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There were two staircases leading to the upper floors, at opposite corners of the building. Sean nodded to the nearest one, and we made our way cautiously up it to the top.

The effort of keeping up with his quietly economical movements made sweat break out along my hairline. My mouth was as dry as my palms were damp. At that precise moment, if I’d had more faith in my own intuition, I would have turned and run. It was screaming at me.

The top floor was closer to completion than those below it, but not by much. It seemed that the centre of the office was going to be an open-plan layout on this level, with separate cubicles around the outside edges.

The building work had reached the stage where the side walls of the cubicles were up, but not the ends. The unfinished walls stuck out like breakwaters along a beach. We used the cover they provided to work our way closer towards the corner office until we could make out the reflected glow of a lamp bouncing off the tinted glass of the windows and the pale plasterboard ceiling.

Then Sean stopped abruptly, and I stiffened behind him as I heard the murmur of voices. It was only when a burst of music replaced them that I realised we were listening to a radio.

Sean caught my eye, and I read his meaning, wondering if he could hear my heartbeat. It was loud enough to be deafening me.

We reached the final wall that separated us from the last room. Sean paused for a moment, as if gathering himself, then we both stepped round it, into the light.

And froze.

Langford had made a comfortable nest for himself in that end office. A military surplus sleeping bag lay rumpled on a piece of camping foam against one wall. The lamp we’d seen, and the radio, were next to an overflowing ashtray on a paint-encrusted table to one side, together with a chipped mug that was striped down the outside with trails of old coffee.

To go with the table there was a single wooden chair, which was now lying on its side in the middle of the floor.

Langford’s corpse was still tied to it.

We didn’t bother checking for a pulse. It’s difficult to see how anyone could have lost the amount of blood that was pooled around his fallen body and have survived the experience.

It spread outwards around the vigilante’s torso, still liquid, but congealing so that it had the consistency of syrup. The smell of it turned my stomach. Langford’s head rested in the lake of blood. It stained his temple and matted in his short hair. His nose and mouth were caked with it.

We didn’t have to wonder how he’d died. The knife was still embedded in his chest, leaving only the camouflage-coloured plastic handle showing. The blade had been inserted somewhere between his sixth and seventh ribs on the left-hand side, slanted slightly upwards, and driven home with a vengeance.

Langford’s eyes were open, rigid, frightened. Incredulous, even. He’d never thought it was going to happen. Hadn’t believed that he was destined to die this way.

Sean crouched by the body and regarded it for a long time without any emotion showing.

“They were aiming for his heart,” he said at last. “Looks like they missed.”

He was right. The wound was too low, or the angle was too shallow for that. Instead, Langford must have suffocated slowly as his lungs flooded with his own blood. It would not, I judged, have been an easy way to die.

The heart is a small organ, all things considered, barely five inches by three, and not easy to hit. Our weapons handling instructors had always advised us to pick another target, if we had the chance. Like the throat.

My own scar prickled in nervous sympathy. I stepped round the body on the pretence of examining the rest of his hideaway, but it was more so I didn’t have to keep looking at the knife, and at the dead man’s eyes.

I was careful to keep my feet out of the spilt blood. I noticed, with a detached eye for detail, that his hands had been bound behind him with wicked thin cord. He’d fought against the restraint, which had cut deep into the flesh of his wrists.

I was making a conscious effort to breathe through my mouth, so I didn’t gag from the sickly stench of the blood. Instead, I could almost taste it, and I’m not sure which was worse.

I glanced away, took in the contents of the table instead, the coffee cup and the ashtray. It was only then that I noticed what was wrong about that cup. There was a wisp of steam still rising from it. I passed my fingers over the rim, felt the faint warmth, and then the implications started to roll in.

I turned to find that Sean had leaned over and touched the backs of his fingers to the dead man’s cheek, almost a parody of affection. He stood up fast then, tense.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here – now!”

“The coffee’s still warm,” I told him.

But Sean was already on the move. He turned back as he reached the far wall of the office, and nodded towards Langford. “I know,” he said, grim. “So’s the body.”

We set off across the office floor with much less regard for stealth than we’d exercised on the way in. I reckon we made about one-third distance. Then the gloom of the interior shattered in a flare of light and deafening sound.

I heard the sound of the shot change abruptly as it swerved off one of the partially-completed walls. It must have hit part of the wooden framework, rather than the blocks.

I dropped instantly, diving behind the nearest pile of thermalite blocks and thankful of the solid cover. Sean, I saw, was already down, making a mockery of my reflex time. He’d been forced further away from me, and was only just sheltered by a low wall of plasterboard off-cuts. He was trying to ease a look over the top of them.

I kept my own head well down. It was getting to the stage where I’d had enough experience of being shot at to recognise the fact without needing visual confirmation.

Sean didn’t even manage to get his head up to clear his eye-line before the second shot discharged. I don’t know what it hit. One of the block walls to our right, by the sound of it, and sizzled off harmlessly into the darkness.

Breathing hard, Sean delicately tried to alter his position.

“Charlie,” he whispered, “can you pinpoint him?”

I screwed round, keeping low, and peeped cautiously over my protective stack of blocks, expecting the blaze and the thunder of another shot. None came. I glanced back to Sean, shook my head.

“Keep looking.”

I’d just time to cram my fingers into my ears before he risked another exposure. It helped stop them ringing as we were treated to a third deafening concussion.

The shooter was getting his eye in with practise. This time the bullet hit close to Sean’s head, scouring across one of the sheets of plasterboard and disintegrating part of it into a puff of white chalk. He ducked back fast, swearing under his breath.

I blinked a few times, trying to clear my vision, but the four dazzling outward streaks of the muzzle flash in the low light seemed permanently burned across my eyes. I shut them, but it didn’t help much.

“He’s in the stairwell, I think,” I told Sean quietly.

“In that case,” he murmured, “you’d better take this.”

I opened my eyes again to find the Glock was out in his hand, and he was offering it to me. Before I’d a chance to argue, he threw it across the gap that separated us. I caught it automatically, closed my hands round the pistol grip, and slipped my right index finger onto the trigger.

And, suddenly, I was back in the killing house on camp. Back inside the skin of the girl who’d trained to be a soldier. Back up against the system that hadn’t wanted me there, didn’t believe I had what it took to succeed. Back with the observers waiting for every hesitation, and mistake.