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you, Colonel,’ the hawk-faced man said. ‘What you knew was not important. Your rank and your position working here at the Russian embassy were sufficient for our needs.’
    The man smiled, actually smiled. It was a smile of greed, of an appetite about to be indulged.
    ‘But when I reviewed the dossier my people had gathered on you,’ he continued, ‘I saw your photograph and I saw this …’ The colonel’s whole body froze as, almost tenderly, the man traced the deep scar on his face with the tip of his forefinger. ‘And that’s when I realized I had met you before …’
    Again, the colonel desperately tried to remember this man. Again, he failed. Other memories instead rose up inside his mind. The long-dead boy who’d given him this scar … his daughter in his arms, laughing giddily as a child … that man outside her apartment now, waiting for his orders to—
    More freezing water sluiced down on his face. The hawk-faced man leered in.
    ‘You will remember me,’ he said. ‘My colleague here will make certain of that.’
    A tinkling of metal.
    Zykov strained to look to his left. The bespectacled man was removing several stainless-steel surgical instruments from his medical bag. He laid them out neatly on the mattress beside the colonel’s head.
    The colonel fought again to break free, but the men holding him simply tightened their grip. The room’s dimensions started shifting again. The bed canopy began melting like wax. A hissing of breath filled his ears.
    The Adrenalin, he realized, it was wearing off. The SP hybrid was once more taking control. Zykov squeezed his eyes tight shut, as kaleidoscopic images burst like flak across his mind. He prayed that he’d black out.
    He did not.
    ‘I want you to think back to nineteen ninety …’ The hawk-faced man’s voice clawed deep into the colonel’s skull. ‘To the Biopreparat weapons facility you illegally raided with an anonymous armed group on the twenty-ninth of April …’
    A bolt of clarity. The colonel’s eyes flashed wide open in disbelief. What? But how can this man know about —
    The hawk-faced man grinned down.
    ‘You cost me my career that night,’ he said. ‘It’s because of that humiliation that I’m here with you now. But more important is what you stole. That’s what you’re going to tell me about now, Colonel. What you stole. And where you took it next.’
    No, thought the Colonel. Not that …
    Because how could this be? What Zykov had gone to the Biopreparat for … what he had taken … its very existence had been classified … a state secret. Not even the SVR could have got access to that . And no one – no one apart from Zykov’s six brother officers, whose loyalty was beyond reproach – knew that he had ever been involved in any kind of theft at all.
    Suddenly Zykov knew in his gut: these people were not SVR. They had nothing to do with his government. They were not working for Russia at all. So who the hell were they? What were they planning to do?
    He gasped. The drug had just dredged up another memory. From over twenty years ago. Of where he’d seen the hawk-faced man before.
    The image of a zealous young officer rose up inside his mind with photograph-like clarity. A disarmed, humiliated young officer,kneeling on the cold wet concrete outside the Biopreparat facility, cuffed alongside the rest of the guards, turning and watching the colonel as he climbed back into his unmarked truck and … and pushed his balaclava up from his face to sneeze.
    My God , he thought. Can it be possible? Could this man truly have glimpsed my face? My scar? So very long ago?
    The colonel felt the hands holding him tighten, pinning him hard to the mattress. The man in the spectacles closed in and stared deep into his eyes. His pinched-up mouth left him looking hungry as a rat. A tooth of metal glinted in his hand.
    When the colonel started to scream through his gag, it made a noise like rubber screeching on tarmac. It was the sound of