He woke up at five with a headache the pain of which would have caused the Spanish Inquisition to think, perhaps, they might have gone a bit too far, this time. As Butcher reluctantly embraced consciousness, he realized that the headache had been building up for a while and his fevered, half-awake hallucinations had made him tear off the bandage on his neck and bleed into the pillow. Gritting his teeth against the extremely convincing sensation that he still had a drill buzzing at the bone of his skull, he sat up, contemplated the crusty, red stain on the pillow and examined himself in the mirror. Astonishingly, his appearance wasn’t as bad as he felt. He had a blobby, congealed mess all over his neck but, apart from that, he didn’t look like a man whose brain was trying to exit his skull via his eyeballs. Between the buzzcut and the beard he looked like a homeless man who had been kidnapped by a mad scientist for his psychotic experiments.

Who would’ve thought appearances could be so accurate?

He rifled through his previous day’s shopping until he found the ibuprofen and necked two with a glass of water, feeling a distinct and sore lump where they passed whatever that psychopath in Project Dragon had stuck in his throat. Then he sat on the edge of the bed in his underpants and tried not to move too much while he waited for the anti-inflammatories to kick in.

Somehow, in the course of the four hours of pseudo-sleep he had managed to catch, something resembling a plan had begun to form in his head. It wouldn’t do to stay local for too long. The area around Hereford was probably the largest single concentration of international Special Forces in the world. Of course, it wasn’t like you’d spot a Navy Seal on any street corner, or bump into an SBS diver at the Tesco Express, so the odds of seeing someone he knew weren’t huge, but they weren’t zero, either. So job number one was to get the fuck out of Herefordshire. But job number two was to solve a problem that hadn’t yet turned up: get strapped.

It was just one of those things that they drilled into you at Stirling Lines: when you’re on a mission, you are always tooled up. It didn’t matter if you were spotting Iranian chemical weapon sites, observing new-wave Irish Republican terrorists or tailing a Russian illegal who had decided to take a suspicious day-trip too close to a military site - you always went strapped because if things went to shit, at least you could shoot back. Butcher had contemplated the point that he was basically a civilian, now - or, at least, Gregory Parsons was a civilian - working for a civilian. This shit with BRS and the Cuttler Procedure was ringing every fucking alarm bell that twelve years in uniform had put in his head and his gut was pointing due trouble. And when Butcher was facing trouble, he liked to do it two ways: with company and with overwhelming firepower. But as a fire team with a SAW and a Barrett didn’t seem likely to turn up and volunteer to assist, he was going to have to make do with what he could get.

*

Like traveling anywhere in Wales, it seemed, it took no time at all to get quite close to where he was going, and then forever to actually get there. He thought he remembered the backroads up this way, but signage was sporadic. He took a few wrong turns and missed the final turn three times before he finally spotted it: more overgrown than he remembered. The fact that it was half past six o’clock in the morning in February didn’t help matters, as a fog had consumed this part of the Black Mountains and, somehow, Wales had managed to combine fog with rain, which he felt ought to have been impossible. But eventually he saw the ancient sign, the old white paint peeling off and the black letters long since rendered illegible. When it came to finding Ty Coch Farm, you pretty much had to know it was there, or you wouldn’t. And that was how the owner liked it.

Butcher pulled into what looked at first glance like no more than a lay-by and unhooked the rusted gate, pushing it with a scrape across the wet mix of gravel and mud. He carefully eased the Insignia up a steep mess of a track better suited to Land Rovers, before it reached the point that even four-wheel drive was going to struggle with the incline. He gave up, made sure the hand brake was on tight and went the rest of the way on foot, careless of the wet mud now oozing through the thin fabric of his battered trainers, his hoodie pulled up over his shaved head against the steady rain, intensified by the drips tumbling from the naked branches of the trees that leaned close over the track.

Where the trees and undergrowth cleared and the incline flattened out, he trudged into a grassy space, hidden in the lee of the steep climb up what the Welsh called a mountain and everyone else called a hill - although to be fair, from this angle, it looked about as much fun an ascent as the Matterhorn, so he supposed it was academic. A cottage was slumped at the end of the track, with paddocks to either side, their fences half-rotted and heavy with moss and lichen. He could see a bare lightbulb on in an upstairs room, through a window made only half-transparent through dust and age, and chickens wandered across the drive, so he knew someone was up and about. An overgrown and abundant vegetable plot threatened to consume the ground floor of one side of the cottage.

Butcher waited.

‘Heard ye done some naughties, Butcher Boy,’ said a Scottish accent behind him and to his left.

‘I’m not here for your opinion, Jock,’ he replied, lifting his hands.

‘Cash?’

‘Of course.’

‘Follow me.’

The man who passed him, shouldering the over-and-under twelve-bore shotgun as he did so, could have been anywhere from fifty-five to eighty-five. Beneath the grey-green tweed cap, his grey and white beard and deeply-lined face were old. But he moved young. There was nothing stiff or awkward in his gait and, although he moved at a leisurely step without looking back, he had a wary readiness about him that was familiar to anyone who’d worked alongside the Regiment - especially the old guard who remembered Provo kill-lists and bombs placed under family cars and in pubs favoured by the uniformed services. Butcher had never served with Jock McCoy. He didn’t even know for sure that the man had even been in the Army. He was just one of those things you learned about, eventually, when you were around the right people for long enough. Butcher wasn’t even sure who had first told him about Ty Coch - the Regiment’s unofficial quartermaster’s department.

Butcher had first come up to the farm after an off-book mission in Guinea, on behalf of their friends in the Foreign Service. They had come back with three crates of brand new AK-12 assault rifles, plus magazines and ammunition, in the back of C130 Hercules out of Sierra Leone. They had previously been the property of a local warlord operating out of Cote d’Ivoire, courtesy of a diamond trade deal with a Russian oligarch. The team had seized them as evidence, but the local liaison had nixed any chance of a case being brought against the Russian. And the warlord… well, by that point he wasn’t going to be anyone’s problem so the weapons cache was suddenly a bit of an awkward point.

But a couple of phone calls later and his boss had said they’d go to Ty Coch. When they landed back at Brize Norton, the crates went into the back of his boss’s knackered old Range Rover and he and Butcher had shot across to Wales to visit Jock’s farm.

For his trouble, Butcher had walked away with five hundred quid in cash, no questions and fewer answers.

His last time at Ty Coch, he’d been sent to Jock before a joint mission between the Det and the Regiment. The brief had called for a particular target - a former Belarusian politician-turned-entrepreneur who was funnelling millions to far-right groups in his home nation who were, in turn, funding white supremacist terrorists in the UK - to be shot with a particular calibre of round that the Regiment didn’t have in the armoury. Something obscure he couldn’t remember now - possibly Czech. Turns out, Jock not only had twelve rounds, but also an example of the pistol the rounds had, themselves, been originally manufactured for. Apparently it was the signature weapon of a well-known assassin working in those circles. It cost a thousand quid out of Regimental petty cash to take away both ammo and pistol. But once the job was done and they were all back, the Regiment’s armourer didn’t want the tainted thing so much as within a hundred yards of his armoury. The higher-ups didn’t really like UKSF getting that close to HMG’s really dirty work, although it had never bothered Butcher. So he put the pistol into an old wellington boot in his airing cupboard at home. Then, next time he had a weekend off, he toddled over to Ty Koch and got a refund of four hundred.

He dropped it into the Benevolent Fund collection in the museum.

Over the years, Butcher had put together enough of the pieces to understand how things worked. Jock supplied select members of Her Majesty’s Government with untraceable hardware to order and at a below-market price. In return, a blind eye was turned to the supply service he also provided to select members of the international criminal underworld. Rumour had it that an over-zealous Liverpool detective, following up some leads in a Ukrainian people-trafficking case, had once managed to get as far as the farm. He had got no further. How terminally his investigation had been concluded varied, depending on who was telling the story. Still, Butcher had never worked out how someone as transparently Glaswegian as Jock McCoy had found himself in the foothills of the Welsh mountains, nor how he managed to still sound as if he’d just stepped out of the Brazen Head, although - as far as Butcher could tell - he’d been at Ty Coch at least two decades.

They went around the back to a shed. Jock pulled back an old rug and lifted the ring on a trapdoor.

‘You’ve not invited me down before,’ said Butcher.

‘Ach, ye were still bein’ a guid boy then,’ said Jock, descending before him. ‘Ye’ve joined the dark seid noo, so ye have. Certain… privileges come with that, ye ken.’

He pronounced the word “privileges” with care, like he’d had to learn it specially.

‘Pistol?’

‘Yeah,’ said Butcher. ‘Something simple. Needs to be easy to get more ammo.’

‘Cannae beat the good old Browning Nine Millie,’ said Jock. They were in a narrow corridor, one wall and the ceiling made of corrugated iron. The ground underfoot was wet earth. But the other wall was just stacked metal boxes, one on top of another, unmarked, their metal lids like shelves or drawers. ‘She’s shit for accuracy, and heavy as fuck, but she’ll no let ye doon when it matters, and the ammo’s cheap as chips in half the pubs in London.’

‘It’ll do,’ Butcher agreed. ‘I’m not fussy.’

‘Five hun’ed,’ said Jock. ‘And another hun’ed per box of rounds.’

‘Twenty round boxes?’

‘Aye.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it, plus two boxes. Throw in a cleaning kit?’

‘Fuck, son, ye culd clean this fucker wi’ olive oil ‘n spit.’ Jock chuckled. ‘But aye, OK.’

*

Butcher eased off the hand brake and carefully backed the car down the track and out into the road. He wasn’t sure where he was going next but, conscious with every swallow of the tracker in his throat, he felt an urgent compulsion to put distance between Jock’s farm and himself before he stopped to make any more plans. A complete lack of mobile phone reception was one of the reasons Ty Coch was where it was, so there was a good chance that the tracker had lost signal while he was in the area. But without knowing how the little bastard worked, Butcher had to assume that, once he was in an area with a decent signal again, it would send a record of his every move. And whilst he was pretty certain he could survive whatever mess he had got himself into with BRS, he was less sure that he would survive the experience if Jock every found out that he’d brought a tracking device to the farm.

Butcher had put a couple of rounds - “On the house”, as Jock had put it - in the magazine and given the pistol a brief test drive in Jock’s garden. No one was going to turn a hair at the sound of a couple of gunshots in the countryside as long as you didn’t get carried away with a full-auto. Now the Browning was in his jacket pocket with a full mag, but nothing in the chamber. The spare rounds were in the other pocket. But job one was to get shot of the clothes he’d been wearing for the last twenty-four hours, and to do something about how he looked. Ball’s medical friends had already done wonders for his hairstyle, but the beard was a mess. He’d tidied up the blood from the neck wound and found an Elastoplast to stop it oozing. But that and the patch on his skull were going to draw attention he could do without. And walking around a shopping centre in a hoodie was a great way to make sure any passing police officer would take an interest.

He headed south to Newport Retail Park and, by the time he left two hours later, he had put the BRS company credit card through a good shake-down. New clothes, new coat, new shoes, new bags. He’d even treated himself to a couple of sets of running kit. He had a full wash-kit, a laundry kit, and about a month’s worth of tinned food. Oh, and a high-end laptop. But if he was going to take a hunting mission seriously, he would need to make a stop.

‘Blacksite Supplies,’ said the voice on the car’s brand new hands-free kit.

‘Hi,’ said Butcher. ‘Look, I need some stuff from you, but I need it today. I’m on the road. If I were to swing by and pay when I arrive, can I take it away on spec? You’re in High Wycombe, right?’

‘Er, I guess,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘We aren’t set up for face to face retail, but I can take a card if you don’t mind waiting while I clear it? If we’ve got it in stock.’

‘Yeah, that’s fine.’

‘OK. What do you need?’

He gave them a list off the top of his head. Some stuff wasn’t in stock so they talked around it while he headed for the M4 and the quickest way to High Wycombe.

By the time he was heading back towards Cheltenham, the boot of the car had a high-end DSLR camera, an IR camera, a small camera drone controlled from an app on his phone, night vision goggles and several GPS tracking boxes - about the size of a packet of cigarettes, although he could make them a lot smaller with a screwdriver and about fifty pence worth of supplies. He also had a set of lock-picking tools and a stab-proof vest. The former in the pocket of his new gabardine, alongside the pistol. The latter under his nice, new shirt. The guys at Blacksite were happy to point him towards a local military surplus place and he added a light body armour harness to the pile in the boot.

Odds were, he wouldn’t need half of this stuff. But that was always the way. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, as Colour Sergeant Berriman had been wont to say.

In the bathroom of another cheap hotel on the outskirts of the spa town, Butcher thought about Berriman again, as he scraped the thick mess of beard off his cheeks. What would he think about how his top cadet looked now? A buzz cut like something out the fucking US Marines and a goatee beard like a Poundshop Ming the Merciless!

*

Cheltenham was home to the internationally-famous Gold Cup racing event, a major annual Literature Festival, the Government Communications Headquarters, about one-third of said government’s cleverest people and - not uncoincidentally - Doctor Ron Cuttler of BRS.

Driving 1

Investigation 1

Merchant 1

Weapon Handling 1

He ignored the updates and dismissed them with a blink. He was observing Cuttler’s apartment block from his parked car. He had the DSLR on the dashboard, recording video in case something happened while he wasn’t paying attention. Cuttler’s thick file was open in his lap.

The guy came from a whole family of overachievers. Older brother was the CEO and Chairman of a significant defence contractor, called Cuttler Technical Services, based down in Hampshire, not far from good old Aldershot. Little sister was…

Well, that was interesting.

About a year ago, the family reported young Cally Cuttler missing. And she was a good deal younger than Ron. Broken condom job, he guessed. But she had been a pretty serious musician from the look of things. Liverpool Institute. Then disappeared. Police thought she had a drug problem. Working theory was that she had turned hooker and then got killed. But - Butcher flipped the paper back and forth for more - there didn’t seem to be any actual evidence for that idea. Just lazy rozzers making assumptions about a rich girl playing common people.

Class was a funny thing. Which reminded him of Cuttler’s little briefing, again…

*

‘Eventually, you might get a class,’ he said. ‘Not, like, a social class, but the nanoids will categorize you in a broad specialization. This takes a little while, so you should be patient. And there’s really no way to predict what it’ll be. You can try to influence it with the decisions you make and the actions you take after the procedure, but unless you know every one of the hundreds I’ve put into the system and exactly how they’ve been weighted, it’s hard to game the process.

‘A lot of people wouldn’t ever get a class with this system if they just went about their daily lives. There’s no “office drone” class or “reality TV addict” class. But the assumption is that the people who are given the procedure first are going to be exceptional individuals with particular reasons for being given the procedure. As you’re among those, the odds are good that you’ll get a class within the first few weeks, at some point.

‘If and when you get a class, it means the nanoids will focus on certain stats and skills more than others. Plus, it will unlock some extra abilities that you might find helpful. Stuff the nanoids can do that is a bit… extra.’

*

At this rate, Butcher thought, he was going to bet on him getting the Sitter In Car class. It didn’t look like anyone else was watching the place. Nothing suspicious was going on and Cuttler definitely hadn’t shown up. It was unlikely he was lying low in his own apartment, but you never assumed. He’d look fucking stupid if his target turned up in the most obvious place he didn’t look.

So he got out of the car, circled the block a couple of times and then approached the front door and found Cuttler’s buzzer for apartment 213. He buzzed it and waited, then buzzed it again. After a couple of minutes, he buzzed 212 and got an answer - a woman.

‘Hi, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to wake up Ron Cuttler in 213, he’s -’

The door buzzed open and the intercom went dead. Yeah. That was why Butcher owned a house. Or at least, why Andy Evans owned a house. Greg Parsons owned sod all. Mind you, it didn’t hurt that the apartment block system had a camera at the buzzer, and that Butcher had made a point of dressing as smartly as he could. He was in a charcoal grey suit (off the peg, but a good, thick pure wool), with a decent cotton shirt and a dark blue tie. Over it, he wore a brown three-quarter length double-breasted gabardine and, to conceal the buzzcut, a tweed flat cap. Being both smart and bland made him look as non-threatening and forgettable as possible. It also offered plenty of bulk and a multitude of handy pockets.

He took the stairs up to the second floor and found Cuttler’s door. The lock was a very good one. Butcher had some decent skills with the lockpick set, but he could see at once it would likely take him ages to get through it, so he knocked on the door at 211.

‘Holy shit, what?’ said a man on the other side with an American accent.

‘Um,’ said Butcher, as diffidently as he could, ‘I’m looking for my brother, Ron Cuttler. I’ve not heard from him for some time. He lives in 213. I just wondered if maybe he’d given a neighbour a spare key or something.’

‘Ask Emmy in 210,’ said the man. ‘She’s tight with 213.’

Butcher knocked at 210 and a woman opened the door.

‘Hi,’ she said. She was late twenties, maybe early thirties, with dark brown hair, full sleeve tattoos on both arms and a pair of silver rings through one nostril. She was wearing a training singlet with a logo on it for a local gym. And - Butcher tried not to stare - she had the same broken square glyph over her head that he had seen over his in the mirror. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ said Butcher. ‘Are you Emmy?’

‘Sure,’ she said, eyes narrowing.

‘I’m Ron Cuttler’s brother,’ he said. ‘Did you know Ron was missing?’

She looked him up and down.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Butcher. There weren’t many points of physical similarity between him and Ron Cuttler. ‘I take after Dad.’

‘Yeah, I know he’s missing,’ she admitted. ‘Had the police over a few days ago. Not turned up?’

‘No, he’s not turned up,’ Butcher agreed. ‘I heard you might hold a spare key for him. I just wondered if you might let me into his apartment to look around myself? I’m not sure the police are really that focused on the case and, y’know, he’s my little brother and, well, I don’t know if you know that our sister disappeared a year ago?’

She nodded.

‘Mum’s taking it really hard,’ he said. ‘I’m only just holding it together myself. I need to feel like I’m doing something, you know?’

‘Sure.’

‘You can watch me in there, if you want,’ he offered. ‘I just want to look around. See if there’s anything the police might’ve missed that means something to me because I’m his brother.’

She nodded, picked up a key off the side table by the door and walked across the corridor to 213, unlocking the door and pushing it open for him.

‘Thanks,’ said Butcher.

‘No problem.’

He went in and looked around the space. It was pretty open-plan. A short corridor led into a good-sized living space which flowed through to what was probably supposed to be a dining room with a big window and a view over the Waitrose car park, which Butcher supposed was fractionally better than Lidl. Off to the side was a small galley kitchen and the only doors led into a double bedroom and a bathroom.

It wasn’t tidy. Wasn’t filthy. It just looked like the place a guy like Cuttler lived alone. He had a big PC set up with three large monitors. There was a big glass display case full of various collectible figures. Butcher recognized Batman, but the others were a mystery to him. The big dragon model was impressive, he supposed. There were framed posters from classic scifi movies. The bedroom looked lived in. The kitchen wasn’t untidy. There was a stack of takeaway menus on the counter-top and he flicked through them.

It was the sort of place you’d tidy up quickly if you unexpectedly got lucky, but not one you’d avoid bringing her home to at all. He imagined that Cuttler might have a girlfriend. He was a geek, sure, but he was a rich geek.

‘Guy at 211 said you and Ron were tight?’ he asked Emmy, who was lounging at the doorway.

‘We played D&D a few times,’ she replied. ‘He’s in my WOW Guild. We did a bit of PVE together. Traded pokemons. That kind of thing.’

‘I have no idea what you just said,’ admitted Butcher, flicking through a pile of mail on a coffee table.

‘We played board games and computer games,’ she translated. ‘It wasn’t physical.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said, turning towards her, ‘but it sounds like you did know him quite well. You don’t seem that bothered that he’s missing.’

‘Ron’s a funny guy,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I didn’t see him for weeks, sometimes. We get a lot of folks here that work at the Doughnut and we get used to not asking about work and that. I know Ron worked for a paper company out near Hereford but, otherwise, I got used to him not being around. I think I’ll start worrying about him in a week or two.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Butcher, finding a pen and paper. The Doughnut was the ring-shaped main office of the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ. ‘But his family is worried about him right now, and his employer doesn’t know where he is either. So if you do see him, or you think of anything…’ He handed her the scrap with the number of his new phone on it. ‘Look, the police probably said the same thing. Call them too. But if you think of something or see something and you think the police wouldn’t care or it seems too small to bother them… Let me know, OK?’

She nodded and, as she took the scrap of paper he watched her eyes flicker, just for a second, towards the space over his head…

*

Butcher pulled the door of the block shut behind him but, as he set off to circle the block again before heading back to the car, he got another notification:

Bluff 1

Investigation 2

Default WIS adjusted to 5