At first, Butcher wasn't sure what he was looking at. The two monitors showed little more than vague motion blur and darkness, punctuated only by the clocks running at the bottom of each screen, showing synchronized time: 16:48LIMA20012025 - nine days ago - and distinguished by the markers in the opposite corner. The left-hand screen was marked V41; the right-hand one, G11.

Then suddenly, in one picture, what had been nebulous shapes resolves into focus as the back of someone running. He's in demi-uniform. Tan trousers and a combat vest over a grey long sleeve t-shirt. His head is wrapped in a dishdash scarf. For a split second he stops to look back and even though his face is covered and his eyes hidden behind ballistic goggles, Butcher can see the alarm in his body language. Whoever is wearing this camera is chasing him, not following him. They are in an alleyway between low-quality brick buildings. The floor is dry dirt. There is the impression of dust in the air and Butcher can almost taste the memory of it on his tongue.

The other screen shows a rough wooden door ahead and a hand reaches out, smashing the door open. There's no audio on the footage, so Butcher had to imagine the sound of the impact. On the other screen he watches the fleeing man tumble through a door and he realizes that the left-hand camera is on the man in front.

V41 tumbles into the opposite corner and G11 piles in behind him, dressed in desert camouflage, a matching cap and combat vest. The room is dimly lit, but he can see basic furniture - a mix of hand-made wooden stools and cheap plastic chairs of the kind you found all over the world. The internal light is a bare bulb, swinging from a cable dangling from the visible boards of the ceiling. Butcher can see the pistol in G11's hand, now, in both screens. He can see G11’s face, too. The wavering pistol hovers over V41 then swings to cover the rest of the room and a third man appears in the visual: he's in a light blue shirt, open collar, and pale chinos. He has tanned skin and a country club hair-cut. Some sort of ID badge dangles on a lanyard around his neck. His hands go up instantly in response to the pistol, but G11 closes on him, V41 forgotten. Butcher sees G11 seize the civilian by the throat, push him up against the wall and press the pistol to his forehead.

V41 raises a wavering pistol to point at G11 who, without looking, slaps his pistol back under his armpit. There are two small flashes. V41's hand drops, but the camera keeps rolling.

G11 puts his pistol back to the head of the civilian who looks terrified. He is talking, but the picture is unclear and the room is dark. Butcher can't make out the details of his lip movements. Then the pistol twitches and G11 drops the civilian, who slumps down. A small spray of blood is visible on the whitewashed wall behind him.

The footage stops.

‘So…’ said the man on the other side of the desk, gesturing at the monitor he had turned for Butcher to see. ‘What the fuck was that?’

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Shakespeare fixed his gaze upon his second-in-command. He was not, Butcher knew all too well, a man easily moved to expletives.

‘If I told you I didn’t know, would you believe me?’ he asked. His fingers, knitted together between his knees, flexed against each other. The video had made difficult viewing.

Shakespeare sighed

He was of an age with Butcher: mid-thirties, clean shaven of course, and dressed in light camouflage. But for the commonality of their approximate age, he couldn't have been more of a contrast with Butcher, whose shaggy mop of hair and scrappy beard looked more "homeless" than "Home Office". He was dressed in yesterday's hoodie, old jeans and a pair of Nikes, which was all he’d had time to put on when he’d got his boss’s text that morning.

Butcher’s demeanor was calm, but his heart was racing.

'Golf One One was your call-sign in Sudan,' said the colonel, flipping open a file in front of him that Butcher recognized as the After-Action Report he had filed just two days ago. 'And as far as I could tell, that was you, shooting an American contractor and a British aid worker called Jonathan Arnold. Your own body-cam footage proves it was you. DTG shows it was the day before you left country - after the op was finished.'

Somewhere in the storm of confusion in his head, Butcher noted that whoever had given Shakespeare the footage didn't know or hadn’t told him who Victor Four One was in the footage. But they'd identified Arnold. Butcher remembered Arnold. And “aid worker” were not the words he would have used to describe the slimy piece-of-shit people-trafficker.

‘So before this all goes particularly pear-shaped…’ Shakespeare closed the file, pushed it to one side and stood up from behind his desk, coming around to sit on one of the arm chairs opposite Butcher.

‘Andy,’ he said, ‘I’ve known you for ten years. You’re an outstanding soldier and a high-quality officer. Nothing about this scenario makes sense to me. You and I both know that what we do doesn’t always mean playing by the rules. But if we don’t know what happened, we can’t protect you.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ asked Butcher.

‘Tomorrow morning, this footage will go to Army Legal Services,’ said Shakespeare, sitting back in the chair. ‘They will pass it immediately to the Metropolitan Police who will allocate an investigator. And he will be on his way to Hereford by lunchtime.’

‘Have I seen this?’ he asked. ‘Officially?’

‘Officially, no,’ replied Shakespeare. ‘If you can tell me what went down, I can have words with our friends at Six. They can head this off. I don’t believe you went off-reservation, Butcher, but these men have families.’

Butcher shook his head.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he replied. ‘We had wrapped up the op. I did a couple of days’ delivering training for the locals as per the plan. We had one day’s down-time and I was invited to the consulate. I remember arriving and, after that… nothing until I was standing in the queue at the airport.’

‘Holy shit,’ sighed Shakespeare, running a hand down his face. ‘And it didn’t occur to you to mention this to anyone?’

‘I thought I got drunk,’ said Butcher, shrugging. ‘There didn’t seem to be anyone from the consulate chasing me down to suggest I’d torn the place up, so I figured I’d had a few too many and just taken a while to get my brain in gear. I thought it would all come back to me eventually.’

‘This looks like you took a private job, Butcher,’ said Shakespeare. ‘This looks like you took a job to assassinate a private citizen.’

‘Why would I film it?’ begged Butcher.

‘Proof of work completed,’ replied his boss. ‘Why else would it not be in the official footage that came in with the AAR? You took a private job, executed an aid worker, gave the footage to your employer to secure payment and now they’ve turned on you by sending it to me.’

‘You don’t have to act on this,’ said Butcher quietly, before he could stop himself.

‘Are you fucking insane?’ demanded Shakespeare, standing up. ‘Andy, whoever got this to me will send it to someone else if I don’t act. And if I don’t act, I will be complicit. I am literally sitting on this for as long as I humanly can, but can you imagine the shit that will roll down upon the Det if I let this go unactioned longer than tomorrow morning?’

‘What do I do?’

‘I am fucked if I know,’ replied his CO. ‘This isn’t just your neck on the line, Butcher. It’s not even just mine. If it were… Well, to be honest, screw you. I’m not throwing in my pension to go down with you, you wanker!’

They both laughed, but neither met the other man’s eyes.

‘This is about the reputation of the Det, of UKSF, hell, of the UK’s military-diplomatic relations with Sudan and the whole of Africa,’ Shakespeare went on. ‘I’m sorry, Andy. If you can’t tell me more than you have, I’m going to have to call the provosts and put you under arrest until the Met can get here -’

He was interrupted by the phone on his desk ringing. He looked at it in annoyance, then seemed to do a double-take at the caller ID. He held up a finger to Butcher and answered the phone.

‘James, hi,’ he said, voice suddenly devoid of the stress that had weighed it down a moment ago. ‘What brings you back to me so soon? … I see… That’s… odd. Listen, I might actually have a solution to your problem that could be a solution to my problem, too.’

As Shakespeare spoke, Butcher looked up at where the colonel was leaning on his desk to find his old friend looking back at him.

‘I’ll need to check some things,’ said Shakespeare to “James” on the other end of the call. ‘It’s not an idea without risks, although I know that doesn’t bother you… No, not like that… Yes, just give me… half an hour or so. Good stuff. Speak to you in a moment.’

He put the phone down and came back to sit opposite Butcher again.

‘I need your word, Andy, that you’re not screwing me on this gap-in-your-memory thing,’ he said, his face in the serious mode he took on at Orders group meetings. ‘I think there’s a way you might still get away with this, but this is going to be one squirrely op.’

‘Like Ukraine?’ asked Butcher, a slim smile on his lips.

‘Way, way more squirrelly than Ukraine,’ replied Shakespeare.

*

‘Butcher, this is James Ball,’ said Shakespeare, introducing the slim, balding man in the charcoal-grey, pin-striped suit. They were in the car park of a pub on the outskirts of Hereford. It was a foggy February afternoon and the car park had no cameras. It wasn’t the first time Butcher had had a quiet conversation here. He shook Ball’s proffered hand. ‘If you go with him now, you’re cut off. Don’t try to call me. Don’t contact anyone in the Det or the Regiment. If you get what you’re looking for, give it to James. He knows the right places to take it. With luck, we’ll have your name cleared.’

‘This is not how I saw you doing my retirement speech,’ admitted Butcher.

‘I’d say you deserve better, but I’d be lying,’ replied Shakespeare, with a smile. ‘If things don’t pan out, James has resources. If you do right by him…’

‘I can put those resources at your disposal,’ said the enigmatic Ball. ‘We can work something out.’

‘I’ll be AWOL the rest of my life,’ said Butcher, fists tightening around the thought of it. It didn’t seem fair.

‘Andy Evans will be AWOL,’ said Shakespeare. ‘You, on the other hand…’

‘Names change,’ said Ball. ‘Faces change. Work for me, Butcher.’

Butcher looked across at his friend.

‘Or don’t,’ said Ball, shrugging. ‘Go and face the music. See how general population suits your lifestyle.’

‘You didn’t tell me he was such a wanker,’ said Butcher to his boss.

‘It’s only fair,’ replied Shakespeare. ‘I didn’t tell him what a cunt you are.’

He raised his hand, knowing already what Butcher would decide. And, after a moment’s pause, Butcher took it in a tight grip.

‘Thanks, boss,’ he said. And with his other hand, he removed his phone from his pocket and handed it to Shakespeare. ‘Perhaps you could put this in a bin, somewhere near my place?’

*

Butcher and Ball drove into the Herefordshire countryside to a tiny, isolated commercial estate that looked like it had been built in a set of old farm buildings. The sign at the gate just said “BRS” in red letters on a white background. Nothing else - no phone number, no web address, no slogan.

Ball’s car was a non-descript Vauxhall Insignia - the car of middle managers and tedious salesmen - but Ball’s suit was bespoke and, now that Butcher could see it more clearly, had a casual line that screamed quality tailoring. The company site they entered was similarly at odds with itself. The buildings were slightly run-down and tatty, with weeds growing through cracks. But it was only as they passed the gate that he spotted the permanent guard hut, tactically positioned to watch the road without being visible itself and with an uncommonly alert-looking security man at the desk. And the cameras. And the other guard, casually patrolling the fence line in a loose blue jacket that still moved in a way that betrayed the shoulder holster to anyone who knew what to look for. And the windows - scrupulously clean and clear, with good quality security fittings.

And then the cars.

Ball parked his six-year-old Insignia in a row that included Range Rovers, Teslas, an Audi R8 and a BMW i8. Ball caught the expression on his face.

‘We pay well for talent, Butcher,’ he said, unlocking the doors and climbing out.

‘Work hard, play hard?’ Butcher asked, shutting the door.

‘My people are very dedicated,’ was all he said to that.

They entered the building through an unprepossessing reception area. The receptionist greeted him and went to hand Butcher a visitor pass, but Ball shook his head and she retreated with a wordless nod.

The next corridor was a stark contrast to the rundown exterior. What looked like it should have been production space was smooth lines and elegant geometric colours that Butcher recognized as being the latest thinking in stimulating creativity in the workplace. A series of rooms were visible behind frosted glass and code/card access panels, and the architectural light-fittings, Butcher realized, were ducting down daylight to make the space feel surprisingly welcoming and bright considering how opaque its purpose seemed to be.

At the far end, they entered a large office and Ball took a seat behind the desk, as Butcher clocked the third person waiting there.

‘You’ll be wondering what we do here, Butcher,’ said Ball. ‘It’s quite straightforward. We develop world-saving technology.’

‘You’re an arms developer,’ Butcher replied. Realizing there was nowhere to sit where he could see the door, he settled instead for standing near it, where he could see both Ball and the obvious paramilitary type in black, watching him silently. ‘And this gentleman is here to silence me if I should get a sudden attack of the conscience about whatever disreputable shit I’ve dropped myself into.’

‘Actually, we don’t make arms,’ Ball half-corrected him. ‘Let's be honest, between the Swiss, the Americans, the Chinese and the Russians, hardly anyone else bothers to develop new arms any more. We make the technology that’s eventually going to make arms obsolete. The investment we’ve already had is measured in hundreds of millions. The potential profit is literally billions. BRS is poised to become the most valuable company in the world in under ten years.’

‘What have you done?’ asked Butcher.

‘We are about to usher in a technological step forward that will literally save the world from everything that is currently plaguing it. Global warming? We can fix it. Deforestation and loss of habitat? We can fix it. International pandemics? We can stop them. Political corruption? It’s within our grasp.’

‘All very interesting, but not what I meant,’ said Butcher, jerking a thumb at the guard. ‘What I mean is: what have you done that means the muscle, here, is poised to off me if I so much as breathe in the wrong shade or purple?’

Ball sighed.

‘Look, Butcher… Can I call you “Butcher”?’ he asked and then went on without waiting for an answer. ‘Major Andy Evans is done. Your career is done. Your reputation is in the shitter. I don’t know why you killed those people and I don’t care. Whoever passed that footage to your boss wants you on the hook for this, one way or another.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘We don’t have time to hope that your reputation might eventually be slightly less ruined than it is right now,’ said Ball, steepling his fingers. ‘I have a problem that needs an urgent solution. I went to Nathan because I thought he could give me one, but he couldn’t. Until you suddenly turned up out of the blue and in need of safe harbour.’

‘You have a mission for me.’

‘I have a mission for someone who isn’t Andy Evans,’ said Ball, tossing a packet over his desk and onto the extremely smart glass coffee table beside him. ‘By close of play tomorrow, Andy Evans will be a wanted man. I have the resources to make sure that his description is wrong. Between me and Nathan, we can make sure that the photographs on HOLMES and that get circulated to the press are someone else. I can even arrange things so that the fingerprint records that are handed over to the Met by your friends at the Special Reconnaissance Regiment aren’t yours.

‘This is no trifling expense I’m talking about. And this is no small amount of effort I and my team are prepared to put into making sure you are safe to do the job I need you to do. Do you understand how important this is to me? How much I am prepared to put into it to make it right?’

‘You stand to make billions,’ agreed Butcher.

‘No! This is not about the money!’ He stood up, gesturing at the office in a way that managed to take in the whole building, including Butcher and the grim-faced security man in the corner. ‘This is not about wealth. This is about literally changing the world!’

‘Are you trying to recruit me or convert me?’ asked Butcher, who finally decided to take a seat on the sleekly uncomfortable-looking chair furthest from the gorilla. ‘Look, I’m on board with this against my will, but with no meaningful alternative. You give me a mission and I’ll carry it out to the best of my ability. I don’t mind knowing the bigger picture, but I don’t need a messianic vision to do my job.’

Ball came around the desk to face Butcher.

‘I just want you to see this as more than just a convenient way out of a tight spot,’ he said, leaning back against the desk. ‘This is a job with purpose, and with a future. You've given up a lot, after all.

‘You’ve given up a pension that would have been taken away from you anyway. You’ve given up a house on which you still owe eighty-five percent of the mortgage and which you only live in for two months a year. You’ve given up a family you don’t have.’

Butcher was quietly intimidated by the speed with which Ball must have done his homework - or had someone do it for him. He clearly had access to some significant people if he was casually on first-name terms with the head of the Det. And there was certainly some truth to what he said. The Det had given Butcher purpose, but for ten years it had also been a burden - working on secret and deniable overseas missions he couldn’t discuss outside the office had made it impossible to form anything resembling a functional relationship outside the unit. And being an officer and, lately, the second-in-command had made it impossible to get close even to members of the opposite sex in the Det itself. He knew others managed it. But he never had.

The fact that Andy Evans was a sad and lonely man was something he had been determinedly pretending not to see for the last few years.

Ball picked up the packet Butcher had ignored and went to the door.

‘Let me show you exactly what it is we’re trying to do here.’

He stepped past Butcher, out into the corridor and, using a keycard he produced from his breast pocket and stabbing in the numbers, he opened a door right outside. Butcher sensed the guard move. He stood at a distance just within reach of Butcher, but not where it would be easy for Butcher to have a go back. He was good. Butcher wondered if he was ex-Regiment. He didn’t recognize the face. Probably not British. Butcher sighed and followed Ball through the door into what turned out to be a lobby for a sleek industrial-sized lift.

‘I thought this was single-storey,’ he said out loud.

‘Only above the ground, Butcher,’ said Ball as the lift doors opened. The guard made to enter, but Ball raised a hand and shook his head. The guard showed no reaction to that. He stepped back and locked eyes with Butcher as the doors closed.

‘This is some serious James Bond shit, Ball,’ said Butcher as they descended, turning to face him.

‘You have no idea,’ said Ball, calmly. He met Butcher’s hard stare. He was at least three inches shorter than Butcher. He looked fit, but not strong. For all that his technical role was in reconnaissance and observation, Butcher had a well-earned reputation as a close-quarters guy, but his gut feeling on looking Ball up and down was that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could take him if push came to shove.

The lift announced that they had reached Basement Six and the doors opened. Six floors down? What the hell?

They exited into a corridor almost identical to the one they had left. Even the light was still being ducted down, although the walls were bare of psychologically-uplifting geometric colour patterns. Here, the glass walls weren’t translucent. As they walked along the corridor, Butcher looked in and saw laboratories with long benches of stainless steel, and equipment he couldn’t begin to identify. Beyond them were more rooms through heavy steel doors. There were cameras and code pads everywhere. A lot of the ones he could see were biometric, now, not just number pads: fingerprint readers and iris scanners. Not a lot of people. The ones he could see were in scrubs or white noddy suits - hazmat gear. It looked like there was more activity further back. But they stopped at a door just past the middle with a white plaque that read “PROJECT DRAGON”. Ball unlocked it and opened the door into the corridor, gesturing for Butcher to go in first.

It looked like a cross between a high-end dentist’s surgery, an operating suite and a torture chamber if Apple made torture chambers. On the far side was a stretch of equipment at which three staff in white noddy suits, gloves and masks were working and one of them looked up, annoyed at the intrusion. Butcher saw the annoyance in his eyes turn to fear at the sight of Ball.

‘Show this man the demo flask, please,’ said Ball without introductions.

The man went to a large, steel refrigerator and removed a glass container with a screwed-on lid.

‘You know you don’t have to keep them refrigerated?’ asked Ball.

‘They are a sample,’ said the man in the mask. ‘Samples go in the fridge. That’s procedure.’

Ball shook his head and took the flask off the man and picked up a magnifying glass from the bench. He handed both to Butcher, who took them cautiously, looking at the contents of the flask. The contents looked like grey dust or sand - like something off one of those tropical volcanic beaches - shimmering and almost liquid in consistency until he raised the magnifying glass and almost dropped it.

The “sand” was insects. At least, he thought so at first. He wasn’t squeamish. He couldn’t afford to be in his job… what used to be his job, anyway. But beetles just… did it for him. If he ever faced Room 101, it would be full of beetles. Not spiders. Not butterflies. Maybe centipedes. But definitely beetles. But as he looked closer he realized that they didn’t just have the iridescence of beetles, but of metal. They were tiny machines. Each one seemed no more than the size of a grain of sand.

‘I’ve heard of nanotechnology, but this… This shit isn’t supposed to be possible.’ He looked up at a pleased-looking Ball. ‘Are we talking a grey goo scenario?’

The man in the mask laughed.

‘Oh, god, no,’ he insisted. ‘These chaps aren’t self-replicating. And they’re more… builders than breakers. I mean, if you dropped the flask it would bounce. But if you took the top off and poured them out it would be no worse than pouring out a handful of sand, except a lot more expensive and time-consuming to clean up!’

‘The doctor, here, is mostly right,’ agreed Ball. ‘They do a little bit of breaking. But it’s all about the software. We call Project Dragon “the ultimate bio-hack”. These are literally the mythical cure for cancer. But they’re so much more than that. These guys can fix us. They can cure us. And they can make us better. They can make us stronger, faster… They are the recipe for superhumans.’

Butcher suddenly knew what the reclining dentist-chair-torture-device was for.

‘What’s the catch?’ asked Butcher, handing the flask back to the masked man. ‘If you think I’m going to be a human guinea pig, I’d rather take my chances with the prison system.’

‘Relax, Butcher,’ said Ball. ‘This is well into human testing. We know it works. Our problem is that it only works one way, because it’s only been programmed to work one way and we can’t change it, because the one person who knows how to program them has gone missing. We need you to find him.’

‘No metal beetles?’ asked Butcher, in relief.

‘Oh, god, yes,’ said Ball with a grin. ‘You’ll get the metal beetle injection. It’s the only way you’ll have a chance of finding him.’