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had been easier than he’d expected. The police were slow to react when the shooting was eventually reported and, although they had gone through the motions of taking statements and looking for evidence, their heart wasn’t in it. Velasquez was well known in the area and had been implicated in a number of police killings in Madrid. The tit for tat killing of a drug dealer with links to unsolved police murders was not something the police were going to get excited about. But this wasn’t why the assassin was thinking so deeply. Richards was a cautious man who usually gave several weeks notice of any meeting. The urgency of this most recent request was therefore unusual and the assassin’s pulse quickened at the prospect of a new job. ‘If it pays sufficiently well,’ he thought to himself as he ran, ‘it could well be one of my last.’

Chapter 6
    Heathrow was crowded as Lucy Masters headed towards the Air India check-in desk. She was dressed in skinny jeans, climbing boots, polo shirt and blue micro-fibre fleece. Her hair was tied in a ponytail and threaded through the gap at the back of her baseball cap. Her sunglasses were hooked into the V of her polo shirt but kept falling to the floor as she struggled to push the trolley containing her enormous North Face climber’s bag towards the neatly dressed girl at the check-in. She’d made the decision to wear the boots because they were heavy and she was worried about her baggage allowance. She was regretting it now as she realised that she’d have to take them off to go through security. Isobel was already in Nepal and had been texting her repeatedly, telling her about the people she was meeting in the hotel she was staying in. Lucy couldn’t wait to join her. An hour later, she was bracing herself as the airplane accelerated down the runway and lifted off for the thirteen-hour journey to Nepal.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ she said to a passing stewardess when the seatbelt lights had gone off and the cabin crew had started to move around the aircraft. ‘Please could I have a bottle of water?’
    The Nepalese stewardess smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ she said, disappearing off into the galley. She returned a few minutes later and gave Lucy the water.
    â€˜Thank you,’ said Lucy, looking up at the stewardess just as the blond head of a man disappeared into the toilet a few rows ahead. She hadn’t noticed him before. The struggle with her bag had been all consuming and she was only now taking in the people around her.
    A few minutes later the man reappeared from the toilets and started back towards his seat. She could see him clearly as he stepped over the legs of a middle aged man to get to his chair. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties with blond straggly hair and a tanned, unshaven face. She couldn’t see the colour of his eyes but she did notice a recent scar that ran across his right cheek. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and faded old Levis held up with a Kenyan beaded belt. He braced against the back of a seat to lift himself over the man’s legs and, as he did so, Lucy noticed the well developed muscles of his arms and shoulders tense with effort. And then he was gone, sinking down into his seat three rows ahead. ‘I wonder where he’s going,’ thought Lucy with a smile. Her last boyfriend had lasted nearly a year but they had broken up eight months ago and she’d not met anyone she really liked since. Several well meaning friends had asked her to dinner to meet similarly aged single men but she could see why most of them were still single. ‘I suspect people say that about me,’ she thought to herself. The problem, as she saw it, was that most men were not good at treating women as equals. They wanted to be admired by a lesser being and seemed to find it difficult dealing with someone who wasn’t really very impressed by whatever they had done. For the