Exit wound

46

The Airbus’s first encounter with the Imam Khomeini International Airport runway wasn’t its last – it continued to bounce for several hundred metres before the pilot slammed on the reverse thrust. The fun and games were all lost on my neighbour. He jolted awake with a final snort, shot to his feet before the plane had even turned off the runway and started rummaging around in the overhead locker.

I stared out of the window. The Imam Khomeini International Airport had been built to commemorate the mastermind of 1979’s Islamic Revolution. The blurb in the seat pocket in front of me said it had opened officially in May 2004 and was designed to take over from Mehrabad as Tehran’s main airport for foreign air travel. Mehrabad, in the meantime, had been designated as Tehran’s principal domestic airport. Gripping stuff. Kettle would have been on the edge of his seat.

From my brief sweep of our surroundings as the plane trundled along the taxiway it was clear that IKIA was only half finished, whatever it said on the tin. Much of it was still a building site. Diggers tore along the perimeter fence, sending up clouds of dust behind them. Men with hod-loads of bricks over their shoulders stared at the plane as it bumped past them. The skeletons of half-completed buildings rose from the dirt on either side of the runway.

Beyond the fence, I could see nothing but scrub and rubble. Nobody was ever going to contest the building of another runway here; it might only have been twenty miles south of Tehran, but in reality it was in the middle of nowhere.

In the distance, half hidden by shit kicked up by the construction work, were rows of military transport aircraft – a hallmark of the developing-world welcome. There, among them, parked in front of a modern, single-storey building, was a gleaming white Dassault Falcon 7X.

As soon as the aircraft rocked to a stop, everybody sprang to their feet to follow the example of my farting friend, who was already elbowing his way down the aisle and powering up his mobile. I waited until the plane was three-quarters empty before I got out of my seat and pulled down my day-sack.

As soon as I stepped off the jetway into the terminal I could see big brother was watching me. There were CCTV cameras everywhere. I tucked behind a group of passengers from my flight and scanned the faces coming the other way. All I got back was a shed-load of gawping from suspicious-looking Iranians. I hadn’t seen a Westerner since we’d stopped off at Dubai.

The inside of the terminal was as modern as anything I’d ever been in. My Timberlands squeaked on the polished marble as I followed the signs in Farsi and English to Immigration.

The military presence was low-key until I got to Passport Control. Iranians and Arabs were directed one way; I was sent the other. I followed a roped-off walkway until eventually I ended up facing a stern-looking woman in her twenties seated in a glass booth. It was flanked by two AKs, each with a green-uniformed squaddie firmly attached. I glanced over my shoulder. The welcome was exclusively for me. I knew the best way to deal with situations like this was to look intimidated. People in booths like to wield power over others. It makes them feel good.

The woman adjusted the arms of her thick black specs beneath her thick black head covering and beckoned me towards her. ‘Passport.’

I handed it over. Now I was closer I could see her face was more Cindy Crawford than Ugly Betty. She had smooth skin, a small, slightly upturned nose, and gleaming white, perfectly uniform teeth. She looked so perfect she could have been chiselled. And, coming from Tehran, she might very well have been. More plastic-surgery and sex-change operations were performed here than in LA or Bangkok – another useless nugget I’d picked up among the stuff I’d learnt last night from Julian’s int pack.

She looked up from my passport. No smile, just disdain. ‘Your business, Mr Manley?’

First trick question. She was already holding my passport: the London media visa stated exactly what I was here for.

‘I’m here for IranEx – the aerospace and defence exhibition. I’m a journalist.’

She seemed to take it in her stride. She slid the passport under a scanner and stared into space while her computer crunched away at the data.

The two AK-holders glared at me as if I was George W himself. But that was OK: they got as much bullshit fed to them about us as we did about them. I just carried on playing dumb, not getting too smart, and looking a little bit scared.

Bang, bang.

I glanced down. She was stamping my passport.

‘Enjoy your stay in the Islamic Republic. Now I need your fingerprints.’ She pointed to a small box covered with a green rag. They used the same system in the US: place a finger on the glass tray and she’d take a picture. The only difference here was the absence of wipes, just the same bit of rag for everyone.

47

Like Iran’s defence industry, my little light reading in Tufnell Park last night had told me, its internal security apparatus shouldn’t be underestimated. Not much was known about Tehran’s counter-intelligence set-up, but what was, wasn’t good. No single organization appeared to have complete control. That was good to hear: it meant there were gaps in the system. The problem was, I didn’t know where the gaps were.

There were three groups I had to worry about. The first was MoIS, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or Vevak, as it was known in Farsi. It had around fifteen thousand full-time members all doing their meanest for the Republic. It had lost some of its powers in the 1990s following a scandal in which a truckload of Iranian dissidents, mainly Sunni Kurds, had ended up very dead – a fact that made even the lapdog Iranian press sit up and complain. Perhaps it had occurred to them that they might be next in the queue. To show it was still on the side of the people, the Iranian government drummed up some charges against what it called ‘rogue elements’ in Vevak and, after some ritual bloodletting, everybody went away happy. Except the rogue elements. They’d ended up facing Mecca, but six feet under.

In the meantime, the power of the second mob, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Intelligence Branch, had increased. Much smaller than Vevak, the IRGC Intelligence Branch were fearsome in their loyalty to the state – they were the Iranian equivalent of the Gestapo, in effect, and swore death to the enemies of the Islamic Revolution. I decided to try to give them a wide berth.

Then there was the Basij Resistance Force, a volunteer army of around a million people, mostly old men, who had volunteered after completing their military service, or others too young to join the army. A bit like the Hitler Youth, I supposed.

The Basij had a history of martyr-style suicide attacks dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, which had claimed a million lives on both sides during the 1980s. These lads were the ultimate guided weapon. They’d run across enemy minefields to clear them, or load up with explosives and detonate themselves on top of an Iraqi tank or trench.

Like the Stasi in East Germany, the Basij were also the ‘eyes and ears’ of the revolution. Put a foot wrong or badmouth the government and, chances were, someone, somewhere would tell the Basij. The next thing you knew, the lynch mob would be at your door.

The police force comprised around forty thousand regulars under the control of the Ministry of the Interior, but compared to Vevak, the IRGC and the Basij, these guys were pushovers. And even though the mullahs appeared to view women with complete contempt, it didn’t stop them recruiting tens of thousands into the ranks of the secret police.

I wondered where Ms Perfect fitted into this picture. Perhaps the Tourist Board corps.

My bag was the only one left on the carousel by the time I reached the baggage hall. It didn’t look as if it had been tampered with, but of course it had. Otherwise they would have let me take it on board as hand luggage, as I’d planned to.

I walked out into the arrivals hall and spotted a tall guy in his early thirties, in a very shiny black leather jacket, holding up a placard. He had a neatly groomed goatee and was so thin his Adam’s apple looked as though it was fighting to get out of his neck. A pair of round, wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his incongruously bulbous nose. The scrawl on the placard read: ‘Jame Munley – travel from Dubai’.

48

Majid Forsheh was from the Ministry of Information. He’d been assigned to me at the personal behest of the minister, he proudly informed me, to attend to my every need for the duration of my stay in the Islamic Republic.

One look at Majid, with his white shirt buttoned all the way up and no tie – an evil Western invention – told me he wasn’t just here to help me on and off the buses. Everything about him reeked of security. But what had I expected? If it was an open secret that defence exhibitions were crawling with spooks, then it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to get a minder. But that was OK, because I had no choice. Getting what Julian wanted – and, more importantly, what I wanted – was what I was here for. I’d just have to work around him.

Majid insisted on carrying my case as we walked to his car. ‘Did you have a pleasant trip, Mr Munley?’

‘Why don’t you call me Jim?’ I gave him a five-hundred-watt smile. ‘Fantastic, mate. Great passengers, good food and first-rate in-flight entertainment. I’ll never be touching British Airways again.’

Majid beamed like a lottery winner. ‘And what do you think of our new Imam Khomeini International Airport?’

‘I think the Ayatollah would have approved. Beats our Terminal Five hands down.’

‘Yes, it is most impressive, is it not, Mr Munley?’

We’d established, then, that Majid didn’t do sarcasm – and that he didn’t like the name Jim. Maybe I should have kept it more formal.

We stopped by a Mercedes E-class that had pulled over in a bus lane. A guy in a short-sleeved white shirt – buttoned up, of course – had been pretending to read a newspaper as he sat behind the wheel. He awoke with a start when Majid sprang the boot and shot out to help with my bags long after the moment had passed. He was in his sixties and balding, but had forearms the size of logs and shoulder muscles that rippled under his shirt. Wrestling was a big thing here, and this old boy looked like he could still go a few rounds.

Majid sat in the passenger seat. I got in the back. The airport’s public-address system called the faithful to prayer just as the sun began to set over the distant mountains.

‘I expect you are tired, Mr Munley, so we will go straight to your hotel. You are booked into the Bandar, are you not? Three stars. A very nice hotel, very central. Your people chose well.’ I caught his smile in the rear-view mirror. ‘This is your first time in Iran?’

My first time, I acknowledged. But on the basis of what I’d seen so far, it certainly wouldn’t be my last.

He turned around and shook my hand. ‘Then welcome. I hope you will enjoy your stay here very much.’

The wrestler pulled out of the bus lane and almost ran into a taxi. There was a screech of brakes and a sudden whiff of bubbling rubber, then an angry exchange between the two drivers. But one glance at Majid and the other guy got right back into his box.

That told me just about everything I needed to know. I’d been placed very firmly in the tender loving care of the IRGC’s Intelligence Branch.

49

‘The one and only difficulty with our new airport, Mr Munley, is its distance from the city centre. It will take us more than an hour to reach the hotel. No doubt you have heard about our traffic, Mr Munley.’

And the pollution, I felt like telling him, but thought better of it. Not that Majid took my silence as an invitation to shut up. I was getting the full Thomas Cook treatment.

‘Fortunately, we have a very good modern metro system. There are three different types of taxi, too. The yellow metered ones are best. There are also white non-metered taxis that ply certain routes, almost like a bus. And then there are private cars run as taxis, mostly by people in their spare time to supplement their income…’

He waved a hand theatrically. ‘But you don’t need to worry about any of this, Mr Munley, because for as long as you are here you are our guest and all your travel needs will be taken care of. The driver and I will pick you up at your hotel in the morning, I will be your escort at IranEx, and if you have any desire to see our city, then we will be only too happy to take you anywhere you please. My government wants your stay in Iran to be a memorable one.’

‘That’s great, Majid, thank you.’

These lads are OK, nine times out of ten. They’re very much like me in a way, victims of circumstance. Most think differently from what they say about the place they live because they have to live there. Most just toe the line and try to get by as best they can. The nutters who believe all the bullshit can normally be sniffed out very quickly. And even they eventually get to realize it’s all bollocks, no matter what side you’re on.

‘It is important to us that you see Iran in its true light. As a man of words, Mr Munley, I am sure you will already know that Iran is not the place it is characterized to be by certain sections of the West’s media. We are an open, democratic society and our only interest is in fostering peace.’

Try telling that, I thought, to the relatives of almost a hundred dissidents killed by Iranian assassins outside Iran in the thirty years since the revolution – or of the victims of the two hundred or so terrorist attacks around the world that had supposedly been given the backing of Altun and his mates.

Shia militias had been supplied by Iran, via Altun, with highly advanced IED technology, specifically to target our troops in southern Iraq. Missile technology was supplied on a regular basis to Hamas and Hezbollah. The list was endless. The missiles for Hamas and Hezbollah were aimed at Israel, even though there were tens of thousands of Iranian Jews, some of whom were in the Iranian parliament. They saw Israel as Zionist, not Jewish.

I treated Majid to another broad smile and turned my head towards the window. That’s just the way it is. If this lot weren’t the bad guys, then someone else would be. And I wasn’t looking for a cuddle.

We left the airport approach and drove past a hotel decorated with dozens of flags, not one of which I recognized. As we joined the newly tarmacked road for Tehran, I noticed some bodies standing on the roof of a brand-new multi-storey car park at the airport perimeter. They looked like soldiers or police, some kind of security presence. One was wearing a peaked cap.

There were three of them. The one with the cap had what looked like a radio pressed to his ear. Another was talking into a mobile phone, and the third was using binoculars to scan the runway.

Majid followed my gaze and shook his head. ‘Do you have these people in your country, Mr Munley?’

‘Sure. We have security everywhere. Brits are the most spied-on citizens in the world.’

The corners of Majid’s eyes creased in confusion. He looked almost hurt. ‘Mr Munley, I am not talking about surveillance. The people on this roof are interested in the aircraft that take off and land from this airport. It is their – how do you say? Their hobby?’

50

We hit the traffic in the southern suburbs and ground to a complete standstill. With petrol at about 5p a gallon, why would anyone bother to walk?

The road signs were in Farsi and English, and everywhere I looked I saw Paykans – the Iranian-built copy of the Hillman Hunter, a car that went out of production in Britain forty years ago. My dad used to have one when I was a kid. They only stopped making these things here in 2005. Not a moment too soon, judging by the shit coming out of their exhaust and adding to the thick smog. They looked like dustbins on wheels alongside the brand-new Renaults, Volvos, VWs and all the latest Japanese models on display.

As we trickled along, Tehran became more and more of a contradiction. One moment we were passing modern glass-and-steel office blocks that could have come straight from Dubai, the next I was staring into decrepit alleyways or at water-streaked concrete tenements that could have been designed by Stalin. And ten seconds later I could almost have been back in the Mall of the Emirates. Posters for Levis, iPods and Sanyo TVs were everywhere. Britney and Hannah Montana filled CD-shop windows.

Fast-food outlets sold Thai and Chinese on plastic trays. Young men wore Western clothes and shared hookahs at out-door restaurants. Outsiders might have expected angry crowds ready to stone any woman who showed a bit of ankle, but I saw plenty with their headscarves pushed back – a trick that must have kept them within the rules laid down by the ayatollahs, but only just.

If I was ever in any doubt about exactly where I was, the giant murals of Iran’s leaders, past and present, were constantly there to remind me. Top of the pops was Khomeini, whose face scowled back at me from the sides of buildings in every square we inched through. Next in the popularity stakes was the present Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and behind him the president, Ahmadinejad – the lad who had made windcheaters the must-have clothing item in this neck of the woods, and who’d threatened to wipe Israel and the West right off the map. The only way I remembered his name was by pronouncing it ‘Armoured-dinner-jacket’, but I didn’t tell Majid.

‘You like what you see, Mr Munley?’

‘It’s different.’

‘Oh? I have never been to London. Tell me.’

‘You don’t see murals of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair on the sides of buildings in London – but nobody liked them very much.’

Majid laughed.

We passed a billboard that displayed an evil-looking Bush, blood running from his pointed teeth. ‘Marg bar amrika,’ it said. I knew that one: ‘Death to America’.

Majid felt the need to explain. ‘You have to remember that in Iran our president answers directly to our Supreme Leader and the Supreme Leader is God’s chosen representative – a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. We note with amusement that it is Mr Ahmadinejad, our elected president, who receives a most unfavourable press in the West, but what your colleagues appear to forget, Mr Munley, is that it is the Supreme Leader who wields all the power. And the Supreme Leader, our spiritual guide, is given his mandate by God…’

There were also lots of posters in shop windows and pasted on walls showing the two main faces fighting the presidential election in June. Hard-liner Armoured-dinner-jacket and the reformist and former prime minister Mousavi. I’d lay money on who Majid was going to vote for.

Almost two hours after we left the airport, we finally arrived at a hotel that seemed to offer the best of both worlds – a tall glass-and-concrete number that looked like Stalin had designed it after a night on the piss at the Burj Al-Arab.

Majid handed me his business card and told me to call him if I had any problems. ‘Day or night, Mr Munley. I am here to help. May I suggest that you do not walk around the city? This is a free country, but Tehran has its darker side, like all capital cities, and the traffic can be dangerous. By now you will know that it can come at you from any direction. If you would like to go anywhere, see anything of our great city, Mr Munley, the driver and I will take you. It would be our pleasure. And please, Mr Munley, always have your passport with you at all times. For your own safety, you understand.’

As we walked towards the lobby, Majid pointed down the street to a busy junction. ‘We are on Mofateh Street. The big road that crosses it there is Taleqani Avenue. The Alborz Mountains – the range you saw as we drove in, and will see from your room – lie to the north of the city.’

He smiled again and this time I noticed a row of chipped white teeth. ‘Mr Munley, you have me as your guide. As I say, you can call me day or night. No problem too large or too small.’ He pointed to the card he’d given me. ‘What time do you want to arrive at the exhibition?’

‘How about as soon as it opens? I always like to be one of the first. Get to know the ground, that sort of thing.’

‘The exhibition centre is some way to the north. I will be here at six thirty. We have to allow for the traffic. Do you need any help checking in?’

‘No, you’re all right, mate. I’ll be fine.’

I bent down to get a view of the driver and gave him a wave. ‘See you later, mate.’

51

My room was on the seventh floor. It wasn’t much bigger than my cell at Paddington Green and stank of old cigarettes, but there was no point asking them to change from the one Majid had picked for me. How else would he have known what I could see from my window?

All the foreigners’ rooms would be crawling with surveillance devices. Even looking for the mikes and their transmitters would flag up things about me I didn’t want them to know. After all, I was just a geek journalist.

The view from the window made up for everything. I moved the plastic garden chair and got comfortable. Set between high-rise hotels and office buildings I picked out the spindly outline of the Milad Tower, the fourth tallest in the world, Majid had told me with some excitement, and the glowing minarets and dome of Khomeini’s shrine, another landmark he had proudly pointed out to me on the drive in.

I wondered what Altun was doing right now. Something more interesting than counting cars and minarets, I was sure. If his picture was anything to go by, he’d followed the Shah’s example and embraced all the trappings of the American Dream. Come the revolution, he’d slipped seamlessly into the new way of life. Maybe he was like the KGB guys before the Wall had come down, just someone who saw what was coming and adapted to make the best of it.

From then on, Julian reckoned, he’d been climbing the greasy pole. First as a back-room boy during the Iran-Contra scandal. He was still a back-room boy, by the sound of it, but one who’d helped Armoured-dinner-jacket into power – and was still the main broker when it came to deals between Iran and anyone who had a beef with the West. I bet that made him a very busy man.

The trouble was, Julian had no information on where he might be. It was reasonable to assume he still lived in the city, but that wasn’t going to help me get a cab to his place.

There was no getting away from the fact that this city was the capital of the most powerful and stable country in the Middle East. The lads buzzing about in their cars below me knew it wasn’t called the Persian Gulf for nothing. They were busy riding the Islamic fundamentalist wave and wiping out the last vestiges of a secular Middle East.

They weren’t doing the mad-mullah thing, though. They were cleverer than that. Armoured-dinner-jacket and his pals pursued Iran’s interests coldly, rationally and methodically. They were fighting an asymmetric war. Why take on the West militarily when they’d lose? Better to back a bunch of other nutters and let them do the fighting.

Everything boiled down to one central objective: clearing out the old Sunni order, the foundation stone of American interests in the Middle East. With Saddam – a Sunni – gone, they had a very friendly Shia government in Baghdad. They were backing the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both Sunni power bases. How long could they last? The Af-Pak situation was a nightmare, and a fight Obama might very well lose. Then there was US-friendly Saudi Arabia with a Sunni royal family to sort out – and Altun tucked away in the shadows, keeping the pot on the boil by supplying weapons and the means to fight the jihad without Iran having to commit a single soldier.

I turned my back on the view and started to sort myself out.

There was a single bed, a fridge containing a jug of iced water, a wardrobe, a phone, a table and two plastic chairs. There was also a Koran, a prayer mat and slippers, and an old twelve-inch TV. A notice on the table in English and Farsi proudly announced that the Bandar Hotel had ‘why-fi’. The motel we’d stayed at in Dubai had had nothing on the Bandar.

The TV was even older than I’d thought. It didn’t have a remote. I hit the ‘on’ button. It took an age to warm up. As the speaker mushed away, I slung my clothes into the cupboard.

I pulled the laptop out onto the bed and fired it up as the TV behind me finally swung into gear. A slightly fuzzy Oprah was talking to a big-haired woman about losing her home in the recession. I pushed the channel button to see David Hasselhoff saving the world in fluent Farsi and Columbo tripping up yet another bad guy who was too clever for his own good. I didn’t bother trying to find the BBC Persian channel. Aimed at the hundred million Persian speakers in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, it was sponsored by our Foreign and Commonwealth Office – so it wasn’t top of the pops in a government-approved hotel.

This place really was a mosaic. They watched our films and TV, and listened to our music. They wore our clothes and ate burgers. But they had no problem strapping on an explosive vest and taking on a tank or foot patrol. Not because Allah wanted them to, but because it was seen as the only way to win. One thing was certain: we needed to sort our shit out and prepare for what might be coming our way.

Everything on the laptop Julian had provided was seriously geeked up for Jim Manley’s world. There were articles penned by Manley for a whole string of defence journals, email correspondence with his ex-wife about how the property was going to be sold and the cash divvied up.

The system’s history was everything you’d expect it to be. I flicked through email traffic with editors, public-relations consultants, sources within Britain’s defence industry, even plane-spotters.

Plane-spotters.

The guys on the roof of the multi-storey.

I wondered.

I logged on to the hotel’s free why-fi network. These lads had taken to technology obsessively, just like us. Farsi is the most common language on the Internet after English and Mandarin Chinese. Armoured-dinner-jacket even wrote his own blog.

The grindingly slow speed made me feel right at home. Access details eventually came up on my screen. I tapped ‘aircraft enthusiasts’, ‘plane-spotters’ and ‘Iran’ into the search-engine and hit ‘enter’. This would have been Manley’s porn channel for the night. Up popped a website called www.iranianmetalbird.net. Magic. The little fuckers got everywhere, even in a dictatorship. Though the West was poring over every aspect of Iran’s infrastructure, the mullahs hadn’t thought to shut the Internet door.

The website tracked civil and military aircraft that had taken off and landed at most of Iran’s major airports, and was bursting with photos – lots of photos. I didn’t expect to see Altun waving at the camera, but I clearly had a long night ahead of me.

I started by doing what Jim Manley would do pretty much as soon as he arrived. I sent an email to my editor, telling him that I was in the city and going to work tomorrow. I added a note about my new best mate Majid and what a nice, helpful guy he was. Someone in a Tehran basement would be poring over this any minute now, and I wanted to give those lads something to smile about.

I went back to plane-spotting at IKIA as Oprah put the world to rights.

The first clutch of pictures was of C-130s departing IKIA, and a Chinese copy of the MiG-21 landing at Mehrabad. There was even an email address for the guy who’d taken this last one and posted his comments – in English: ‘A Chengdu F-7M used for training flights, tail number 3-7714, taking off from Mehrabad Airport. For more information contact Ali on ali@iranianmetalbird.net’.

There was a knock on the door.

‘Mr Munley?’

I pulled back the bolts and found myself staring at the unblinking eyes of my new best mate. Maybe he’d already read my email and was here to thank me for my kind words.

‘I am sorry, Mr Munley. I hope I do not disturb you, but I forgot to give you this. My profound apologies.’ He handed me a bubble-wrap envelope. ‘It is the press pass for the show and vouchers for food here in the hotel, a gift from Iran. They have no restaurant but will bring whatever you care for so there is no need to go out and face the traffic. Have you tried your mobile yet, Mr Munley?’

‘No, I just emailed my editor.’

‘Your mobile, unfortunately, Mr Munley, will not work. We are taking great steps to update our systems. So you have another gift, a mobile phone for the duration of your stay.’

He smiled and I smiled, both knowing it was all to do with keeping tabs on my calls – and, of course, being able to track me with it once I’d tucked it into my pocket.

‘Thank you very much, Majid. Very helpful.’

‘I will see you in the lobby at six thirty tomorrow morning. I wish you a pleasant evening.’

52

Tuesday, 5 May

0820 hrs

The traffic was bumper to bumper, just as Majid had predicted. It gave me some thinking time. I hadn’t bothered placing tell-tales in the room to check if it had been investigated while I was out. I was sure it would have been and didn’t want to flag myself up as aware.

When we finally arrived Majid came good. The area around the conference centre was chaotic. We glided through the crowd and past Registration with little more than a wave of his papers. A giant white banner ahead of us didn’t fuck around. It announced in two-foot-high red letters: ‘IranEx 2009 – The Achievements of the Islamic Republic that Will Make America Suffer a Severe Defeat’.

The tools of my new trade were proudly on display and I looked the part. My name badge was pinned to my shirt, my Nikon hung round my neck, and I had my laptop, tons of reading material and three thousand dollars in cash in my day-sack. The war on terror and the US trade embargo meant credit cards were a no-no.

I had another two thousand in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills and my Samsung satellite phone, all tucked far enough down both my Timberlands for me to fold the tops of my socks over them. An ordinary mobile was out of the question. I needed something secure to call Julian on, and to yell for help if I was in the shit. Anything but a satellite phone would be tracked and listened in to, which was why the Iranians wouldn’t allow them into the country. I’d only use it when I had to. The Iranians wouldn’t be able to listen in, but they would still see its transmission footprint. They’d come looking to find out who was using it and why.

Finally, my passport was in a neck wallet where it should be, around my neck. If I had to drop everything and run, I had the important stuff physically attached to me.

A few metres further on, surrounded by a crowd of admirers, were a tank and a fighter aircraft. The plane was set on a giant plinth; the tank on a mound of plastic rock. Both had been sprinkled with flower petals. The Third World War had collided with the Chelsea Flower Show.

Majid was looking at the aircraft the way most of the young guys I’d come across studied Zoo and Nuts. ‘You will know, of course, what this aircraft is – a Saegheh 80. “Saegheh” means thunderbolt, Mr Munley. As you can imagine, we are very proud of this achievement, because it is living proof that Iran can stand on her own two feet.’

I’d never given a whole lot of thought to aircraft, other than when I’d been jumping out of them or measuring the threat they represented. But I’d done my homework on the flight and recognized Iran’s first attempt to build an indigenous combat jet. I decided not to tell him that it was little more than a halfarsed improvement of the F-5E, an American fighter designed in the 1950s that had been supplied in quantity to the Iranian Air Force during the reign of the Shah.

Majid droned on as we circled the plinth. For the first time since I’d arrived in Iran, I saw something above the crowd that could only have been worn by a Westerner. Who else would walk about in a green floppy jungle hat covered with badges? As we got closer a tall guy with wavy light brown hair and a matching safari vest came into view. He was armed with a notepad and an impressive camera and set about photographing the Thunderbolt from every angle. He looked more spook than journalist. The other onlookers included an Iranian cleric and, judging by the medals and scrambled egg on display, a North Korean Army mega-general.

‘The Saegheh 80 is a joint project between the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force and the Iranian Ministry of Defence. The first prototype flew in 2004 and the first production variant entered service two years later. It is a multi-role fighter, every bit as good as the F-15 or the F/A-18 built in America…’

I nodded enthusiastically and took a few polite pictures before we moved on to a large exhibition hall that had been transformed into a one-stop shop for Armageddon. Most of the stands were given over to Iranian companies displaying models of aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles – Iranian copies of the drones the Americans used to hunt for bin Laden on the Af-Pak border – and every kind of weapon imaginable.

Majid stood with his hands on his hips gazing at the hardware. ‘Well, Mr Munley, what do you think? So much to see and so little time. It must be hard for someone like yourself to know where to begin.’

It was, though not for the reasons he suspected. I had to play the game for a while to bed myself in before trying to move on from the Iranian gear to the Russian. M3C was all I cared about. It was my only link to Altun.

I needed to remain as far as possible on ground Mr Munley was familiar with. ‘I’d like to see what Iran is doing in my field – surface-to-air missile systems.’

‘Of course. Then we should visit the stand of the Shahid Kazemi Industrial Complex. The managing director would make a good interview subject for your journal. He can tell you – honestly and openly – about all the great strides that Iran is making to achieve technological independence in this area. And he can tell you, too, how our defensive weapons are more than capable of defeating threats from potential aggressors to our nation.’

We stepped onto a stand whose centrepiece was a badly made model of a SAM battery. It looked a lot like the American Patriot system, with the missiles housed in vertical tubes on a mobile launcher, supported by two other vehicles: a launch-control cabin and a radar unit.

A tall, thin man with piercing brown eyes, a buttoned-up shirt and no tie stood centre-stage. His windcheater was probably on a hook behind the brochure rack. He was explaining to a South East Asian general, via an interpreter, how the system worked. As I leant forward to look more closely at the model I could see his badge. He was from Burma. The man holding court was the MD, Majid whispered in my ear, so we would have to wait.

The system was totally automatic and could engage as many as a hundred targets at once, the MD told his guest. ‘It can track, target and destroy threats at low, medium and high altitudes from as far as a hundred and fifty kilometres.’ And it was one hundred per cent made in Iran…

The Burmese listened politely to the MD’s sales pitch for a few moments more before wandering off as if he was in a street market and a lad was trying to harass him into buying yet more bin liners.

Majid stepped in and introduced me. I told the MD that I was preparing an article on man-portable air-defence systems and was interested to know what Iran was doing in this important field. My editor had promised ample page-space.

They conferred for a minute and, while it was all in Farsi, from the tone I pretty much knew how the conversation was going – Mr MD was wondering how much he could reveal to a Western technical journalist, and Majid was reminding him that this was a showcase of Iranian capabilities so he shouldn’t hold back.

Whatever passed between them, Mr MD relaxed. He started to tell me about a new shoulder-launched missile called the Misagh-3, which he claimed was even better than the latest versions of the American Stinger.

I jotted some notes and stuffed the brochure he gave me into my day-sack. If nothing else, it made me look like I knew what I was doing while I worked out how to get to M3C instead of listening endlessly to what the Iranians were doing in the name of the Great Republic.

53

Majid took me into a room constructed from three adjacent Portakabins. It looked like it had been air-dropped into Iran from the 1972 Ideal Home Exhibition, and the cigarette smoke hovering at face level gave it that extra stamp of authenticity. The work surface running around its edge was covered with brown Formica. The floor was covered with red and black marbled lino tiles that did their best to camouflage the burn marks from stubbed-out butts. Air-conditioning units were built into the wall, but none was switched on. They probably didn’t work.

On the left-hand side, some local journalists typed away on desk-top computers that Alan Sugar would have fired immediately. The light grey plastic had been turned black in places by years of handling, and the air vents looked like coked-up exhaust pipes. Several more journos jabbered into Bakelite telephones set up alongside them.

On the far side of the room two or three foreign journalists pounded away on their laptops. One was the guy with the jungle hat and long lens I’d spotted earlier. A TV in the corner was belting out Iran’s version of Sunrise. Same colour scheme, same rolling news at the bottom of the screen. The only thing missing was Eamonn Holmes. And his tie.

Majid waved his arm to clear some of the smoke from an Iranian journalist standing next to us. ‘This is the press centre. From here, Mr Munley, you can file your stories to your editor, check the latest announcements from companies at the show or simply relax. You will find everything that you need here, including free Internet access. Know that all your editorial needs can be met in this room. And if there is anything we haven’t thought of, then all you have to do is ask.’

Only part of me was listening. The rest was tracking a girl who’d just walked into the room. The scarf on her head didn’t quite cover her hair, which was so naturally blonde I knew she couldn’t be Iranian. She looked a whole lot like the one from Abba I’d fancied big-time as a teenager. I used to sit in the NAAFI as a sixteen-year-old boy soldier with my pint of Vimto and a steak and kidney pie, waiting for Top of the Pops to come on. ‘Dancing Queen’ had been number one for what seemed five years, and this boy soldier always hoped her reign would be extended one more week.

As she manoeuvred past us and sat down under the TV, it was like having Cinza walk by at the funeral. The Red Sea parted. I studied her face. And why not? Every other man in the room was. The high cheekbones gave her away. She was Ukrainian or Russian; eastern European, for sure.

The bit of me that wasn’t tracking her and listening to Majid was trying to work out how I could access the chalet line that Kettle had told me about – the VIP area where the execs hung out away from prying eyes; the place where the real deals were done and maybe Altun would be. I needed to head over to M3C and get an invite.

‘Majid, I need to do a comparison of the missile system I’ve just seen with what the Russians are developing in the same field. Are M3C exhibiting here?’

Majid riffled through the show guide. ‘They are in Hall Two, at Stand Three E – next door, in fact, to the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Complex. You know this company, I suspect, James… Do you mind if I call you by this?’

‘No problem, mate.’ I knew I should have said James at the airport. Never mind, he was coming around.

Majid inclined his head in a mock-bow. ‘After you have visited the Russian stand, I can take you to see the director of Shahid Hemmat. You will like this company very much, James. It represents the very best of our Iranian technology. Doubtless you heard of the rocket that Iran put into orbit last year? The company that built it was Shahid Hemmat. You will be able to give your editor a real exclusive, believe me.’

You had to hand it to him. When his days in the Revolutionary Guard ended, he could always become a salesman for Iran plc.

54

In the middle of the M3C stand was the SA-16M, the missile that Kettle had asked me to look out for. It was spotlit from above and the placard beneath it was printed in Farsi, Russian and English. A number of salesmen in mega-smart suits tried to get eye-to-eye as Majid and I studied the latest addition to their company’s product range. I wondered how much of a discount they offered for gold.

For once, Majid was out of his depth. M3C wasn’t Iranian and he had no authority here. What he really wanted to do was to haul me next door, so I could big it up with the guys who’d pitched Iran into the ballistic-missile club – or, as he put it, ‘The peaceful pursuit of the commercial space business.’

The Russian stand was among the biggest and slickest at the show. Behind the weapons and the display boards, there was a reception area staffed by two heavily made-up girls with orange electric-beach tans, their heads covered with red scarves. Their eyelashes fluttered like electrocuted daddy long-legs. Just beyond them was a row of office windows. Shadows moved behind half-closed blinds. A squat Russian with a shaved head came out and barked at the salesmen, then disappeared.

I stepped up onto the stand and approached one of the mega-suits. ‘Do you speak English?’

‘Leetle…’

‘Jim Manley, ADTM.’ I handed over one of my business cards.

One of the other suits stepped forward. He’d gone to the trouble of Anglicizing the name on his card. It read: ‘Paul (not Pavel) Sergeyev, Media Relations’. Great, the company spin-doctor.

‘Hello, how can I help you?’

I explained who I was and what I was after. The mega-suit and Paul (not Pavel) went into a huddle with one of the girls who began hitting her keyboard.

I turned to see Majid deep in discussion with a little guy in a white turban and brown robe at Rockets R Us across the way. He must have been warming him up for me.

Paul (not Pavel) reappeared by my side. ‘Mr Manley, please forgive me for taking so long with my colleague. We just wished to check your magazine. Of course.’

His flawless English carried a hint of an American accent. ‘Now, please let me show you our wonderful SA-16M.’ He pointed towards the missile with an open hand, like a game-show host introducing tonight’s star prize.

55

I followed Paul (not Pavel) the few steps to the missile. ‘Mr Manley. Your magazine, it’s a good publication. I have just seen that we have our people translate it for our technical staff.’ He smiled. ‘They learn much from it. What do you need to know about the SA-16M?’

‘You could start, I guess, by telling me something about its status. Is it in production yet?’

‘Yes, yes, it’s in production.’

‘And what’s so special about it? The SA-16 has been around for years.’

He nodded. ‘It remains a favourite with our customers.’

I didn’t remind him that a whole load of those customers were terrorists. ‘So, talk me through it.’

Paul (not Pavel) lifted the green tube off its stand. He stood with it on his shoulder. ‘The SA-16, as I’m sure you know, Mr Manley, has no IFF interrogator. The SA-16M – the improved version you see here – retains the simplicity and robustness of the original design but adds the IFF interrogator. We are conscious that customers demand high levels of safety and assurance from the weapons that we sell them and so we have provided Identify Friend or Foe technology in our product. Nobody wants to be responsible for… What do you British call it? A blue-on-blue? A friendly-fire incident, anyhow…’

‘Is that it?’

‘Well, there are some further modifications, but it would be wrong of me to discuss them in any depth.’

‘Countermeasures? It’s got to be. It’s all about getting the missile past the aircraft’s defences, isn’t it?’

‘You know your subject, Mr Manley. You look like you were once a military man…’

‘I was in the British Army. Way back. We used to fire the Blowpipe system. Not the easiest of man-portable weapons to use.’

Paul (not Pavel) laughed sympathetically. He was right. Blowpipe was a heap of shit. ‘I, too, was in the army, for many years. That is why I know this is an excellent piece of engineering for the man on the ground.’ He shrugged a little to adjust the weapon still on his shoulder. ‘It is completely fire-and-forget. It is so simple, a child could use it. And, with the SA-16M, the added bonus is that it is effectively immune to all the very latest countermeasure systems.’

I pointed at the missile. ‘I hear the seeker’s faulty.’

He laughed again, but uncomfortably this time. He took it almost as a personal insult. ‘No, these rumours are just that, rumours. We have been improving the seeker’s capability. It has been a period of development, not repair.’

‘Could you knock down an Apache with one of these?

He paused. ‘Mr Manley, you are drawing me into a technical discussion that I would prefer not to have. So let’s just say that with the SA-16M and even the non-IFF version, the SA-16, we have found an ingenious way of combating dark flares. That took some time to perfect. But if you know how to discriminate against dark flares, then you can defeat all countermeasure systems. You understand what I mean?’

I nodded. I did.

‘I expect you would like a simulation, yes?’

He handed me the missile launch tube. It felt pretty much the same weight as the Stingers I’d used in Afghanistan – against the Mi-24 Hinds these lads had flown in the eighties. Paul (not Pavel) looked the right sort of age to have been there. I threw it onto my right shoulder.

Paul (not Pavel) directed me to look through the sight. ‘First thing you must do is position the aircraft within the range ring – you need to keep it positioned there throughout the engagement sequence. The SA-16M is an all-aspect missile, which means you can engage the target from any angle. You understand?’

I nodded.

‘Next, you must interrogate the aircraft to see if it is friendly or not. The IFF interrogation switch is on the left-hand side of the gripstock. Here. You’ve got it?’

I felt for the switch with my thumb.

‘If the aircraft is friendly, it will transmit a coded signal back to the IFF interrogation system within the launcher. The system emits an audible signal that tells you whether the aircraft is confirmed friendly, possible friendly or unknown.’ He flicked a switch on the simulator console.

I heard a succession of short electronic beeps coming from the missile by my ear.

‘You hear that? That tells you the aircraft is a confirmed friendly.’

The beeps changed into a succession of longer signals.

‘This means possible friendly…’

The longer beeps changed into one continuous signal – a high-pitched wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

‘And this means the aircraft is unknown – for our purposes, therefore, it is the enemy. Clear so far?’

Clear, I told him. It was very much like a Stinger, but easier. Like he said, a child’s toy.

‘So, now you must select the arming switch, here on the other side of the gripstock. Feel it?’ He directed my forefinger to the switch. ‘Now, push it forward. This readies the weapon for firing – super-cooling the seeker to allow it to lock onto the target’s primary heat-source, most likely its engine. When enough infrared energy is detected, you will once more notice a high-pitched signal – there, you hear it?’

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…

Like before, only louder.

‘That tells you the seeker has a firm lock and is tracking the heat-source.’

Once the missile was tracking the target, there was precious little its pilot could do, Paul (not Pavel) said. The missile operator just had to flick a switch forward of the gripstock from safety to armed, then pull the trigger. Provided the aircraft was below 10,000 feet, its destruction was 99.9 per cent guaranteed.

Where the SA-16M differed from any other system on the market – certainly one this affordable, Paul (not Pavel) added, with a smile you’d normally get from a car salesman – was that it defeated all known countermeasures. He didn’t mention those mysterious dark flares again, but I had already lodged the term and Kettle could translate when I was back in London.

I couldn’t quite see why the Taliban or a group of head jobs on the Heathrow flight-path would need Identify Friend or Foe technology: as far as they were concerned, everything up there was the enemy. But what worried me most was that Saddam’s doors could buy a shed-load of this shit.

I heard raised voices coming from the neighbouring stand. The Shahid Hemmat Industrial Complex had been invaded by the Iranian press corps. Photographers, reporters and film cameramen were jostling for position. Some even seemed to be coming to blows as they tracked an entourage a dozen strong, some wearing military uniform, moving between the ballistic-missile and space-launcher models. At the centre of the entourage, in the glare of the film camera lights, was the guy in the white turban and brown robe.

I turned to Paul (not Pavel). ‘What’s happening, mate?’

The Russian looked at his watch. ‘It’s Mohammad Kermanshahi, the leader of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. He’s here for the press conference.’

‘What about?’

‘We are making a joint announcement with the Iranians.’ He glanced nervously at his watch again. ‘You will have to excuse me, Mr Manley. I need to make my way to the conference hall.’

When I turned back to Rockets R Us, I could see that Majid was being swept along by the crowd, against his will, towards one of the exits.

56

I slipped off the M3C stand and made my way to the exit furthest from the one I’d seen Majid jostled through. I pulled out the map of the exhibition centre and took a second to orient myself. The chalets were on the far side of the facility. A hatched line on the map indicated that they were segregated from the rest of the site by another level of security. The head shed didn’t want any Tom, Dick or Abdul invading their space as they talked business away from the prying eyes and ears of the exhibition halls. I wouldn’t even want to mix with people like me. If Altun was here, he’d want to be tucked away somewhere like that.

I passed through an exhibition hall filled with artillery pieces, rocket launchers and mortars, crossed the open area with the petal-strewn tank and fighter aircraft, and reached a barrier manned by a couple of AK-carriers. One was checking a pass by the driver’s window of a Toyota pick-up laden with bottles of mineral water and Zam Zam, Iran’s answer to Coca-Cola. I’d guzzled gallons of it in Afghanistan and got to quite like the stuff. It reminded me of the Strike Cola my mum used to buy in the Co-op to keep the dentist busy.

The guard returned the driver’s papers, raised the barrier and waved the truck through.

I flashed my press pass with the confidence that said, ‘Here it is, look at it, and fuck off,’ and kept moving. I ducked under the barrier and kept walking. Ahead of me was a row of single-storey executive Portakabins, with flags fluttering out front.

I pretended I knew where I was going and pressed on.

I found myself in a kind of avenue. The corporate hospitality suites stretched away to either side of me. There were clearly big bucks to be made here if you were in the mood to trade arms with the pariah state.

It was mid-morning and the sun was already high in the sky. The avenue was filled with people making their way to and from the chalets. Cars with blacked-out windows rolled past me. Crates of food and drink were off-loaded into kitchens. The aroma of spicy food hung in the air.

It was hardly the Excel Centre, but it was busy. Among the Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans and a dozen other dodgy former members of the Soviet Good Lads Club, I was just another white face. No one paid me the slightest attention.

I pressed on, turning to give the M3C chalet the once-over as I did a walk-past. It was much like their stand, bigger and slicker than the competition. The M3C logo, a stylized arrow bisecting a circle with a red star in it, fluttered on the company flag. A couple of BG straight out of Central Casting flanked the glass entrance. They were wearing sun-gigs and suits that couldn’t hide the weapons beneath their jackets. Five feet beyond them, engines running, were three very shiny black Mercedes saloons.

I’d walked past the chalet when I heard a crackle.

I turned.

One BG had a radio up to his ear. He brought it down and waffled back.

The other half snapped to attention and pulled open the door.

A third BG waited in the front passenger seat of the middle Merc.

A moment later, a man with slicked-back hair, sun-gigs and a khaki windcheater stepped out into the sunshine. He paused, as if to smell the air, and looked about him. He seemed particularly pleased with himself. Then, escorted by one of the BG who’d been on the door, he walked slowly down the steps and slid into the Mercedes.

I had a possible.

57

I dropped onto one knee and made like I was tying a shoelace. I tried to get my Nikon up. Too late. The Mercedes pulled out of its parking slot and headed in the direction I’d just come from.

I doubled back as quick as I could against the flow of people.

It was an E-class, straight from the showroom. I scanned it quickly for a VDM (visual distinguishing mark). The plate meant nothing to me: it was in Farsi. I needed something to pull it from a sea of other vehicles. It had four doors, tinted windows and five-pointed, star-shaped aluminium wheel hubs; all bog-standard, which was how Altun would have liked it. The only thing that distinguished it from any other brand-new black E-class 350 was a mobile phone antenna mounted on the roof with its left-hand blade bent slightly upwards. A set of chintzy green curtains was drawn across the rear window to provide that extra little touch of anonymity.

Every now and again the driver encouraged pedestrians to move out of the way with a blast of the horn. As the crowd parted, the car surged forward ten metres or so. It reached the Zam Zam barrier. I kept on fighting my way through the crowd.

The barrier lifted and the Merc rolled forward. It manoeuvred its way around the petal-strewn tank and the fighter, still heading for the exit. Maybe if I ran through one of the exhibition halls I could get to the head of the taxi line and intercept the wagon as it drove off-site. It picked up speed as the crowd thinned. Fuck it, I was going to lose him. I fired off about six or seven shots of the rear of the Merc. I’d learn the plate script.

But Altun wasn’t leaving after all. The driver turned down an alley to the side of the conference hall, the entrance to which was blocked by an armed sentry.

The two BG stepped out of the car and did their job, covering their principal against a shoot from both ends of the alley.

He darted into the building.

I ran across the road and muscled my way to the front of the crowd surging through the large glass doors.

A cordon of men clutching AKs to their chests directed us towards a huge staircase that curved up to the first floor. As I climbed, I spotted some of the journalists who’d been in the press centre and slipped in behind them. A Brit and a French guy were speculating on trade-fair gossip. I overtook them at the entrance to the conference room. There was another logjam. A phalanx of flustered media-relations people, some Iranian, some Russian, staffed a table to the right of the door. A woman in a headscarf was signing journalists in. The lad with the badges on his hat argued the toss with her in German. I could just hear her above the din. We all had to hand in our cameras. ‘The Ministry of Information will provide the pictures.’ She took his and gave him a numbered ticket.

Fair one. The Afghan warlord, Ahmad Shah Masood, had been assassinated two days before 9/11 by Al-Qaeda posing as journalists. They’d detonated a bomb rigged inside their TV camera.

More journalists milled around us and had a good honk. I was too busy deleting the Merc’s registration-plate pictures. I had to. If they had any sense they would check the cameras while they had the chance, and half a dozen hits of a VIP number-plate wouldn’t be good for business.

An extended hand almost hit my face. ‘Aha, James Manley, ADTM. We meet at last!’ The Brit I’d passed on the stairs looked up from my badge and we shook. ‘I’ve been reading your stuff for years. Some of us thought you didn’t exist, dear boy.’

I managed my best smile as the pissed-off German disappeared inside without his big lens.

He kept on shaking. ‘Collier. Military Systems and Components Quarterly.’ In his other hand, he was clutching a pipe.

This wasn’t the time for pleasantries. ‘Collier,’ I said. ‘Fuck off.’

He stood there trying to work out if he’d heard me right.

The woman was asking me to open my day-sack. She removed the Nikon and gave me a ticket. ‘If you have a mobile phone, Mr Manley, you need to keep it switched off while you are in the conference room. If you do not, it will be taken from you. You can collect your camera from here when the conference is concluded.’ She gave me a badge and waved me on.

58

The conference hall was built like a theatre. There were banked seats – around two hundred of them – leading down to a stage. Whole blocks near the front were filled with Iranians, all with the same red badges. The front row itself had been reserved.

The noise was deafening. Near the front, photographers jostled each other for a good view. The stage was bare except for a long table covered with a bright red cloth. Ten matching red chairs were ranged behind it. On the table there were two jugs of water, a glass for each seat, and three evenly spaced microphones. To keep the theme going, a single vase of flowers sat in the centre of the table.

Name-plates were arranged in front of each chair, but I was too far away to read them.

The only clue to the imminent announcement was a PowerPoint slide that erupted on a screen behind the table: Towards A New Era of Space Collaboration. It looked like Military Systems and his French mate had been right.

I flipped down one of the seats near the back and played about with my boot, trying to extract the mobile without looking like I was drawing a weapon. I got up again and made my way to the aisle, then down towards the melee of photographers. ‘’Scuse me, coming through, sorry, ’scuse me…’

The lights went down, leaving just the stage illuminated.

59

The auditorium fell silent as White Turban walked onto the stage. All the red badges jumped up and stood to attention. They stayed on their feet while more dignitaries filed in. Some went on to the stage, others to the VIP seats.

Then came my possible. He took the furthest seat on the right, not far from an emergency exit. His size, face shape and nose were all familiar. One of his BG kept the exit clear. The other stood behind his left shoulder.

I had to get much closer to make a positive ID and take a decent picture. I elbowed my way down towards him. I felt a tap on my shoulder and breath in my ear. ‘I have been looking for you everywhere,’ Majid whispered. He made it sound like an act of complete betrayal.

I turned to him as the waffle sparked up on stage. ‘Sorry, mate, I got lost trying to find you so I thought I’d just crack on.’

‘Please, James, do not get lost again. This will be a very important announcement. Something positive for you to write about. We listen now.’

Up at the table, White Turban leant closer to a microphone.

Majid nudged me. ‘This is Minister Kermanshahi, a very important man – a very powerful man.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘One of my colleagues will provide a translation.’

On cue, someone at the end of the table started to interpret, first in Russian, then in English. The announcement concerned the teaming of Iran’s illustrious rocket industry with Russia’s foremost rocket-manufacturing company, M3C. Nobody was actually calling a spade a spade and mentioning the word ‘missile’. The purpose of the teaming arrangement between Shahid Hemmat and M3C, explained the interpreter, was to help establish Iran as a true presence in the commercial space launch business. Using its long-standing experience, M3C would help Iran adapt its existing two-stage rockets to launch micro-satellites into space. At this point, there was a loud ripple of applause from the red-badge brigade. White Turban subdued them with a wave of his hand.

The presentations from the stage went on for the best part of an hour. My eyes never left my target. I was just too far away for a picture, and with Majid at my elbow I had no chance anyway. That didn’t matter just now. What did was that I’d found him. His eyes confirmed it.

The interpreter announced that the formalities were over, but the minister would be happy to take some questions.

Altun turned in his seat and gestured towards the emergency exit. The BG stepped forward. As the lights came on for questions he bent down to take his instructions. On the back of his neck a tattoo linked his collar to his hairline. I couldn’t see the pattern. I didn’t need to.

Altun moved swiftly to the emergency exit with Tattoo and the other BG.

I started to get up. I’d catch them outside.

A hand grabbed me.

‘I’m sorry, Majid, I need the toilet.’

‘No, James, we have to wait until the important men leave. It is very impolite. You must stay.’

A woman’s voice, clear, loud and confident, fired the first question. Her accent was Russian. ‘Minister Kermanshahi… I would like you to tell us about the military implications of this deal…’

It was Agnetha from the press centre.

Kermanshahi looked like he’d been hit by a tank round. He raised his eyes, shielding them against the lights that shone down on the stage.

Everybody turned to look at her, including Altun and Tattoo.

On the stage, the interpreter whispered something into Kermanshahi’s ear. His face tightened with anger. The interpreter picked up the microphone. ‘There are no military implications. Now, if you please-’

‘In particular, Minister Kermanshahi, I would like you to explain why Iran is acting as a broker in the supply of weapons built by M3C to-’

There was a howl of indignation from the red badges but my eyes were on the emergency exit. It was closed. Altun had disappeared.

‘Sorry, mate, got to go.’

I jumped out of my seat and ran up the steps. Majid called my name, but I wasn’t stopping for anyone.

As I reached the back of the auditorium, I collided with Agnetha. Two plain-clothes security men were dragging her out, kicking and shouting. I pushed back at her. ‘Out the fucking way.’

The security men stumbled back a pace, and I was gone.

60

I burst outside and raced around to the alleyway.

The gate was padlocked and the sentry had gone.

No time to stop and think. I had two known locations for him. Locations where I knew he’d been.

The first was M3C’s chalet.

I ran back to the avenue. My throat was dry and sore as I pushed through the crowds. Sweat streamed down my face and stuck my shirt to my back under the day-sack.

I looked right. No Merc.

Gulping air, I showed my press pass to the heavies at the M3C door and told the girl I was there to interview Paul (not Pavel), the media guy.

She was ice-cold, unsmiling. ‘Everyone has gone for all day. You are Mr…?’

But I was already running again, back towards the auditorium. What now? Back to Majid to get a bollocking for not being able to control my bladder, and lose the target? Or just fuck him off and keep looking?

It was an easy choice. The target was more important than Majid’s annual report.

The second known location was the Falcon, and I’d need the Nikon if I was going to do my bit for Julian.

61

I rushed outside the exhibition centre and flagged down a knackered eighties Peugeot taxi, one of the yellow metered ones Majid had gone on about. ‘Airport, mate – the airport. You understand?’

The driver wore a dirty T-shirt and dragged on a cigarette as we crawled down the road. A curtain of brown haze hung across the city. I inhaled a lungful of diesel and chemicals the moment I wound down the grime-covered window to scan for the Merc’s VDM. At least Altun, wherever he was heading, would be stuck in the same mid-afternoon traffic. Limo or not, it didn’t matter – Tehran’s jams didn’t discriminate.

I tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him I’d pay double if he got me to IKIA fast.

He shrugged his shoulders and pushed his hands towards the nightmare outside.

He spoke basic English and was determined to tell me about Tehran’s night life. ‘You want plenty drink, my friend. You like to party, mister?’

I looked up and caught his expression in the mirror. I was a breath away from being offered his daughter. I got out my mobile and checked the pictures.

‘Signal very bad Tehran, my friend, very bad. Ahmadinejad very bad. Mullahs very bad.’ He drew a finger, knife-style, across his neck.

They were crap: too distant and too dark. The mobile went back into my sock and Majid’s went out of the window.

By the time we got out of the city and the traffic began to thin, I’d learnt more than I’d ever wanted to know about what this man got up to on his nights off. And still no Merc.

Anyone caught with alcohol was looking at a public flogging or a prison sentence so they drank at private parties. ‘You like come my house tonight, mister, for drinking and girls?’ By now, we were on a long, straight dual carriageway that cut through the sand-salt desert towards the airport.

I shielded my eyes against the glare, searching in vain for any sign of a black vehicle ahead. The surface reflected the sunlight like a mirror. The temperature in the back of the taxi was unbearable, even with the window open.

Fifteen minutes later, I caught sight of the control tower in the haze. Ten minutes after that, we entered the airport perimeter. I looked at my watch. It had taken two hours to get there. The Merc would have warp-speeded it as soon as it was out of the city, but there was still a chance – unless the aircraft had been on the pan, engines turning. Unless he’d gone somewhere else entirely.

I reached for my cash and prepared to hand over a ten-dollar bill. Then I remembered it wasn’t my money but Julian’s and doubled it. My friend, the pimp, thanked me over and over as I jumped out of the Peugeot and looked up to the sound of aircraft engines crackling in the late-afternoon sky.

A white Falcon was climbing like a rocket, banking towards Tehran and, half masked by its pollution, those fucking Alborz Mountains where it would disappear from sight.

62

I tracked the Dassault until I lost it in the heat haze. Part of me was thinking about the phone call I’d have to make to Julian; part of me was wondering what I’d tell Red Ken and Dex when we met up at the final RV.

‘You very late, my friend?’

I glanced down. The pimp was watching me in the rear-view mirror.

‘We go Tehran, yes?’ Having seen the colour of my money, he clearly thought he must be on to a good thing.

Going back to Tehran to regroup, get a bollocking from Majid and probably get binned from the country seemed like a good idea. I’d get Julian to task me to carry on with the job and find him the Falcon’s destination.

But then I saw something glint on the roof of the multi-storey ahead of us. Somebody was up there with a pair of binoculars. I shook my head. ‘Nah, I’ll wait here.’

The driver shrugged, giving me the universal sign for whatever, and drove off.

I slung my day-sack onto my back and headed for the multi-storey. The sun burnt my face and I had to squint. A gust of wind blew in from the airfield, bringing with it the smell of jet fuel. I was dripping with sweat and my shirt was soaked.

It was a lot cooler in the stairwell – and, like the rest of the airport, the multi-storey was over-specified and under-used. Only one in ten parking spaces on the ground floor of this polished concrete building were occupied.

I began climbing the stairs. The sound of my footsteps was drowned by the roar of another aircraft taking off. The smell of aviation fuel was rapidly replaced by the stink of urine from a men’s toilet on the second floor. Busy or not, car parks are the same the world over.

The stairs finally led to a door on the fifth level. I waited for the sound of the aircraft to recede, then put my ear against it. I heard the murmur of young voices on the other side. I turned the handle and pushed.

The roof level didn’t have a single car parked on it – at least, none that was visible from my viewpoint. Half a kilometre beyond a waist-high wall around the edge of the building, the metal-and-glass roof of the airport terminal shimmered in the heat. To the right of it, I could make out the control tower and a revolving radar dish.

I could also hear the male voices very clearly now.

I stepped out onto the roof and closed the door behind me. Pressing my back against the wall of the stairwell, I stuck my head slowly around the corner.

There were three of them leaning on the wall, their backs to me. One was pointing across the airfield. Another was listening to a radio. The third guy was using a pair of binoculars to track whatever the first lad was pointing at. They were dressed in jeans, T-shirts and, despite the heat, thin windcheaters from the Ahmadinejad spring collection.

What I’d taken yesterday to be a military-style hat on the head of the guy with the binos, I now realized was nothing more than a baseball cap. He gobbed off excitedly to his mates, giving a running commentary of what he could see.

I started towards them, a big smile on my face, one hand up in a wave and the other shielding my eyes. ‘Hello, any of you guys speak English?’

The one with the radio turned and stared dumbly, then nudged his two mates in the ribs.

63

Foreigners weren’t a common sight for these lads – even at what was supposed to pass for an international airport. The guy with the baseball cap was the only one who sparked up – he seemed generally more confident than his mates.

‘Hello, who are you?’ He spoke, of course, with a slight American accent. They were all around the same age; somewhere in their early twenties.

I told them the truth – well, sort of. I flashed my IranEx badge at them. ‘James Manley, British aerospace and defence journal – Aerospace and Defence Technology Monthly.’ They exchanged doubtful glances with each other until I handed over my business card.

The guy with the baseball cap studied it, then looked at me. ‘You work for ADTM?’

‘You know it?’

‘Sure.’ He took a step forward and shook my hand.

I missed the names of his mates, but I caught his loud and clear.

‘Ali.’

Under the peak were two very clear and excited brown eyes. He kept smiling, like he was waiting for something from me as he held onto my hand and kept shaking. ‘Iranianmetalbird.net, you know it, yes? That is why you are here?’

One of Ali’s mates, a beanpole around six-four, spoke to him in rapid-fire Farsi. He didn’t like me at all.

‘There a problem?’

‘He wants to know what a foreign-defence reporter is doing at IKIA – a civilian airport.’

‘Not entirely civilian.’ I pointed to the military-transport aircraft I’d seen alongside the northern perimeter fence when I landed. I could still see them there, way in the distance. As a piece of point-scoring, it wasn’t up to much but it bought me a few seconds. ‘I came here to find you.’

He took a step backwards. ‘Me?’

‘Your website. It’s pretty well known in defence publishing circles back home. My magazine has been meaning to approach you for a while. IranEx gave me the opportunity to look you up. I take it that you’d be happy, Ali, if we could agree the right terms, for us to reprint some of the pictures that you post on the web, maybe even write some articles for the magazine?’

Ali looked at his mates, then at me. ‘You are offering me a job?’

‘A contract, possibly. But let’s see how good you are.’ I gave him a smile. It wasn’t going to be much of a test. ‘An aircraft, white private jet, took off from here a short while ago. Do you know what make it was?’

I liked his enthusiasm a lot more than the scowling glances I got from his mates.

‘Sure. A Dassault Falcon 7X.’

‘What can you tell me about it? Does it have a history here?’

Again, the beanpole interrupted him. This time, the conversation between the three got heated. Whatever was being said, Ali was clearly in the minority.

‘Is there another problem?’

Ali pulled a face.

I pointed at the beanpole. ‘What’s up with him?’

‘He wants to know why a foreign-defence journalist is interested in a commercial aircraft. A corporate jet, of all things. This has nothing to do with the military, he says. Perhaps he is right.’

‘I’m interested because it’s registered to a Russian aerospace company that’s exhibiting at the show – at IranEx.’

Ali smiled. ‘You mean, a Russian missile company that’s exhibiting at IranEx.’

‘You know about this company?’

‘There’s not much I don’t know about the aerospace business, Mr Manley.’ He beamed. ‘It’s my hobby. You could say it’s my life. Why else would I be up here?’ He flung his arm around the expanse of tarmac and desert as another 747 rumbled down the runway.

He stopped playing helicopters and pointed towards a low building faintly visible through the dust of the construction work on the other side of the airport; the building I’d seen the Dassault parked in front of when I’d touched down yesterday. ‘That’s M3C’s own private terminal. From the air-traffic movements of its corporate jet fleet, it is very obvious to us that M3C is doing a lot of business with my country. We are not stupid. If we posted the movements of M3C aircraft on our website, we’d find ourselves in a lot of trouble.’

‘You have data?’

He smiled. ‘We see everything that flies in and out of this country.’

The other two shifted uncomfortably.

‘I’m doing a story on this company, Ali. Aircraft and the weapons that can take them out the sky, that sort of thing. I need to know where that jet has been over the past few days. It gives the article a bit of excitement – you know, international company jetting around the world, that sort of thing. Did you see any of the people who boarded the plane?’

Ali shook his head slowly. ‘No, it was on a pan the other side of their terminal.’ His voice went up an octave. ‘But isn’t the 7X a great bird? It only entered service in 2007. This is the very first one we have seen in Iran.’

It was still as hot as an oven and we’d been standing out here long enough.

‘Ali, I’d like you to show me everything you’ve got on that jet.’

‘I can show you its flight paths on my computer at home.’

‘Let’s go, then. Where do you live? The magazine will pay you, of course.’

He smiled again. ‘That’s good, Mr Manley, because I drive for a living. And, to be honest, it’s not much of a living right now.’

64

He lived in a southern district of Tehran; a journey, he said, that would take us around an hour from the airport. We drove there in his sparkling white Paykan. He told me proudly that it was nearly fifteen years old, but it looked almost new. His father had lovingly maintained it. The taxi really belonged to his dad, but now he was ill and Ali had had to interrupt his studies at Tehran University to drive it and help make ends meet.

He seemed like a decent enough lad. As we left the airport behind, I apologized for the trouble I’d caused him with his mates. They’d gone one way in the car park and we’d gone another. When they’d parted, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

As we drove through the desert on the southern approaches to Tehran the rift still seemed to hang in the air like smog.

After a long silence, Ali finally sparked up. ‘Do not feel bad, Mr Manley. The thing that unites us is our mutual interest – planes, aerospace, technology. We get on, but they are not like me. There are – how do I say? – differences between us.’

‘You’re all geeks like the rest of us, aren’t you? What’s not to like?’

‘I am a Kurd, Mr Manley.’

‘A Kurd and so a Sunni, eh?’

With both hands on the wheel he shrugged and smiled.

‘Not much going for you here, is there?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘A minority in my own country, Mr Manley. Qasim and Adel, on the roof, do not feel this way themselves, but their families certainly do. Their fathers do not like them to spend time with me.’

‘Know the feeling, mate.’

‘I do not feel Kurdish. I consider myself an Iranian, a proud Iranian. But not everyone looks on me the same way.’

‘Know that feeling too, Ali. Almost like being invisible sometimes, yeah? They want to get in your taxi because they want a lift, but don’t really want to be seen with you…’

We passed another poster of Bush with vampire teeth. Ali kept his eyes on the road, glancing occasionally in the rear-view. ‘Do you believe Iran will go to war with the West?’

It was already, but in a cleverer way than he was thinking. ‘Dunno, mate. You?’

‘Our economy, Mr Manley, is deteriorating and unemployment is a disease. I believe it is one of the key reasons why our rulers are spoiling for a fight with the West. When your world is falling apart, it is always preferable, is it not, to blame someone else? Especially Great Britain.’ He looked across to me for some encouragement.

‘Always. It’s what people do.’

He liked that. ‘My father always says that if you trip over a stone you can be sure the British man put it in your way.’

It was a fair one. The Brits had been the main colonial power in the region for two hundred years. There was bound to be a lot of resentment. I’d be pissed off too.

‘My father says that you are more cunning than the Americans and you use them as glove puppets. That’s why Bush is on all posters and no British man.’

‘I don’t think we’re that clever, mate.’

‘Maybe, but I believe that our government is determined to have a war with the West and that there is very little that ordinary Iranians can do about it.’

‘Sounds like you’re not much of a fan.’

‘We Iranians lost over six hundred thousand people in eight years of war with Iraq, and millions more were injured. The war was not started by Iran – it was Saddam Hussein. He invaded Khuzestan province. In the name of Allah, in the name of Holy War, the mullahs sent millions of Iranians to the front.

‘I studied history at university, Mr Manley. I know about conflict – trench warfare, poison gas, wave upon wave of young men cut down by machine-gun fire. So I think Iranians should have had enough of it, but the lessons of the past are easily forgotten. I am not afraid of you, Mr Manley, but Qasim and Adel are. They believe what they are told – that Israel and the West want Iran’s destruction. When they see a foreigner, it frightens them. They think foreigners bring trouble for them. You’re not going to bring trouble for us, are you?’ He turned to me.

‘No, mate. I’ve got enough of my own.’

He smiled. ‘That’s good, Mr Manley, because my father was a warrior in the war and I would fight also for my country. I may not be a fan of my government but I would never do anything to hurt Iran.’

‘Call me Jim.’

We pulled off a main drag and manoeuvred our way down a cobbled alleyway, narrowly avoiding the people walking on both sides of us. This wasn’t the London-, New York- or Paris-priced part of town. There was no pavement. Waste water ran in an open channel along the middle of the street. Tall houses with shuttered windows cut out most of the light.

It was coming up to six o’clock. The modern supermarkets and malls I’d seen in the north of the city had been replaced by holes in the wall – dark, dingy shops that seemed to sell everything from car batteries to carpets.

The people we passed were dressed more traditionally than the Iranians I’d seen in the central and northern part of the city. There were lots of turbans and women in chadors. But I wasn’t getting the stares I’d expected. Just like the housing estate I’d lived on as a kid, it didn’t matter what colour you were or where you came from. The one thing that bonded people here was that we were all in the shit.

‘Where are we?’

‘Bazaar Mahfouz. It is part of the Tehran bazaar. It has ten kilometres of covered stores and alleyways. It is, I believe, what you call a maze and where we live is just a tiny part of it. Jim, you have nothing to fear.’

I wasn’t worried. I felt quite at home in any low-rent area.

He smiled and turned into a narrow cul-de-sac. He parked alongside a wall and switched off the engine. ‘From here, we walk.’ He opened the boot and removed a canvas cover for the Paykan. ‘This is the Kurdish-Sunni part of town. Everyone leaves us alone here.’

That made my day. With luck it would keep Majid off my back.

I helped him pull the cover over the roof, then followed him out of the cul-de-sac and into a covered alleyway lined with yet more shops.

65

As we walked past the concrete blocks, turning left, then right every few metres or so, we passed all kinds of traders. On one street they sold nothing but carpets; on another, books were all the rage, including a lot of English textbooks.

The election posters in the shop windows round here were all of Mousavi, greyer hair and beard than Armoured-dinner-jacket, and with a steady gaze behind wire-framed glasses instead of the president’s squint. Green rubber wristbands in support of him were on sale everywhere.

‘Like I said, this is the Sunni part of town. Our president does not get any support from here.’

‘Who do you think will win?’

Ali just shrugged. ‘Even if my sister’s vote makes the difference and Mr Mousavi wins, it will not matter. The president will be re-elected, of course. No election will change anything. That can only be done by the Supreme Leader. He decides everything.’ He smiled and pointed at one of the posters. ‘Even who can stand for election.’

I started off trying to memorize the route, but soon knew I’d be in trouble if the shit hit the fan. After several more twists in the journey, I was completely lost. Traders at every corner tried to sell me a hundred and one things I didn’t want, from flip-flops to melons.

We ducked into another tiny alleyway and passed a cafe with a handful of tables spread under a patched awning. The lads were all linked up to a hubble-bubble. There was hardly room to pass by and my nostrils filled with applewood smoke.

An old man sweeping shit out from under the chairs caught Ali’s eye and waved. Ali waved back. They gave each other a burst of Farsi.

We walked on. I glanced back over my shoulder. ‘What’s he on about? Me?’

‘No, just chit-chat, but a little bit formal. We have to be formal – respectful – with people older than we are. He is my father’s friend. We used to come here to meet him for a breakfast of fried egg and meatballs in the days before my father became ill.’

Talk of food made me hungry all of a sudden. I hadn’t eaten since about six this morning.

‘When I could eat no more, my father would drive me to Mehrabad airport in the Paykan so we could watch the planes taking off and landing. This, for me, was the perfect day.’

Ali told me that his family had lived in the bazaar ever since his great-grandfather had crossed the border from Iraqi Kurdistan. He’d made a fortune trading sugar. The family had built a large house in the bazaar on the proceeds and Ali was old enough to remember what it had been like when his grandfather had still owned the entire building.

The Shah had tried to break the power of the bazaris by building roads through the district. He’d failed, because the bazaar was too big in every sense of the word. At the time of the Shah, almost half of the country’s retail economy had pumped through its streets and alleyways and over the years the bazaris had branched out into new disciplines, like money-lending and banking.

After the revolution the mullahs had decided the bazaris were getting above themselves so they encouraged the growth of shops, supermarkets and banks in the central and northern part of the city. That way they’d fucked up the bazaris’ power base and managed to achieve what the Shah had failed to do.

Under Ali’s grandfather, the family business had collapsed. To pay off his debts, the old boy had converted their home into apartments, selling off every floor except the top one, which was where Ali now lived with his father and his sister. Life, clearly, wasn’t easy.

We emerged into a courtyard and Ali pointed to the large, red-brick house opposite. It had an ornate double door for an entrance and big balconies with carved stone pillars rising to the fifth floor. It looked like a Venetian palace. ‘This is where we live, Jim. Come.’

He pushed open the door. Inside, dim electric light fizzed from a bare bulb hanging from the flaking painted ceiling. Rubbish littered the cracked marble floor. There was a rank, putrid smell – either the rotting rubbish in the bins I could see under the stairs, or perhaps something had died.

There was an ancient lift, too, but it had jammed fast between two floors and looked like it had been there since the time of the Shah. The lift well, as we passed, seemed to be the main source of the stench.

Ali climbed the stairs ahead of me, our footsteps echoing off the walls as we made our way to the fifth floor.

‘Jim, it would please me greatly to work on your magazine.’ He started taking the steps two at a time. ‘And my sister Aisha would be so happy!’

Halfway up, Ali’s mobile beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open. ‘The signal is so bad here that I only pick up messages when I am on the second floor.’ He stopped to read the message, swore under his breath, then broke into a run.

I called after him, but he was already half a floor ahead of me, taking the steps in threes. I didn’t catch up with him until we reached the apartment door. ‘Ali?’

He was breathing hard and fumbling in his pocket for his keys. ‘It’s my sister, I-’

The door was opened by a girl in her late twenties, with heavy kohl-laden eyes and long dark hair. She wore frayed jeans and a T-shirt with a photograph of Bono just about to swallow a mike.

She glanced at me and cut away just as quickly to focus on Ali. She spoke fast, pulling him into the apartment as she did so. There was a look on her face – one that I knew from years of soldiering and a whole lot more of shitty times.

Somebody was either dead or dying.

66

I followed them along a dark corridor into a room with tall French windows. Dirty full-length net curtains blew into the room. There was a double bed with a large carved headboard set against the far wall. A ceiling fan that wobbled on its axis above it pressed the sheets against the outline of a body. Despite the open window and the fan, the room remained sweltering. Voices drifted up from the street below. The melons and flip-flops were still on special offer.

Ali jumped onto the bed and pulled back the sheets. His father was curled in the foetal position, a bag of bones in a pair of stained pyjama bottoms. Every inch of his sweat-covered skin seemed to be scarred with short, angry red welts, like someone had turned a sandblaster on him years ago.

The girl knelt by the pillow and mopped his face with a flannel. The fact that he was shivering was the only way you could tell that he was still alive.

The girl lifted one of his eyelids. From where I was, just behind her, I could see that the pupil was as small as a pinhead. His breathing was painfully shallow.

Ali felt for a pulse. His sister stood up and put her ear to their father’s chest. Their eyes met and she gave a small shake of the head before turning to a chest of drawers.

‘Ali, you need help? I am-’

The girl raised a hand to me as he moved back towards the bed. ‘No, but thank you. We know what to do.’

Ali manoeuvred his father into the recovery position.

The girl held a syringe to the light, flicked it with her finger to work the air up, and squirted a small jet of the fluid from the needle.

Ali took hold of his father’s wrist and tried to find a vein. He looked at his sister and shook his head. She just shoved the needle into his arm, below the shoulder joint, and depressed the plunger.

I picked up the box from the top of the chest. The drug was American: Naloxone. They used it for acute cases of heroin overdose. Ali’s sister knew they didn’t need to get a vein up: straight into the muscle would do just as well. They’d been here before.

67

I turned back to see the two of them stroking their father’s wet grey hair away from his forehead. Ali checked his cheap market Casio as he and his sister murmured to each other. If the Naloxone worked, Dad’s pulse would become stronger and his breathing more regular in about five minutes. If there was no visible improvement within ten, there’d better be a doctor in the neighbourhood.

Right now I didn’t exist to them. It wasn’t the time to push them for what I wanted. I shut up and looked out over the broken rooftops, cluttered terraces, telephone wires and washing-lines stretching away into the middle distance. There was a thick forest of TV aerials and satellite dishes as far as the eye could see. The dishes weren’t allowed by law, but this was Iran. Another contradiction – and I bet there were plenty of viewers sitting down in front of their TV with a plate of kebabs to watch the BBC.

It was fifteen minutes or so since we’d stepped into the apartment and the Naloxone was doing what it said on the tin. Some colour had returned to their father’s skin. His breathing was stable.

The girl looked at her brother and gave him a faltering smile. The danger appeared to be over – for now.

Ali got to his feet. ‘Jim, this is my sister, Aisha. Aisha, this is James Manley, an English journalist here for the defence exhibition.’

She got to her feet. She brushed her dark hair away from her eyes. ‘Mr Manley…’ Like Ali, she spoke excellent English with a trace of an American accent, and a tone that betrayed the fact she wasn’t too pleased to see me.

Ali beckoned me towards the door. ‘We will need to keep my father under close observation for the next two to three hours. After that, God willing, he should make a full recovery. Aisha will watch first. You and I, meanwhile, can talk.’ He gestured towards the bedroom door. ‘Please…’

68

I followed Ali through the room and out onto a balcony. The sun had just slipped below the horizon. Night was falling fast and with it came the chorus of wailing. We seemed to be hemmed in on all sides by minarets.

Ali leant on the balustrade and stared at the street below. ‘I’m sorry you had to see my father like this. He is a good man, but he suffers.’

‘What happened to him – the scars? The war?’ That type of shrapnel injury does things to a man. I’d seen it.

‘Would you like a drink? I don’t drink myself, but my father always has whisky – black market.’

‘No, mate, I’m all right.’

‘Aisha will bring us something. Some chay, perhaps – tea.’

I asked him again.

He shrugged. ‘When Aisha and I were little, we used to ask him about the scars. He always used to tell us that he’d fought off a fire-breathing dragon.’ He gave a bad dragon roar and then a smile. ‘He used to breathe on us just like that, holding his hands up like claws, and making this noise – the noise that the dragon made when it breathed fire at him. We used to run away, squealing and laughing…’ His voice tailed away.

‘What happened to him, Ali? In the war?’

Ali beckoned me to a carved table in the corner of the balcony and invited me to sit down. He pulled up a chair next to me. For a moment, he stared out over the rooftops, a faraway look in his eyes. Then he reached into his pocket. He produced an object wrapped in an ornate, gold-embroidered cloth, the kind of thing I’d been dodging during my walk through the market. He started to unwrap it, but was disturbed by a noise inside the apartment – the sound of a door closing. He rewrapped it quickly and placed it back in his pocket just as Aisha walked in. He smiled at her. ‘How is Father?’

Out of some kind of respect thing for me, perhaps, he spoke in English.

‘Resting.’

While there was something childlike and innocent about Ali, Aisha was every inch the big sister. She still wasn’t impressed with me.

I held her gaze. ‘How often does this happen, Aisha?’

‘Often enough, Mr Manley. But we will cope, we need no help.’

Fair one, keep my nose out. It was clear she didn’t want me here. Except that I’d been dragged headlong into the apartment of an overdosing heroin addict, it was none of my business.

‘Would you like some tea, Mr Manley?’

‘Tea would be good.’

As soon as she had left the room, Ali retrieved the object from his pocket. He set it on the table and unwrapped it again. ‘I am sorry, Jim, but my sister doesn’t like me talking about certain things, things that interest me, but are of no interest to her – and especially in front of strangers. But, if you will allow me to say so, you do not feel like a stranger to me. I have always wanted to do what you are doing – writing about military technology, aircraft… hardware, I think you call it. And that you were looking for me is such a compliment. I feel very privileged.’

With a final flourish, he unfolded the cloth and produced a military medal inscribed in Farsi.

69

He passed it to me. ‘My father joined a Basij Battalion – a volunteer battalion. They ended up in a village in the desert somewhere west of Khorramabad.’

The decoration was thin and tinny, but those things didn’t matter to any soldier from any country the world over.

‘The Iraqis attacked and our forces counter-attacked. The village changed hands many times. My father was a lieutenant, in charge of a platoon of young Basij. Most of them were just fourteen or fifteen.’

I passed the medal back and he polished it with the rag.

‘My father was ordered to carry out a first-wave assault on the village. They had to attack across the minefields, using their own bodies in the name of jihad to clear them so that the main force of Revolutionary Guards could follow through and wipe out the Iraqis. He did not hesitate. He and his men assaulted the enemy across the minefield. That was when my father was injured. A mine blew him up, but he and his soldiers who survived the minefield still fought on and took the village. The Revolutionary Guard were not needed. And he received this for his bravery.’ He held up the newly gleaming disc. ‘A martyrdom medal. The highest award you could receive. The Supreme Leader himself presented it. War is a terrible thing, James, but for my father to have been decorated in this way, for what he did, is a very big honour. It is one of the many reasons I love my father so… and why I forgive him for what he has done.’ He wrapped the medal back in the rag.

‘The drugs? That could happen to-’

‘No, Jim. My mother, he was a terrible man to her. He beat her – sometimes I would come home from school and she would be lying just there.’ He pointed under my chair. ‘In her own blood. My father would then cry and beg forgiveness, and she would give it.’ He stood up and put the martyrdom medal back into his jeans. ‘I keep it with me. Always.’

‘You should be very proud, Ali.’

He stood up. ‘I am, Jim – very much. Now let me show you what I know about the Falcon.’

70

I’d never been able to understand what made grown men stand at railway stations or airports writing down numbers – or play golf, come to that.

Ali’s bedroom shelves were lined with books, some in English. There were hefty volumes on engineering and reference books by the yard on all kinds of aircraft. Maybe this subject and this room were where he’d retreated when the trouble started at home.

Ali opened an antique desk. Inside was a laptop. He fired it up, snatching the odd glance at his father through the adjoining door as he waited for it to come online. I sat and got on with my glass of very sweet black tea. Through the open door, I had a good view of his dad. He was sleeping soundly now, as the fan battered his bedding once more.

Ali kept his voice low. ‘First, I need to log on to iranianmetalbird.net to see if there have been any unusual movements…’ He tapped some keys and his home page came up. He traced his finger across a table. ‘Both main airports, Jim – IKIA and Mehrabad. From this time column I can see which aircraft have landed and departed.’

‘In real time?’

‘Let me show you.’

He typed in further instructions and the screen changed. This time a digital map of the entire Gulf region appeared. Moving across it were hundreds of letters, numbers and what I’d always known as ‘tracks’ – dotted lines that charted an aircraft’s speed and heading.

I checked the time in the corner of the screen against my watch. Everything was happening live. ‘How do you get into data like this?’

He looked at me and smiled because he knew something Mr Manley didn’t. ‘IKIA is my country’s pride and joy. The government bills it as a modern airport comparable with the best in the world – Singapore, Dubai, Denver… It’s not, of course, but one of the things they upgraded at the time they built the airport was an air-traffic reporting centre for the Tehran region and, unlike the airport itself, it’s pretty good.’

‘You hack into the air-traffic-control computer?’

Ali was now in full-on geek mode. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. A commercial aircraft, as I’m sure you know, Jim, will transmit a constant stream of data to centres like these – where it is, where it’s heading, lots of different information. The data is transmitted essentially in the form of an email. The emails are encoded into radio signals, and if you have a good scanner, you can intercept and receive those signals.’

His smile turned into a big grin. ‘A member of our group has a scanner linked to his laptop and some decoding software that allows him to see the position and heading of any aircraft in the region. What you are looking at is the result. We post it on a secure site to which a handful of us have access. In any other country, this wouldn’t be illegal – in fact, the scanner and the software are standard equipment for spotters in most parts of the world. But this, my friend, is Iran. We have to exercise some care…’

He hit some more keys and the screen changed. I checked the digital clock. This time, we were looking at a representation of the air-traffic picture as seen by a controller at the Tehran reporting centre a little after five o’clock local time – pretty much the moment at which the Falcon climbed away towards the mountains.

Ali peered at the screen. ‘Now, let’s see…’ He used the tip of a biro to point at a dot that was slowly tracking away from Tehran.

I got into geek mode too. ‘That’s our bird?’

He nodded.

‘What can you tell me about it?’

He hit the keys again and a small panel appeared next to the slowly tracking dot. ‘This tells me almost everything I need to know. Type of aircraft: Dassault Falcon 7X. Fuel status: full. Destination: Quetta, Pakistan…’

‘Does it give a passenger manifest?’

‘It flew out empty. There were no passengers.’

I looked at him to check he wasn’t taking the piss. ‘You’re sure no one was on board?’

He was busy on the keyboard. ‘Sure, the catering company only delivered meals for the pilots.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘See? It says so right there. Two different menus in case one man gets food poisoning. Just two sets of meals, Jim. It’s going to Quetta empty. Maybe to pick someone up or something. Who knows?’

‘Are you able to track back?’

He gave another of his little smiles. ‘You mean, review the historical air-traffic picture? Sure. How far do you want to go?’

‘I’d like to know the aircraft’s status when it first flew into IKIA.’

‘Two days ago, correct?’

I nodded.

Ali started to type. A few seconds later, the screen changed. He leant forward, said something under his breath, and rekeyed the data.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. You don’t often see this…’

‘See what?’

‘The aircraft did not file a flight plan. Do you know where it flew in from?’

‘The UAE.’

He flicked open a notepad and leafed through. When he found the page he needed he ran his finger down a set of letters and numbers next to the margin.

‘What are those?’

‘Registration numbers.’ He flicked to another page and typed in some more data. He leant forward. ‘Ah, OK…’

‘What?’

‘I made the mistake of thinking that this is a commercially owned aircraft. It isn’t.’

‘No, it’s an RF registration. It’s almost a military aircraft.’

He pointed to the dots and tracks criss-crossing the Persian Gulf, before picking one of them out with the tip of his biro and following it – a track heading north out of Dubai.

‘The software “sees” all commercial air traffic along with all the details of a particular flight. Take this one, for example. From the data on the screen I know that it’s an Emirates flight out of Dubai, that its registration number is A6-ZDA, that it’s en route to London and that it’s at fifteen thousand feet and climbing.’ He then pointed to some untagged dots within Iranian airspace. ‘You see these? These are all uncorrelated tracks. The system registers their presence – it has to know where they are for it to operate safely – but the tracks themselves carry little if any data. Some do not even carry call-signs.’

‘And those are military flights?’

‘Yes. The Falcon effectively fell into this category when it flew out of UAE two days ago, but reverted to a civilian mode of operation inside Iran. That is very odd. They must have been keen to hide something.’

He geeked about the screen a bit more. ‘Would you like to see the photographs?’

I couldn’t help sitting upright.

‘I told you, Jim. Nothing flies in and out of the country that we don’t know about. We had never seen a Falcon 7X before. It is a very rare bird. When it was on the ground we photographed it from every angle we could.’

‘Yeah, OK, then. Let’s have a look. Why weren’t they on your website?’

‘I have to work, Jim. I haven’t had time to unload.’

I didn’t want to sound too full-on about it. ‘If they’re any good, I’ll buy them right now.’

71

‘Even though it’s a big jet, the Falcon has a short take-off and landing capability.’ He scrolled down a list of files. ‘It was one of the few large corporate aircraft to have been cleared for service at London City – as you know, Jim, an airport that’s renowned for stringent regulations governing the aircraft that use it.’

I nodded. If you needed STOL capability to get you in and out of London City, the airstrip RV would have been a piece of piss. That was why it had been used. It could carry the weight, get in and out, and didn’t look military.

He opened a file and up came hundreds of aircraft thumbnails. ‘Found them.’

The first few were of the Falcon coming in, nose high, flaps dangling, over the perimeter fence at IKIA just hours after Red Ken and Dex got dropped. I wondered if their bodies were on board, or whether they’d been burnt or cut up and fed to animals – anything to ensure they’d never be seen again. There was a good picture of the Falcon as it hit the tarmac – you could see little puffs of white smoke coming up from the wheels. There were several of it taxiing and many more of it parked up in front of M3C’s very own terminal, the building tucked away on the far side of the airport.

We were getting closer to what I hoped was going to be gravy time. With his long lens, Ali had snapped several clear pictures of the aircraft’s passengers as they disembarked. First off was Tattoo, still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he’d dropped Dex: short-sleeved blue shirt, tail hanging out over jeans. One snap had him putting his sun-gigs on, exposing his ink-covered arms.

And then, in the next shot, there was my target: standing at the top of the air-stairs, sniffing the breeze. The picture was an improvement on the black-and-white, but not by much.

‘You know who any of these people are?’

‘Just M3C people, I suppose.’

There was another shot of Altun as he made his way down the steps and then, finally, the money shot: staring out over the airport, his face turned to the camera, almost as if he was posing, one hand smoothing back hair that had been ruffled by the wind…

‘Ali, they’re excellent. The magazine will love them.’

‘Really? You are sure these are good enough for you?’ He was a happy man.

‘More than sure, Ali. I’ll take all of them. I’m sure my editor would agree for me to pay, say, a thousand dollars.’ I didn’t want to fuck about. That would have been more than he made in a couple of months behind the wheel of the Paykan. And the three of them could do with it. I would have liked to give them more, but I still had a job to do and no idea what it would end up costing.

‘I have more!’ His fingers darted across the keyboard.

I found myself staring at several good clear shots of a forklift truck offloading the wooden crates. The second loadie from the airstrip was in charge. There was nothing that looked like a couple of freshly wrapped bodies.

72

I needed to get them out of my possession and into Julian’s as fast as I could. Majid would be going ape and I might find myself hung upside down and searched with rubber gloves.

I couldn’t send them from Ali’s apartment: Vevak would pick it up. I didn’t want this rebounding on him or his family.

There were internet cafes, of course, but they were definitely monitored.

There was the press-centre at IranEx. In among the images of boring take-offs and landings, people standing next to an undercarriage wheel and all that shit, my editor would be getting the Falcon, the gold and the faces that accompanied it. By the time Vevak cottoned on to what I’d sent – if they ever did – I would be away from IranEx and hiding in the city, trying to find Altun and the loadies. With the Falcon now in Pakistan, I only had one known location for Altun and that was IranEx. There were two more days of the exhibition, so that was where I’d wait. I still had more to do for Julian, then for Red Ken and Dex.

I checked my watch. It was already past midnight. Majid would have staked out the room after searching it, and getting his lads to check for me in all the Western hotspots.

‘Ali, any chance of me staying the night? It’s a waste of time going back to the hotel now. And if you want a job in that taxi of yours, you could take me to IranEx in the morning and work with me for the next couple of days. I’ll pay you another five hundred.’

His eyes lit up. ‘It would be a pleasure. What time do you need to be there?’

‘Soon as it opens.’

73

We ate dinner cross-legged on the carpet – a meal that Aisha had prepared that was a cross between soup, and potato, tomato, chickpea and mutton stew. She was a busy girl. As well as looking after these two she was a medical student at the university, and had joined Mousavi’s green movement for reform. She had the wristband to prove it.

Ali was munching away like a good ’un, his pockets stuffed with the wad of oners I’d just given him.

Aisha, however, didn’t seem too pleased to have the extra income in the house. She was almost ignoring me. Ali was either too blind to see it or chose not to notice.

Every so often one of them would get up to check on their dad, but the Naloxone had worked its magic and he was no longer in any danger. It wasn’t the first time he’d overdosed, Ali said. He’d done it so many times, in fact, that when their mother left and they were just kids, they had become experts on what to do. Some days, the two of them would come home to their dad crying in a corner of the bathroom, clutching his knees, shaking with fear – or just throwing a wobbler and smashing the place up.

‘Have you two heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?’

They looked at each other for any recognition.

‘It’s an illness that some people can develop after having experienced one or more traumatic events – like fighting a war, like getting blown up, like seeing fourteen-year-old boys being blown to bits beside you. It affects some people hard. There’s no telling who. Maybe your dad…’

Aisha acknowledged me at last. Well, sort of. At least she was listening.

‘Guys with PTSD can have problems with alcohol and drugs. Sometimes they can’t communicate with family and can get violent against them.’

They both stopped eating and listened. ‘Does he have nightmares – you know, shout out in his sleep?’

Aisha stifled a sob, which I took as a yes. ‘It’s OK, he can be helped. Your dad needs treatment.’

Ali comforted her as she cried into his shoulder. I tried to lighten it up a bit. ‘Even the great Satan has a general who suffers from it because of his time in Iraq. Can you imagine that?’

Aisha pulled herself off Ali, her hair now pasted to her face. ‘How do we help him? What does the American general’s family do?’

It was a tough one. I wasn’t sure Iran was known for its mental-health record. ‘He needs to see someone who can treat psychiatric conditions, someone who understands what he’s going through and knows how to help. Tell them you think he may have PTSD – look it up online. He doesn’t have to be like this.’

74

Wednesday, 6 May

0555 hrs

The muezzin had sounded like he was right outside my window when he started calling the faithful to prayer half an hour ago. I’d spent the night on the floor in Ali’s room. I didn’t get much sleep. His dad woke me several times as he cried into his sheets. Aisha had plodded past our door to tend him.

Ali was in the kitchen. Incredibly, he looked as bright as a button. Maybe it was the thought of going to Air Geek City. ‘Would you like something to eat, Jim?’ He was tucking into a pitta-bread sandwich that had bits of salad hanging out of it.

I nodded away and looked for a kettle or teapot. Ali got the idea. ‘Chay? Or ghahve?’

‘Ghahve would be great.’

Ali poured some into a cup while I threw some goat’s cheese and lettuce into some bread.

Aisha walked in. She had never got out of her jeans and Bono T-shirt, and her hair didn’t look so perfect after her intensive-care night-shift. She acknowledged me with a nod, then spoke to Ali in Farsi as she poured herself a coffee as well.

Ali picked up another cup and followed suit. ‘I will go and check on Father.’

When he’d left the room, she placed the fifteen hundred dollars on the table in front of me. I gave my full attention to the remains of my sandwich. ‘Mr Manley – thank you, but we do not need charity.’

‘It’s payment for your brother’s pictures and the time I’ve spent with him. He drove me from the airport and he’s driving me for the next two days. Thinking about it, maybe it isn’t enough.’

She cupped her mug with both hands and brought it up to hide her smile. She slowly shook her head. ‘You know it is a small fortune. And now I am embarrassed.’ She took a sip then pulled a pack of Camel from her pocket. She offered me one.

My turn to shake my head. ‘The money is yours. He’s earned it.’

I pushed the notes back at her but she focused on lighting her cigarette. She took the smoke down deep. ‘Thank you for explaining about my father. I have been online most of the night. I think I have found someone who understands these things, a doctor at the university.’

‘That’s great, Aisha. I’m sure everything will work out.’ There must have been millions here suffering after that war. No wonder the place had become Heroin Central.

Aisha sank into one of the three knackered wooden chairs, her cigarette held high so I didn’t get a face full of it as I sat down opposite her. I watched her as I sipped my coffee, so sweet it was almost sticky. There was a lot more going on in that head of hers.

‘Ali…’ She finally broke the silence. ‘He is a dreamer. He always has been. He idolizes his father. They have a special bond. Ali does not think about himself, so I have to, Mr Manley. You know, if he could ask for any job, any job in the world, it would be yours. Do you really think you will be able to get him work from your magazine?’

I hated this part of the job when it involved real people. But it had to be done. I still needed Ali. ‘I can’t promise anything. I have to talk to my editor. But, yes, of course. I think he’d be excellent.’

‘I understand, but please do that, Mr Manley. And maybe ask him if Ali could come to England and work. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

‘But what about you and your dad?’

She blew another cloud of smoke into the air and showed me her wrist. ‘Do you know what this means?’

I nodded.

‘I will work with the party to bring reform to our country, Mr Manley, our green movement, our green revolution. Looking after my father will be easy compared to looking after my country. Ahmadinejad will win no matter how many votes he gets, and that means there will be blood on the streets after the election.’

She took another drag and picked some tobacco from her lips. She spent more time than was necessary removing it from her fingertip.

‘We students, the young, we need to show our people that we can change, but still be a Muslim country. I do not know if our green revolution will end like the Berlin Wall coming down, or with a slaughter like Tiananmen Square.’

She drank and then smoked, her eyes burning into mine so I understood the seriousness of what she was saying.

‘But it is a struggle that I do not want Ali to be part of. He deserves better. I am going to make sure he gets it.’

Ali was coming back down the corridor.

As if I didn’t feel enough of an arsehole already, she pushed the money back at me. ‘Here is his airfare. Please, look after him, won’t you?’

He reappeared with an empty cup and a big smile as I shoved the notes into my pocket.

‘We should leave now, Jim.’

‘Can you get me a mobile in the market? You know, just a cheap pay-as-you-go?’

75

It was too early for any but the local press to be up and about, and I was able to take my pick of the desktops in the media centre. I worked quickly. Nobody paid me any attention. There was no sign of Majid. I had left $3,500 in the drawer next to the Naloxone, somewhere they were sure to find it. I’d been hoping it would make me feel better about bullshitting Ali and Aisha, but it hadn’t. In fact, it had made me feel worse. They were real people, who deserved much better than crossing paths with the likes of me.

I’d kept the last $1,500 for myself. I wasn’t out of the country yet and might need some in-the-shit money. The cash would still come in useful in Dubai. I planned to stay there a while. There was a Suburban at the airport that needed attention.

I opened up the file and hit the email option. I typed in my editor’s address, shoved in the USB stick Ali had downloaded the pictures onto, attached them along with some others to disguise them a bit, and hit send.

Then I dragged the mobile out of my sock and went just outside the door to get a signal from whoever’s satellite was up there. The two bars were enough for a call to my editor.

‘Morning, mate. I’ve sent some photos for the next edition. Can you text me to say you’ve got them?’

It was four and a half hours earlier where he was but Julian was a very happy boy.

‘Will do. Any movement on Altun? Found out where he lives, his contacts – anything?’

I could hear him rushing about now, probably heading for his computer. It was OK for him to use clear speech as he didn’t have bodies walking past every couple of seconds.

‘Not yet, but working on it. Soon as I have anything for you, I’ll call.’

‘Excellent.’

Behind me, just inside the door, I was aware of an argument kicking off.

‘All right, mate, see you soon.’

I cut the call and turned to see the big German guy in the jungle hat leaning over the reception desk, clutching a steaming cup of whatever and having a go at the girl about the milk. Our eyes met and he wandered through the door. ‘Morning.’ He checked my badge. ‘James.’ He held out a tanned hand.

I checked his. ‘Morning, Stefan.’

He towered over me, and had that world-weary look of been-there-done-it about him. Sixty-odd years ago that square jaw and mass of hair would have been sticking out of the turret of a panzer. He was here for Die Welt, according to his badge, but no way was Stefan Wissenbach a reporter for any German weekly. Maybe he’d come in my direction because he could smell a fellow fraud.

He took a sip of his brew and still didn’t like it black. He offered it to me. ‘Never one to say no to a brew, so thanks.’ I glanced at my mobile. Nothing yet from Julian. I took a sip. I quite liked instant.

As we leant against the Portakabin, Stefan rubbed the couple of days’ growth on his chin. ‘Just the same old stage-managed bullshit?’ He had a clipped German accent.

‘It’s my first.’

He laughed, then stretched and yawned at the same time. ‘Well, you won’t have another press conference like yesterday’s. Anna had fire in her belly yesterday, for sure. She is one Hitzkopfig, that girl.’

That bit of German wasn’t in my squaddie vocab. It certainly didn’t sound like food or beer. ‘The blonde one, going on about missiles?’

His eyes darted about, sizing up a couple of good-looking women who’d come past us to lay out trays of dodgy sandwiches for the morning media frenzy. ‘The new SA-16M – probably the only thing worth coming here to see.’

There had been quite a buzz about these things. The Brits, Iranians, Russians, and now Germans. Maybe they were the new must-have.

I checked my mobile again. Still nothing. I wondered about Majid picking up the email and knowing where I was. Not even GCHQ was that quick. It would take a couple of days. ‘The guy at the M3C stand told me they can defeat dark flares. That explains the rumour the missile had a fault. It didn’t. They were redeveloping it to defeat the flares.’

His eyes shot from the women to me. I suddenly had his full and undivided attention.

76

‘But, like I said, this is my first time. What are they?’

He laughed. ‘You Brits!’ A heavy hand slapped my back and pushed the bottom half of the coffee from the cup. ‘You invented them.’

‘I’m more an infantry-weapon guy.’

His hand left my back with a smile that said he had smelt a little more about me. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Both hands went up into the air, as if he was framing something up there. ‘When an aircraft is targeted, it could be by using laser or radar. So the aircraft has countermeasures to stop that happening. But with a handheld SAM, the system for detecting the target is best described as a passive device that emits no signal. These things…’ He turned to me and pulled down his lower right eyelid. ‘The Mark 1 Eyeball.’

He paused. ‘You with me so far?’

I knew the theory. These things were just like a Stinger. I let Stefan waffle on as I checked the phone.

‘It’s the same with the missile itself. It has a passive seeker that homes on heat – the engine, usually – and so, traditionally, the first time you ever know you have a missile coming up at you is when it hits.

‘You remember the order for all NATO aircraft to stay above fifteen thousand feet during the Kosovo conflict because the low-level threat from the handheld SAM was too great? Were you there?’

I nodded.

‘Me, too. Fucking slaughter.’

He took a couple of seconds as his head churned up whatever nightmare he’d been part of.

Julian was back. He’d got them. I closed down.

‘It is the same today. If you want to stay alive when you go low-level, then you need to chuck out flares – lots of them. But you can’t dispense flares all the time. You don’t have enough of them.

‘Since the Balkans, the Russians have designed a missile able to discriminate between the flares that aircraft dispense and the heat-source – the engine. Instead of being seduced away from the aircraft towards the flare, the missile examines the flare, rejects it, and looks for a darker heat-source, if you like, less intense – the aircraft itself.’

Stefan’s hands were up in the air once more.

‘The missile literally climbs a “ladder”, rejecting flares, locking back onto the aircraft, rejecting another flare and so on – until it hits the aircraft. That’s why the black flare was developed.’

‘So they burst out of the aircraft a different colour?’

‘No, they look the same as normal flares, but they have a different temperature range – they don’t burn like magnesium flares, they mimic the heat signature of an aircraft much more accurately. So now, when the missile rejects the regular flare and goes looking for the darker heat-source, it sees the black flare and goes for that instead.’

‘Could it take down an Apache?’

He knew where I meant. His hands were down and the smile had disappeared. ‘If they weren’t bullshitting you, it would be able to take down anything that is out there below ten thousand feet.’

‘Nice talking with you, mate.’

We shook.

Ali and the Paykan were waiting for me outside.

On my way out, I broke open the USB stick and swallowed the memory. If these lads had spent years putting shredded bits of paper back together, finding out what was on a smashed stick would be a piece of piss.

Stefan Wissenbach would be making sure his people, not DieWelt, knew what we both did. They, too, had people out there. If an Apache or fast jet was taken out, we could no longer assume control of the air. Worse still, if a C-130 full of troops got dropped, the people back home would go ape-shit. It could all be over by Christmas. Then the dramas would really start to kick off.

I powered up my local mobile as I walked towards the exit. ‘Hello, mate. You get the car parked up where I showed you?’

I didn’t want Ali to have a call from my sat mobile registered on his. Better to use local – and how much more local could you get than his dad’s machine? It wasn’t as if he’d need it today, unless he had an urgent appointment with his dealer.

77

We sat in the front of the taxi in what looked like a bus lay-by but had become an overstuffed car park. Anywhere vehicles could stop in this town, they did.

IranEx was just under a hundred away, right in front of us. That was why we were here, to have a trigger on the entrance and wait for the Merc. With baseball caps tilted over our eyes and leaning well back in our seats we looked like loads of others, just getting our heads down for a moment or two before grappling with the challenges of the day.

I’d told Ali I was doing an M3C story. I was going to follow the management, find out where they were staying and try for an interview. They’d turned me down yesterday, but that wasn’t unusual in our neck of the woods.

He nodded as if it all made sense, but I could almost hear that mind of his ticking over. He was going along with it because I seemed to be offering him a future.

Ali stared through the windscreen, concentrating on the traffic as I watched the entrance. People and vehicles streamed in and out.

‘Jim, you will email me about the job when you get back to England? Do you think your editor will like my work?’

I couldn’t work out if he was questioning his own capabilities or doubting me.

‘I will take classes to become a good journalist. Will you tell your editor that? I will work very hard.’

‘I will, mate, don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be OK.’

Now I was doing the worrying. Giving a guy a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel only to snatch it away was an arsehole’s trick. I knew what it felt like, waiting on a promise that never came good. My step-dad was always promising us a trip to Margate or to the fun fair. I’d wait for the day to arrive, my heart racing, excited to be doing stuff that other kids did all the time, but nothing ever happened. I’d start to doubt myself, checking I had the right day, waiting for him to come back from the pub, but he never did.

‘Highway To The Danger Zone’, the theme tune to Top Gun, erupted beside me. Ali flushed pink with embarrassment. ‘Sorry, Jim – I cannot seem to erase it.’ He flipped open his mobile. He sounded guarded at first, but there was a rapid thaw. He was soon waffling away. Whoever it was, they’d called with good news.

I spotted the wrestler’s vehicle, held in traffic, trying to cut across the road to IranEx. Majid was up front and looking very pissed off. He, too, was waffling away at warp speed into his mobile. His spare hand jabbed into space, as though he wanted to hit whoever was on the other end.

Ali closed down. ‘Qasim and Adel. They say the Dassault is back, Jim. It’s just landed.’

‘Let’s head towards the airport. Can they get any pictures?’

On second thoughts, that would be a mistake. ‘No, no, don’t ask them.’ I didn’t want to get them thinking too hard. ‘You’re all mates again, are you?’

He tucked his phone into his pocket. ‘It is good that it has come back, Jim, no?’

‘Very good, mate. They’ll call if something happens?’

We could be anything up to two hours away.

We were fighting through the southbound traffic when Top Gun kicked off again.

‘Salam?’ He listened, jabbered away for a few seconds, then turned to me. ‘The Dassault has been met by a car. A black Mercedes. It has already left.’

78

The taxi sat in the shadow of a small avenue of trees on the city outskirts. Behind us, a scrapyard was surrounded by a rusty barbed-wire fence. Piles of old cars were stacked on top of each other next to mountains of worn-out tyres. Either the place was abandoned or the people who worked there had decided to stay out of the sun. Even the dogs were lying low. The birds chirping in the branches above us were the only sign of life. A couple had taken a dump on our car’s windscreen.

Ahead of us the heat haze shimmered over the only road into Tehran from IKIA.

I sat behind the wheel, with Ali’s ball cap still on my head and his aeroplane-geek binos on my lap. My eyes were glued to the steady stream of cars heading north.

The contrast between the bright, reflected sunlight on the white desert sand and the shade beneath the trees made it almost impossible to see us from the road. It was the perfect trigger point.

Ali sat beside me, flapping but not saying so. He now knew for sure that this wasn’t anything to do with journalism.

‘It’s not just about taking pictures of planes. It’s about finding out what people are doing with them.’

He nodded, but I could see last night’s dreams fading and fear taking their place. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll show you the ropes. My editor already knows I couldn’t crack this story without you.’ I studied another blob of black coming our way.

The less he knew the better, for his own good. He was staying with me for now anyway, whether he liked it or not. I needed him and his car. If he sparked up and said he didn’t like it, he was going to spend the next few hours in the boot.

Gold, Altun, M3C, dark flares and now something, or more likely someone, arriving from Pakistan. I didn’t know what these fuckers were up to yet, but it looked increasingly like it had to do with Brit, US and even German blood staining the Afghan desert.

I adjusted the focus. The black blob had become a Merc. Its side windows were blacked out. ‘Here we go, mate. I got a possible.’

I fired up the engine. The Merc was two up in front, both with gigs on. I couldn’t make out who they were, just the silhouettes and shades.

As it drove past the trees, I prepared to follow. ‘Got it. That’s ours.’

I slid my sun-gigs on and pulled out.

The Paykan’s wheels hit the tarmac and I pushed my foot down as far as the fifteen-year-old pedal would let me. There was no reason to talk to Ali. I had more important things to do now.

The traffic slowed and thickened as we entered the city. I could see the Merc four vehicles in front. Its green curtains and bent mobile antenna were as clearly in view as they had been in the binos.

We juddered up the road. Traffic-lights somewhere up ahead were letting no more than three cars through at a time. Mopeds whizzed in and out through the smallest of gaps.

With vehicles between us and his rear-view blocked by the chintzy green curtains, we were hidden. We’d have a problem if he turned and I was held, but that’s just how it goes. I was more concerned right now about keeping my head down to help the ball cap and gigs do their job – hiding my face.

We edged forward. The jam wasn’t a problem for me. Out on the open road with just four gears and an old Paykan engine would have been far worse.

Up ahead, the traffic went from bunched to more or less gridlocked. Horns honking, engines revving, it moved forward a few feet, then ground to a halt again for minutes on end. Cars peeled off left and right to try their luck down side roads. I gradually ended up right behind the Merc.

I eased forward until I was just about kissing his boot. If I couldn’t see his wing mirrors, then the driver couldn’t see me.

Ali strained forward in his seat. ‘Bobby Sands must be a very important man in the UK, yes?’

‘Bobby Sands?’

‘My father said the Supreme Leader changed the name of this street in his honour.’

‘What did it used to be called?’

‘Winston Churchill.’

79

‘Death to America’ and ‘Burn the US Den of Espionage’ were scrawled across the only stretch of wall that hadn’t been covered by Mousavi’s green revolution posters.

About a hundred beyond the long-abandoned US embassy, the Merc took a sudden left, no indicators. I couldn’t go with him. It would be too obvious. They would ping me immediately.

‘Jim, he has turned…’

‘Can I get down the next left?’ It was approaching fast. ‘Hurry up, Ali, think – can I go down? Is it a dead end?’

Too late; I turned.

I kept checking the junction about seventy ahead and pressed the pedal to the metal. No Merc had crossed it left to right by the time I got up there.

‘Jim, it is lost. I think I should drive now and-’

‘Shut up.’

I stopped at the junction and checked left. No sign of it moving away from me or parked. It must have gone straight on. Swinging the car left, I hit the gas. I needed to make distance before turning into the target’s road.

‘Jim, please. My father’s car! Please, Jim, we will get into a lot of trouble. I want to go home.’

I slowed to turn right. I had to take it calmly on the corner in case the Merc had parked up just past it.

No sign of it.

‘Jim, please – I really, really want to go home.’

I carried on down the road, avoiding the swarm of wheel-barrow-pushing construction workers buzzing around the concrete skeleton to my right. I checked each junction. The Merc must have parked. It had to have done, unless he’d pinged me. Why else would it come down here?

‘Jim-’

‘Shut up and check down the roads your side.’

At the far end, about two hundred further on, we emerged into a square. Stalinesque concrete office buildings were ranged round a patch of dusty ground with a couple of park benches and a moth-eaten palm tree in the middle.

The Merc nosed into view on the far side.

I watched the green curtain and bent antenna pull up at a set of iron gates set into an archway. The driver lowered his window and stuck out his ink-covered arm to punch some numbers into an entry-pad.

I carried on around the square as the gates swung closed behind the target. I took the first road out of sight and pulled over. I leant across and opened his door for him. ‘Go and see if the Merc comes out again. Walk around the square, just act normal. Don’t look directly at the house, or the Merc, the driver, anything, anyone. Just walk…’

‘Jim, I don’t think…’

‘Just do it, Ali!’

He climbed out reluctantly onto the pavement.

‘Walk slowly past. Tell me what you see. Does the building have a name, a number, anything? I need to know if the Merc stays or leaves. I’ll meet you further down this road. Now go!’

I drove off, watching him walk back towards the square, shoulders down and scared. Fuck it, I’d had no choice. There’s no time for debate when this stuff happens. All you can do is grip the body and make it do what you want. Only afterwards can you give it a hug and make up.

I was able to turn back towards the square at the next junction and park up – a tactical bound, which meant the Paykan was out of line-of-sight from the square. I kept my head down and sun-gigs on.

I glanced at the construction site two hundred further down. A cloud of dust billowed around the base of some rickety scaffolding that framed a couple of minarets. They looked for a moment like a couple of missiles taking off.

Ten minutes later Ali slumped his way towards me. He couldn’t even look me in the eye as he got back in. ‘The car has gone. It was coming out as I got to the square. The building has no number or name.’

He collapsed into his seat, close to tears, as I hit the ignition. I needed to get a trigger on the target. I still had to find out who was inside that building, and why. ‘It’s all right, mate. You’ll get the car back and everything will be OK. Not long now.’

I knew he didn’t believe a word of it.

80

1905 hrs

Last light would be with us in less than an hour.

With the brown PVC seat of the Paykan tilted back, I could see straight through the windscreen towards the target. It was a two-floor, drab concrete cube, an office building, much like the rest around the patch of dirt and dust, surrounded by high walls. CCTV covered the gate, walls and even the building itself.

No one else had left or entered it since I’d stagged on. But there was at least one body inside. A couple of minutes after we’d moved into position, a ceiling fan had started to turn in a first-floor room. I’d scanned the place through Ali’s binos but couldn’t see who’d switched it on. With the wall so high and me so low, my perspective was limited.

There had been a great deal of coming and going. Trucks piled high with rubble had pulled out of the construction site every few minutes. The last one had left more than an hour ago. About fifteen others loaded with steel reinforcing rods were now parked up in the square. An old guy in a leather jerkin and flat Afghan-style hat had done his best to direct them but the drivers totally ignored him and did their own thing. Even Ali managed a smile as we watched them moving through the gate, oblivious to the old boy’s complaints, with their rolled-up blankets tucked beneath their arms.

Young women had paraded constantly through the square all afternoon. Some were in Western dress, some a mixture, some totally covered. Those in burqas had trainers and jeans on underneath.

The construction site had already achieved iconic significance for the local population. It was an extension of the campus for what the mullahs intended to become the Islamic world’s foremost seat of learning. Aisha studied medicine here; there were more mosques and classrooms on the far side of the plot.

The cicadas were going ape above the distant drone of traffic. A slight breeze rustled the dry leaves of the near-dead palms. I glanced across at Ali. He was feeling more of a prisoner now than a friend. He was scared of leaving his dad’s car with me, but even more scared of staying.

It was time to let him off the hook. ‘Listen, mate, you can go soon – and with the car. OK?’

He sat up slowly, eyes straight ahead, hardly daring to believe what I’d just said. ‘Thank you, Jim, thank you. I will not say anything to-’

‘It’s all right, mate. Listen, I need you to know something. I’m not going to bullshit you. I’ll do my best with the job. But it’s a long shot…’

He turned very slowly towards me. His eyes bored into me. ‘You are not a journalist, are you, Jim?’

‘No, mate. But you’ve helped me do something important. I’m not exactly sure where it’s going to lead yet, but we’re doing our best to stop what happened to your dad happening to a whole lot of others.’

He nodded, but I knew he was far from convinced.

‘I’m sorry, Ali.’

He raised his hands and slowly massaged his temples. It was some time before he spoke. ‘Can I go home now?’

‘Yes, mate.’ I paused. ‘But I need one last favour.’

81

This area didn’t have streetlighting. I wasn’t complaining – I always felt safer in the dark. I stood against the fence, trying to get some pitta bread down my neck. There was no curtain across the target window, and the fan kept going. Somebody had turned the light on but I still hadn’t been able to see who.

Another light came on, somewhere on the ground floor this time. Weak light spilled over the wall.

I now understood how difficult it must have been for the women in the Emirates food hall to hoover up their Big Macs. Getting anything through the hole in Ali’s mum’s old burqa was proving very difficult indeed. Most of it seemed to miss and tumble down the black material.

No way could I have got away with what I wanted to do tonight without some sort of cover. Burqa’d up, I passed for a very chunky university girl. If Arab men could cover up and get through airport security on their sisters’ passports, I should be able to mince about at night in this kit to my heart’s content. If not, I’d soon find out.

Snatches of waffle and banter filtered through from the far side of the tall plywood sheets that encircled the building site. I looked through the gap where two sheets didn’t quite meet. Blankets were spread out round a fire, with pots and pans rigged over the flickering flames. The wood spat and split, completing the western campfire effect. It could have been a scene from a John Wayne movie – except that these boys, truck drivers, I guessed, were in dishdashes and had a TV perched on top of a pile of concrete blocks, next to a fat extension reel. The other end of the lead disappeared in the direction of a genny I could hear ticking away in the distance.

A couple of students walked hand in hand across the far side of the square, giving the odd giggle along the way. I stayed in the shadows and thought about Ali. I wondered what he was going to do. Tell the police? Tell his sister, and she’d tell the police? She was going to be really pissed off with me. I didn’t know, and I tried not to care. Whatever, it was out of my hands. All I could do was what I was doing now – keeping eyes on the target and trying to identify whoever was in there.

I’d had no choice in my treatment of Ali, but that didn’t stop me feeling sorry for him. First his dad’s illness had screwed up his university plans, and now I’d done the same with his dreams of a journalistic career.

Fuck it, there was nothing I could do but cut away from all that and get on with the job.

I needed to get a trigger on the target and find out who was in there. Altun had to be somewhere with the Pakistan delivery. Whether he was sitting under that ceiling fan or not, I still needed to find a way of making entry on target tonight. Short of bursting straight into M3C’s airport HQ, I had nowhere else to go.

I needed to find a good OP, ideally high up in an unoccupied building that was still under construction and looked right down on the target. The closer of the two minarets fitted the bill. My only problem would be getting into it. I couldn’t just sashay past the lads round the campfire – it wasn’t that kind of party. Nor could I get over the fence. I’d checked. It wouldn’t happen. The only way was to head for the uni and see how I could make my way from there.

Before I did anything, I had to finish getting some more bread and water down my neck – instead of down my burqa. I didn’t know how long I was going to have to be up there, or the next time I’d get a chance to eat or drink.

I was finally done. I brushed the crumbs off the black material and moved onto the pavement, day-sack over one shoulder. I blended in pretty well, I thought, apart from being a foot taller than the rest of the girls. I just hoped my size-ten Timberlands wouldn’t stick out too much, and that nobody stopped me to sympathize about how badly the diet was going.

I went back into the square and followed the other students down to the right of the target, trying to avoid taking long paces or looking like I was about to enter a boxing ring. Paralleling the road that led to the university via the construction site, I lost eyes on target. I wouldn’t have it again until I got into my OP, but it was worth the risk. If I stayed at ground level I wouldn’t see jack.

A hundred metres or so past the square, the students were starting to bunch. By two hundred, they were crossing the road and coming in from all directions, bottlenecking at what I assumed must be the entrance. I joined the mob.

We surged through the gates into a big, brightly lit open space with marble flooring. A mosque reared up on the far side, another couple of hundred metres away. Its huge square facade and minarets towered above us, floodlit from the ground like something from Cape Canaveral. The spotlights were harsh enough to make God blink.

The square was humming with chat and ring tones. The girls laughed, glanced at their homework and munched peanuts or other stuff out of bags. It could have been almost any university campus, almost anywhere in the world.

I worked my way to the right of the mosque, where a tree-lined border had been planted to give the square some shade. I kept moving, making sure I didn’t bump into anybody or anything and draw attention to myself. It was easier said than done, when the hole I had to look through was smaller than a Warrior’s letterbox. I wanted to move through this lot like oil, not giving a single person cause to stop, stare and wonder what class the big bird was in.

I headed beyond the trees and into the stretch of shadow where the floodlights between the old and the new part of the campus didn’t meet. I picked my way over mounds of earth and rubble for about twenty metres until I was in total darkness. I took off the burqa, folded it up and shoved it into my day-sack. I’d need it again to get out.

82

As my eyes adjusted to the ambient light, blurred shapes slowly took on recognizable outlines. I picked my way past a cement mixer, and piles of wood, concrete blocks and steel. Soon I could see the bubble of orange light from the campfire and hear the mush of the TV they were shouting at.

As I moved closer to the carcass of the new mosque I could see the drivers from earlier quite clearly. The TV was side-on to me but I caught the odd bit of frenzy. ‘Rooney… Giggs… Rooney, Rooney…’ They suddenly roared at the screen, rose as one from their blankets, then sank back, disappointed. I knew that feeling all too well.

The old man in the hat offered round cigarettes to console them. Then they got back to the job in hand. Tin plates glinted in the firelight as they scooped more rice and sauce from pots over the fire.

I half crept, half crawled to the opening that would one day house the tall white mosque doors. I slipped inside as the truckers threw down their plates and sparked up again about something involving Ronaldo.

Windows had already been fitted into the walls, but the stars shone through a big empty hole in the central dome forty metres above me. I picked my way carefully around endless piles of cement bags, wheelbarrows and scaffold towers that reached skywards towards nothing in particular. I headed for the far left-hand corner, the minaret closest to the target.

A cool breeze blew down the spiral stairwell as I started to climb. Twenty steps up, I passed a narrow slit window – the kind Robin Hood’s mates fired arrows from in Crusader castles. It looked out over the back of the mosque. I had a bird’s-eye view of the lads and Man U. The noise from the TV gradually faded. When I reached the muezzin’s chamber, it was like entering the Tardis. The room was wider than I’d expected – the concrete floor was eight to ten metres across – and perfectly circular.

The smell of cement filled my nostrils. On the far side, just visible in the half-light, were stacks of boxes, concrete blocks and a pile of sand. Stark white light flooded in from four narrow, dust-coated windows that extended from waist-level to the roof. A door led out to the muezzin’s balcony. It would bristle with loudspeakers by the time the thing was finished.

I tried the handle, but it was locked. No problem. I still had a good field of view down into the target from the window to its left. It was a bit fuzzy because of the shit on the glass but I could see the lights were still on. I checked my watch. It was coming up to nine.

The panoramic view was even better than my hotel room’s. The square directly below was a big dark patch, but to my right, the floodlighting around the university mosque picked out hundreds of ant-like students milling about in the courtyard. I was prepared to bet that every one of them would be sporting a green wristband. A few blocks away to the left, traffic streamed along the main.

I moved closer to the window overlooking the target and wiped a bit of cement dust off the glass with my shirt-sleeve. Binos are an excellent night viewing-aid when there’s ambient light. I raised one of Ali’s lenses to it, scanned along the second storey, then focused on the still-lit window.

I could now see a wooden floor, a white leather settee and, next to it, a small rectangular glass side-table holding a tray of half-eaten meat and rice. Only one plate, one glass and a half-empty water jug. The room on the ground floor to the left of the building’s entrance was clearly a kitchen. The arched gateway was the only way in or out of the courtyard. The double glass doors at the front opened into a reception area. The target was some kind of business premises.

Movement at the top window caught my eye.

I swept the binos upwards with one hand and tried to undo the flap on my day-sack to get at my Nikon with the other. A picture would make Julian a happy boy.

Tattoo was in mid-bend. As he picked up a tray, his heavily inked biceps slid out of his short-sleeved white shirt. He stood with his back to the window, treating me to a grandstand view of the artwork on his neck as he talked in the direction of the dead ground on the other side of the room. His body language was respectful. He was almost standing to attention, tray held out in front of him. He nodded, turned and disappeared.

Whoever was also in there would move at some stage. I didn’t know if I’d get a picture from here in this light but, fuck it, I’d try. Why not? I had the kit.

As I straightened up with the Nikon, I spotted another freshly cleared patch of window, directly under mine. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

I put the camera down slowly on the day-sack and stood up, my full attention still on the window. Then I turned and launched myself into the dead ground behind the building shit on the other side of the room.

83

The shadowy figure shifted on its hands and knees, trying to scuttle for cover. I kicked hard into the centre of the mass. There was a dull scream. The figure surged towards me, arms straight out like battering rams, and thrust me back against the wall. Then it kicked and punched like a mad thing before breaking away and running for the stairs.

I followed and jabbed my Timberland against a running leg. The body crashed to the floor. There was a moan, and hands started to flail. I pinned an arm to the ground with one foot then kicked hard with the other, two, three times into the centre mass, then reached down and found the back of a neck. I jammed my hand around a throat, squeezing the windpipe, and rammed the head against the concrete blocks. Fingers scrabbled their way upwards and gripped my wrist. I heard lungs fighting for air. I ran my free hand down the body for a weapon and brushed against a woman’s breast.

Keeping a firm grip on the girl’s throat, I shifted my free hand to the base of her skull, raised both my arms and started to lift her back across the chamber. She was level with me, but facing away. All she could do was stumble backwards, trying to keep up with me, trying to keep on tiptoe to minimize the pressure on her throat.

I reached my porthole and jammed her face against the wall to its right. I still had a job to do. I still had to keep trigger on the target.

Nothing was happening. Light but no movement.

I scanned down, trying to see into the kitchen. Again, nothing.

Then I turned my attention back to the girl. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

Her blonde hair hung limply over her face as she begged for oxygen. She didn’t look too much like Agnetha from Abba right now.

84

The call to prayer kicked off big-time in the mega-mosque over the way. I checked the drivers, hoping that Ronaldo and his mates would have covered any noise that might have worked its way down there. But they were otherwise engaged. The TV had been turned off and they were shifting their blankets to face east.

I kept my hand tight around her windpipe.

I couldn’t see her face clearly in the gloom but I knew it would be bright red by now. She’d be dizzy soon from lack of oxygen and that was good. It would control her.

I looked back towards the target. A man had begun to pray below the fan. He was on his knees, pointing in the same direction as the truckers. His forehead was pressed against the floor.

Agnetha’s hands worked their way up to my wrist again, but she didn’t struggle. She couldn’t: she was starting to die.

I let go of her throat, pushed her to the floor and kicked her up against the wall. She gave a gut-wrenching gasp. ‘Get your face down! Face down!’ I stuck my boot on the back of her neck. She could breathe, but she wasn’t going anywhere fast. I picked up the camera and fired it up, checked the flash wasn’t on, pointed and shot. I clicked the shutter three times in quick succession and checked the screen. All I’d got was a burst of light from the window that turned everything around it dark.

There was a choke and a mumble from under my boot. ‘There’s not enough light… I’ve already tried…’

I rotated the ball of my foot, like I was stubbing out a cigarette. ‘Shut it!’

A sermon of some kind was being banged out over the speakers at the top of the uni mosque. Using my camera zoom, I watched the body beneath the fan continue to pray. He was in his early thirties with neatly cut, side-parted hair and a well-trimmed beard, and dressed in a plain dark suit, white buttoned-up shirt, no collar. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a Bollywood movie poster.

I put the camera down on my day-sack and grabbed a serious handful of hair. ‘Get up! Up!’ I needed her to know who was in control here. That way she had no choice, no power, no voice. I slid her up the wall, my knee pressed between her shoulder-blades, until her face was level with the bit of window she’d cleaned. I rammed her face against the glass. ‘Can you see him? Who is he?’

‘Taliban,’ she rasped.

‘He got a name?’

‘I don’t know it.’ There was no fear in her voice. She was angry, a bit like she’d sounded at the press conference. ‘Please let go. I’m not going to run. I’m not going to shout. I’m not going to do anything. I’ll do what you say.’

‘Why is he here?’ I shoved her face back against the glass.

‘To buy ground-to-air missiles. SA-16s.’

‘Who from?’ I wanted to know everything she knew.

‘M3C, of course. That’s why he’s in the Neptun building. Look, I can help you. Tell me what you want to know. Just fucking let me go.’

‘What’s Neptun?’ I stood directly behind her, forcing her back against the wall. I twisted my hand further into her hair. Her skin tightened like a bad facelift. ‘What’s Neptun?’

‘The building – the office. The company’s called Neptun. It’s one of the companies M3C absorbed when it went multinational. It produces handheld surface-to-air missiles. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? That’s what we’re both here for.’

‘The Taliban buying 16s?’

‘Well, you’re British, aren’t you? You’re here about the missiles, trying to stop them getting into Taliban hands, yes? Look, I can help you. Just let me go. I’m not going to do anything. We’re both here for the same reasons, for God’s sake. What do you think I’m going to do?’

‘Spark up like yesterday. How are they being paid for? Is there a middleman? They dealing direct?’

‘Heroin cash – and direct, of course. Why would he be at Neptun if not? Either drugs direct or cash from the sales – I don’t know exactly which and I don’t really care. All I want to do is expose the deal – maybe even stop it in its tracks. Why don’t you let me help you? We want the same things, don’t we?’

The Taliban had stopped praying and was back on his feet. He started rolling up his mat, then stopped and dug a cell phone out of his jacket. Headlights rolled into the square and the Neptun gates swung open. The Taliban put the phone to his ear as the Merc pulled in.

I let go of her hair. ‘Pick up the binos. Tell me who you recognize.’

She nodded and did as she was told. The reception lights were now on. I zoomed the Nikon in on the white-marble-floored hallway. A large French-style three-seater settee with mahogany arms stood on the right-hand side of the foyer, opposite an ornate desk complete with repro Bakelite telephone and a couple of high-backed chairs. Tattoo and the Taliban waited just inside the glass entrance.

‘You know the guy with the Taliban?’

She took a couple of seconds to check him out. ‘No.’

The Merc swept round the forecourt. The rear door opened before it had come to a standstill. Out jumped Altun, arms at full stretch. He and the Taliban embraced and lavished multiple kisses on each other’s cheeks. Tattoo skirted round them and kept eyes on the square.

‘Do you know him? You know the lad who’s just got out?’

She scoped him for another few seconds and shook her head. I could feel her disappointment. ‘He was at the press conference, but I don’t know him, no. Who is he?’

‘That’s one of the things I aim to find out. Who were you expecting?’

‘Brin.’

The name didn’t register with me.

‘He owns M3C. That’s why I’m here. If I can prove the deal is going ahead, I can shine a light on some high-level corruption. I may also help prevent your planes and helicopters, and America’s and Pakistan’s, getting blown out of the sky by my country’s missiles…’ She took a deep breath. ‘I keep telling you, I can help you. Isn’t it about time you started to believe me?’

The three of them piled into the Merc and they drove back out of the gate.

Agnetha rested her head against the window, her eyes closed as the headlights disappeared towards the main. Either she didn’t know as much about what was happening as she’d claimed or she was bullshitting. It didn’t really matter which. We probably did want some of the same things, but I doubted she had the solutions in mind that I did.

There were plenty of people like her out there who were bent on saving the world, and a conscience was a good thing, I supposed – except that in situations like this it could easily get you killed. Crusaders for truth look great under the studio lights. But in the real world they get swatted like flies.

85

I thought about pushing her back down onto the floor and giving her the Timberland treatment while I packed my day-sack, in case she made the mistake of thinking we were new best mates.

‘M3C are trying to hide the SA-16 deal by using Iran as the broker. That probably explains the guy in the Mercedes.’ She gestured towards the Neptun building. ‘Look, I can’t prove it yet, but Brin is where all this shit begins. The Taliban may fire the guns and Iran may think it’s pulling their strings, but M3C loads the bullets. If we can close Brin down, that’s where it ends.’

‘Until some other fucker takes his place.’ I pulled the cord to close my day-sack and spotted a nylon shopping bag close by where I’d found her.

‘It’s not just the military who are killed by these things. People who have no say, who are just trying to get on with their lives – the ones everybody forgets. That’s why I’m here. We have to stop-’

‘For fuck’s sake, shut up. Here…’ Her bag contained the same sort of stuff I had in mine: cash, passport, camera, burqa. No weapon. I threw it at her. ‘You come in via the university?’

She nodded and pulled out her burqa.

‘We’d better get out the same way.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Your hotel.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You throttle the life out of me, treat me like a silly little girl who doesn’t know shit, and then expect me to invite you back to my room?’ She gave a soft laugh. ‘They moved me out to the airport. I’m getting thrown out of the country tomorrow. They want me on the first flight out. I’m on the seven thirty to Astana, then Moscow – they’re in such a hurry to get rid of me they’re not even sending me back to Russia. They put security in the lobby so I just took the rear exit. What’s the worst they could do if they catch me sneaking back in with you? Threaten to throw me out in the morning?’

The worst they could do was a whole lot worse than that, but I didn’t think now was the right time to mention it.

86

We sat in the back of the cab in our burqas, me playing the big, ugly sister. There wouldn’t have been a lot to talk about even if we’d both sounded local. We were on the outskirts of the city, in the glow of cheap orange streetlights and what looked like a shanty town thrown together with cardboard, wriggly tin, mud and straw. Dogs skulked and pissed on the pavement. Kids in rags played in the doorways.

Agnetha wore a plain band of gold on the third finger of her right hand. In Russia, that meant she was married. If she’d worn it on the same finger of the left, it would have sent a clear signal that she was divorced or widowed. Either her husband was at home doing a little light housework or she wanted people like me to stop bothering her.

It hadn’t taken us long to get out of the minaret and sneak past the drivers. They were now focused on the Iranian answer to Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. All we could hear was canned laughter, punctuated from time to time by giggles beneath the blankets.

The square was teeming again as women poured out of the mosque. We dusted ourselves down as best we could before taking our places in the crowd. We headed up to the main and jumped into a taxi – a Peugeot 305 with a sunroof, air-conditioning and a nice blue digital dash. Just right for the ladies.

Agnetha gave directions. Her Arabic was really good. These lads weren’t Arabs, but they understood her. After all, their religion was inseparable from the language. They’d known it since they were kids.

I felt my eyes beginning to droop in the comfort of the rear seat and the cocoon-like security of the burqa. I shook myself awake and tried to make sense of the M3C/Iran/Taliban triangle.

The Taliban had the drugs and the cash to pay for the weapons.

It didn’t add up.

Why did Altun need the gold?

Why would a guy who was so high up the food chain organize a robbery and use a Russian plane to cart away the proceeds? Why would the mullahs turn a blind eye? They weren’t that mad.

And then I realized that the deal wasn’t being brokered by the Iranians at all. Agnetha was wrong. They had nothing to do with it.

So what was Altun up to? And why did he need the gold?

I was going round in circles. I had to cut away. The answer didn’t matter. It didn’t do anything for me right now, and it couldn’t affect what I was going to do.

87

We were approaching the airport road. Red and white lights blinked on top of the towers. The terminal glowed brilliant white. It looked like a recently landed UFO.

The Peugeot drove towards Agnetha’s hotel. Beyond the flags in the driveway, the lobby was another beacon of white neon. A bored-looking guy in a uniform slouched at the reception desk. Agnetha asked the driver to go round to the back. I checked my watch. It was coming up to eleven.

She paid off the driver and pretended to look for her car. The blue glow of the dash faded into the night.

She led me to the steel fire escape. I took off my burqa and bundled it into my day-sack but she kept hers on. I was quite pleased about that. The bruises on her neck would be developing nicely. She was halfway up the stairs before she realized I wasn’t following. ‘Aren’t you coming up?’

I shook my head. ‘The room’s probably bugged.’

‘But I-’

‘You online?’

‘Yes.’

‘Whatever I find out, I’ll let you know. What name am I looking for?’

‘Anna Ludmilova. Shall I spell it?’

‘I’ll find you.’

I headed out of the car park, my day-sack on my back. I broke into a jog to get out of the light and make some distance. Being alone had never been a big deal for me. It was simpler than surrounding yourself with people the whole time, and I’d sometimes confused it with a kind of freedom. But I’d have given almost anything just then to have Lord Dex of Cards and his Hallowe’en torch beside me, and to be able to take the piss out of Lord Ken of t’Pit for firing up his thousandth roll-up of the day.

This might be a crusade for Agnetha, but it was a whole lot more than that for me. I reckoned I’d already discovered enough to keep Julian happy for a day or two. I’d done what I’d been asked to do. Now I was going to find Altun and his mates again. And then I was going to kill them.

It wouldn’t stop any missile deal; it might not even delay it. It wouldn’t get the Taliban flapping or make the world start smelling of flowers. But it would make me feel a fucking sight better.

88

I was pumping the Timberlands as fast as I could, but the Air France 747 overtook me with ease as it taxied down to the bottom of the strip about two hundred to my left and prepared for take-off.

I’d kept on the Imam Khomeini International Airport approach road so that I could move faster. I was soaked with sweat, but my head was clear. The M3C terminal was on the far side of the complex. Behind me, a never-ending stream of traffic roared along the main.

The 747 lumbered down the runway and climbed into the air. I turned off the tarmac and stumbled across a stretch of rubble-strewn sand, keeping out of the stark white light that separated the airport from the desert.

I picked my way past a spaghetti junction of rusty metal pipes and interconnecting valves that were due to bring water into or take waste out of IKIA at some point in Majid’s glorious future. A single-track road curved around the edge of the airfield. I turned onto it and speeded up again. My throat was dry. My hair was plastered against my face. The day-sack pounded my back with every step. I felt like a squaddie again, on a tab. Switch off, head down and make distance. It’s what you do once you’re there that counts, so get there fast.

Two more airliners took off as earthworks, bulldozers and heavy plant sprang up around me. Three hundred metres of concrete and wasteground separated me from the perimeter fence as I skirted the end of the runway.

I stopped and got out Ali’s binos as another jet taxied down towards me. Either there wasn’t a night-flying ban in Iran, or nobody gave a shit. I focused for a moment on the taxiing jet. A line of passengers settled into their window seats and reached for their safety instructions or gazed in silent wonder at the monument to the ’79 revolution. Then I panned right until I found the M3C hangar in the semi-darkness opposite. It was around two hundred metres away.

The Dassault was on the pan. No lights, no generator on the go. But there was a dull glow from the centre of the building. I scanned the windows, but the blinds were down.

Still keeping to the shadows, I made my way round towards the turning circle outside the front entrance and raised the binos again. There was no visible security; no barriers, no checkpoints and no vehicles.

I could see a darkened reception area, accessible via big glass front doors. The building straddled the perimeter fence. The only way to get airside was to go through it.

I cut across the wasteground, past a seemingly random scattering of abandoned concrete sewage pipes, sections of rusted fencing and deep caterpillar tracks. I needed a good OP, close enough to see anyone who arrived; close enough to grip them before they had any time to react.

I slowed. I didn’t have to gulp great lungfuls of air any more, but the sweat started to pour big-time now I was cooling down. I hated this bit. Every stitch of my clothing was starting to stick to me. I knew the sand would, too, once I’d found somewhere to hide up.

I was about a hundred away from the M3C set-up. It was as close as I could go. There was no cover from here on in. I crawled into one of the sewage-pipe sections to sort myself out.

I eased off the day-sack and leant my wet back against the concrete. All sorts of grit and giant spider’s webs immediately found their way down my neck and into my shirt. I took a couple of deep breaths and hoped my body heat would dry everything off before dawn.

Using the ambient light from the main terminal, flashing tower beacons and yet another aircraft taxiing down the runway, I got out the mobile and powered it up. It was just after 0300.

Julian needed to know about the missile deal and the dark flares, but my finger hesitated over the keys. It didn’t want to call. Right now I was in control. If I talked to him there was a strong chance I’d have to disobey a direct order. I was a hundred per cent sure his way of dealing with this situation wasn’t going to be the same as mine. I’d fucked over enough people on this job already. I didn’t want to add him to the list.

I started to put together a text. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to call me in, but I needed to let him know what was happening, just in case I fucked up and joined Red Ken and Dex a whole lot earlier than I’d planned.

SA-16 seeker has NO fault.

It now has ANTI-DARK FLARE CAPABILITY.

I also told him about the Taliban, M3C, Altun and their deal.

But don’t know where the gold fits in.

I felt a gentle breeze as I crawled out of the pipe in search of a satellite signal and a weapon. Minutes later my fingers closed around a metre-long section of steel tubing that was just what I’d had in mind.

89

Thursday, 7 May

0535 hrs

A sliver of sunlight edged above the eastern horizon. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of it burst through. Birds sparked up and punctuated the quiet moments between take-offs and landings. If Altun turned up I’d wait until he’d dropped off his new best Taliban mate, then take him and his BG on with the steel. The BG would be first: I wanted his weapon. Then I’d drop Altun with it. With any luck he’d take some time to die. If he didn’t turn up, I’d take the BG and persuade him to tell me where Altun was. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it would do. And when it came to choices, I was running on empty.

I never thought too much about dying. My most philosophical view on the matter had always been: fuck it. If I was too slow or too unlucky today I was dead, so anything else was a bonus. It had always been that way. Maybe that was why I’d always been the one to put my hand up and volunteer. Fuck it, so what? It’ll be a laugh…

Laughs had always been in pretty short supply where I came from, and I guess the situation I was facing right now wasn’t so funny. But I’d treat myself to a good one when Red Ken and Dex gave me the thumbs-up from whatever cloud they were hanging around on.

There was movement at the rear of M3C. Three guys in dark blue boiler-suits headed for the Falcon and hooked up the generator. Its engine kicked in and lights flickered on inside the aircraft. A set of steps unfolded, linking the cabin to the concrete so the ground crew could jump inside and do whatever ground crews did at times like this.

Two guys in short-sleeved white shirts and ties, each carrying a black air-crew case, strolled up to the 7X and disappeared inside. Shouldn’t be long now.

The sun heaved itself over the horizon to my right and threw the mountains on the other side of the city into sharp relief. A pair of headlights came up the road, fast. I raised the binos. It was a Merc, trailing a dust-cloud, covering the distance in a few short minutes that I’d taken hours to cross.

I steadied the binos. The sky was still too dark and the car too far away for me to be able to see whether or not its antenna was bent, but I knew where I was placing my money. It pulled into the turning circle and the passenger door began to open.

I pulled the steel tube from behind me.

It was two-up in front. This was going to be hairy.

As the vehicle stopped, the BGs jumped out. Both were in sleeveless white shirts with weapons on their belts. Tattoo had been in the passenger seat. I couldn’t be totally sure, but the driver looked like the second loadie from the Dubai airstrip. They opened a rear door each.

Altun and the Taliban stepped out onto the concrete and fastened their jackets. They didn’t talk, or give the muscle a second glance. They headed towards the terminal. Tattoo went for the boot and his mate rushed past them to hold open one of the big glass doors. The Taliban was still dressed in last night’s suit. Altun’s was grey, and the shirt had a buttoned-down collar. They disappeared inside. Tattoo followed with two small overnight bags and a prayer mat, and the door closed behind him.

Time to move. I gripped the steel rod and crawled out of the concrete pipe. Get to the terminal, wait to see who came out, and go for it. My head was completely clear, my heart-rate even.

Another vehicle approached the M3C terminal from my right. It was also a Merc. These boys hadn’t spent too much time at the Paykan dealership. I eased myself back into the pipe as it pulled up alongside the first. This time no one jumped out to open the rear door. It did that by itself, and a pair of short dumpy legs appeared.

Spag’s light cargos and blue fleece strained at the waist as he clambered out. There was no mistaking the fat fuck.

A thousand thoughts raced through my head in a nanosecond, none of them good.

90

The Dassault’s engines had started to whine as soon as the second Merc had spat out its passenger and he’d waddled into the terminal.

I wrenched the Nikon out of my day-sack. I still couldn’t believe it.

Spag was dead – I’d seen him killed.

No, I hadn’t. I’d just seen his body. I never actually saw him go down…

I’d seen Red Ken and Dex go down; seen them take a whole mag each. I thought I’d seen Spag get the same treatment, but he’d never been directly in my line of vision. There had been a gap of a few metres between Red Ken’s body and his. As soon as he saw Spag run out of the arc of fire, Red Ken must have realized it was a stitch-up and tried to drop him.

Four bodies came out of the terminal airside and headed for the Falcon.

I rattled off a series of pictures of Altun, the Taliban and Spag sharing a joke, then some more as they walked up the aircraft steps. Tattoo’s sidekick checked the bags were on board before joining them. The stairs were sucked into the fuselage and the aircraft headed off down the runway.

I scrolled back through the pictures. They were all in focus, and I knew without a doubt that I was looking at Spag and the second loadie, the one who had hosed Red Ken down.

I got out the sat comm and powered it up. ‘Jules, stand by, get a pen.’

‘Nick, listen, I want-’

‘In a minute. You ready?’

‘Nick-’

‘Mate, listen to me…’

The roar of the three engines drowned whatever he was trying to say.

‘That’s the Falcon, Jules. It’s just left IKIA. Altun is on board. So is the Taliban and Spag. Spicciati is alive. The fuck is part of the deal. Track it, tell me where it’s going and I’ll get there, find out what’s happening. Just find out where it’s going for me.’

There was a pause.

The Falcon’s engine noise faded.

Finally Julian spoke. ‘I know.’

‘Know what?’

‘I know that Spicciati is alive.’

This was not a good day out for Julian. I could feel his pain.

‘I’m sorry, Nick. This is where it ends. I’ve been ordered to stand you down. It’s been taken away from us. Stand down – acknowledge that, Nick.’

‘You pissed or what? We don’t know if the gear is in-country yet. And if it isn’t, we don’t know where it is or how they’re getting to it. I’ll find that out, mate. Follow the plane and I’ll get there and stop this shit. What if our lads get dropped out of the sky tomorrow? That’s all right, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’ Julian sounded as pissed off as I was. ‘Nick, I can do nothing here. It’s not just you being stood down. It’s both of us.’

‘He still CIA? You telling me it was some fucked-up Ollie North-style double-dealing CIA bullshit that got Dex and Ken killed?’

The line stayed dead for a few seconds.

‘Jules! Is he?’

‘Roger that. He never got out. He’s been undercover for years. I’m sorry. We didn’t know. No one knew.’

I felt like I’d been hit by a sledge-hammer. ‘You didn’t know?’

‘Nick, if you decide to go ahead and do whatever it is you plan to do, it’s against my direct order. I will no longer answer your calls and I will track your sat comm. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Acknowledged, I’m stood down.’

‘Correct. Good luck.’

I powered down. Fuck it. I didn’t trust our Firm. I didn’t trust the US Firm. Or any other fucker’s Firm, come to that. The whole fucking lot of them only gave a shit about one thing. Themselves. Well, not quite all of them. There was still Julian.

I checked my watch: 06.10.

I leapt out of the pipe and bundled my kit into my day-sack as I ran. I left the steel tube behind. I didn’t want to make too much of a mess of Tattoo. I needed clean clothes.

This was my start line. Nothing else mattered now apart from getting to Tattoo. He was going to die first, simple as that.

My head was crowded with images of Dex falling to the ground as Tattoo pumped rounds into him. And now he was just metres away from me. I wasn’t going to hang around.

I sprinted past the Merc, checking that there was no one inside it. It was parked less than a couple of metres from the entrance. The keys were in the ignition.

I pulled the peak of my ball cap down low, walked up to the door and rapped on the glass. Tattoo looked up from behind the desk, put down his drink and gave me a curl of the lip, half in sheer bloody-minded irritation, half in disdain. I wasn’t that surprised. I’d caught my reflection in the glass – a day’s stubble and filthy clothes. I wouldn’t have invited me in.

I banged harder.

Tattoo sprang up and powered towards me, his arms swinging like an RSM’s on the drill square. He had a holstered Makarov on his belt, along with three mags in holders.

I turned towards the Merc, gesticulating and waving.

He was nearly at the door.

I kept moving towards the car, pointing to the back of it as if there wasn’t a moment to lose.

I heard the buzz of the door-release mechanism. He started gobbing off at me in Russian.

I gripped the mobile in my right fist like a dagger. There was no time to answer him, to look up – no time to do anything. Head down, arm bent and solid, I spun around and rammed the top end of it into his gut.

He dropped, but only to his knees. He went for his pistol.

I slid behind him, totally focused on the weapon. I grabbed it and wrenched it downwards.

As it bounced off the tarmac, I lifted his chin with my left hand and jammed the top of the mobile into his throat with my right, just below the Adam’s apple. I pulled back with all my strength, trying to bury the thing in his neck.

His hands reached up to mine, fingers scrabbling, trying to pull them away. I dragged him out of line-of-sight of the entrance to the building and dropped to my knees. He came down with me, his legs splayed out in front of him.

I pressed my chest down on the back of his head, keeping maximum pressure on his throat. I pulled the mobile towards me as if I was trying to thrust it right through his throat and stab myself between the ribs. The more he struggled, the harder I leant against him.

He kicked and bucked like an animal until his windpipe was finally crushed. Snot and saliva frothed at his nose and mouth and his brain started to close down. His hands flapped weakly at my arms.

Hypoxia had him in its grasp. He collapsed, but it wasn’t over yet. I counted off another sixty seconds before I wrenched us both to our feet and starting dragging him towards the Merc.

I dumped him on the back seat and gave his shirt a wipe. There was no blood, but a good few nostrils-ful of snot. I pulled his coat off its hanger, checked its pockets, found what I was looking for and laid it neatly on the front passenger seat.

I jumped in behind the wheel, twisted the key in the ignition and slipped it into drive. I rolled slowly out of the turning circle, then accelerated towards the multi-storey car park.

91

The car park was as empty as the last time I’d been here. It seemed more like a century ago than a couple of days. I peeled off the ramp at the second floor. I wondered whether Qasim and Adel were up on the roof, not a care in the world, getting their rocks off as another airliner took to the air.

I opened the back door and started to undress Tattoo. He was bigger than me so there’d be no drama getting into his kit. I unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it over his shoulders. His chest and back were covered with tattoos. He’d obviously done some time. The pictures of bears shagging women and rats with numbers above them would tell anyone in the know what detention centres he’d been to, and why.

He had stars tattoo’d onto his kneecaps. In gang language, he was going to kneel for no man.

With Tattoo tucked safely into the boot, and none of his ID in the car, I emptied a couple of bottles of mineral water over my face and hair. I dried myself off with my own shirt before putting on his, brushed as much sand and shit off his trousers as I could, then finally slid on his jacket.

I binned the mobile as I legged it towards the terminal.

It was 06.45.

Inside, it was busier than I’d expected, a lot busier than when I’d flown in. I looked up and scanned the departures board. The Moscow flight stopped off first in Astana. I headed towards the ticket-sales counter. The girl standing behind it looked as though she’d just come off the high-cheekbones-and-perfect-teeth production line.

I took some deep breaths as I went to slow everything down inside my body and my head. I got into the zone. I’d always known that people like Red Ken, Dex and I were lucky to be able to do that. I didn’t know if it was genetic or acquired or a combination of the two, but when everything went to rat shit, thinking clearly just sort of happened. It had nothing to do with being brave or, in Dex’s case, certifiably insane. It had to do with mastering the stress when it would be natural to flap big-time.

Stress improves performance. Your heart-rate is governed by adrenalin levels. That’s all good stuff when you need flight, fight or bluff, but there is an optimum state – when it’s hammering away at between 115 and 145 beats per minute. Anything above that and your body stops being able to control what it’s doing and you get killed because you fuck up. Or in this case it arouses suspicion and encourages the uniformed automaton in the driving seat to check everything about you more closely, starting with your passport.

She finished her call as I reached the counter. She looked up and switched on her brilliant white smile. I tried my best to match it.

‘The seven thirty for Moscow via Astana. I’d like a seat, please.’

She tapped away at her computer keyboard as I flipped Tattoo’s passport out of his jacket pocket and got extra busy looking down and fucking about in my day-sack.

She scanned it and passed it back to me with just a cursory glance at the personal details. She certainly didn’t see anything odd about a guy with a British accent presenting with Russian travel docs. I know people who’ve travelled the world on their wife’s passport. You just have to show a bit of front.

‘How would you like to pay, Mr Sinitsin?’

‘US dollars, please.’

She checked her tariff. ‘That will be ninety.’

She gave the keyboard a really good hammering and a ticket eventually clattered out of the printer beside her. She passed it across the counter, giving me the opportunity to admire her green wristband and immaculate manicure.

‘You are boarding at gate ten. Air Astana do not allocate seats, but that is no problem – the flight is nearly empty. Please hurry. The gate is closing in fifteen minutes.’

Immigration and security were a piece of piss. They were there to tag foreigners coming in and nationals going out, not the other way round. The camera had lost its memory card; it was now in my mouth. My James Manley passport was in Tattoo’s wallet.

A stewardess looked at my boarding pass and waved towards the hundred or so empty seats. As I moved down the aisle I heard the door close behind me. I spat the memory card into my hand.

The aircraft was relatively new, much better than the ropy gear that former Soviet Union countries used to fly. There were three seats either side of the aisle. I spotted Anna about three-quarters of the way back, on the right-hand side, hunched over her netbook. Judging by the expression on her face, she was using the last few minutes before take-off to spit teeth and feathers at her readers about the misdeeds of M3C. She had a silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. I knew she was going to be wearing it for a good few days.

I didn’t know where the Falcon was headed, and Julian wasn’t going to be of any help. I had to get out of the country. So here I was, with the only person who could help me find out what the fuck was going on.

I carried on down the aisle and took the seat next to her.

92

Anna looked up, eyes like saucers. She opened her mouth to speak, but I silenced her with a finger to my lips. My other hand swivelled the netbook towards me. I hit the keys with my two middle fingers.

talk like this

Nowhere is safe from surveillance, especially on an aircraft. Even the toilets can be bugged. State-of-the-art systems can screen out the sound of running water.

falcon left with the 2 players onboard – do you know where?

no

People were still thronging the aisles and waffling away on their mobiles, but the plane had started to taxi.

I slotted in the memory card. Spag’s picture filled the screen.

know him?

She shook her head and typed.

who is he?

dont know

I didn’t need to tell her anything that didn’t help me.

he with the other two?

I nodded.

how did you know about neptun building and the meet?

She smiled.

a source

who?

She smiled again.

go fuck yourself

I tried again.

can you find out where the falcon is going?

There was a commotion behind us. The stewardess had started bollocking people big-time. She spotted the netbook so we got a verbal slapping as well.

Anna turned and nodded.

We touched down in Astana at 12.15 local. Once we’d left the plane, Anna scrabbled around in her day-sack and pulled out a mobile and battery. Good drills: no tracing. Once she’d reunited them and found a signal, she started dialling. It wasn’t long before she was mumbling away, her hand covering her mouth to hide the sound.

It took no more than a minute. As she closed down and removed the battery again, we exchanged our first words since I’d sat down next to her.

‘Well?’

‘He will help us.’ She raised a finger and tugged her scarf far enough down her neck for me to glimpse a bruise that was pretty much the same colour as Tattoo’s prize tattoo. ‘At least until he sees this, you bastard.’

We transited through for the 13.25 flight to Moscow.

93

Astana airport

IKIA had been a palace compared to this dump. The transit lounge was old-school Communism back with a vengeance – drab, dirty, full of cigarette smoke and people lying on top of crushed cardboard boxes because there weren’t any seats.

Anna toyed with her plastic coffee cup and looked at the empty tables all around us. I asked her the question again. ‘Why are you so fixated on just one man?’

She took a big pull on her cigarette.

‘Br-in…’ She almost choked on the word. ‘Brin was one of those people who found themselves in the right place at the right time the day the Soviet Union ceased to exist – the first of January 1992. He was in his mid-thirties, an ardent Communist and, until Gorbachev and Yeltsin pulled the plug on the old system, a man at the very height of his career – or so he believed. Back then, even he couldn’t have guessed quite how big and successful he would eventually become. None of Russia’s oligarchs could…

‘Brin was extremely ambitious. He came to Moscow from the fourth largest city in Russia – Gorky, which is now known as Nizhny Novgorod. During the Communist era, Gorky was a closed city – the reason many dissidents were sent there. Once you arrived in Gorky, it was almost impossible to leave, such was the ring of security the KGB placed around it. And for good reason: Gorky was a strategic industrial centre for weapons production, something Brin knew a great deal about.’

She paused and gazed into the middle distance for a few moments, watching the smoke she exhaled blending with the grey wall of the cafeteria.

‘Brin was not an engineer. He was an administrator, and he was KGB. He was responsible for the production of a large part of the programme. And by all accounts he was good at it. Russians build weapons differently from the way they are built in the West.

‘In the USSR we had bureaux, as we called them, places where the weapons were conceived, designed and prototyped. The bureaux were usually in Moscow or Leningrad and the production facilities were almost always in areas very far removed from the centre – places like Gorky.

‘Brin did such a brilliant administrative job at the production centre that he was transferred before long to the design bureau in Moscow. He was only thirty-eight and already a KGB colonel, and assigned to one of the most important defence projects in the USSR – a strategic missile system that, when built, would have had the power to wipe America off the map. It never came to that, thank God, because soon after he arrived in Moscow the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War ended.’

She looked into my eyes. ‘You have to imagine what it was like on that January morning – the day Russians returned to work after the country that they had known and sworn allegiance to for more than seventy years had effectively evaporated. For some, the phones stopped ringing, orders stopped coming in, and they simply went home. Brin was not one of them. With his friends in the KGB – soon to become the FSB – he was able to purchase stock in the company.

‘Within a very short space of time, he had complete control of it. Many Russians who worked in the defence industry thought that it would go into a terminal decline as the Cold War ended. Not Brin. With the liberalization of the Russian economy, he soon started to acquire other missile companies, some for next to nothing. By 2003, with the blessing of Putin’s government, he had built M3C into what it is today: a one-stop shop for anyone needing anything from the smallest handheld weapon to a nuclear missile. The nuclear variety were not on sale outside Russia, of course, but that never stopped Brin selling the technology within them to pariah states that had the money to pay – under-the-table deals that were allowed to proceed because they had the blessing of Putin and his cronies in the FSB.’

‘How did you get involved?’

‘Chechnya…’ She was lost to me again for a few seconds. ‘Chechnya was good for M3C. War has been good for M3C, full stop. The conflict saw the Russian government pour billions of roubles into weapon systems devoted to the systematic eradication of the Chechen people. I was in Chechnya as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta.’ She sighed. ‘At first, it was the humanitarian narrative that pulled me in. Later, I realized that the corruption that sustained it – fuelled it, in fact – was the story I was supposed to tell.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Putin started the Chechen war. It suited his purposes to have a conflict on our doorstep – to get ordinary Russians focused on an external enemy, rather than the real enemy, the corruption that lies at the heart of Russia itself. Corruption in our country is a cancer, fostered by alliances between powerful figures in our government, oligarchs who control our economy and criminals – mafiosi. Having started it, Putin and his government needed to sustain the war in Chechnya.’

‘So why single out Brin?’

‘Chechnya made Brin a billionaire many times over and he, in turn, made sure that the people who were keeping the war going were also very well rewarded. I can’t get them all.’

‘This is the story you want to tell?’

‘It’s the story I’m compelled to tell. The trouble is, ordinary Russians are bored – they think they’ve heard it all before. They have become anaesthetized to scandal. But they haven’t heard this story – not by a long chalk…’

She smiled fleetingly. ‘I am lucky. My source told me about the Tehran meeting. The Cold War may have ended, but there is little affection in the upper echelons of the Russian government for the West. Nor, as you can imagine, do Russian defence companies care particularly about the fate of the average NATO soldier.’

I took a taste of muddy coffee and changed tack. ‘Is Brin normally involved in heroin?’

She smiled again, but bleakly this time. ‘Defence is a declining market. With George Bush gone and Barack Obama in power, the amount of money that the Americans are due to set aside for their defence and intelligence expenditure is declining dramatically. It is the same in Russia. Apart from anything else, few people in the grip of the current economic crisis can afford highly sophisticated weapons. The Russian government certainly can’t. It is raiding any budget it can to pay for the current debt crisis. And that isn’t going to change any time soon.

‘Brin is not a fool. Quite the opposite – he remains a driven, highly ambitious man. He needs to look for new sources of revenue, and yields do not come any bigger than those to be found in the opium and heroin market. The Taliban want highly sophisticated missiles? They pay for them with heroin – and Brin cements another part of his developing trade.

‘That is the picture that I went to Tehran to capture. I needed to see an employee of Brin dealing directly with the Taliban. I needed a photograph of the meeting that would make those responsible for that transaction completely transparent. The evidence would be published and it would lead to Brin. The story is ninety per cent written, I just need that picture. Then you can do whatever you have to do…’

Anna didn’t have quite as much of the story as she thought. She didn’t have the bit I had – and that bit was Altun. I suddenly saw a whole lot more – more, even, than I’d tumbled to in the past twenty-four hours. The only thing I didn’t understand was where Spag fitted in.

Did I care about Brin? He was Anna’s demon, not mine. My attention remained fixed on Altun and Spag – and it would stay there until I’d got payback for Red Ken and Dex. No – that wasn’t true. I wanted every fucker on the trail to get what was coming to them for what had happened in Dubai. Brin had just been added to the list.

‘Anna, why are you telling me all this?’

She looked at her watch and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Because you need to understand.’

94

Moscow Sheremetyevo

1730 hrs

The seatbelts sign was still illuminated, but the engines were winding down. That was good enough for most of the locals. They were up and out of their seats as if the first to the exit got a free bottle of vodka.

Anna and I let the initial wave scramble for the door.

If I’d been able to speak the language, we’d have disembarked separately, but my Russian didn’t stretch any further than da, niet, spasibo and dasvidaniya, and that wasn’t going to get me to the bottom of the steps. I needed Anna. Only with her help could I remain the grey man.

She zipped her camera and laptop into her day-sack and looked out of the window. ‘In Moscow we have only two seasons, summer and winter. The snow has melted and the sun is out. It must be summer.’ She smiled, waiting. It must have been a joke.

All the same, it wasn’t going to be as hot as Tehran. I wished Tattoo’s jacket was a little thicker.

We eventually joined the scrum – I didn’t want us to be the last off. We reached the galley area, turned left and shuffled towards the door. I’d slung my day-sack over my shoulder. On the ramp there were three guys in fluorescent jackets – normal airport staff manning the air-bridge. No men in black leather waiting to push us back onto the plane until the real people had gone.

We walked up the ramp and joined the spur that led to the main terminal. People milled about at gates or drifted in and out of shops that seemed to sell nothing apart from chunky watches and bottles of vodka shaped like AK-47s. I finally spotted a pharmacy.

I’d briefed Anna. She went in, and came out again with a pack of tissues and a jar of stuff that stank of eucalyptus. I looked at her with obvious gratitude and rubbed a handful round my throat. It made my eyes water. I opened the tissues and had a good blow. The airport was bound to be crawling with CCTV. Untold pairs of eyes would already be watching us. This was no time to look furtive or guilty, or anything other than a passenger with two days’ growth and a bad cold.

We came to the end of the walkway and took a down escalator, following the signs for Passport Control and Baggage Reclaim. I could see the Immigration hall straight ahead of us when we were only halfway down the escalator. This was where Igor Sinitsin would stand or fall. It all depended on whether the body had been found. Unlikely until it started to smell. Then it would need to be identified, and the only ID was the Merc’s number-plate. It should give me a few days, but you never knew.

There were four or five people queuing at each of the desks. I blew my nose to give myself something to do. At the same time I reddened my face by holding my nose and trying to breathe out.

We waited in line. I still had my day-sack on my right shoulder. Anna had hers on with both straps fastened, and a small blue plastic wheelie-case by her side. She was a pro: no hold luggage to lose control of or delay you. We exchanged a smile, but there was no excessive eye contact. For those watching on monitors and from behind two-way mirrors, that would add up to suspicious behaviour.

The suit in front of us went through with not much more than a nod and a wave to the official. It was Anna’s turn to approach the booth. She looked back and pointed. I saw her gripping her throat and miming a cough.

The Immigration guy signalled me to join them. He was mid-thirties and looked as if he spent every hour he wasn’t in his booth pumping iron, shaving his head and taking misery pills. He also looked much more interested in her than me, that was for sure.

I handed over my passport. He asked me something.

I made a sound as if to speak, then brought a fistful of tissues up to my face and croaked. My throat was agony.

Anna answered for me.

His eyes flicked up and down as he studied first the picture, then my face. He put the passport down below the level of the desk and I saw the tell-tale glow of ultraviolet light. Something troubled him. He looked back into my eyes and muttered another question. I guessed it wasn’t to ask me why I was so much more handsome in the flesh than on camera.

I gave a weak smile and Anna gobbed off. He grunted something but he didn’t hand back the passport. There was a bit of a lull, like he was waiting for me to fill the silence with a confession.

Then Anna made another comment and he smiled. He put the document back on the desktop. As I took it, his attention had already returned to the line.

I started to walk. We were nearly there.

The sliding doors opened into the arrivals hall and we ran the gauntlet of taxi drivers holding up bits of cardboard and people clutching bunches of flowers. Nobody gave us a second glance.

Anna pointed towards an exit. I was still apprehensive. Being dependent on others gave me the same feeling as knocking on a strange door without knowing who or what was on the other side.

95

We set off across the huge concourse. Judging by the signs, we were either heading for the car-rental desks, the platform for the Moscow express or the car park.

We came out of the terminal and took a left. Definitely the car park. As we rounded the corner of the building and entered the walkway into the multi-storey, we turned left again. We were at the bottom of a stairwell.

A guy in his late sixties was standing waiting, a black woollen coat over his arm. His hair was grey and well-cut, like the suit he was wearing under his open black raincoat and the woollen scarf around his neck.

Anna flew into his arms and it was full-on hugs all round. They kissed each other five or six times on the cheek then drew back and gobbed off to each other in Russian for several seconds. He ignored me and made her put the coat on. I’d started to appreciate her joke. It might have been summer in Moscow, but there was a chill in the air.

She thanked him for his kindness, gave him a beaming smile and fed an arm through his.

I took the chance to look around. I mostly noticed what was missing. There were no CCTV cameras trained where we were standing. This boy was switched on.

They talked some more. He spoke quietly and warmly, his pale grey eyes fixed on hers. They were slightly rheumy with age, and made him look kind, like everyone’s favourite granddad.

She finally turned to me. ‘Semyon was alarmed after my call. He wasn’t expecting me back for another two days.’

‘And Semyon is…?’

She translated for him and he looked at me and smiled. His teeth were yellowing, but at least they were still his. He offered us both a cigarette from a light blue pack. Anna took one. He said something that seemed to have nothing to do with cigarettes and she answered.

‘What’s he saying?’

He sparked up a plastic disposable and she cupped her hands round his as he offered her the flame.

‘He’s asking me about you. I said we can trust you.’

‘Can you?’

‘I’ve spent my working life around bad people. I can smell them. And why would you risk everything to be here with us now?’

‘Risk everything?’

Now it was my turn for the smile. ‘When he sees what you did to my neck, Semyon will probably want to kill you.’

The old boy spoke again and her brow creased. The waffle bounced back and forth a couple of times.

She turned back to me. ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid. The Falcon came back here, to Moscow.’

‘No – that’s good. Tell him that’s good.’

Anna didn’t bother. ‘He says it’s due to go to the proving ground tomorrow. Assuming everyone is still together, that can mean only one thing. They will test fire. There were rumours that it was faulty, but-’

Semyon gobbed off some more.

‘You know about dark flares? You know the importance of them? You know that the SA-16 can defeat-’

I dredged a name out of my briefing notes. ‘Vologda?’

She nodded. ‘It’s in the middle of a military training area.’

‘I know.’ I undid my day-sack and took out the Nikon. ‘How long will it take to get there?’

‘Maybe six hours by road.’

‘There’s no train?’

‘The line goes from St Petersburg only, and the area is north of the city. No internal flights either.’

Semyon said something else.

‘The weather forecast is cloudy until the afternoon. They will want a clear sky.’

With the camera powered up, I opened the side to replace the memory card. There was something I wanted to show Semyon. ‘Does he know where the people in the Falcon are now? They in Moscow?’

They waffled away, but it wasn’t sounding hopeful.

‘Can he try and find out where they are? It’s really important.’ I didn’t give a shit what Anna had in mind for them after she had her photos. ‘Where is the Falcon?’ If I could get to it before they took off tomorrow, maybe I’d be able to get the job done without leaving the city.

She didn’t have to ask Semyon. ‘No good. M3C have their own hangar in a military air base on the other side of the city.’

I passed him the Nikon. ‘Ask if he knows him.’

Semyon pulled a pair of cheap reading glasses from an alloy tube and focused on the back screen.

‘The little fat one, tell him.’

He zoomed in until Spag’s face filled the screen.

The accompanying shrug and shake of his head said it all. As he handed the Nikon back his eyes fixed on mine. He seemed to be apologizing.

‘If he doesn’t know where they are, I need to get into the proving ground. Can he help?’

His eyes bounced between the two of us and he gobbed off some more.

‘OK. We will go to his apartment later tonight and he may have more information.’

I realized I had their relationship all wrong. It wasn’t their apartment. But they’d said a lot more to each other than she was translating. ‘I don’t want to go to his place. I want to meet outside.’

‘No.’ Anna protected him. ‘He may be able to get maps, papers, find out where everyone is in the city. If he is stopped in possession…’ She searched my face. ‘No matter where they are, you will take me.’

Semyon asked something.

Anna turned to me. ‘We do not know your name.’

‘Manley. James Manley.’ I’d always wanted to say that. ‘But you can call me Jim.’

‘Jim, we need to help each other. We get what we want, the pictures that prove the story, then you can do whatever you have been sent to do.’

Semyon stepped forward, his hand extended, but his eyes burnt into mine. There were several messages there, none of them good.

96

Izmailovsky Park, Moscow

1930 hrs

We followed the crowd out of the ornate, almost Victorian-looking metro station. The thirty-minute non-stop express ride from Sheremetyevo had given me time to check out the others in the carriage.

Once up at street level, Anna fumbled about in her day-sack for a pack of cigarettes. It gave me time to study the twenty or so who’d come up with us.

We headed down a tree-lined avenue littered with empty bottles and rusty cans. Anna’s wheelie-case squeaked over the paving-stones. At the end, set in a large park of patchy grass, was a mock-Russian fortress with bell towers and onion domes. We could have been in Disneyland, if it hadn’t been for the slogans and graffiti daubed on the walls and the methers sparked out beneath them.

We manoeuvred round a group that had gathered to watch and applaud a fire-breather and passed through a pillared gateway topped off with balloons. The Izmailovsky flea-market was huge. You could lose yourself in it – and anyone you needed to.

Anna had chosen well. I wanted somewhere we could disappear for a few hours, that had constant movement and faces that changed quickly. She knew the score. She’d been doing it herself for years. Campaigning journalists weren’t exactly in the Good Lads Club in this country.

Her flat was routinely watched. A hotel was out of the question – they’d want to see our passports. So, it was hang-about time until we went to Semyon’s. After that, the plan was for her to go and collect her car. If Semyon didn’t know where the targets were in Moscow, or if he discovered that they’d already left the city, we’d need to get to the proving ground as fast as we could. The area was the size of Wales, the brochure had said. Finding it was one thing; finding out where exactly the test firing was going to happen was quite another.

Straight ahead there was a long run of stalls. The flea-market was a tourist attraction and kept long hours. A group of Japanese camcorded each other buying tat. Cold War chess sets, brass busts of Lenin, and Russian dolls with Putin and Obama painted on them were flying off the stall. So was the cheap padded coat I asked her to buy me, the sort any respectable granddad would wear. Del was very happy with the US dollars she handed him.

I steered her down an alley that opened up on our right. As we moved behind a rail of hanging T-shirts, I turned and had a quick browse. Nobody was following or taking the slightest interest. I decided I didn’t want a Putin T-shirt after all and we moved on. If someone’s behind you innocently, they might follow you the first time you take a turn. At a push, they might take the second. But nobody follows you round the third side of a square without a fucking good reason.

Anna caught on fast and didn’t need to ask. She pointed to things, smiled and laughed. Sometimes she took my arm. Worst case, I was a foreigner with a girl I had out on appro from the Russian-brides catalogue.

The third right had brought us into the flea-market’s very own B &Q district: rows of stalls covered with all your needs if you were building a house or knocking one down, from second-hand screwdriver sets to petrol-powered Kango hammers. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eight and coming to last light. The first stars were out. The temperature had dipped. We still had three or four hours to kill.

We crossed into a place filled with counterfeit DVDs and CDs and Russian rock memorabilia. Techno thumped from a speaker. A guy with a head-load of stubble-length bleached hair tried to get Anna to buy a Prodigy mug. Instead he got back the short, sharp Stalin daughter’s stare and bollocking. We moved on a bit, but not far. The deafening music was good – it made it impossible for anyone to hear our conversation.

She drew my head down and moved her mouth against my ear. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I could feel her breath. I wasn’t going to complain about that.

I pointed to a cafe at the end of the alleyway instead. Embers glowed in an open fire. A guy was cutting neat slices off something roasting over it. I started to head towards it.

‘No, not there.’ She pulled me in the opposite direction.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Somewhere else. Anywhere but there.’

97

We sat in a bar filled with people, smoke and music. It doubled as a kebab shop, and that was what she bought me to eat. I filled my face and lifted the Pepsi Max can to my mouth. She gunned down Baltika beer from the bottle. I was sure I’d never seen Agnetha do that.

‘Remember, we got a busy time ahead.’

She put down the bottle and picked up her cigarette. She blew the smoke towards the ceiling, as if that was going to stop the nicotine getting anywhere near me. ‘Do not patronize me. If I want a drink I’ll have one. You are not my father.’

‘Is Semyon?’

The cigarette went down and the beer came up. ‘No, he is not. But he is special – perhaps more so, even, than my own father.’

I looked at the ring on her right hand. ‘What about your husband?’

The beer bottle smacked down on the tabletop. ‘Do I ask anything from you? I don’t even know if James Manley is your real name. IranEx is full of people with unreal names. Are you a spy, Jim? I imagine you are.’

I couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t know how much I wished I was. I’d been brought up on old Bond films. ‘No.’

‘I don’t believe you. But that’s OK.’ She nodded at the two remaining kebabs. ‘They will get cold.’

As I kept eating she drank and smoked, deep in her own world. She ordered more drinks and tapped another stick from the pack.

‘What about you? Are you a spy?’ I wiped grease from my mouth. ‘Your Arabic’s good. And your English is better than mine.’

‘I am what I say I am. I like languages, that’s all. Besides, Arabic pretty much came with the territory.’

‘Chechnya?’

‘Yes, and Bosnia, and Afghanistan…’

‘I thought your thing was anti-corruption.’

‘It is. Where do you think M3C sells its weaponry?’

‘Does your source work for them?’

‘Semyon… Semyon is a very trusted friend.’ She spoke the words slowly to emphasize just how much she meant them.

I picked up a piece of pitta bread and got stuck into the last kebab. ‘How do you know him? I mean, M3C are the enemy, aren’t they?’

She didn’t answer. Neither did she fire up another cigarette as I ate. She just stared at me, her mind buzzing. ‘OK, Jim, we’ll talk…’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not married.’ She lifted her right hand. ‘I wear it to keep men out of my way. This is Russia, after all. But it is also there to remind me that I was going to marry once, years ago. Semyon was going to be my father-in-law. I love him deeply. He is the only family I have now.’

Her hand came down and played with the cigarette packet.

‘My boyfriend was older than me. My father didn’t approve.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Grisha. We used to go to that place you were aiming for, to escape the eyes of my family. It’s a young person’s hang-out – always has been. He always said it served the best shashlik in Moscow.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was 1987. We were young. We were in love. And then he went to Afghanistan. I waved goodbye to him at the station… and the next time I saw him he was in a coffin. Now Semyon and I have only pictures of Grisha to remind us of what he was like.’

I watched a tear form and trickle down her cheek. She fumbled to get another cigarette out of the pack. I took it from her and helped.

She sniffed. ‘I still go there sometimes when I want to remember him.’

The firebrand who’d gobbed off at the press conference didn’t square with the person I was with now. In Tehran she’d seemed utterly driven. The girl in front of me was vulnerable. But if you’d lost the love of your life in a war? The picture was steadying a little. ‘Grisha’s death still drives you.’

She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. But not, I suspect, for the reasons you think.’

I passed her the cigarette and she took it and lit up. ‘Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. Then, one day, February ’eighty-nine, the letters stopped. They told us he was missing, presumed dead. We wrote requesting further information, but the army never replied. It was like he’d never existed.’

In the wake of the Chechen war, I’d helped a number of families who’d tried to find out what had happened to their dead or missing sons. But during the Soviet era it would have been dangerous even asking the question.

‘It must have been – must still be – difficult.’

‘What?’

‘Not knowing what happened.’

‘But we do.’

98

Anna toyed awkwardly with her Baltika. ‘Almost a year after we lost the war, Semyon got a call from a man who claimed to be the colonel of the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on Grisha’s body.’

She saw something in my face. ‘You’re thinking the army didn’t carry out autopsies on ordinary soldiers? Sometimes they did. In certain circumstances.’

I didn’t need to ask her what they were. I knew she was going to tell me soon enough.

She took a swig. ‘The colonel told Semyon that he wanted to meet, that there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was scared to meet him.’

‘Why?’

‘This was Soviet Russia.’

‘So you said you’d go.’

‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man – this colonel – at a cafe. He told me about himself – told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. It was then that he showed me the pictures.

‘The autopsy had been carried out at a military medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: he was face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.’

The tears were really flowing now. She didn’t even bother wiping them away.

‘I asked the colonel what had happened and he told me Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier had been hit by an antitank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled, removing the back of his skull. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head – just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’

She steadied herself.

‘The fragment that had killed Grisha had come from an antitank missile that had only just entered service with the Soviet Army. It was effectively brand new. Someone had sold it to the mujahideen. Never mind that it would kill Russians. To the people who’d done the deal, the only thing that was important was the money.’

‘So why did this pathologist approach Semyon?’

‘Oh, that bit was easy. In exchange for the information, he wanted a job.’

Caught in the pool of light cast by the street-lamp outside, a couple of peaked caps and heavy trench coats walked past the window. They stopped to look through the glass. She watched and waited until they moved on.

The stub of her cigarette joined the others in the ashtray. ‘Jim, we should go.’

99

We were on a main drag – a long prospect heading westwards, the direction we needed to go. Traffic streamed in both directions. I turned to Anna as she took my arm. ‘Tell me about Grisha.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘As much as you want to tell.’

She wrapped her coat more tightly around her against the wind that was blowing along the prospekt. With it came a few spots of rain.

‘Grisha was an idealist. He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening, when I came back from school, I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I loved Pushkin. We got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him – in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. That’s why he joined the army.

‘He would have been conscripted anyway to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well as fight for them? It meant signing up for five years, but then he’d be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher. But to do that he first had to become a soldier.’

‘What was he? An engineer, an officer?’

‘No, he was nothing special. Just a normal infantry soldier. One of the thousands our government sent to be slaughtered out there.’

‘I had a friend, a British soldier. He’s just been killed in Afghanistan.’

‘Did you love him?’

I had to think about that one. ‘There were four of us who were close – we’d done a lot together. I’m the only one left now. You know what? I think I cared for all three of them. I miss them very much.’

She looked away. Her tear-stained cheeks glistened in the glow of a street-lamp.

I’d surprised myself talking about Tenny, Dex and Red Ken like that. I decided to cut away before it happened again. I didn’t like not being in control. ‘So, how much older than you was Grisha when you met? Was he old-enough-to-be-your-dad sort of old?’

‘No, no.’ She gave a giggle, which surprised her even more than it surprised me. ‘We’d started dating when I was just sixteen – a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen. Like I said, my father did not approve of the relationship. But by then my father did not approve of anything much.’

She paused.

‘He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. My mother was scared of him. I was his only child. He wanted me to make something of my life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. Grisha and I had to see each other in secret. Thank God he had a motorbike, a Ural, so we could escape every so often for a few hours on our own.’

For a second she seemed lost. ‘When he joined the army Grisha went away for almost a year. In that time I saw him only once. He didn’t talk about his training, but I could see that it had affected him deeply. It was only years later, through my work, that I found out what they do to recruits. Systematic abuse. Punishments have nothing to do with your performance. If the officers and the NCOs in charge are having a bad day, they beat you. If they are bored, they beat you. When Grisha came home that summer, he was a changed person. He didn’t want to talk about the army, just kept telling me that it wouldn’t be long – another four years – and then he’d be free of it. I had just turned eighteen so we decided to hand in our application.’

‘For what?’

‘To get married. Russians do not have engagements and rings. We just apply to ZAGS, the department of registration. They furnish a date when you can marry.’

The rain was falling harder now. She unwrapped the scarf from her neck and tied it round her head. ‘It was stupid – I was so young – but I wanted to let him know that I would wait for him. I couldn’t tell my father. But Semyon was very supportive. He became like a father to me, too. It was he who bought the Ural, a beat-up old thing from the Great Patriotic War, and restored it for Grisha. The only times I saw Grisha happy that summer – his old self – was when he and his father worked on that bike and when we were out riding on it.’

I didn’t say it, but Grisha was lucky to have had her – and Semyon. I’d never had a dad who cared enough about me to buy me a skateboard, let alone restore a motorbike.

‘We bought the rings…’ She gently played with hers, twisting it around her finger. ‘But the wedding never happened. He was sent to Afghanistan before ZAGS would give us a date…’

Her tears returned, and I thought about the three I’d lost. I’d never dwelt on how much those fuckers meant to me. It wasn’t as if we’d lived in each other’s pockets but just being with them again, even fleetingly, had made me feel good. They were my family, or as close as I was ever likely to get.

‘Anna, you still have family. There is still someone who…’

Ahead of us, lit by a flickering street-lamp, was a bus shelter. Anna stepped into it and I followed. The shelter stank of the things bus stops normally stink of. The rain drummed on the roof.

She smiled sadly and removed her scarf as I reached out and touched the ragged bruise on her neck.

An image filled my mind – of a twenty-one-year-old kid lying on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. ‘So Semyon works for M3C. He was working in one of the companies sucked up by Brin? Weapons that Semyon had helped to build killed his son?’

She gave a shallow nod. ‘That’s why Semyon and I do what we do.’ She checked her watch. ‘Come, time to go and see him.’

Her wheelie-case bounced behind her as we carried on towards the station in silence. I could see the lights of the metro up ahead. I’d been keeping one eye on it. In the couple of minutes since I’d last looked, the crowd outside had almost doubled in size. Anna had noticed it too. In the harsh light of the entrance, over the heads of the people waiting to get in, I could see two grey peaked caps. Police were checking everyone returning from the flea-market as they passed through the turnstiles.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they are searching for drugs. It happens sometimes…’

‘Let’s walk to another station, yeah?’

We edged around the back of the crowd and onto a main drag.

At the time Grisha was killed, everything was still for sale. Now it was more organized, and that made it more dangerous. It was easy to see why she was a woman with a mission.

But I had one too.

And if Semyon had found out where they were staying in the city, I could be done and out of here by the morning.

100

2348 hrs

Grey apartment blocks loomed either side of us. We kept in their shadows while holding the trigger on Semyon’s equally drab concrete building. Lights pushed through net curtains on two of the five windows that made up his second-floor flat.

An old diesel truck, a product of some ancient Soviet factory, belched fumes as it trundled past. We were about eight K away from the Gucci and Prada stores off Red Square. The tarmac was cracked and potholed. Areas of hard-packed mud that had once been turf were covered with a layer of dogshit and rubbish.

‘It’s a company apartment, Jim. He has done very well. The higher he has gone, the more information he has been able to discover.’ Anna told me this was a middle-class area, but it was like the old USSR had never gone away. Communism had produced generations that couldn’t have cared less about public areas. Why should they? The Party told them they’d take care of everything. Anything the other side of their own front door meant nothing to them. They weren’t even allowed to feel any responsibility for it.

‘Do you two have any tell-tales? You know – a sign to show it’s OK to go up?’

‘Yes – it’s always at night, so he has the kitchen light on, the one to the far right.’

I checked again to see if anyone else was watching his windows. ‘You sure that’s the only way in and out?’

‘Yes, Jim, it’s an apartment block. Just the one entrance and exit. And before you ask, those are the only windows. He has none facing the back of the building.’

She was getting a little bit crisp, but so what? Questions like these kept you alive.

‘He got a car? You see his car out here?’

‘No. He uses Grisha’s motorbike. It will be in the garage.’

She dug about in her pocket and replaced the battery. ‘Let me call him.’ She started pressing away.

‘How come you use a mobile if you two need to be so disconnected?’

‘It’s a pay-as-you-go. We both bought them for cash and only use them between us.’ She closed down the mobile. ‘His isn’t on.’

I took a breath and started to move.

‘No, Jim, it’s OK. He often forgets. He is getting old, that’s all. Come, we’ll check if his bike is there. Will that make you happy?’

I took her arm and we walked down an alleyway. The long, one-level strip of concertina garage doors ahead was covered with graffiti.

She led me to one about two-thirds of the way down, stood on tiptoe and pulled out a piece of broken concrete to retrieve a key. We lifted the door together. The smell of petrol and oily rags hit my nostrils.

Once inside and the door was down again she hit the power. A dull orange bulb hanging from a dodgy wire sparked up in the middle of the ceiling. Anna walked over to the bike. As she ran her hand over the metal it was as if her memories returned.

I knew about Urals. I’d blown a few up in Afghanistan with our IEDs. They were big, clunky pieces of Soviet engineering, a little underpowered but solid, and ideal over rough terrain, which was why the Red Army had bought them in their tens of thousands. This one still had its bullet-shaped sidecar fixed on the right-hand side, and was a mass of immaculate, gleaming chrome and black gloss – Semyon’s mobile shrine to his dead son.

Anna walked around the machine, reliving old times. ‘I come here by myself sometimes… birthdays, anniversaries…’

I felt the working parts while she sat in an old cane chair pouring her heart out. They were warm. Semyon had been using the Ural less than an hour ago.

‘I know this is stupid, but we called this old thing “Cuckoo”, after a song we loved. It was a hit when we met. Everyone used to sing it and…’ She stared into the sidecar for a few more seconds, before reluctantly getting up. We closed down the garage and headed for the apartment.

101

We walked into the lobby through a set of wooden doors with Victorian-wired glass panels. The harsh white light from the overhead fluorescents did the cleaners no favours. Hastily swished mop marks showed as plain as day across the black marble floor.

Sweet, flowery disinfectant did battle with the stench of boiled cabbage. There was no lift, so we climbed the stairs to the first floor. Anna pointed down the corridor. I counted four doors. ‘Last one on the right.’

I signalled to her to carry her wheelie. It was making too much noise.

None of the doors had a bell or a knocker. They didn’t even have numbers. Each was just a plain sheet of veneered plywood with a fake brass knob, dulled from decades of use.

We reached Semyon’s apartment. Anna’s hand was poised to rap against the veneer. I heard a dull thud inside and knew exactly what it was. I pushed Anna clear as the lock turned.

I rammed my full weight against the opening door. It only travelled a foot. I burst through to see the body behind it stumbling back into the hallway. Tattoo’s mate staggered to his feet, one hand tugging his leather jacket away from his waist. I focused on the other and jumped on him, pinning him to the floor. I grabbed his fingers a nanosecond before they could make contact with the pistol-grip in his waistband. His cologne matched the building’s disinfectant. I felt my eyes water and my throat constrict. With him in the room, the boiled cabbage didn’t stand a chance.

He bucked and kicked, trying to head-butt me off him. His stubble rasped at my neck and face.

I pushed my hands down on his, determined to keep the weapon where it was. My knuckles sank into his stomach. I felt the hammer of the revolver and found my way to its grip. We rolled about on the carpet, each scrabbling for some kind of advantage. His fist thumped into the side of my head. I tried to sink my teeth into his face or neck to cause him enough pain to disorient him.

I thrust my right hand between the weapon and his skin, searching for the trigger. At the precise moment my middle finger found the guard he raised his knee to push me away. I used the distance between us to jab my finger onto the trigger.

There was a dull thud.

The suppressed barrel put a round into his lower gut, bollocks, cock or leg. I didn’t know which and didn’t much care. I shoved my left hand over his mouth to muffle the scream.

I suddenly had enough space to draw down the weapon. I jammed the long fat barrel against his head and fired again.

I rolled off his corpse and allowed myself a couple of deep breaths before moving on. I knew there wasn’t time for more. ‘Anna?’ I got up and closed the front door.

Low-level bookcases ran the length of the corridor. Books and magazines lay strewn across the floor. The brown, swirly-patterned carpet at the entrance to the living room was wet with blood. Anna knelt, sobbing, beside Semyon’s body. He lay half in, half out of the doorway, still in his raincoat and scarf. He’d thrown up his right arm in a vain attempt to protect himself. He must have known what was coming. There was no mistaking the exit wound on the left side of his forehead, slap in the middle of his frontal lobe. It wasn’t the only one. His left arm and both legs were stained crimson where he had taken rounds.

I checked the weapon. The chamber was empty. I ran my hands over the second loadie’s body for spares. He was carrying no extra ammunition. I guess he must have brought just enough to torture and kill an old man.

I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a bread knife. Two sets of bike gear lay on the floor, along with the rest of the room’s contents. They were old waxies, 1980s-style jackets. The pockets had been turned out.

The kettle had boiled dry on the stove. Semyon must have put it on as soon as he came in. The loadie had been waiting for him, or maybe he’d just knocked on the door. Semyon had known we were due any minute.

If anybody else had been here, they’d have done their stuff by now. All the same, I had to make sure. I cleared the two bedrooms, living room and bathroom. They’d all been ransacked. Drawers had been emptied, stuff torn apart – even in Grisha’s room, another shrine, still with his teenage football teams and pop-star posters on the wall.

I checked the loadie’s pockets and pulled off his fashionably pointed shoes. I couldn’t stop thinking about Red Ken lying on the tarmac, having taken a mag from this man. It made me feel good that the front of the bastard’s head now looked like Semyon’s. I just wished I’d been able to cause him the same amount of pain.

He had nothing on him at all. He’d come to the job sterile, and there was no sign of whatever he’d hoped to find in Semyon’s apartment.

The old boy must have kept whatever he was going to tell us in his head. That was why he’d been tortured. The leg wounds were kneecappings. The one in his arm had gone through his elbow. The grey woollen scarf that hung loosely round his neck was soaked with saliva. The loadie must have shoved it against his mouth to muffle the screams as he pumped in another round.

There was more blood on the living-room sofa and two or three separate trails across the floor. Semyon had been one hell of a guy: he must have used every ounce of his dwindling strength trying to crawl into the hallway and warn us. The loadie had head-jobbed him on his way to the front door.

Semyon had probably been pinged at M3C as he’d tried to find out where the targets were staying – or to get details of tomorrow’s test firing. He must have held out and said jack shit. The loadie had decided to sit tight and wait for us to arrive.

Anna’s car was now a no-no. They’d see us coming a mile off.

I snatched the jackets, leggings, gloves and helmets off the kitchen floor. The keys were by the cooker.

I went back to Anna. Her sobs were turning into a wail and it was getting far too loud. I grabbed her under the arm and pulled. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him.’

‘No, not yet…’ She stroked what was left of his head.

‘Anna.’ I bent down and took her face in my hands, trying to get eye contact. ‘Anna, I need you to get me to the proving ground.’

She turned and grabbed me. She pulled me into a desperate hug, sobbing into my shoulder. I held her for a while, stroking her hair, comforting her. I knew it didn’t mean anything. She was just clinging to the wreckage. The muffled sobs continued as I gently prised her away from me. ‘Anna, you can’t help him here.’

She nodded slowly and her body sagged. Her arms fell away from me.

I helped her to her feet and we both stood there, knowing there was nothing we could do for Semyon but not wanting to leave him untended. I looked again at his head wound, the outstretched arm. My eyes were drawn to the magazine beneath his pointing hand.

I suddenly realized what he’d been trying to do.

He hadn’t crawled into the corridor to warn us, or thrown out his arm in a last vain attempt to protect himself. He’d been giving us another kind of message.

The magazine cover shot was a group photo, a row of suits in front of a shiny new glass building. I picked it up and jammed it into the bike jacket. I’d try to make sense of it later. Right now we had to get as far away from here as possible. ‘Let’s go.’

I grabbed her case under my arm and closed the front door behind us.

102

Friday, 8 May

0053 hrs

We drove along the not-so-deserted streets. Anna was riding. I was in the sidecar. She knew the bike and she knew the city. I couldn’t stop thinking about Semyon. I knew I should cut away – I’d always managed to do that in the past. Sometimes my survival had depended on it. Sometimes I’d just used it as an excuse not to look at myself too carefully in the mirror. Whatever, it wasn’t working any more.

I finally managed to grip myself. Even if I did know why he’d got zapped, it didn’t change anything. I still had no control over what Altun and Brin and the Taliban did or didn’t know. The most important thing was that they didn’t have us. I was still moving on. I still had a job to do. I still had my mission.

After ten minutes we were a good tactical bound away from the flat. I tapped her leg and pointed down a side-street. Two or three clapped-out cars parked in front of a line of locked-up Spar-type shops were intermittently floodlit by a flashing neon bar sign. She pulled in and stopped and I passed her the magazine.

She took off the black full-face helmet and shook her head to unstick her hair from her skin. She was still in a bad way, but comfort wasn’t what either of us needed right now. We needed to crack on.

I hoisted myself out of the sidecar and we examined the magazine cover together. Semyon was on the far right, in the back row. I pointed at the egg-shaped guy in the centre of the group.

Her face turned to stone. ‘That’s Brin.’

‘First name Vladislav? Is he Vladislav Brin?’

The wind was getting up. She wrapped the waxed jacket more tightly around her. It must have been Grisha’s: it was in far better condition than mine.

‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘He is the CEO of M3C.’ She cupped her hands to light a cigarette, took a deep drag and, without taking it out of her mouth, pulled her wheelie-case from between my legs. She undid it and retrieved a pashmina, which she wrapped round her neck. I’d been cold in the sidecar; she must have been freezing.

She stared at the magazine cover, transfixed. I couldn’t tell whose face she was concentrating on. The one she hated or the one she loved.

‘I know Brin.’ I zipped the case up and shoved it back into the footwell. ‘The last time I saw him was in ’eighty-eight. He was selling technology to the US in East Germany.’

She jerked her head round. ‘What?’ Her eyes blazed.

There was no need to bullshit her any longer. We had less than a day to do what we needed to do. I told her everything I’d been keeping from her. I told her who I was. I told her about how Dex, Red Ken and I had lifted the gold. I told her what had happened when we were loading it. I told her about Tenny, Altun and Spag. I told her why I’d been in Iran, working for Julian, and about getting binned from the job as soon as I knew that Spag was involved, and that he was still CIA. I told her who had killed Semyon. And finally I told her I was there for one reason and one reason only – to avenge my mates’ deaths.

She stared at me, taking it all in as I continued.

‘I still don’t understand where the four of us fitted in. I know Altun is the middleman between Brin and the Taliban. I know the Taliban can pay for the missiles with heroin or heroin money – it doesn’t really matter which. I can’t understand how Spag and the gold are involved. Or what cements him to Altun and Brin.’

‘Nick?’ She thought for a while. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care.’

That was good enough for me. ‘You’re right. The story, the pictures, so what? They won’t bring Grisha or Semyon back. These people -’ I pointed at the magazine ‘- these people will survive anything you do and then they’ll kill you for it. It’s just the way of the world. So fuck ’em. I’m going to kill them. I don’t care that the CIA are involved and I don’t care about the gold, the heroin or any of that shit. I’m here for Red Ken, Dex and Tenny. They were all I had left. And now I’m here for Semyon and Grisha too. I’m here for revenge. What about you? You want some?’

Her whole demeanour had changed. ‘Yes – no more story. I want revenge.’

‘Good – you get me to the proving ground and I’ll do the rest.’

She took the cigarette from her mouth, flicked away the ash, and considered the burning tip. ‘How?’

‘I don’t know yet. We’ll share the riding – get us both out of the city and I’ll work something out.’

103

Outskirts of Vologda

0648 hrs

The night ride along the endless ribbon of pitted tarmac had been dank and miserable, and so was the truckers’ stop we’d pulled into. A strip of ancient wooden shacks was attached to each side of a filling station. Poor-quality light spilled from their windows and dribbled away into the forest. Power lines drooped between their poles and branched off over the parking area. If it hadn’t been for the Cyrillic signs, I could almost have been in the American Midwest.

I sat on Cuckoo, wet, cold and hungry – all the things I hated – waiting for Anna to come back.

A convoy of military trucks made their way down the other side of the road. Each set of headlights caught the rooster tail of spray thrown up by the one in front. As they drew closer, they slowed and stopped. I heard boots on tarmac before I saw soldiers run into the shops.

I made myself look busy, double-checking all our gear was well strapped down. The first filling station we’d come to must have thought they’d won the state lottery. Besides fuel cans, a small bubble compass and a roll of Sellotape, we’d bought them out of food, water and maps, and even their stock of towing kits.

The maps had been OK for getting us here, but the training area was just shown as a massive stretch of grey. No roads, buildings or even water-courses were marked, and there was no sign in the middle of it saying ‘Proving Ground’. But I had a plan.

I looked up. The convoy would have come from the naval air base Anna said was located about forty K further up the road. That was the direction we were heading when we left here.

The thunder of turboprops rumbled somewhere above the low cloud. Anna had said the base was where long-range aircraft took off to patrol the Atlantic. I knew the ones she was talking about – Antonovs with wingspans as big as B-52s, but props instead of jets. The papers had reported that the Russian crews held up boards with their email addresses on so the Brit interceptors could drop them a line and join their Facebook page.

Anna came out of the nearest shack carrying two paper bags and a couple of large steaming cups. She wasn’t short of admirers, even here. Five or six soldier boys followed close behind. They whistled appreciatively, zipped up their jackets and headed reluctantly for their wagon.

The bag she passed me contained a small loaf of brown bread and a jar of strawberry jam. I broke the loaf in half and scooped jam into it with two fingers. ‘Did you find out where we can get it?’

‘About ten kilometres further up the road.’

I wolfed down the bread and jam between gulps of strong, sweet black tea, then climbed back onto the saddle. Getting aboard Cuckoo was just like straddling a regular bike, except you had to manoeuvre your right leg just ahead of the metal bars connecting it to the sidecar and just behind the air intake for the right cylinder. I liked to be able to move my leg around, and it felt hemmed in by the hardware.

Another invisible aircraft laboured above us as I kick-started the Ural. I hoped the cloud cover hung in there. We needed all the help we could get.

104

0710 hrs

We soon found ourselves paralleling a four-metre-high chain-link fence. The fir trees the far side of it seemed to advance and recede as we continued, and in a few places crossed the wire in an attempt to overwhelm us.

It doesn’t matter what flag you’re flying or what uniform you’re wearing, every army in the world has certain things in common. The chain-link fence is one of them. The high command can’t seem to get enough of them. They don’t stop anyone getting in, but they’re great for hanging warning signs on. Red ones emblazoned with a skull and crossbones were pinned to it every twenty-five metres or so. I couldn’t read the Russian writing beneath, but the message was clear.

We throbbed away at the Ural’s top speed of 100 k.p.h. Its basic 750cc twin-cylinder sounded like a diesel truck. These machines hadn’t changed a bit since the Russians reverse-engineered the German Army’s BMW in 1939 – and Cuckoo was the real deal, one of the originals. It was designed to go to war, take a pounding and still come back for more.

Like most of the really good squaddies I knew, it was also a pain in the arse. Taking orders was not what it was about, and I rather liked that. There was plenty of feedback from the handlebars. It had its own way of doing things, and it didn’t care who knew.

It wanted to turn right whenever I accelerated, so I began steering left to counteract the pull. But easing off the throttle for a shift of gear made the bike yaw back to its original axis. I had to learn to feather my steering according to throttle input in order to keep the thing heading in the direction we needed to go.

Braking and turning were also no picnic. Hitting the front brakes pulled the Ural to the left, whether or not you wanted to go there. Right turns were even more hair-raising. If the change of direction was too sudden, the bike would start to lift.

We passed a barrack block overlooking a wet parade-ground. An endless line of wooden shacks stretched along its furthest edge, probably selling everything from beer to women. Neat lines of trucks and APCs glistened in the rain. Soldiers drilled or ran around at the double, all the normal business. It could have been any fortified military compound anywhere on the planet. It was exactly what I’d been hoping for.

We cracked on. I checked the odometer, watching it move up to the ten K mark. Anna slapped my left leg. We’d reached the truck stop she’d been told about. I pulled in.

This one had a hardware store. There were rows of shovels and picks lined up against a wall in some kind of display, next to knackered tractors that had probably left the production line in Stalin’s time.

I waited outside in the rain while Anna went in. I took off the helmet to get some air. My whole body felt grimy and stiff, like I’d spent the night in a trench. For some reason, a night in the open always feels worse after first light. It was the bit I’d hated most about being a squaddie.

Anna came out twenty minutes later, laden with gear. ‘Shall we fill it up at the pump?’

‘Not here. Let’s get on target.’

I put the helmet back on and we rode for another thirty K along the fence line. The skull and crossbones still made regular appearances every twenty-five metres or so. The occasional building materialized out of the drizzle beyond the wire. I didn’t have a problem with the bad weather. There would be no test firing until it cleared.

At the thirty-five K mark we reached the guts of the air base, and barrack block after barrack block, all drab concrete and flat-roofed, interspersed with semi-circular huts made of corrugated iron. The whole place was heaving with lads in uniform trying to look as though they were on the way to somewhere important.

We passed the main gates. A MiG fighter and a Hind helicopter gunship were mounted on plinths either side of them. Two sentries in fur hats and camouflage waterproofs stood to attention beneath them, AKs across their chests. Their pissed-off expressions reminded me that there was something about being a squaddie that I’d hated even more than waking up after a night in the open.

Runway lights throbbed in the gloom behind them, fading away into the distance. Several massive Antonovs were lined up on a concrete apron alongside jets and helicopters. Jeeps buzzed between them. I slowed down as much as I could without drawing attention to us. I gave my visor a wipe and scanned the place for a smaller white jet among the grey.

Nothing.

We pushed on, passing armoured fighting vehicles and general military traffic.

About a K further on, a dense block of trees came right up to the fence line and crossed over it. The chain link disappeared among its branches.

I braked and shouted down to Anna. ‘What do those signs mean? They saying the place is mined?’

‘No – just that you’ll be shot if you trespass into the training area.’

I slowed some more and checked behind us for possible observers. There were none. The road was deserted. I swung Cuckoo to the right, across a thin strip of wet grass, then manoeuvred between the trunks of the firs until we reached cover up against the fence. I turned off the engine, dismounted and pulled off my helmet. ‘Now you can fill it.’

I lifted a whole lot of gear off her legs and undid the rope clamping the full petrol cans to the rear parcel rack. As she tried to haul herself out, I dropped one of the cans by the sidecar and left her to it.

The fence was easy enough to climb. I used one of the pickets as support. I wasn’t worried about sensors. This thing stretched for hundreds of miles.

From the top, all I could hear was the gentle glug of fuel into our new Chinese chainsaw. I couldn’t see anything of the runway through the trees. That was good: it meant they couldn’t see us.

I jumped back down and grabbed the other can. We’d topped up the bike at every filling station we’d come across over the last six hours, even if the tank was three-quarters full. If we had to leg it, the last thing we needed was a fuel gauge on zero.

Anna was done. She screwed the filler cap tight. ‘What are we going to do now, Nick?’

‘They’re going to shoot down drones, right?’

She nodded. ‘When the clouds clear. They’ll want to do it at near maximum altitude.’

A MiG screamed off the runway to our right.

‘Maybe they’re going to take off from here. It’s the main base and the only airstrip we know about so far. We should penetrate as far as we can into the area, and check out where the drones are heading.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No, we’ve got to keep on pushing forward. The more we do that, the more we can find out – and the more chance we have of getting on target.’

I pointed to the clear plastic bubble on the side of the chainsaw. ‘Pump that thing until it fills with fuel.’

I went and tied everything back onto the bike. It was beginning to look like a really bad Cub Scout’s rucksack – all we were missing was a frying-pan and a bunch of tin mugs. ‘OK, on the bike. You’re going to ride through the hole.’

I picked up the chainsaw and after ten or twelve wrenches on the starter cord, and finally working out how the choke operated, the thing sparked up. I stuck the eighteen-inch blade against the chain link to the right of the steel post I’d just used to climb up, and throttled up to full revs. It was pointless worrying about the noise. If we were heard, we were heard. There was nothing I could do about it. What I could do was cut the fence and keep cracking on.

The thing didn’t cut that well – they never do at first. The chain bounced and snagged, but we got there. By stretching my arms as far as I could above my head, I cut a strip about two and a half metres high.

I turned off the saw and handed it to Anna. ‘Lash everything down – even the helmets. We have to look as normal as possible when we get back on the road.’

She nodded. We were definitely going to do this job and then escape. Everything would go like clockwork. That was part of the forward-momentum thing. You did your best to make yourself sound as if it was going to work, as if the job was going to be done. With luck, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I laced my fingers through the bottom of the fence and tried to drag it upwards.

105

It resisted at first, but came up easily once I’d wrenched the lower links clear of the undergrowth that had twisted its way through them. We were left with a gap like a badly drawn, inverted V.

Anna revved and pushed Cuckoo through, gouging its beautiful paintwork right down to the bare metal in places. She brushed her fingers lightly across the scars as she made way for me to replace her on the saddle. I knew what she was thinking, but I reckoned both Semyon and Grisha would have thought it was all in a good cause.

We worked our way through the trees and bounced onto a four-metre-wide gravel track that cut through the forestry like a firebreak. Puddles stretched across its rutted and pot-holed surface as far as the eye could see. The Ural bucked and reared and sent up sheets of muddy water, but kept ploughing on just like it was built to do.

I could hear the props of a reconnaissance aircraft taking off a couple of hundred metres to our right.

I just wanted to keep moving forward, try to find something – anything- that might give us a clue as to where we were, and where we should be going. I was working on the assumption that the most secure area, the proving ground, would be in the middle of the site rather than at the edge.

For a moment I was back in Brecon, in the training area where I seemed to have spent half of my squaddie life – a maze of forestry blocks, tracks and firebreaks just like this, and just as wet.

The cloud hung low overhead, and mist filled the gap between it and the treetops. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the drizzle fell in a fine sheet. Give me proper pouring rain every time – but this stuff would do just fine. Low cloud meant no drones.

The little bubble compass was taped onto the speedo lens. The ball inside it pitched and yawed with every pothole, but I could see we were heading roughly north-north-east. I tried to keep the air base to my right. We were moving in more or less the same direction as the runway, towards the centre of the site. We emerged from the firebreak after another two hundred metres. I stopped when the track and the tarmac converged.

Most of the activity seemed to be at least seven or eight hundred away, the other side of the runway. I pulled the Nikon out of my day-sack and scanned what I could see of the air base. I checked the lines of aircraft for drones and the Falcon and found neither.

We carried on until we hit a junction from which five different gravel tracks headed back into the trees.

Numbered arrows in a riot of different colours were nailed to picket stumps. This was good news if you’d just been told to follow the yellow route to the RV point, but not much help otherwise.

Military training areas are plastered with signs and markers because head sheds the world over assume every squaddie is as thick as shit, and needs every message to be delivered as simply as possible. Don’t drive your tank here. Don’t dig your trench there. We don’t want this whole place to be full of flattened buildings and fucking great holes. A training area might look rough and ready, but there are more restrictions than a national park.

I could see another sign a bit further down one of the tracks – a wooden panel on a metal pole, with faded lettering beneath a smaller version of our old mate the skull and crossbones.

The Ural’s valves clattered as I bounced us down to it.

‘What does it say?’

‘Nothing much, Nick. Ranges. Shooting ranges.’

‘How far?’

‘It doesn’t say, just down this road.’

As we headed onwards, another Antonov thundered over-head on its way to fuck about over the North Sea and hassle Scotland.

Anna looked up at me from the sidecar. ‘Why are we going to the ranges?’

‘They’ll be restricted areas. That means there’ll be checkpoints to stop unauthorized traffic moving through them. And where there are checkpoints, there’s a good chance there might be maps or information on their exact positions. We’re going to get ourselves a map.’

‘What about the sentries?’

‘They’ll be the ones with the maps.’

I checked my watch. It was ten thirty-seven. I opened the throttle.

106

We bumped down the track at 40 k.p.h., only easing off at the bends. I slowed for each one and exited on the outside of the curve to give me more of a view of what lay ahead. I didn’t want to sail round a corner and straight into a checkpoint without warning.

Fir trees towered on both sides of us. The mist cut visibility to a hundred metres. The ranges might have been three minutes away, or three hours.

I drove another couple of K, shut down the engine and listened for the crack of supersonic rounds.

I didn’t hear any gunfire. But I did hear the rumble of wagons coming towards us.

‘Nick, we’ve got to hide.’

‘Where?’

The forestry block was too close and too dense. There were no firebreaks. We had been channelled down the track.

I restarted the engine. ‘Give them a wave. Show confidence. You belong here. We’ll carry on as if nothing’s the matter. No looking back.’

‘But what if-’

‘Fuck it. Let’s see what happens.’

I opened up the throttle. There was no more time for discussion. I wanted us to pass them on the move, not give them an excuse to stop and ask questions.

We were doing a very bouncy 50 k.p.h. as the first set of headlights cut through the gloom. There were four of five of them, closing fast. I had to swerve off to the left to let them keep their momentum.

The trucks were green and canvas-backed. The driver of the first looked as though his face had been carved out of stone. Anna gave him something close to a salute and the lad didn’t even bother acknowledging. The next four rumbled past. I checked in the mirror as I wrestled Cuckoo back on the track and saw soldiers on benches in the rear, leaning forward and resting their heads on their rifles. They looked very wet and very knackered.

That was a good sign. With luck they’d just had an early morning on the range.

We came to another sign at a T-junction a couple of K further on. This time, when I stopped and closed down, I could hear weapons in the distance. Single shots: high-velocity cracks as the rounds came out of the muzzle so fast they broke the sound barrier.

‘Anna, we’re nearly there.’ I leant down towards the sidecar. ‘There will be troops, but just sit tight and do what I say when I say it, OK?’

She nodded slowly. She didn’t like it one bit. ‘Do you have a plan?’

‘Sure.’ I gave her a lopsided smile. ‘My plan is just to get on with it. If we fuck up, we fuck up, and they’ve won – but at least we’ll have tried.’

I fired up the Ural again and we lurched in the direction of the shots.

107

One K further on a red flag hung limply at the roadside, a big old cotton thing weighed down with rain – a warning that the ranges were active. Even the most rough and ready set-up of this kind has worked out its safety templates. They cater for the rounds going down the range at the target, with a safety margin each side to cover fuck-ups. Templates normally look like big, open fans, at the base of which are the firing positions. Anywhere inside that fan is the danger area.

Another hundred down, we came across a second red flag and, soon afterwards, a red and white barrier across the road, next to a small shed. I really was back in Brecon.

I could see movement inside. Whoever the sentry was, he’d be bored out of his skull spending all day on stag. I knew the feeling. I’d done range-sentry duty a million times.

He came out reluctantly to see what the deal was with this bike and sidecar. The look on his face said he was already getting ready to turn us back or fuck me off onto another route.

He noticed the civvy clothes and all the gear hanging off the Ural, like we were on some kind of eccentric cross-country rally. He didn’t have a weapon, but why should he? He was just a lad on stag. He’d drawn the short straw. Or, in this weather, maybe not. At least he was nice and dry.

He didn’t have a clue who we were, but he didn’t look overly concerned. Nine times out of ten, the deeper you are inside an area, the safer you feel.

I dismounted nonchalantly and treated him to a five-hundred-watt smile. ‘Hello, mate, how’s it going? Fucking wet, eh?’

His brow creased. He was in his early twenties and had goofy teeth. I could see the sides of a crew-cut under his helmet, which he wore tipped back. I could almost hear the cogs turning.

Was that English?

He pointed behind me and spun his hand.

‘Yes, mate, that’s right. Anna – give me a helmet.’

She reached into the nose of the sidecar and passed it up to me. I showed him the helmet in my right hand as I walked towards him. He stared at me from behind the barrier, inquisitive more than intimidated.

I kept on talking. ‘Listen, mate…’ His eyes were bloodshot. He’d probably been hitting the vodka bottle in one of those shacks opposite the camp. ‘I’m going to fuck you over. I’m sorry.’

I focused on his eyes.

And then I swung my helmet hard at the centre of everything I could see that was flesh rather than metal.

He didn’t have time to react. He took the full force of the blow and he buckled. I threw myself on top of him as he went down, my knees in his chest. I pounded the bike helmet a couple more times into the side of his face, once hitting the ridge of his helmet and missing, once connecting. I didn’t want to hurt him badly. All I wanted to do was keep him out of it for a while. I yanked his helmet off and gave him one more good whack.

Anna went ape-shit. She tried to drag me off. ‘Nick, stop! You’ll kill him. What’s he done? Stop it!’

I stood up. ‘Look for a map in his hut. Go, go!’

Of course I wasn’t going to kill him. I just needed to control him. I had to be short, sharp and aggressive – there’s no other way to do this sort of thing. If you hesitate, he might turn out to be Russia’s cage-fighting king. If you don’t control him straight away, you could land up in a prolonged fight, with the only way out being to kill or be killed.

So, short, sharp and aggressive it had been. Anna wasn’t going to understand this right now – all she could see was another poor bloody squaddie at the sharp end of a fight he hadn’t asked for – but it was the best way to get what I wanted and still keep him alive.

He had a big lump on his head, but he’d be back having a few bevvies with his mates in no time at all.

108

I was dragging him towards the sidecar when Anna came out of the shed. She had two maps in her hands. One was a folded sheet, the other fixed to a board and covered with plastic film.

The sentry wasn’t fully conscious, but he was compliant. I half slapped, half pushed him down into the seat. I shoved his head between his legs and held it there. I didn’t have to use much force. The lad’s survival instincts had kicked in now and he knew which side his bread was buttered. ‘Anna, I need his helmet.’

She handed it to me, concern etched all over her face.

‘Don’t worry, he’s coming with us.’ I tossed it into the sidecar, along with Semyon’s bloodstained one. ‘You ride, OK? We need somewhere off the track.’

I climbed on behind her with the board in my left hand. My right stayed on the sentry’s head. He needed to know somebody was controlling him. It would make him feel safer, and therefore more obedient. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t be scared. He’d know by now that if he tried anything he’d be on the receiving end of a lot more pain.

We carried on to the next junction. Anna turned right, out of line-of-sight of the road the trucks had careered down. She found another firebreak and started down it. I stopped her before we’d gone ten paces. We couldn’t risk running into deep mud. We were off the track; that would do.

I jumped off and undid all the gear on the back. I needed the rope. I got the sentry to sit up and looped it round his neck. It was too much for him. His chest heaved and he gave a couple of loud sobs. Tears started to run down his face, to join the rain and the blood. The poor fucker thought I was going to hang him. ‘Anna, tell him to shut up. I’m not going to hurt him – but if he fucks about I will kill him.’

The colour drained from her face. ‘Nick, I-’

‘We don’t have a choice. I have to keep control. I have to let him know who’s boss.’

She gobbed off to him. Her message seemed to be a whole lot longer than mine. I guessed it didn’t really matter, as long as she managed to calm him down.

‘OK, now ask him if he knows where the testing ground is. The restricted area, the proving ground, whatever you want to call it – does he know where it is?’

She gobbed off some more, while I fastened his hands to his ankles and brought the rope back up and around his neck. I tied it off to one of the connecting rods between the bike and the sidecar. I put his helmet back on his head to protect him as we bounced around.

By now he was sobbing big-time.

‘He doesn’t know, Nick. He hasn’t got a clue. Look at him, he’s just a boy. What would he know?’

I tucked the chainsaw down beside him and secured it with another length of rope, then turned my attention to the maps. There were a lot of fan-shaped areas outlined in red but none of them stretched more than a couple of kilometres. They were everyday, bog-standard rifle ranges. They weren’t big fuck-off testing grounds. A couple of much larger, irregular-shaped areas were outlined in blue. One looked big enough to be Wales.

‘What does this say?’ I jabbed my finger at a heap of Cyrillic.

The boy let out another agonized plea from the footwell. I slapped a hand on his back. ‘Shut up, mate. You’re all right.’

It was going to be a nightmare for him. It was something he would remember for the rest of his life. He’d probably have bad dreams about this day – the day he’d thought he was going to die – but he would be alive. He stood more chance of getting shot by his own troops in a compromise than of me doing him any permanent damage.

Anna finished reading. ‘The whole of that area is restricted – it’s got to be the proving ground.’

I held the folding version open in front of me. ‘So we’ve found the haystack. Now where’s the fucking needle?’ I scoured the area. There were bits and bobs of markings, no more than the major tracks. But then I spotted a short, isolated line, too straight to be a track. ‘That’s got to be a runway…’ The board map showed us the shed we’d nicked it from. There was a big red ‘You are here’ blob for the sentry to show people.

I looked back to my folding map. ‘OK, line-of-sight, it’s about a hundred and forty K from here to the proving ground.’

‘You sure that’s it?’

‘Of course I’m not sure. I just don’t know. But neither do you, and he doesn’t either – or he’s not telling. And where else could it be? You’ve got a proving ground, you’ve got a private company coming in – they’re going to use their own airfield. We’ve got a possible – let’s go for it. On the way we might find something we prefer the look of.’

‘And what about him?’

‘He’s coming with – it’ll reduce the temptation to let the world know exactly where we are and where we’re headed. Get on the back.’

I binned the board map and had a last quick look at the folding one before shoving it inside my jacket. I checked the compass and drove back down to the five-way junction.

I took the track that headed north.

109

1457 hrs

I cut my way through yet another chain-link fence. It felt as though I was making progress. It was our third since we’d entered the training area. We’d used the forestry tracks, going cross-country when the ground opened up. We’d got bogged down once. I’d had to get the squaddie out to help. His name was Zar – a great name and an enthusiastic pusher before I tied him up again.

This had to be the proving ground. The other fences hadn’t carried any signs, but this one did. Instead of being red with the usual ‘Fuck off or we’ll shoot you’ warning, this one was yellow. It looked civilian even before Anna translated: ‘Private property – no military allowed without a permit.’

We were in the inner sanctum.

We’d done just over 160 K to get there. If I’d got this right, the airstrip should be about forty K further north. And if the maps were to be believed, the drones could only take off from the main air base to our south or the airstrip itself. And the same went for the Falcon. It didn’t matter where they took off. I had no control over that. But the drones would still have to get up in the air, and they would still have to do a fly-past to get shot down.

I pulled back the link for Anna to squeeze the bike through. Zar kept his head down. He was switched on. He was a good lad.

Once through, I got back on the driving seat, checked the compass and then the sky. The cloud was starting to lift. A breeze was moving things along. Ominously, shafts of light broke through in the distance, like someone up there had a fucking great torch.

The ground had been getting boggier so there’d be no more cross-country. I took the first track I found running north, up to higher ground. From there, we’d be able to get better eyes on the target ground.

There were no signs or coloured markers on this track. We climbed through forestry blocks and undulating grassland. The valves chattered but Cuckoo plugged on gamely. I stopped to watch the sky and listen, but saw and heard nothing.

We’d been going about an hour since the last fence when I checked the fuel gauge and pulled off to one side to top up the tank.

The cloud was almost gone. The wet fir trees glinted in the unexpected light, and steam rose from the leaf litter on the ground. Shadows appeared at the roadside as the sun burnt through the mist.

Anna dismounted and drank direct from a stream. ‘I’ll untie Zar and let him stretch his legs.’

‘No. Too much time. I’ll make sure he-’ I held up my hand. ‘Listen…’

It wasn’t the thunder of an Antonov. It was the sound of something much smaller, coming from behind us, from the south. I couldn’t see it. The fir trees blocked the view.

I screwed up the cap and threw the can back at Zar’s feet. ‘That’s it – it’s started.’

Anna leapt on the bike behind me. I kick-started it and pointed to the sky. ‘Keep looking up, keep looking up.’

We bounced back the way we’d come, heading south, as I dodged and wove among the potholes. I stopped about ten metres short of the edge of the forest and rolled the Ural the rest of the way to the tree-line.

110

Two aircraft were approaching from the south. The second was flying about four hundred metres behind the first. It was hard to judge the altitude, but I knew it couldn’t be any higher than ten thousand feet. That was the limit of the 16’s effective range.

The gap between them suddenly increased. The lead aircraft had cut away the drone. It banked left, orbiting back towards the air base. Almost simultaneously, the drone’s jet engine sparked up, creating a heat signature as it surged towards us. It passed over us, heading north, its engine giving out a deep, throaty roar. Sunlight glinted off its wings.

All of a sudden, flares burst out either side of the fuselage – brilliant, blindingly white balls of magnesium that decorated the sky like a Roman candle.

The white smoke trail from the SA-16’s power pack streaked across the tree canopy about two K to my half-right. Then it screamed up into the air and towards the balls of light.

The missile jinked left and right.

It locked onto a flare, rejected it, moved onto the next, rejected that too, moved on up, defeating the dark flares like they weren’t even there.

The explosion, when it came, wasn’t massive. Ground-to-air missiles rely on kinetic energy as much as their warhead to down an aircraft. The rear of the drone disintegrated. Splinters of it showered from the sky as the main body started to spin towards earth.

I started running. ‘Back to the bike. We carry on down the track.’

Zar must have been flapping about the explosion, but he didn’t budge.

I kick-started and we were off. The back wheel lost a bit of traction, and slid out. I corrected, and the whole bike shuddered as the sidecar wheel hit a rut. I stood up on the foot pegs to get a better view. I had to keep the power on to keep that back wheel spinning, and I had to keep looking the way I wanted to go – not pointing, but looking. Start worrying about where you’re putting your wheels and the bike stops doing the thinking for you.

The track opened up from the forestry a couple of hundred metres ahead. I could see clear sky.

Legs and arms still straight, I eased back on the throttle. We were close to the end of the firs. I trickled forward another ten metres and nosed it as far into the trees on the right as it would go, then closed down.

Zar didn’t take much coaxing to climb out.

‘Anna, bring the cameras.’

She gripped the kit while I dragged Zar to the nearest tree and retied him. He looked happy just to be breathing.

I waved to Anna. ‘Give me your scarf.’

I stuffed one end of it into his mouth to fill the cavity and make sure he couldn’t develop any sort of sound. I tied the free end round his eyes. Then I grabbed one of the cameras from Anna and we moved forward. When we reached the end of the firs, I stopped and listened. I could hear the buzz of another aircraft. I started running. I wasn’t going to wait for her and I didn’t have to – she had done her bit. Now it was time to do mine.

I hit the next tree-line after twenty metres and slowed. I was sweating big-time under the heavy bike gear but I didn’t give a shit. We were nearly there.

111

I got down on my hands and knees and crept to the edge of the trees. I could make out bodies about three hundred metres away. They stood on the middle of an expanse of tarmac that began where the firs ended. There was another little strip of forestry to the far side of them. The runway disappeared off to the right.

The tarmac dried in a steamy haze around their feet as they chatted. A table and chairs had been set up beneath a small gazebo beside them. It was like a fucking garden party.

I motioned Anna forward. All she could hear was their laughter. She couldn’t make out what they were saying.

I got out my camera and zoomed in on the two eggs on legs. I could hear Anna doing the same.

Spag and Brin stood next to each other in identical light cargos and blue fleeces. It was like one of them was holding up a mirror to the other. They covered their eyes with their hands as they heard the buzz of another prop engine, high up and behind us. Altun and the Taliban were still dressed for the boardroom.

I picked out movement in the trees beyond them. A fifth body stepped out of the shadows with a launcher on his shoulder. Almost immediately, he seemed to change his mind. He swapped it for a fresh one from the back of a people-carrier parked behind him.

He took a couple of steps towards the picnickers, who were now toasting each other. The Taliban watched the others gun a shot glass down their necks. I felt my face flush with anger. I’d have given anything for a weapon to help their party really go with a swing.

A jet engine sparked up above me.

All heads turned to the sky as the second drone came into view.

Altun offered the Taliban a baseball cap but he refused. He’d be used to the sun and, besides, he’d want an unimpeded view. Altun continued his sales pitch as the Taliban looked over at the firing station, then back up at the sky. He nodded slowly as the flares kicked off.

There was a deafening roar as the 16 left its tube. A cloud of smoke erupted beside the people-carrier and a white trail streaked up into the sky. Like its predecessor, it jinked left and right, up and down as it interrogated the flares and sniffed out the correct target.

Two more seconds and it made contact.

Three of them clapped gently as the remaining fragments of the drone cascaded downwards. The Taliban stared open-mouthed at the hole in the sky where there had recently been a plane. He was probably thinking he should have bought more.

I checked the people-carrier. The guy was already pulling out another missile.

I got to my feet.

‘Nick – where you going?’

‘To do what we came here for.’

She nodded.

I turned and ran back towards the bike.

112

I didn’t have time to tell Zar how lucky he was. If he’d been in the sidecar he’d have been coming with me.

I kick-started the Ural and bounced back onto the track, screaming over ruts and potholes towards the open tarmac. The chainsaw, helmets, wheelie-case, all the shit in the sidecar jumped and jolted as I rode out onto the pan.

I had to screw up my eyes. The sun glared off the wet tarmac. I squinted to see the bodies the other side.

The people-carrier was still stationary. The four men beside the gazebo spun towards the overworked motorbike. They didn’t know what it was, but they’d have guessed it wasn’t bringing dessert.

They started hesitantly towards the people-carrier. Before they could get there the lad who’d test-fired the missiles jumped into the wagon and it lurched towards me.

The four players melted into the trees.

Full revs, I aimed at the point where they’d disappeared, trying to outrun the wagon.

I knew immediately it wasn’t going to happen.

The Ural splashed into a puddle the size of a small lake and aquaplaned. I kept the revs up, kept looking the way I wanted to go.

The wagon was gaining on me. Within seconds it was all I could see in my mirrors.

I jinked the handlebars and swung left. The wheel of the sidecar lifted. I had to throttle back before we flipped.

The wagon closed tight up behind me.

Less than a hundred and I’d be in among the foliage.

The sidecar jerked and was suddenly in front of me. The bike was spinning. The fucker had kicked me up the arse.

I had to jump. If I didn’t get off, it was going to take me off. My right leg was hemmed in by the sidecar bars and air intake. If I didn’t go now, I might have to leave it behind.

Hands over my head, chin tucked in, I launched myself sideways. All I could do was curl up, fly, and accept the landing.

I hit the tarmac hard. The air was punched from my lungs. I skidded across the ground. All that lay between me and a severe cheese-grating was the set of 1980s waxies. My elbows and hands took the pain as I rolled and tumbled.

I flipped over onto my back and my head met the cheese-grater. The asphalt ground through hair and skin down to the bone. I was slowing down. I spread my arms and legs to create more friction.

When I finally came to a stop I couldn’t seem to function. I tried to get to my feet. I couldn’t. My vision was blurred. The back of my head felt like a blowtorch was trained on it.

I could see the blurry shape of the van. I saw the door open. The body behind the wheel began to get out.

All I could do was stagger towards it.

113

I hurled myself at the driver’s door and rammed it as it opened. There was a pistol in his left hand. His arm was extended. The metal frame banged against it. I held it there, slapping him like a drunk.

It wasn’t working. He screamed at me through the window as I pulled the door open and he started to launch himself out. I slammed my weight against it and rammed his head back against the trim. His arm came down. I tried to kick the pistol away. He screamed as I held him there, kicking again and again at his hand, sometimes hitting, sometimes missing.

The pistol finally dropped. I yanked open the door again and slammed it hard into the side of his head. He collapsed into his seat. His head crashed into the steering-wheel, then slumped towards the footwell. His jaw came to rest on the door-sill. I raised my foot and kicked down. There was a loud crunch as his jaw gave way and the top of his head carried on four or five inches more towards the tarmac.

The rest of him poured out of the wagon and hit the deck. He wasn’t going anywhere. My head was still spinning. I tried to take deep breaths.

The whine of jet engines sparked up on the other side of the firs.

I stumbled over to the weapon and picked it up. It was a Makarov. I slipped it into what was left of my jacket pocket as the Falcon’s engines got louder. It was still the other side of the tree-line but definitely on the move.

I looked through the windows of the wagon. The seats were down and there was a stack of long green plastic containers in the back. I pulled up the tail hatch and grabbed the handles of the top two. They were light. They’d already been fired. I pulled them out and chucked them down beside their owner.

The next two were heavy.

The nose of the Falcon emerged from the far corner of the tree-line, about four hundred away, turning slightly left, then right again as it positioned itself for take-off.

I spun back to the container and took a long, deep breath. I had to be in control.

My heart-rate slowed, and so did everything around me.

I knew what I wanted to do. I knew how to do it.

I mustn’t rush. If I rushed, I’d fuck up.

The four catches along the side of the tube flipped open easily. I lifted the lid. The 16 and its two-kilogram warhead nestled in a solid-foam cut-out.

The engines screamed as the Falcon developed the thrust to rattle down the runway and take off.

I pulled the weapon from its housing and hefted it onto my shoulder.

I was calm. I was in control.

The sun glinted on the clean white fuselage, still wet from the rain. I just hoped they were looking out of their windows and could see what was about to happen.

I turned on the power pack and heard the gentle whine of the electrics sparking up.

Everything was self-testing. It completed in seconds. As the Falcon’s engines reached take-off power, I took my final deep breath.

114

The aircraft rolled, and was soon roaring down the tarmac, piercing the heat haze and throwing up a huge plume of mist.

I positioned the range ring of the sight on my target. I’d need to keep it there throughout the engagement sequence. Like Paul (not Pavel) had said, the SA-16 was an all-aspect missile. You could engage the target from any angle.

There was no IFF on this one. The Taliban didn’t need it. Neither did I. I felt with my forefinger for the arming switch on the right of the grip stock. The Falcon was halfway down the runway. I pushed the switch forward from safety to armed. The weapon readied itself for firing, super-cooling the seeker to allow it to lock onto the target’s primary heat-source, those three engines on the back. When enough infrared energy was detected, I would hear a high-pitched signal.

It was too easy. The electronics buzzed loud into my ear as it locked on.

The front wheel lifted from the tarmac.

My right ear filled with a high-pitched whine.

The seeker had a firm lock and was tracking the heat-source. We were ready to rock and roll.

I pulled the trigger just as the rest of the aircraft left the tarmac and tried to gain height.

Paul (not Pavel)’s words echoed in my head: provided the aircraft was below 10,000 feet, its destruction was 99.9 per cent guaranteed.

The missile made me wobble as it exploded from its tube. The white smoke trail was almost perfectly horizontal. It created a little white circle as it rolled over to the left, corrected itself, then jinked a little to the right as it locked on.

The aircraft was no more than a hundred metres from the ground when the missile struck. There was a small explosion. No big fireball, just debris falling away from the rear of the target.

The Falcon seemed almost to hesitate, and then dropped back down in a slow clockwise spin. It impacted beyond the end of the runway, throwing up walls of mud around its final resting-place.

A few pieces of wreckage fluttered from the sky like industrial-strength confetti.

As I threw down the tube and staggered towards the driver’s seat of the people-carrier, the third drone scudded across the sky, chucking out flares as it went.

The back of my head felt like it had been dunked in acid. I got into the wagon and hit the ignition. The bike was lying on its side, engine still throbbing. The chainsaw lay about fifteen metres away.

I picked it up. This wasn’t finished.

115

I sped along the runway towards the crash site as hundred-dollar bills fluttered out of the sky. Thousands of the things papered the wet tarmac – it looked like Broadway after a ticker-tape parade.

In the distance, the Falcon looked like a broken toy in a lake of mud. The back third of the fuselage had snapped clean off and lay about a hundred metres from the main section.

I swerved round another chunk of twisted aluminium. The last thing I wanted was a puncture. We still had to get out of this fucking place and I reckoned the Ural had already done its bit.

Brin was moving – staggering – across the tarmac. I swung the wheel towards him. He took another couple of steps, turned and looked me in the eye. His face and hands were charred, his clothes tattered.

My foot hit the accelerator. The people-carrier must have been doing at least forty when it hit him. It didn’t connect with the same explosive force as one of his 16s, but it was the best I could do.

He flew backwards three or four metres. I hoped he’d have massive internal damage. I wanted him to know the meaning of pain before I killed him. I turned back and came to a halt a couple of metres from his burnt and shattered body. I pulled myself out of the wagon. He was face down on the tarmac. His back heaved a couple of times, but each breath sounded like a death rattle.

I pulled him over onto his front and stood above him. Brin’s eyes stared at me. His brow furrowed. Maybe he was trying to work out where he knew me from. He was welcome to try, but it wasn’t going to happen.

He gasped and jerked as I raised the weapon. I didn’t care if he was about to die anyway, I wanted to make sure the job was done – and I wanted to make sure it was me who did it. I had some promises to keep.

I flicked off safety and aimed at his head. I fired just once. I was going to need every round I had.

He lay completely still. His eyes stayed open.

I turned away, leaving him lying in a fast-spreading pool of his own blood, just like he’d left Dex and Red Ken.

I surveyed the wreckage five hundred away. Smoke curled from the gaping hole at the back of the Dassault, but there were no flames.

Neither was there any movement.

Fuck that. I needed to take a closer look. I climbed back into the wagon and drove.

116

The rear section lay on its side, minus the right-hand engine and tail wing. I could see now where the cash had come from. The cargo hold was below the two side engines. The missile’s kinetic energy had ripped apart the alloy boxes inside.

I didn’t want to fuck about with the doors and emergency hatches. If anyone was alive in there it would give them time to think and react. The only way I was going in was via the mess of wires, panelling, seats and jagged metal where the back section had once been attached. From the noise I’d be making, they might even mistake me for a rescuer.

I stopped the wagon at the end of the runway. I was going to have to walk the rest of the way through ankle-deep mud.

I grabbed the chainsaw off the back seat and checked the mag on the Makarov.

I started walking. I was on auto-pilot. This was my time. Nothing was going to stop me. Nothing. I was doing what was right.

With the chainsaw on full revs, I sliced through the twisted wreckage in my path. As soon as there was enough room for me to squeeze through, I dumped it in the mud. I drew down the Makarov and stepped into what was left of the plane.

The smoke-filled cabin was in shit state. Yellow oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling. Seats had become grotesquely distorted. The fuselage had buckled. The dark leather sofas round a fixed coffee-table were upended. Sparks jumped from severed wiring and at least four different warning alarms were going off. They were so loud I could no longer hear the chainsaw still chugging away behind me. I could smell burning electrics, cigar smoke and alcohol.

The crew door swung open and the two pilots saw me. Then they saw the pistol. The door cannoned shut again and I heard bolts slamming home.

Altun was sprawled on the floor to my left, nursing an arm that flopped like a broken wing. It was covered with blood. A champagne bottle was emptying itself onto the thick pile carpet next to him.

His eyes were glued on my weapon. He opened his mouth, but I spared him the indignity of begging. ‘This is for Red.’ I double-tapped him in the head.

Another one down.

I moved along the cabin. Everything was still in slow motion. I was floating.

The Taliban was on the right, hiding behind a section of brown leather. His eyes met mine. He knew what was coming. He didn’t even flinch as the weapon came up. He stared, and waited.

‘This is for Tenny.’

I fired.

One more to go.

I moved deeper into the cabin, clearing a path through the oxygen masks with my Makarov’d right hand.

He was in the far right-hand corner, struggling to get up. His lap was wet. Either it was champagne or he’d pissed himself. There was a cigar on the floor, still smouldering. ‘Nick! Is that you, Nick? You’re supposed to be stood down!’ A cut that started just above his right ear ran all the way to his neck. ‘We’ve got to get away out this shit. Come on, let’s go.’

He staggered to his feet. ‘It’s been a total fuck-up. They should have called you off. They were told to.’

He took a couple of paces but I pushed him back. He toppled into one of the leather chairs. His eyes never left the weapon. He looked up at me, his arms outstretched. ‘Nick, what are you doing? I’m on your side here, that’s why they should have pulled you out. What’s the deal?’ He saw my head. ‘You OK?’

‘Why aren’t you dead?’

His hands came up in mock surrender. ‘Dubai? I didn’t know that was going to happen. I took a round myself.’ He pointed to his side. ‘Luckily it didn’t hit anything vital. I’m not carrying, by the way. I’m going to show you.’

He lifted his fleece and the polo shirt beneath to show a dent in the side of his overflowing gut. ‘I didn’t know. I swear.’ He shook his head. ‘Your people were told to back off. Now they’ve really fucked up.’

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to take all the credit for that. What were you up to, Spag? Doing your Ollie North impression again?’

He pointed beyond the gap in the tail section. ‘You see that shit out there?’ He meant the carpet of dollar bills. ‘That’s the money we’re going to use to fight fucks like him.’ His podgy finger moved to the Taliban. ‘That fucking Obama and his new fucking broom… He’s cutting our budgets left, right and centre… He’s fucking up our world, Nick. My world and your world. But we’re putting that right.’ He gave me his trademark leer. ‘Damn right we are!’

I kept quiet. Neither of us had anywhere to go right now.

‘I used the gold to buy the missiles from Vladislav. You remember him?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Then I geared up by trading the missiles to the Taliban for heroin, via that fuck Altun.’

His hands finally came down. ‘Iran’s having an election soon, Nick. The Taliban paid us way over the odds to get their hands on the missiles. We’re going to flood the country with their heroin and pocket the proceeds. Double whammy! The CIA needs black money to finance guys like me and you.’ He reached out a hand for me to help him up.

I stared along the barrel. ‘Not me, Spag. I was stood down. But you know why I’m here. You were there when it happened.’

His jaw dropped. ‘This whole thing – for two guys? You’re kidding, right?’

I was almost in a trance. I just looked at him, wondering when I was going to pull the trigger. ‘Not just two. There’s Tenny, and all the others like him.’

‘Big boys’ rules, Nick. They knew what they signed up for. This is bigger than them.’

‘Wrong.’

As I brought the weapon up he sprang towards me, slapping my hand off to the left.

The weapon spun and he started running for the gap.

It was OK. I had five or six metres. I wanted to take my time, get it right, savour the moment.

I turned, brought the weapon back up – even thought about my stance. Nice stable position with the feet; weapon solid in the right hand; web of the thumb and forefinger tight into the back of the grip. Nice straight right arm; left now bent, fingers closing over the right wrist.

Both eyes open, fixed on the foresight so it was clear and sharp, I took aim in the centre of the big, now out-of-focus mass dodging the oxygen masks and debris.

The pad of my right forefinger rested on the trigger.

‘Nick! Nick!’

She stood in the opening, right in my arc of fire.

‘Out of the way!’

He saw his chance. The gap between them closed.

I started to run.

The chainsaw engine roared, but it was drowned almost immediately by Spag’s high-pitched scream.

Red stuff exploded over the rear cabin as he fell to his side, the chainsaw still embedded in his chest.

Drenched in his blood, Anna dropped to her knees and vomited.

I jumped over the American’s body and put my arm around her shoulders.

117

Spag’s eyes were fixed wide open, like he was watching with amazement as the blood dribbled from his nose and mouth and his intestines spewed out over a rack of his own ribs. The motor idled, making it pulse from side to side.

I dragged Anna to her feet and out of the cabin. Out on the tarmac, I kept her upright. Once people are on the ground they flap even more. It’s all to do with the body language of surrender.

‘Anna – switch on!’

I shook her. I squeezed her face with my hand, trying to force her to focus. ‘Look at me! It isn’t over yet!’

It took her a while. ‘Yes, yes.’ She swallowed hard and I smelt strawberries again. ‘Yes, Nick, you’re right.’

She wiped hair from her face and I let her go. ‘Now listen to me. I want you to take the wagon…’ I kept my voice slow and low. ‘Take the wagon, and go and untie Zar. Don’t bring him here. He can do that himself. Tell him it’s steak time for him and the lads.’

‘What?’

‘Tell him to take as much money as he can carry and bury the rest. He can come back for it later. Do you understand?’

She nodded.

‘Deep breaths, Anna, it’s all right.’ I kept an eye out for the crew, but if they had any sense they were going to stay where they were until the dust had settled.

‘Then get the bags and all our kit from the bike. We don’t want to leave anything here that can be connected to us. Do you understand?’

‘Grisha’s bike… we can’t…’

‘Just leave it, Anna. We’re taking the wagon. You got what you wanted. It’s time to let go.’

She looked dazed. She needed gripping.

‘Anna! Switch on!’

‘Yes, yes – Zar, I’ll go to Zar.’

She turned away and I went back into the aircraft. I tipped half a dozen immaculately pressed shirts from a Louis Vuitton bag and started stuffing it with muddy hundred-dollar bills. When it was full I found another, and then another. I’d filled four by the time the wagon came back down the runway. The tailgate was still open.

I threw the bags into the back and climbed into the passenger seat.

Anna was recovering. ‘I heard him shouting at you. What did he tell you, Nick?’

‘Nothing we didn’t already know. Everybody’s got their face in the trough and the ones who pay the price are lads like Grisha… my mates… and the rest of us at the shit end of the stick. So fuck it, let’s go.’

We passed the missile-launcher. He hadn’t moved anywhere fast, and was going to need a lot of work on that jaw of his. She was more concerned about me. ‘Nick – your head…’

‘Don’t worry about me.’ The pain was excruciating, but I managed a smile. ‘I’m still breathing. So I’m still winning.’

A fourth drone cut across the sky, not realizing this particular show was over.

She drove fast. We were just about to enter the trees when Zar burst out onto the tarmac, staring wild-eyed at the wreckage at the end of the runway. Anna smiled as she watched him run towards the Ural. ‘I told him to take Cuckoo. It’s his now.’

118

Saturday, 18 July

1456 hrs

London City airport

Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the big plate-glass windows as I strolled through the automatic doors.

Through half-closed eyes, London City airport on a Saturday afternoon was how air travel must have been forty years ago. The building was almost deserted. A couple with small kids were making their way up an escalator towards the departure lounge. Some punters ambled from the shop, magazines in hand, to one of the two short check-in queues. An announcement encouraged last passengers for a flight to Geneva to make their way to the departure gate.

The person I’d come here to meet wasn’t where he’d said he would be, but I’d half expected that. We were at an airport, after all. I turned around and headed back towards the car park. It should have been the first place I’d looked.

A couple of vehicles came and went in the unloading bay. An overweight woman with a bad case of sunburn lugged a heavy suitcase on wheels across a pedestrian crossing, shouting at her overweight kids to keep up.

I heard the roar of engines behind me as a commuter jet pulled into the sky.

I stepped out of the bright sunlight, and scanned the cars. I picked him out of the background clutter, his face angled skywards, one hand shielding his eyes from the glare. I hadn’t a clue what the plane was – I didn’t care – but I knew this was where his attention would be. Once a geek, always a geek… ‘Oi, Ali.’

He lowered his arm and dropped his gaze. ‘Jim!’

That was a bridge we had yet to cross. He rushed up and I held out my hand. ‘Good to see you, mate.’

‘You, too.’ His eyes flicked from my face to my head. The scabs had gone and the skin was starting to lose its redness, but there was still a rather obvious lack of hair on one side.

I bent down so he could have a good look. ‘Came off a motorbike.’ I showed off the little stubby hairs trying to push through. ‘But I can see the green shoots of recovery.’ I stood up again, feeling quite pleased with my joke.

He didn’t get it.

We were supposed to meet in the cafe – the airport being a handy halfway house between my place and his. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry. Have you been here long?’

I shook my head. ‘No drama, mate. Settling in OK?’

‘Yes, thank you. The weather is not like they told me it would be.’

‘Better or worse?’

‘Better!’ He raised his eyes. It was another of those cloudless days that convinced us for a moment that we might have a really good summer this year. The papers had been full of phew-what-a-scorcher headlines.

Ali had been at summer school at the University of East London for the past month – on a lead-in English course before he kicked off his degree in journalism in September.

‘How’s Aisha?’

‘She’s well. I owe her so much. If it hadn’t been for her…’ He didn’t need to say any more.

As far as Ali was concerned, it was Aisha, researching online, who’d found the course as well as the bursary that had paid his tuition fees and living expenses. It was how she and I had agreed it.

Coming up with the cash had been the easy bit. Julian had played his part by pulling strings at the UK Border Agency to ensure that the fast-track student visa went through, no questions asked – not easy, when the subject in question was an Iranian with an encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s aerospace and defence industry.

‘And the old man, how is he?’

‘Better. He has – how do you say? – turned the bend.’

I already knew because Aisha had told me but, Oscars all round, I had to look surprised.

‘It was like you said. My father has been living with a pain in his heart for many years. But he is leaving the past behind…’

‘And Aisha? Things calming down after the election?’

He shrugged. ‘It happened just like I said, Jim, yes?’

Ahmadinejad had won. But he was never going to be allowed to lose.

‘Aisha still believes in the green revolution. She still struggles.’

People like Aisha were the cinders under the ashes. This time it looked like it was going to turn into a baby Tiananmen Square. But next time maybe it would be an action replay of the Berlin Wall.

Ali stood there beaming at me like an idiot, but I could see he was itching to get back to some more plane-spotting. He had my email address.

We shook hands.

‘I just wanted to make sure you’re all right, mate.’

We both smiled and I made to leave.

‘Jim?’

I turned back.

‘What I helped you with… It was a good thing we did, yes?’

‘Not just a good thing, Ali. The best thing.’

This time I kept walking.

SA-16s would still reach Afghanistan, of course. They’d just take a while longer. Heroin would continue to flood the Iranian market. Another Ollie North lookalike was probably already making cash that Obama didn’t know about to spend on a war he wouldn’t want to know about.

I pulled my keys from my pocket and pressed the fob. Twenty metres away, the rear hazards of a gun-metal Porsche 911 flashed into life.

I clambered in and shut the door. I hadn’t had it long enough yet to stop appreciating the sound of that reassuringly expensive clunk or the smell of new seat-leather.

As I eased the car out of the airport onto the North Woolwich Road, sunlight glinted off the gold ring on my left pinky.

I’d found the sixth crate exactly where Red Ken had left it. The tricky bit had been finding a patch of desert where I wouldn’t be overlooked melting down Saddam’s face, but it’s amazing what you can do with a few uninterrupted hours and a propane burner if you put your mind to it.

If the guy in the souk had had any inkling of where the gold had come from, he didn’t show it. He’d got a good deal, so why rock the boat?

As for the CIA’s muddy dollars, Anna had most of them. Getting them ready for circulation must have given a whole new meaning to money laundering. I’d only kept enough to buy me a beanie to cover my head, to clean and feed myself up, and to get on the train with her to St Petersburg, then on to Narva, on the border with Estonia. The river that separated the former Soviet satellite from Russia was a piece of piss to deal with. Then it was on to Dubai.

Five days later, I was home again – just in time for the christening of Red Ken’s granddaughter. At a break in the proceedings, I gave his widow her gold ring and told her I’d opened an account for her with five hundred grand in it. She knew better than to ask where the money had come from. The code was the code, and she knew that he was gone for ever even before I told her. His seat was occupied by a large, framed picture of him in uniform. I liked to think Red Ken would have done the same for me, but maybe I was getting soft in my old age. I must have been, because Tenny’s widow had got the same amount.

Cinza? I have a feeling she’s already made other arrangements, but she got the biggest bottle of Amouage Homage I could find to help her on her way.

After that I’d decided I’d had enough of The Secret Millionaire routine and headed for the Porsche showroom. Well, it was about time I had the odd mouthful of steak as well.

I’d never been much good at keeping score. Did it go some way towards compensating for Dex and Red Ken getting zapped? Julian reckoned it did – but then he always was a big softy.

Not only did he pull strings for Ali. During the Iranian election riots, there’d been a low-key news story that a certain Bradley Capland, banged up in the UAE as a bad debtor, had been allowed to go back to spend his final days in Canada with his beloved wife Sherry by his side. Several commentators expressed their surprise at the UAE authorities – not known for their touchy-feely side – letting him go. The story was a welcome antidote to the bad news that had been flooding out of the Gulf state as the Dubai dream continued to turn sour.

Julian wanted me to work for him and I told him I might. But not just yet – I had some things to do.

It took me ten minutes to reach the basement car park of my docklands apartment block – a glass-and-steel monolith that had had its final lick of paint, the estate agent told me, the day Lehman Brothers went to rat shit. Their crunch had been my gain. If you’ve got cash in your back pocket, recessions are a great time to clean up, the experts say. Since in every other recession I’d ever lived through I’d been penniless, I was only just beginning to find out.

My biggest problem was not really knowing what furniture I needed for the penthouse two hundred feet above my head. But help was at hand. Anna was arriving tomorrow and staying over – as long as she only ever smoked on the balcony.

I had two outings planned: a trip to IKEA, followed by a night out at Mamma Mia. She was a smart girl, but I doubted that even she would get the connection.