Zero Hour

22.35 hrs

Back on the A10 from the airport, I ignored the city centre turnoff. I crossed the North Sea canal. The smoking-chimneys sign warned me to turn off in one K. I downed a couple more Smarties and a swig of Coke.

Anna was pissed off with me. She didn’t want to sit in a hotel room until I’d finished the job. But there was no alternative. The less my contact - and therefore Tresillian - knew about what I had up my sleeve, the better. In any case, the job would be done and dusted within a couple of days. Then we could sample some R-and-R, Moscow-style. And find a way of not talking about how long I might have to go.

I’d follow Tresillian’s most recent set of instructions, then get back on target tonight. Who knows? I might even have her out of there by first light.

It wasn’t long before I was paralleling the market. The place was closed but a lot of the kebab joints and corner shops in the vicinity were still open. Brightly coloured lights glistened in the rain slick that coated the Panda’s side windows.

It had been good spending time with Anna. And I wouldn’t have got here so quickly if it wasn’t for her. But now I had to perform, and when push came to shove, I preferred to work alone. I was in control of just one person. If anything went wrong, I only had one person to blame.

I ignored the first two exits on the small roundabout, including Distelweg, and took the last option. I hit the road that doubled back on itself, eventually turning left onto the street I’d been given. Papaverhoek was narrow, and paved with concrete cobblestones.

Down at the far end, maybe two hundred metres away, sat a baby cargo ship looking like a road-block. I slowed right down. Cars parked both sides. A long blue wooden building with yellow awnings on my right. Blinds - also yellow - closed, but a sign hinting at the pleasures within: ‘FilmNoord XXX’. Foyer open, but no customers in sight.

I passed a run of concrete prefab garages with corrugated-asbestos roofs. Some didn’t have doors, just the arse of a rusty car sticking out. To my left, and stretching for sixty to seventy metres, was a two-storey office block: brick with white metal windows; precise, uncluttered, well-kept, Germanic. Numbered ‘1-3’, it wasn’t the one I wanted.

The next building along was connected to it, with its far end overlooking a patch of wasteground. A large wooden door that might once have been varnished stood to the left of a metal shutter. ‘Dickinson (NL)’ was stamped on a faded white plastic nameplate.

I parked nose-in to the shutter and left the engine running. The windows above me on the first floor were barred and grimy. There was no movement or light.

I retrieved my day sack from the passenger seat and got out. There was nothing in it I’d particularly need if I had to do a runner: it was just good drills to keep all your gear with you.

I looked for cameras as I walked towards the entrance but couldn’t see any. A couple of street-lamps further back towards the main cast an intermittent glow, but that was about it. Nothing much happened down here. The only reason for anyone to venture this way after hours would be to work late for the Germans or stock up on some porn. I wondered if FilmNoord XXX had contributed to Slobo’s collection.

My head was clear. I realized I’d forgotten about the pain as soon as Anna had gone missing. I decided to ease back on the Smarties and see if I could start to grip this thing on my own.

The door had three locks. I rang the bell. The intercom crackled alongside it.

‘It’s Nick.’

‘Bradley.’ His tone was crisp.

‘OK, Bradley. Fifty-five.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Subtract forty-six.’

‘OK. Let me in?’

The intercom closed down and an electric motor to my right began to whirr. The shutter groaned and shrieked its way upwards. I went and sat in the Panda while it finished torturing itself.

Only two of the four fluorescent tubes hanging from its ceiling were working but they were enough to show that the Volkswagen Golf to the right of the loading bay was disguised as a compost heap. Its wiper blade had somehow managed to cut an arc through the shit on the rear windscreen but reversing was still going to be a challenge.

I pulled in beside it as soon as there was enough clearance, then got out and hit the green down button. The floor was covered with dust and the kind of tyre prints they get very excited about on CSI: Miami. Beyond the cars there was an empty space where whatever came into or out of this building was stored, and a set of steps that led up to a gallery.

‘Mr Smith …’

A man in jeans and a leather jacket came down them to greet me. His voice was accentless but educated and his smile was ironic. He thrust out a hand, allowing me a glimpse of cufflinks in the shape of miniature shotgun cartridges, and we shook.

Bradley’s hair was short and blond, and casual dress wasn’t his thing. He reminded me of my estate agent, and the kind of officer I’d done my best to forget about since leaving the Regiment. He had a blue plastic folder tucked under his arm. ‘Shall we go inside? I have your briefing pack.’

He led me back up to the gallery and through a thick wooden fire door. A narrow concrete stairway went up the centre of the building, past a landing with a push-bar fire escape, to a corridor which ran the length of the top floor. Three doors, all of them open, led into empty offices that overlooked the road. A couple of old wooden filing cabinets was all that remained of the furniture, but indentations in the carpet marked where desks had once stood, and worn areas traced the most popular routes between them.

‘What is this place? Who does it belong to?’

He checked his stride, as if he couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. ‘It was built just before the Germans invaded. The Resistance used it as a hide for downed Brit air crews.’

‘Who else knows I’m here?’

He looked disappointed that I’d needed to ask. ‘No one apart from Mr T and Julian. Did Julian tell you he and I knew each other at Marlborough? I joined the army and he … Well, he’s done all right for himself, hasn’t he?’

‘Don’t know, mate. Never set eyes on him. Where do the Dickinsons fit in? Do they know what’s going on?’

‘My mother’s family. They were the ones with the money. Her grandfather started in paper packaging in 1936. He ended up with businesses all over Europe. My father took over the group when my mother inherited, and they both died just over ten years ago. A boating accident …’ The blood rushed to his cheeks. ‘It was only then that I discovered he was bankrupt. I managed to keep a little of the empire, and this is part of it.’

‘Are you in the service?’

He smiled. ‘I like to think so. The company has had links with HMG since those Resistance days. During the Cold War, my father gave the Firm any titbits he picked up while on business in the East. I’m more a sort of roving ambassador myself - one foot in the import/export world, the other with you guys, whoever you are. I don’t need to know. We’re not exactly a new breed, I suppose. Private enterprise doing its bit to defend democracy.’

He gave me a smile that didn’t go anywhere near his eyes.

‘What about the road? Any movement?’

‘Virtually none. The office block next door had less than tenper-cent occupation even before the recession. Now everyone has gone. The whole area is due to be redeveloped.’

‘What about the porno shop?’

‘They don’t get out much. Must be allergic to sunlight. They’ll be forced out eventually, though. The natives are getting restless.’

I followed him into a narrow, box-like room at the back of the building. He turned on the light. Varnished wooden pigeonholes with rusting metal card-holders covered one wall, and a galvanized steel ladder led up to a hatch in the roof.

‘What about the Dutch? They know anything about the job?’

However much you’ve been told, the guys on the ground always know a little bit more.

‘Nothing. The police are really only here to liaise with the Muslim community. They keep an eye on the drug situation, of course. Ironic, really, given what you can get your hands on legally in a bog-standard Amsterdam coffee shop - but they’re trying to keep a handle on it. The violence, the people smuggling, the prostitution all follow in its wake.’

Fluorescent lights flickered into life above us as we moved into the room at the end. Bicycle hooks protruded from the wall opposite another push-bar fire escape.

A brand new kettle, a box of tea bags and a couple of cartons of milk were spread out on the work surface beside a stainless-steel sink with exposed pipe-work beneath it. A large cardboard box sat on the floor with a sleeping bag and one or two other bits and pieces bundled inside.

‘I bought you a few essentials. I didn’t know what you were bringing. There’s an airbed in there and some toiletries, pens, paper, that sort of thing.’ He opened the milk. ‘UHT, I’m afraid. There isn’t a fridge. And of course the tea bags aren’t as good as English.’

He flicked on the kettle and pointed towards an archway in the partition wall. ‘Shower and the like. All the plumbing works.’

I poked my head round the corner and made admiring noises about the unopened multi-pack of toilet paper. He’d thought of everything.

Bradley unwrapped a couple of mugs.

I ran a finger along the push-bar on the door. ‘Do the alarms kick off if I open it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I shoved against it and emerged onto a cast-iron staircase that led past the door from the landing below us and down to the wasteground. No alarm sounded. I couldn’t see any contact points on the doorframe; no sign of a circuit.

‘I’ll check downstairs. Can you do the roof?’

The other door was the same.

I returned to see Bradley giving the roof-hatch bolts the good news with a rubber mallet.

I fixed the brews while he finished the job.

7

Bradley reached for the blue plastic folder and tipped its contents onto the brown carpet between us. I shuffled through a printout of Slobo’s Facebook picture and a couple of A4 Google Earth images. One was a straight satellite view of the target, the other a hybrid with street names superimposed. We were less than two K from where the possible and her companions were being held.

I held up the shot of the square, flat-roofed building. The image was fuzzy, but the tower was identifiable from the shadow it cast across the ground. ‘Any idea what’s inside?’

He hadn’t.

‘What about the outside? Cameras?’

Bradley looked like he was having a tough time in the Mastermind chair. ‘I don’t know, sorry.’

‘Do you know what this job is all about?’ I jabbed at the picture, pressing the paper into the carpet. ‘You know about these two?’

He flashed another of his special smiles. ‘No. And I don’t want to know.’

There are lots of people like Bradley. They range from retired civil servants to company CEOs, all of them out in what they like to think of as the real world. Some help with information. Some are in it a lot deeper, and I had the feeling he was one of them, despite his attempts to distance himself. Maybe he was on the Firm’s payroll. Maybe they had something on him and he had no choice but to play ball. Maybe he was one of the weirdos who liked doing this shit because it fulfilled some fantasy.

‘Do you have secure comms? How do we talk?’

Bradley looked sheepish. ‘I’m afraid people like me aren’t trusted with that sort of thing. I’m not complaining. I’d be at their beck and call, wouldn’t I?’

‘Tell you what, Brad. I have to stay here and crack on. Come back, on foot, tomorrow morning at ten?’

He took a final sip of his brew and put it on the drainer. ‘Ten it is, Mr Smith.’ He dusted down his jeans and threw me some keys.

‘Who else has a set?’

‘Just me.’

That probably wasn’t true. The locks weren’t new. There would have been quite a few sets in circulation over the years.

‘Good. Tomorrow, be precisely on time and use your keys as if the place was empty. Just let yourself in, then stay right there. I’ll come and get you.’

‘OK. Whatever you need me to do …’

I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t thrilled to be given chapter and verse.

‘And don’t ever come into the building with no warning. If there’s an uninvited body in here I’m going to react first and ask questions later. That make sense?’

‘Perfect sense.’ He fingered his miniature shotgun cartridges.

‘So can you see yourself out now, mate? Make sure you close up after you.’

I packed everything back into the folder, and added my credit card and ID. As the shutter gave its final squeak I moved to one of the front windows and watched the shit-covered Golf head towards the main.

8

I leant against the wall and slid down onto my arse to finish the brew. It was nearly half eleven and I was knackered. The last few days were catching up with me.

My body told me to get my head down, but years of training told me to cover my back first. I made my way through to the mailroom and climbed the ladder.

The hatch lifted. It was still miserable outside. There were puddles everywhere on the flat roof, and the clouds still hung heavily in the sky. From my vantage-point I had a panoramic view of the area I’d been looking at on the map. To the south, across the bay, was the distant neon glow of the city. A set of navigation lights lifted from Schiphol to the south-west and almost instantly disappeared.

I scanned the road below me. The dark silhouette of the ship was still visible at the water’s edge about two hundred metres away to my left. A couple of cars were parked outside the porn shop to my right, which showed no sign of closing for business. Two women hung around under the canopies, on the look-out for customers who fancied some live action.

I got on with checking out my escape route.

There was open ground to the rear. If anything kicked off, I’d be in plain sight there. The houses on the other side of the vacant office block next door would give me some cover, but there was an eight-foot height difference between the two rooflines.

Apart from the front entrance and fire escape to the rear, it was my only way out of this building. If I couldn’t go over the top, I’d have to get myself across the road and into the sprawling estate alongside the market. I’d get lost in there, no drama. Then I’d try and hook up with Anna.

I stared into the darkness. It had been a night like this when she’d first told me about Grisha.

Now I was going to die on her too.

This was alien territory for me. I guess I’d always assumed I’d be killed in action, hopefully without much fuss, and with nobody close enough to give a shit. Now I was starting to think that I’d do anything for a couple of months with her. At least we’d have time to say goodbye.

The skies opened once more. Rain fell on me like 7.62 rounds and brought me back to Planet Earth. Kleinmann’s diagnosis had pulled the ring back on one big can of fuck-with-your-head, and I had to cut away from it.

I headed back to the hatch.

I had to put all that shit to one side, and focus on the job in hand.

I had to get myself on-target.

9

I pulled the wooden pigeonhole unit far enough from the wall to slip the blue folder behind it, then wedged a small piece of paper between unit and wall, about six inches up from the carpet, as I eased it back. If anything was disturbed, I’d be able to tell at a glance.

As always when going on-target, I had to be sterile. All I carried with me was cash: my run money. Everything else was in the folder. I didn’t rush the drill even though I’d done it a thousand times. I found myself wanting to enjoy the ritual. If this really was going to be my last job, I wanted to savour every moment.

I folded another couple of pieces of paper and wedged them between the frame and the door of the fire escapes and the roof hatch. I trousered Brad’s mallet and went downstairs. He might be the most obliging lad on the planet when it came to dodgy tea bags and shower gel, but I didn’t trust him an inch. I eased a little sliver of paper into each of the three locks on the front door.

I did my best to bang out the dent I’d left in the Panda’s roof. Rubber hammers are better than steel ones for panel beating, thumping in wooden tent pegs and dropping humans. Steel imparts a blunt trauma on soft material like bone, but rubber or wood conveys all its kinetic energy without penetration. It can take someone down much more effectively. And if you hit a skull too hard with a steel hammer it can become embedded and really mess things up.

I backed the car out into the rain. As the shutters came down I pretended to check that I’d locked the front door properly. I wanted to make sure I could see my telltales if I looked directly into the keyholes. No drama: it all worked.

I got into the Panda and headed down the road. The rain had calmed down but there was more to come. I put the wipers on intermittent. FilmNoord XXX was still open, but the girls had decided to call it a day.

Despite being closed, the market was still brightly lit. The kebab shops and one or two nearby stores were still open. Mopeds buzzed around the place like wasps and one or two lads were busy spraying a beard and glasses on a Geert Wilders poster. For a moment it felt just like home.

I paralleled the main until I got to the small roundabout and turned onto Distelweg. Before I went on-target, however, I had one final bit of business to take care of.

10

I crossed the canal and looked for somewhere to park. The windscreen wipers kicked off again as another squall blew in. I spotted two truck cabs outside a tile warehouse with a massive glass front. I pulled up between them.

The entrance was decorated with a row of oversized concrete plant pots. As anti-ram-raiding precautions went, these ones looked good, but the plants themselves had died long ago. Making it look like I was busy taking a piss, I tucked the safe-house keys in the one nearest the door and scooped some wet mud over them. Two minutes later I was on my way to the target.

I checked the gates as I drove past the stretch of wasteground. Still chained and locked. And still no light from the building.

I parked up between a couple of petrol tankers just short of the bend and got out to check the ferry point. The timetable by the little glass shelter told me it only ran during business hours.

I went back to the car and sat in darkness, engine off, as the rain hammered on the roof.

11

I took a couple of minutes to get my head in gear. Then I got out, locked up and hid the keys in a patch of scrub by the fence. Zipping up my bomber, I headed along the fence line, looking for a way in that didn’t involve climbing. If the possible was Lilian, and I had the chance to lift her, I’d need to get out quickly. The rain had calmed down a bit, but my jeans got soaked in the high grass and clung to my calves.

Eventually I found a gap where a couple of railings had been uprooted and the muddy track between them had been pounded by plenty of feet. It looked like a rat run.

I followed the trail for about twenty metres, then turned to face the way I’d come. I needed to have a clear picture of my route back. Three pinpricks of particularly bright light - cranes standing guard in a construction site, perhaps - hung like a small constellation over the edge of the city across the bay. The gap I’d be aiming for was almost directly in line with them. That was my marker.

The flour silo was about two hundred metres away, exactly as Anna had described it. I picked my way round waist-high chunks of broken concrete and dodged a couple of twisted steel reinforcing rods that arched up at me like bull’s horns. More and more mud stuck to my Timberlands. They were beginning to feel like divers’ boots.

The ground dipped into a hollow the size of a bomb crater. I slid down into it and skirted more lumps of rubble. A circle of rocks surrounded a pile of ash that had once been a campfire. So many discarded syringes were scattered beside it that it looked like the entire junkie community had been playing their own version of pick-up-sticks. I was glad it was raining. They weren’t going to be coming back for a rematch tonight: they’d all be competing with the working girls for space under the shop canopies instead.

Anybody out here would have to be totally off their heads. If I got challenged I’d pretend to be a drugged-up dickhead. It was pretty much how I felt right now.

That thought triggered a memory of my old mate Charlie. He’d been on his last legs about five years ago, and he’d done one final job to earn his family a wad before he keeled over. But I already had the money. I had what Charlie had been after. Why the fuck was I still doing it?

Fuck it - it must be the rain making me miserable. I knew why I was here, and it wasn’t just to have one last crack. It was also about Lilian and those poor fuckers in the green house in Copenhagen, and the rest of them who’d been fucked up and fucked over by those shaven-headed bastards. I couldn’t clear my mind of the sounds and images of what had happened above our heads while Anna was posing as the world’s most uncompromising trafficker. The guys in that house were animals, and someone had to stop that shit happening. I wasn’t going to be saving the world single-handed: I was small fry and hadn’t got much time left to go on a crusade. But I could get one girl out, and maybe free the others, even if it was just a pinprick in the shit-pile.

There was less than a hundred metres to go now. I still couldn’t see any cameras or motion sensors. That didn’t mean there weren’t any. If the intention was to detect people rather than deter them, they might have gone for concealment.

I pulled up about twenty metres short, looked and listened. The silhouette of the silo tower rose into the night sky; it dwarfed the remaining two-thirds of the building. I could make out two windows on the ground floor to the right of it, and two more one storey up. The arrangement made sense of Anna’s description of the interior: two doors each side of the front entrance and a staircase on the left. There were no lights that I could see, and no movement.

A concrete strip ran from the front of the silo to the chained gates on Distelweg. The dock was less than thirty metres away from other side of the tower.

The silo was the only old building in the area. Maybe it was some kind of historical monument. Or maybe it just hadn’t figured in anyone’s regeneration plans yet. Everything else I’d seen had been thrown up with new brick or metal sheeting.

I found a slab of old concrete to sit down on and cocked an ear towards the target. I stayed like that for five minutes. Only then did I look around me, giving my unconscious the chance to take in as much as it could.

My jeans clung to my legs. My boots weighed a tonne. I didn’t have to fake it too much when I swayed towards the silo, hands in pockets. If someone was watching me, I’d look as though I was doped up to the eyeballs.

I mooched along to the left, to the silo tower. The closer I got, the more obvious it was that there were no cameras. It looked as though they’d decided not to draw attention to themselves by throwing up surveillance equipment.

I liked doing this part of the job, just as I enjoyed going through Passport Control on fake documents and all that shit. Beating the system always had given me a buzz, ever since I was being a total arsehole on the Bermondsey estates.

The silo was square and about sixty metres tall. The bricks were rotting and most of the pointing had fallen out. The only things that seemed to hold it together were the old steel reinforcing plates that ran up the sides, and a thick layer of graffiti.

There was no entry point on the gable end. I moved to the corner on the side nearest the water, and sank slowly to my knees. I craned my neck gently round at muddy ground level.

There was no light whatsoever here. The concrete stretched all the way down to the dock, interrupted only by weeds pushing up stubbornly through the cracks. A big section of hard standing lined the water’s edge, where a crane had probably once stood. A conveyor-belt ran down to it from the top of the silo at a forty-five-degree angle, supported by a steel framework made from the world’s biggest and rustiest set of Meccano.

Noord 5 was five hundred metres away on the other side of the water. Its street-lighting and the intermittent sweep of car headlamps did nothing to help me. I put my ear to the brickwork to listen for a generator, but heard nothing.

I moved along the front of the building, covertly now, until I reached two large steel doors big enough to drive a truck through. Yet more weeds grew right up against them, looking like they were intent on forcing entry. None of them had been trodden on or driven over. Two padlocks were covered by security cups so you couldn’t cut through them, and the huge rusty crossbars looked like they hadn’t been shifted any time this century.

I carried on towards the far gable end. More windows: two up, two down, all boarded up with metal anti-vandal sheeting. I put an ear to the one I hoped the girls were still behind. There wasn’t a sound.

I found the door Anna had gone in through. It had two locks. Going by the shine on the brass inserts, they were almost brand new. I sat against it, switching back into dosser mode, and had a look around. The next nearest building was a two-level warehouse or factory about three hundred metres away on the perimeter of the wasteground. Again: no light, no noise, no movement. This silo was a good place to hide people.

I put my ear to the lower keyhole. Nothing. I stuck my nose against it and inhaled deeply. I might be able to smell cooking or a cigarette, anything at all that would give me an indication of life. But all I got, as Anna had said I would, was the aroma of cake shop.

I got to my feet and gave the top and bottom of the double doors a push. They didn’t give an inch. They were bolted from the inside. Somebody had to be in there.

There was no other entrance apart from this one and the large steel doors, as far as I could tell. But that didn’t mean it was the only means of access.

I walked back to the conveyor-belt and started to climb. I only had to scale four or five metres of Meccano, but the junctions I used as hand- and footholds were awkwardly spaced and the steel was rusty and wet. By the time I heaved myself over the top, I felt like I’d completed an assault course.

The conveyor-belt itself was just over a metre wide. Its rubberized fabric was rotten and frayed and a lot of the steel banding was exposed. I raised myself slowly onto my hands and knees and started to crawl. Almost immediately, the rubber between the rollers gave way with a loud, tearing sound. I dropped flat, listened and watched. Then I decided not to fuck around. If they’d seen me, they’d seen me. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about it. I might as well carry on until I heard the shouts.

The belt led up to a pair of rusty metal doors each about a metre square. A gentle push and they opened.

The brickwork was four courses thick. If there was still any flour in there, it would be bone dry. I edged forward on my elbows until my chest was on the lip of the hatchway and peered down. Right at the bottom, the faintest flicker of light showed through what looked like a tunnel connecting the silo with the rest of the building.

A vertical access ladder was fixed to the wall. I curled my body until I was able to reach my boots, unlace them and tug them off. I scraped off the worst of the mud on the top edge of the Meccano, tied the laces together and slung them round my neck. I eased myself back through the hatch, feet first, until I made contact with the top rung. I took a breath and started down.

After about twenty metres I stopped to look and listen. My feet hurt without the boots to protect them, but that was better than leaving mud on the ladder or having clumps of it fall off and land below.

The further down I went, the stronger the smell of flour and the brighter the light. I paused again just before reaching the ground. The edges of the silo were lined with flour two or three feet high.

I stepped down onto a concrete base. I didn’t need to worry where I trod. There were plenty of disturbances in the flour, including footprints.

The opening into the rest of the building was about the size of a garage door. Steel shutters above it were locked in the up position.

Very slowly, I moved my head around the corner. A brick wall stood immediately opposite me, in the middle of which was a door. Two windows either side of it were in darkness. There were also three windows on the second floor of what had probably once been offices. Light spilt from the one on the right - enough for me to see its haze reflecting off the remains of what had once been hundreds of tonnes of flour dust piled up against the walls.

A body moved across the window.

I froze.

Male, early twenties. Both forearms dark with tattoos; cigarette in mouth; bare-chested and overweight. His bitch tits wobbled as he moved.

He shouted something to someone and gestured at his crotch. A young girl shuffled into view. Her hair was dark and frizzy. She sank slowly to her knees in front of him. Her head disappeared below the sill. Bitch Tits soon had a slack smile on his face. He looked down at her, took a deep drag and flicked some ash onto her head.

I stayed where I was. If there was just one of them, maybe I could take him now, then get Lilian and the rest of them out.

I heard screams from the ground floor, along with some very pissed-off male shouting.

The door to Bitch Tits’s office burst open. The new arrival wore a lot of black leather. His head was shaved, neo-Nazi style. His face had multiple piercings.

Bitch Tits wasn’t impressed by what he was hearing. ‘Well, fucking find her! Don’t you dare fucking lose her!’

He was a Brit - a Scouser. It was beginning to sound like a family business.

The ground-floor office door was also thrown wide. This time the yells were Dutch.

I didn’t see any of the bodies. I was too busy climbing back up the ladder as fast as my legs would carry me.

12

I lay on my side at the top of the conveyor-belt and pulled my boots back on. I gulped in mouthfuls of air. The smell of decayed rubber made me gag.

The shouts below me - now in heavily accented English - echoed round the tower.

‘There is nothing.’

‘She is not here.’

More shouts from the Dutch guys outside. Bodies bomb-burst from the door. Bitch Tits screamed with anger - or it could have been fear. His voice was high-pitched, out of control. ‘Fucking get out there! Fucking find the bitch!’

I finished tying my laces and started reversing carefully down the conveyor-belt, keeping as low as I could. A few metres below me, fucked-off men tried to organize themselves for the hunt. It wasn’t working. Bitch Tits was going completely ballistic in Scouse. ‘Yous cunts! We’ll all be in the shite! Get out there!’

By the time I was about two-thirds of the way down, the shouts had begun to fade. I stared into the darkness. The search party had spread into the wasteground. I jumped the last couple of metres and ran for cover.

I legged it in the direction of Distelweg, making each big chunk of concrete a single bound. I checked the ground ahead as best I could, straining my ears for the shout that would signal they’d found her. She’d be terrified. Maybe she’d got stuck trying to get over the fence - desperately wanting to, but having lost all control because she was so scared.

I heard nothing. Total silence. The Dutch must have gone out via the gate or jumped the fence. Keeping in the shadows, I used my three-light marker to navigate back to the gap. Someone else had been through here since I last had. Someone in bare feet. I could see the mark of my boots in the mud, and also the imprint of small, frantic toes.

I slipped through and kept to the edge of the road, almost hugging the fence. The search party would be moving up and down Distelweg by now, checking every bit of cover, flapping more and more as the minutes ticked by.

I came level with the Panda and felt around in the scrub for the keys. Once inside I powered down the window and had one last listen before I fired up the engine.

Lights extinguished, I moved off slowly, following the road on the bay side of the dock. It started to rain again.

There was a massive thump on the front of the car. I braked hard.

A face flew up out of nowhere and banged against the windscreen. For a split second, all I could see was a mass of wet blonde hair and a pair of big scared eyes.

I threw the engine out of gear. Fuck the handbrake. I jumped out to grab her.

By the time I got round to the front of the car the girl was already scrabbling along the tarmac. There was blood on her face. Her jeans were soaked. Her feet were bare.

‘Lilian?’

She was swallowed up by the shadows as quickly as she’d appeared.

I stopped and listened.

Nothing.

I jumped back into the Panda. There was a streak of blood on the windscreen. If it was Lillian, I had to get to her before those fuckers did.

I moved off, nice and slow, windows down.

13

I drove across the canal and into the prefab estate. A left took me back towards the Distelweg bridge. I parked up about a hundred metres further on and tucked Brad’s mallet into the waistband of my jeans. I’d move back onto the target on foot and start searching again from there. I didn’t want to take the car through the area twice that night. It was bad drills. Bitch Tits and his mates might still be out there.

The shop lights splashed across the wet pavements. I was hungry and thirsty, and it was going to be a long night. I went into a mini-mart and bought crisps, pitta bread and a bottle of water. I managed the whole transaction without a single word to the guy behind the counter. I just grunted and paid.

I jammed the crisps into the bread as I walked past a line of graffiti-covered boathouses. I kept close to the walls and fences of the industrial units, ready to dodge oncoming headlights. I threw the last of the crisp sandwich down my neck as I approached the tile warehouse.

I heard a cry.

Then male laughter, followed by grunts and curses, monosyllabic and aggressive.

I took a couple of steps.

And heard it again.

There was a blur of movement from beneath the canopy. The girl ran from the shadows, naked and sobbing. Two guys appeared behind her. Too fast, too powerful. They grabbed her and dragged her back into the darkness.

It wasn’t hard to work out what they were doing to her. I just needed to know how many of them were doing it.

Another cry. Part pain, part despair.

It looked like Bitch Tits was the only one allowed to sample the merchandise on site, and this lot fancied a taster before they dragged her back to him.

14

Rhythmic sobs continued to come from under the canopy. I inched forward, fingers closing around the handle of the mallet.

I heard more grunts and A couple of slaps. There was a muffled, anguished scream followed by a chorus of laughter. The air was heavy with cannabis.

There were four of them, all fully paid-up members of the neo-Nazi club. Crew-cuts, tattoos and plenty of face metal were the order of the day. The girl was on her knees. Three of them stood around her with their jeans halfway down their thighs. A fourth lounged against the door with a stupid grin on his face, smoking a joint. It was either his turn to chill, or he preferred to watch.

The girl’s bloodstained face was rounder and younger than the image I had of Lilian. Much younger. She took a couple more slaps to the head to make her work harder.

A million years of training told me there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t intervene. Bad things happen. This shit went on a million times a day, all over the world. I was here for a job. I wasn’t the UN. I needed to let this run its course. Four guys here raping this girl meant four fewer guarding Lilian. I needed to stop fucking around and get back to the silo.

But there was another voice in my head. Anna’s voice. What about this girl? What about her parents, her sisters, her brothers? How would you feel if this was happening to someone you cared for, if this was happening to me?

I looked round for something heavier than the mallet. A bit of scaffolding would have come in handy. A wheel-brace, maybe …

Then I checked myself. What family? Every scrap of experience and years of fucking up screamed at me: I had to let this one go.

I turned and headed back the way I’d come. I’d have to pull my finger out if I wanted to get this job done by first light.

When I’d covered about twenty metres I straightened up and shoved the mallet back into the waistband of my jeans.

Another heartbreaking scream pierced the darkness.

Fuck it.

I pulled the mallet out again and turned back.

I was in auto mode, en route to a possible nightmare. I’d need to be quick and hard - just take them down and run. After that, the girl would have to sort her own shit out.

I got within a few metres of them. She was still on her knees. The one in front of her looked up just in time to see me jump into the air and bring the mallet down hard a couple of inches above his eyebrows. He didn’t say a word. He couldn’t. All I heard was a loud pop as the toughened rubber worked its kinetic shit and he crumpled to the floor.

I spun round, swung back my arm and zoned in on the guy to my right. He got the good news just above the temple. He groaned and collapsed onto the girl.

She whimpered and tried to kick him off.

I turned to the other two. The one with the spliff was still some distance from Planet Earth, and instead of rushing me, the other stupid fucker was pulling up his jeans. I barged against him. He staggered back under the canopy, arms windmilling, and crashed into his mate.

I didn’t give them a second to recover.

Mr Windmill’s jeans had slipped back round his knees.

I swung the mallet from right to left, demolishing his cheekbone and part of his jaw. He howled with pain. It didn’t make up for what he’d done to the girl, but it was a start.

Mr Spliff threw up his arms to protect himself, but he still wasn’t up to speed. I cannoned into him. As he went down I gave him two more quick hits. He’d managed to cover his head, so I snapped his wrist with the first blow and banged the second into his bollocks. That opened him up big-time. I brought down the mallet right on top of his closely shaven nut. Hard rubber smashed into soft bone with a dull thud. He wasn’t going anywhere fast. He wasn’t going anywhere, period.

I dug the keys out of the plant pot. The girl held her jumper against her breasts, watching me.

Two of the bodies stirred.

I grabbed her arm and dragged her out from under the canopy. I gathered up her jeans and thrust them at her.

‘Go! Go on! Fuck off!’

She stood there shivering, clothes held up in front of her, knees trembling, like the child she was.

I gave her a shove. ‘Go! Run!’

Two sets of headlights swept down the road from the direction of the bridge.

She was so tiny it was easy to pull her out of sight. I pushed her against the wheel of a trailer loaded with pallets as the engine got louder. She struggled, trying to escape. She probably thought I fancied a bit of what the neos had already helped themselves to. I grabbed her by the back of her head, wound my fingers through her hair and pushed her against the tyre.

The car came into view: a green Passat, two up. It slowed but didn’t stop. I caught a glimpse of long, greasy black hair and matching shirt but couldn’t see their faces. Ten seconds later a blue-and-white did the same. I dragged the girl to her feet the moment it had passed and we started moving in the opposite direction.

We’d covered a couple of hundred metres when I heard the whoop of a siren, just one quick hit. Blue lights strobed the darkness, glinting off the puddles, then they stopped just as suddenly.

We kept going.

She had to come with me now, even though I knew I was giving myself a very big dose of drama. I couldn’t let her get lifted. Tarasov and his box of tricks had better be worth all this shit.

I flung open the back door of the Panda and shoved her down into the footwell. Then I jumped in behind the wheel.

‘You understand English?’

The only response was some laboured breathing and a cough. She was crying quietly to herself.

Ten minutes passed. There were no more wailing sirens or blue flashing lights. What the fuck was going on? One of the neos was probably dead, and the others couldn’t have legged it. A broken jaw makes you think twice about doing that. It makes you want to stay very, very still instead.

A set of headlights appeared in the rear-view. I felt between the seats to make sure she was still hidden. The green Passat rolled past, still two up. I got a better look at them this time. They’d completed my circuit, down past the ferry, up the bay road, then back.

I waited five more minutes, but there was no sign of the blue-and-white. I switched on the ignition.

‘Stay down …’

I threaded my way through the housing estate until I came out onto a main. I didn’t know where the fuck I was, but I’d work it out soon enough. There was a lot of trouble by the back seat, and I needed to think.

15

I killed the lights and engine the moment I’d nosy-parked in front of the shutter.

‘You - stay there.’ I still didn’t know if she spoke any English, but she didn’t move a muscle.

I pretended to fumble with the keys while I checked my paper telltales. All three were still in position.

I didn’t hit the light switch inside, just pressed the shutter button. As the car came into view, I could see that she was now sitting next to the child seat, her jumper on. She tilted her head and pushed back her blood-matted hair so she could watch me through the windscreen.

I got back into the car and gave her a smile. She pulled her jumper down self-consciously over her thighs, but if her face showed any emotion, it was relief.

I drove into the bay and hit the button again. She remained motionless as the shutter ground its way down. I only hit the light switch when we were in total darkness. The two fluorescent tubes flickered and hummed.

She looked around her. I tapped on the slightly dented roof and bent down to her level. ‘You’re safe here.’ I gestured with my hand. ‘Come on.’

She didn’t budge. She looked at me like she had a choice about this and had decided to stay put.

I pushed down the front passenger seat, leant in and grabbed her arm. She stumbled out onto the cold concrete, clutching her wet and muddy jeans. ‘Let’s try again. What is your name?’

Nothing.

‘Russia? Ukraine? Moldova?’

Her goosebumps were the size of shirt buttons. She tried to cover herself up.

I pointed to the stairs at the back of the loading bay and gave her a gentle push. ‘Let’s go. Up there.’

She stopped at the first landing, awaiting my next command. I steered her all the way to the top floor, keeping behind her so I could check the telltales without her seeing what I was doing. She stood stock still in the middle of the floor, waiting to be told what to do.

I got a much better look at her now. She was no more than five feet tall and could have been anything from fourteen to eighteen years old. Her dyed blonde hair was thick and wiry, and brushed her shoulders. It needed about a week’s worth of shampooing. She was a skinny little thing: not through lack of food, there just wasn’t anything of her. With high cheekbones and huge dark brown eyes, her face looked bigger than her delicate shoulders and graceful neck seemed capable of supporting. She had no eyebrows. They’d been plucked or shaved. It made her look like a porcelain doll. Or a ghost.

I pointed to the shower room.

She looked at me and shivered.

‘Let’s go.’ I took her hand. She offered no resistance. She probably couldn’t have even if she’d wanted to. She felt like she weighed less than the mallet.

I turned on the shower. The cubicle filled with steam. I pointed at the bottle of gel and mimed washing my hair. I showed her the towel, then closed the door and let her get on with it.

I filled the kettle and flicked it on.

I was tired, and pissed off with myself for breaking a life-time’s rule. But there was no point beating myself up about it. Even if it hadn’t been the right thing to do, she was here now. I had to deal with it. I threw a couple of Smarties down my neck with a cupful of cold water.

The kettle clicked off and I made myself a brew with plenty of milk and sugar. I dragged the sleeping bag and airbed out of Bradley’s box. He hadn’t lashed out on the electric-pump option. I didn’t have the energy to inflate it; she’d have to, if she wanted a comfortable night.

I dug around in my day sack, stripped off and put on a dry sweatshirt. I threw my spare jeans onto the sleeping bag; hers were in shit state. I added a long-sleeved T-shirt, a clean pair of socks and some boxer shorts for good measure.

Brew in hand, I went into the mailroom. I checked the telltale and pulled out the folder. I wanted to show her Lilian’s picture.

I sat near the sink with my back against the wall and checked my watch. After 02.00. Fuck, I hadn’t even been here six hours and I was already in rag order.

I put my mug down and rested my head against my knees. The next thing I knew, I was woken by the sound of her coming out of the shower. I looked up. The towel was wrapped under her armpits. She caught sight of the sleeping bag and all the gear and very nearly smiled. Or maybe I was just kidding myself.

‘Drink?’ I pointed at the kettle and made a brew sign with my right hand.

She looked down at my mug, which was still half full. I took a sip. It had gone cold. I must have been out of it for at least half an hour. She raised a non-eyebrow.

‘Yeah, I’ll have one.’

She brushed past me as she leant down to collect my mug. She smelt of shampoo. Her knees cracked, and she still had chicken skin because of the cold.

I stood up and stretched while she got busy with the kettle. I wiped the dribble off my chin stubble and pointed at the gear. ‘That is for you. Dry clothes.’ I went through the motions of putting on jeans. ‘Blow up the airbed.’ I made a trumpet out of my hands and puffed through it. ‘For you to sleep … All right?’

She passed me a steaming mug. The tea was black, with half a kilo of sugar. I fished out Slobo’s Facebook picture and pointed.

‘This girl. Her name is Lilian. Was she in the building? Have you seen her?’

I couldn’t read her expression at all.

‘Have you seen her? Lilian. Her - name - is - Lilian …’

She nodded.

‘You have seen her? Today?’

All of sudden she was scared. I didn’t blame her. It must have taken her back to the last place she ever wanted to be.

‘You sure? Lilian - with you?’

She examined the picture more closely. Her brow furrowed, and she nodded again.

I dug about in Brad’s goodie box for the packet of cheap biros. On the back of the picture, I sketched the internal layout of the silo complex, based on what I’d seen and Anna had told me. I traced a line into the main entrance and then right, into the first room. ‘Lilian - is she in there? In there with you?’

She took her time before giving me another nod. I don’t think she needed to think. It was more that she didn’t know what the fuck was going to happen to her next.

‘The guards? The bad guys?’

I treated her to my cartoon gorilla impression, complete with the hands-under-the-armpits thing. It didn’t even get a flicker of a smile.

‘The guards, there are four?’ I held up my fingers. ‘Four?’

She didn’t answer. She burst into tears.

‘It’s OK. No one will hurt you now. It’s OK …’

I went back to my wall, slid down it and took short sips of brew. I didn’t want to crowd her. She calmed herself down, got dressed and started blowing up the airbed.

She avoided eye contact. I didn’t know for sure what she was thinking, but I could guess.

I finished my brew and went back into the mailroom for the BlackBerry. I sparked it up as I returned to the loading bay. I didn’t yet know whether the girl could speak, but I knew that she could hear.

The ringing tone went on for longer than before.

‘I’ve found her.’

‘Excellent.’

‘I don’t have much darkness left but I’ll get back there now and try to lift her anyway.’

Tresillian did his usual party trick. ‘No, you will not, Mr Stone.’

Not even a ‘well done’ this time.

‘But it has to be tonight.’

There was an uneasy silence at the other end of the line.

‘We have a … complication … Once you have lifted the girl I want the building and anyone inside it destroyed. No one who has had contact with Lilian must get away.’

‘Destroyed?’

‘I want an explosion. I want a spectacular. I want to see it on News at fucking Ten. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You want me to blow up a building in a major European city?’

‘Is there an echo on this line?’

I fantasized for a moment about blowing up the silo with Tresillian inside it. ‘No, there is not.’

‘Very good.’

‘But first I need you to attend to another matter. It appears we have a little competition. Stand by, Mr Stone. But don’t move a muscle. Your contact will explain.’

The line went dead.

By the time I got back upstairs, the girl was tucked up in the sleeping bag with her hands wrapped around her mug. She looked me in the eye, and I finally got the slightest of smiles.

I sat back down against the wall and rested my head on my knees once more.

16

Thursday, 18 March

06.27 hrs

I woke up face down on the carpet. The sleeping bag was draped over me. I opened my eyes to see a pair of bare feet peeping out from under my rolled-up jeans. She leant over me, her hair frizzed almost into an Afro after sleeping on it wet. She had a brew in her hand. Her expression softened as she put the mug down beside me.

I tried to focus on my watch. At least I’d got a couple of hours in. I looked up at her groggily. ‘You OK?’

She didn’t reply. She looked even more like a waif with my clothes hanging off her.

I sat up, stiff and sore from sleeping on the floor, but I’d got used to that over the years. It’s just a matter of how you position your head and shoulders and spread your legs to distribute the weight.

I tore a blank strip off the bottom of the A4 sheet that held Lilian’s picture, grabbed one of the biros and wrote down an address.

I took a sip of the extra-sweet black tea and gave her a grin. Didn’t they have any fucking cows east of Poland?

She retrieved her brew from the sink and went and sat on the airbed. Her knees came up to her chest. Her arms went round them. Her face was expressionless once more.

I had to get this thing moving. Bradley would be here at ten. By then I needed to have dealt with her, sorted myself out, and worked out exactly what I wanted him to do for me to get this job done.

As soon as we’d finished our brews, I pulled myself to my feet. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

I draped my bomber round her shoulders and coaxed her up. I took her hand and, gently but firmly, steered her to the door.

At last there was a reaction. Her eyes were like saucers. She was scared.

I opened the door for her and shooed her out. I let her go downstairs in front of me so I could check the telltales.

She stood shivering on the pavement in her bare feet while I locked up. I didn’t replace the telltales in the door. I wasn’t going to be long, and the less time I was exposed with her on the street, the better.

We started down Papaverhoek towards the main. I almost had to drag her. We passed FilmNoord XXX. The white tarpaulins lining the market flapped and billowed in the distance. The morning traffic buzzed across the junction ahead of us.

I dug into my jeans for the wad and counted out about a hundred euros.

She looked at me blankly. I had to prise open her hand and shove the money into it. ‘Take this. You’ve got to go.’

I handed her the strip of paper and made sure she focused on what I’d written. ‘Go to the Radisson Hotel, Schiphol airport. Taxi - take a taxi, yeah?’

I ran my finger under the address and slowly repeated it.

‘Radisson Hotel. Airport - Schiphol airport. You take a taxi, yeah?’

I pointed to the road that led to the nearest taxi rank. ‘Taxi, that way …’

I hadn’t a clue if she totally understood me, but she got the general drift.

‘A woman …’ I started signing like I thought she was deaf. ‘A lady - with short blonde hair - will meet you. She will help you. Help you go home, yeah?’

Her eyes welled up. I could see she was trying not to, but she couldn’t help it. The tears eventually fell.

I took off my Timberlands and dumped them on the ground next to her feet. She didn’t move. I had to get hold of each of her ankles in turn, lift it into a boot and lace it up.

‘OK, you’ve got money and shoes - so go!’

She stood there.

‘Go - it’s time!’

‘Where am I?’ Her accent was heavy enough for her to be Brezhnev’s daughter, but her voice was clear. ‘What country is this?’ She looked and sounded like the lost child she was.

I didn’t want to hear any more. There wasn’t time. I needed to be back at the safe-house ASAP. ‘You’re in Holland. Amsterdam. You have money. Get a taxi to that hotel. The blonde woman, short hair - she’ll be there to meet you and help you.’

‘I come with you?’

‘I’m leaving tonight. I’m not staying here. The woman will help you.’

I pulled out another couple of hundred. ‘Take a taxi to the airport. And make sure nobody sees you with all this money. Just go.’

I turned away from her.

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s OK. Use it to get home.’

‘No - not for this money. For what you did. For what you did last night.’ She shuffled towards me in the Timberlands, raised herself onto the tips of her toes, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder and headed off in the direction of the larger of the two roundabouts, not wanting to look back.

Chucking a left, I walked for maybe two hundred metres until I spotted a phone box. Anna answered immediately. It was as if she was on stag. Her iPhone only rang once.

‘Listen - one of the girls from the building is heading to you right now, in a cab.’

‘Does she have a name?’

‘Probably. This has to be quick, I have to get back. She’s got dyed blonde hair and no eyebrows. Maybe call Lena and see what she can do for her. I need you able to move at a moment’s notice in case the shit hits the fan.’ I didn’t tell her that it already had.

‘Are you planning on bringing them out one by one?’

It was a half-arsed attempt at humour but it made me laugh anyway.

‘Nicholas?’

‘What?’

‘Be careful.’

17

From where I stood in the shadows by the middle office window, I had a good view of the front door and along about ten metres of road back towards the main. I’d be able to see Bradley coming - and anybody who was behind him.

My watch told me he should be here within the next ten minutes. I’d showered and shaved. I’d been to the market and bought everything I was after - for now, at least. I had new jeans, a ready-faded pair like the ones I’d seen the East European lads sporting in Moldova club land. The sweatshirt was so cheap it felt like a carrier bag, and my brown padded nylon coat wouldn’t be on the catwalks any time soon. The trainers I’d selected to replace my Timberlands didn’t even have a name, but fifteen euros wasn’t going to take me all the way to Niketown.

The sky was grey. The sun occasionally made it through the clouds, but never for more than a few seconds. I tried to concentrate on the street below but I couldn’t get the girl out of my head. That wasn’t good. I hoped things would turn out OK for her, but this wasn’t helping me with my next task. I was writing a mental list of gear I’d need to put the silo on CNN and the BBC - and how to divvy up that list with Bradley. There were a few things I could ask him to get for me, but one or two others I really had to get hold of myself.

I tried to cover all the options. Best-case scenario was that the girls would be kept in the silo until they were due to be moved. Would the Scousers accelerate the process because their neo mates had been given a malleting and a piece of merchandise had done a runner? These lads were in a tough business. They’d be looking over their shoulders big-time, but I doubted they’d flap every time there was a bit of a drama. And I doubted they’d call the police to report an assault. The burst of lights and siren had puzzled me last night, but now I wondered if the boys in blue had just thought the neos were dossers and given them a quick blast to move them on.

As for the lads in the Passat - fuck knows what was going on there. Fuck knows what Tresillian was up to either. Why destroy the building? Bricks don’t talk. If it was just a plain search-and-destroy job I’d probably have binned it now and done a runner with Anna. But the girls - I couldn’t leave those poor fuckers. Which meant I had two days and two nights left to get the job done.

Bradley saved me from my thoughts. He strolled into view, hands in his pockets, dressed exactly the same as yesterday. He reached the door and I heard the buzzer. I looked as far along the street as I could to make sure no one else was with him.

I headed downstairs in time to watch him step inside.

‘Morning, Mr Smith.’ He gave my new clothes the once-over. ‘I’ve got you a present.’ He undid his jacket to reveal a box of Yorkshire Tea. ‘It’s a great shop. Even sells baked beans.’

His smile disappeared. ‘I have some news. There’s been a change of plan.’

I turned for the stairs. ‘No rush, mate. I know. Tresillian told me last night. We’ll talk in a minute.’

Sometimes people can get so sparked up about putting the information across that they get ahead of themselves. Better a trickle than a torrent.

He went straight to the sink when we reached the top floor. He couldn’t have missed the mountain of aspirin packets on the draining-board. I’d bought three packs from each of four shops. But he eyed the mallet.

I shrugged. ‘It fell down last night.’

He filled the kettle and I ripped the cellophane off the tea.

‘The guy you took the video of? He’s called Michael Flynn.’

‘Who is he?’

Bradley showed me a black-and-white printout on a sheet of A4. I could see this really was a family business. The Flynn gene pool hadn’t been blessed. Both sons had the same fucked-up eyes as their father. Robot looked a year or two older than Bitch Tits, who had put on a few pounds since this was taken.

Bradley stuck a finger on each of the boys’ heads in turn to indicate. ‘Mick Flynn has two sons - Jimmy, the elder, and Ray. Jimmy moves these girls on to the UK and all over mainland Europe. He’s a major player on the drugs scene as well.’ He hesitated.

‘Very nasty people, the Flynns. The police found two girls in a rubbish skip three years ago. They’d been beaten and burnt so badly it took months just to discover who they were. Mick and Jimmy are rumoured to have tortured them for trying to escape from one of their holding houses. It was Ray who’d let them go. He took such a beating from his father that he was in hospital for weeks.’

‘So where’s the complication?’

‘You may not be surprised to hear he’s not the only game in town. Some new boys want in. Moldovans. If they succeed, things could get very messy for us. And for you.’

‘Why? I’m not here to fuck about with some tin-pot gang war.’

He pursed his lips. ‘I’m way down the food chain - but I think Mission Control is worried that they might hit the silo before you do.’

‘What can you give me on these fucking Moldovans?’

‘I have an address.’ He turned back to the kettle. ‘You’ll need to write it down. The names here are as long as the roads.’

I pulled a Bart Simpson notebook out of Bradley’s goodie bag.

I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t written it down for me. He wouldn’t be leaving anything to link him to the job. If I was in his shoes I’d be making me do the writing as well.

‘It’s on W-e-s-t-e-r-s-t-r-a-a-t, number 118. It’s just short of the junction with Noordermarkt, in the western part of the city. It’s quite a smart area. There’s a cafe with striped canopies on the junction.’

‘You know anything about the house? Is it alarmed? How many occupants?’

He handed me a brew. ‘We know the main man drives a smart green—’

‘Passat?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because my nan’s Gipsy Rose Lee. What does he want doing to, this Moldovan?’

‘Killed, Nick. That was all he would say.’

‘I’d rather be doing the Flynns.’

‘Mr Tresillian didn’t say anything about the Flynns.’

‘Yeah, anyway. Any idea where he parks the Passat?’

‘That’s all I was told. I thought you knew how to find out stuff like that.’

Fair one. He was sounding more like Tresillian by the minute.

‘So I take care of things in Westerstraat before they make a play for Lilian and her mates, then turn the silo into a hole in the ground?’

He nodded. ‘Life never ends well, does it?’

‘What?’

‘No matter who we are or what we do, we all die.’

‘Tell you what, I need you to get me some gear.’ I walked towards the door. ‘I’ve got to get a move on.’

He fell in behind me as I headed for the stairs.

‘Can you get me shotgun cartridges?’

‘Yes.’

‘Birdshot, solid shot, whatever. I need at least two hundred rounds.’

We reached the bottom of the stairs.

‘No need for receipts.’ I grinned and held out my hand. ‘Lock up, so real people still think the place is empty.’

We agreed that he’d come back at the same time tomorrow, and I headed back up the stairs. I waited by the first exit onto the fire escape until I heard his key in the top lock, then legged it three at a time to the top floor. I grabbed the mallet, ran to the mailroom and scrambled up the ladder. I twatted the bolts and lifted the roof hatch.

I’d wanted my new best friend on foot today not just because of security but also because I wanted to start finding out what the fuck this guy was all about. Making him walk was a way of slowing him down. It might give me the chance to see what he did next.

I kept low to minimize exposure as I headed towards the top of the vacant office block.

Yesterday Bradley had claimed he didn’t know what was going on - and didn’t want to know. Yet this morning it seemed like he knew everything. He claimed he didn’t have comms, yet he’d been talking with Tresillian. It was all a bit too foggy for me. And having comms didn’t mean they ‘had you’. That was bollocks. If it were true, I’d have dumped my comms on day one. No one will ever call when you’re not expecting them to: it could compromise the job. The only danger lies in passing on mixed messages - like this fucker had been doing. Maybe he’d made the mistake of thinking I was a knuckle-dragging gorilla from London who should be kept in the dark. And maybe Tresillian had too.

I reached the next-door building and moved to the edge. I poked my head slowly over the parapet and looked down onto Papaverhoek. Bradley was almost level with me, hands in his pockets, heading for the main.

I slid back, took a bit of a run-up and jumped towards the higher roof. I managed to hook my hands over the raised brickwork at its edge and scrabbled with the tips of my fifteen-euro trainers to continue my upward momentum. One elbow followed, then the other, then my right knee as I swung my legs to the side like a pendulum. Ten seconds later I was lying on my stomach on the tar-and-gravel surface. I got to my feet and ran past the entrance to the central stairwell to the far side of the block.

Bradley had a BlackBerry in his hand. He was taking too much time just to dial. The fucker was waiting for secure comms. He finally raised it to his ear. I watched his back as he walked down towards the junction. His free hand was cupped around the phone. Whatever Tresillian was saying, he had Bradley’s full attention. His head was down, and he kept close to the wall, as if it was giving him a bit of protection, and preventing him from being overheard.

So he had comms after all, and he was bullshitting. I’d been correct not to trust him, and not to say a word about the girl.

I watched him veer right at the junction and disappear. There was a gap through which I could see the main drag between the big and small roundabouts. I waited for a while, in case he came back into view.

If I’d had more time I might have followed Bradley to see what the little shit got up to, but I had more important things to do. I gave it another ten minutes.

18

I sheltered under the little ferry’s glass canopy and watched the city grow slowly bigger as we crossed the bay. It looked more like a Second World War landing craft than anything a tourist would leap onto. But, then, who in their right mind would want to visit the decaying docks and warehouses of Noord 5?

The other seven passengers all had bicycles. A couple in workmen’s overalls munched their lunchtime sandwiches. The rest were in jeans and trainers, like me. They all had day sacks.

On the other side of the scratched glass, boats of all sizes zigzagged between the big cargo vessels nudging their way east along the waterway into Europe or west out towards the North Sea. High in the air, and so far away it was scarcely visible, I could just about make out the pinprick of a helicopter. Not many people would have noticed it. Even fewer would have known the reason it was static. There was probably a surveillance operation on. More than likely, it would be something to do with drugs.

I could picture what was going on up there. Somebody would be sitting in the co-pilot’s seat with the world’s most sophisticated optics at their disposal. The heli was an eye in the sky. These things could hover kilometres from the target area and still get a grandstand view.

Even back in the nineties, when I was doing surveillance in places like Belfast and Derry, the gear was phenomenal. I once lost the target in a crowd in the Segments, a shopping area protected by turnstiles and security fences. I didn’t have to panic. The boy was obsessive about his trainers and bunged them in the washing machine most nights with a scoop or two of Daz. The optics were so good I could just rattle around looking at feet rather than bodies, waiting for a pair of spotless white trainers to appear - which they did.

Nowadays helicopters were used to track vehicles that have had small GPS devices hidden on them, or to support covert police surveillance teams on the ground. The eye in the sky means the surveillance team don’t have to be right up the target’s arse all the time; they can go where the heli operator tells them to, only closing in when they’re about to be unsighted. If he goes into a building, they can stay back: they don’t have to have the trigger on the house because the helicopter can do that.

My walk from the safe-house to the ferry had taken me past the tile warehouse. I had the mallet with me. It always felt better having a weapon. The parking spaces were filled with shiny but battered Transits - Distelweg’s factory units were doing a roaring trade. Almost every one of the bays was full. I’d kept my hands in my pockets as I mooched past the flour silo, head tucked down inside my new nylon padded jacket but eyes up. The gates were still chained and padlocked.

I’d passed the hole in the fence without giving it a second glance. The oil tanker that had been parked up yesterday had gone. The lads waiting for the ferry leant against their bikes, smoking or chatting on their mobile phones.

The Panda, for now, was static and hidden. I wasn’t going to take it back to a place I’d been honked at. I wanted to check out the silo without being pinged by the neos.

The ferry was now about halfway across. The sky was still trying to make up its mind whether to rain or shine. Now and again a shaft of sunlight broke through, but it was soon beaten back. I stared out of the window, yawned and checked to see if the pinprick was still above us. There’d be a lot of covert ops going on in the Costa del Clog. This city sold a whole lot more than red cheese and tulips. It was the world’s drugs hypermarket and the United Nations rolled into one.

The Russians and Turks controlled the heroin, the South Americans the cocaine. The Moroccans, Jamaicans and Africans ran weed. The challenge for British gangs was transporting the stuff home. Most tried to ship it as bog-standard cargo, but there were other ways. The East Europeans helped them out. A mule can swallow about a kilo of coke packed into condoms. Fuck Dragons’ Den. The big-time drug tsars could eat the men in suits soft-boiled for breakfast. If only these lads could apply their skills to the real world, we’d be out of recession in no time.

Deals were done here because it was a perfect distribution hub, east and west, and not just for drugs. For Brits like Flynn, the UK was only a ferry ride away, or less than an hour on a plane. Friends and family could pop over for the weekend. The Dutch all spoke English and they looked like us, so it was very easy to blend in. No wonder a third of all British fugitives were tracked down in this neck of the woods. One Brit was lifted by the Dutch police with a PS125 million haul ready for shipment to the UK.

The landing-craft ramp came down at the end of Tasmanstraat. The bikes trundled off first and I followed. The road was dead straight, built on reclaimed land. I wanted to get hold of a map, but I wasn’t going to find one here. The smart apartment blocks on my right looked like they’d been built in the thirties. On my left, the road was lined with trees and bikes. The canal was wide, with more apartment blocks on the opposite bank. They were Gucci too, and there wasn’t a scrap of litter or an election poster in sight. This must be where the professionals lived. Perhaps they were all so rich they didn’t need shops. They had everything delivered.

I carried on towards the west end of the city. Daffodil buds poked through the ground, searching for sunlight. It was trying really hard to be spring, but it wasn’t happening yet. What was going on here? I was on a job, not a nature trail.

I finally came across a shop on the ground floor of an apartment block. It wouldn’t sell maps but the green cross meant it would have something else I needed. I went inside. Maybe a pharmacy in the building gave some indication of the age group of the people who lived here. I bought three packets of aspirin in tin foil and a bottle of water. I washed down a couple of Smarties and moved on.

The road became busier and wider still. I came to a bridge at a T-junction. Traffic lights were strung on cables across about five converging roads. The apartment buildings looked more sixties now, but were still upmarket. One to my half-right was arranged in an open square. A shopping plaza filled the ground floors. I headed over. There was another pharmacy, a newsagent and a cafe with chairs and tables outside.

There’s something magic about the number three. If I tried to buy four packs the pharmacist might get sparked up - it just tipped the scale. If they balked even at three, I had my excuse ready. I took one a day to keep heart attacks at bay.

The newsagent fixed me up with a shiny new postcard-sized tourist map. The target road was about a kilometre away, at the start of the narrower canals. I’d soon be in Van der Valk country again.

Heading back towards the main to get my bearings, I noticed a bunch of daffs around the base of a tree that had managed to leap out of the mud and burst into flower. Either the plaza had its own microclimate, or the bulbs hadn’t paid any attention to Mother Nature’s timetable.

I went and sat outside the cafe and waited for someone to come and take my order. I admired the daffodils again, and then I found myself looking at all the people around me, doing everyday stuff like going into shops and walking around with mobiles; mums pushing prams; a couple of old men sitting on a bench under the tree, reading newspapers as they waited to die. I looked at the tree. It would also be budding soon, I supposed.

I’d never really bothered with this sort of stuff. When I was a squaddie, I only knew three types of weather: wet, hot, and cold. Even as a kid, I didn’t understand about seasons. I didn’t know how it all worked. Council estates were grey all the time, so what was the point?

I made a decision. I didn’t want to die without living. Once this job was over, I needed to have a look at the real stuff. I’d head for Moscow with Anna and go and see some paintings I’d read about and try to work out what had got everyone so excited. In the meantime I’d sit here for a while and let my unconscious soak it all up. This could be my one and only chance at a bit of normality. Maybe I’d thought of it as shite all my life because I couldn’t be bothered to get off my arse and go and have a look. Then again, maybe it was because I was scared of getting too close to what these people did - going to work, having a mortgage, raising families, looking in the mirror, being real.

19

A group of toddlers played in the square, watched over by their mums. The weapons-grade buggies they were pushing had probably cost more than my first car. I watched them for a while, then sat and stared at the speck hovering high over the eastern side of the city for so long it almost hypnotized me.

I was woken from my semi-daze by the arrival of coffee and a sticky bun. Good. I had to start concentrating. The job was the thing that mattered, not some daffs sticking out of the mud or me wondering what the view was like from the eye in the sky.

I drank my coffee, then fished out my map. The streets and canals became narrower from here on in. Westerstraat lay at the base of a triangle of land, with canals framing the other two sides. A road ran down from the apex, and vertical streets either side paralleled Westerstraat, forming a grid of sorts. I hadn’t taken much notice of this yesterday. I’d just concentrated on Anna’s directions and getting to the meet on time.

Anne Frank’s house, another place I should add to my bucket list, was a bit further down. I’d walked past it a few times when I was a squaddie, but never gone in. It hadn’t offered strippers or beer.

I headed back to the junction with my pockets full of aspirin. I’d get a whole lot more later on: I’d need a Bergenful to achieve what I had in mind.

I crossed a bridge over the west-side canal. As I walked down it, I scanned the roads parallel to Westerstraat; they were narrow and one-way. I was coming into the Amsterdam I knew best, in Van der Valk country: canals, trams, cyclists weaving between pedestrians, cobbles, narrow one-way streets. Centuries-old houses leant out over the brick-paved streets. Bikes were parked everywhere. Pedestrians were segregated from cars by lines of bollards. The buildings were immaculately kept and predominantly residential. Even the houseboats looked expensive. A James Bond villain would have looked completely at home among their timber and glass.

I remembered reading somewhere that a couple of hundred years ago these houses were taxed according to how much land they occupied. Surprise, surprise, the Dutch went narrow and high. There were at least four or five storeys to all these places, with big, warehouse-style winches sticking out of their attics so anything large and heavy could be hauled up to the higher floors.

It was going to be a nightmare to recce in these narrow roads. There was no cover and no reason to be here. I couldn’t just stand in the middle of a lane and study my target. I’d be able to do one walk-past, maybe two at a push, as long as I came back in an hour or so from a different direction.

There was the odd shop, and yet another pharmacy. I went in for more aspirin but also discovered something else I was after. Pure alcohol. Well, 95 per cent pure. It wasn’t for drinking, but the sort old people use as an antiseptic. I bought two 500ml plastic bottles of the stuff and crossed it off my mental shopping list.

Eventually, I turned left onto Westerstraat. It seemed out of place somehow, an eighty-metre-wide boulevard among the lanes. There was even a central reservation big enough for two cars to park nose to nose.

A lot of the expensive-looking seventies and eighties apartment blocks boasted shops on their ground floor. They were independents rather than chains: a bike shop, a couple of small supermarkets, an Internet cafe next to a mattress store, a newsagent.

118 was down at the end of the street, as Bradley had promised. I saw a sign for an Internet cafe that turned out to be more of a 7/11. There were four or five banks of screens. You paid in a slot machine and could order food and drink, even buy music CDs.

I logged on with five euros for thirty minutes, then hit Google Earth and Street View for my virtual tour of the target. I could see the striped canopy that ran outside the cafe. The target house’s pitched roof was immediately to its left. It was narrower than those on either side of it. It backed onto a square, with four similarly proportioned terraces lining each side. I clicked the arrows anti-clockwise along each of them, looking for a gap between the buildings. I finally found an archway. I could imagine a coach and horses rattling through to the stables after dumping the good burghers of Noordermarkt outside their front doors. The whole area had now been segmented, with fences and walls bordering private parking spaces and places to store industrial-sized wheelie bins.

I soaked up the imagery. This was the only known location for the target, and not a bad one. At least it wasn’t exposed to the real world, unlike the cafe next door. Whatever went on inside was kept inside. For a while, anyway.

I wanted to get into 118 later today, to work out the best access route when I came back later to finish the job. I needed to check out the alarm system, and might even be able to adjust a window or door lock to make re-entry a whole lot easier. Once I’d sorted the competition, I’d have bought myself the time to get everything in place to hit the silo. My number-one priority was still the girls, whatever Tresillian had in mind.

I Googled Anne Frank’s house and a couple of galleries to mix the session up a bit, then deleted my history and closed down, making sure the log-off really did log off.

20

The white cafe with striped canopies and a blue door was open for business on the junction ahead. The canal was less than a hundred metres further on. White plastic sheeting protected a run of stalls in a small, brick-paved square between the two. There were no green Passats in sight.

I crossed the road opposite 118 so I had the clearest possible view of its front elevation. A small glass porthole protected by a metal grid was set into the solid wood front door. The windows on all three floors were wooden-framed and double-glazed. I couldn’t see lights or movement behind any of them.

I spotted two keyholes: Union cylinders, probably with night latches. They wouldn’t normally be a problem to defeat; I could just buy a couple of other Unions and doctor the keys. But the road was constantly busy, and I didn’t fancy fucking around with them in front of an audience: people were having a beer and a pizza just a couple of metres away. With any luck they’d have the same kit on the back door as well.

The entry point into the square was about a hundred metres up Noordermarkt. The street was much narrower, with houses and shops on both sides. Most of them seemed to be selling candles, linen and anything else that was white. The good burghers’ coaches would have been rolling in and out of here pretty much all the time back in the eighteenth century, but these days they were a bit more reluctant to welcome uninvited visitors. A pair of wrought-iron gates now stood guard a few metres in. They were surrounded by vines and flowers, but weren’t just there for decoration.

To the left of the archway, within arm’s reach of a driver, was a bank of buttons on a steel box and a numbered keypad. To the right of the main gates was a smaller one for pedestrians, with its own digital entry box mounted on a steel panel on the latticework frame. There are ten thousand possible combinations to a four-figure code. I’d be here all week trying to find the right one; that was the whole point of them. I needed a simpler solution: I needed to find out how the guys on the inside of the square - and their welcome guests - managed to get out.

I pulled the map out of my pocket and gave my head a bit of a scratch as I pretended to get my bearings. The main exit would be triggered from the inside by a detector as a car approached the gate. But how did they open the pedestrian gate from the inside? It wouldn’t need a code: they’d have a simple push-button arrangement of some sort. Was the button on the back of the electric lock? Was it set back, on the wall? I couldn’t see much in the shadows. I gave the steel panel behind the entry keypad another look. It had to be there for a reason. It had to be there to stop anyone on my side of the fence getting access to the exit button.

I couldn’t risk going any further in - I might just as well be wearing a striped T-shirt and a stocking over my head. I wandered back onto Noordermarkt and took the first left. I wanted to do a complete 360 of the square. There might be a less secure route in. I hung another left and was soon back on Westerstraat. I’d found nothing.

I crossed the road and carried on back towards the target, keeping my eyes open for a newly parked Passat or any change on-target. Was an extractor flue knocking out steam perhaps, because somebody had come home and jumped in the shower?

Nothing.

It was only two o’clock and another three or four hours until last light.

I carried on towards the canal, following signs that showed a little man walking towards Anne Frank’s house. Not that I was going to see it - not yet, anyway. I was heading for the centre, the area of town I knew well, the bit that was full of bars and whorehouses, backpackers and tourists. That was where I’d blend in best, and where I could buy what I needed to get this bit of business done without anyone remembering me.

I crossed the canal and stopped at an ATM. I drew out three hundred euros on Nick Smith’s MasterCard, as you would do if you were bumbling about the city centre, planning a bit of souvenir shopping and maybe a mooch around the red-light district.

I carried on to Damrak, the main drag from the central train station. It was a blur of trams and cars. Bells jangled. Cyclists wove between pedestrians. The place was packed, mainly with drug-dealers whispering, ‘Weed? Cocaine?’ to anyone who came within reach.

There were a couple of camping shops. A lot of the visitors here were backpackers. I went into the biggest, and therefore with luck the least friendly, and bought myself a black fifty-five-litre Bergen. Into it went a hard plastic knife-fork-spoon set any Scout would have been proud of and a Russian-doll type assortment of cheap aluminium cooking pans of the kind he’d make rehydrated stews in that nobody wanted to eat.

I also bought a twenty-litre plastic water container, the sort that concertinas down to save space, and a roll of silver gaffer tape big enough to stick the world back together. The last bit of kit I bought from this place was a portable stove in a plastic briefcase, fuelled by aerosol cans rather than Camping Gaz canisters.

At the checkout I paid with cash and picked up a novelty mosque-shaped dual-zone digital alarm clock that was on special offer. I only needed Dutch time, not Mecca’s, but it had a big speaker at the back of the green plastic casing. That meant it would have a decent battery pack to power it.

I shouldered my Bergen and headed deeper into the city centre. I still had a lot of shopping to do. I needed two tool sets, rubber gloves, three thick 500ml drinks glasses, small halogen light bulbs, a couple of metres of tubing and a shedload of aspirin. I needed some bits and pieces from a hardware store too, and a roll of freezer bags - not the zip-tight ones, which still let in air, but ones I could twist shut and seal with a wire twist. They were the only kind that would stop air getting in and causing an explosion before I wanted one.

21

By the time I got back to Westerstraat my Bergen was filled with nearly everything I was going to need. It wasn’t dark enough yet for me to infiltrate the square and do my stuff. I might as well sit, look and listen. I made my way down to the cafe and took a table under the striped canopy. From here I could keep eyes on the target door. When the waitress arrived I ordered a pizza and a big bottle of water.

There was still no sign of life on-target. No light, no movement. There was plenty happening outside it, though. Little kids skipped past, hand in hand with their parents. Some stopped at the cafe for juices and ice creams and all sorts of other stuff that had to be cleaned off their faces with a pressure washer. Then there were shop deliveries, people like me just mincing about, and others engrossed in phone conversations. I sat back and watched, taking in some more of this real-life shit while I waited for my Margherita to make an appearance.

I glanced down at the Bergen. The business end of a red plastic G-clamp poked out of the side pocket. I’d bought it, along with a basket load of other stuff, in Amsterdam’s equivalent of a pound shop. I pulled the flap back over it - nothing to do with being covert; everything to do with neatness. Having things sticking out of a Bergen was a big no-no in the army. They could catch or get pulled out, and make all sorts of noise. ‘That’s what fucking flaps are for,’ our instructor had yelled at us zit-covered boy soldiers. ‘So fucking flap the fucking flaps over.’

This was the second or third time recently that I’d found myself thinking about all the strange and funny stuff from way back. ‘What’s in the past belongs in the past’ had always been my mantra. What was happening to me? Was this part of the process when you knew you were about to die? Was I going to spend the next two months digging all this stuff up and reap-praising what I’d done and said? Or was the thing in my head growing and pressing the access buttons on Memory Central?

I dug a hand into my jeans and dragged out four Union keys. I’d thrown away the locks themselves, in four separate bins. They weren’t the first four I’d picked up. I’d had to hunt for ones that didn’t have exaggerated variations in their peaks and valleys. These were as even along the teeth as I could find. I wanted to spend as little time as possible filing them down.

The pizza arrived. I ripped off the crust and rolled up the rest. I’d never seen the point of cutting it up with a knife and fork or one of those little wheels that flick tomato sauce all over your shirt. This method was much more efficient.

As it got darker, I pulled the plastic G-clamp from its pouch and unscrewed the adjuster until it came off completely. I was left with something more like a C than a G. I chucked the bit I didn’t need back into the Bergen.

One last check of the target front door and windows. Still no lights. I paid my sixteen-euro bill with a twenty and slung the Bergen over one shoulder. I wandered around the corner, not looking too purposeful, and up between the candle and stationery shops on Noordermarkt.

With the clamp in my hand, I pulled the second Bergen strap over my free shoulder and turned under the arch. This time I went straight up to the gate. You can’t hesitate. You have to look like you do this most days; you have a reason to be there, and it’s not just to make off with the good burghers’ flat-screen TVs. I stood in front of the lock so my body and the Bergen masked my activity, as you would if you were about to insert a key or tap in a few numbers you didn’t want anyone else to see.

I focused on the steel plate behind the keypad and worked the open end of the clamp between the wrought ironwork so that the jaws of the C looked set to take a bite out of the panel. The top pad was now poised on the inside of the plate. I scanned the wall to check I hadn’t missed a button on my recce, then eased the clamp back towards me so that the pad could make contact with the electronic lock release. There was nothing I could do now but move it back and forth and hope to connect.

I heard footsteps behind me, but passing by on the pavement, not turning in through the archway. Nobody paid me any attention. I manoeuvred the C clamp another five or six times and suddenly heard a gentle buzz. The gate was open. I pushed my way through and closed it behind me.

Sure enough, the archway opened onto the square. I walked with purpose. I was a householder returning home. I always got a bit of a spring in my step after a successful infiltration, but this one felt particularly special. In all probability, I didn’t have many more of these to go.

22

I took cover behind a group of over-sized wheelie bins and got my bearings. The area had been carved up by a good few more low walls and fences since Google Earth had taken its snapshot.

Lights shone at all different levels from the backs of some of the houses. Bodies moved around in one that looked like it had been converted into offices. There were no faces at any of the windows.

I bent down and pulled a pair of dark blue washing-up gloves from a side pocket of the Bergen. I’d ripped them out of their packaging when I’d bought them and thrown it away. I pulled them on and felt around in the Bergen for the mini toolkit. China’s finest had set me back ten euros in a hardware store and came neatly packed in a black plastic box.

The set consisted mainly of screwdrivers, but I’d been after the tiniest Leatherman rip-off on the planet. It contained every tool I needed, including a knife and a saw.

‘You’re only as sharp as your knife.’ Another instructor’s voice from way back, as clear as a bell.

I shoved all the kit I needed into my jeans pockets, then took off the nylon jacket and left it on top of the Bergen. It could hang out behind the bins for a while instead of rustling on my body.

I jumped up and down to make sure I hadn’t left any coins in my pockets, or anything that was going to rattle or fall out. I did one last check that all the other bits and pieces were good and secure in their pockets. I headed for the target, toolbox in my left hand.

I ran through the what-ifs. What if the Passat came in as I was approaching the target? What if another vehicle did? Where would it look natural for me to move to? What if it came in while I was working on the door, and caught me in its headlights?

I had no idea whether any of the doors ahead of me might suddenly fly open. There was a chance the cafe’s might. They were bound to have lads coming in and out with deliveries and bin bags. Fuck it, I didn’t really care. I was just going for it. If anything, I was upbeat. I was doing what I wanted to be doing. I got a kick out of covert entry and going in and doing things when people didn’t know you were there. I always had.

As a kid, I used to break into the local fruit and veg shop and hole up in a corner while I ate their bananas. I wasn’t hungry: it was all to do with the fact that I knew I was there and they didn’t. When I couldn’t sleep, I used to hide under the table in the kitchen. I sat listening as my mum and stepdad smoked themselves to death on Embassy Golds in front of the telly.

The target’s parking space was separated from the cafe’s by a two-metre-high wall. It was empty. The cafe’s space was chock-a-block with wheelie bins and empty crates. Ahead of me were a couple of doors. A few lads were busy knocking up even more pizzas behind steamed-up windows.

There was nothing on the ground floor of the target building except a door, and the same pattern of windows on the higher floors that I’d seen at the front. As I moved closer, I could see that the door was slightly raised. A short steel staircase led up to it. Closer still, and I saw a basement well, with maybe two metres of clearance between the house and the square. It would be my best bet for cover if I needed it.

First things first. I nailed my mindset. Plenty of people would be walking up to doors in this square every day, and that was all I was doing. I looked for somewhere convenient to stash a spare key. There wasn’t anywhere, not even a plant pot or a flat stone. It looked like the area was swept and cleaned every day. Either it was a Dutch tidiness thing, or they were ultra-cautious about security.

I checked the back-door lock. It was a Union pin tumbler, chrome, centre right, all very nice and shiny. Maybe they had one key for both front and back. I made my way very slowly down the steel steps into the basement well. I didn’t want my feet to jerk across a window. I didn’t know who or what was down there yet.

As my eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, I lowered myself slowly onto my knees. I put one eye against the sash window. The glass was clean. The paintwork was pristine. The frame was wood and the panes were double-glazed.

I couldn’t see too much of the room on the other side of it, but the decor looked smart. There wasn’t any rubbish: no magazines lying about; no clothes flung over a chair; everything was in its proper place. Were the Passat team just tidy lads, or did they have a Dutch housekeeper? And, if so, was she a live-in?

I couldn’t see any motion detectors in the corners. I gave the bottom rail of the sash a shove. You never know. It didn’t budge.

I shuffled across to the next window, which looked into the same room. I tried again, with the same result. A pity, but nothing insurmountable. I needed to get in and sort out the locks. Down here in the basement was going to be my entry point when I came back.

The door alongside them was lever-locked and bolted top and bottom. It didn’t move an inch. And there wasn’t even a speck of dust down here, let alone a hiding place for a spare key.

It was time to go and deal with the back door. I pulled out the three Union keys that I’d tied together on a string. I gripped them between my teeth while I extracted the mallet from my waistband.

I headed up the stairs. I was going to be exposed, but there was nothing I could do about that. I wasn’t going to hang around for the green Passat to pull up so I could try to hijack its occupants.

I gave the dark blue door an exploratory push top and bottom; they both moved. No bolts. I’d been counting on that, because it was closest to where they’d leave the car, but I felt the tension leak out of my shoulder muscles nonetheless. If they’d secured the back and just gone in and out of the front, I’d have been in trouble.

A pin-tumbler lock contains a row of spring-loaded pins. When you insert the key, its peaks and valleys adjust the pins, both upwards and downwards, until the cylinder can turn. Once the operation is complete, the cylinder returns to its original position and so do the pins. It was a tried and tested system and, until a few years ago, secure. Then somebody discovered how to ‘bump’ them with a substitute key.

You insert the bump key all the way into the lock, pull it out one notch, apply pressure in the direction of the turn, and give the end of the key a sharp tap. The key bangs against the end of the lock, and the kinetic energy travels back along it. The pins jump, and because of the pressure you’re applying, the key will turn.

I shoved the first of my trio of keys into the lock, pulled it back one click, my finger and thumb applying the necessary clockwise pressure. I put an ear to the door to check for noise one last time, and gave the handle a short, sharp tap with the mallet.

Nothing.

I tried twice more.

Nothing.

I swapped keys. I tapped again, and on the second attempt my clockwise pressure turned into a full rotation.

23

I shoved the string of bump keys back into my jeans, stepped onto the mat and gently closed the door behind me. The place was in darkness. There were no winking lights on a console by this door or the one at the far end of the hall. There was no bleep of an alarm waiting for a PIN to be entered.

The house smelt as if its owner had emptied every boutique in Noordermarkt of its lemon-scented candles. I flicked on the deadlock. If someone did come back, they wouldn’t be able to get in. They’d give it a few goes, thinking the lock was jammed, and that would give me enough time to exit from the front.

I let my jaw drop open, so all the internal noises like breathing and swallowing didn’t intrude. I did nothing but listen for a minute or two. The house was completely silent. There wasn’t even the tick of a clock. All I could hear was the dull rumble of the Westerstraat traffic.

I cocked my head and listened again. I wanted to make sure no one was reacting. I’d opened a door. Even when people are asleep, their eardrums can be sensitive to minute changes in air pressure. Grannies call it sixth sense, but more likely it was caveman-survival stuff. You needed a little advance warning if a brontosaurus was coming to visit.

I waited a few seconds longer. There was still no creak of a floorboard, no sound from a radio or TV.

As my eyes adjusted, I began to make out the streamlined cabinets to my left and right. The walls were white. Rugs covered the polished wood floor all the way to the front door. A small bowl that contained change but no keys was perched on top of a glass cabinet. The two men’s winter coats hung on a rack above it. There were no handbags, purses, patterned umbrellas or a copy of the Dutch version of Hello! to suggest a female presence. Two doors were open to my left. Gentle light filtered through them from the street. There was no hint of cigarette smoke or stale cooking. All I could smell was furniture polish, lemon and more lemon.

I focused on the shape of the front door at the end of the hallway. Somewhere down there would be the staircase to the upper floors, but I wasn’t going to use it. I wasn’t going to check the rest of the house. There was no need. Everything I was interested in was downstairs. I wouldn’t be long down there, with luck no more than ten minutes. All I had to do was study the windows and door, and work out which of them I was going to leave unlocked for when I came back.

I put down the toolbox and mallet and took off my trainers. The floor would show any grit or dirt in this show-home, and anyone as fastidious as its occupants would notice. I would also check my socks weren’t leaving sweat marks. If they did, I’d give them a wipe when I did my clean-up recce on the way out.

I tied the laces together, put the trainers over my left shoulder, and picked up the little black box and the mallet. There were two doors to my right. One of them had to lead to the basement stairs.

I was reaching for the handle of the first when it opened and light flooded into the hallway.

24

The guy had greasy black hair that reached the collar of his black shirt. His sleeves were rolled up. There was a mug in his hand.

He spotted me and his jaw hardened. With not so much as a shout, he hurled the mug. It missed me but the hot stuff in it didn’t.

I lunged for him, but I was too slow. He was gone, legging it back into the room he’d come out of.

I followed him, crashing past leather sofas and a table. On the table sat an empty plate and a small kitchen knife. He grabbed it. He had a weapon. He turned back towards me. His face was stone.

I spun and tried to dodge the stab but he was too fast. I felt a punch to my buttock. At first there was no pain at all. A split second later, there was a dull throbbing at the site. Then a burning sensation permeated outwards and turned into intense pain. My leg buckled under me. As I crashed to the floor, I vomited. A trainer smashed into the top of my head. A pissed-off voice screamed down at me in a language I didn’t understand.

He kicked out at me again and I jerked back my head. My face slid in my own puke. I brought my arms up to protect my head. The top of my right leg felt like there was a blowtorch playing on it.

He yelled something, either to me or to someone else in the house.

I brought my knees up to protect myself, trying to get into some kind of foetal position, but the pain in my leg prevented me. I had to jerk my right leg out to keep it straight, and curl up the left one as best I could. I got a kick to the stomach for my trouble. Thank fuck they were trainers not boots, but it still hurt. I was going down here.

My left eye was blurred. I tried to wipe it on the side of my arm. He walked around me and kicked me in the back. I took a deep breath. I felt his hands and knees pushing against my back, then his hands digging into my pockets. He dragged the cash out of the front of the jeans and I knew I’d never see it again. I hoped he’d count it - anything to give me some time to recover.

The pressure left my back. I watched as the trainers moved round to face me. He carried on to the door, and closed it to contain us both. The next thing I heard was the bleep of numbers being punched into a mobile phone. He was breathing like a porn star, but when he spoke, his voice was calm.

There was a pause.

I opened my eyes. The tattoos running up his forearms were tribal. They looked like the Pizza Express logo, and were very dark and new. He closed down and the phone went back into his pocket. He walked past me and disappeared to the other side of the room. Then he came back over and I sensed rather than saw him reach out. Pain shot through me. I realized the knife was still sticking into me, and he was sawing it backwards and forwards.

He leant down and shouted words I didn’t understand. He played with the knife some more. All I could do was take the pain.

I gritted my teeth as the knife came out. My right buttock was on fire.

He screamed it down into me, jamming it back in.

He had to push a cushion over my face to muffle my yells.

25

The cushion came off and the kicks rained in.

I curled up. I flexed my leg even though I could feel the blade still stuck in my buttock.

There was nothing I could do. Sometimes you’ve got to accept you’re in the shit and ride it out. He wasn’t going to kill me. He was waiting for someone. I was still in with a chance.

The kicking continued until he finally lost his breath and beads of sweat poured down his face. Then there was silence. I heard window blinds being opened and closed, and the slam of vehicle doors outside. Black Shirt grunted something as he fought for breath. For all I knew he was talking to himself.

The back door rattled. Not once but twice. That was supposed to be my signal to leg it out the front. Black Shirt took a long, hard look at me and decided I wasn’t going anywhere fast. He whipped along the corridor and did the business with the latch.

I heard another voice, deeper, stronger. He didn’t like what he found. He started yelling. A pair of legs edged around the vomit. I saw immaculate jeans over smart brown brogues.

My arms were still protecting my face. The blue rubber gloves were covered with vomit. I lifted my elbow. He, too, had black hair and a dark complexion. He had his hands in the pockets of a short camel-hair coat. He bowed from the waist to try and get some perspective on my face. I smelt a mixture of cologne and cigars.

He straightened up and turned to Black Shirt. His hands swung between me and the pool of sick.

Black Shirt hung his head. It looked like Brogues was his boss, and he’d let him down badly. And, going by the concern on his face, Brogues didn’t dish out that many second chances.

Brogues shouted as hard as he pointed. My body screamed at me in pain, but the longer his rant, the longer I had to recover.

Black Shirt muttered something and tossed him the container of Smarties.

Brogues threw up both his hands. It clattered to the floor. He didn’t want his prints on it. He leant down to me and shouted a question in my ear. I moaned and groaned as if I was out of it on drugs. I wished right now that I was. At least it would dull the pain.

Brogues didn’t bother asking again. He looked up and down the hallway, rubbing the designer stubble on his face and then the back of his head.

He pointed at Black Shirt like an inquisitor, his tone lower, more threatening. I still couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but was pretty sure he was asking him to solve a problem, and that problem was me.

A moment later Brogues decided the time for questions was over. His jaw jutted and he started issuing orders. Black Shirt was looking for a little sympathy and understanding but getting fuck all. Brogues didn’t wait for a reply. His shouts faded down the corridor and I heard my door slam.

26

I waited for Black Shirt to get close. I coughed and snorted the sludge from my nose, trying to make it sound like I was suffering, but in fact trying to get as much oxygen into my lungs as I could.

He picked up a cushion and kicked me. He knelt carefully behind me so his knees weren’t in the puke, and pulled my head back and up. I took a deep breath just as the cushion came down.

Both his hands pushed against my mouth and nose. I gripped his wrists. He grunted with effort. My nose was compressed to breaking point. I knew I could hold my breath for maybe forty-five seconds. I struggled for twenty, and then I let my hands fall from his as he kept pushing. As my right hand dropped I wiped as much puke off it as I could onto my jeans. I jerked my head backwards and forwards to make it look like I was in the final throes of suffocation. I was, but I was also trying to grab another lungful of air while my hand closed round the knife handle.

My chest was going to explode. I could feel my face bloating and burning as I gripped the weapon more tightly. Now was the time. I jerked the knife out of my arse and swung my arm high. I rammed it back down in as wide an arc as I could manage. If it missed him, I risked stabbing myself.

It made contact. He screamed. There was resistance. It didn’t go straight in. I had to force it. The skin finally buckled and the blade sank between the bones.

I didn’t pull it out. I might not get it in again. I pulled it down towards me as hard as I could and twisted my body as he came down on top of me.

I sucked in air. I saw the blade in his neck. There was no blood. It had missed the artery.

I kept digging, twisting and pushing, swung my left knee and came up astride him. The serrations faced the back of his neck. I got my left elbow onto his shoulder, pinning him with as much of my body weight as I could. His face was turned to the right. I twisted the blade until the serrations faced his windpipe and started to saw. The knife wasn’t sharp enough. I had to bring it out and plunge it in again. I kept my arm solid, moving it up and down using the top of my body to get some weight behind it to help it rip through the tissue.

He screamed again. I grabbed the cushion and held it over his face with my free hand as I tried to cut into him.

I forced the cushion down harder. The knife was firm in my hand and my arm was rigid. I rocked and used body weight to move it up and down.

It wasn’t long before he gave up. He had no choice. His body was giving up for him. It wouldn’t be long. I would just have to leave him to die. It wasn’t him I was here for. I now had to grip Brogues.

I lay there, trying to recover. I took deep breaths, snorting and gobbing to clear my nose. Black Shirt was fading fast. The rasping and gurgling noises became fainter and fainter.

I put my hand in his pocket and retrieved the money he’d forgotten to tell his boss about, and then put my trainers back on. I yanked the knife out of his neck and gripped it in my left hand.

Slowly, I opened the door. The hall lights were on. The clink of bottle on glass came from my left, the other end of the hallway. I walked towards it, picking up the mallet on the way.

Brogues started gobbing off as soon I opened the door. I couldn’t see him immediately but I could hear him. He thought I was Black Shirt. He took a swallow of something and walked round the corner towards me when he didn’t get an answer. He had a tall glass of light brown stuff in his hand with ice floating on top. This boy was sharp. He charged towards me. No hesitation; no fear.

I stood still. There was nothing I could do about this. His eyes were locked on mine. He knew exactly what he was going to do when he got to me.

I had to do the same. I tried to focus. I could feel the blood warm and wet on my leg. It was ripping me apart but I had to get into the zone where it all became slow and defined in my head. He was coming to kill me, to do the job that Black Shirt had failed to do.

He finally got his head down. He was going to body-charge me back into the hallway. Once he’d done that, he was going to jump on top of me and finish the job.

I raised the mallet and waited. I concentrated on the back of his head. My whole world was focused on the blurred shape barrelling towards me.

When he was less than half a metre away I swung the mallet down. In the same motion, I twisted my body and dropped like a matador to get more energy behind the hardened rubber.

As my knees bent, he crumpled. His head fell onto my thighs and he came down with me. By the time I hit the floor his head was wedged between my thighs and chest. I checked his pulse. There wasn’t one.

I scrambled to my feet. Keeping the mallet with me, I raced as fast as I could to the first floor. Unlike the hallway below, the rooms were all spotless.

There was no point looking for a weapon. Brogues seemed too switched on to have anything that might compromise him in the house. He didn’t even have an alarm system that could bring the police running if tripped.

I pulled a white satin duvet and the bottom sheet off a bed and staggered back downstairs. I checked Brogues’s pockets for the Passat keys. They were empty. I had to stop and take a breath to calm down. Of course: the bowl by the back door. I wrapped him in the sheet. He wasn’t bleeding, so wouldn’t need anything thicker to soak it up. I turned off the lights, picked up the mallet and tool-box, and left him in the now darkened hallway.

I went outside and retrieved my Bergen. I threw on the padded nylon coat to cover the mess on my jeans and sweatshirt. I climbed into the Passat. It was automatic, top of the range. I turned it round and reversed back in towards the door. I hit a button and the boot clicked open. I did one last scan. The square was in darkness. All the neighbours were in their own perfectly manicured little worlds. Nobody was rushing to investigate.

I couldn’t lift them. I was going to have to lug each one down the steps and load them one at a time.

I wrapped Black Shirt in the duvet and dragged and pulled it towards the back door. I bumped him down the first couple of steps. The second was level with the Passat’s boot. It took all my strength to lift and push him in. I brought down the lid in case someone above me suddenly got curious.

I repeated the process with Brogues, then got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. The Passat rolled towards the gates. I didn’t have a clue how they opened, but I’d find out soon enough.

I drove slowly. Now wasn’t the time to look like I was in a hurry. I travelled twenty metres into the square and turned right into the archway. I stopped about three metres from the gates and they began to open.

I turned left up Noordermarkt. My arse was still sending Mayday signals to my brain, but I was breathing and I’d removed another couple of traffickers from the landscape before they could make a play for Lilian and her mates. Right now, that was all that mattered.

PART SIX

1

I turned left onto Papaverhoek and passed FilmNoord XXX. The window blinds were up and bright blue-and-white rope lights shone their welcome onto the pavement.

I’d used the same route as yesterday from Westerstraat, taking even more care than usual not to become the focus of any attention. I kept the sun visor down even though it was dark. There weren’t as many speed and CCTV cameras here as in the UK, but I wasn’t taking chances.

I passed the German office block and nosy-parked in front of the shutter, exactly as I’d done with the Panda. Headlights off, I climbed out and limped over to the door. The telltales were intact. I went to put the key into the top lock. Pain shot through my buttock as I raised my arm. The congealed blood felt cold on my skin. I’d been sitting on the warm leather of the Passat’s driving seat and now the air was getting to it.

I leant on the door with my left hand as I started on the last lock. My leg spasmed and bile flooded into the back of my throat. My nostrils stung as the puke acid launched another attack.

I wrestled the door open. I wanted this wagon under cover as soon as possible, and then I wanted a brew, a shower, and some first aid.

The footsteps behind me were heavy. I spun round. She emerged from the dark interior of one of the doorless garages and headed straight for me, arm outstretched. She was still in my boots and clothes.

‘What the fuck?’

‘Please, please …’

She had a wad of euros clutched in her hand.

‘Please, the money. Take it. I—’

I grabbed her and bundled her over the threshold, then followed her in. She fell against the stairs. I shoved my face right into hers. ‘Wait here!’ I needed her off the street, as well as the Passat. I’d get rid of her later.

She shut up. She was going to do what she was told. She wanted me to help her. She was going to be compliant.

I moved as fast as I could into the loading bay and down the metal steps towards the shutter. I banged the button and it started to grind open. I didn’t turn on the lights. As soon as there was enough clearance I bent down and eased myself underneath it. It still stretched my wound and another jolt of pain shot through my body.

I slid behind the wheel. There was a smear of blood on the driver’s seat, but there wasn’t a pool of it. The capillaries withdraw after the initial trauma and the deeper muscle mass closes the wound. After a while the site is just gooey, not running with the stuff. But there was still one fuck of a hole in my right buttock and every move I made felt like I was sitting on a red-hot poker.

I drove in and parked alongside the Panda. As soon as the shutter came down I went back through to the front door and closed that too.

As the lights flickered on, she clambered to her feet, the cash still in her hand. ‘Take me. You leave tonight, yes? Help me. Please.’ Her eyes had filled with tears.

I stood with my back to the door. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you go to the airport? The woman, the blonde woman, my friend, was waiting for you.’ I dug into my jeans, dragging out more cash.

She slumped to her knees and threw her arms around my legs, squeezing them tight. The red-hot poker got busy again and I pushed her off more vigorously than I’d meant to.

She saw the blood smeared on her hands from round the back of my jeans and must have smelt the bile. ‘Let me help you. I will help you.’

I leant against the door. My mouth tasted of puke. My leg throbbed excruciatingly. I clenched my teeth and breathed deeply through my nose. ‘Right - go upstairs. Get the kettle on.’ Fuck it, it would all be over in twenty-four hours.

‘Kettle?’ Her face relaxed. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew I wasn’t kicking her out.

‘Boil the water.’ I mimed drinking. ‘For tea.’

She nodded and jumped up, eager to please. She bounded up the stairs.

I turned and locked the front door. I didn’t bother with any new telltales.

Pushing myself off it, I shuffled back through the fire door and into the loading bay.

I took off the Passat’s fuel cap. There was nothing to tell me if it took diesel or petrol. I gave it a sniff. Good: it was petrol. I’d need an extra bit of accelerant for what I had in mind.

I retrieved the Bergen from the front passenger seat and hauled myself upstairs to what I hoped was going to be a brew.

2

I checked the remaining telltales as I made my way gingerly up the stairs. I did all I could to avoid bending my leg. They were all in place.

The girl was standing with her back to me as I hobbled into the room. She seemed to be preparing the brew as if it was a three-course meal. Anything to look indispensable, I supposed. The roll of cash I’d given her sat on the drainer beside the open box of Yorkshire Tea.

I shrugged the Bergen strap off my shoulder and let its weight drag it down my arm. I didn’t have the strength to lift it off properly. I leant against the wall in a vain attempt to relieve the pain. I didn’t want to sit down and stretch the wound site any more. I was fucked, and I was glad to be here.

I let the Bergen drop to my feet and spoke to the back of her sweatshirt. ‘What’s your name?’

She didn’t turn. Perhaps she still thought I was going to show her the door. She really was just a kid, doing the brew-making version of dragging the duvet over her head.

I didn’t know if she hadn’t heard me or if it she was ignoring me. I said it louder. ‘What is your name?’

Her hands flew around in front of her as if she was conducting the Philharmonic rather than just squeezing out a couple of tea bags. ‘Angeles.’

‘Like the city?’

She finally turned and smiled.

‘Where are you from, Angeles? Nationality? Your country?’

‘Moldova.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the airport, like I said? You could be safe now.’

She turned back and mumbled something into the drainingboard.

‘What?’

She got stuck into the sugar bag and finally came towards me with two steaming mugs of the black stuff.

‘But I am safe. I want to stay with you.’

It wasn’t much more than a whisper. Her hair fell across her face. I found it even harder to understand her now I couldn’t see her mouth.

I was desperate to sit down, but leant my weight against the wall instead. She stood in front of me.

‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen. I will cook for you. I will look after you. Anything. Please let me stay …’

I nodded and started drinking. The brew was hot and sweet and right at that moment it was as good as anything I’d ever tasted.

She sipped hers like a bird, then started waffling like a madwoman. ‘I will help you, yes. Will you take me away from here? I can go with you tonight?’

I raised a hand to encourage her to slow down. ‘I want you to do something for me. Get that towel and tear it into strips.’ I held my thumb and forefinger about three inches apart. ‘Like a bandage, yeah? I’m going to go and clean myself up.’

I started to move, but winced as the pain shot through my arse.

‘Please - let me help. What happened?’

‘Don’t ask. Don’t say anything. Just do what I say and I’ll help you, OK?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

I staggered into the shower. As I turned on the water and waited for the steam, I struggled to peel off my trainers and jeans.

3

I almost screamed with pain as the hot water hit the puncture sites. But it was the only way. I had to get them clean.

I cupped my hand below the wounds and scooped the water over them. It was the best I could do for now. I’d get it sorted when I’d lifted Lilian and waved goodbye to Flynn and his silo.

Once the important stuff was done, all I wanted to do was get the smell of puke off me and brush my teeth. I could almost feel where the acid had burnt into the enamel.

I stuck my head out from behind the curtain. ‘Can you bring me those bits of towel?’

I ducked back under the trickle of water and worked shampoo into my hair. It wasn’t long before the door opened and in she came. I turned to face her. I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, but I didn’t want her to see the stab wounds either.

I climbed out of the shower and used the part of my sweatshirt that wasn’t covered in puke to dry myself. She stood there with the door open, staring at the ‘blunt trauma’, as Kleinmann had called the knife, bullet and dog-bite scars that covered my body.

‘Get your clothes off.’

She stared at me.

‘Take them off. I need them.’

I tried to work the strips of towel around me like Gandhi to give my arse some kind of dressing. It wasn’t happening.

Angeles handed me my jeans and sweatshirt before leaving. I put them on, then folded one of the strips and shoved it down the back of the jeans as best I could to get some protection over the punctures. I’d seen lads in Africa with much bigger wounds, big machete cuts that had taken chunks out of their arms and thighs, and they were still going strong. All I had to do was crack on for another couple of months.

As I pulled the sweatshirt over my head, I realized that in a curious way the pain felt good. It was from a proper old-fashioned wound, not some cancerous growth that I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t do much about. It was the sort of pain I could handle, and an aspirin or two would help. I wasn’t going to run short of them any time soon. Perhaps the Smarties would too.

And then I realized something else: I’d left the Smarties at 118.

Fuck it, I’d be with Anna soon and I’d sort it then. Right now I’d just have to crack on.

Angeles was sitting on the airbed with the sleeping bag draped around her shoulders. The rest of my clothes were wet with blood or covered in vomit. I’d bin them eventually, but for now I was going to put them in one of the spare offices. The smell was making me want to gag even more. I started to gather them up. She jumped up to help. She grabbed whatever she could and wrapped it all in the brown nylon coat.

‘Are you going home to your family? Your children?’ She smiled. ‘You have a baby seat.’

‘I said no questions, remember? Don’t ask. Do you understand?’

Her face fell. I kept forgetting she was only fifteen.

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

I took the bundle from her and reintroduced my feet to my Timberlands. ‘I’m going out for a little while.’

Her world was falling apart once more. ‘Please - can I come? Please don’t leave me. You are coming back?’

I scrabbled about in the Bergen for a couple of aspirin. ‘I’m going out to get some food, all right? I’ll see if I can get you some clothes too. What do you want to eat? Meat? Bread?’

‘Anything. Thank you.’

‘Just sit down and rest. Do not leave the room. Understand?’

She wrapped herself up once more and settled on the airbed. She started to shiver.

‘Look, I will be coming back. All my gear’s here. I’m coming back. It’s OK.’

In an ideal world it would be better if she came with me so I had control of her all the time, but I didn’t have enough clothes for her. And I had a phone call to make.

I dumped the Bergen in the loading bay and locked the door. I headed down past FilmNoord XXX towards the market. I felt a lot better with my boots back on. The market itself wouldn’t be open just yet, but some of the shops would be.

The all-night store I landed up in could have been anywhere in the Middle East. Big sacks of spices sat alongside crates of weird fruit and veg. The Arab version of Starsky and Hutch blared out from a TV mounted over the counter. Behind the checkout a young guy, with shaved sides to his gelled jet-black hair, munched pistachio nuts and watched the car chase. Half a souk’s worth of bling hung down the front of his T-shirt, and the Iranian flag hung proudly behind him.

I walked up and down the aisles and filled a basket with pitta bread, cans of salmon with ring-pulls and cartons of UHT milk that sat alongside 25-kilo bags of rice and huge aluminium cooking pots. There were cheap plastic buckets, dustpan and brush sets, ironing boards and, more importantly, kids’ clothing - cheap cotton shirts and jumpers, most of them with old Disney themes like Lion King or anything else that had passed its sell-by date. There were a few things that I thought would fit her and I threw them in the basket as well. I couldn’t see any decent bath towels, just small ones the size of dishcloths, but they’d have to do.

I got back to the counter as the cars drew level and bad guys with seventies haircuts and spear-pointed collars drew their weapons and fired at each other. The soundtrack sounded like belly-dancing music on steroids. A dozen or so phone cards were displayed in clear plastic wallets behind the boy with the bling. The point-of-sale poster showed little arrows aiming at all the different world flags, and a sentence or two in Dutch that I guessed told me it only cost two euros to call Iran or the USA. I grunted and pointed, as most people do if they can’t speak the language, and managed to end up with a fifty-euro one.

I headed out with my shopping in thin carrier bags that dug into my fingers. The good thing about poor areas of any city, especially those with a migrant population, is that most of the phone boxes are still working. The mobile-phone network hasn’t taken over completely because the locals don’t have the cash.

I went into a call box and scratched the strip off the back of my brand new if slightly grubby card. I dialled the company number, and then the code. Finally, I dialled her mobile number.

I got a ringing tone, and then her recorded voice in Russian. I waited for the bleep.

‘Anna - it’s Nick. I’m going to keep trying to get hold of you.’ I hit the receiver and rang straight back. If I’d woken her, she might have been too slow to pick up. After three rings I got the Russian version of hello.

‘It’s Nick.’ I only told her as much about the girl as she needed to know for now. This wasn’t the time for a full rundown and you never know who or what is listening. ‘Her name is Angeles. She won’t leave me. You have to come and pick her up.’

‘She is scared, Nick. She’s scared of everything and everyone - except for you right now. You’re probably the only friendly face she’s seen for months. I can get a cab and pick her up, but she could still run. Why should she trust me? She’s probably been handed from person to person, and each one has made her situation worse. Can’t you hand her over to the contact with Lilian?’

‘No. I’ll explain later. Could you lock her in the room?’

She thought for a few seconds. ‘She is young, yes?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Jesus. There’s no saying what she will do. You are her only friend. Just think, Nick - chances are, the reason she is here is because of strangers. I have already called Lena. She will be able to help. She has contacts in the city. But you’ll have to take her, Nick - you’re the one she trusts.’

I stood with the phone to my ear while I tried to forget the pain in my arse and do some thinking.

‘Nick? What do you want me to do?’

‘OK, I’ll keep her with me. Can you set up the meeting with Lena’s people at your hotel, say three hours before the flight?’

‘What flight?’

‘Our flight to Moscow. We need to be away from here as soon as we can on Saturday. You should book the flights. Still

got my card details?’

‘Yes. But—’

‘But what?’

‘The other girls. What about them?’

‘Don’t worry. I have that sorted.’

4

My fingers were numb and throbbing from the carrier-bag handles by the time I got back.

She jumped off the airbed to grab them, the sleeping bag still gathered tightly around her. ‘I help you.’

I let her. Why not give her the chance to feel she was earning her keep?

‘Here are some clothes for you. Take a look.’

I went over to the kettle. I could hear the rustle of plastic behind me.

‘My friend, the blonde woman, is going to help you - in a couple of days. But I’ll be with you to make sure everything is OK, yeah?’

There was more rustling as she ignored what I’d said, pulled the gear out and tried it on.

‘You must never tell anyone you were here, or tell anyone anything about me. You understand?’

I turned to see Angeles splitting open one of the carrier bags to make a kind of tablecloth. She spread it on the floor by the airbed and started tearing into the bread and opening the ring-pull cans.

‘Angeles, do you understand what I said?’

All I wanted was for her to say jack-shit until I got tucked in with Anna in Moscow. After that, so what?

She looked up, her big eyes focused on mine, and nodded.

‘OK, good. Start eating. Don’t wait.’

She shook her head. She sat on the carpet with her legs tucked under her and waited while I poured water over another couple of Yorkshire Tea bags and added too many spoonfuls of sugar. I took the brews over and motioned her to take the mattress. No way was I going to sit down.

‘Will you put some fish in the bread for me?’

She looked disappointed I wasn’t joining her, but made me a salmon wrap and handed it to me. She didn’t mess about after that. She gulped hers down, sucking her oil-stained fingers after each mouthful.

‘Angeles, why have you got no eyebrows?’ I wasn’t going to tell her I’d seen what she had to do with an eyebrow pencil.

She stopped eating, mid-mouthful. Her hands, still holding the food, fell onto her lap. Her eyes followed. ‘They raped us and then they held us down and shaved our eyebrows. They told us that the customers like their girls to look like that.’

‘Just painted on?’

She nodded slowly, her head still down, as her mind took her back to wherever that place was.

I grabbed one of the cartons of UHT and sat down carefully beside her. She liked that.

I passed the milk over. ‘What happened? How did you get here with the other girls?’

‘I was walking home from school. Men came in a car when I was outside my village. Ukrainian men. They hit me, and put me into the trunk.’ She looked up. Her face was a mask. ‘They drove me to Odessa and locked me in a garage. In the trunk.’

She tried ripping at the carton’s edge to release the milk but she couldn’t do it, and it wasn’t because she hadn’t the strength. A tear welled in the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. She put the carton onto the carpet as she tried to fight back. I picked it up.

‘I was a virgin. I wanted to wait until I married, like my mother. But the men …’

I handed her the open carton and gave her a moment or two to gather herself. ‘How did you get here?’

‘I escaped from the garage. I went to the police. But they arrested me and sent for the Ukrainian men. They handed me back to them.’

I waited while she wiped her eyes. She took a swig of milk, her hands rigid with anger and distress. I was beginning to understand why Anna had felt so strongly about me not just handing her on.

‘The men took me on a boat. I was on it for a long time. I had to …’ She turned away, overcome by shame once more. ‘I had to pay my fare …’

‘You came here, to Amsterdam?’

‘No, Copenhagen. Your picture, the girl - she is here now. She came here also. She told me Copenhagen. The men there …’ She rubbed an index finger over where her eyebrows should have been. ‘The men there did this.’

‘You both stayed at a house there, an old, cold house?’

She nodded. ‘A week, maybe ten days, I do not know.’

‘And Lilian, the girl in the picture - she stayed there with you?’

She nodded. ‘For maybe three or four days, with three other girls.’

My mind went back to the meeting with Robot, and what had been happening above us.

‘Then they put us into a truck with lots of furniture and brought us here. But I escaped. I climbed up the tower.’

She wasn’t celebrating.

‘Angeles, how many men are there in the building? Where do they stay, what do they do? Do you think you could do me a drawing of the layout?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. It was dark when we arrived and then we were kept in the room.’

‘Did you go out of the room to eat, use the toilet?’

She shook her head. ‘There is bucket in the room and they bring food from a takeaway. I don’t know what else, I—’

‘It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ I didn’t want to put her through any more of that shit than I had to. ‘What about your parents? Brothers? Sisters? Family? Did they try to find you?’

She shook her head. ‘My father? The Ukrainian men said they have given my father money. If he says anything or I go home they will burn our farm down. No one will help. My mother? What can she do?’

‘The men, maybe they lied … Maybe they just said that so you wouldn’t run home. You know what? My friend has people in Moldova who will help you. One of them was like you, taken away and all alone. But she is safe now, like you will be. They can find out if it’s true what the Ukrainian men told you. Whatever happens, they can help you go home. Would you like that?’

She nodded. The tension was starting to ebb out of her face and neck. She gave me a small, shy smile. ‘My brother … he looks like you.’

‘Poor guy!’ I gave Angeles as much of a grin as I could manage and left her to finish her picnic. The Bergen was in the loading bay, where I’d left it. I dragged out the twenty-litre plastic container and went back upstairs. I was going to need a lot of water for what I had in mind.

She watched me as she tidied empty cans into a bag.

‘Stay here. Get some sleep. I’ve got to fill this, then do some work downstairs.’

She looked scared again.

‘I’m not going anywhere, but do not come down, OK? Just stay here. Do you understand?’

She nodded.

‘It’s not long now. Then you’ll be safe.’

She took a breath. ‘What is your name?’

‘Nick.’ I turned away quickly and disappeared to fill the container. My head had filled with images of what had happened to her and Lilian in the green house. I had to cut away.

I took the showerhead off and used it like a hosepipe. It was easier than fiddling around in the sink.

I hobbled down the stairs again with the full container and the bundle of vomit-soaked clothing. I laid out the kit at the back of the loading bay, behind the two vehicles. The fluorescents flickered uneasily. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need much light.

I took out the camping stove and screwed in the fuel, then opened the Russian-doll nest of pans.

The bulkiest item of all was the aspirin. I’d picked up 320 tablets of the stuff, and was going to use them all - minus the two I’d already taken, the two I swallowed now, and a couple more for luck.

The red-hot poker perked up again, but I found myself grinning like an idiot. I was going to sort out the bastards who’d done those things to Lilian, Angeles and the kids I’d spotted in the green house, and I was going to use 314 aspirin to give those fuckers the world’s biggest headache. The kind of headache you got from an Improvised Explosive Device.

5

I didn’t need much high explosive to totally fuck up the silo and anyone in it. CNN and the BBC were going to end up with some great footage. Two lumps would do it: one of about a kilogram, to produce a kicking charge; and one half that size to produce a firebomb.

Picric acid is magic stuff, but a fucker to make. To get there, I was going to have to separate the acetyl-salicylic acid in the aspirin from its bulking agent, add a couple more ingredients, and do a bit of mixing and distilling. The trouble was I only had the kit to make it in small batches. The whole process was probably going to take me all night.

I knew it better as Explosive Mix No. 7. As part of my anti-terrorism experience, I’d had to learn to be a terrorist. A lot of the time I was doing pretty much the same as they were, infiltrating a country, buying everything I needed in corner shops and pharmacies, and mixing those items with others in my basket so I wouldn’t get noticed by the guy on the checkout. Then, like a terrorist, I’d go back to my hide, make and plant my device, and get out of the area before it went off.

The big difference nowadays is that we’re in the age of the suicide bomber. They go in and stay with the device to make sure it goes off. Sometimes they’re even wearing it. Neither of those things featured in my plans.

The first demolitions course I did when I joined the Regiment had lasted twelve weeks. I loved every minute of it. Even as a kid, I’d been fascinated by the TV footage of Fred Dibnah dropping power-station chimneys, and tower blocks imploding within their own perimeter. The principal task I trained for back then was to fuck up an enemy’s industrial base.

Their troops might be giving us the good news at the front line, but no army can function if it can’t get supplies. We might want to drop a bridge, railway line, hydroelectric power station or crude-oil refinery - or render docks useless, open floodgates, destroy military or civilian aircraft. So much damage can be done with just two pounds of plastic explosive. Why send in an air force to destroy a big industrial complex when the same result can be achieved by taking out its power source? It might be easier for a four-man team to infiltrate as civilians, do the reconnaissance, then buy ingredients over the counter to make the devices.

Destroying something doesn’t necessarily involve removing it from the face of the earth. A large factory or even a small town can be neutralized by taking out an electricity substation. It might just mean making a small penetration of about half an inch with explosives into a particular piece of machinery. That might be all that’s needed to disturb the momentum of the moving parts inside it. The machine then destroys itself. The skill is in identifying where the weak point is, getting in there to do it, and getting away again.

The problem is, you’re not going to have a notebook in your pocket with all your formulas and bomb-assembly instructions. We’d spent the first few weeks of the demolitions course having to learn them by heart. There were nine basic mixes: nine different types of explosive for nine different types of job, from low explosive - a lifting charge if you want to make a big crater in a runway or blow up a road or vehicle going along it - to high explosives, which can be used with enough precision to cut steel if you want to destroy a power station or drop a bridge or a couple of pylons. It’s horses for courses, different explosives for different attacks. High explosives were going to be perfect for me on this job.

I pressed forty aspirin tablets out of their foil and crushed them in the first of the three 5mm-thick juice glasses I’d bought in the market. I used the hard plastic spoon from the knife-fork-spoon camping set. It couldn’t be metal. I was making picric acid because it’s easy to detonate. The downside is that the slightest friction or percussion can set the stuff off. What’s more, it attacks metal, creating salts that are just as explosive. It can only be safely in contact with wood, glass or plastic.

I opened the little tap at the bottom of the container, poured some water into the largest of the cheap aluminium pans and put it on the gas. While I waited for it to come up to the same temperature as a hot bath, I added a little water to the powder in glass number one to make a paste, then added a splash of alcohol. I stirred until it liquefied.

Only now was there time for my stab wounds to get a little TLC. I pulled my jeans down and poured some of the alcohol between the wound and towel padding. It was like my skin was on fire.

I left the mix on the concrete floor and hobbled over to the Passat. Brogues wasn’t in complete rigor mortis yet. Everything but his eyelids was still soft and pliable. The process normally starts two to three hours after death and it can take maybe another four for all the muscles and organs to stiffen. It was cold in the loading bay, which would speed things up. The eyelids are among the first bits to go rigid, along with the jaw and neck. His eyes were no longer closed; he stared dully out of the boot. That was why the poor used to place coins over them to keep them closed.

His skin was already pale. The blood had settled in the parts of the body closest to the ground and had drained into the larger veins. The back of his head didn’t look as beaten about as I’d thought it would. I pulled off his handmade brown suede shoes. I needed the matching socks.

I tried to sit down while I shoved a sock over glass number two, but my buttock wasn’t at all keen. I had to stand and lean down instead. I poured the aspirin mix into the sock sieve. Cloudy liquid trickled through. After a while I removed the sock and wrung out the dregs. I didn’t want the rubbish that was left - that was just the bulking agent. What I needed was in the glass - or, rather, what was going to be left after I’d evaporated the water and alcohol out of the liquid. But that was still a few steps away.

Glass number two went into the simmering water. It was going to take about twenty minutes for the alcohol and moisture to evaporate and leave a residue of white powder.

The next stage was to add the acid. Concentrated sulphuric was a lot harder to come by, these days, because of anti-terrorist legislation. Unless you’re an industrial chemist, buying it arouses suspicion. My original plan had been to drain some of the Panda’s battery acid, but the Passat was a bonus. Or so I thought. There was more of it, but it was a fucker to get out. Everything under the bonnet was covered and sealed to make it look all nice and Gucci. Nobody serviced these things any more: they just plugged them into diagnostic machines.

I poured out a third of the contents of each cell into one of the smaller cooking pots. Even depleted, the battery would still work. The battery acid had to be boiled until all the white fumes had disappeared. It had to be seriously concentrated.

The method for making picric acid hadn’t changed for years. It was discovered in the late 1700s, and initially used as a yellow dye for silk and wool. Its explosive potential was discovered a hundred years later. The problem was, this stuff was so strong it attacked common metals like lead and copper to create even more dangerous salts, which were sensitive to shock. During the Boer War, the artillery boys threw shells into their guns and blew themselves up. There were some massive explosions in factories and ammunition ships. Tin and aluminium were the only metals picric acid didn’t corrode. Millions of tons of the stuff were used in bombs and grenades in the First World War. They were all coated with tin to prevent the acid contaminating the metallic shell. Even so, munitions factory workers were nicknamed canaries because of the way it stained their skin.

Then they discovered that picric acid was only a nightmare in powder form. Even these days, if the powder is stored in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to take enormous care not to trap grains of it in the threads of the bottle and cap. It’s so volatile that just unscrewing the top will make it detonate.

I was going to miss the kick of being able to get shit like this together and see the results. The payoff would be sitting on the flight to Russia with Anna on one side and somebody tapping away on his laptop on the other and me thinking, When you watch the news today you’ll see what I’ve been up to.

I could see the white powder starting to settle in glass number two as the water simmered gently around it. I took the pan off the cooker and replaced it with the one holding the battery acid. It wasn’t long before white haze was rising and wafting round the lock-up. Once it had stopped, I poured some of the concentrated acid into glass number three. Then, using the plastic knife, I slowly shifted the white powder out of glass number two and added it to the other so it became a white liquid.

All I had to do now was add a bit of potassium, before placing glass number three in the water and letting that boil down until the mixture turned a yellow-orange colour.

The final stage would be to filter it through a second sock placed over glass number four. But this time it wouldn’t be the liquid I was after. I wanted what stayed behind in the sock. The yellow and - thankfully - wet lumps that remained were what this process was all about. Once dried, they would turn into one big fuck-off unstable explosive that could be detonated very easily by heat or an electric charge. For now, however, it would be stored wet in a double layer of freezer bags, twisted, folded over and fastened with the wire retainer to keep the air out and the acid wet. I would keep filling the bags until I had enough.

6

Friday, 19 March

07.20 hrs

I’d fallen asleep in Brogues’s camel-hair coat, lying on the footwell carpets from the Passat. I’d spread them out on the floor alongside my four bags of explosive.

I forced myself up off the concrete. There was plenty more to do.

The first thing was to empty the water container to prepare it for its next payload. I opened the tap and let it run out on the floor. Next I got hold of the set of blister-packed halogen bulbs. The plastic packaging was so rigid I had to use the Chinese Leatherman to make any headway.

These bulbs were just what I needed. They were small, they banged out a huge amount of instant heat, and for their size they were more robust than normal bulbs, which were increasingly hard to find anyway because of EU green legislation. These ones would probably be banned as well when the law makers found out they could be used as detonators.

I pulled one out. It was about the size of the tip of my little finger. It had two loops of metal at the bottom for terminals.

The mosque digital alarm clock was next out of Santa’s Bergen. I shoved in four AA batteries, then yanked out the leads that connected the power source to the speaker at the back. I twisted the bare wires around each of the bulb loops and set the clock to 08.00. Then I set the alarm for 08.01. Bang on time, instead of me getting the muezzin’s wail, the bulb lit up. After three seconds it was hot to the touch - not enough to detonate anything, but that didn’t matter for now. I was going to do something else to the bulb to bring it up to speed. I turned off the alarm clock to save the batteries and put it down.

The twenty-litre container had emptied. I picked it up, together with the length of clear plastic tubing I’d bought from a shop that sold tropical fish, and headed for the Passat.

I opened the fuel cap and shoved the tube down into the tank. With the empty container by my feet, I put the other end of the tube to my lips and sucked. My lungs filled with petrol fumes but I kept going. A few seconds later, the tube darkened. As soon as the fuel had risen to within an inch or two of the tip I slid my thumb over it and took it out of my mouth. I pointed it down into the container, pulled my thumb away and the fuel flowed.

I remembered all the times my stepdad had sent me out nicking petrol from other people’s cars during the fuel shortage in the seventies. I was only about twelve. After that, he said there was a sugar shortage, so I used to get sent out to pocket the sugar shakers from cafes. There wasn’t a sugar shortage, of course: it was my stepdad’s way of saving a few pennies, and fuck the fact that I might get caught.

I left the tube where it was and let the siphon do its stuff. It was time for a brew. The flow would stop as soon as the fuel in the container reached the level of the tube, which was about twenty centimetres below the neck. That would be plenty.

I had a quick look at my G-Shock. Bradley was going to be here soon. I needed to have Angeles tucked away by then.

I had a quick check of the telltales on the way up to see if she’d been having a nose around. They were all in place, and so was the one behind the pigeonholes. I realized I felt nowhere near as bad as I thought I would without the Smarties. I made a mental note to stab myself in the buttock next time I felt a headache coming on.

The moment I opened the door she leapt up from the mattress and cut across the room. ‘Nick! I make tea?’

I gave her a big thumbs-up. ‘Madness not to.’

I looked at the sink. The mugs had been washed. Everything was laid out neatly. The milk stains and tea circles where I’d been making brews had all been cleaned. ‘You had anything to eat yet?’

‘No, Nick. I wait for you.’ She looked worried. ‘I touch nothing.’

I let her get on with it while I dug around in the plastic bags for a piece of pitta. It had started to go hard. What little scabbing I had on my arse had cracked with my exertions and was starting to hurt again. I leant on my good leg and gnawed on the crispy bits around the edges of the bread.

‘Listen, Angeles, someone is coming to see me soon.’

She handed me my brew. She didn’t look happy.

‘This one must not know that you’re here, OK? You understand?’

It didn’t seem to register.

‘He must not see you. I’ll find you somewhere to hide. You’ve got to stay out of sight, yeah?’

She seemed to like the thought of not being seen. Maybe it meant she wouldn’t be moved on.

‘Stay hidden until I tell you to come out. You’ve got to be quiet. He’s going to get really pissed off if you’re here. He’s only let me use this place because he thinks I’m on my own. If he thinks anyone else is here he’ll be very angry with me. You understand?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, yes, Nick. We still leave tonight?’

‘No drama. Tonight. We’ll meet the friend I told you about and she will ask her friends in Moldova if what the Ukrainian men said was true.’

I dunked my bread in the tea to soften it.

She almost skipped back to the sink to pick up her brew.

7

I had an even better vantage-point from the shadows beside the window of the middle office. I could see the front door as well as back along the road towards the main.

I checked my watch and gulped down my last couple of aspirin. They weren’t helping much with the pain in my arse, but I thought I’d try one more dose just in case. The sky was still overcast. The sun hadn’t quite given up trying to fight its way through the clouds, but it must have been tempted.

Bradley came into view, still in exactly the same clothes, but this time gripping a heavy and expensive-looking leather overnight bag in his right hand. I watched him to the door, then headed for the stairs.

By the time I’d got down to the fire escape on the first landing and turned to look down to the front door, he was inside and beginning to lock up.

‘I have everything you asked for.’

‘That’s great, mate. Thanks.’ I went down to meet him. ‘Half the job’s already done.’

‘What do you mean?’

He followed me up the steps to the fire door and into the loading bay. His head bounced around the place, taking in the smell of vomit and petrol and the mess of pans and sock-covered glasses in my preparation area. The last of the sulphuric acid was still in its glass. But mostly his eyes darted between me and the Passat.

He was desperate to know what was going on but didn’t want to ask.

‘He’s in the boot.’

‘In there? You’re sure it’s him?’

‘You tell me. Whoever it is, I got his sidekick as well. Don’t ask.’

I fished out the key fob from my pocket and pressed the button. The bodies had hardened up completely. They were both curled up like Pompeii victims. Their puke- and bloodstained white shrouds only half covered them.

I went and picked up Brogues’s camel-hair coat and extracted a slim crocodile-skin wallet. I produced a credit card with an unpronounceable name on it and tried to pass it to Bradley.

‘Very good.’ He didn’t want to touch it. ‘How did you do it?’

‘Like I said, don’t ask. That’s my job. I’m more interested in what you’ve been up to. You get the cartridges?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He put the bag down and started to unzip it.

I talked to the top of his gelled-back hair. ‘Have you spoken to Mission Control since we met up yesterday, last night, whenever?’

‘No, not at all. Why do you ask?’

He was still hunched down by his bag, his eyes on the cooker. Mine were on the boxes of shotgun cartridges.

‘How many did you get?’

‘Twenty. When are you going to the silo?’

‘Tonight.’

He nodded slowly as if the message had to sink in. ‘I think I need to know what time you will be leaving here. I need to be ready to pick up the girl.’

‘I’ll drop her here as soon as I’ve got her, and then I’m heading straight off. I’ll gaffer tape her up so she won’t go anywhere.’

‘What about the Passat?’

‘Like I said, everything here will be clear. I don’t know what time - nine, ten, eleven o’clock - but it’ll definitely be clear tonight and the girl will be waiting.’

He knelt down to unload the cartridges. ‘Excellent.’

He picked up the empty bag and we headed for the fire door.

‘I suppose I’ll never meet you again, will I, Mr Smith?’

‘No, mate, never.’

If only he knew the real reason. Both of us would be dead really soon. I was coming to terms with that myself, but I almost felt sorry for him. He was a two-timing little shit, but all in the name of queen and country. Sadly for him, people like Bradley didn’t realize that his queen had no idea he even existed, and his country didn’t give a shit in return.

We went back down to the front entrance. Bradley stretched out his hand. ‘Good luck, Nick.’

‘Thanks, mate. And you.’

I unlocked the door and he stepped onto the road. Empty bag in hand, he carried on walking without looking back.

8

Back in the office, I threw open the cabinet doors. She was curled up like another Pompeii victim. Her face was creased with concern. It wasn’t about being tucked into a filing cupboard and doing her own little Anne Frank, it was more to do with winning approval. ‘I was quiet, yes? You did not hear me?’

‘Yep, you were quiet. Now I have to go and work, so you have to stay up here again, OK? Go back to the airbed, rest, keep warm.’

‘OK, Nick.’

I followed her into the back room. ‘Not long now. We’ll go out and buy you some real clothes for when we go to see my friend. I’ll stay with you, don’t worry, and we’ll get some more food, OK?’

She nodded.

‘You stay here.’

I closed all the doors behind me and headed back to the loading bay.

There were twenty cartridges in each of the twenty boxes, which was more than enough. In fact, it meant I could make my devices a bit bigger and a lot better.

Laying out my ingredients as before, I got back to work. The gaffer tape was a standard two-centimetre roll. I pulled out about two metres and placed a pan on each end so it didn’t curl.

I opened the knife bit of the Chinese Leatherman and cut the top off the first cartridge. They were old. The red waxed-cardboard body cut far too easily, and the small pellets that dropped out were lead. They’ve been steel for years now.

After the front two-thirds of the cartridge was empty, I dug out the cotton wad that separated the shot from the propellant. I tipped the grains of propellant onto one end of the gaffer tape and an inch or two along it. I was doing pretty much the same as my stepdad used to do when he rolled his own fags, only this one packed a bit more of a punch than Gold Leaf did.

It took just over an hour to cut and pour the full two metres. I needed to make sure that whatever propellant was touching the tape was actually stuck to the adhesive. That way, there would be continuity in the burning even if there was a break here and there among the loose stuff if the fuse got bent. Once I’d done all that, I rolled the gaffer tape nice and tight until I had two metres of fuse half a centimetre thick. I put it to one side with the picric acid, well away from where I was working.

The next job was to make sure my bulb detonator was going to do its stuff. With the pliers part of the Chinese Leatherman, I crimped off the glass nipple to expose the insides of the bulb. I poured in propellant from one of the sixty-odd cartridges I had left over. Then I turned on the clock, set the alarm for one minute’s time, and waited. The element lit up. Within three seconds the propellant ignited in a burst of bright flame. A small cloud of cordite was left hanging in the air.

I shook the residue off the bulb and reset the clock. I tried it again, this time without the propellant, and the light came on. I now knew the wire connections to the two terminals of the bulb were good, and the bulb itself was still working. Why use a new bulb and run the risk it was a dud?

I moved the assembly away from everything else. The clock was the initiation device, and the bulb was the detonator. Now that they were joined, I had to make sure they didn’t do their jobs until I wanted them to. I took the batteries out and laid them to the side.

There was just one more manufacturing task, and that was to pour the remaining propellant into two of the freezer bags, one for each charge. It took me just over an hour. When I’d finished, the bags went alongside the picric acid and the fuse.

I was almost done. All that was left was to retrieve the bags of damp picric. I cut them open and spread the yellow, claylike substance on plastic to dry. Then, making one final check that Brogues’s coat, credit cards and wallet were back in the boot of the Passat, I headed up the stairs.

The market would be open now, and we both needed clothes for our exfil. I needed to look as clean leaving the country as I had when I came in. And Angeles, well, she just needed to look dressed.

9

The food stalls were piled with all kinds of products you’d normally find in a souk, from dates and spices to bags of rice and pistachios. The next one along sold nothing but second-hand clothing. Both of us blended in well. Angeles didn’t get a second glance in her gear from the House of Bling.

I was going to keep her with me now, regardless. No way was I was going to let her stay in the safe-house with the Moldovans downstairs and a roomful of volatile explosive mixes. If she nosed around and found the bodies she might lose it completely. If she found the mix and fucked about with it she could take down the building. Only by controlling her at all times could I be sure that I knew where she was.

The first priority was a coat each, not only to keep us warm and dry, but also to cover our existing clothes if we had to do a runner before we bought anything else. All the voices around us were Dutch, Arabic and Turkish, so I did my normal grunt and point. Next came a couple of sets each of trainers, jeans and sweatshirts. I also bought her a hairbrush to sort out the bird’s nest on her head.

I was pissed off that I was still going to be in-country when the place went up. The timer had to be set for two or three hours at most. That way, the batteries had a good chance of staying charged. Once I left the silo, I had no control over the device. I wanted it to be exposed for the least possible time, yet still able to give me enough to get out of the area.

I also couldn’t control the space that the device was placed in, so would have no way of knowing if it had been discovered. I had to factor in getting back to the safe-house afterwards, not just to pick up Angeles, but also to shower and scrub the DNA and cordite off me, then get rid of the clothes I’d worn on-target. The last thing I wanted to do was to turn up at the departure gate, and have security sensors detect traces of explosives on my clothes or hands.

We moved away from the clothing stalls and she got changed in one of the coffee shops that lined the market while I slid into my nasty new black coat. I bought kebabs and coffees, and she shovelled everything down like a girl possessed.

‘Nick?’

‘What?’

‘Your friend, what is her name?’

‘You will find out soon enough.’

Even with just a few weeks left, I couldn’t force myself to change the habit of a lifetime. I’d found over the years that giving out my own name was OK because it belonged to me. I could decide what I did with it, and what lies I was going to attach to it. But divulging the names of others was a different matter. That had to be up to them. In either case, you don’t give out information unless you have to. The less she knew about me, Anna, Flynn and all the rest, the better. I didn’t want to have an in-depth conversation about what I was doing here and where my family was. The only thing that was important was to get us both out of this situation. And as long as I kept her away from the loading bay, she’d know nothing and I could sort her out.

As we passed FilmNoord XXX, I scanned the road ahead. The ship still blocked the view of the waterway but apart from that there was nothing out of the ordinary, not even a car parked on the pavement.

We got to the door. She saw me checking the telltales in the locks.

‘This is a bad area. You have to make sure nobody breaks in.’

The keys ripped through the little slivers of paper and I opened up. Angeles went through with the bags. I followed and turned to close the door.

The two bodies that bomb-burst out from the garages came at me in a blur of leather jackets, shaved heads and face metal. They were already halfway across the road and closing on me fast.

I jumped inside and tried to slam the door shut.

She looked at me, terror-struck, rooted to the spot.

‘Run! Go!’

They kicked and pushed, jarring me backwards and forwards. I couldn’t hold it any more.

The door crashed open.

10

I pulled her through the fire door and into the loading bay. That was where there were weapons. Where there were weapons, there was a chance.

There was nothing else I could do for her now.

I let go but she grabbed my hand again. I had to push her out of the way. The pulse in my neck surged as my body built up to the fight. She screamed somewhere behind me but my focus was on the glass of acid sitting on the concrete.

One of them was so close I could hear his laboured breathing. I dropped to my knees. They banged against the concrete. The pain shot up my thighs. I grabbed the glass and some of the liquid spilt. It burnt my right hand. As I turned, all I could see was jeans and boots.

I jerked the glass upwards and let go of it a split second later. I rolled away to escape the splashback.

The bearded neo screamed and his hands clawed at his face. He fell to his knees level with me. I jumped up. I wanted the Leatherman. I wanted one of the glasses. I wanted anything that was a weapon for the next man, who now blurred into my vision from the left. The grunts and screams continued from the lad below me. He was still on his knees as he took the pain.

The thud as the other guy’s body hit me full-on was as hard as if I’d walked into the path of a moving car. The momentum hurled me against the opposite wall. The back of my head hit the blockwork. Stars burst in front of my eyes. Hollering and screaming was coming from everywhere: from me, from them, from Angeles.

I scrambled onto my hands and knees. I had to stand. I had to keep on my feet. Go down and you’re finished.

Neo number two was back and at me. He leapt on top of me. We grappled like a couple of scrappers in the schoolyard. I tried to head-butt him, bite him, anything to get him off me. I kicked and bucked. Both of us screamed. He had a week’s bristle on him that rasped against my cheek. The boy stank. I could smell booze, cigarettes and unwashed skin. My face was stuck into his neck. I tried to get my hands up to squeeze against it. He snorted with exertion and snot fired from his nose.

He finally opened his eyes and I could see them bouncing around, out of control. He was in a frenzy. He managed to get his hands around my neck and squeezed. I tried to shake left and right. He started to snarl like a pit-bull.

He was on top of me, on the floor. I wrapped my legs around his body. My arse felt like I’d sat on a branding iron, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that. If I could get him closer he couldn’t exert the same pressure round my neck as he leant in to me.

He lifted his head and snarled. It gave me a chance. I tried to head-butt him, tried to make contact wherever I could. I tried to bite into his cheek. He jerked his head away. I could taste his week-old sweat.

His mouth opened as he threw his face down onto the top of my head. He bit into my scalp. I could hear the skin break as his teeth sank in, and then the sound of him straining to bite harder.

I managed to get my legs tighter around his gut as the fucker started to pull his head back. I could feel the snorting from his nose as his teeth dug into my scalp and scraped along the bone.

I shoved my hands up in front of his face as my capillary bleeding sprayed the ground and ran down the back of my neck. My thumbs searched for his eyeballs and found the cheekbones and then went on from there. I pushed them down into the sockets. He jerked his head back. His teeth had to lose their grip. He needed to scream.

I moved my right hand so I had a flat palm underneath his chin, then switched my left to his ear. I didn’t have much choice. If he’d had a fistful of hair I’d have grabbed that instead. He howled at me through clenched teeth.

I wanted to break his neck. To do that I had to screw it off, like I was turning a tap. I had to take the head off at the atlas, the small joint at the base of the skull. It’s not so hard if you’re doing it against a body that’s standing. If you get them off balance as they’re going down, you can twist and turn at the same time, so their own momentum works against them. But all I could do was keep my legs around him and try to hold him in one place.

I managed to get my boots interlocked, and at last I could squeeze and push down with my legs, at the same time twisting up with my arms as hard as I could. I kept on turning. We both screamed at each other. He bit my hand, trying to jerk his jaw left and right. This wasn’t so much about him trying to kill me. I didn’t know what he was doing. He was totally out of it.

I slid my left hand round the back of his head. I kept the palm of my right under his jaw and pushed up and round. His neck went with not too much of a crack. He slumped down without making a sound. His body didn’t even twitch. He just went very still. I rolled over and kicked him off.

My vision was blurred. Pain seared the top of my head. Blood ran down behind my ear. But scalp wounds always look worse than they are. They’re seldom serious. All there is on top is skin and bone.

My lungs were bursting. I sucked in oxygen as I rolled over onto my front. I forced myself up, ready for the next wave. But the drama wasn’t what I was expecting.

Angeles was kneeling over the other body. He was lying on his back. Her arm moved up and down, up and down, into his body. Blood covered her hands and face as she stabbed and stabbed into his chest.

‘It’s OK - stop!’

I staggered over to her and caught her arm in mid-air as it headed down for another strike. I eased the Leatherman from her fingers and threw it on the floor. My right hand had a bright pink oval shape where the acid had etched into the top layers of skin, exposing the sensitive stuff beneath.

The area round the other guy’s right eye had swollen so much it swamped the eyeball. The left one was open and dull.

Angeles convulsed with sobs, maybe from relief, maybe from fear. Maybe it was just happiness at getting back at these fuckers. I didn’t know, and right now I didn’t care. All I had to do was make sure we were secure.

‘Wait here.’

I staggered through the fire door and down to the entrance. I locked up. When I returned to the loading bay she’d hardly moved from her kneeling position next to the body.

I stood over her and lifted gently under her armpits. ‘It’s OK. Let’s go.’

I’d sort all this shit out later. For now, I needed her to get out of here before it all sank in and she started howling at the moon.

I helped her to her feet. She turned and put her arms around me and sobbed quietly into my chest.

In theory, the immediate priority was to get her cleaned up, and after that, to do the same to the loading bay. But she needed comforting. I put my arms around her and rocked her from side to side. ‘It’s OK, you’re safe. It’s all over. I’ll look after you. Everything’s going to be OK.’

11

I took her straight over to the shower and turned it on. There was a hum of electrics as it kicked off. Five minutes later she was still standing there, arms down at her sides, shoulders dropped.

‘Get in there. Clean yourself up. Get some clean clothes on. You’ll feel better.’

She didn’t move. She just stared down at the blood on her hands.

She had to wash it off her quickly if she was to have any chance of putting this behind her. The longer you smell it, the longer you see and feel it, the deeper it digs into you. Every time she smelt blood in a butcher’s shop, she’d think about today. Every time she had red ink or paint on her fingers, it would take her straight back. It didn’t matter that the fuckers deserved it, or that she’d exacted some kind of revenge. If she kept being reminded of what had just happened, she’d be haunted for the rest of her life.

Steam billowed out of the shower and into the room. I dabbed at a pearl of blood that ran down my forehead. It would stop soon. I coaxed her towards the door. ‘In you go. I’ll take care of everything. Just get cleaned up, yeah?’

I wasn’t getting any reply.

‘Angeles, do that now? Please?’

I took her face gently in both my hands and bent down to try and get some eye-to-eye. There wasn’t just blood on her hands now, but blood on her cheeks as well.

Finally she looked at me. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes.’ There was no point denying it. ‘But you did nothing wrong. You did a good thing. They would have killed us. You have saved your own life - and you have saved mine. Do you understand?’

Her eyes dropped.

‘You understand that what you’ve done is good, don’t you?’

Her head nodded slowly.

I kept my voice low and soft. ‘Angeles, take your time. Clean up. But first, give me your clothes. I’m going to go downstairs, and I’m going to sort everything out. Do you understand?’

She gave a nod and I let go of her face. She started to undress and I went to the sink. The cold water on my hand felt almost as bad as the acid had, but I knew it was the only way. In a perfect world I’d have kept it up for at least half an hour, but that wasn’t going to happen.

She came out with her bloodstained clothes in a bundle. Her shoulders were hunched. Her skin was goose-bumped all over. She looked like she belonged in a horror movie. Her skin was so white it was almost translucent, but her hands and face were crimson.

‘That’s great. Now go and have a shower. I’m going to bring the shopping up.’ I gave her a smile. I pointed to her hair. ‘You’ll be needing the brush, won’t you?’

I didn’t get a smile back. There was nothing I could do for her apart from get things sorted and try to make her as physically comfortable as possible.

She loitered by the shower door.

‘It’s OK, Angeles. I’m not going anywhere except downstairs. I have to sort everything out. You’ve got to help me and I’ve got to help you. Everything is OK. Go, go.’

She nodded slowly and stepped into the steam.