Still, he knew he was in over his head. He wasn’t a leader; he wasn’t a soldier. He’d killed, multiple times, but had never been involved in anything remotely as large-scale as what had happened in Ternhill this morning.

His phone rang and he snatched it out of his pocket. It was the inbound helicopter telling them they would arrive in twenty minutes. He hung up and notified his men outside to make one last concerted scan of the area to ensure that all was clear.

Kent walked over to the prisoner now but addressed the men guarding him.

“Chopper is twenty minutes out. Look alive, lads.”

Dirk Visser’s head turned to the voice. Through the bag and in accented English, the banker said, “You’re in charge here?”

The Englishman said, “I guess I am, yeah.”

Visser said, “Look, friend, thank you for rescuing me. Now I just want to go back home. Why am I still tied? Why am I blindfolded? I have nothing to do with—”

Kent snapped back, “I’m not your fuckin’ friend, mate. Don’t talk to me, don’t talk to anyone at all. Just sit your arse there and wait. You’ll be getting a ride out of here soon enough.”

“A ride? A ride to where?”

“Dunno. But I’d hazard a guess you’re gonna get a talkin’-to here before they take you away.” He looked around the room. “God knows this bloody place has seen its share of interrogations.”

* * *

• • •

Court moved across the property carefully, passing a derelict chapel and scooting along behind a low brick wall, half broken by time and the elements. He crawled through the tall grass, remaining low enough to avoid detection, and made it to within one hundred feet of the eastern wall of the target building. Here there was one more building between himself and the old hospital.

He decided to look in to see if he could move through the building next to him instead of around it. Fighting his way past brambles and some broken old hospital beds smothered in vines, he arrived at a window and looked in.

A sign on a door inside said Viewing Room. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to view on the other side, but whatever it was, he figured it was probably not much to look at considering the poor condition of the structure.

He stepped through the window, carefully measured his footsteps around broken glass, and made his way into the room. He passed through the door of the Viewing Room and found the space behind it completely empty other than papers and plaster on the floor. In front of him, however, he saw three doors, each with a faded sign attached.

Female, Postmortem, and Male.

He was standing in the middle of an abandoned mortuary.

He entered through the middle door and found himself in Postmortem. There were broken lab tables and another stretcher, and to the right was a doorway to a flight of stairs that went down into darkness.

Court took the stairs, sensing there was some sort of underground access to the hospital itself. He pulled the headlamp out of his pack and flipped it on the red light setting because red light does not cause pupils to shrink like white light does, so he could retain some of his night vision. Before him he saw a tunnel that did, indeed, lead off in the direction of the large building at the center of this property.

The tunnel was rank with mold and ankle deep in water and trash, but with the dim red light from his headlamp leading the way Court moved out, slowly so as to make as little noise as possible. He didn’t think there were enough people on this property for them to post a guard down here, but he knew he couldn’t be sure.

The passage had been built wide enough for a gurney to be pushed along; obviously it was designed to move bodies from the hospital to the morgue. Black-and-green lizards shot along the walls and ceiling while Court negotiated the decades of trash along the floor.

Halfway up the tunnel he could see that it ended at a pile of garbage in front of a metal door. Court continued to within twenty feet, covered his headlamp with his hand, and used the faint light that shone through his fingers to make his way over the pile. He turned the light off now, opened the door enough to squeeze his body through, and after this he stood silently for a full minute, listening for any sounds. Eventually he put his earplugs back in and turned them on briefly.

Court flipped on his headlamp, back on its red light setting.

He stood in a dusty basement, so he made his way to the stairwell at the end. Court climbed, exceedingly careful with every footfall.

At the top he realized he was in a former medical ward of the hospital. Porcelain sinks lined the wall; metal tables and trays and shelving units lay twisted and turned.

The broken window in the room looked out to a courtyard of high weeds, and a small road beyond that snaked through several other buildings in the complex. There was what looked like an old army barracks, a water tower, and a massive parking garage.

He also saw the two cars he’d noticed from the air, parked there behind the building, and was surprised when he recognized the models. One was a Dodge Charger; it was matte gray and appeared to be at least ten years old.

The other was a twenty-five-year-old silver Mercedes Benz SL-500 sedan. Assuming the Mercedes to be the V8 model, and certain the Charger was a V8 Hemi, Court knew he was looking at two muscle cars, something of a rarity in Britain, and he worried this meant the men from Ternhill had received reinforcements.

He looked out into a corridor illuminated by shafts of light through the windows. Here he turned on his hearing enhancement again, and he immediately recoiled at the sound.

A helicopter was approaching. It changed pitch, and this told him it was in the process of landing.

He worried the prisoner would be spirited out of the area before he could make a play for him, and he also realized the opportunity that the noise of the landing helo gave him. He knew from the windows that he was in the east wing of the building, so he moved into the corridor, turned to his left, and began hurrying as fast as possible, staying out of the dusty sunlight as he went.

* * *

• • •

Six men climbed out of the Airbus H145 helicopter from London and began walking quickly towards the west wing entrance of the hospital.

Their eyes scanned the entire property as they moved, and the man in the center of the group did not seem pleased at all about the surroundings.

Roger Fox was thirty-nine years old, with reddish brown hair styled neatly and a trim goatee. He told people he’d been educated at Princeton, in the United States, and he wore a charcoal suit made by Savile Row’s Henry Poole along with a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona.

Four men in his security component carried submachine guns under their light jackets, but they did their best to hide the weaponry as they advanced on the building, unsure about this location and its proximity to wandering eyes.