Free Ultimate Weapon by Chris Ryan

was about to start getting out Ikea catalogues, and talking about seating plans for the wedding
.
    ‘Which bird is that, then?’
    Laura ran her fingers through the hairs on his chest. ‘There is always a girl somewhere.’
    Jed shook his head. ‘No one special.’
    ‘I’ve seen the files, Jed,’ said Laura sternly. ‘What’s her name again? Sarah? The daughter of a Regiment guy, right.’
    Jed shrugged. ‘We might be on a break right now, I’m not really sure.’
    He could hear Laura trying to stifle a laugh. ‘Guys always say that when they’re shagging someone else. Does she
know
about this
break
?’
    ‘It was her idea.’
    ‘So what’s she like?’
    Jed rolled over, so that his body was lying right next to her. He could feel the friction of her skin against his. ‘First you tell me why we’re really going to Iraq.’
    ‘We told you, to find out what’s in that plant.’
    ‘Bollocks,’ said Jed. ‘There are easier ways of doing that than sending an SAS team into the place.’
    Laura arched up, stretching out her lips so they met his. ‘You just do the shooting,’ she said. ‘Leave the thinking to us.’

SIX

    Nick took the pizza from the oven, opened a bottle of water and started eating. There was always pizza in the freezer, and it always tasted the same. Sometimes he wondered why he bothered taking them out of the box: the pizza tasted of cardboard, so he might as well eat the whole thing.
    On the hi-fi, he was playing Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, a song that had been among his and Mary’s favourites. They’d played it at their wedding, and he’d played it to Sarah when she was a baby: there was something about the harmonies that seemed to help to get her to sleep. ‘Silver girl,’ he thought to himself as he listened to the final verse of the song. It was where his nickname for her had come from. ‘
Sail on silver girl, sail on by,
’ crooned Art Garfunkel. ‘
Your time has come to shine / All your dreams are on their way.
’
    He glanced through the two-bedroomed cottage. He’d bought it with Mary, but she’d died before they had time to decorate it. He’d thrown some magnolia paint on the walls, and in the study he’d kept a few mementos of his time in the Regiment, but otherwise it could have been a rented cottage. Tonight it lookseven emptier than usual, Nick thought. It was missing something. Sarah. She wasn’t here very often, but there was always the sense that she might come home for a visit. Just the fact that she had a room made a difference, even if it was empty most of the time.
    Right now, it doesn’t look like she’s coming back anytime soon.
    He’d checked the phone as soon as he stepped through the door. Nothing. He’d checked the mail, but there was nothing apart from the usual bills, credit-card offers and a letter from the agency confirming his next shift on the rigs.
    Finishing the pizza, he walked up to Sarah’s room. It was next to his own bedroom, and he’d left it almost exactly as it was when she was a teenager: there were some posters of Blur and Pulp on the wall, an easel where she liked to paint, and bookshelves crammed with all the books she’d needed for her A levels. Nothing else. Just like her room in Cambridge, Sarah left little of herself in any of the places she stayed. She took everything with her.
    Her diary, thought Nick. It must be around here somewhere.
    He found it in the drawer of her desk. He skipped past the writing – she’d only kept it for about six months when she was seventeen – towards the phone numbers. There was a list of about twenty of them, all written in her neat, black lettering – Sarah updated it occasionally when she came to stay so she could call her friends locally, but she hadn’t touched it for at least two yearsnow. It was a long shot, he knew. Sarah wasn’t necessarily in contact with any of these people now.
But when somebody vanishes off the face of the earth, where else do