The bedroom they’d desecrated was as new to him as it was to her. His ops team had traced several contactless payments made on Matt’s debit card in the previous twenty-four hours, totalling over a hundred euro’s. Which meant Sam had filtered enough money to leave Italy.
Either to escape.
Or return.
Pulling rank, Wallace had made the decision to retreat to an undisclosed apartment in Surrey, heavily guarded by his own private security team. It was one of the governments safe houses, used to stowaway high-risk individuals. Wallace had wielded his power and took the keys. It was safer to be off the grid.
But the feeling of cowardice had led him to call Ashton personally before sending a car to pick her up. She’d arrived, dressed immaculately in a black dress, undoubtedly expecting a night of fine conversation and charm. Wallace had made it clear he was in a foul mood from the offset, but her attraction to his position had made it an easy encounter.
She’d gone to the bedroom, undressed, and then called him in.
There had been no kissing. No foreplay.
It had been almost transactional.
But the feeling of control was fleeting and Wallace lifted himself from the bed and wrapped a dressing gown around his naked body.
‘Can I have a shower?’ Ashton asked, the bed covers held against chest to cover her modesty. Her words were tinged with regret.
‘Of course,’ Wallace responded, a feeling of guilt threatening to take over. She was an admirable woman, who had worked hard for a tremendous career. While her attraction to him had been unrequited, he would make sure he wouldn’t let it hinder her prospects going forward.
‘Are you okay?’ Ashton asked sheepishly, sliding herself from under the sheets. ‘Was everything okay?’
Wallace grinned.
‘It was great,’ he replied, reaching for his box of cigars. ‘I need some air.’
Ashton nodded meekly, understanding that their one-time tryst was firmly over. As she headed towards the en suite bathroom, Wallace walked back through the expensive apartment and slid open the door to the balcony. The chill of the spring evening hit him like a splash of cold water, the wind riding up his gown and causing him to shiver. He looked down at the cigar cutter, reminded of the torture his friend, Marsden, had gone through. Trevor Sims had ordered the removal of several fingers with a similar device.
Wallace smiled as he remembered putting a bullet through the man’s skull.
Lighting the cigar, he let the thick smoke cascade around him as he contemplated the next move. While there was every chance Sam would disappear, he knew it was unlikely. The man had an outrageous moral code, one that would never let him rest if there was a wrong to put right.
Wallace had killed Marsden.
Sam would want answers.
While the threat of revenge was enough to make Wallace hide, it was the USB stick that had caused his once unbreakable aura to crack. The device was out there, in a location that Sam would most likely know. While the documents were protected by the very best that cyber security had to offer, it still made him nervous.
Wallace had put as much in place as he could.
Amara Singh was being followed.
Pearce was under surveillance too.
Etheridge, the man his ghost, Mac, had brutally tortured, had disappeared off the radar entirely.
Wallace sighed as he thought of Mac.
There had been no contact since that night in Rome, where Mac was run down by, he assumed, Alex Stone. The man had lived and breathed the idea of revenge on Sam, an idea that Wallace had carefully nurtured ever since he recruited him. While he felt the man’s pain for not seeing the mission through, Wallace knew that Mac’s obsession with Sam was not what he needed.
Not for this.
This would require someone of a stable mind, which made their proficiency all the more terrifying.
It would also require personal investment.
For the first time in decades, Wallace felt his hands shake with fear as he reached for his mobile phone and made the call he’d promised he would never have to make.
The tyres of the coach hit a pothole in the road and shook the entire vehicle causing Sam’s forehead to collide with the large, Plexiglas window. He awoke with a start and a frown, his eyes blinking him back into consciousness.
A few hours of undisturbed sleep had been most welcome, even if his dreams were littered with the memory of his son’s death.
That and the vast number of criminals he’d put in the ground.
He remembered them all.
From the horribly scarred brute in the High Rise, to the fight to the death with Oleg Kovalenko atop a large tower. Even the first bullet he’d fired in Amy Devereux’s apartment, hitting a masked man between the eyes and setting him off on his path of justice.
It had been a long road home, but the coach had turned off the M25 and as Sam’s vision restored completely, he smiled warmly as they passed a large sign.
Welcome to Farnham
Craft Town.
It had felt like a lifetime since Sam had been in this part of the UK, waiting patiently with a cup of tea while his friend, Paul Etheridge, mocked up his fake passport and complained about his impending divorce. Sam had felt bad, as his shoot-out with the armed police within Etheridge’s house surely hadn’t helped. But Etheridge had made it clear it was the straw that had broken the camel’s back, and that the loveless marriage had long since dissolved.
He was a wealthy man and a young woman like Kayleigh hadn’t exactly been in it for the passion.
But since paying for Sam’s ticket to Kiev and passing on the intel of where to find Carl Burrows, Etheridge had gone off the radar. Every phone call Sam had attempted had gone to voicemail and Sam couldn’t help but feel nervous.
Marsden had entrusted him with a USB stick that he’d
