Zero Hour

ZERO HOUR

Andy McNab

PART ONE

1

Wednesday, 5 September 2007

22.39 hrs

The Arab guy at the keyboard was so small his feet only just touched the pedals. His shirt collar was far too big for him, and so were his green suit and matching bow-tie. It looked like the management had ordered a dozen the same size and tough shit if you didn’t fit. Tonight’s menu had been dished up along much the same lines, but at least the place had air-conditioning.

Diane perched herself on the stool next to mine. She was dressed up for a night out. Everything was covered, but she’d overdone the makeup. She crossed her legs and leant towards me. The pack of B&H glinted in the bar light.

I picked up my orange juice with a shake of the head. ‘No thanks, I don’t.’

‘Quite right too.’ She tapped a long red nail on her disposable lighter, took her first deep drag and reached for her G-and-T.

‘What do you think of it so far, Nick?’

‘My kind of party.’ I checked my G-Shock. Less than nineteen minutes to go.

Her half-emptied glass went back on the bar. She studied me as she took another drag. ‘Your first time?’

I gave her a grin. ‘Thought I’d give it a go.’

‘This is my second.’ She swivelled to face me, losing herself for a moment in a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘The first time I didn’t really want to come. It was so soon after my divorce. But all my friends— Well, everybody has their own lives, don’t they? Kids and mortgages. Too much going on, I suppose.’

‘Same here. I was left at a loose end. My mates have better things to do than play around with a single lad. Or maybe their wives won’t let them out in case I lead them astray. I’ve always wanted to come here, so when I saw the ad I thought, Why not?’

She took another drag and raised her drink again. We clinked glasses, toasting our exclusion from the world. She sucked an ice cube into her mouth and crunched it.

‘How long were you married, Nick?’

‘Not long. Couple of years. You?’

‘Fifteen.’ She made it sound like we were cellmates comparing stretches.

‘Long time …’

She downed the rest of her gin a bit too quickly. I sensed her life story was about to swamp me. I pointed at her glass and mimed a scribble to the barman.

She kept going. ‘You’re right. A very long time. We didn’t have any kids. He left me for a younger woman, of course. He’s got a little girl now.’

A fresh glass appeared. The first sip went down very smoothly.

‘What about you, Nick?’

‘Only one.’

‘How old?’

‘She was sixteen.’

Her face fell. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘How did she … pass away … if you don’t mind me asking?’ Her hand slid across and gripped my arm.

‘An accident. In London. She was … run over.’ I didn’t care if she thought I was lying or not. ‘Anyway, I’m knackered - I think I’m going to head back.’

‘Oh, please, I didn’t mean to upset you. Please stay.’

‘It’s not that.’ I smiled at her. ‘You know what? Maybe that’s why I’m here. The women in my life don’t tend to stick around for long. I tend not to get that involved, you know what I mean?’

The bill arrived. I made a move for my wallet but she gripped me more tightly.

‘I think you and me are exactly the same, Nick. The last thing I want is an … attachment.’

I freed my sleeve and counted out some notes. She was getting ready to leave too. ‘So, Nick, maybe we could go back to the hotel and have a quiet drink there, away from the rest of the gang?’

She nodded over at the restaurant area, where a table of eight or nine was still waffling about today’s highlights.

‘Thanks, Di. But I think I’ll just get my head down.’

I grabbed my nylon day sack and slid off the stool. I turned for the door as she finished off her drink. She wasn’t giving up. ‘Nick, if you can’t sleep, call my room. I’ll only be reading. Or I’ll be downstairs with the others. Anything but sleeping. It’s just so … hot …’

She wasn’t wrong. I pushed open the doors and walked out of the Jisr al-Kabir into the heat of the night. The restaurant was only a stone’s throw from the landmark suspension bridge that spanned the Euphrates in the north-eastern city of Deir el-Zor, but there was no cooling breeze off the river. Deir el-Zor meant ‘monastery in the forest’, Baltasar had told us. I’d have to take his word for it. All I’d seen was rugged mountains and desert, and farmers tilling the fields on the banks of the river. Not much went on here unless it had to do with the newly invigorated tourist trade. All the action was eighty miles downstream, in neighbouring Iraq.

There were untold numbers of ancient cities around here, our guide had continued. They’d survived Romans, Jews, Ottomans and even the French, who ran the country until 1946. Just about the only natives we’d come across were street vendors trying to flog us camel-hair blankets or sacks of cardamom or coriander. What the fuck was I going to do with any of those?

It was here that we’d be staying for the next three nights of our ten-night run-around of Syria’s religious and cultural sights and antiquities. Our tour group was a mix of born-again singles looking for the Promised Land, history-buff singles who wanted to follow the routes of Crusaders and sad-fuck singles like me and Di.

The hotel was the other side of the river. I wandered past the teahouses that lined the road down to the bridge. The pavement tables overflowed with old guys, their hookah-pipes bubbling away as they spun the shit. You name it, the topic was taboo in Syria, but the night was the coolest time to get out and get waffling to your mates, so here they were. And the open air was just about the only place they could be confident the secret police’s ears weren’t flapping.

I smiled to myself. If everything went to plan in the next two hours, these lads were going to have a lot more to talk about. And they weren’t the only ones.

2

As I crossed the suspension bridge I couldn’t help another little smile. We’d been here earlier today with our ever-enthusiastic guide. Baltasar was a squat, energetic little man with an enormous moustache. He kept twirling the tips as if they were waxed, but they weren’t. Seconds after each twirl, the whole arrangement would collapse again in the heat.

He was so devoted to his mother-country that he claimed just about everything you could think of originated from here. Even Jesus spoke Syriac - which was probably the only fact he’d given us that was actually true. As we’d gazed out across the mighty waters he’d told us the Euphrates featured strongly in the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. ‘Where it is written that the river will be one of the scenes of Armageddon …’ He’d raised his hands to the skies like a prophet. ‘The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the east.’

Tonight it wasn’t going to be kings coming from the east. It was going to be loud bolts of thunder roaring in from the west, in the form of seven F-15 fighter jets armed with AGM-65 Maverick missiles and 500-pound bombs.

The hotel lay a block beyond the far bank. The rectangular concrete monolith had had a few licks of green paint and a bit of a dig-out to cater for the tourists, but that was about it. The air-conditioning, like Baltasar’s take on history, was beyond repair.

The security guard at the front door had a blue sweater on over his blue overalls. There wasn’t as much as one drop of sweat on his ancient face. I went into the lobby. The small bar area and a couple of soon-to-be-threadbare sofas were taken up by faces from our Road to Damascus tour. I hadn’t bothered to find out all their names. Baltasar was at the centre of the group.

‘Ah! Mr Shepherd! Are you not coming to join us?’ He gave his whiskers a tweak. ‘I was explaining about the archaeological remains at Dura-Europos and—’

I kept on walking. I pulled out my BlackBerry and waved it. ‘I’ll maybe come down later, mate. I’ve got to make a call.’

There weren’t any lifts. The stairway was encased in mustard-coloured walls and a musty, smelly brown carpet that kept me company up all six flights. I’d asked for a room at the top. I wanted the view over the city; I didn’t mind what it cost.

I let myself in with a large key. The room was basic, but at least it was clean. There were two sheets and a pillow, a thin green blanket and no TV. A two-litre bottle of water and a small glass took the place of a mini-bar. I used it to clean my teeth each morning, then got the rest of it down my neck before buying another from Reception for the day’s sightseeing.

I shoved my earphones into place and hit the icon that looked like a date and time application. It took a second or two to load, and when it did I tapped in Cody’s number.

There was a long tone, followed by a short break. Cody Zero One was beginning to receive the call. The green padlock icon on his illuminated screen would be telling him it was in secure mode. He wouldn’t have to shove anything in his ear. He’d just press a button and take it on loudspeaker.

Cody Zero One was my new mate in Air Combat Command at Nellis Air Force Base. He was in the CAOC (Combined Air Operations Center) but this was a Coalition operation. The US might be controlling things from Nevada, but it was British boffins at GCHQ who’d contributed the technical and electronics expertise, while the Israelis were providing and flying the weapons-delivery platforms, the F-15s. All three empires were all taking part.

Nellis was about eight miles from the centre of Las Vegas. I knew it well. I’d been there a number of times when I was in the Regiment. We came with RAF Tornado crews to practise splashing targets with lasers so they could come in and bomb them. After a day on the ranges, we’d get down and hit Vegas for as long as we could. Not so much for the gambling - what’s the point? - but for the big bowls of shrimp they gave away free to keep you at the slots and tables.

The tone sounded another two times before a familiar Texan drawl came online. ‘This is Cody Zero One. Identify yourself. Over.’

The signal strength was fine, but sound quality wasn’t that good and there was a delay of about one and a half seconds. He sounded like he was doing lengths in a swimming-pool. The software was very much first-generation. It had to take what I was saying, bounce it off whatever satellite they were using, encrypt it, bounce it down to Cody and back to me once Cody started gobbing off. We had to follow radio voice procedure.

I pictured Cody in his air-conditioned bunker twenty metres under the Nevada scrublands, with his desert camouflage uniform starched to fuck, and his perfect teeth and white walled haircut. Alongside him would be a jug of coffee and a box of Krispy Kremes, and in front of him a set of massive plasma screens projecting real-time satellite pictures of the target about twenty miles from my balcony.

The al-Kibar complex was a nuclear reactor. Specifically, it was a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor, a carbon copy of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor in North Korea. As you’d expect, the Israelis were unhappy about having one of these on their doorstep, especially one that was tooling up to produce nuclear weapons for a country they had technically been at war with for sixty years. To make things worse, North Korea and Iran were both implicated. Iran was going to use al-Kibar as a secondary facility for its own nuclear programme.

Tonight’s operation was going to take less than an hour from start to finish, but it had taken nearly a year to confirm and plan. Luckily for me, it was the UK that had put one of the two final nails into the coffin of al-Kibar. I was holding the shitty end of the stick, but that didn’t matter to me: I was here to fly the Union Jack. Fucking about in another country, getting things done and, more importantly, getting away with it, that was the juice for me.

My iPod earphones sparked up again.

‘This is Cody Zero One. I say again, identify yourself, over.’

‘Cody Zero One, this is James Zero Two. Over.’

I couldn’t wait for the day when the software was so smooth you could just talk.

Cody came back after a couple of seconds. ‘Roger that, James Zero Two. Fifty-nine - I say again, fiver-niner. Over.’

I did a quick calculation to make sure I wasn’t about to fuck up. ‘Roger that. Fifty-nine, fiver-niner. That’s minus fifty. Minus fiver zero. Over.’

I wanted to make sure I got this right first time. I’d only have one chance to confirm it. The password was nine. To get 59, you had to take off 50. If he had said 02, I’d have said plus 07.

‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am is not airborne. Acknowledge.’

‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. Ra’am not airborne. Out.’

I wasn’t cutting off the phone. I was just making sure he didn’t rattle on with the commentary until I needed to know.

Pilots all over the world like to give themselves nicknames. There are Lightning Strikes, Cobras, Hell Hawks, Flying Buccaneers - all sorts going on. 69th Squadron of the Israeli Air Force called themselves Ra’am - the Hebrew for thunder.

It was hard not to take the piss, but then again, I wasn’t an Israeli with a fucking great mushroom cloud taking shape right on my doorstep. Nor was I a Yank with worries about what the fervently anti-American Iranians were up to. I was just a Brit low down the food chain doing a job, and that was the way I liked it.

I unzipped the day sack. First out was my very Gucci Nikon digital camera, together with the world’s supply of lenses and all the leads and bits and pieces to download pictures onto my Sony notebook. I’d had to explain to Security that I used the extending umbrella with the silver-coated interior as a reflector to help with my photography. These three bits of kit were all I was going to need to do my bit of the job.

The Brits had confirmed that al-Kibar was a nuclear plant. Up until then, the Israelis had had no concrete evidence of its use - or who was helping build it. All they knew was that the Syrians received high-ranking military delegations from North Korea. Mossad was convinced that they were intent on upgrading Syria’s military capabilities. North Korea had already helped Damascus develop medium-range ballistic missiles, and chemical weapons such as Sarin and mustard gas. So were they now taking them to the next level?

If that was the case, Israel would retaliate exactly the same as it had in Iraq in 1981 - when they flew over the border and bombed the fledgling Osirak reactor near Baghdad back to the Stone Age. There was no fucking about. They asked no one. They just went and did it. They broke international law, but nobody gave a shit. The only victim was Saddam. The fact that they themselves had nuclear weapons didn’t come into the equation. A lot of people belonged to that club. Even Pakistan and India were members. But the line in the sand had to be drawn at Axis-of-Evil countries, like Syria and Iran.

The Israelis suspected what was happening at al-Kibar, but they lacked hard intelligence. And Syria was a different kettle of fish from Iraq. Washington wouldn’t back an attack without the int. But then things changed. In November 2006 Mossad came to the Brits for help. A senior Syrian official was staying at a big fancy hotel in Kensington that cost PS1,600 a night. The Security Service went in and had a mince around. The guy had been incredibly careless. He’d gone out for the night and left his laptop in his room. MI5 opened up the back and inserted a Trojan horse program. Over the next couple of months, they drained out the construction plans for al-Kibar, together with hundreds of emails and photographs.

The photographs did the most damage. They showed the complex at various stages of construction since 2002. The main building looked like a tree-house on stilts, with pipes leading into a pumping station on the banks of the Euphrates. It was going to need a lot of water to create fissile material. As the building grew, it sprouted concrete piers and roofs, which could only have one function - to camouflage the place from above. Al-Kibar’s core design, they could now prove, was the same as North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor, even down to the number of holes for fuel rods.

The clincher was a photo that showed an Asian guy in blue tracksuit trousers standing next to one of the Arabs who’d been working there all the time. The Brits quickly identified the Asian as Chon Chibu. He was the chief engineer behind the North Koreans’ plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.

The Israelis were wetting themselves with this int, but it still wasn’t enough for the US. Washington thought it would be years before the Syrians were capable of producing a bomb. They could be fucked up without the US getting drawn into another war.

Things might have stayed that way had not a high-ranking Iranian decided to switch sides. General Ali-Reza Asgari was a massive catch. Head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon in the eighties, he’d become Iran’s deputy defence minister in the mid-nineties. His fall from grace had come after the election victory of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Asgari had branded several of those close to the new president as corrupt. He was living on borrowed time.

The Iranian general was an intelligence goldmine. He confirmed that Tehran was building a second, secret, plant in addition to the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, already known to the West. And that Iran was funding a top-secret nuclear project in Syria, launched in co-operation with the North Koreans.

Finally, the US had to sit up and take notice. The UK would be standing shoulder to shoulder with them, and sharing blood. That blood, of course, was going to be mine if I fucked up. From swanky executive suites in Kensington to high-profile defectors larging it in Washington, the operation had now come down to Cody munching doughnuts in Nevada, and me sitting in a dingy hotel room checking my watch.

In exactly fourteen minutes, a bright flash would light up the night in the distant desert, followed by the sound of thunder that would signal Armageddon.

3

I plugged the laptop into the wall socket, let it sort itself out, and unfurled the umbrella. I extended the handle, pulled off the small plastic knob at the end and lifted the cap beneath it to reveal a USB slot. I placed what was now a satellite dish on the floor by the open window.

Six floors below me, giggly Brits headed back to the hotel against the hum of traffic. Long fluorescent tubes dangled outside a line of shops to show off the goods on display. Above me hung a huge blanket of stars. In the middle distance, between the stars and the city, lay the inky blackness where the desert took over. Out there somewhere, oblivious to what was on its way, was al-Kibar.

The 200mm zoom lens was much heavier than the others. It housed a lithium battery that could power the device on its own or become an instant backup if the local grid cut out. I ran a lead from it into the USB slot in the top of the umbrella. Another USB wire ran from the camera to the laptop. Its screen was now displaying thumbnails of the hundreds of pictures I’d been taking to make my cover story stand up.

I hit the blue circle icon to open the programme.

‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am are airborne - Ra’am are airborne. Acknowledge.’

‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. Ra’am airborne.’

I checked my G-Shock: 23.26. I fired up my countdown display. GCHQ had pre-set it at eighteen minutes.

The F-15s had taken off from Ramat David Air Base, just south of Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. It was also near Megiddo, which, according to Baltasar and the Book of Revelation, would be one of the sites of the final battle between good and evil. That seemed appropriate. The attack on al-Kibar was certainly going to be Biblical.

Ten fast jets would take part in the initial attack, though only seven would be coming my way. For now all ten headed west, out into the Mediterranean. It was a decoy manoeuvre. Both the Turks and the Syrians would be tracking them. Everybody wants to know what the Israelis are up to 24/7 in this part of the world.

The screen displayed an empty bar chart. The Tefalheads at GCHQ who’d put this together must have realized that I needed everything to be as simple as possible. I turned off the lights and picked up the umbrella so that the inside and the shaft pointed out of the window. I moved it up and down and side to side until the bar chart was about three-quarters full of green. It was the best I could do and all that was needed.

I propped the umbrella on a chair and anchored it across the handle with my pillow.

‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am first wave ready to go active.’

I adjusted the dish. ‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I am seven-five, seventy-five per cent. Over.’

‘Roger that, James Zero Two. Seven-fiver. Good to go. Stand by.’

Someone somewhere counted down Ra’am’s first wave on a radio. It was slow, guttural and very Israeli. ‘Five - four - three - two - one - go, go, go.’

‘This is Cody Zero One. Ra’am first wave active. Acknowledge.’

‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I’m still seven-fiver.’

Three of the ten F-15s had peeled off and headed east-north-east towards the Syrian border. They were going to attack the radar site at Tall al-Abuad with their Maverick missiles and 500-pounders. The moment that happened, the stakes would be raised. Every unit near the border would hear what was going on, and the Syrian military would start flapping big-time.

All I could do now was listen as Cody gave the running commentary. I needed a picture in my head of what was happening. So did the other guy listening in. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, was taking personal responsibility for the Ra’am part of this attack. I was sure his surroundings were a little more comfortable than mine.

‘This is Cody Zero One. Ten seconds to contact.’

I counted them down on my second-hand.

‘First attack - ordnance deployed. Contact, contact, contact. Second attack …’

There was a pause.

Cody was waiting for the Mavericks from the second wave to deploy as he watched the target on his screens. He’d be looking for the splashes all over the night-vision thermal imagery as bombs and missiles hit the radar installation.

‘Ordnance deployed. Contact, contact, contact. Third attack …’

Another pause, shorter this time.

‘Weapons deployed.’ For Cody, it would have been like watching a video game. ‘Contact, contact, contact.’

That was the radar defences fucked up.

‘Ra’am second wave now active … James Zero Two, acknowledge.’

‘Roger that, Cody Zero One. I still have seven-fiver.’

The seven remaining F-15s were now screaming towards the Syrian border to break through the secure corridor that had been opened by the attack. From the moment they hit Syrian air space, it was exactly eighteen minutes to target.

Cody couldn’t help himself now. There was excitement in his voice. ‘Ra’am second wave - now in the combat box. James Zero Two, all yours - acknowledge.’

‘Roger that, Cody Zero One.’

I hit my countdown timer. My eyes were glued to the screen. I wasn’t sure what to do if the bar percentage dropped. Fuck about with the umbrella, I supposed.

The F-15s would be virtually hugging the ground to avoid being illuminated. Now the border had been attacked, ground-to-air missile systems would be searching the sky. They wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on, but they’d know there had been an attack on their air defences, and that meant there was going to be an air incursion. But what type? Jets? Ground troops? A combination? There’d be nothing for them to latch onto just yet, but Ra’am couldn’t hug the desert for ever. They were going to have to gain height in excess of 8,000 feet in order to assume their attack profiles. That was where I came in: if I didn’t fuck up the Russian-made Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 surface-to-air missiles that were protecting al-Kibar, they were going to fuck up Ra’am, and it really would be Armageddon.

Everything fell silent. Cody, me, Ehud Olmert - we were all holding our breath. Even the noise outside was blocked as I kept my eyes glued to the screen and the bars fluctuated between 73 and 75.

I checked the timer. Fourteen minutes fifteen seconds to go. I turned back to the screen. My laptop was linked by satellite to America’s Suter airborne-attack system. This package could feed enemy radar emitters with false targets, and even directly manipulate the Tor-M1 and Pechora-A2 sensors so they closed down completely. And that was what was happening now - or, at least, I hoped it was. I was directly attacking the microprocessors within the Syrian missile systems. It was easy enough. The chips had had kill switches programmed into them. When I hit the go button, I’d be sending a pre-programmed code to those chips, enabling Suter to override and tell the system what to do.

Syria’s missile systems might have been built in Russia, but the chips inside them hadn’t. Russia had been in shit state for years after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Bizarre as it seemed, they plugged the gap by buying microchips off-the-shelf from Taiwan and the West. Washington and London weren’t slow to catch on. As soon as they found out what was happening, they mobilized their Tefalheads. Microchips bound for Moscow and other unfriendly states were either reprogrammed or built from scratch with back doors or kill switches installed. Until they twigged, the West would be at liberty to disable whole weapons systems at will.

It wasn’t the first time the Russians and their various mates had been at the sharp end of this particular conjuring trick. In 2004, the CIA inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment bought from Canadian suppliers to control a trans-Siberian gas pipeline. A three-kiloton explosion tore the pipeline apart; the detonation was so large it was visible from outer space.

The radar systems on the border were old Soviet-era kit and didn’t have the kill switches, so they had to be hammered the old-fashioned way. The Syrians also had the newer, state-of-the-art Russian Pantsyr-S1E missile systems, but luckily for us they wouldn’t be operational for a month. I guessed that was a reason we were pushing ahead with the attack.

There was a distant rumble in the sky. It could only mean one thing. The F-15s’ engines were on full thrust to push them up from the sand. At 8,000 feet they’d acquire the target and scream down towards it at forty-five degrees. That was when they were at their most vulnerable. If I fucked up, they could be illuminated.

I didn’t even bother looking out of the window. They were miles away in the darkness.

I looked at the timer. Fifty-eight seconds until the first attack.

There was a loud thump.

Then another.

I glanced at my watch as the door took another pounding. There was nowhere to run. I had to stay and make sure this shit worked.

‘Nick … ?’

I gave a low groan. ‘I’m sleeping.’

Cody sparked up in my earpieces. ‘First attack - ordnance deployed.’

‘Shorry … Nick …’ Her voice was slurred. It sounded like she had her face pressed against the door. ‘I was wondering … if you fancied a drink. Maybe I could bring a bottle up?’

‘Contact, contact, contact.’

There was a distant flash of sheet lighting, then another, from the strip of darkness between the city and the stars. A few seconds later, the pressure waves from the first series of explosions rumbled over the rooftops.

Cody continued his commentary as the next Ra’am rolled down into the target.

‘Nick? Did you hear that? What was that?’

‘Thunder … There’s a storm out there.’

The screen still showed 73-75 per cent. There were more flashes and rumbles as the seven F-15s kicked away at the target.

Cody gobbed off in my ear and the thunder continued to roll. I muted the BlackBerry. ‘Tell you what, Di, give me ten minutes and I’ll see you down at the bar.’

She rattled on the door with both hands to mimic the explosions. ‘Better bring that umbrella of yours.’

Another lightning bolt flashed on the horizon, then faded with her laughter as she headed back along the corridor.

PART TWO

1

Tuesday, 9 March 2010

12.50 hrs

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I leant against the triple-glazed floor-to-ceiling windows of my penthouse apartment and tried to look out over Docklands, but the stabbing pain in my head played havoc with my vision. It felt like I was swimming through a pool full of razorblades.

The glass-and-steel monolith had had its final lick of paint the day Lehman Brothers had gone belly-up and the owner was no longer flashing the cash. ‘Their crunch is your lunch,’ the overly pushy estate agent told me, with a megawatt grin and flash of racing-car cufflinks. ‘If you’ve got cash on the hip, you can really clean up at times like this.’

I’d been penniless through every other recession in living memory, so it seemed like a nice idea. And I’d loved everything about this place, from the dual-aspect reception room opening on to the roof terrace to the secure underground parking space; from the granite worktops to the limestone bath with integrated TV; from the private balcony and walk-in wardrobe that hadn’t yet been filled, to the guest bedroom with the cantilevered glass pod sticking out over the dock.

It was like something out of a Bond film. The photochromic glass frontage darkened when the sun got too bright during the day, and the night-time views across to the Canary Wharf towers and the glistening river beneath were so fantastic I never closed the blinds.

Before the headaches had begun I’d just sit there with a brew, mesmerized by the aircraft warning lights. If I needed a change of scenery I’d wander over to the other side of the apartment and gaze past Tower Bridge towards the mishmash of South London estates that used to be my manor. As a kid I’d looked back across the water and thought the disused ware-houses and crumbling tenements along this stretch were even worse than the shithole I called home, but Docklands was a very different story now. And so was what had been happening inside my head for over a week.

‘You OK, Nick?’

Julian was sitting on one of my fancy leather armchairs, working his way through my supply of coffee capsules.

I didn’t look round. ‘Yes, mate.’

I wasn’t about to tell him the truth. I didn’t like people worrying about me. It made me uncomfortable. No one had given a fuck about me when I was a kid, and I’d got to prefer it that way.

The forest of tower cranes standing over Millwall Dock was a blur, but the one with Christmas lights still draped across its boom was starting to come back into focus.

‘This isn’t good for you, stuck away up here, keeping your-self to yourself. You’re turning into a recluse. You’ve got to get back out into the real world, do the things you do best.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m worried about you.’

I knew he wasn’t just concerned about my social life: he had a job for me. I’d tried to blank the pain instead of dealing with it these last few days; trying to stand there and take it until it gave up for a moment and went away. Maybe it was working. I’d always gone that route during my time as a deniable operator, and before that when I was in the Regiment. I’d done it as far back as I could remember.

I’d taken whatever my stepdad had dished out and not given him the satisfaction of knowing I was about to cry. I’d just stepped up to the plate, taken the punishment and dared him to have another crack. Which he always did. Me not reacting the way he wanted had pissed him off big-time: the slaps had got harder, and so had I.

So, no way was this shit going to get to me.

I turned back to Jules. He was dressed immaculately as usual, in a crisp white shirt and black suit, shiny shoes, perfectly knotted fancy red tie. He looked more like a Calvin Klein model than the first black section head of the Security Service, MI5.

We’d become quite good mates, as far as the mates thing went for me. He wasn’t coming over from his Edwardian apartment in Marylebone and banging on my door for brews the whole time, but he was a regular visitor, and always called first. Maybe that was why I liked him so much. Or maybe it was because he was the only mate I had left. Everyone else seemed to have got themselves royally fucked up or dead.

‘Listen, mate, I keep telling you I’m not interested. Why the fuck would I want to go and work again? Take a look at all this.’ I waved a hand around the apartment, then wiped it down the side of my face as if it was about to magic the pain away. ‘Waste of a morning, mate. I’m shitting money. I don’t need any of yours.’

He put down his mug. ‘Ah, yes - your grandmother’s inheritance …’

‘She put it away for a rainy day - bless her.’

Pinpricks of light still swam across my retina, but I could now see well enough to get the full benefit of his ironic expression. Julian knew exactly where the cash had come from.

I took a seat beside one of the three glass coffee-tables scattered around the massive room.

Op Sec triggered MI5’s answer to Catch-22: they could only tell you what the job was once you’d signed up for it - but you wouldn’t want to do that until you knew what you were letting yourself in for. Not even our friendship could change that.

It was another of the reasons I liked him. He was one of the good guys, straight down the line. Truth, integrity, defence of the realm and all that shit: he radiated it.

I realized I was a bit jealous. I might have the penthouse, the knockout view, the Porsche downstairs, but this lad had things money can’t buy.

Jules leant forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘They want you back, Nick.’

‘After all those years of getting fucked over from both sides of the river, all of a sudden your lot can’t do without me?’ I laughed, and that made my head start hurting all over again.

Jules shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Nick?’

I managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. ‘Never better, mate. Never better. Although that fucking “Chinese” we had the other night has given me the odd dodgy moment.’ I pointed a finger. ‘I blame you.’

He leant back in his chair. ‘You should be thanking me. No wheat, no dairy, no toxins - Vietnamese is probably the healthiest food you’ve eaten in your life.’

‘But don’t you get bored eating that Ho Chi Minh shit all the time?’

He smiled. ‘When I do I’ll go somewhere else. You still coming on Saturday?’

‘I’ll call you.’

Ten minutes later he headed for the lift and I made it to the toilet just in time to bulk up another gutful of coffee-flavoured bile.

2

Wednesday, 10 March

11.34 hrs

The wind gusted down Harley Street, throwing pellets of rain against the window. The nurse had disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, after announcing that Dr Kleinmann was just checking a few things. She’d done her best to look encouraging, but it wasn’t working.

A dark blue Bentley coupe pulled up across the road. I’d spent a great morning test-driving a green one a couple of months ago, but decided it was just too wide for my parking space. An overweight driver leapt out with a multi-coloured golfing brolly and held it over a couple of equally large Arab women as he ushered them into the clinic opposite.

The row of gracious old houses where grand families had once played charades by the fire and drunk to the health of Queen Victoria now hosted hundreds of offices and treatment rooms, turning over cash-paying patients seven days a week.

I was waiting in one of the drabber ones: the consultation fees hadn’t stretched to a can or two of Dulux in the last couple of decades, and they hadn’t been chucked in the direction of the central heating either.

Apitted brass chandelier hung from a sepia moulding above my head, casting enough light over the carpet and furniture to make it painfully obvious that they could have done with a bit of a steam clean. Shabby or chic, it didn’t seem to make much difference to the bill. Whatever you were there for, you came out a few hundred quid lighter. A clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes, and the pounds.

Fuck it, I wasn’t exactly spoilt for options. The NHS needed all sorts of details that I’d got out of the habit of providing, and BUPA weren’t much better. The Firm had never provided health insurance for people in my line of work, and without a bank account I was willing to divulge, I couldn’t set up my own. My credit history was non-existent. I’d slipped out of the frame years ago, when I’d left the army; I hadn’t paid tax since I’d picked up my discharge payslip. So I had to come to places like this, pay cash, and get on with it. I wasn’t complaining. The less anyone knew about Nick Stone, the better.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Stone.’ The accent was East Coast, but it would have been equally at home in LA or Jerusalem. Dr Max Kleinmann carried a large brown folder with my name splattered all over it, but he didn’t look happy to see me.

His expression was as grim as the weather and made sterner still by his black-framed glasses. Was he suffering under the usual burdens of marriage, mortgages and school fees, or was he just pissed off not to be on Rodeo Drive?

His dark, tightly curled hair was thinning on top, and a patch of stubble sprouted from above his Adam’s apple where he’d failed to zap it with his razor. The combo made him look a bit ridiculous, and that cheered me up for some reason. Perhaps it would help me take what he was about to say to me less seriously.

‘I just wanted to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing …’ He came and sat opposite me, on my side of his desk. ‘I wish I had better news for you.’

I turned back towards the window.

‘You OK, Mr Stone? You still with me?’

Of course I was. I just didn’t know what to say. I came out with the first thing that hit what was left of my mind. ‘That’s me fucked, is it?’

He didn’t even blink. ‘This is where the hard work starts. Let me show you …’

I followed him over to a light box on the wall. He hit a switch and it flickered into life. He slid the scan under the retaining clips.

He pointed to the tiny shadow on the right side of my brain. ‘This lesion, I’m afraid, is the problem. We know it as a glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly virulent type of astrocytoma. It’s a high-grade tumour, which tends to grow quite quickly. It’s the most common type of primary malignant brain tumour in adults. I’m surprised the symptoms aren’t worse. You have headaches, nausea, drowsiness?’

‘Yeah, all that. Listen, Doc, I don’t need to know all the technical bollocks. Just - can you zap it?’

‘With treatment it can be made bearable.’ He breathed in slowly. ‘Mr Stone, have you anyone waiting for you downstairs?’

‘No, there’s no one. No one to call, no one to worry about.’

At last Kleinmann was looking a little happier. He wouldn’t have to trot out the usual bullshit, shepherding me and my loved ones through the emotional labyrinth that led from here to fuck knew where. He could just get down to business.

He pushed his glasses further up his nose and leant forward to take a closer look at the tumour, in case it had changed into something nice like a Teletubby in the last few minutes. I found myself doing the same, examining the scan as if I knew what the fuck I was looking at.

‘You say it’ll keep growing?’

It was hard to believe that something so insignificant was going to finish me off. I’d always imagined it would be something a bit bigger, something more like the diameter of an RPG, a rifle butt or at least a 7.62mm round, but this little fucker was no more than pea-sized. Checking out like this? It felt so … pedestrian …

I tried to smile. ‘I always wondered what a death warrant looked like. Does it have a use-by date?’

I turned away and went back to my chair. I didn’t need to see any more. Looking wasn’t going to change anything.

Kleinmann followed me. ‘Like I said, Mr Stone, this is where the hard work starts. Chemotherapy and radiation treatment, that’s going to help, and there is—’

‘But will that nail it?’

Kleinmann sat down opposite me. ‘No.’ He flicked his coat over his legs like a woman adjusting her skirt. ‘It could keep you going for six months, possibly longer. But without any treatment? Two months, maybe. We can’t stop the pressure on the brain increasing. Of course, if you need a second opinion—’

‘Don’t worry, Doc, no second opinions. It’s there, I’ve seen it.’

‘What about the treatment? Would you like to go ahead with the chemo and radiation? The pain is going to get worse. There could be weight loss, maybe incontinence, vomiting still to come. But I will give you some drugs to help you in the short term.’

I got up and headed for the coat hooks. ‘Thanks, I’ll take whatever Smarties you’re offering. But chemo and all that gear? I don’t think so.’

Kleinmann sprang to his feet. ‘There are far more advanced treatments available in the US - or Italy, if you want to be closer to home. I could recommend some excellent clinics …’

I bet he could. With a nice little kickback if I took him up on the offer. ‘I think I’m going to handle this my own way.’

‘Let me give you some details of support groups, counselling—’

‘I don’t need any of that.’ I shrugged on my coat, then paused. ‘Out of interest, any reason I got it? Just one of those things?’

‘You have an unusual amount of tissue scarring. You appear to have taken a great deal of blunt trauma to the cerebral cortex over a number of years. Are you a boxer, maybe?’

I shook my head.

‘When the grey matter is shaken about over a sustained period of time it can cause irreparable damage - and in extreme cases provoke conditions such as yours.’

‘Thanks for that, Doc.’ I gave Kleinmann a slap on the shoulder. ‘I hope your next appointment’s a nice boob job.’

I made for the door, not knowing quite what I felt. It wasn’t fear. Fuck it, we’ve all got to die some day. It was more frustration. I didn’t want to end on a dull note. Better to burn out than fade away, I’d always thought. Better to be a tiger for a day than a sheep for a year; to die quick standing up than live for years on my knees. All the shit I’d seen on soldiers’ T-shirts the world over actually meant something today.

‘No, no - wait, Mr Stone. You’re going to need to control the pain as the symptoms worsen.’ He disappeared for a minute or two and came back with a large bottle of shiny red pills. ‘Take two of these every six hours.’

I nodded.

‘And please, take this information.’ He waved a brown A4 folder at me, stuffed with leaflets and flyers. ‘It’s all in there - treatments, support groups, help lines. Read them, think about it.’

I took the folder and stuffed it in the nearest wastepaper basket, then headed back towards my 911 waiting faithfully in the rain.

3

16.15 hrs

The storm pounded against the triple glazing.

For about the hundredth time in the last hour, I reached for the mobile, twisting and turning it in my hand before putting it back down again.

What the fuck was I going to say to her?

Did I need to say anything?

It was only six months since I’d first held Anna in my arms. Even then I’d had the feeling I’d known her all my life. We were standing among the wreckage of an aircraft full of dead men and drug dollars I’d shot down in Russia. We’d met at an arms fair press conference in Tehran two weeks earlier. I was working undercover for Julian; she was investigating a corrupt Russian’s links with Ahmadinejad and the Iranian ayatollahs.

She said she wouldn’t have touched me with a ten-foot pole if she could have sorted it on her own. Then she gave me the kind of smile that makes your knees go funny. I’d first set eyes on her when she was giving the Russian a hard time in front of the world’s press. She was a dead ringer for the girl from Abba with blonde hair and high cheekbones. I’d fancied her big-time. 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 hit the screen. ‘Dancing Queen’ had already been number one for about five years, and I took my seat in front of the TV every week hoping her reign would be extended.

This amazing woman had helped me choose furniture for the flat, and in between writing investigative pieces and flying around saving the world she’d come and stay. Only a few days at a time, mind, but for me that was almost long-term. The only thing we’d fallen out over was her smoking. She wasn’t about to be sent onto the balcony to do it.

I headed for the kitchen sink, swallowed a couple of Kleinmann’s Smarties and stuck my mouth under the designer tap. I clicked the kettle on and told myself I had to bite the bullet.

Did I really want to do this? Did I really need to do this?

I had to. I didn’t want her standing in the wreckage with me again. She deserved so much better.

I twisted and turned the mobile in my hand. Why drag her down with me?

My arse rested against the stainless-steel cooker. It would always be this shiny. I had all the toys now, but I was never going to turn into Jamie Oliver.

Finally, I stabbed a finger at the keypad and dialled.

‘Jules, mate? Count me in for Saturday.’

4

Saturday, 13 March

14.00 hrs

Chelsea were at home to West Ham. Kick-off wasn’t for another hour, but I still had to park so far from the ground I might as well have walked all the way from Docklands. I still preferred it to taking the tube, especially the way I was feeling.

I passed the Vietnamese restaurant on the corner by Fulham Broadway where Jules came to be deprived of wheat and dairy practically every night. Fuck that. I went into the station and came out again with two big frothy coffees.

I walked the last couple of hundred metres up the Fulham Road and flashed Julian’s spare season ticket at the turnstiles. The concourse was buzzing with blue-shirted fans clutching plastic pint glasses of lager, and overseas visitors taking pictures of each other eating expensive hot-dog baguettes. I made my way through them to the Block A steps. The stadium gradually came into view as I climbed. It was huge and, apart from a few bored-looking stewards in fluorescent orange jackets, virtually empty.

Julian was in his usual seat in row twelve, studying the programme with the kind of concentration he’d normally save for a PhD thesis.

‘Oi, mate …’

He turned round, all smiles. I made my way along the row and handed him his coffee.

‘Nightmare parking, as usual. If you were a true friend you’d support a team closer to my home.’

‘I don’t know why you don’t use the tube.’

‘No way, mate. After a lifetime of being poor, it’s the 911 everywhere for me, including the corner shop. You posh lads think it’s good to cycle and take public transport, and I’m glad. There aren’t enough spaces as it is.’

Jules shook his head and smiled. It was the same banter every time, but he didn’t care. On the phone, he sounded like he’d shared a school desk with David Cameron. In the flesh, his closely cropped hair, clean shave, sharp suit and glowing ebony skin made him look like he should have been out there with Drogba on the pitch, not watching from the stands.

Posh lad or not, I enjoyed his company. I certainly wasn’t here for the football. The last time I’d gone to a game more than twice in the same year, I was a twelve-year-old bunking over the fences at Millwall. I didn’t really like it even then - I just went for a laugh, a pie and a can of Fanta. But it was no picnic at Millwall: it always ended with a brawl.

I fished in my pocket for the season ticket.

He shooed it away. ‘You’ll be needing it for next time.’

This was the third time this had happened. ‘How much do these things cost?’

‘Enough to make my eyes water.’

‘Another burden on the bleeding taxpayer.’

‘When was the last time you paid tax?’ Julian flashed his perfect white teeth. ‘Come to that, when was the first time?’

I gave him a 500-watt grin, even though I suddenly had a head full of pain. I palmed two Smarties and swallowed them with a gulp of Pret A Manger’s frothiest.

We both stared out over the pitch.

‘I’ve been giving that job a bit of thought.’

Julian glanced behind us. People had started to fill the nearby seats but there was nobody within earshot. His eyebrow arched towards his immaculately sculpted hairline. ‘What about Granny’s nest egg?’

‘She always wanted me to work for a living …’

Jules pulled out his BlackBerry and hit the secure speech icon before dialling. That was a good sign. His spare hand covered the mouthpiece like he thought I’d added lip-reading to my CV.

He closed down and put it back in his pocket. ‘OK, you’re on. But you’ll need to give me a lift in that penis extension of yours.’ Jules got to his feet. ‘We have an audience with the top man. He’ll meet us in three hours. The Blues will have to win without us.’

‘Not a chance. West Ham will kick the shit out of them. Three-nil, I reckon.’

5

GCHQ Cheltenham

17.23 hrs

I came off the M5 at junction eleven and followed the A40 east towards Cheltenham. Just before the town, I turned off at a roundabout. Jules switched the radio to medium wave to tune into Talksport.

They were waffling about football and, of course, I’d been way off the mark. Chelsea had won 4-1.

We pulled onto Hubble Road. GCHQ had been the most secretive of Britain’s three intelligence services since way back, and I always reckoned they chose this location on the edge of a spa town in rural Gloucestershire just to add to the mystique. While MI5 and MI6 gathered human intelligence, GCHQ’s main mission was soaking up the signals equivalent, via the interception of phone calls, faxes, emails or any other electronic means. They monitored the airwaves for any vital snippet that might stop a terrorist attack in the UK or help the military in Afghanistan. They were also tasked with protecting the government’s communications against attack by enemy code-breakers.

This was Boffin Central, where some of the world’s most powerful computers played tunes for people with brains the size of a planet. I smiled to myself as I remembered the TV commercial for Tefal. A group of white-coated boffins with extra large heads hovered over a new kettle or iron, making sure it was perfect for the likes of me. They must have filmed it right here.

The man we were going to meet was Julian’s new boss. The whole of the British intelligence community’s new boss, by the sound of it. Tresillian had been made uber-chief of all three services - MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - a position that had only just been created.

‘There’s a thread of continuity at last. If GCHQ picks up a whisper, he can give the order for SIS to take immediate action. None of the old red tape.’

‘Or the old checks and balances?’

I slowed. There was a barrier across the road ahead, manned by two guys in uniform. The first layer of security. Jules flashed his pass and we were waved through.

‘Seriously new broom. Actually - new broom, old handle. His family go back to before the Domesday Book.’

I nodded. The most powerful people the world over are the ones we’ll never hear about. Like those who are so rich they make sure they never feature on Forbes’ List or the Sunday Times Richest.

‘That’s nice for him. But is he any good?’

‘Shit-fucking-hot, if he says so himself.’

I was so surprised I took my eye off the road. I’d never heard him swear.

He directed me to the car park at the front of the huge steel building. Everyone called it the Doughnut. Viewed from above, that was exactly what it looked like.

I drew level with a black BMW 5 that was three up.

Julian nodded. ‘Tresillian’s already here.’

‘Hope he’s got the kettle on.’

The driver was still behind the wheel, in weekend clothes. The engine was running. He was watching a DVD on a windscreen-mounted player. The two in the back were in suits that looked just a little too small for them. They were waiting for their principal to finish his meeting with us so they could take him home.

The driver’s window came down and Jules said hello.

As I got out, I recognized a scene from The Transporter. I nodded. ‘Great movie.’

I got no reply. The window slid back up.

A sign by the main doors said cameras, mobile phones and recording equipment or similar electronic devices were forbidden in the main building.

Jules handed the woman at Reception some ID that looked like a credit card and she swiped it through a reader. ‘Good evening, Mr Drogba.’ She passed him a form to sign, checked it, and passed me a red badge. ‘If you could hand that back in when you leave, Mr Lampard?’ She didn’t bat an eyelid.

We hadn’t even got past the main reception area before we hit another layer of security. This time it included the electronic equivalent of a full body search. We carried on and followed a circular walkway that ran inside the building. Everyone called it the Street. It felt a bit like being in an airport terminal, with open-plan offices leading off both sides. Glass cases displayed exhibits from GCHQ’s history, including the radio set used by the Portland spy ring to send messages back to Russia in the fifties and sixties.

‘I don’t know what the layout was before, Nick, but now the linguists and analysts work on the upper floor. They’ve had to squash up to accommodate CSOC.’

The cross-governmental Cyber Security Operations Centre was another new one on me. It had recently been set up to deal with any threat Britain might face from the Internet - and to carry out some cyber attacks of its own.

All the guys on the upper floor spent their time studying intelligence on everything from terrorism and nuclear proliferation to serious organized crime and counter-espionage. It was no place for the likes of me. Neither was the basement. I remembered the huge halls with endless rows of blinking computers. In all there were about ten thousand square metres of the things. They generated so much heat they needed a cooling system that used a lot of local water. During the floods in 2007, the mains were cut and special supplies had to be tankered in.

We passed something I didn’t remember from past visits: a small memorial honouring the number of GCHQ staff who had died in service. More had been dropped in Afghanistan in the past few years than anywhere else.

6

I followed Jules from the bright, fluorescent corridor into a room where the only light seemed to come from the glow of plasma screens mounted on a walnut-veneered wall.

As I closed the door behind me, the hum and chill of air-conditioning took over. A dozen solid walnut chairs sat around a huge oval walnut table. The room was carpeted with Axminster’s finest, and it smelt like it had only just been laid. I wondered if it was the fruit of some kind of government initiative to boost local industry or Tresillian cocking his leg and marking out his territory. If they’d given Anna the cheque-book and an hour in Ikea she could have saved the taxpayer thousands.

At the far end of the table, below a vibrant plasma screen, I saw the world’s most pissed-off face. There were far too many wrinkles in it for a man in his early fifties. His hair was thinning on the top and swept back. Either it was wet with sweat or he’d stepped straight from his office shower.

Charles Tresillian looked like he’d sprung from a grainy black-and-white of Shackleton’s final expedition and spent his Saturdays running from office to office, encouraging the troops. The set of his jaw certainly suggested he had a country to protect, and he expected to lead from the front.

A map of Moldova, wedged between Romania and Ukraine, north of the Black Sea, was spread across the screen behind him.

For fuck’s sake - these guys must see me as a one-trick pony.

Tresillian kept his brooding gaze on me as I crossed the carpet. He slid two files across the table at no one in particular. I went to the right and Jules to the left.

‘You’re our man, are you? Are you as good as Julian says you are?’ His voice was deep and clipped. His finger provided the punctuation. ‘He tells me you’re shit-fucking-hot.’

People expected the shits and fucks to tumble from mouths like mine because they assumed we wouldn’t know the difference between a thesaurus and a brontosaurus. But from a posh well-educated lad like Tresillian they somehow carried the same gravitas as one of Churchill’s soundbites.

I nodded. ‘Yeah, I am.’

‘Well, I’m the shit-fucking-hot man with the big picture. Sit.’

Jules and I took chairs facing each other. I leant forward and dragged one of the buff-coloured folders towards me.

‘Gentlemen, shall we?’

Tresillian opened his folder and we followed suit.

‘This is the situation, Mr Stone. It is one that you will endeavour to make good. Hector Tarasov is a friend of the UK in Moldova. Our sources in-country tell us that his daughter has gone missing. We want to find her for him, in as covert a way as possible.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s an industrialist.’ He tapped the printout of the map. ‘Here, in Transnistria.’ His finger stayed on the narrow sliver of land to the east of Moldova. ‘When it was part of the Soviet Union, Moldova had its share of factories, many of them military. With independence, in 1991, the eastern strip of the country, known as Transnistria, east of the Dniester River, seceded.’

I tried a smile. I wasn’t comfortable with the Mr Stone business, and even though my head was starting to pound again, I wanted to see if I could lighten the tone a bit. ‘Sounds like one of those lunatic names the head sheds give a country during battle training.’

It wasn’t going to happen.

‘If only, Mr Stone. Transnistria was Moldova’s most industrialized region, as well as its most Russified. Moscow intervened to stop a civil war over the secession, and since 1992 Russian troops have watched over what is being termed a “frozen conflict” that has left Transnistria isolated, unrecognized by any nation but Russia, and Moldova divided.’

He raised a finger at the plasma screen. ‘The reason our friend is very important to us is because this strip of land is a major producer of Russian arms for worldwide export. It has the largest steel-production plant that the Russian Federation has access to.’

‘What does Tarasov’s factory make?’

‘Tons of mind-your-own-fucking-business.’ His lips pursed and his frown added another ten years to his age. ‘This operation is about the daughter.’

I looked down at an eight-by-five colour picture of a young woman with dyed blonde hair that reached her shoulders. The roots showed through in the centre parting. She’d gone for the Goth look; her pale, almost translucent skin made her look like she belonged in a teenage vampire film. A bare male arm hung loosely round her neck. She was trying hard to smile into the camera, as you do at family events when you’re having a shit time. The image almost filled the page. There was no information about where or when it might have been taken.

‘Her name is Lilian Edinet. She’s twenty years old. This picture was taken approximately seven months ago. We have, of course, checked on all social networking sites to see if we could get any information on her whereabouts or any more recent photos.’

Another image was pasted over the map on the screen - the wide shot her face picture had been lifted from. She stood in front of a T55 tank mounted on a stone ramp surrounded by plaques: a monument to the great wheat harvest or whatever. The arm belonged to an older man, who looked a lot happier than she did. He was in his mid-forties and had very dark, almost jet-black hair and a dental plan that only money, not God, could give you. Peas out of the same pod, they looked like a double act. Behind them was a massive chunk of boring grey factory. Red signage proudly covered the top third of the building.

Tresillian looked up. ‘That is Hector Tarasov.’

He turned to Jules. ‘I don’t care too much for Facebook myself. I can’t see why anyone would want to make so much information freely available. It’s out there for ever. Good for us, though, eh?’

My head filled with questions. ‘Can I make contact with Tarasov? Find out what he knows? What about her mother?’

‘On no account must there be any contact with Tarasov.’

‘He must be taking steps of his own to—’

Tresillian was dismissive. ‘More from Julian later. As I said, it’s the girl we’re interested in. She is the sole reason you’re here.’ His eyes searched mine to make sure I was getting the message.

I nodded. ‘Lilian - she doesn’t look that happy, does she?’

‘On the contrary. By all accounts this young woman is quite a feisty little piece. However, she is missing, and you will find her at all costs. UK plc does everything within its power to help its friends.’ He paused. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Of course. You want leverage to score some big Brownie points off the Dadski.’

He didn’t answer or smile. Nick Stone was too far down the food chain to make funnies. He reminded me of some really good officers I’d come across in the army. They weren’t your best mates, but you knew where you stood with them, and exactly what was required. If you didn’t fuck them over, they might not fuck you over. But it still all depended on what side of the bed they got out of that morning.

‘Exactly, Mr Stone. We’re not a fucking charity, are we?’ He turned his head. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘Exactly, Mr Tresillian.’ Julian’s teeth gleamed in the subdued lighting. ‘We have a job to do.’

He turned back to me. ‘I cannot impress on you enough, Mr Stone, that this matter is of national and international importance. It is critical that this young woman be found and delivered to us. When you find her, a contact and safe-house will be available until arrangements are made to bring her back to the UK. She will never leave your sight, and only when she is physically under the contact’s control will the task be complete.

‘If you find her and she’s dead, I still want the body. However, you will not kill her to make your job easier. Nothing and no one must be allowed to stop you achieving your aim. Nothing. No one. Is that understood?’

I nodded. Hector Tarasov must be one powerful player. Tresillian even wanted bragging rights delivering the body.

He nodded back. ‘That’s very good. One last thing. This situation is very fucking delicate. Only the three of us in this room and eventually the contact will ever know that it’s happened.’

I nodded again.

‘Good. Has Julian completed your financial requests?’

‘We haven’t discussed that yet, but finance—’

‘Good.’ He slammed the palms of his hands on the table as he stood up. ‘Very good.’

Julian and I pushed our chairs back and stood up. Tresillian advanced on me with the relentlessness of a large armoured vehicle. ‘Julian will brief you now. The next time we meet will be to congratulate you on a job fucking well done.’

As he gripped my hand I smelt tobacco. A splash of Old Spice and an anchor tattoo on his forearm and he could have been a ringer for my granddad.

He went out, leaving his folder on the table.

7

We sat back down. The gentle hum of the air-conditioning replaced Tresillian’s growl.

I pointed at the now vacant chair below the screen. ‘He seems a lad. I bet he’s changed more than just the carpet.’

Julian carried on extracting sheets of paper from his folder and lining them up on the table. All I got from him was a wry smile.

‘She attends Moldova State University in Chisinau, the capital. Do you know Moldova?’

Not much. Particularly with a splitting headache. I’d never operated there. ‘Only bits and pieces. It’s best known for arms smuggling and people trafficking. What about the police - is anybody liaising? Is there someone in the British embassy I can rely on?’

‘Out of the question, on both fronts. The local police are either useless or corrupt. If it turns out she’s been kidnapped they might even be part of the problem.’

‘When did she go missing?’

‘Ten days ago.’

‘Who’s been looking for her?’

‘Only the father. He’s frantic, according to our sources. He’s hoping he either gets a ransom demand or she’ll be back in touch. Kids that age drop off the radar all the time without thinking of the implications.’

I pointed up at the screen and the green-glossed T55, its barrel facing forward, ready to attack. ‘He’s an “industrialist”, right? The tank outside the factory provides a bit of a clue. Any known enemies in the arms world?’

‘None. He manufactures for the Federation so he’s one of the bad guys but, as I understand it, he’s our friend and we want to keep it that way.’

I focused on the picture of the girl. ‘She speak English?’

‘Probably of the cable-TV variety, same as any other kid anywhere.’

‘And you have nothing at all from the networking sites?’

‘She closed her Facebook page two weeks ago. She’s not on any other site.’

‘You’ve checked flight manifests out of Moldova?’

Julian nodded. ‘And visa applications that come into the Hungarian embassy in Chisinau - they deal with all applications for Schengen countries.’

‘Tell me about the name.’

‘Edinet was her mother’s maiden name. She died when Lilian was little. It helps her keep a low profile. We don’t think anyone at the university knows who she is - it reduces the kidnap risk.’

‘Can you give me addresses?’

‘We don’t have her latest details. Like a lot of students, she’s floated from flat-share to flat-share. The last sighting was at the university a couple of weeks ago.’

‘What about Tarasov himself?’

‘He can’t go to the police, of course, because they’re too corrupt. Alert the Mafia and all of a sudden he’s facing a massive ransom demand if they find her. He’s bound to be looking. But stay away from Tarasov, Nick. He’s strictly off limits - Tresillian wasn’t joking.’

Fair one. ‘What’s she studying?’

‘Sociology.’

‘Does she have any medical conditions?’ If she needed insulin injections or whatever, I had to know. And if she’d been kidnapped, she might be dead already.

Julian shrugged.

Something else really puzzled me. ‘Why is this an MI5 job and not the Firm’s?’

‘With Tresillian at the helm of both, the demarcation lines are blurring.’

I swallowed another couple of Smarties as he glanced back down at Lilian’s picture.

‘As Tresillian said, nothing must stop you finding her. Of course we’re going to deny anything to do with the operation, but you will have secure comms with me at all times. I’ll help you as far as I can, but we cannot be seen poking around in-country. It wouldn’t help our relationship with Lilian’s father, and certainly not with the powers that be.’ He gathered up the paperwork. ‘Why don’t we get some coffee while I give you the lowdown?’

I followed him to the door. Bright light flooded into the room.

I couldn’t help smiling to myself. I was back at work. One last kick at life.

And I now had a really good reason to phone Anna.

PART THREE

1

Monday, 15 March

10.47 hrs

The International Airport Chisinau is the biggest in the Republic of Moldova. It’s a member of Airports Council International (European region), the massive posters in the revamped terminal proudly proclaimed, as well as the Airport Association of CIS Civil Aviation and the ALFA-ACI (L’Association des Aeroports de Langue Francaise Associes a l’Airports Council International). What was more: The main priorities of the personnel’s activity consist in providing a high-level of flight safety and qualitative services.

But for all its fancy new associations with the West, old habits died hard. I was held by three Customs guys in a side office ten seconds after they saw a European passport and no mates tagging along. There was a special tax I needed to pay. Since I was only carrying a day sack, they pegged it at thirty dollars.

I’d now been waiting for Anna’s flight from Moscow Domodedovo for close to five hours - the last two because her Air Moldova flight was delayed. This was probably the eighth time I’d gone back to the coffee shop in Arrivals, treated myself to a milky Nescafe instant, and soaked up the propaganda as I sat and sipped it.

I’d even resorted to reading the warnings on the packet of Nurofen I dug into occasionally. Long-term kidney damage wasn’t high on my list of concerns, so I popped another couple out of the blister pack, grabbed some more Smarties and washed them all down with a swig of coffee.

I’d transferred my two-week supply of shiny red pills into a plastic Superdrug case. It was easier to shove into my pocket than a big fuck-off bottle. Also, the label had my name on it and I couldn’t be arsed to scratch it off.

It had taken me seven hours from Heathrow with a Munich connection. Normally that wouldn’t have been much of a problem; I was used to living in airports. You just find some seats, lie down, read posters, drink brews. If you’re lucky, you go to sleep. But that wasn’t going to happen. My head was pounding - but I think it was mostly about seeing Anna again.

Fetch up in Moscow, with the biggest collection of billionaires on the planet, and you can’t move for fancy foreign labels. Moldova’s old split-level Soviet-era airport had had a major refurb, but Starbucks and all the high-end brands had still given it a miss. Jules had told me that its earning potential outside the small capital was the same as Sudan’s, so I guess it was no surprise.

Despite Julian’s briefing, I wasn’t exactly sure where Moldova stood in relation to the rest of the planet. Some guys immersed themselves in demographics and GDPs and could tell you the ten most popular names for girls and boys wherever they fetched up, but I never saw the point. This place was land-locked, and had a population of five million. The industrial strip, whose name I kept forgetting, ran along its eastern border. That was all I knew, and all I needed to know. All I had to do was find the girl, grip her, and hand her over.

I took out my new BlackBerry and checked for messages. The Tefalhead at GCHQ who’d briefed me on the encryption system and then got Mr Lampard to sign for it had been very pleased with his toy. Apparently it contained both a hardware and software-based secure communications solution that protected GSM cellular communications with a unique authentication service and advanced end-to-end encryption software. I hoped it worked better than the one I’d been issued with three years ago.

‘Combined with a secure mobile authentication solution it is capable of ensuring that all mobile voice and SMS communications, as well as data-at-rest within the device, are fully protected. It offers security against any attempt to intercept active communications both from inside a telephone network as well as over-the-air.’

That was all well and good. I just needed to know that, when I switched it on and pressed the security app icon, Jules and I could talk without anyone else listening in.

The security technology was based on encryption algorithms as well as a user/device authentication process, the Tefalhead explained. I could pretty much grasp that. But I got lost when he started talking ciphers and 128-bit block sizes.

‘Your BlackBerry uses these algorithms simultaneously as well as a 4096-bit Diffie-Hellman shared secret exchange to authenticate each call/device/user, in order to provide multiple layers of security and an effective fall-back inside the crypto-system design.’

I’d nodded enthusiastically and his face lit up. ‘So, to recap … I press the app icon if I want secure speech. When a call comes in I wait for the app to give me the go-ahead, and both sides can talk in real time?’ I can’t have been the brightest pupil he’d ever had.

I took another sip and looked around. Moldova might be in shit state but at least they were trying to get out of their hole. Most of the arrivals coming in from other flights were suited. Most of the guys with wheelies and mobiles stuck to their faces gobbed off in Russian, but I picked out a few European and American voices. A couple of the local papers sitting in the newsstands were English editions. They’d binned visas for people like me and I didn’t even have to show a return ticket. Anything to get new money into the country. But for all that, the staff still mooched about like throwbacks to the old order. They’d brightened up the buildings and forgotten to refurbish the employees.

At long last the Moscow flight flagged up as landed. It was show time. I suddenly worried that I should have cleaned myself up a bit in the last five and a half hours.

I got up and walked over to the sliding doors that stood between Customs and the arrivals hall. I knew she’d be one of the first out. Like me, she travelled light. The rest she’d buy when she needed it.

I felt my stomach flutter. At first I tried to blame it on the drugs. But I couldn’t escape the fact that I was excited - for the first time in as long as I could remember.

Then the real world kicked in. She’d agreed to come when I’d finally got round to phoning her, but only after I’d waffled and begged and lied about needing her help with a K and R. Perhaps she was only here to find yet another poor girl ripped out of her world, drugged up, beaten and fucked on the other side of the planet. That was the sort of thing that made Anna get up in the morning. I just happened to be along for the ride.

As the first wave of wheelie bags swept past, I almost had to stand on tiptoe to look beyond them. The doors half closed, then pulled back again to reveal a blonde in a black woollen coat, with a haircut that looked like a German helmet.

I locked on to her eyes but she seemed to look right through me.

2

I tried to read her expression as she came through into the hall. She scanned the faces beyond the barrier, trailing a wheelie behind her. When she finally spotted me, there was no instant smile or greeting.

I blurted out the first thing that came into what was left of my head. ‘You’ve had your hair cut.’

‘I thought I’d ring the changes. More practical for my next job. Well, the one I was going to take.’

She’d been approached by CNN to cover women’s issues following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in some of the former Soviet republics. She knew the subject matter and this part of the world like the back of her hand. CNN must have liked the hairdo: they’d granted her a two-month deferment.

She let go of her wheelie and it toppled over. She left it where it was, finally treated me to the smile I was hoping for, and ran the last four or five paces towards me. She threw out her arms, wrapped them around me and held me tight. I did the same. I really couldn’t get enough of this girl.

Her hair brushed the side of my face. ‘Mmm … Nice smell.’ I took in another lungful of Bulgari. I’d bought her some in London during her last visit.

She moved her head a little so she could get her mouth closer to my ear. ‘I love it.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘You know what, you idiot? I missed you …’

The pain in my head leaked away, along with the tension in my shoulder muscles. Anna’s perfume was more effective than any number of Kleinmann’s Smarties. I hadn’t been able to gauge her mood on the phone. She’d immediately offered to help, but didn’t overcook things on the emotional front. I understood that. I was the same. Unlike me, she wanted to save the world. Maybe you could only do that if you kept yourself just detached enough from it to stop all the shit stuff swallowing you up.

On past performance, I knew that anyone I got involved with wouldn’t stick around too long. Now I also realized that a tiny part of me hoped she might be able to save me too - or at least give me the chance to avoid flushing the last couple of months of my life down the toilet as well as the rest.

She took half a step back and gave me a long, hard look. ‘You have the picture for me?’

I righted her wheelie and she took my arm as we walked towards the coffee shop. I opened up my secure BlackBerry and clicked on the blow-up of Lilian. I left her studying the image at the square plastic table as I went and bought more Nescafe instants with hot, sweet milk. They cost twenty lei each, but the woman was more than happy with a couple of dollar bills. Hard currency still said more about you than the local stuff ever could.

Anna’s eyes were still fixed on the screen when I came back to the table. ‘Does Julian know I’m here?’

‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And it won’t hurt us.’

She turned the BlackBerry screen towards me. ‘She’s very pretty, beneath all that anger. Trafficking has to be the strongest possibility.’

‘But she binned her Facebook account before she went AWOL. And she’s a uni girl, switched on, not some pointy-head from the sticks who’ll fall for the nearest scam.’

Anna smiled like a mother whose kid has just said something naive. ‘You know nothing about this country and its people until you understand about trafficking. I’ll take you to see someone who will help you understand.’

‘Have you ever come across the name Hector Tarasov? He’s her father. He has a factory in Transnistria. A factory with a tank outside.’

She shook her head and reached into her coat pocket for her iPhone. ‘I can Google—’

‘No need, mate. I’ve already had a look. Nothing. It doesn’t matter, just background.’

She sat back, not touching her brew, and tilted her head to one side, studying me.

‘What?’

‘I’m still trying to work out why you’re here, Nicholas.’ She’d started calling me that recently - told me I deserved all three syllables, especially now I’d got a penthouse and a Porsche. I knew she was taking the piss, but I rather liked it. ‘You should be enjoying your life. You have no more reason to do this sort of work.’

I thought we were made of the same stuff: she wasn’t going to hang up her Crusader’s shield any time soon. I was surprised she felt the money might have changed things for me. ‘I am enjoying my life. But I don’t want to just fade away.’ I laughed slightly uneasily. ‘I want to die with my boots on.’

She gave me a puzzled look. ‘I know you’ve taken some punishment over the years, but you should be able to survive a straightforward K and R job …’

I took another sip of coffee and decided that eight cups was already more than enough. I couldn’t quite bring myself to look her in the eye.

‘Except that this isn’t a K and R job, is it, Nicholas? When have you ever been involved in the commercial world?’

I’d known it wouldn’t be long before she rumbled that one. Recovering kidnap victims is quite a business. If the victim is recovered alive, you can cop a percentage of the premium that would have been paid out by the underwriters in the event of a death, or on any ransom demand. It wasn’t entirely risk free, but Anna was right - it was a long way from being on the receiving end of an RPG.

‘I’m doing it for Jules.’ I shifted my chair closer to hers. ‘I couldn’t tell you over the phone.’

She lifted a hand and stroked my face. ‘You look really pale, Nicholas. You sure you’re feeling OK?’

‘Sure. Too many planes, that’s all.’

She got to her feet. ‘Why don’t you fix the car? I’ll phone and check the hotel reservation, then call Lena. I’ll wait for you outside.’

‘Lena?’

‘There’s nothing Lena doesn’t know about trafficking.’

I walked away with a bit of a spring in my step. The only negative so far was that there weren’t any hotels at the airport. If we did find Lilian, we might have to hole up somewhere with her until Tresillian sorted out the safe-house. The beauty of an airport hotel is that all you have to do is scan the departures board, see which plane’s leaving next, and leg it to the sales desk.

3

It was only fifteen Ks into Chisinau. There were a surprising number of shiny new BMWs and Mercedes weaving their way between the clapped-out trucks and tractors, but the road still wasn’t exactly choked with traffic.

The fields on each side of us looked absolutely knackered. As with most of the old Eastern bloc the heavy use of agricultural chemicals, including banned pesticides like DDT, had ripped the heart out of the land. And severe soil erosion from diabolical farming methods had fucked whatever chance these places had of being self-sufficient.

Anna grimaced as we passed a police car. ‘I’ve been to more than fifty different countries and I’ve never seen cops as corrupt as the ones here.’

‘They certainly don’t hang around. I had to cough up a fistful of dollars to get through Customs.’

‘I was stopped here twice in two hours once, both for completely invented offences. They target locals the same. They don’t even wait for people to do something wrong. The moment they’ve finished fleecing one victim, they flag down the next.’

Anna was on a roll.

‘And it’s not just about driving. Their favourite trick on a slow night is to stop foreigners at random for “looking suspicious”. Two hundred lei is the standard fine. If we get stopped on the street you’ll be asked for your passport. The law says that foreigners have to carry them at all times. Photocopies aren’t good enough. If you’re alone, keep saying you don’t speak Romanian or Russian. There are no guarantees, but if you’re lucky they’ll be too lazy to pursue it.’

We hit the city proper. Many of the people on the streets looked pretty well turned-out, particularly the young guys.

I nodded at a fancy-looking restaurant. ‘I thought we were supposed to be in Europe’s poorest country. Who can afford to eat in a place like that?’

‘You don’t want to know. Moldova’s the same as everywhere in the old Soviet Union. There’s a handful of haves and a whole nation of have-nots.’ She stared out of the window at the wide concrete esplanades. ‘Most people in Moldova don’t live like this. They scrape by on less than three dollars a day. Away from the towns, work is scarce. I wrote a piece about a small village a few kilometres from Chisinau where every male had sold a kidney to the West. In lots of villages, only children and grand-parents remain. Over a million have left the country to find work. That doesn’t include the numbers who’ve been trafficked.’

‘I take it Tarasov is one of the haves?’

‘For sure.’

‘And how do we explain all the Mercs and Hummers?’

‘The Moldovans like to claim Transnistria can’t function independently. They say it doesn’t have the industry or infrastructure - but they do, and not just through weapons manufacture. There’s a 480-kilometre border with Ukraine and it’s not controlled. As well as the sale of old Soviet military machinery, extortion of businessmen and money laundering, there is huge trafficking in arms, drugs and, of course, human beings. About two billion dollars are being laundered every year in Transnistria and no one wants to give that up without a fight.

‘But what should really have the rest of the world sitting up and paying attention are the dozen or so companies that produce arms around the clock. They’ve turned up in Chechnya, Africa, all over - even in Iraq in Saddam’s day and now Afghanistan. International organizations don’t accept that Transnistria even exists, so they can’t visit and investigate. There, Nicholas - next right.’

Anna directed me off the main. A couple of turns later, we pulled up outside another drab Soviet-era monolith a dozen storeys high. ‘Forget the arms business. Everyone should just have shares in ready-mixed concrete.’

The Cosmos was pretty much in the centre of town. I could see a bank with an ATM, a shopping centre, restaurants, and a Western-style supermarket with a multi-storey attached.

I parked in a guest space and walked towards the entrance, my day sack over my shoulder. She trundled her wheelie a step or two ahead of me.

‘To be fair to Stalin, the city had to be totally rebuilt after the Second World War. The little the Germans left standing was flattened by an earthquake.’

As we approached the reception desk she stopped for a moment. ‘I stay here a lot. They know me. That’s why we’re in separate rooms.’ Her eyes suddenly sparkled. ‘Besides, we’re working. See you back in the lobby in fifteen minutes. Lena isn’t that far away.’

4

Lena Kamenka’s office was in the basement of a run-down apartment building south-east of the city centre. An old woman scrubbing her doorstep with a brush and bucket pointed us to a staircase. There was a look of disapproval on her wizened face. Some things, it said, are best swept under the carpet and left there.

I followed Anna down the metal steps and stood behind her as she pressed the buzzer.

The girl who answered the door was in her early twenties. She had the kind of jet-black hair you can only get from a bottle.

‘Welcome. Please come in.’

She led us along a corridor, past a battered sofa and coffee-table. The walls of Lena’s office were lined with archive boxes. She sat behind a small desk strewn with files, waffling away at warp speed on the phone. She greeted Anna with a smile and a nod.

‘You would like coffee?’ The girl smiled shyly.

‘Thank you.’

She left the room and Lena gestured to us to sit down. She carried on her conversation for another ten minutes in about three different languages. When she finally hung up, she threw her arms round Anna and greeted her like a long-lost sister.

I guessed Lena was about thirty. In a stylish blouse, grey cardigan and sharply tailored trousers, she looked more like a lawyer or businesswoman than a social worker - or she would have done if it hadn’t been for her short, spiky blue hair and long, silver-painted fingernails.

She joined us at a small table covered with yet more files and loose-leaf binders. Photocopied head shots of young women stared up at us from their covers. Most were teenagers. One looked no older than twelve. None of them looked like Lilian.

Lena was a repatriation specialist. Her main task was bringing trafficked Moldovan girls home. Nearly all of them had been sold into prostitution abroad.

‘You are lucky to catch me in.’ Lena sighed. She spoke English like it was her first language. ‘I have to go to Odessa today to collect a girl off the ferry from Istanbul. There’s usually somebody on it for us. As for the airport, sometimes I think I should just take my bed up there and move in.’

Brothel raids in countries like the UK, Germany and Holland produced many of her clients. Her number was on the walls of police stations all over the world.

Lena tapped her cell phone. She’d positioned it carefully in front of her and kept checking the signal every minute or so. ‘I never switch it off. Sometimes they’re just metres from the pimps. I might have only seconds to get their details. Often they don’t even know what country they’re in.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘I tell them to look out of the window. A road name, a bus number. Sometimes I’ll get caller ID, but I can’t call back unless they tell me to. It’s too dangerous.’

We needed to cut to the chase here. ‘Anna told you my paper is interested in trafficking into London, yeah?’ I leaned in. ‘What’s the chain, Lena? Does it start with a kidnapping?’

‘Sometimes, yes. They drug girls, take them from the fields. Sometimes they drag a drunken city girl off the street and bundle her into the boot of a car. But they don’t need to go to all the trouble of beating them up and smuggling them out of the country if the girls are happy to travel of their own free will. Sometimes they even pay their own fares. The gangs call it “happy trafficking”. These ones are even given fake passports if they want to get away to start a completely new life, away from the poverty - or whatever else it is they’re trying to escape from. The gangs prefer these girls. If they’re not bruised and battered they’ll earn more as prostitutes.’ She sighed. ‘It’s only when the person who meets them has taken away their passport that they discover the broken promises, and by then it’s too late. The ones with fake ID are lost for ever.’

She looked up as the black-haired girl came back in with a tray carrying three steaming cups. She put the tray down on Lena’s desk and busied herself with an ancient fax machine. Then she lit herself a cigarette and joined us.

‘There isn’t anything happy about happy trafficking, is there, Irina?’

The girl stared at me for so long I thought she was never going to speak. Then I realized she didn’t quite know where to begin.

‘I was seventeen. I was at college. I was training to be a teacher. English teacher. One day a girl I went to school with came to see me. She was working at an expensive restaurant in Greece, she said. She was making a good salary. She could get me such a job if I wanted. I needed more exams to graduate, but also I needed money. My mother was ill.’ Irina took a drag and blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘I agreed to go with my friend. She organized everything. She drove us to Odessa, and came with me on the ferry to Istanbul. Then she put me on a plane to Athens. She said she would join me later.

‘Another “friend” met the flight. He told me the waitress job was finished. He said he could take me to Italy. There was work in Italy, he said. On the journey, he asked me strange questions. “Do you have any scars? Will your parents come looking for you?” We arrived in Milan and there was no restaurant. That was when I found out what my school friend had been working as. And to buy her freedom and get back to Moldova, she had promised to recruit a new girl.’

She inhaled again, more deeply this time. She was bracing herself. ‘In Italy, the “friend” took me to meet some men in an apartment. Russian men. They said I had to help them repay their investment. I said no, so they beat me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t do what they said, and give them what I earned each day.

‘I kept saying to them I must go back to Mother. My mother was sick. She needed medicine. They didn’t listen. I had to work seven days a week, from the afternoon to early morning the next day. Twelve hours every day, except when I had my period. The Russians took everything. They said if I tried to escape, the police would bring me back to them. The police were their friends.

‘There were three other girls. We were all locked in the same room until a customer came. We had to wear big T-shirts. For six months, I did this work. The customers paid fifty euros for half an hour. Sometimes I made a thousand euros a night. I got nothing.

‘And then, at the end of each night, the Russians had a game. They would come into our room and they would rape us all one by one. One of the girls cried so much they said the neighbours would hear. They crushed her toes under a door as punishment.

‘Escaping was not easy. You cannot just jump out of a window and be free. And we had no money. Some of the regular customers were policemen. Our visas were renewed even though we were prisoners. But we talked about it a lot.

‘The apartment was in a big old building. In the winter it was cold. We used to put a blanket in the big gap under the door to stop the draught. I was doing that when I suddenly had an idea. The door was locked from the other side, but they always left the key in. It was a big old-fashioned key. I pushed about a metre of the blanket underneath, and I used an eyebrow pencil to push the key out of the lock. It fell onto the blanket and I pulled it to our side. The others were too scared to come with me, but I ran.

‘I ran and ran. A lady waiting for a bus gave me some money. I took a bus to another city.

‘I went to a church and the priest telephoned Lena. She made all the arrangements and she was at the airport for me. Not my family. They were too ashamed. When I went home, the police came to my house two days later. They didn’t want information about the Russians. They didn’t want to know anything about my friend or her friend in Athens. All they wanted was sex. I said no. They said they would tell the Russians where to find me. They knew who they were. I called Lena and she rescued me - again. Now I help her with her work.’

Irina looked exhausted from retelling her story, but also defiant. ‘I still work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But now it is with Lena, helping others like me. We will stop the trafficking one day.’

The way she said it convinced me she’d succeed - or die trying.

5

Irina went to make more coffee. Lena offered me a cigarette. I shook my head but Anna was straight in there. They both lit up.

‘Who are these guys? Old-fashioned Mafia?’

Anna waved a hand at the case files that surrounded us. ‘Or the Russian, Albanian and Ukrainian gangsters who run mixed cargoes of women, drugs and arms? Take your pick. But one thing is certain: they’ll do anything to turn a profit. Lena told me about those speedboats being intercepted in the Adriatic. The traffickers threw the women overboard to distract the police and protect the heroin and the hardware.’

Lena nodded. ‘But it must have hurt them. I’ll tell you a sad statistic. After weapons and drugs, human trafficking is now the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world. Tens of billions of dollars a year. Obviously, trafficking on this level requires organization and cross-border networks. But at the Moldova end, things aren’t so structured. Many of the recruiters are amateurs who see an opportunity and grab it. Friends betray friends. Even a family member sometimes, in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars. Maybe worst of all, it can be the person the girl shares her bed with.’

Anna and I exchanged a glance.

‘Anna told me when she called that she’s helping you research a piece on girls who end up in the UK - is that right? In which case, there’s something you have to understand about Moldova. More than a quarter of the economically active population have migrated in search of work. A third of our GNP - a billion dollars - is money sent home from abroad.

‘Irina and I go around the country, giving out our numbers and showing films. But it’s an uphill struggle. Nobody wants to believe us. On TV, they have their noses rubbed in glossy images of life abroad. Maybe they only have to look next door to see a neighbour’s new clothes or mobile phone. An unemployed girl who’s starving isn’t going to be put off by our warnings.’

That made a lot of sense, but our girl was bright and from a rich family. I was about to ask about university kids, but Lena hadn’t finished.

‘Moldova is important to the traffickers as a source, but the trade isn’t centralized. There are local recruiters, but nearly all Moldovan girls are sold to non-Moldovan gangs. It isn’t a vertical business model. Once they’re out of the country, it’s almost impossible to pick up the trail. We have to wait until the victims contact us.’

‘Where do they end up?’

She shrugged. ‘All over. The Balkans were the big destination until about ten years ago. Now it’s Russia, Turkey, Israel, Dubai, any European city … The methods have changed, too. Traffickers have become smarter. Like I said, nowadays it’s mostly happy trafficking. Victims are only allowed to go home when they’ve worked off “debts” and “fines” invented by their pimps or, like Irina’s friend, if they undertake to send back one or two replacements.’

‘What about the authorities? Supposing a girl is reported missing, what happens? Do the parents go to the police?’

She shook her head, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst out laughing. ‘No. Nobody goes to the police. We never share information with them. The most powerful gangsters are nearly always former cops - and so are their kryshy…’ She looked at Anna, lost for the right word - the first time in an hour.

‘Roofs.’

‘Yes, their roofs - their protectors. These men are at the highest level of the police and the Ministry of the Interior. Before they’ll even open a case they demand sex or money.’

A phone rang, and stopped. Irina went over to the fax machine. She had to bend down to read the first few lines as the paper curled back on itself. ‘From Spain …’

Lena’s mobile rang. She picked it up and signalled for quiet. She listened, then spoke quickly and urgently into the mouthpiece.

She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go.’

Irina handed her the sheet.

‘A girl has just been found during a raid in Barcelona. I have to speak to her mother.’

I snatched a glimpse of the picture. The face was bruised, but the girl it belonged to wasn’t Lilian.

6

Str A Mateevici

15.15 hrs

We were parked on the wide avenue that divided the university from the park in the north-west of the city. The university was Lilian’s last known location, which made it a good place to start.

The trams had looked tired and their wires had sagged across the cobblestoned streets as we drove out of the centre, but my first impressions of the city had been wide of the mark. It might have been in shit state, and there was quite a bit of rust about, but there was also a lot of civic pride. Mateevici was clean. The trees both sides were well tended. At first glance we could have been in any town in Connecticut, had it not been for the US embassy building about six hundred metres down the road.

The State University campus was a sprawl of trees, grass and concrete paths. Most of the buildings were ugly lumps of post-war concrete, part of Stalin’s rebuild after the annihilation. A couple of grand Hapsburg Empire-type buildings had survived. They looked like giant Battenberg cakes.

The students walking past the car had come straight from Central Casting. Some were lanky; some were overweight. Most were scruffily dressed. Their day sacks were stuffed with books. Some shared jokes; some walked on their own with headphones or mobiles stuck to their ears.

‘Hard to think that only in April last year these kids were rioting on the streets.’

I’d been away on a job at the time and must have missed the coverage. ‘What about?’

‘Moscow. Young Moldovans didn’t like their leaders embracing the Kremlin. The president, Vladimir Voronin, was a Communist, very pro-Russia. For the past four years the Kremlin had mounted a charm offensive to woo him away from the EU and NATO with offers of subsidized gas and closer economic ties. It paid off. Voronin refused to join Brussels’s Eastern Partnership programme. He called it “a plot to surround Russia”.

‘Then came the elections. The trouble started as soon as the result was announced. The Communist Party had won a suspiciously large proportion of the vote.

‘Ten thousand demonstrators massed in the city centre, most of them students. They carried Moldovan and European flags and shouted anti-Communist slogans. They gathered outside the government building and made their way down the main boulevard to the president’s office. The police used tear gas and water cannon but they couldn’t stop the crowd breaking in. Windows were smashed on two floors and fires started.

‘Voronin called it an attempted coup d’etat and pointed the finger at Romania, a NATO and EU member. Moscow backed him up. The Kremlin were shitting themselves. Imagine - protesters overrunning Moldova’s parliament and ransacking its president’s office. The scenes must have been horribly familiar to them. It’s only five years since young pro-Western protesters toppled Moscow-friendly regimes in Georgia and Ukraine.’

I nodded. I’d been to both after their ‘colour’ revolutions. Russia’s power in the region was at an all-time low. At home, the Kremlin kicked back by stamping out foreign-funded NGOs, abolishing local elections and setting up special ‘youth groups’ so they could keep an eye out for anything similar happening inside Russia. Abroad, the Kremlin’s new priority was to assert its influence and fight against increasing Westernization. Moldova’s unrest would have been a test of Russia’s ability to project power and protect friends.

‘What happened?’

‘What always happens when the people take on the state. The police came in mob-handed and arrested more than two hundred.’

‘Could Lilian have been involved?’

‘A sociology student? Does a bear shit in the woods?’

‘Russian bears shit wherever they want to.’

She grinned. I liked it when she did that. ‘Ready?’

I nodded. I was in her hands. I didn’t speak the language, and I wasn’t the world’s leading expert on universities.

‘They’ll think we’re parents visiting, or here to find out about evening classes or something. We’ll just wander round a bit, try to find out what bars she went to or groups she hung out with. Then we’ll take it from there.’

We left Mateevici and followed one of the concrete paths that snaked through the grass. Anna had been on Google in the car. There were twenty thousand students, spread across twelve faculties.

We stopped at a blue and white signpost that must have been really useful if you could read Cyrillic.

‘OK. Philosophy’s in that direction. Sociology must be close by.’

She put her arm through mine as we followed her hunch. ‘These kids are hungry for knowledge, Nicholas. They know it’s the way out of poverty. You people in the West, you have it so easy. You think education is a right, not a privilege that must be earned. You have a welfare system to catch you if you fall, or if you just don’t give a shit. These people have no safety net. They have nothing without an education.’

I could see through the windows that every lecture room was packed. We came to a newer building, lots of brick and glass. I held the door for her. Wherever you are in the world, an institution smells like an institution: a blend of body odour, wood polish, boiled cabbage and bleach.

She led me down a wide corridor lined with posters, wall charts and notice boards. My boots squeaked on the tiles. Students young and old leant against walls and talked sociology shit, or maybe just shit.

Anna stopped an older guy in a brown and grey patterned sweater. He looked Scandinavian rather than Russian. He pointed in the direction we were already heading. I smiled my thanks and got a very dark look in return. Maybe my jacket didn’t have enough herring-bones and snowflakes.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I thought we’d start at the administration offices. Maybe I’ll say I’m an aunt on a surprise visit from Moscow, hoping to pick up her phone number or address.’

We came to a line of benches that would have been more at home in a park.

‘Wait here, Nicholas. It might be better, just a woman on her own. And we’ll have a problem explaining the fact you don’t speak your niece’s language.’

It sounded fine to me. I took a seat as she disappeared into the office.

7

I was surrounded by display cabinets bursting with trophies, framed certificates and photographs of bigwigs handing them over, shots of social and sports events, class and year portraits. It got me thinking. I decided to have a closer look.

It took a few minutes, but it was worth it.

A group of students dressed like Victorians stood, bathed in sunshine, outside the building; a party maybe, or some kind of commemoration. Lilian was in three of the pictures. She was alone in one, poking her tongue out at the camera. In another she looked almost shy, alongside three or four other girls. It was the third that interested me. The lad she was with had eaten a few too many pies. He had a mop of fuzzy brown hair and bum-fluff on his chin. He and Lilian had their arms around each other. Their eyes were swivelled towards the camera and they seemed to be enjoying a very un-Victorian kiss.

I was about to move on to the next display when Anna rushed out of the office. ‘We need to go.’

I kept scanning the photos. ‘Hang on, look at—’

She grabbed me. ‘Now, Nick. Now.’

Sweaterman was piling down the corridor towards us with a posse of six or seven very pissed-off mates.

‘What the fuck’s happening?’

The office clerk came to her door. She shouted and waved her arm to move us on.

‘No questions.’

I started walking fast beside her. We went back the same way we’d come in, with Sweaterman’s posse in hot pursuit.

8

Anna didn’t turn a hair as we drove away. There was no need to flap. They hadn’t jumped into vehicles and followed us. All we had to do was make some distance.

I watched in the wing mirror my side as we rumbled across a cobbled junction. Trams, buses, cars, carts - all tried to head in a dozen different directions at the same time. Once we were clear I glanced behind us.

‘What the fuck was all that about?’

‘They thought we were secret police.’

I turned back but kept an eye on the wing mirror. A dark blue Beamer with the new shark-eye headlights and low-rider sills was shadowing us, but keeping its distance. The front fairing made it look like a hovercraft. It was having a hard time with the cobbles and potholes.

‘So teachers now stand up to the police round here, do they?’

‘The people united will never be defeated. Haven’t you heard?’ She allowed herself a smile. ‘Or, as they’ve been saying more recently, the people with Twitter will never be defeated.’

‘Like the green revolution in Iran?’

‘They had it here first. As soon as they heard the result, the students started tweeting, trying to mobilize opposition. There was also a rush on Facebook and videos on YouTube. Suddenly everybody knew what was going on. It gave them a sense of power. Something they’d never experienced before.

‘The police wanted to get in there and grip everybody, of course. The first people to arrive for a rally outside the government buildings found their cell phones were dead. The network had been switched off. But somebody had Twitter, and they used it to give live updates over the GPRS networks. The authorities won that round, but it could be the beginning of the end of totalitarianism. It’s fascinating, don’t you think - what started as social networks becoming the tools of political change? I might do a piece on it—’

I cut in. ‘Chuck a right.’

She didn’t ask. She just did.

We turned onto a single-carriageway street lined with shops and apartment blocks. A group of cyclists, all women in black, wobbled over the cobbles in front of us. Anna had to slow down. She glanced in the rear-view. ‘The BMW?’

I didn’t turn round. I smiled and moved my hands as if telling her a funny story. ‘He still with us? He’s been back there a bit too long.’

She turned her head and smiled back. ‘The registration is C VS 911. That’s a Chisinau plate. Four men. Very short hair. Not smiling, not talking.’

I nodded as we eased past the women, still jabbering away with no awareness of the vehicles trying to get past in both directions. Anna changed up and we accelerated.

‘Take the next right.’

The indicator clicked away. The Polo lurched across a pothole as we hit a small side road. I sat back and waited for Anna.

‘They’ve come with us.’

‘Any of them talking on a phone or radio?’

‘No.’

‘Good. They’re not setting an ambush. As long as we keep moving we’re OK for now. Every time we turn, see if they communicate.’

‘Who do you think they are? Secret police? Uni security?’

‘Did you get as far as mentioning Lilian’s name in the office?’

‘No. The woman was on the phone, face like thunder. She was probably getting the good news from the guy in the sweater.’

‘Could it be the university warning us off, or trying to find out who we are? Might be police, I guess - maybe somebody saw me checking out Lilian’s picture. They may be doing the same. Whatever, we need to bin them as fast as we can.’

‘How am I going to do that? Are we going to drive around in circles until we run out of fuel?’

‘Head back towards the hotel. Remember the supermarket across the road? Drive into the car park.’

We overtook an old guy with ladders roped to his bike as she worked her way back onto the main.

‘They’re with us.’

‘Normal speed. Nothing we can do about them. We’ve got to concentrate on that lard-arse in the photo. We need to find out who he is. Maybe she’s done a runner with him. It could be something as simple as that. Falling in love and all that sort of shit.’

‘How are you going to go back and check that out, Nicholas?’ She sounded annoyed. ‘You going to disguise yourself as a normal human being or something?’

‘Give Lena a call and tell her we’re on our way.’

I pulled out her iPhone and dialled the number. She was waffling away in Russian as we approached the multi-storey.

‘We want one on the ground floor if we can. In between a couple of parked cars.’

She drove under the height bar and into the gloom.

‘There, to the right - straight in.’

Anna swung the wheel. The Beamer followed us in and rolled to a halt. They only had two options: back out, park up and come back on foot, or come past us looking for a space. They couldn’t park close by because we’d have eyes-on. With luck, they’d have to carry on up to the next floor.

Anna slipped in between two minging old Skoda-type estate cars. The Beamer’s tyres screeched on the painted concrete as it carried on up the ramp.

She turned off the engine and started to get out. I gripped her arm. ‘Bring everything. This car’s history. We’re not coming back.’

We made for the pedestrian exit. There was no point checking behind. It was all about making distance and getting as many angles between us as we could.

We’d soon find out if they were following. I hoped not. There were a lot more of them than there were of us. And they were big fuckers.

9

17.05 hrs

Irina sat behind the desk. Lena collated documents and pictures for her visit to the mother of the girl in Barcelona. She was still trying to trace her. The address they’d been given was wrong. I could barely see them. The women were all smoking their cigarettes like they were one step away from the firing squad.

Anna brought them up to speed. ‘Nicholas heard rumours about one of the traffickers in London. His source said he was moving girls to the UK and had a contact at the university.’

‘Contact?’ Irina rested her hands on the mountain of box files in front of her. ‘What is his name?’

I shrugged. ‘I wasn’t given his name, but I was shown his picture. There’s a shot of him outside the faculty office.’

Lena was still gobbing off on her mobile.

‘We got chased out before we could find his name.’

She didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘I’ll go and have a look.’

‘You sure?’

Of course she was. She’d done things that were a lot more dangerous.

‘When?’

‘As soon as possible. Now?’

‘Lena can drive me.’

‘OK. He’s overweight, with big frizzy hair. In one of the photos he’s kissing a girl. She’s blonde, dyed blonde.’

Lena closed down her mobile. ‘No problem. I’ll drop you off.’ She’d been listening to every word. She pulled another cigarette from her pack and stabbed it at us. ‘You want to stay here?’

‘If that’s OK.’

‘Of course.’

They started towards the door, arm in arm. Lena’s mobile kicked off again. She dug in her bag. ‘But please don’t leave. The office must never be unattended.’

Anna and I sat back and enjoyed a moment’s silence.

Eventually I stood up and went over to the stack of files on the desk.

10

We spent nearly an hour flicking through them. There wasn’t anything to check on a PC because there wasn’t a PC.

I was feeling rough.

Anna read my mind. ‘Up the stairs, you can’t miss it.’

I followed her instructions and dry-swallowed a couple of Smarties. Fuck the water: I didn’t trust anything out of a tap in this neck of the woods.

Anna was kneeling by the fax machine when I got back, sifting through sheets of paper. ‘Maybe the police don’t want them to be online. It would make Lena’s job too easy.’

I picked up a box file labelled 2005 and discarded it. Our target wouldn’t have left school by then.

‘I bet it’s Lena who doesn’t want to be online. Cell phones are giving the police enough information already.’

Anna brought another pile of documents to the desk for me to rifle through. ‘You OK, Nicholas?’

‘Fine. I was knackered from the flight and we haven’t exactly been dossing around since then, have we?’ I paused. ‘All this smoke’s not helping.’

Anna scrutinized the desk top. ‘I’ve been thinking, Nicholas. Maybe we could go away together … Spring is so beautiful in Moscow.’

‘What about CNN?’

‘CNN can wait. Maybe I could show you the White Nights in St Petersburg.’ Her face lit up. ‘It’s such high latitude the sun doesn’t sink below the horizon. You can walk along the river in daylight, even at two in the morning.’

‘Sounds like an insomniac’s paradise.’

We sat in silence for a while. I didn’t know what more to say. Did I look that bad? Was it that obvious?

‘Nicholas … Why are you really doing this job? You don’t need to. It’s not a game, you know.’

‘Part of me has always tried to pretend it is a game. But not this time. I don’t want to go all dewy-eyed on you, but I’m worried about this girl. I don’t want to let her down. I’ve been there before, and I didn’t like it.’

Her iPhone rang. ‘Hello, Irina.’ She grabbed a pen and paper with her spare hand. I watched her write just two words.

Viku Slobozia.

They spoke a little longer, and then she closed down.

‘That’s him. He’s a post-grad. Irina’s already called Lena. Neither of them has heard of him. Lena’s picking her up.’

I’d been hoping his name would ring bells. They’d know who he was and where he lived, and we’d go down to his flat and come out with Lilian. What now? I picked up a file with a photocopied picture on the cover, and a light bulb flicked on in my head. ‘You know what, Anna? Lilian might not be on Facebook any more, but this boy might be.’