The Engineer's bodyguard gave Frank Thorpe the jitters. The man wasn't doing anything that should have given him cause for concern - he leaned against a black 850 BMW sedan, lost in the pages of a porn magazine, while the Engineer stretched nearby. Same as usual. Thorpe bent down, pretended to retie his running shoes, heart pounding. The bodyguard had to be three hundred pounds at least, with a head like a hammer, and Cyrillic tattoos ringing his squatty neck, busy now staring at Tits and Clits Annual. Thorpe smiled at his own nervousness, strung out on adrenaline, imagining the worst. You'd think he'd learn. The moment of truth... it applied to Thorpe even more than to the target.

……

The beached spook is Frank Thorpe, in limbo having recently left an off-the-books American Intelligence unit after an operation went down-river. The "hard charger" was a stranger whom Frank saw mow down a young kid selling sweets at the airport and keep going without so much as a backward glance.

Almost on a whim Frank decides to use all his skills and resources to give that stranger what they call in his trade "a wake-up". But his good deed quickly veers out of control. And as he tries to mend things Frank finds someone from his own past is out to give him a rather bigger "wake-up".

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOURE

FIVE

SIX

SEVERN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

TIRTEEN

FORTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINTEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOURE

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE