Solo

– massive overkill. If he spits at you – tear his throat out. If he kicks you in the shin, take his leg off. Take both legs off.’
    Bond began to calm. He looked down at Breed’s body – a mugger’s switchblade sticking out of the back of his neck. He could be carted away later. The fact that no one had appeared from the house when the shots were fired was a good sign. Bond roved around and found his gun. Breed’s second round had hit just in front of the trigger, scarring the metal with a raw weal. He cocked the gun, shot the clip out, slammed it back in. It seemed to be working fine.
    He took off his balaclava and wiped the smear of sweat from his face. He pushed through the garden door into the drawing room and began to move quickly and watchfully through the public rooms: a library, a smaller sitting room then down a parqueted corridor towards the main hall with its wide solid staircase. Every now and then Bond paused and listened – but he could hear nothing that suggested there was anyone else in the house.
    A pair of modern swing doors led off the hall behind the staircase. Bond pushed them open and saw that here the decor changed completely. Another wide corridor stretched before him, painted pistachio green with white rubberised tiles on the floor. It looked like a hospital and from behind closed doors – inset with panels of glass – came the hum of machinery. Bond peered into one room – incubators, centrifuges, sterilisers, freezers. Another room was fitted out like a ward with four beds and a nurse’s station. Other doors were labelled ‘X-ray’ and ‘Dispensary’. There was an office with the name ‘Dr Masind’ on it – a name that seemed vaguely familiar. This was clearly the state-of-the-art receiving clinic for the children from the AfricaKIN flights.
    Bond kept listening and kept hearing nothing that alarmed him. He wondered where Gabriel Adeka was – upstairs? Perhaps he should turn back and explore the upper floors. Then he arrived at the end of the long corridor. To the left was a door and to the right a flight of stone stairs that led down to a basement or cellar area. He pushed open the door to find himself in a kind of schoolroom with two rows of desks facing a blackboard. On the floor in front of the blackboard was a pile of what looked like discarded clothing. Bond switched on the light to see that it wasn’t clothing but little rucksacks – the rucksacks the kids had been wearing when they disembarked. Bond picked one up – its bottom had been ripped out. He picked up another similarly torn open. All the rucksacks appeared to have been cut apart.
    He turned to switch out the light and saw another rucksack intact on a side table. Beside the rucksack was a Stanley knife. And beside it was a neat stack of what looked like slabs of putty, wrapped in cellophane. Bond picked one up – eight inches long, four wide, one inch thick – about 500 grams, he reckoned. This must have been what Breed was occupied with when Turnbull McHarg had tooted his horn and Bond had shot the arc lights out. Bond picked up the knife and cut away the bottom of the rucksack to reveal in the lining another slab of what he now realised was raw heroin moulded into a flat bar, the size of half a brick. Twelve sick kids, twelve little rucksacks, six kilos of heroin. Who was going to search a malnourished child shivering with fever? Or an eight-year-old amputee? As drug-smuggling went it was heartless, brutal, simple and extremely effective. Each AfricaKIN flight must have its quota of—
    Bond heard something – a cough.
    He froze, then switched off the light and stepped back into the corridor. He heard the cough again, coming from down the stairs in the basement – lung-racking and feeble. Was there a child down there, Bond wondered? Some sort of isolation ward for the extremely contagious?
    He levelled his gun and began to move carefully down the stairs. There was a night light set in the ceiling that gave off a pale pearly glow revealing a wide landing with two doors off it. The cough came again. No child – an adult, Bond thought. There was a key in the lock of the door behind which the coughing continued. He put his ear to the door and heard the sound of laboured breathing. Bond turned the key and then the handle, and shoved it gently open, his gun pointing into the room. The landing light provided enough illumination for Bond to see that there was a man lying on a mattress in the far