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prison.’
    ‘You’ll have it.’
    ‘And my choice of team specialists,’ he added.
    ‘Done.’
    Once more Drake glanced down at the photograph of Maras. Her piercing blue eyes stared back at him, as if to bore straight into his soul. What they would see there, he didn’t care to imagine.
    I hope you’re worth it, he thought.
    ‘All right,’ he said without looking up. ‘I’m in.’

Chapter 4
    Cell No. 62, Khatyrgan Prison, Siberia
    FORTY-ONE, FORTY-TWO, FORTY-THREE
…
    Breathing hard, beads of sweat dripping from her brow, Prisoner 62 forced her aching arms to work, pushing her body up from the freezing concrete floor before slowly lowering it back down again. Over and over she performed the same exercise without rest or respite.
    Forty-four, forty-five
…
    She’d had a name once.
Maras
; a code name given by a man who once cared about her. And before that, another name given by parents who once protected her. Both were gone now. There were no names in Khatyrgan. Here she was Prisoner 62, and that was all.
    Wispy tendrils of steam rose from her warm skin, her body heat radiating out into the tiny unheated cell. She kept quiet as she worked, limiting her breathing to short gasps, knowing that any excessive noise might draw the guards to her cell. Guards with fists and boots and rifle butts.
    Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight
…
    Always they came in force, too many to fight off alone in that cramped cell where she couldn’t move properly. If they were angry or vindictive or just felt like having fun , they would beat her until she was close to blacking out, when she almost begged for the darkness to swallow her for ever. In those situations there was nothing she could do except curl into a ball and wait for it to end.
    It had been worse when she first arrived here, before they learned the kind of grudging, reluctant respect they had for her now. In those first few months they had tried to beat her down, tried to subjugate and break her, but she didn’t react like the other prisoners. She didn’t cower in fear, she didn’t meekly submit.
    She fought back.
    All too often they had come away with gashes and bruises of their own. And more than one unfortunate guard had to be carried out by his comrades, moaning and bleeding. She could fight like a wild animal if the need was upon her, lashing out with a ferocity that surprised even her jailers, and refusing to stay down until she was physically unable to stand.
    Eventually, despite the ferocious beatings they exacted in revenge, they had grown tired of nursing their own injuries and suffering the indignity of being hurt by a woman, and they had relented in their assault. It was just as well, because by that point she was almost at the end of her rope.
    Those had been some of the darkest days of her life, and she had seen many of those.
    Forty-nine, fifty
.
    With one final push, she got her knees under her and rose up from the floor, clenching and unclenching her fists to get some circulation going again. She had wrapped her hands in rags to keep them from freezing, but still the cold seeped through. The cold was everywhere in Khatyrgan.
    It was her true enemy. Not the guards or the other prisoners, but the remorseless, relentless cold.
    It was why she exercised with such dogged determination each day, why it was the first thing she did when she woke each morning and the last thing she did before falling asleep at night. The body heat it generated kept the cold at bay, at least for a while.
    In any case, there wasn’t much else to do here. She was kept in solitary confinement twenty-four hours a day, carefully set aside from the rest of the inmate population. She knew there was an exercise yard in the prison, but she had never seen it since the day of her arrival. She hadn’t seen sunlight since then either – there was no window in her cell.
    How long had that been? Two years? Three?
    She didn’t know. She had lost count.
    Better not to know.
    This cell was