Sam Bourne 4-Book Thriller Collection. Sam Bourne

the hardwood floor, and felt a sudden powerful surge – gratitude for this woman who was offering not only emotional sustenance but a razor-sharp intellect. He felt as if she was saving him.

      In a gesture that was almost involuntary, he reached out to touch the back of TC’s neck, so that his palm touched her skin and his knuckles brushed against her hair. Her head was down, as if she was a coy schoolgirl receiving a prize but now it came up to meet his gaze. Again without conscious thought, a pulse of energy went through Will’s hand, pressing slightly on TC’s neck as if to bring her closer towards him.

      She moved and he moved and now their lips were touching in the lightest of kisses. He could smell her skin, an aroma that made his muscles weaken and his blood race at the same time. It was a familiar feeling, one he had known with TC a thousand times before. His innards seemed to melt, even as his loins hardened.

      She stopped suddenly, gripping his arm with an urgency he knew was not lust. Her mouth was away from his.

      ‘Shhh. What’s that?’

      It was a metallic rattle, now repeated. It seemed to be coming from inside the apartment. They froze, neither risking movement. Will saw his hand still cupping the back of TC’s head, his fingers in her hair, and caught himself. What the hell was he doing? Beth was a hostage in some godforsaken jail and he was making out with his ex-girlfriend on the floor of her apartment. The shame seemed to congeal somewhere in his guts; he sickened himself.

      He pulled his hand away and pushed back out of the embrace. He was exhausted, he told himself, his spirits sunk. It was a reflex, a cry for help, the act of a desperate man, a grasping for human comfort; it was gratitude for all TC had done, it was the familiarity of a former lover, it was a lapse, a moment of madness, the unhappy by-product of a crisis. All these explanations coursed through his mind and he knew they were all true. But they would not convince anybody, least of all him.

      TC tensed again, gripping Will’s arm tighter. The buzzing had returned, a grinding, jangling sound. Was someone inside this flat, carrying an electric saw, attempting to muffle it inside a blanket?

      Will now leapt to his feet, striding over to the couch by the front door where he had dumped his coat. He shoved his hand into the side pocket and held up his phone for TC to see: set on silent, it had vibrated against his keys.

      ‘Damn, we missed a call.’

      Will dialled his voicemail. You have one new message. His chest began pounding. What if it was some vital clue? What if it was Beth herself, having wriggled out of her chains and somehow crawled on hands and knees to a phone, only for her husband’s number to ring out – because he was too busy necking with his ex-girlfriend? Will appalled himself.

      At last the message was playing.

      ‘Hey, big fella.’ It was Jay Newell. ‘Don’t know what this is all about and my ass would be in the wringer if anyone knew I had so much as farted in your direction, so this stays strictly in the vault, OK. Capisce? All right, here is the news. Turns out the autopsy report on your friend Howard Macrae found, cue drum roll, a “puncture on the right thigh, consistent with” – get this – “a tranquillizer dart”.’ Newell was beginning to chuckle. ‘Can you believe that? A tranquillizer dart? Like they use to stun elephants in the zoo. Apparently, they fire ’em from some big safari gun. Anyway, blood tests confirm the guy had a shitload of sedative in his system at ToD as well. Sorry, time of death. I’m going native, Will! I’m talking like a cop! Help! OK, hope that works for you. Give me a call, sometime. We should hook up. And send love to your gorgeous wife from me.’

      Will almost fell into the couch, as if knocked off his feet. He realized now that he had never expected this theory of his to stack up; a Brownsville hustler and a wing-nut from Montana were almost mathematical opposites. He had contacted Newell to confirm that the deaths of Macrae and Baxter could not possibly be linked. With that proved, he could start looking in more likely directions.

      But Yosef Yitzhok had told him to look to his work and so he had. In the lead up to Beth’s abduction, his work had consisted of two bizarre stories at opposite ends of the continent. And yet now Will had proof that they were connected. In life these two victims had both performed an unusually good deed; in death, they had both been anaesthetized before the act of murder. The method of sedation was radically different, just as the killings had been. But it was too much of a coincidence.

      Will began to feel elated. At last he had made progress; a hunch had been vindicated. Somewhere in the events of the last week lay the key to Beth’s kidnapping and, therefore, her freedom. He had come this far, all he had to do was work out the rest. He was closing in.

      Will jumped to his feet, about to stride over to TC and trumpet his breakthrough. Instead he halted after two paces. First, he was hit anew by the memory of a few minutes ago. Now, to add to the shame and self-disgust at his betrayal of Beth, was embarrassment. He had made a pass at TC and both of them would have to act as if it had never happened.

      Then another thought struck him. It surely meant something that Baxter and Macrae had been killed in a similar fashion, but what exactly? Just because these two deaths were apparently related, what did that have to do with Beth’s kidnap? Baxter and Macrae might have lived thousands of miles from each other, but they both lived in different worlds from Beth – and from the Hassidim for that matter. So YY had told him to look to his work, but what possible connection between these three events could there be?

      As he began to pace around the room he wondered: could his stories have served as a trigger for the Hassidim to take Beth? She had gone missing on Friday morning, just as his Baxter story had appeared in print. Could something in that story have set off the plot to kidnap his wife? Was there something in the combination of the two, Baxter and Macrae, that spurred the Hassidim to abduct Beth?

      Will spooled back to last night in Crown Heights. His story on Baxter had been marked and laid out in the room where he had been interrogated. The Hassidim had been discussing it. It was not the by-line that interested them: they already knew he was a reporter for the Times. They had emailed him at the Times address. No, it was the story itself. Or, thought Will for the first time, the stories.

      He reached for his cell phone, finding the inbox of messages and scrolling through the batch from YY. He counted ten, making sure he got past the latest riddles. There it was. Decoded, it read: 2 down: More’s to come.

      At the time, both he and TC thought it was a mere confirmation message. Like one of those computer games: Well done, you have reached level 2, the Castle of Doom. Next, prepare to enter the Sanctum of Fire . . .

      Now Will saw it differently. ‘2 down’ referred to Macrae and Baxter. But who were the rest?

THIRTY-ONE

       Saturday, 7.05pm, Cape Town, South Africa

      He used to come here when it was all-white. This beach, with its gentle curve of fair sand, was one of his favourite spots. When he was a student, he would come to ogle the girls and drink beers by the crateload. Back in those days, outsiders thought his country was in flames, consumed by a race war. But it did not feel like that; at least not to him. He was white and well-off and having the time of his life. He knew a couple of guys who had signed a petition, but otherwise politics did not intrude. Besides, as an Afrikaaner who had grown up in the rural heartland of the Transvaal, he was raised to believe the separation of the races, apartheid, was not offensive but natural. On the farm, rabbits and cows had their own places and did not mix, so why should blacks and whites be any different?

      Now the beach looked as beautiful as ever, the water glittering in the moonlight. As he faced the Atlantic Ocean, he could hear the buzz of the bars behind him: a more mixed crowd now, black, white and what he had grown up calling coloured. He tried to tune out the noise; he wanted to listen to his own thoughts.

      Was he elated by what he had just done? He was not sure. Relieved, certainly. He had been planning this moment for months. Each day, taking a different document home – sometimes a diagram, sometimes a string