Ashton didn’t see it that way. Without holding back, she vehemently ripped into Sam, comparing him to the criminals he’d eradicated. When Sam had countered that he’d done more to fight organised crime in a year than the police had in a decade, he thought she was going to strike him.
As she rolled out the list of his crimes, Sam sat listening, his cuffed hands resting on top of each other, and his badly beaten face a picture of bloodied and bruised calm.
After the London Marathon had been bombed the year before, Sam had investigated the death of a young officer, stumbling along a conspiracy that linked a high-ranking inspector to one of the most dangerous criminals in the country. As Sam had unpicked the horrible truth, he’d left a trail of bodies in his wake, all to save an innocent psychiatrist, Amy Devereux, who had been caught up in the disgusting cover-up.
It had seen Sam break his promise to his beloved son. A promise that he wouldn’t kill anymore.
With fifteen deadly and highly decorated years as the UK’s most lethal sniper, Sam had promised his son that he would shed no more blood.
That and he would read as many books as possible, just to placate his son’s insatiable thirst for the written word.
Memories of his son sitting in his beanbag reading were some of Sam’s fondest, but as with all memories, they begin to fade and it hurt Sam to acknowledge that those treasured moments were starting to lack the finer details.
The colour of Jamie’s T-shirt.
The title of the book.
Soon, the very image itself would fade, a generic representation of what he thought his son looked like.
Sam may not have kept his promise to not kill, but he’d intended to keep his promise when it came to the books.
His mission to save Amy also cost him the life of his best friend.
Theo Walker.
One of the most respected medics in the forces, the two men had been firm friends as they toured Afghanistan, with Theo eventually stepping away from the army as Sam transitioned into General Wallace’s elite team. Although no longer a medic, it was engrained in Theo to save people and he began a warmly received youth project in Bethnal Green. As a black man who had turned to the army to get away from a life on the streets, Theo was driven to help as many young children walking in similar shoes as possible.
Theo had given his life to protect Amy, a sacrifice that Sam refused to be in vain as he stormed Frank Jackson’s High Rise and brought his, and the corrupt inspector’s, empire crashing to the ground.
Several men were killed along the way, many by the pinpoint accuracy of Sam’s trigger finger.
Sam would serve time for every one of those deaths.
As Sam had continued his war on crime, he soon stumbled across a desperate father, Aaron Hill, searching for a missing daughter the police had ignored.
When Sam pointed out that fact, Ashton dismissed it, adamant that everything possible had been done to bring Jasmine Hill back.
It was Sam who eventually did.
With the horrific future of sex slavery at the hands of the Kovalenko crime family, Jasmine would have ended up as another statistic and another lost soul in a brutal trade. Sam had taken on the Metropolitan Police himself, engaging in a shootout with an Armed Response team before his all-out assault on the Kovalenkos.
Several more were killed, including Andrei Kovalenko and his brother, Oleg.
Sam took responsibility for their deaths, but also of the locating and successful rescue of Jasmine Hill and three other girls.
Ashton refused to comment.
With the destruction of the Kovalenko’s sex trade, Sam had also helped uncover a link between them and a leading mayoral candidate, which led Ashton to suspect that DI Adrian Pearce was working with Sam. It was an allegation Sam strongly denied, although his mutual respect with the detective had blossomed as they took down Frank Jackson and brought in Inspector Howell. Pearce had become a strong ally, not only offering Sam help from the inside, usually against his better instincts, but also guidance.
Pearce had reminded Sam several times he was a good man.
A good man doing bad things for good reasons.
While Ashton couldn’t charge Sam with the subsequent assault on the Kovalenko’s Ukrainian hub, she assumed it had been his handiwork. She discounted it as an international issue, along with the incidents in Berlin and Rome.
According to her, they didn’t matter. A statement that Sam refuted.
Sergeant Carl Marsden, his mentor, had been murdered in Rome.
Murdered by General Ervin Wallace.
That mattered.
Ashton scoffed at the accusation, her affection for the fallen general betraying her neutrality. Sam noticed it in a split second, the flicker of her eye as his name was mentioned. He was trained to absorb everything, drink in every detail, and use it to his advantage.
Whether it would help him kill a man from a few kilometres, or aid his escape by a matter of seconds, there was no detail that was inconsequential.
Ashton had history with Wallace.
That much was clear.
Ashton soon brought the conversation back to the panic Sam had caused at Liverpool Street Station two days prior, with the video footage of him being hurled from the promenade to the ground floor spreading across the social media platforms like wildfire.
Sam calmly deconstructed her narrative, indicating his attacker was Farukh Ahmad, an assassin and associate of Wallace, who had elicited his help to track Sam down.
Again, Ashton dismissed Sam’s besmirching of Wallace, but Sam countered with explicit details about the files he’d been given.
The files that Wallace had killed for.
That Marsden had died for.
As Ashton’s face drained of colour, Sam painted the true picture of Wallace, a war monger who had more blood on his hands than Sam, Farukh, and any killer or soldier in the country. It was why Sam had been made target number one by Wallace and his Blackridge outfit, and why Sam
