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had booked a flight to the UK so that he could snatch the girl. Snatch her and use her as bait. Bait to catch Shanklin. So that God could finish off what he had started in the woods.
    But God had arrived at Heathrow Airport two days ago to be confronted by the spectre of Danny Shanklin’s face staring out at him from every TV screen he saw.
    God gazed down now at the newspaper headlines on the floor, which said that Shanklin and a Russian diplomat, Colonel Nikolai Zykov, had assassinated a United Nations envoy in London and had simultaneously massacred the civilians who had been walking past the Ritz Hotel at the time. Colonel Zykov had died of a heart attack in the hotel room shortly afterwards. Danny Shanklin had fled across London, the subject of what was now being described as ‘the Biggest Manhunt in History’. He had somehow foiled half a million CCTV cameras, nine intelligence agencies, 33,000 cops – and escaped.
    God did not care if Danny Shanklin had done what the newspapers said. God did not care why Danny Shanklin might have decided to kill all those people. Or whether he had even done it.
    No, people killed and were killed every minute of every day, and God did not care about them.
    What God cared about was that Danny Shanklin now had a price tag of ten million dollars on his head. And was at the top of every global security and intelligence agency’s Most Wanted list. Which meant that Shanklin would once again be doing everything in his power to vanish from the face of the earth.
    What God cared about most was that Shanklin had got to his daughter first and had taken her into hiding with him – and had thereby taken her from God.
    Anger flowed red. It flowed like fire through God’s veins. And, there, again, he felt her slithering up from the black – the
BITCH GODDESS
– probing, searching for weakness, trying to seep back into his mind through the gaps. But this time he blocked her. He turned to the family. He focused on them instead.
    He focused on paper and stone and scissors . . .
    He went for the older girl first and stretched out his clenched fist. She was in her late teens, around the same age as Danny Shanklin’s daughter.
    L
    E
    X
    I
    E
    God’s tongue flickered hungrily across his lips as he savoured each letter of Shanklin’s daughter’s name, like a fresh and wondrous taste in his mind.

CHAPTER 5
CAUCASUS MOUNTAIN RANGE
    A sound like running water. Vibrations. A numbness like dental anaesthetic. A booming echo. A soft and sensual moan.
    Am I dreaming? Valentin Sabirzhan strained to see through the blurred slits of his eyes. A shiny surface ballooned, then distorted and shrank in the weak light. What was it he could see? Some kind of wall? Whatever it was, it was curved.
Where am I?
A cave? No, the surface of the wall was too reflective. It’s metal, he thought. And –
yes, right there
– he could see rivets running upwards in a line.
    A gasp. Laughter. Another moan. Of what? Pain? Delight?
    Valentin tried to move. Couldn’t. His body wouldn’t respond to the commands his brain was frantically sending out. Every part of him felt numb, cradled, and seemed to be tingling, as fuzzy and here-and-yet-not-here as his mind.
What’s happened to me?
Panic ripped through him.
Have I broken my back? My neck?
    ‘See how he’s trying to blink away the blood,’ a woman’s voice said in Russian.
    Blood?
    Another gasp. Of pain. Oh, yes, there was no mistaking it this time. More laughter followed. The sound was so near, yet Valentin knew it was not directed at him but at somebody else.
    ‘Look . . . see how hard he is trying, even though his eyelids are no longer there . . .’
    No longer there?
    Fear. Valentin felt it then. This was no dream. No nightmare either. He would not wake from this. It was real.
    He tried again to move. Desperately now. But it was like trying to will a body frozen in ice to move. Only this time – yes! – even though he couldn’t move, he did at least feel