"Where could they be, Natalya?"

Returning down the marble stairs, after a brief—and fruitless—perusal of the pool deck, Zima took a moment to compose herself before replying; even her deep reserves of self-control were running low. Their prisoners were gone. The fault must be Diaz's. And it was Salazar himself who had put them into the idiot's incompetent hands.

What on Earth did her employer expect her to say?

Irritation notwithstanding, she retained sufficient composure to realise, "They've escaped and it's your fault," would not be the most politic choice of reply.

"They must have overpowered Diaz and taken the stairs." She turned to Higgs, standing beside Salazar, clutching the bag of 'tools' she had requested for the intruder's interrogation. With the borderline riot still simmering down in the basement, the bruised and battered man had been the only one available to lend a hand with the more physical aspects of the questioning. She pointed to the stairwell door.

"Go after them, while I head to the control room. Maintain radio contact and let me know the instant you see anything."

"Aye aye, boss." With a mock salute, Higgs dropped the bag onto the tiles with a healthy clank and strode over to the door. He tried the handle. "You've got a key, yeah?"

Zima fought down the urge to scream. Of course she had a key. It was the one she'd given to Diaz, back when she'd ordered him to take Higgs and Torres to search the stairwell from the top down, what felt like a lifetime ago.

The same key had now been used to lock her out. And the closest spare was in the control room, some thirty-odd storeys away. She took a deep breath—while this situation was without question what her former superiors would have labelled 'sub-optimal,' she hadn't survived and thrived during her years in the FSB by going to pieces when confronted with a problem. She marshalled her thoughts.

"I do not. Higgs, you go to the control room and monitor for the escapees. I will take the lift to the next floor down, enter the stairwell there and give pursuit." Decorum and delegation be damned. This problem had dragged on far too long—it was past time she took matters into her own hands.

"Mr Salazar, given the current limitation on our resources, I suggest you lock yourself in the penthouse office, until I can organise security for you. I will let you know as soon as the fugitives have been found." She locked eyes with her employer. "And, sir—given their elusive nature to date, my recommendation is that rather than recapture, this time they be shot on sight. Diaz as well—he's quite clearly a liability whose services the Syndicate is better off without."

The businessman's frosty expression made her wonder if she may have overstepped the nebulous bounds of her authority, but after a moment, he responded with a curt nod.

"Very well, Natalya. It will be as you say. With one exception. While I agree Diaz and Mr Devine are to die, you will return my Mica to me. I have unfinished business with that young lady. Now, go and make it so. And let us have no further surprises. I do not wish to be disappointed again."

She could think of several potential surprises she would like to provide Salazar with right now, any one of which would do far worse than 'disappoint' him. Deciding it was probably best if she didn't speak, she gestured for Higgs to follow her, and set off for the lift.

Salazar stood and watched them go, his forbidding look fading as he did so, to be replaced with a half-smile. For as aggravating and unexpected as tonight's events may have been, they had their benefits, if looked at—and utilised—in the right way.

The Syndicate head was a man who believed in wringing every conceivable advantage from a given situation, and as he walked up the stairs to the pool deck, he pondered those on offer tonight.

For a start, there was the elimination of Hugo. The big man may have served him well in the past, but with his death Jaime could now see his retention as head-of-security for the foolish sentimentality it had been. Loyalty was all well and good, as was brute strength, but both were poor substitutes for competence. In these complicated times, brains were required to leaven the brawn the Syndicate had once relied upon to safeguard its operations.

Which brought him to the second benefit. Natalya Zima's resume and references were impeccable, but Salazar hadn't reached his current position by relying on the opinions of others. And with tonight's ever-escalating sequence of crises he couldn't have asked for a better acid test of both the temperament and capabilities of his new security chief. She had done well thus far, but he was yet to be completely convinced of her worth.

And thirdly, there was the mysterious Mr Devine himself, the source—the catalyst—for those very events. Jaime had spoken the truth when he'd told Nick he loved a good puzzle—although, to be strictly accurate, what he really loved was a challenge.

Having been forced from his youngest years to overcome the handicaps and hindrances put in place by weaker men of lesser worth, he found he had acquired something of a taste for it. Why else would the scion of one of the world's wealthiest families, with a birthright of luxury and power laid out before him, expend his time and effort on battling to the top of a global crime network and then guiding it to ever greater strength and profits? How else was a man of his unparalleled abilities to test—and to better—himself?

Particularly when his birthright, for all its privilege, had not bestowed upon him the pre-eminence he knew with every fibre of his being should be his. No—rather than merit, the random chance of birth, combined with the tyranny of custom, had instead granted his older brother the role of principal heir to the Salazar dynasty. The great oaf.

For Jaimie—the second son—the legitimate path, while both respected and lucrative, was paved with mediocrity. With safety. With boredom and borderline irrelevance. For a man of his parts, that was never going to fly. His ambition and restless intellect, starved and stymied in the legal world, had been forced to look elsewhere for their challenges.

And this supposed accountant was certainly proving to be such a challenge. It had been so natural—so obvious—to assume the man must be a mercenary, a soldier-of-fortune, a weapon launched at him by any one of his enemies or rivals or even supposed allies, an agent of destruction intended to wreak maximum havoc and humiliation upon its unsuspecting target.

Many of his actions tonight lent weight to that assumption: his illicit entry to the building, Mica's abduction, Hugo's defeat—significant achievements all, each worthy of the most skilled professional. And yet, in other ways, his amateurism was breathtaking. He had wounded Hugo rather than killed him, he had allowed Diaz to go free and abandoned Mica after striving so mightily to capture her, and then, having done so, had chosen to return in a harebrained second incursion, armed with an unloaded gun, resulting in nothing more than unconsciousness and capture. It was bewildering.

Standing by the poolside, he gazed up at the Libretec building, looming several storeys higher than his own—still an annoyance to him, even several years after its construction. Bewildering and...a little hard to believe. Oh, not the leap itself—that appeared to be beyond dispute. More so its rationality. Its validity as a genuine tactic, conceived by a reasonable mind. Jaime by no means considered himself a timid man, yet he knew with absolute certainty there was not a chance in infierno he would—or could—have made that leap. Mr Devine was either very brave or very...something else. Quite what that something else may be, he wasn't yet sure.

Then there was the accountant backstory and the evident bond he shared with Mica—hardly something one would expect in a hardened mercenary—plus a dozen other inconsistencies and mysteries.

"Ah, well," he murmured, as he turned back towards the stairs. As much as he was fond of puzzles, a good dose of blood-soaked carnage would help relieve the disappointment of not solving this particular conundrum. Or, at least, of not solving it yet. The intruder's death—while no doubt a setback—would hardly be the end of the matter. Favours would be called in, sources tapped, moles placed and quite likely, bones broken, and in time, the instigator of this attack—if there was one—would be revealed. Then the true revenge would begin.

Jaime could wait. He was good at waiting.

And on the subject of waiting, a glass of cognac would help pass the time until Zima called. Smiling in anticipation, he started down the stairs. If he was not mistaken, there was an unopened bottle of L'Art de Martell in the office's small but well-stocked bar, and he could think of no better way to toast the imminent bedding of his sweet Mica, the hopefully slow and painful death of the incompetent Diaz and, most of all, the demise of the slippery Mr Devine. It was good to know the enigmatic fellow had sprung his last surprise.

Or, so he thought. Because the sight of Nick, standing at the bottom of the stairs, surprised the absolute hell out of him.

"W-w-wait."

Just a few minutes earlier, Diaz had turned from locking the door to the rooftop and stood blinking at Nick in the stairwell's harsh fluorescent glare, dazzling after the soft moonlight of the rooftop.

"I'll be fucked. You do talk."

Nick stared him. What the hell was that supposed mean? "N-not if I c-c-c-can help it."

Diaz absorbed this with great seriousness. "Right. So, what's with the stutter? You some kind of ret—?"

"Enough," interrupted Mica. "Nick, what do you mean, wait? What's wrong?"

"I'm not g-g-going."

She took a step towards him. "What? Of course you are."

He shook his head. How to make her understand? How to explain the need to liquidate his unused Nick stocks? And his realisation that the best way to maximise their worth did not lie down those stairs and back in the outside world, the world which had already chewed him up and spat him out once and would no doubt do so all over again, if given the chance?

No. It was time to cash in his chips, and it wasn't going to be for small change.

"I'm g-g-going to k-kill Salazar."

She drew in a sharp intake of breath. "Nick, no. Surely, you can't be serious."

"I'm very serious. And d-d-on't call me Shirley."

Diaz, who'd been watching their exchange with an increasing degree of consternation, snorted, but Mica wasn't to be distracted by his lame attempt at humour.

"Don't be so stupid. You're not a killer, and he has that Russian woman with him, and who knows who else by now, and...and..." She trailed off, at a loss as to why she had to explain something so obvious as the idiocy of going back through that door. "Nick, we have the chance to get out. To live. We need to take it—please."

We, she said. Nick looked at her—so earnest, so pure, so...Mica. He found himself tempted. Perhaps the world wouldn't be quite so tough, if there was a we. He'd never really been a part of a we, before. Not a proper one, anyway. It would have been nice to know how it felt, even for a little while. The whole I thing hadn't really gone so well, after all.

But he knew that was a pipe dream. He was a suicidal accountant with a speech impediment and she was a brutalised abductee whose psychological scars he couldn't even begin to imagine. It was not written-in-the-stars stuff.

Even so, he would have liked the chance to see how things might have worked out. Maybe it would have been great. Maybe it would have been a bust. Maybe she would have hated Back to the Future and wanted pineapple on her pizza and all bets would have been off.

But he'd never know. They'd never know. Because if they went down those stairs, if they managed to dodge whatever psychopathic Syndicate goons still lay in their path, if somehow against all odds, they navigated their way out of this hellhole and to freedom, they may well save themselves—but they'd be condemning countless others to the fate they'd escaped.

Because the monster in the penthouse, the spider at this centre of this web of evil, would still be there. Secure in his ivory tower, Jaime Salazar would carry on dispensing his bribes and wearing his silk and no doubt raping his next Mica, all the while orchestrating the worldwide network of misery and pain and exploitation that was the Syndicate, safe in the knowledge that he was untouchable, inviolable and far from the reach of anybody foolish enough to want to stop him.

Only he wasn't. Tonight he was within the reach of a pissed-off desk-jockey with nothing to lose and a chip on his shoulder and a great big dose of foolish enough.

He took a deep breath. "Mica. Think. I have to d-d-do this. Nobody else will. Nobody else c-can. He owns the p-p-police. He's g-g-got g-guns and g-g-goons and money and everything on his side. Other p-p-people will g-get c-c-caught. P-people like you. H-h-hundreds. Thousands. Unless I st-st-stop him. How c-c-can I not g-g-go back?"

Tears glistened in her eyes. "I'll come with you."

He shook his head. "It d-d-doesn't need t-two. B-b-besides"—he placed a gentle hand on her cheek—"you have all that knowledge in there. You n-need to escape. You n-need t-take the Syndicate d-d-down—from the outside."

"But, Nick...I...we—"

He silenced her with a thumb to her lips. "Don't," said inner Nick. "Don't say what you're about to say. You can't. Because, right now, if all of this ends, it doesn't matter. But, here's the thing. The instant it starts to matter—it ends. Don't make it matter, Mica."

Real Nick? Real Nick didn't say anything. Real Nick just lowered his hand and turned away. Not because of the stutter. No. Real Nick said nothing because he knew damn well it wouldn't matter what he said. It was already far too late.