‘The bastard doesn’t even snore.’

‘Perhaps he’s not asleep?’

‘At 2.30 in the morning? So why are his lights off?’

‘Okay. Okay.’ Vau stopped outside Sabir’s bedroom door, one hand on the handle.

Abi stood a little away from him. Without a sound, he unhitched the telescopic fighting baton from his sleeve. Then he nodded.

Vau threw open the door.

Abi sprinted towards the bed, landing with his legs splayed, the full weight of his body concentrated on where he expected the sleeping man to be. ‘Christ, Vau. There’s nobody in here.’

‘You’re kidding?’

Abi disentangled himself from the bed covers and cracked on his torch. ‘This bed’s been slept in, though. It’s still fucking warm. Go and check the bathroom. Then we’ll do the rest of the house.’ Already, without knowing why, Abi was getting the sense that the house was deserted.

‘He’s not in the bathroom either.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t see a car leave while I was sleeping? Are you sure he didn’t see us?’

‘Hell, Abi. Of course he didn’t. I would have told you. His car is still in the garage.’

‘Maybe he went for a walk? Maybe he creeps across the boundary fence every night and porks the next- door-neighbour’s wife?’

Vau shook his head. ‘No. I watched him prepare for bed. I even used the binoculars to make sure it was him. The curtains were wide open all the time. The man doesn’t seem to give a damn that anyone who wants to can look in on him.’

‘Let’s check downstairs, then. Perhaps he’s got a study? Or maybe a dressing room with a spare bed in it?’

Vau made a face. ‘Dressing rooms like that are for men who want a break from their wives. Like Monsieur, our father, remember? Sabir hasn’t got a wife. He lives alone.’

Ten minutes of frenetic searching convinced the brothers that Sabir wasn’t anywhere in the house.

Abi threw his head back and exhaled through his cheeks. ‘Right. Let’s do something constructive. Let’s find if he’s written anything down. At least that way we won’t leave empty-handed.’

‘What are we going to do then?’

‘Burn the place down. That’ll bring him running.’

5

Sabir had almost succeeded in dozing off when he saw the study lights go on in the main house. For a split second he refused to believe his eyes. Then he eased himself out of the hammock and stood, still rocking with tiredness, on the extreme edge of the lawn and just beyond the arc thrown by the lights.

His house was being burgled. That much was clear. At first the thought caused him some bemusement. What was he going to do? Who was he going to call? His cell phone was up in his bedroom, and he was standing in his back garden, in pyjamas and bare feet, on a chill and windy October night. I mean, how dumb can you get?

Weapons? He didn’t have any. What an idiot. He didn’t even have a pair of carpet slippers to hit the burglars with. And he couldn’t see himself bearding potentially armed men with a garden rake.

He was just beginning to move away from the house and towards Main Street when some instinct stopped him in his tracks. Perhaps it was the memory of another night, five months before, when he had huddled down behind a sand dune in the Camargue and watched a similar house, once again in total darkness save for the opalescent glow from a fragile circle of candles.

That time, the candlelight had been outlining the hooded figure of his blood sister, Yola Samana, as she teetered precariously on a three-legged stool with a noose around her neck, whilst a dispassionate Achor Bale sat in the invisible shadows and watched her as he might have watched a staked-out lamb during a midnight tiger hunt.

Either way, the sudden unwanted echo of the recent past was enough to make Sabir pause in his flight and rethink his position. He edged back towards the summer house wall, hissing nervously through his teeth. He could clearly see the shadows of two men reflected off the ceiling of his study. Burglars? The heck with that. Burglars didn’t walk around their victim’s house switching on the electric lights. CIA? FBI? IRS? Who the hell else gave themselves the right to come visiting honest citizens in the middle of the night?

With a sudden, intense conviction, Sabir knew exactly who the men were, what they were looking for, and why they were looking for it.

It was at this point that he remembered his father’s old shotgun. Ever since his childhood it had been kept in the understairs wine cellar, hanging upside down by its trigger guard on a meat hook. Sabir hadn’t moved a thing in the house since his father’s death three years before – there had never seemed any point. So if the trigger guard hadn’t rusted away in the interim, the shotgun would presumably still be there.

Sabir’s sudden focus on the shotgun and on the sanctity of his family home served to pull him together and renew his courage. If these men came from the Countess, as he suspected they did, he had no choice but to confront them. They were his problem and his problem alone. He was damned if he would scuttle off down Main Street in his pyjamas at three o’clock in the morning and go wake up his neighbours.

Sabir had one ace up his sleeve, however. He knew from his time as a journalist on the New England Courier that Massachusetts had draconian burglary laws – armed burglary carried a minimum fifteen-year jail term, and even unarmed breaking and entering could fetch you five. And he was willing to bet that whoever the Countess had sent would have come armed.

As he headed for the cellar he began to rehearse in his mind just how the thing might conceivably play out.

6

Vau straightened up from his perusal of Sabir’s study and turned towards his elder brother. ‘Sabir must keep everything locked away in his head. There’s nothing of any interest in here.’

‘Did you really think there would be?’

Vau shrugged. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think anything. As far as I’m concerned, we just came here to revenge ourselves on Rocha’s killer.’

‘Ever the foot soldier, never the captain, right?’

‘You can laugh at me all you want, Abi. But I know where I stand in the general scheme of things. I’m grateful to Madame, our mother, and to Monsieur, our father, for adopting me. I’m grateful for the title I’ve inherited, and even more grateful for the money that goes with it. Cleverer people than me can work out strategies and interpret prophecies and delay the coming of Armageddon – or whatever the hell it is we’re meant to be doing. Me, I just obey orders.’

Abi sprawled back against Sabir’s desk, his arms spread to support his weight. He looked his brother up and down, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that you’re a happy and contented man?’

‘Happy? Contented? I don’t know about that. But there’s one thing I do know.’ Vau hesitated briefly, as if gathering his thoughts together after a long hiatus. ‘I’m going to confess something to you, Abi. Something that you may not give a damn about. But I’m going to tell you nonetheless.’

Abi cocked his head to one side encouragingly. He was clearly enjoying himself.

Vau snorted in a lungful of air, as if he was readying himself for a hundred-metre free-dive. ‘You are the only person I truly care about in this world, Abi. The only one. And that’s not because you’re anything special – don’t ever think that. But because we’re viscerally linked. You’re my twin. We were even connected together, or so they tell me, when we were born. Plus you’re brighter than me, Abi, I give you that. And quicker. But you won’t ever find

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