Predator. Wilbur Smith

he was carried away in a body bag. His life was different now. He had a daughter who had already lost a mother. He couldn’t let her lose her father too. And he had Jo. She brought peace to his life and the promise of another, better, happier way of living.

      ‘You’re not as young as you used to be, Heck,’ Cross told himself as he got up from the folding canvas stool on which he’d sat to eat his lunch with a crack of his knee joints. Though his muscles were still as strong as ever, they seemed to ache just a little more than they used to. Perhaps it was time to let his right-hand men, Dave Imbiss and Paddy O’Quinn, take charge of Cross Bow’s active operations. God only knew they were up to the task. So was Paddy’s blonde Russian wife Nastiya, who was as ruthlessly dangerous as she was magnificently beautiful.

      Hector picked up his rod and waded back into the waters of the Tay for his afternoon’s fishing. But before he settled to the task a thought flashed into his mind: that he was almost ready to give Jo the news that she longed to hear; that he was ready to settle down. For once Johnny Congo was dead, that would be the last of his enemies gone. Maybe that would allow him to enjoy a quiet, peaceful life at last.

      Just maybe, he thought as he prepared to cast his fly across the river, and just maybe salmon will learn to take a fly.

      As befitted his status as one of the young pillars of Houston society, D’Shonn Brown had a luxury suite at Reliant Stadium, home of the city’s NFL franchise, the Houston Texans. He had invited his corporate security consultant Clint Harding, a former field lieutenant in the Texas Rangers, the state’s elite law enforcement agency, to join him as the Texans took on their divisional rivals the Indianapolis Colts. Harding’s wife Maggie and their three teenage kids came along, too, as did D’Shonn’s current girlfriend, a ravishing blonde real-estate heiress called Kimberley Mattson, who looked kooky but hot in an insanely expensive pair of old-fashioned five-pocket jeans by Brunello Cucinelli, rolled up at the ankle to show off her new rose-garland tattoo. The party was completed by Rashad Trevain, his wife Shonelle and their 9-year-old son Ahmad. In total, then, there were ten affluent, respectable Houstonians: young and old, male and female, black and white, all cheerfully socializing at a football game. An attendant was on hand to serve them from a private buffet of hot and cold gourmet foods. Ice buckets held bottles of Budweiser, white wine and soft drinks for the kids. A bank of TV screens showed live every other game being played that Sunday. A cheerleader dressed in shiny red boots, microscopic blue hotpants and a low-cut stretchy crop-top popped in for the personal visit granted to every luxury suite. All in all, what better image could there be of twenty-first-century America?

      Midway through the second quarter, the Texans scored a touchdown. As the stadium rocked to the roar of the crowd, D’Shonn leaned over, gently pushed Kimberley’s hair away from her ear, which he then kissed and, while she was still smiling, said, ‘Excuse me, baby. Got to talk some business and nothing is gonna happen in the game for a while.’

      ‘Anything I should know about?’ asked Kimberley, who had powerful entrepreneurial instincts herself.

      ‘Nah, Rashad’s got a problem at one of his joints. He thinks some of the bar staff are ripping him off. He can turn a blind eye to a free drink from time to time, but he draws the line at cases of champagne.’

      D’Shonn got up from his seat and made his way to the back of the box, where Harding and Rashad were already waiting for him. ‘Got a solution for that pilfering issue?’ he asked.

      ‘Yeah,’ Harding said. ‘I’ll put one of my boys in there undercover, have him work as a waiter. Anything’s going on, he’ll find out what it is and who’s doing it.’

      ‘Glad you got that sorted. Now, tell me about what’s going to happen to Johnny Congo. It’s a funny thing. I could write you a dissertation about capital punishment from a legal standpoint, but I know a lot less about the specific practicalities. For example: how do they get a guy like Johnny from Polunsky to the Death House?’

      ‘Real carefully,’ said Harding, drily. He was a tall, lean man, as tanned and tough as pemmican, and he’d been a damn good cop, proud of it, too, before he came to work for D’Shonn Brown. The security job for which he’d been hired was a genuine one, but as time had gone by he’d become progressively more aware of the dirty truths that lay hidden behind D’Shonn Brown’s shiny, corporate façade. He’d not witnessed any actual crimes, but he could smell the lingering stench of criminality. His problem, however, lay in a second discovery: just how much he, and more importantly his family, enjoyed the extra money he was making since he’d quit the Rangers. There was no way he could go back to a government pay cheque, so Harding appeased his conscience the same way Shelby Weiss did, by never doing anything overtly illegal, or knowingly aiding in the commission of such activity.

      Right now, for example, his old cop instincts were telling him that Brown and Rashad were up to something, but as long as nothing specific was said, and all the information he provided was in the public domain, he could honestly say that he had no knowledge of any actual felony being planned or committed.

      On that basis he continued, ‘So, Polunsky’s about a mile east of Lake Livingston, and there’s nothing around it but grass and a few trees. Anyone gets out of that place, which is an impossible dream, there’s nowhere for them to hide. Now, the Walls Unit is different. It’s pretty much right in the middle of Huntsville.’

      ‘What happens in between?’ D’Shonn asked.

      ‘Well, it’s about forty miles, I guess, as the crow flies between the two units. And the lake is right between ’em, so you got three basic routes you can take: go around the south of the lake, or around the north, or ride right across the middle on the Trinity Bridge. Now the Offender Transportation Office has a standard protocol for the operation. The prisoner always travels in the middle vehicle of a three-vehicle convoy, with state trooper patrol cars back and front. The only people who know the precise time of the departure from Polunsky are the prison warders, police and Offender Transportation staff involved in the transfer, and the route to be taken is not made public.’

      ‘But it’s one of three, right? North, south or middle?’ Rashad Trevain chipped in.

      ‘Yessir, those are the basic routes. But, see, they got ways to vary them all. I mean you got two roads out of the Polunsky Unit, just to start with. Then there’s a road along the west shore of the lake, from Cold Spring up to Point Blank, and that kind of links up the south route and the middle route, so you can move from one to the other.’

      ‘Multiple variables,’ said D’Shonn.

      ‘Right, which is the whole idea, makes it impossible for anyone to try and guess the route in advance. Plus, when you’ve got three vehicles, all carrying armed officers, that’s a lot of firepower. Listen, Mr Brown, I don’t know if this is good news for you or not, but your buddy Johnny Congo is going to make it safe and sound to his appointment.’

      ‘Certainly sounds like it,’ said D’Shonn. There was a roar from the stadium and a shout of ‘Turnover!’ from J. J. Harding. ‘Time we got back to the game,’ D’Shonn added, but as they were heading back to their seats, he tapped Rashad on the shoulder and said, ‘You and me need to talk.’

      Modern technology abounds with unintended consequences. The pin-sharp satellite imagery of Google Earth gives anyone with a Wi-Fi connection a capacity for intelligence-gathering once reserved for global superpowers. Likewise, anyone who opens a Snapchat message immediately starts a ten-second clock ticking down to its destruction. And the moment it’s gone, it’s totally untraceable. That works perfectly for teens who want to swap selfies and sex-talk without their parents having a clue, and equally well for someone planning a criminal operation who doesn’t want to leave a trail of his communications.

      D’Shonn Brown had connections. One of them was to a specialist arms dealer, who liked to boast of his ability to source anything from a regular handgun to military-grade ordnance. He and D’Shonn exchanged Snapchat messages. A problem was defined. A series of possible solutions was proposed. In the end, the whole thing came down to three words: Krakatoa, Atchissons, FIM-92.

      While that debate was proceeding, a handful of high-end