.

At the hospital gates, a barrier arm guarded the exit. A parking attendant leaned out of her station. “We’re on lockdown. No one in or out.”

“It’s an emergency.” Jamie went with a Welsh accent.

The woman frowned. “That’s an OT car. What even is an OT emergency?”

“You can ask me that when it’s your grandmother who can’t get off the loo because her grab rail came off in her hand.”

The attendant blinked, like she was seeing a mind picture, then shrugged and lifted the barrier.

Outside the gates, they crept into a traffic jam. Rain peppered the roof. The windows fogged up. No sign of the helicopter—it’d probably scarpered after failing to take down Jamie, before local forces could scramble to respond. This close to Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, the police wouldn’t take chances.

“What’s happening?” Samira hissed.

Jamie rubbed the windscreen. The wipers beat like a crazed metronome. “Not a lot. Who’d be a getaway car driver in London?”

“Oh my God, Jamie. We just stole a car.”

“Technically, I stole it—though you did force me into it. But don’t worry. We’ll return it clean and with a full tank.”

As they crawled onto Westminster Bridge, a familiar blond head snaked around the umbrellas bobbing along the pavement. Wisely leaving the sinking ship, ready to regroup. Jamie would have to drive right past him, but with a dozen cops in view, the goon would be keeping his head even lower than Jamie’s.

Police were waving traffic by with barely a glance. He’d bet they had no idea what they were looking for but figured it wasn’t an NHS hatchback going two miles an hour.

Jamie hung a left after Big Ben and the traffic eased up. Union Jacks sagged from the towers of Westminster and the Abbey. He had to fight the urge to drive on the right-hand side, after so many years on the Continent. When they’d passed through the main tourist area into the neoclassical stone of Millbank, he gave Samira the all clear to climb into the front seat. She slid her sunglasses back on and adjusted her wig. Not that anybody on the streets had their heads up. And the dreich day and foggy windows would mess with CCTV.

“So, Putney, right?” he said.

“You know how to get there?”

“Aye. Got an address?”

She recited it from memory. “I just hope Charlotte’s there. I had no safe way of telling her I was on my way. I don’t even know what we’re collecting. This could all be for nothing.”

“Ah, it’s been fun so far. But you’d better hold your breath—we’re passing MI5.” He jerked his head to a stately building to their right, no doubt ablaze with activity beneath its imperial facade, given the morning’s alert. “Look at it, sitting there all fat and self-important while an enemy of the American people passes right by.”

“Is this you trying to make me feel less anxious?”

“Not working?”

“Not working.”

“Stick with me. We’ll be okay.”

Right. Because nobody who stuck with him ever came unstuck?

She doesn’t need to know.

Then again, she’d had intimate experience of coming unstuck in his company. Shite, they were going to be alone in a car for maybe half an hour. She wouldn’t want to talk about what’d happened between them, would she?

As they left the spooks behind and veered back to the Thames, she swore and pulled something from her coat pocket. The goon’s phone.

“I’d forgotten about this,” she said.

“We’ll chuck it in the river. You know how Tess is about phones being traced.”

She lifted the phone to the gauzy light coming through her window and tilted it left to right, like she was looking for a way in. “Believe me, I’m the same.”

“You’ve caught her paranoid tendencies?”

“You could say we contracted them from the same source.”

“Get rid of it, Samira. The guy said something about GPS tracking.”

She squinted at it. “This won’t take a second.”

“What won’t?”

“It might be useful to find out what this guy knows, where he’s been. If they can GPS-track it, so can I.”

“How long will that take?”

“A minute or two. I’ll download a backup app and sync everything to the cloud—GPS data, phone calls, texts... I can sift through it later.”

“Just you do that. It’s not password-protected, then?”

“Looks like a swipe pattern,” she said, pulling off a glove. “Which is only effective if you wipe the screen after each use.” She flicked a fingertip in a Z shape and the screen lit up. “You see?”

Oh, he did see. Nothing sexier than a smart brain. And the longer she used it for techie stuff, the less time for awkward after-the-morning-after conversations. With luck, they’d get through the next few hours with no chance to even reference their...liaison. Just so long as he didn’t go kissing her again. Self-control wasn’t his strong point but he could at least manage that, dopamine or not.

Right?

CHAPTER SIX

“NO TEXTS OR EMAILS,” Samira said, swiping and tapping too fast for Jamie to get a fix on the screen. “No stored numbers. These guys are careful.”

A white bakery van stopped in front of them, and the driver climbed out and opened up the back. Jamie leaned on the horn. Samira jumped.

“Sorry,” he said. “This woman’s decided to use Grosvenor Road as a loading zone.” He veered around it. “Bloody London drivers.”

“Jamie, if we’re going to judge on stereotypes you’d be grumpy and pasty and miserly and I’d be a kid with a bloated stomach and flies in my eyes.”

“Too long in this country and I’ll be back to pasty and grumpy quick smart, don’t you worry. And on my income, I can’t be anything but miserly.” Humor. Yes. Humor was good. You couldn’t laugh and panic at the same time.

“I’ve forgotten what an income is.”

He peered out the windscreen. “How long until you’ve finished with that phone? I have an idea.”

“I’m done. I’ve uploaded the GPS data but I won’t be able to throw it into a mapping tool until I get to a computer.”

He lowered his window. “Give it here.”

She wiped her prints off it. As a double-decker sightseeing bus passed the other way, he tossed it onto the open top level. Rain had driven the tourists downstairs.

“That should have the mercenaries driving in loops around central London.”

“Nicely done,” she said, wonder in her voice. He liked hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed hearing wonder in a woman’s voice. He’d missed her silky voice, best heard murmuring sweet groans into his—

“How long until Putney?” she said.

“Uh. Twenty minutes. We’ll park a few blocks from your friend’s apartment and walk. Just a precaution,” he added, as her shoulders tensed. “Ninety-nine percent of precautions are unnecessary. It’s the one in a hundred that turns out to be necessary that makes the other ninety-nine worth it. But you don’t need any lessons in caution now, do you?”

He resisted pointing out MI6 headquarters across the river, a cross between a Disney castle and a tiered wedding cake.

“So...you came here because there was no one else available...?”

Shite. “Uh, well, I know the territory, so I was the obvious choice.” And the fact that Samira was the one at risk? Well, Jamie hadn’t needed time to stop and weigh things up. Some would call that his downfall. That and dopamine. “And it sounded like a bit of fun.”

“Huh.”

What did she want to hear? That he hadn’t stopped thinking about her in thirteen long months? In France she’d made it excruciatingly clear she wanted him gone, stat. And his conscious brain had told him she was dead right, for both their sakes. Other parts of him, on the other hand...

He stole a sideways glance at her. Whatever her reason for pushing him away, he’d swear indifference wasn’t it.

“A bit of fun,” she echoed. “Kidnapping a woman from a train station, hijacking an ambulance, trespassing through a hospital, impersonating a doctor, lying to police, stealing a car, drugging a man.”

“Ah, but you’re forgetting the time I saved a man’s life while under fire using a rare and controversial technique, outran a helicopter assault, engaged in hand-to-hand combat to rescue said woman, outwitted the entire Met Police force and escaped under the noses of MI5 and MI6.”

“MI6?” she said, looking around.

“Oh, we left them way behind.”

“I’m not sure if you’re brave or reckless.”

He smiled. “Definitely reckless. You, on the other hand, are brave.”

“Hardly. I’m only doing this because I have no choice.”

He shrugged. “So am I.”

“What do you mean you don’t have a choice?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to let you walk into the hands of those bastards, was I? And with guys like Flynn and Angelito—when they say they need you, you don’t say no, regardless of the cost.”

Samira was silent a minute. She pulled her glove back on. “You shouldn’t have come.”

And there it was. What had he expected? Jamie, you have to leave, she’d said that morning in France, pushing away the croissants he’d bought from the boulangerie while she’d slept in. This was a mistake.

“Samira, look, it’ll take—what?—half a day to get this evidence off to Tess? Then you’ll never have to see me again, if that’s what you want.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Well, that was something. “Then what did you mean?”

“I mean, it’s dangerous to be here with me.”

His eyes widened. Tell me about it.

“No, I don’t mean that, either.”

Shite, how did she follow that train of thought?

“I’m not very good at explaining myself. I mean, I’m relieved you’re here. But being around me makes you a target.”

“I know that. I’m good with that.” Her gaze practically itched the side of his face.

“Did I ever tell you how my fiancé died?”

Whoa. He hadn’t seen that coming. “I don’t believe so, no.” Come to think of it, she hadn’t mentioned the guy at all in France.

“He died in a US drone strike in Somalia after I called his cell phone,” she said, quiet and precise. “That’s how Hyland’s goons tracked him down—they’d been waiting for him to break cover.”

“A military strike? How’d Hyland get away with that?”

“Tess reckons he arranged for the US to get intel that a terrorist leader was hiding out where Latif was staying, and then pressured the president to deal with it. Latif was collateral damage, officially. Of course, by then Latif had given enough information to Tess to bring down Hyland’s former company and his cronies, but the senator slipped the noose. We think Latif had been hunting evidence that could bring Hyland down, too. And now Hyland wants me gone, thinking I know too much. Which, unfortunately, I don’t.”

“Oh Jesus. I knew some of that but not all. I’m sorry. And we think Charlotte now has this evidence? She works for GCHQ, right? Why wouldn’t she just tell her bosses?”

“Maybe she did. Or maybe she doesn’t know who to trust. Governments are loath to intrude on other governments’ dirty secrets. And everyone has secrets.” She sat straighter. “Anyway, my point is that if I’m a target, you’re a target. And I already lost one...”