The air was hot and heavy when Degan got out of the cargo plane. His face and neck instantly coated with sweat and his survival pack felt like an iron ball on his back.

'Careful out there, Sir,' said the toothless Brazilian pilot who had landed him on a cracked and overgrown airfield surrounded by tropical trees, 'there's trouble around these days.'

Degan tipped him well and then set off straight into the bushline. He had only made twenty paces when he heard the plane engines reignite, and before long the noise was right above his head, chugging into the distance as a disappearing shadow.

He got out his TabPhone and traingulated the signal. A small red speck dotted his target about four miles from the runway in an area that the mapping system believed to be nothing but trees. Degan hitched up his laden sack and got to walking.

Hours later he mounted a steep climb and stopped to catch his breath, drinking deeply from his canteen. He had seen no-one, which was not surprising, and also nothing, which was unsettling. Not a whisper of birdsong, not a scurrying or a clicking or so much as a growl. There was wind and the rustling of trees, but otherwise only a smell that reminded Degan of abattoirs and bad restaurants.

He jumped when his TabPhone rang, louder than any other noise in the rainforest so far. It was Wilkes.

'Hey.' He tried to sound as if he wasn't out of breath.

'Where are you? ' Wilkes demanded bluntly.

'Thought I needed a vacation.' Degan took another swig from the canteen. 'That's a pina colada and this is Aruba, baby.'

'Fine,' Wilkes seemed to buy it, 'not the worst idea. Let me know next time, we've got a lot happening this week.' He paused, and Degan knew he was agonising about something. He could almost hear the synapses burning. 'We have a new cage runner.'

'We need them. Is it that kid Waymark sent you?'

'So you were listening. Maybe Aruba agrees with you, haven't heard you this cheerful for a while.'

'Yeah. Well, you know, if you can do without me... '

'Think so. How long you going to be?'

Degan checked his location. The red dot was within a few hundred yards.

'Not too long. '

'Good. Call me when you're back in country. Maybe stop over in Havana while you're there, I might have a job for you.'

'You know Im a billionaire, right?'

'Then I doubt you turn down business opportunities. Have fun in Aruba, and fly on a manifest next time.'

Degan hung up and swore loudly. Wilkes was having him tracked. Looks like he was right to stay off the radar, in all senses.

The hill rose a few feet further before the treeline broke over a deforested area, about the size of a stadium. From the height Degan could see something which was not on his map, and in all likelihood was not on any map, and that was probably half the point.

It looked a little like the compound; concrete, grey and reinforced with a steel perimeter fence. Two guard towers flanked the entryway but did not appear to be manned - or womanned - by anyone or anything. There was always a chance they had set up some kind of automatic early warning system, coupled with the possibility that every step he took might be onto a semtex mine that would blow him back to the States in tiny pieces.

Alright, thought Degan, treading carefully.

He circled around, using the trees as cover, putting himself on the opposite side of the perimeter fence out of the view of the guard towers. The basic detection equipment he had with him was accurate enough to spot basic level explosives, so with each new step toward the perimeter he hoped that they had nothing more sophisticated buried in the dirt. The air grew cooler the further he stepped away from the trees; now but for the wind there was no sound at all, and from the broken and dilapidated appearance of the concrete outside he might have been trying to sneak into an abandoned building in the middle of the Amazon.

Degan reached the fence without being exploded or spotted. Digging into his survival pack he drew out a pair of small bolt-cutters and made himself a small gap in the chain-link. Once through, the flap sprung back into place. It should be easily missed until a patrol came by, which so far did not look likely. He wiped the sweat from his brow and steadied his hands.

It was just then that he heard voices. Two of them, both female, heading in his direction. Degan hurled himself behind an air vent pumping dioxide gas past his head and waited for them to pass.

'Can you believe how unfair this is?' One said to the other, conversational and apparently not having noticed the uninvited male in their midst, 'the whole place gets to see Slate's trial, and we're stuck out here watching for jaguars and scorpions?'

She sounded American, the second did not. Degan could not place her.

'Yeah, well, someone's got to. Maybe we can get a look if we pass by the greenhouse. I don't see why everyone's so, like, worked up over it. She's not even that famous.'

'Are you kidding me? Millie Slate was, like, the most famous woman I know. I would kill to get to meet her.'

'You better hurry up, I hear they're going to totally execute her.'

'Oh, come on, that's never going to happen.'

Degan didn't hear the rest of the conversation; he had already doubled back and slipped past the guards, making a beeline for the glass-roofed annex. He padded lightly so that the bolt-cutters didn't make too much noise sliding around in his pack. Poor guards those two might be, he still needed to remain incognito for as long as possible.

The greenhouse, as they called it, was in reality a long broad room with a glass roof, but few windows. Degan made for an access door at the North-East corner of the building and found himself in a stairwell. Too exposed. The stairs running away from him led into a basement level. Degan hopped the entire flight in one jump and slipped through the door, finding himself in a long pipe-filled corridor that bore a strong resemblance to the bowels of a steam liner, but more strongly, the basement level of the compound in which he was keeping Natasha.

If he had his bearings right, the corridor ran directly underneath the grand greenhouse room above. He searched quickly for a weak spot in the ceiling; there were no access panels, but a narrow ventilation shaft presented itself to him about sixty yards along the corridor. He whooped internally and hoisted himself up on the pipes, dropping his survival pack on two horizontal pipes so that he could climb into the shaft.

Muffled voices became clear and sharp; despite everything being black and smelling like day-old breath he was sure he was virtually in the room. Someone was speaking, and them only, but he could hear many voices whispering and coughing closer to him. The woman who spoke seemed older and had a slight wear to her voice.

'...and if you have any respect for our cause, you will respect the power of this courtroom.'

There was a pause, after which Degan thought he recognised Millie Slate's voice.

'Fine. So what is your judgement?'

That's Millie Slate. Bingo, he thought, and then considered the fact that despite the enormous complexity of tracking her down, he had not considered for one moment how he was going to extract her and bring her back to Wilkes for the in-your-face moment he had been planning to savour for several weeks.

'Our judgement,' the older woman continued, 'is that you did in fact murder one of Nova Femen's most staunch supporters, a fellow woman, Germaine Edgecliff. Furthermore, it is our belief that you did so out of spite and to avenge the wrong she did to you, which we also acknowledge. This entire process has given us all a great deal of grief, and as we continue our deliberations-'

'Hey, nosejob!' Millie interrupted the judge, to a wave of dismay and shock, 'we don't have time for this shit. You want to spend the rest of your life locked in a room with other women while we moan about how its all so unfair? Then let's all get on a plane and turn ourselves in to Bluenorth. This is exactly what they want, us fighting each other. I'm here to help you actually achieve something other than using up supplies and bitching to each other. From what I've seen you think that you can actually win this war with blog posts and hashtags. If you don't want my help I'll be glad to do it all myself. I mean, that's what, yeah that's what I've been doing so far, right? Are you idiots ready to actually do something or do we need a fucking seconded motion for that, too?'

The courtroom was silent. Degan had to chuckle to himself. She hadn't made it to Chief of Staff for nothing, he thought.

'Miss Slate,' the old woman continued, with a touch of hurt in her voice, 'our judgement is that you have committed a crime of passion against a fellow member. While your defence was adequate, we cannot let this go unpunished.'

'Right, fine, execute me or exile me, whatever. Just get me out of this damn courtroom.'

'Neither will be your punishment. Instead of offering you an officer's position within our Militant wing, you will be given a recruit's post and made to undergo correctional therapy.'

'Jesus,' Millie groaned, 'You sure you won't reconsider exile? Hell, I'll even take execution over Miss Freud.'

'Don't tempt me.' The old woman said threateningly. 'Your case will be reviewed in six months. Until then please return to your quarters and await orders.'

The court was adjourned. Degan slid back out of the vent shaft and into the dank corridor, picking up his survival pack along the way. Millie was going to be held in a secure location, probably guarded. That meant both that getting to her would be hard, but also that he would know where she was. He would have to wait until nightfall either way, which meant finding a place to hide. One of the abandoned solitary cells might do the trick. What the hell was this place built for?

He was at the point of picking out a cell to lay low when he heard the door at the top of the stairwell open and footsteps heading toward him. He panicked, knowing that opening a door with rusty hinges would give him away so he scurried back up into the pipe network. Two women entered the corridor, looked left and right and started to walk. They wore navy blue and yellow-collared uniforms with the NF insignia on them.

'Ugh, I hate coming down here. This place is so creepy.'

'Grow up. Its just a basement.'

'I hate basements. Why do we have to check this place? Its like Command are scared of ghosts or something.'

'All I know is when this place was built it was evacuated pretty quickly. Some local tribe had a problem with it violating their land... or so they say.' The woman with short hair and glasses winked at her colleague enigmatically.

'Don't say shit like that!' The more slender blonde slapped her on the arm, 'It freaks me out, seriously Marie. I don't wanna be here.'

'I don't blame you,' Marie dropped her tone to a husky growl, 'they say they found something underground... something evil...'

'STOP IT!'

Tania did stop. She stopped completely, shining her flashlight over the ground in front of them. Degan turned his eyes to the spotlight and his heart leapt into his mouth. His bolt-cutters were lying in the middle of the corridor!

'What the...' Tania crouched down and picked them up, 'where did these come from?'

Degan was already working his exit strategy. Two of them wasn't too bad.

'Tan, seriously, if this is some kind of practical joke its not funny.'

'I've never seen anything like this in inventory...'

The problem would be the noise, Degan thought, hoping they had shut the basement door as they came in. The skinny blonde was already edging towards the door. Soon enough the spread of his attack would be too wide, and the moment would be lost.

'We need to report this. I've never seen these in our inventory-'

Tania fell flat to her face as a silenced bullet made a hole in her head. Degan was already leaping out of the piping, lunging toward the blonde to break her jaw so that the inevitable scream was stifled into a hack. She hit the floor, barely conscious, before Degan pumped a round into her chest.

Someone would have heard the half-scream, thought Degan. He picked up both bodies and dragged them into a cell, closing the squeaking door slowly. His plan was in ruins; before long they would be reported missing and soon enough found, and then this whole place would be under lockdown. He had to find Millie.

He jumped back up into the vent shaft and shimmied along until he saw a grate. Pushing himself up through it, he found himself inside the huge glass-ceilinged courtroom. To him it looked more like a forum for some great lord, an audience chamber for an emperor. The place was now completely deserted, as he had expected. He made for a side-door as softly as he could, hoping that somewhere there might be a blueprint layout of the building.

Just as he got to the side-door he noticed a plaque on the wall. It wasn't a map, but it caught his attention, and when the words formed in his head he felt as if they didn't compute. They were not words that should be there. They couldn't be there.

'What the fuck...?'

His question was met with the click of a pistol as it cocked behind his head.

'Turn around, slowly.'

Degan raised his arms and got to his feet, eyes still on the plaque as if it were written in an alien language. Someone grabbed his arms and forced him to turn around.

There were five of them this time, all wearing the same navy and yellow uniform. They had guns all, trained on him, and faces full of terrible fury.