Killing for the Company

January 2003, two months before the coalition invasion of Iraq.

FOUR

London.

‘It’s six o’clock on Monday, 7 January. This is the news.’

In a small ground-floor flat just off Seven Sisters Road, a man stared at his reflection in the mirror while the radio babbled in the background.

‘UN weapons inspectors have reported that there is no indication that Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction. The chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, however, has stated that, while Iraq has cooperated on a practical level, it has not demonstrated a genuine acceptance of the need to disarm unilaterally. This follows claims by the United States that Saddam Hussein has ordered the death of any scientist who speaks to the inspectors in private, and it is expected that…’

The man switched off the radio and went back to staring in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. His right eye was hooded, the result of an old injury. Just below his left eye there was a two-inch scar, bright pink and crooked. When he smiled the scar made his face look more damaged. Not that he smiled much these days. Today — his birthday, as it happened — he was more than usually aware of how fucked up he looked. He scowled and glanced around the tiny bathroom. Thirty-four years old, and this piece-of-shit flat in one of the scummiest bits of London was all he had to show for his life so far.

Chet Freeman looked down to see the prosthetic limb strapped to the stump of his right leg. It always hurt — especially when he put pressure on it, which he did every time he stood up. The remnants of his shattered knee bone were forever breaking down; his skin was often bleeding and sore. When people saw an amputee, they only ever saw the prosthetic limb, never the damaged flesh that sat in it. The limb itself was hi-tech and well cushioned, but the flesh was human and it ached 24/7.

Yet in a weird way his prosthesis reminded him how lucky he was. For Chet, life was divided into ‘before Serbia’ and ‘after Serbia’. When things started to get him down, he just reminded himself that the ‘after Serbia’ bit could easily never have happened.

He had no memory of the blast. No memory of the evacuation or amputation. One minute he was in a room with Luke, a kid’s cot and a hobby horse; the next he was back in the UK at Selly Oak Hospital, his home for a year. He lost count of the times the doctors sliced wafers of skin from his back to graft over his wounds, all the while telling him that by rights he should be dead. Then he’d been moved into rehab at Headley Court.

At Headley they taught him to walk again — a long, slow process. Nothing like a stint in that place to make you count your blessings, though. Chet’s amputation was below the knee. That at least gave him the movement of the knee joint. In rehab he met several double above-the-knee amputees, and even one basket case — a quadruple amputee whose life seemed to Chet to be barely worth living, though the guy seemed remarkably positive given his circumstances.

The Regiment had offered Chet a desk job back in Hereford, but he wasn’t the desk-job type and quit the military. His pay-off had been just enough to buy this tiny flat, and there was a small army pension; but it was barely enough to live on, and anyway he needed something to get him out of bed in the morning. To sit and brood would have been the death of him.

By the time he was dressed, Chet just looked like a regular guy. Some of the amputees he knew didn’t mind their prosthetic limbs being on show. Not him. He liked to cover up his leg — not out of shame, but because he didn’t want people treating him differently. His trousers successfully hid the limb. A specially made shoe hid the foot. There were the scars on his face, sure, but that was no different to any of the ex-army winos who staggered up and down Seven Sisters Road. At least he looked better than them. Just.

He limped into the kitchen just as the phone rang. Chet let the answering machine on the work surface click in. ‘This is me. Leave a message.’

‘Chet, mate, it’s Doug…’ Doug Hodgson, a leg amputee like himself thanks to an anti-personnel landmine in Kosovo. They’d gone through rehab together. He was a good lad, but his prosthesis wasn’t his only war wound. The poor guy was riddled with PTSD. He hid it well, but Chet knew it filled his nights with dreams and woke him early every morning. Hence the six a.m. call. ‘Happy birthday, yeah? So if you haven’t got plans to get your chin buttered tonight, how about meeting up for a few jars? Call me, right?’

Chet frowned. Doug had this image of Chet as a ladies’ man, but with one leg and a scarred face he was hardly catch of the day. A glance at the state of the kitchen showed that the place lacked a woman’s touch: peeling yellow wallpaper, a filthy hob, the only decoration a Blutacked poster of the London skyline that had come with the flat but Chet had never bothered to change.

The remnants of last night’s booze were still visible in the kitchen: half a bottle of Bell’s, a couple of empty tins of Asda’s strongest lager. The first thing the occupational therapists had told him at Headley Court had been to lay off the sauce, but they weren’t the ones who had to put up with the discomfort, or the embarrassment, or the frustration. Still, he didn’t like to be reminded the morning after of how much he’d knocked back, so he pressed the empty cans into the already overflowing bin and stowed the whisky bottle in a cupboard, before taking a loaf of bread from its packet and hacking off a hunk with the only sharp knife in the kitchen. As he ate the dry bread, he picked up a piece of paper from the side, stained with a ring from the bottom of a coffee mug.

It was a letter, written on expensive vellum paper and emblazoned with an elaborate letterhead: an ornate G, printed in gold foil, with the words ‘The Grosvenor Group’ in copperplate underneath it. They sent Chet one of these notes every time he did a bit of work for them, short and businesslike, the wording always the same: Dear Mr Freeman Please take this letter as confirmation that we will expect you at 7.30 a.m. at 132 Whitehall on 7 January 2003. As usual, the details of this engagement are subject to the non-disclosure agreement in force between ourselves.

Chet looked at the clock on the greasy oven. 06.28. Time to get going. Today might be his birthday, but a job was a job, and he needed it. He grabbed his rucksack full of gear and left the house.

It felt bitterly cold as he stepped outside. His old black Mondeo — automatic transmission so he could drive it with one foot — was parked outside, a dent in one side, three key scrapes along the other. Back in the Hereford days he’d gone everywhere on a Yamaha R1. Those days were gone and so was the motorbike.

Leaves swirled in the wind, but the sky was crisp and blue. He could have driven, or waited for a bus to take him to the tube station, but Chet was stubborn. His leg hurt as he walked as briskly as he could along the road, but he was damned if he was going to live his life any differently because of that. At Headley Court they’d suggested he got himself a wheelchair for occasional use. He would rather die.

Jobs for amputees that didn’t involve sitting behind a desk were hard to come by. The usual bodyguarding gigs that most Regiment personnel fell into on leaving the army weren’t open to Chet, but he still had certain skills that people and organisations were willing to pay for. The Grosvenor Group was one of them. They were a big American firm manned by brash men in expensive suits. They clearly made a great deal of money in ways Chet didn’t really understand, and with money came paranoia. Almost weekly the company called Chet in to sweep offices where they were holding meetings. Different locations every time, but always the same request: check for bugs, check for surveillance. What the hell went on in these meetings, Chet had no idea.

The tube was busy and sweaty. Chet was glad to emerge at Piccadilly Circus, just another face in the crowd as he made his way down to Whitehall, stopping about thirty metres before he reached the familiar MoD offices.

Number 132 was a tall building with wide stone steps and a tinted-glass revolving door. Inside was all marble and mirrors. Chet entered and headed straight for the security desk in the middle of the cavernous atrium. A friendly-looking, Brylcreemed man, in his sixties and wearing a grey suit, smiled up at him.

‘Good morning, sir. Can I help?’

Chet nodded. ‘I’m expected.’

‘Your name, please, sir?’

‘Chet Freeman.’

The man consulted his computer. ‘Sixth floor, sir. I will need to check your bag before you go up.’

Chet shook his head and a brief look of alarm crossed the man’s face. ‘It’s security regulations, sir. I’m sure you’ll…’

‘Call up,’ Chet interrupted him. ‘They’ll clear it with you.’ He turned and wandered away from the desk.

A minute later the security guard gestured him back. ‘Please go up, sir. Everything’s fine. You’ll just need to sign in.’

Chet nodded again, waited while the security guard issued him with a plastic ID card to clip on his shirt, then headed for the lift.

He got out at the sixth floor to see a wide, open-planned office on his left, all carpet tiles, pot plants and water coolers. There were perhaps twenty people working there, mostly female. The air was filled with the sound of phones ringing softly; each call was answered immediately.

The person who emerged from the huddle of desks to greet him was male, early twenties, with dishevelled hair. He looked at Chet like he was looking at dog shit. ‘Have you been here before?’ he asked, his voice dripping with public school.

‘Where are the rooms, pal?’ Chet asked curtly.

‘Up here, on the right. They’ve set two aside for us, next to each other. We’ll choose which one to use at the last min…’

‘Thanks. I know the drill. So who is it today?’ The kid shrugged just as they stopped beside a grey door.

‘This it?’ asked Chet.

The kid nodded.

‘Why don’t you run along then?’ Chet winked at him. ‘You must be very busy.’

The kid got the message and left him to it.

Chet entered the room. It was entirely unremarkable. A beech-coloured meeting table with twenty or so chairs around it took up most of the space. There was a whiteboard at one end with an overhead projector, and three large tinted windows looking out over Whitehall and from which, if you looked up, you could just see the roofs of the buildings opposite.

He got to work. From his rucksack he pulled a set of screwdrivers, a torch, two bulky Nokia mobile phones and a radio-frequency bug detector. He started with the plug sockets — unscrewing each one, directing the torch into the cavity and searching for bugs or any sign of tampering — before climbing awkwardly on to the board table and investigating the light fittings.

Once he was satisfied that the sockets and lights were clean, he started calibrating the RF detector. He laid it on the table and turned the dial fully on. The detector started beeping rapidly, so Chet gradually turned the dial down until it stopped. He picked up one of the mobiles and used it to call the other. The radio signal from the phones caused the detector to start beeping again.

Holding the phones, he stepped back three metres, towards the windows. The rate of the detector’s beeping decreased, but not by enough. He adjusted the dial, then stepped back again. This time the beeping was right. He disconnected the phones and the detector went silent. Now he could start to sweep.

He ran the detector along the blinds above the windows and carefully checked the OHP. He swept under the table and chairs and examined each of the carpet tiles for signs of tampering, before carefully sweeping all the walls and the ceiling. It took half an hour before he was satisfied that everything was clear, at which point he packed up his gear, left the room and, now that he’d swept it, tacked a red cordon over the door so nobody could enter. Then he moved to the adjoining office — which was identical in every way — and started to repeat the operation.

Chet was just unscrewing the first socket when the door opened. He looked over his shoulder to see a woman. A couple of years younger than Chet, which would put her in her early thirties. And cute. Definitely cute. She was carrying a small vacuum cleaner and wore a blue and white checked uniform that identified her as one of the office’s cleaning ladies, but a lot easier on the eye than most. She had long red hair, pale, clear skin, green eyes. Her nose turned up attractively at the end and there was a tiny silver stud through the left nostril.

She looked surprised to see him. ‘Oh… Excuse me… I thought…’

Chet stood up and gave her one of his rare smiles. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said, then noticed a flicker of annoyance on her face. He took a couple of steps towards her and read the name on her plastic name tag. Suze McArthur. ‘Sorry, Suze. No cleaning in here today.’ He caught the faintest whiff of a perfume he recognised from an ex-girlfriend, but that had been a long time ago.

Suze looked flustered. ‘I’ll go next door…’

‘’Fraid not. Out of bounds.’

‘But I have to clean…’

‘Looks like you might have the morning off.’ Chet hesitated. ‘Tell you what — I’ll be free in a couple of hours. I’ll buy you coffee.. ’

The girl backed away. She scurried back up the corridor, taking her vacuum cleaner with her and casting just a single glance over her shoulder as she went. She almost appeared frightened.

Jesus, Chet thought. I didn’t think I looked that bad.

He went back to sweeping the room. Twenty minutes later he was done. After cordoning off the room, just as he had the first, he stood watch in the corridor outside.

He’d only been standing there a few minutes when he heard a commotion by the lift, which he could just see from his position. A group of five people had arrived. Three of them were muscle — he could tell just by the way they held themselves. The fourth man was entirely bald, his face and scalp tanned and shiny, his suit a bright blue that suggested he was foreign — French or Italian, perhaps. As he drew nearer, Chet could see that he held across his chest a leather wallet file with the ornate G emblem of the Grosvenor Group. He was speaking loudly, with an American accent, to the fifth man.

And Chet recognised him.

‘What the hell…?’ he muttered to himself.

The Prime Minister wore a well-cut suit and his trademark red tie was impeccably tied. Alistair Stratton almost had the bearing of a film star, out of place in this workaday office environment, and was listening attentively to the bald man as they walked, his brow creased in earnest concentration. Stratton glanced at Chet as he approached, and clocked his scarred face, before quickly recovering and turning his attention back to the bald man. There was something about being in his presence that impressed Chet, despite himself.

They stopped outside the first cordoned-off door. ‘Who’s in charge of security here?’ the bald man asked abruptly. He clearly hadn’t noticed Chet standing there. ‘I said, who’s in charge of…?’

His eyes fell on Chet.

‘You?’

Chet nodded.

‘Which room?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Come on, we don’t have all day.’

‘Take your pick. They’re both clean.’

The American looked at the two doors, shrugged, chose the closest, then stretched out one arm to indicate that the Prime Minister should enter.

Stratton, however, waited for a moment. ‘Ex-military?’ he asked Chet.

Chet wasn’t surprised the PM could tell. He knew he had the bearing. He nodded.

The PM held out his hand for Chet to shake. His skin was cold and dry, his grip firm. ‘Thank you,’ he smiled. ‘I, er… I don’t believe people say that enough.’

The bald man looked a little surprised that Stratton had taken the time to stop, but he quickly followed his lead. He slapped Chet’s upper arm in a comradely way. And if he noticed that Chet was unimpressed, he didn’t show it.

‘Shall we, Prime Minister?’

Stratton nodded and followed the American inside, closing the grey door firmly behind him.

The muscle immediately took up position: one outside the room, one where the corridor entered the open-plan area and the third by the lift. None of them even acknowledged Chet’s presence. He shrugged. If they wanted to stonewall him, fine. He needed to stick around till the meeting closed, so he took himself off into the empty room to wait.

Chet sat on the edge of the large meeting table, facing towards the windows looking out over Whitehall. It felt good to take the weight off his leg. He pulled a fifty-pence coin from his pocket and started flicking and catching it as he tried to make sense of what he’d just seen. Chet made a habit of not asking too many questions about these meetings the Grosvenor Group wanted to keep so secret. It suited him just to do the job and get paid. He couldn’t help wondering, though, what Stratton was doing here and what conversation was being held in the adjacent room.

He walking over to the window, absent-mindedly tapping on the tinted glass as he looked down on to Whitehall. It was full of buses, taxis and pedestrians, silent from this height. Number 10 was just up the road. The Houses of Parliament too. Stratton had any number of places he could conduct meetings. Why here? Unless he didn’t want this meeting to be common knowledge…

He flicked the coin again and caught it.

He remembered a conversation he’d had years ago, sitting in a Serbian bar. Luke Mercer was speaking quietly so as not to be overheard. ‘Stratton is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’ Chet had seen Luke three weeks ago as he was preparing to go away on ops. He’d asked where, but Luke had given him an apologetic look. ‘Sorry, buddy. You know the deal.’

Yeah, Chet knew the deal. With the Americans and the Iraqis squaring up to each other, and the Brits showing every sign of wanting to come along for the ride, Chet could make an educated guess about what Luke was up to. But a guess was all it could be. He was out of the Regiment and out of the loop. Get used to it, buddy.

It was as these thoughts circulated in his head that something caught his eye. A flash of sunlight reflecting off something on the opposite roof.

Movement.

Chet squinted, trying to make out what was up there. Partly hidden behind a railing was a figure. He grabbed his bag, pulled out a pair of binoculars and quickly focused them. The blurred figure grew sharp.

A woman. Long red hair. Cute nose. Stud on the left. Some kind of machine in front of her.

‘Cleaning lady, yeah right,’ Chet muttered.

And as he said it, he was already hurrying towards the door.

FIVE

Chet moved as quickly as his leg would allow him — out of the door and past Stratton’s security people.

‘Hey — where you going?’ the guy outside the meeting room shouted.

Chet ignored him and walked on.

His mind turned over. What had he just seen? The woman on the roof opposite was in no position to make an assassination attempt: the angle was ridiculous. And whatever the apparatus was that she had set up in front of her, it hadn’t looked to him like a sniper rifle. She was up to something else.

The lift took an age to get to the ground floor, and the moment the doors opened he half ran, half limped out of the building. The PM’s black limo was parked outside, with two more security men standing next to it. As Chet ran past, one of them put a sleeve to his mouth and started talking; Chet ignored them and hurried across the road towards the building opposite. He didn’t enter. The reception area was crowded, with thirty or forty office workers milling around and a security check-in. There was no way he’d talk his way through that. The same went for the girl. There had to be another access.

He looked back across the road. Stratton’s security hadn’t left their positions, but they were watching him and updating someone on the radio. Fine. He could explain his actions later. Right now he needed to get up to the roof. He hurried round to the side of the building, where a thin passageway separated it from the next one. It led to a much smaller side street running parallel to Whitehall, and as he turned left he found the rear of the building had a fire-escape door with an external metal staircase leading up to the roof.

He was fit enough to climb the five storeys to the top of the building in less than a minute, but his leg hurt like hell all the way. As he stepped out on to the roof, he felt the wind blowing strongly. It brought with it the honking and roaring of the traffic below. The top of the London Eye rose in the distance.

He saw her immediately. Suze, or whatever her name really was, had her back to him and was slightly bent over, with her hands over her ears.

The howling of the wind was so strong that Chet didn’t bother with stealth. He strode straight towards the young woman. When he was about a metre behind her, he saw that she was crouched over what appeared at first glance to be some kind of photographic equipment on a tripod. Chet quickly twigged what it actually was, though: a long-range laser listening device. All you had to do was point the viewfinder in the direction of a window. The device would pick up the vibrations on that window caused by people speaking inside, then convert them back into sound. Linked to it was a little black cassette machine that was recording whatever the listening device picked up.

Chet had used something similar once himself, during a short tour in Northern Ireland just before he was dispatched to the Balkans. On that occasion he’d been treated to the sound of a PIRA bomb-maker in flagrante with some slapper he’d picked up in a pub a few hours previously. He was still getting stuck in when they burst into the flat.

Back then, the laser listening device had been supplied by 14 Intelligence Company, surveillance experts with all the latest equipment at their disposal. Where the hell this girl had acquired such a piece of kit was anyone’s guess. Maybe he’d just ask her.

Chet tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and spun round. She was wearing headphones connected to the apparatus, and her eyes were slightly wild.

‘OK, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Her eyes darted from Chet, to the apparatus, to the office on the other side of the road — through the window of which Stratton and the American couldn’t be seen because of the tinted glass. She seemed unable to speak. ‘Oh, God…’ she breathed.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Chet said calmly, holding his hands palm outwards to try to calm her down. He found his eye drawn to the curve of her neck. The smooth, unblemished skin.

‘No…’ Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘Please. Please! ’

‘Just come with me and we’ll sort this out.’ She seemed terrified, so he tried to sound as reasonable as possible.

‘Please…’ Her tear-filled voice was hoarse now. ‘They’ll kill me if they find out. I swear, they’ll kill me…’

She was desperate. That much was obvious. Desperate or nuts. Why was it always the cute ones that ended up being loonies? Chet could tell by the way she glanced over his shoulder that she was preparing to bolt; when she did, he was ready for her. He grabbed her by the top of one arm before she could even get past him. She started to writhe violently, but her slim build was no match for his strength. He kept a firm grip on her until her struggling had subsided into short, panicked breaths.

‘Listen to me carefully,’ he told her. ‘Nobody’s trying to kill anybody. You just need to come with me…’ But the girl was shaking her head again. She glanced down at the meeting room, then looked as if she’d made a sudden, reckless decision.

She removed the earpiece she was wearing and handed it to Chet. ‘Listen,’ she urged him. ‘Listen to what they’re saying…’

Chet shook his head. He wasn’t interested. If he brought her in, the Grosvenor Group would think the sun shone out of his arse. The gig would be his for life. He made to grab her again.

The girl shrank back. ‘If you don’t listen,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to carry me kicking and screaming out of this building, I swear. They’ll think you’re… raping me or something…’

Chet stared at her. She was totally wired, and looked as if she might just do what she threatened.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. He grabbed the earpiece and put it in his ear, half wondering if he’d be humouring her like this if she wasn’t a looker.

At first all he could hear was an indistinct and horrible cacophony — interference from the wind and the traffic down below — all of which was clearly affecting the vibrations of the window glass. He winced as he got an earful of static, which slowly morphed into something that sounded like several men talking underwater.

‘I can’t hear a thing,’ Chet said.

‘Keep listening.’

More static. More noise.

Then there was a word. Just a single word out of the meaningless burble.

‘Baghdad.’

Chet strained to hear more, but the distortion had returned. It dissipated a few seconds later, however, and he was able to make out a second word.

‘Military.’

Hold the fucking front page, Chet thought. So Stratton was discussing military action in Iraq. The guy probably didn’t talk about much else these days. The girl was looking at him with wide, expectant eyes. Chet made to pull the earpiece away, but she grabbed his hand. ‘Listen! You have to listen!’

Chet winced again as a burst of static exploded in his ear. But this time it was immediately followed by a few seconds of clarity.

He heard the bald American, the guy from the Grosvenor Group. He sounded lazy and confident. ‘Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go…’

A couple of seconds of distortion, then the voice became clear again.

‘…the Americans are all on board… The question is, how are you going to get it through…?’

The voices disintegrated once more into noise.

Chet removed the earpiece. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Now pack your bags. You’re coming with me.’

The fear returned to the girl’s face. ‘No… You haven’t heard what I’ve heard… You can’t have…’

‘That’s enough.’ He grabbed her by the arm again.

‘I’ll tell them we’re working together,’ she gabbled. ‘When we spoke outside the meeting rooms, they’ll have that on CCTV.’ She looked at the listening device. ‘I’ll say you helped me get this.. ’

Chet felt himself getting angry. She had a fucking screw loose. But his employers were paranoid — that was what kept him in a job. It wouldn’t take much for them to start having second thoughts about him.

Fuck it.

It only took one swipe of his arm for Chet to knock the girl’s listening equipment on to the hard concrete of the roof. It smashed as it fell, and she looked terrified. She got down on all fours and scrambled to eject a cassette from the recorder. ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Chet hissed, and he pulled her away from the edge of the roof back towards the fire-escape stairs. She wriggled and writhed, her face a picture of dread, but there was no way she was going to get free from Chet’s grip. He pushed her on to the staircase first, then bore down on her so the only thing she could do was descend. As she went, she started begging again. ‘Please… you don’t understand.. you’ve got to let me go…’ And when it was clear this wouldn’t work, she started up with the threats again. Chet just kept forcing her down.

He knew, when they hit ground level, that she’d try to run, and he was ready for that. He grabbed her arm once more and for a moment they stared at each other, he with dislike, she with fear.

Fuck it, thought Chet. Let her go. If she started putting ideas about him into people’s heads, he could kiss the Grosvenor Group job goodbye. He pointed to his left, the direction from which he’d come. ‘Stratton’s people are going to be looking for me,’ he said. ‘Go that way.’

He released his grip and the girl jumped backwards like a frightened animal. ‘Thank you,’ she said softly. Chet didn’t reply. He watched her hurry away, then turned right and headed back round the corner of the building into Whitehall.

Straight away he clocked Stratton’s muscle — two of them standing on the pavement, thick necked and slightly out of breath. They were looking around over the heads of the passers-by, searching for something. When they saw Chet, they bore down on him like a couple of fire and forget missiles.

‘All right, fellas?’ he murmured once they were standing on either side of him. Sweat trickled down the nape of his neck. ‘Fag break, is it?’

‘You,’ said one of the men, and he poked his finger in Chet’s direction. ‘With us.’

Chet looked from one to the other. He considered trying to sweet-talk them, but if ever a couple of goons looked impervious to charm, they were it. He forced himself to smile at them, but they didn’t once lose that dead-eyed look as they led Chet across the busy road and into the building he had been contracted to sweep.

The ride in the lift up to the sixth floor was a silent and uncomfortable one. Chet’s mind turned cartwheels. Had Stratton’s guys followed him when he left the building? Did they know what had happened on the roof? How the hell should he play this?

They exited the lift and strode towards the meeting rooms, all eyes from the offices on them. From the corner of his vision, Chet could see the kid who had first greeted him, now watching intently. The third bodyguard was still standing outside the room Stratton and the bald man were using. As they approached, he knocked gently on the door.

Almost immediately the bald American stepped outside. ‘What the hell,’ he whispered when he saw Chet, ‘is going on?’

Chet started to formulate a response, but he didn’t get a chance to speak.

‘We saw you up there,’ the bald man said. ‘Who was it? What were you doing?’

‘I thought there was a security breach,’ he replied firmly. ‘I went to investigate.’

‘And?’

He almost told them — about Suze McArthur and the listening device. But something stopped him. He didn’t know what. The tension the man was displaying, perhaps. The palpable anxiety oozing from him.

‘It was nothing. A student peace protester putting up a banner. I sent her packing.’

Silence.

Suddenly the door opened and Stratton appeared. He said nothing, but his face was pale.

‘We should leave, Prime Minister,’ the bald man said.

Stratton nodded, then strode back down the corridor, followed by the bald man and the bodyguards. Chet stood there and watched the PM’s entourage head towards the lift. As the doors opened, Stratton looked back over his shoulder. He narrowed his eyes, then faced the front again and hurried into the lift.

Chet’s heart was thumping. He could feel the blood in his jugular. He walked into the other room, where his rucksack was still on the table. He gathered it up quickly and looked out of the window as the girl’s voice echoed in his head. You haven’t heard what I’ve heard..

But Chet had heard enough. That fragment of conversation he’d heard suggested that the PM was being pressured by the Americans to go to war. But everyone knew war was coming anyway. Certainly Chet could read the signs. Was there anything more to it than that? Probably not. Suze McArthur was just a kid with a head full of ideals. There were a million anti-war campaigners like her the length and breadth of the country. They didn’t understand the real world. They didn’t understand that sometimes war was the price you had to pay for peace.

He realised as he made his way back down the corridor towards the lift that the price for the morning’s events could well be his job. And all thanks to that stupid girl. The bald guy from the Grosvenor Group was clearly annoyed, and it was nothing to him that the chances of Chet finding another job like this were practically zero.

‘Happy fucking birthday,’ he muttered as he limped out of the room. It was time to go find himself a drink.

SIX

Somewhere near the Jordan-Iraq border.

A car drove through the dusk. A red Toyota, automatic transmission. Its chassis showed signs of wear — a large dent along the side, a broken brake light and rust patches all along the undercarriage. But despite being beaten up, it was lovingly decorated. A picture of Saddam Hussein, the disciple of Muhammad, was propped on the dashboard and surrounded by little fairy lights; multicoloured garlands were pinned along the top of the windscreen. Arabic pop music played softly on the radio.

The driver had a short beard. Normally his hair was brown, but he’d dyed it black and applied enough fake tan to darken his skin a few shades. He wore a traditional Arabic dishdash, which fitted loosely enough for his shoulder holster and ops waistcoat to be invisible. It was stained and crumpled, saturated with the previous wearer’s sweat and stinking on account of it. The driver had gone to great pains to make sure he looked like the lowest of the low. The poor were looked down upon where they were headed. They were anonymous. Invisible, almost. That could be a distinct advantage.

The figure in the passenger seat wore a burka: a plain, black outer garment and a long face veil with a small grille for the eyes. At this moment the passenger was staring ahead, along the straight, featureless road with desert on either side. Then he spoke, his voice several octaves lower than the average burka-wearer, and with a Derry accent. ‘If you think I’m wearing this shit once we get in-country.. ’

Luke Mercer winked at him. ‘Finn, relax. You look fucking gorgeous. We bump into any ragheads, you’ll be fighting them off with a shitty stick.’

‘Fuck you, Luke.’

‘Worst comes to the worst, you might have to. You know, for the sake of appearances and all…’

Finn muttered something under his burka that Luke didn’t quite catch. He suspected that it wasn’t entirely complimentary. Finn had been sulking ever since he’d lost the toss to decide who’d be Abdul and who’d be Aisha on their little sortie into enemy territory. Still, Finn was four years younger than Luke and definitely the junior party in their little unit. From what Luke knew about him he’d moved out of the Province to the outskirts of Farnham before he was a teenager and his only ambition in life had been to join the British Army. Nice enough fella, but a bit of a trigger-happy reputation. He was new to the Regiment, though — just six months in. It wouldn’t take long for him to settle down, but as far as Luke was concerned, the coin had landed the right way up.

They were driving along the main road leading east towards the border with Iraq, which by Luke’s estimation was about twenty klicks away. For a main thoroughfare it was pretty empty. Not surprising, really. Given the way the Yanks and the British were flexing their muscles, Iraq wasn’t exactly a top tourist destination at the moment.

‘They still got us?’ Finn changed the subject.

Luke looked in the rear-view mirror. The road might be empty, but one vehicle was staying close: a white pick-up, manned by four other members of their squadron.

‘Rear-echelon motherfuckers,’ Luke said.

Luke and Finn wouldn’t be risking the official border crossing. Too dangerous. The car and its occupants might look authentic to the casual observer; they might have forged entry documents; but it wouldn’t take much to find the gear stashed in the back: two Colt M4A1s — compact, efficient weapons with sight and torch fitted — a Minimi light machine gun, an anti-tank rocket and the chunky black boxes and red wires of their comms gear. There were NV goggles, two boxes of grenades — fragmentation and white phosphorus — and several small blocks of C4 explosive. All in all, not a cargo they really wanted to start explaining to Iraqi border officials.

They drove in silence for a couple of minutes, before approaching a side road that veered off in a southerly direction. Luke slowed down while Finn took a GPS unit from the glove box. ‘This is it,’ he said.

To call it a road was overstating things. It was a neglected, stony, bumpy track. Luke took it slowly. The car wasn’t up to much, and the last thing they needed was to stop to make running repairs. It had a lot more work to do yet.

They followed the track for ten klicks before going static. The pick-up pulled up a few metres behind them. It was fully dark now, and Luke killed the lights while Finn pulled off his headdress to reveal a mop of black hair, high cheekbones, a black beard and a fake tan just like Luke’s. Good-looking and he knew it. They climbed out of the car.

The moon was low and bright, with clouds drifting occasionally past. It lit up the surrounding desert. Luke looked back the way they’d come. He could just make out the headlamps of the occasional vehicle on the main road. At right angles to that road was the Iraqi border. It looked to the two soldiers like a dome of light in the dark desert sky, and beyond it Luke could see more lights in the desert: Iraqi border-control vehicles, no doubt, patrolling the frontier. Get picked up by one of them and they’d be enjoying Saddam’s hospitality before they knew it — assuming they survived the initial arrest.

This was still Jordanian territory, though. They needed to find somewhere to cross into Iraq.

The driver of the pick-up joined them. Nigel Foster — Fozzie — was a tall man with a nose that had been broken in two places and a balding head. He was wearing civvies — ripped jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt — and he grinned at Finn. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Finn ignored him and removed a kite sight from the boot of the Toyota. The unit had studied the imagery and the intelligence long enough to know that the border was marked by a berm — a low ridge of earth constructed to stop vehicles crossing — as well as, in places, a barbed-wire fence. But they also knew that there were places where the border could be breached. Black-marketeers smuggled their goods into Iraq at these locations. Every border was porous, if you knew where to look.

The night air was still, but suddenly an unsettling noise reached their ears, like a baby screeching. Luke knew that wild dogs roamed the area in packs, lean and hungry. Impossible to tell how close they were — sound travels in strange ways in the desert. But Luke had the distinct impression that they were looking for dinner.

Which wasn’t a bad idea. Fozzie returned to the pick-up. Luke got back into the Toyota and got some food down him — a foil pouch of sausage and beans, cold and stodgy — while Finn scanned the border with the kite sight. Every twenty minutes they swapped. The temperature dropped and a chill wind started to whip around the car.

‘Nothing,’ Finn said after an hour. ‘Looks like Abu Dune Coon might be spending another night with the goats before we get to him. Hope he likes the smell of shit.’ He handed the kite sight to Luke. ‘I hate the fucking desert.’

Luke shrugged. ‘There’s worse places than this.’ He started scanning the border again, running through their objectives in his mind. Abu Famir was an Iraqi academic who had been educated in the West and was an outspoken anti-Baathist. Given Saddam’s penchant for disappearing anyone who disagreed with him, Abu Famir had done well to survive this long. Plenty of men with similar politics had ended up rotting away in Abu Ghraib prison or at the bottom of a mass grave.

It was clear the Americans were closing in on Saddam. Nothing to do with his human rights abuses, of course. He’d been happily torturing and killing people even back in the day when the Yanks considered him an ally. No, the politicians had reasons of their own for an invasion. If and when Saddam was deposed, they’d need a new government in place — a government they’d be able to control.

Which was where Abu Famir came in.

War was only weeks away. That was an open secret. The UN weapons inspectors currently combing the country for WMDs weren’t looking for evidence; they were looking for excuses — excuses for a war that was going to happen anyway. Half the Regiment was already behind enemy lines, scouting, gathering intelligence, paving the way for an invasion. Luke’s unit had a more specific objective: locate Abu Famir, currently in hiding in the Al-Anbar region of western Iraq, and smuggle him back across the Jordanian border. When Saddam and his psychotic sons had gone the way of the dodo, the invaders could bring in Abu Famir and men like him to construct a new administration. The Regiment’s target was the man the coalition had earmarked as the new prime minister of Iraq once the regime had been changed.

That was the theory. But first they had to find him.

Local intelligence reports suggested that Abu Famir was hiding out in the village of a Bedouin tribe about 100 miles from the border. The Bedouin were nomadic, herding cattle, sheep and goats, as they had done for hundreds of years. It was accepted even by the Iraqi government that they could wander across the borders into Jordan and Syria. In another time that would have been a good way to smuggle Abu Famir out of the country, but not now. The Iraqi government knew war was around the corner. They’d upped their border controls and even the Bedouin were no longer allowed to cross.

So if they wanted to get Abu Famir back into Jordan, someone had to go and get him. That was where the Regiment came in. Luke and Finn were to infiltrate the border and snatch Abu Famir; Fozzie and the boys in the pick-up were to stay on the Jordanian side, ready to be called in if anything went wrong. And the chances of that happening were higher than normal. They weren’t the only people who wanted Abu Famir. It was impossible to say who they might run into.

‘I’ve got something.’

Luke spoke quietly. Through his kite sight he’d located exactly what they’d been looking for. Two vehicles, headlamps switched off to avoid detection, cutting across country, eastwards towards the border. He zoomed in and focused on them. Two klicks away. Here was their passport into Iraq.

He turned to Finn. ‘Let’s move.’

The light of the moon was bright enough for Luke and Fozzie to operate without headlamps. If the vehicles they’d seen were smugglers, they’d get spooked if they clocked a tail. So Luke kept his distance, while Finn maintained eye contact with the vehicles through the kite sight.

‘They’re slowing down,’ he said after they’d been trundling along for half an hour. ‘Reckon they’re crossing?’

‘Could be, buddy,’ Luke said. ‘Could be.’

They went static again and watched. The vehicles were still, but there was movement around them. ‘That’s the border,’ Luke said. ‘Got to be.’ Finn climbed out of the car with a Silva compass, already set to adjust for the magnetic variation of the area. He stepped a few paces away so the metal of the vehicle wouldn’t affect the needle and quickly took a bearing so that they would be able to locate the crossing point — the smugglers, after all, were unlikely to hang around once they’d penetrated the border.

‘Bearing 272 mils,’ he mumbled to Luke when he was back at the car, before pulling out his GPS unit and taking a precise fix of their location. Once he knew their lat and long, he opened up his map on the bonnet of the Toyota. The border was clearly marked in red and it was only a moment’s work to locate their current position and draw the bearing from it. Where the bearing hit the border, that was their crossing point. He punched the coordinates into his GPS as a separate waypoint before folding the map, giving a quick thumbs up to the guys in the pick-up and getting back into the Toyota.

‘Got it?’ Luke asked.

‘Got it.’

Two minutes later they watched as the vehicles in the distance headed north.

Luke took the Toyota offroad and, following Finn’s direction, struggled over the stony desert. Fifteen minutes later they approached the border.

The berm that marked the boundary between Jordan and Iraq was about two metres high, but here there was a small indentation, just wide enough for a vehicle to pass through. On the other side of the berm, however, was a ditch about a metre deep, and beyond that a barbed-wire fence. While it was possible to drive through the berm, it wasn’t immediately obvious how the smugglers had crossed the ditch or got through the barbed wire.

As Luke got out to investigate with three of the guys from the pick-up, the cold desert wind blew sand into their eyes. It took them no time to locate two long planks of wood abandoned in the trench. These they used to bridge the gap, then examined the barbed-wire fence. Someone had cut and unfurled it, before closing it back up again so it didn’t attract attention. Luke curled the cut wire back and returned to the car. Fozzie had left the pick-up, and now all six Regiment men were standing round the Toyota.

‘You’ll radio check with base, let them know we’ve crossed over?’ Luke asked.

Fozzie nodded. ‘Take care, fellas,’ he said. He grinned. ‘Hope it’s not a one-way ticket.’

‘Next time there’s an opportunity for one of us to get his bollocks shot off by a raghead,’ Luke retorted, ‘the job’s yours.’

‘Deal,’ said Fozzie. ‘We’ll RV in twenty-four hours.’

Luke and Finn got back into the car, and a moment later they were trundling over the planks and through the breach in the fence. In the mirror Luke saw the guys returning everything to normal. He looked at the clock on the Toyota. 22.18. They’d gone from safety to danger in a matter of seconds.

‘Welcome to Disneyland,’ he muttered, and started driving.

It was two minutes past midnight when they joined the arterial road that ran west back to the border and east through the desert and eventually to Baghdad. Luke and Finn wouldn’t be travelling that far. According to their intel, the Bedouin village they were heading for was approximately eighty miles east of this location. Not far in ordinary circumstances; but behind what were effectively enemy lines, it was a very long way. The road wasn’t busy, but occasional vehicles passed in either direction.

They drove in silence. As they passed a large Arabic road sign, Finn turned the radio up slightly and the wailing of an Arabic singer filled the air. ‘Voice of a fucking angel,’ Luke muttered. Finn said nothing.

They’d been driving for no more than an hour when Luke saw lights up ahead. ‘Checkpoint,’ he said tersely. It wasn’t a surprise. They knew there was one permanent checkpoint between the border and the place where they were intending to turn off into the desert. This was it. ‘Hope you’ve got the lingo, mate,’ said Finn.

Luke’s Arabic was good, but it wasn’t perfect. Not for the first time in the past six years he found himself wishing that his partner on this op was an old friend.

‘Guy I know called Chet Freeman,’ he murmured. ‘We could use him here.’

‘The pegleg who caught a frag out in Serbia?’

Luke kept his eyes firmly on the road ahead. ‘You call him that again,’ he said bluntly, ‘I’ll waste you here and now. Roadblock or no fucking roadblock.’

Yeah, Chet was a good man in a tight spot. At least he had been once. His days of adventure were at an end. But with a bit of luck, Luke’s own language skills would be sufficient to get them across this roadblock.

Finn switched off the radio, removed his Sig from its holster strap, slipped the headdress on again and tucked the weapon into the folds of the burka. Luke pulled over on to the stony ground beside the highway. He removed his own handgun and placed it beside him in the door, before keeping his eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror.

They stayed like that for five minutes, until Luke saw three sets of headlamps approaching from behind. It was better to hit the checkpoint as part of a convoy rather than on their own, as it meant they had less chance of being stopped. A reasonable strategy, but reasonable strategies sometimes have a way of going pear-shaped. As the third vehicle passed — a pick-up not unlike the one the guys were in back at the border — he pulled out into the road and drove towards the checkpoint.

Two hundred metres to go.

A hundred metres. Luke saw another vehicle approaching from behind and gaining on them quickly.

Fifty.

As the vehicle twenty metres ahead started to slow down, Luke did the same. Only now could he make out the details of the checkpoint up ahead. There was a concrete bunker on the side of the road, presumably there to protect the soldiers manning the checkpoint from the sun. The rest of it looked makeshift: two barriers, one for each side of the road; a light-armoured military truck parked up on one side, its headlamps lighting up the road; and — Luke counted them — seven Iraqi soldiers in shabby olive-drab uniforms and black berets. Three of them stood in a group beside the truck, smoking cigarettes, their breath billowing around them in the cold night air; the remaining four were in pairs, each pair manning a barrier.

The vehicle ahead crawled almost to a halt. As it did so, one of the guards raised the barrier and waved it through with a bored expression. He was young, probably just a teenager. Luke checked his mirror. The vehicle that had been approaching them from behind was now only about ten metres away and coming to a halt. Its headlamps dazzled him, but even so he could just make out the shape of a military truck.

Not good. ‘We’ve got company.’

Finn looked over his shoulder. ‘Personnel carrier.’ His muffled voice was curt. ‘But there’s a fucking top-gunner…’

Luke accelerated slightly to follow the car ahead through the checkpoint while the barrier was still open.

No such luck. The barrier lowered and the soldier raised a palm to stop him.

Finn was looking in the side mirror at the vehicle behind them. ‘Republican Guard,’ he said, his voice tense. Luke felt his blood pounding in his veins. This was the last thing they needed. The Republican Guard with their red berets were the elite of the Iraqi Army. Better trained and better equipped than the shitkicking squaddies who were probably manning the checkpoint as part of their national service. Ordinary citizens referred to the Republican Guard as zanabeer — wasps — on account of the way they swarmed around the country. If things went noisy now, the SAS men would have a truckload of the fuckers — maybe twenty of them — swarming around the Toyota, and that was a scrap Luke didn’t fancy. He checked his own mirror. Sure enough, he could see the driver of the truck leaning out of his window, his red beret fully on display. Luke sensed Finn gripping his pistol. ‘Looks like we might be calling Fozzie in earlier than we thought,’ Finn said, his lips hardly moving.

Luke couldn’t answer. A second young soldier had approached the driver’s side, so he wound down the window. There was no greeting. The soldier shone a torch into the car while his colleague walked round to the back.

‘Salam,’ Luke muttered as the light fell on his face.

The soldier gave him a sharp look. Had he noticed a chink in Luke’s accent? The cold night air bit his skin, but Luke still felt sweat soaking his back as he glanced in the rear-view mirror. The figure of the first guard was silhouetted against the lights of the Republican Guard truck.

He was right by the boot of the Toyota.

If he opened it, they’d have no choice: Luke moved his arm down to his side, inches from his gun.

There was a shout, and both soldiers looked round. The Republican Guard driver from behind was yelling something at them. Luke couldn’t tell what he was saying, but he understood the tone of voice as this higher-ranking soldier bellowed orders at the two Iraqi squaddies like they were a piece of shit on his shoe. Fear crossed their faces as they hurried back to the barrier and started to raise it, all thoughts of Luke and his dodgy accent apparently gone.

Luke didn’t fuck about. He sped through the barrier the moment it was high enough to pass. As he reached the other side he saw that the military truck was flashing its lights at him. Moments later it overtook and stormed down the road ahead.

Finn let out an explosive breath. ‘Thought I was going to have to waste a round on that fucker,’ he said, his voice muffled behind the burka, as they continued to drive into the darkness.

‘Would have been a shame to get your glad rags all bloody.’ Luke checked his mirror. Nobody from the checkpoint was following. And up ahead, the truck was out of sight.

The road was poor — potholed and broken down by the countless heavy military vehicles that had passed along it over the previous two decades. At 01.00 they passed some buildings by the side of the road — a filling station and a mosque next to each other, where several cars had stopped. Luke and Finn had no need of prayer or fuel — there were canisters of petrol in the boot, along with their more specialised gear — so they just pressed on.

At 02.12 they came to a fork in the road. Luke bore left, then doubled back, heading north-west up towards the Syrian border. Guided by Finn’s GPS, he soon took a right-hand turn off the main road and into the desert. He drove on for some ten kilometres before Finn quietly spoke.

‘Let’s go static,’ he said. ‘The village is about two klicks up ahead.’

Luke came to a halt and killed the lights. 02.58. Three hours till sunrise. They’d be entering the village at dawn. Lift Abu Famir and then swastika it back to Jordan.

But until then they’d just have to wait.

SEVEN

Chet had lost count of the number of pints of cold Stella he’d chucked down his neck that afternoon. He’d headed straight for a basement pub just off Leicester Square where the barmaid looked like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle. He celebrated his birthday surrounded first by the office workers in for a liquid lunch, then by tourists taking the weight off their feet after a day’s sightseeing, and finally by the office workers again, boisterous and increasingly arseholed now work was over.

But Chet had barely noticed any of them. As he sank the beers, he couldn’t stop thinking about the events of that morning. There had been rumblings over the past few days about an anti-war march through London. If it went ahead, Suze McArthur was exactly the kind of leftie who’d be up at the front waving some wanky banner for the TV crews. Chet was the kind of person who’d be at home. The last people asked their opinion about a war, he knew, were those who’d been in one. And if the girl was surprised that the decision to move into Iraq had already been taken, she was more naive than most. ‘This war is good to go,’ the American had said. Well, of course it was. When the hell did people think decisions like that were taken — the day before troops moved in?

No, it wasn’t Suze with her wild eyes and embroidered nose who kept coming to the front of Chet’s mind. It was Stratton. What was so important that he had to come to meet an American businessman, rather than the Yank going to him? Why was he talking to the Grosvenor Group in some anonymous office and not in Number 10? And what did the Grosvenor Group have to do with it anyway?

Fuck it, Chet thought as he signalled to the bulldog for another pint of Stella. Not his business. As long as he kept pulling the pay cheques, the suits could discuss whatever the hell they wanted. Trouble was, after today’s bollocking he didn’t know how long the pay cheques would carry on coming.

At 22.30 he’d gathered up his rucksack of gear and staggered to the tube. Time to get his head down.

As he left Seven Sisters station, the cold was sobering. He walked as briskly as he could down the main road and into his little side street of terraced houses and maisonettes. The street lamps bathed the pavement in a yellow glow, but only a handful of houses had lights on in any windows. The booze and the darkness meant that he fumbled slightly as he unlocked his own front door. Once he was in, he slammed the door behind him and made his way in the darkness along the narrow hallway and towards the kitchen.

As he stood in the doorway of the kitchen he saw a red light flashing. The answer machine on the work surface, indicating a single message was waiting for him. His rucksack still slung over his back, Chet stomped into the kitchen and, still in darkness, pressed the play button.

He half expected it to be his amputee friend Doug, berating him. It wasn’t. A voice — female, posh and brisk — filled the kitchen. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Freeman. This is Angela Glover, Grosvenor Group human resources. I’ve been instructed to inform you that your services are no longer required by the gr…’

Angela Glover, whoever the hell she was, didn’t get to finish her message, because Chet had pulled the wires from the back of the answer machine and hurled it to the floor. The cheap plastic shattered against the floor, and Chet made to stamp on it with his good heel. ‘Fucking bitch… ’

‘You should learn to calm you temper.’

Whoever had entered Chet’s kitchen behind him had done so in absolute silence. Chet felt the unmistakable sensation of cold metal against the back of his head.

He froze.

‘I’ll explain what’s going to happen.’ The intruder was female, her voice quiet and throaty, with an accent Chet couldn’t quite place — not American, exactly, but as though she’d learned English from a Yank.

‘You’re going to tell me the name of the woman you spoke to outside the meeting room today. If you do that, you might live to see morning.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Do you really need me to answer that?’

No, he thought. Not really…

Chet’s eyes were getting used to the dark, but he knew that in the absence of light his peripheral vision was the strongest. He used that now. To his left, within reach, was the half-eaten loaf of bread from that morning, with the kitchen knife lying to its side.

‘I didn’t speak to anyone,’ he said.

Get her talking, he figured. Then, when I make my move, she’ll be distracted.

No reply. Just the continued pressure of a weapon against the back of his skull.

‘Feel like telling me how you got into my flat?’

‘I feel like killing you. I’m going to count to five. If I don’t have a name by the end of it, that’s what I’ll do. One.’

He could grab the knife with his left hand. It wouldn’t take much to overpower this woman, whoever she was.

‘Two.’

His fingers twitched.

‘Thr…’

Chet yanked his head to the left just as he grabbed the knife and spun round. He didn’t fuck around with threats: he just sliced the blade into the back of the intruder’s gun hand. She cursed as the weapon fell to the floor, but used her good hand to swipe a blow at Chet.

It wasn’t just the force behind that blow that surprised him; it was the training too. The side of the intruder’s hand dug sharply into Chet’s neck, startling him momentarily and giving her the opportunity to raise her right leg and kick him hard in the stomach. Chet stumbled back, the wind knocked from him and his balance shaky. He saw the woman a metre in front of him, bending down to pick up the gun that she’d dropped, and he knew that he only had moments. This woman was a pro, no doubt about it, and she wasn’t going to give him a second chance.

He barged towards her, using all the strength in his good leg and the advantage of his greater bulk to knock her out of the way. She clattered against his rickety oven, and as she did so, he listened for the sound of the gun being knocked out of her hand again. He didn’t hear it, but she hissed something in a language Chet didn’t recognise: ‘Harah!’

And then there was a gunshot.

The weapon was suppressed, so the sound it made was just a dull thud. Chet saw a spark as the round left the barrel and he felt it whizz just inches from his hip before it thumped into the wall.

She could fire another round in seconds. Chet had to get out of there.

He didn’t give her time to re-aim, but burst out of the kitchen and hurtled back along the hallway, all traces of his previous inebriation a memory. When he got to the front door, he could hear the woman coming out of the kitchen. He could almost sense her raising the weapon again.

As he stepped over the threshold and pulled the door closed behind him, a second round splintered the wood from the inside. Chet limped down the pathway and round to the far side of his dented Mondeo, where he ducked out of sight.

He froze, his heart pumping furiously, and he listened carefully.

At first there was nothing. Then, after about ten seconds, footsteps. The shooter had turned left out of his house and was heading off down the street fast. Chet pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and entered. He threw the rucksack of gear on to the passenger seat, turned the key in the ignition and the engine jumped into life. The tyres screeched as he pulled out into the road and sped away. Chet glanced in the rear-view mirror as he accelerated. He could just see her, standing on the pavement, lit up by a street lamp, looking in his direction: black clothes, wavy black hair down below her shoulders, full lips, a beautiful, angry face.

And as Chet turned left out of his road, his mind was ablaze with questions. Who was she? How did she get into his flat? And why the hell had she just tried to kill him?

EIGHT

05.00 hrs.

Just under an hour till dawn. Luke and Finn could see the Bedouin village up ahead.

They’d approached slowly, keeping the engine noise to a minimum. In the distance they had seen the lights of what they assumed to be Iraqi border patrol vehicles. If they were discovered by one of these, things could get messy. But the desert was big and they were small. Nobody saw them.

Now they had left the car and were approaching on foot. They were on a dusty track that bore tyre marks but also animal footprints. On either side the terrain was dotted with boulders and low brush. Five minutes after they left the Toyota they passed a rusting car chassis. God knows how long it had been there. Years, probably.

Finn had changed out of his burka and into grubby gear much like Luke’s. They had both used the cover of darkness to double-check the gear packed away in their ops waistcoats that were hidden under their dishdashes: magazines for their pistols, grenades, Plasticuffs. Their disco guns were fitted to their ankles, but their main weapons were closer at hand. They had each looped a piece of bungee cord in a figure of eight around the butt of their carbine, then threaded this around their arms so the weapon itself was hanging underneath their armpits — well disguised by the dishdash but accessible in a split second. With luck, they’d be in and out, but they didn’t know what was waiting for them up ahead, so they had to be prepared. And that meant packing some heavy shit.

Within ten minutes of leaving the car, they could see the outskirts of the village. They checked it out through the kite sight. It was a poor place — a seemingly random agglomeration of about twenty breeze-block houses, each a single storey high and with a shallow-sloping corrugated-iron roof. About 200 metres from the outermost of the houses was the shell of an older dwelling. The blockwork had crumbled, there was no roof and an old acacia tree, heavy under its own weight, had grown through one of the walls. Luke pointed at it. ‘We’ll set up an OP there,’ he said.

Finn nodded and together they headed for the derelict house. They were ten metres away when there was a sudden movement. Both men instinctively went for their weapons, only to see a beady-eyed goat scramble to its feet and put a few metres between itself and them. The bell round its neck gave a repeated dull clunk as it moved, and its breath steamed as it watched them make their way into the OP. The ground was covered with rubbish — old tins, rusting jerrycans and sturdy branches from the acacia tree. A gap in one wall where a window used to be formed a perfect place from which they could observe the village, and Finn took up position here. He pulled an A4 photograph and a pencil-thin red-filtered torch from under his robe. It was a satellite image of the tiny village. Each house was easily identifiable — there were twenty-two in total, and they were mostly set in a rough circle around a central courtyard — and one of them had been circled in black marker. This, if their intelligence was correct, was where they would find Abu Famir.

The two Regiment men examined the image together. Within seconds they had identified their OP, which was on the southern edge of the village, just east of the track leading into it. Their target location was on the north-eastern edge of the village, backed by an area of low brush and with a solitary tree growing about ten metres behind. Finn handed the photo to Luke, before bending down with his kite sight and scanning the darkness.

‘I’ve got eyes on,’ he said after a minute. He stood back so that Luke could have a look.

It took Luke about thirty seconds to take everything in. The central courtyard was about forty metres wide and littered here and there with large objects that were difficult to make out from this distance. The shell of another abandoned car? A collection of disused oil drums? Wandering around these objects were a number of animals — more goats, Luke assumed. The tree that they had noted on the satellite image was easy to make out; just beyond it Luke could see the target house. It was no different to any of the others: just a poor, blockwork dwelling with no windows and an iron roof.

Luke stepped back from the kite sight. ‘We wait till first light,’ he said. ‘Then we move in.’

Finn nodded, and went back to surveying the village through the kite sight.

Within less than twenty minutes the cold, grey light of dawn was starting to push back the inky night sky. Luke and Finn were ready. This was the best time to lift their target. It was dark enough to give them a bit of cover if they needed it, early enough for nobody to be about, and sufficiently late that any noise they made wouldn’t cause alarm. As they’d been waiting, a couple more goats had wandered up to the OP. That could be to their advantage. Luke selected a thin, sturdy acacia branch, about a metre long. If he could use that to guide a few goats into the village, they would look like Bedouin wanderers.

They stepped out from the OP. Three goats had congregated about ten metres away. Luke approached slowly, making a clicking sound in the corner of his mouth. One of the goats bolted, its bell jangling noisily as it disappeared into the night; but the remaining two lingered. The musty smell of the beasts and their shit reached Luke’s nose; when he tapped one of them firmly on its haunch, it made a shuddering sound. Another tap and both animals started wandering in the direction of the village.

A thick silence surrounded them — a silence in which the clanking of the goats’ bells and their own footsteps sounded deafening. Luke brandished his acacia branch firmly, but he also kept his left arm loosely by his side, ready to access his carbine. But at the moment there was nobody around. The goats in the central courtyard gazed at them curiously as the two SAS men stood at the edge of the settlement and looked in. The object Luke had seen through the kite sight was indeed the deserted chassis of an old car; and as they ventured further in, he could feel some residual warmth from the oil drums. Clearly someone had lit a fire in them the previous night.

Thirty metres to the target. Luke tapped one of the goats, and the men walked side by side past the oil drums and towards the building where they hoped to find Abu Famir.

From the corner of his eye, Luke sensed movement.

Somebody had appeared from one of the houses at their ten o’clock, no more than twenty metres away. Luke looked closely at the figure. It was a boy, no more than twelve years old, though his face already bore the ravages of a hard life. His body did too. The bottom half of his left leg was missing and he was able to stand only with the aid of a sturdy stick nestled under his left armpit. He wore a heavy cloth robe and a brightly coloured hat, and in his right hand he was carrying a metal bucket. He stared at the two strangers with wide eyes full of mistrust.

‘You clocked the kid?’ Luke murmured.

‘Roger that,’ replied Finn.

As he spoke, there was more movement. The door of the target house — distance, twenty-five metres — was opening.

Then — fuck! Four figures emerged from the house. They were all wearing plain Arabic dress, though one was a lot older than the others. He had a short white beard and little round glasses, and Luke immediately recognised him from pictures he’d seen: Abu Famir. The man’s eyes darted around.

As they exited the building, the younger men surrounded the Iraqi academic. They were not quite so dark of skin, and they each carried an MP5 Kurz. They made no attempt to hide their weapons and held them like they knew how to use them. Abu Famir had good reason to seem on edge: it looked like Saddam’s men had already caught up with him.

Luke and Finn stopped dead in their tracks. Abu Famir’s entourage did the same.

The two groups of men stared at each other, nothing but three old oil drums and two goats between them.

And then there was a shout.

It came from the lame boy. He had dropped his bucket and was pointing furiously at Luke and Finn. His words were a little garbled, but Luke had enough Arabic to work out what he was saying.

‘They have stolen the goats!’

Abu Famir’s guards quickly looked at each other, as if deciding what to do; but the two goats had already made their decision. Clearly startled by the boy’s shouts, they turned and bolted. One of them collided with Finn, who was momentarily knocked back. His dishdash twisted, revealing the bottom couple of inches of his carbine’s barrel.

One of the men shouted. He had seen the weapon, and was raising his.

‘Get down!’ Luke yelled, and both men hit the ground just soon enough to avoid a burst from the MP5 thundering into them. It hit the oil drums in the middle of the courtyard, causing a harsh, metallic sound to ring out across the air, and puncturing entry and exit holes in the metal. By now, though, the SAS men had accessed their own weapons. And that was bad news for the ragheads.

The guy who’d just fired his MP5 was the first to get it: two rounds, one from Finn, one from Luke, both full in the face. His features seemed to explode, and he was thrown back violently against the front wall of the house, his blood soiling Abu Famir’s grey robe as he fell. The boy was stumbling back into his house, but Luke’s attention was already on their target’s remaining companions. One of them — the taller of the two — was taking aim at Finn; the other was just behind Abu Famir.

The taller man fired a burst in Finn’s direction, just as one of the goats bolted between them. The animal’s squealing was cut short as rounds from the MP5 hacked into its flesh, ripping a seam along its side and spewing its entrails. Finn wasn’t hit, but Luke knew his mate wouldn’t get a second chance. He fired, and delivered another headshot to this trigger-happy Arab, who spun down into the dust.

The man behind Abu Famir was short and stocky, with rumpled dark hair and sharp dark eyes. He raised his weapon to fire over the academic’s shoulder, but as he did so Abu Famir — his face full of fright and his glasses skewiff on his face — began to run.

‘Get him!’ Finn roared at Luke as he fired at the remaining companion, catching him not in his face, but at the top of his left shoulder. The guy went down like a sack of shit, and the two SAS men scrambled to their feet. Luke headed right, following Abu Famir the way he had run — fast for an old man — round the back of the house; Finn went in the opposite direction.

The back of the house was like a junkyard: rolls of barbed wire lay beside old tyres and metal troughs. There was a vehicle parked here — a modern black 4 x 4. They found the old Iraqi pinned against the far side of the vehicle, his eyes wild and his body shaking. He had the expression of a man who was sure he was about to die. He shook his head as he saw Finn and Luke advancing on him; and although he had opened his mouth to say something, no words came.

Finn grabbed Abu Famir by the collar of his robe while Luke checked the vehicle. The key was hanging in the ignition. ‘Get him in!’ he barked.

Finn opened up the back seat and bundled Abu Famir inside, then took a seat next to him, rolled down the window and propped his weapon through the opening while Luke took the driver’s seat and started the engine. As he put his foot down, Abu Famir started jabbering in Arabic. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ said Luke as the vehicle started to move.

But the Iraqi wouldn’t quieten down. ‘British?’ he asked anxiously in English.

‘Bullseye,’ Luke growled as the car accelerated round the corner of the house.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Jordan. All expenses paid.’

‘Jordan? But…’

He didn’t finish what he was saying. As Luke drove into the main courtyard, he checked over his shoulder. The two corpses hadn’t moved, of course, but the stocky third man — the one Finn had caught in his shoulder — was up on his knees, one hand pressed against his badly bleeding wound.

‘Down him!’ Luke shouted at Finn.

‘NO!’ Abu Famir’s voice was strangely high-pitched, and as Finn prepared to take the shot, the Iraqi threw his thin body against him. Finn fired, but the shot went awry and by the time he had pushed Abu Famir away, the vehicle was halfway across the courtyard: the angles were wrong and Finn’s face was stormy.

‘You must go back for him,’ Abu Famir shouted.

‘You’ve got a fucking death wish, mate,’ Luke said as he continued to burn the 4 x 4 across the courtyard.

‘They weren’t here to kill me. They are my brothers — Jordanians — here to help me. We were preparing to leave together and you killed them…’

Luke hit the brakes. ‘What are you talking about?’

Abu Famir’s frightened eyes darted from one man to the other. ‘They were here to help me.’ He twisted round to look out of the rear window. ‘But he… he is not Jordanian. He is Iraqi… my colleague, in hiding with me. You cannot leave him there to die…’

‘Fucking try me,’ Finn muttered. He turned to Luke. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said.

But something stopped Luke from hitting the gas. Their orders were clear: get Abu Famir out of Iraq. Nothing more, nothing less. Even so, sometimes on the ground you had to adapt.

Abu Famir started up again. ‘If Saddam goes, my friend will be an important man. Yes, a very important man… my deputy… he must be saved…’

‘Finn,’ Luke instructed. ‘Shut him up.’

His mate held his weapon against Abu Famir’s body. ‘You heard him,’ he said. And then: ‘Jesus, Luke — what are you doing?’

Luke had gone into reverse and was now speeding back towards the house. He didn’t answer his friend, but when he was ten metres from where the wounded man was lying, he hit the brakes and the 4 x 4 screeched to a halt. He jumped out and ran round to where the guy was lying, keenly aware that seven or eight Bedouin men had come out of their homes and were looking towards the site of the firefight, though they kept their distance.

It was immediately obvious that the guy was in a mess. The blood from his wound had almost fully saturated the robe he was wearing; his face was pale, his lips slightly blue; his right hand was pressed against his left shoulder where the bullet had entered, and blood was oozing between his fingers.

Luke got out of the vehicle and strode towards him. The man, trembling violently, whispered, ‘Harah, harah, harah…’ Then he reached for his MP5, which was lying on the ground about three metres from where he had fallen, but Luke got there first, grabbed the weapon and stood over him.

The man’s eyes widened and he stopped muttering. He stared at the weapon in Luke’s hand. ‘Lo…’ he whispered. ‘Lo…’

Luke bent over, grabbed the injured man just under his good shoulder and pulled him roughly to his feet. He gasped in pain and it took all Luke’s strength to keep him upright. He yanked him towards the 4 x 4 and bundled him into the passenger seat, ignoring his hollers of pain. In the process the man’s blood smeared Luke’s own robe.

The Bedouin men watched impotently as this scene unfolded in front of them. Maybe they were used to such horrors; maybe they were just scared to get involved. Either way, Luke floored it out of the place, acutely aware that Finn didn’t agree with what he’d just done. Tough shit. He was calling the shots and he’d made his decision.

Within a couple of minutes they had reached the Toyota and come to a halt. As the two SAS men climbed out of the 4 x 4, Finn yelled, ‘For fuck’s sake, look at him. He’s going to compromise us.’

Luke opened the boot of the Toyota, took out a med pack and handed it to Finn. ‘Let’s get them into our vehicle. You can treat him on the go.’

‘Treat him? You’re fucking losing it, Luke. Let’s just nail the bastard now and get out of here.’

Luke ignored him. ‘We’re going to get right away from the village, then get on the radio to base, tell them what’s happening. If the order comes through to extract him too, that’s what we’ll do. If not, we waste him. Now stop fucking arguing and let’s move.’

He walked round to the other side of the 4 x 4, opened the door and dragged the wounded man back towards the Toyota.

NINE

Two and a half thousand miles away, in a poky top-floor studio flat just off Edgware Road in London, Suze McArthur was half asleep on the sofa.

The sofa was covered with an embroidered ethnic throw that Suze had bought on a shopping trip with friends to Camden Market. The friends had long since deserted her for jobs and husbands and kids, no longer content with the world of student marches and protests. Suze would be thirty in just two months. The throw had adorned the sofas in the various bedsits she’d rented ever since college, her job as a midwife never allowing her to afford anything bigger.

In front of the sofa was a small wooden chest that doubled as a table, on which a patchouli joss stick had almost burned down to the end. Next to the joss stick was a Dictaphone loaded with a C90 cassette. There was only one picture on the wall — a slightly crumpled old X-Files poster showing Mulder and Scully, arms folded and back to back, looking down into the room. A TV was on in the corner and on top of the set there was a photograph: a picture of Suze with her arm around a much older lady sitting in a wheelchair, a pink hyacinth blooming in the background. The floor was covered with newspaper cuttings, and in one corner a lava lamp shone dimly.

Dramatic music from the TV, and Suze came to. Her last memory was of watching 100 Worst Serial Killers, some crap American rubbish. She looked at her watch. Half past eleven. The big-haired female presenter was standing outside a forbidding Victorian building. Slowly Suze tuned in to what she was saying.

‘It is here, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, England, that the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper lives, and it is here that he will most probably die.’

A familiar orange-backed picture of a black-haired man appeared on the screen.

‘In 1981 Stuart Sutcliffe was convicted of the murder of thirteen women. The Ripper claimed during his trial that a voice in his head had instructed him to kill prostitutes, and that this was the voice of God. The Yorkshire Ripper is not the only serial killer to have made such claims. A significant number have made similar assertions that God…’

Suze fumbled for the remote control and turned the TV off. She shivered. Some things were better not watched alone and in the dark. That included tales of serial killers and religious nuts. She remembered something she’d read a long time ago: the world is divided into good people and bad people. Good people will do good things, bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things takes religion.

Good people. Bad people. Sometimes, she thought to herself, it was difficult to tell the difference.

She got down on her knees and starting collecting the clippings. A jumble of headlines that she’d read a hundred times before filled her mind. ‘profits soar… aerospace industry on upward trajectory.. management buyout boosts stocks’. When she had them in a pile, she placed them all back in the box file where they lived, and on the spine of which she had written two words in clear black marker pen: ‘grosvenor group’. She carried it to the other side of the room, where she slotted it into its place on a rickety Ikea bookshelf, next to an identical box file with a single word written on the side: ‘stratton’.

Her pretty face curled into an expression of dislike.

She went over to look out of the room’s one small window. From here she could see the street below — Wimbourne Terrace — and, above the opposite roofs, the A40 flyover, with plenty of cars travelling in either direction even at this time of night. She turned and looked back into the room, and her eyes fell on the Dictaphone.

Maybe she should take the tape to the press. Make it all public. But did she trust them? And would they believe her anyway, even with the evidence?

Suze shook her head. The truth was, she didn’t trust anybody. She had gone to such lengths to acquire the contents of that tape on the table — it made her feel sick, the memory of the danger in which she’d put herself — and now she wasn’t only afraid of its contents, she was afraid to do anything with it!

You’re fucking crazy. The words of the man with the limp who had caught her on the rooftop earlier that day rang in her head. She winced as she thought of the things she’d threatened him with. Shameful things.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe she was crazy.

Maybe these bastards had dragged her down with them.

Perhaps she should throw the tape away? Burn it. Forget she’d ever heard its contents and just get on with her life. Get herself a husband and some kids, like all her friends had. Like her mum had tried to persuade her to do for so many years, until her mind had started to wander.

But she knew she wasn’t going to do that. She knew what she’d heard. And even if she didn’t yet know the full story, she knew she had to do something to stop it.

Suze put the Dictaphone on the bookshelf alongside her research files, then found herself a blanket and snuggled up on the sofa again. She needed a clear head, and for a clear head she needed sleep.

Whether sleep would come, with all these thoughts spinning around in her mind, was a different matter entirely.

Chet drove.

His mind was racing. What the fuck had happened? Who was the intruder? Who had tried to kill him?

You’re going to tell me the name of the woman you spoke to outside the meeting room today. If you do that, you might live to see morning.

Suze McArthur. That pale-faced redhead with a stud in her nose and the smell of incense in her clothes had someone running scared. But who? And why?

He remembered what he’d overheard on the rooftop. Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go… the Americans are all on board. The question is, how are you going to get it through…?

Was that enough to persuade someone to make an attempt on his life? No way. Chet knew the decision to take out an individual like that was never made lightly — especially if the hit had to be carried out on home turf. Too many things could go wrong. Killing someone was easy; covering it up was more difficult. The conspiracy theorists loved the idea that the intelligence agencies would think nothing of assassinating suspected terrorists or troublesome members of the royal family, but that was bullshit.

And in any case, the woman in his flat had not been British. As he drove, Chet desperately tried to place her accent. ‘Harah!’ she had said. Chet was a first-class Regiment linguist, and he thought the word seemed familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

It was just past midnight when he turned off Euston Road to drive down Gower Street and into the West End. He parked his car in the NCP on Wardour Street, hid his rucksack underneath the passenger seat and limped through the maze of red neon, pubs and sex shops. A woman, comfortably in her forties and with too much make-up on, called to him from a doorway. ‘Looking for a bit of business, love?’

He put his head down.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers, darling!’ The woman’s voice had turned angry when she realised she was being ignored.

Chet carried on towards Trafalgar Square, and from there to Whitehall. He walked down the opposite side to number 132 and stood for a moment observing the entrance. He didn’t really know what he was looking for — maybe an unmarked van parked suspiciously nearby; individuals carrying out surveillance in the street. He knew the signs to look for and right now he saw none of them, so he crossed the road and made his way into the building.

The big, marble-floored atrium was entirely empty, with the exception of a solitary security guard on reception — different to the guy Chet had spoken to that morning. He had black skin and dreadlocks and was reading a copy of the Sun. He glanced up when Chet was a couple of metres from the reception.

Chet smiled at him. ‘Graveyard shift, mate?’

The guard put down his newspaper and Chet noticed that he’d been examining page 3. ‘You said it, brother,’ he sighed.

Chet looked around, then leaned in a bit closer. ‘I wondered if you could help me out with something.’

‘Ain’t no one here this time of night,’ the guard replied. ‘Except me, of course.’ He prodded the newspaper. ‘And Delightful Debs from Dagenham.’ He laughed, and Chet joined in.

‘Not looking for someone here. I’m looking for someone who was here,’ said Chet. ‘A chick.’

A broad grin crossed the guard’s face.

‘I did a little security job here this morning. The name’s Chet Freeman. Check your computer if you like.’

The guard shrugged and tapped at the keyboard of his terminal. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘I got you.’

‘So I got talking to this girl. Said her name was Suze. Cleaning lady. Redhead. Kind of…’ Chet made a gesture with his hands to indicate a shapely figure. ‘Should have got her number there and then, I guess…’

A troubled look came on to the guard’s face. ‘Ah, I don’t know, man. I’m not supposed to give that kind of information out. You know, home addresses and shit.’

‘Hey, course not. I understand. I was just thinking, you know, maybe a phone number… if you had it…’

He winked at the guard, who gave an amused shake of the head and replied, ‘I don’t know, brother. She must have been pretty cute for you to come chasing after her at this time of night.’

‘Yeah. Or maybe I’m just desperate.’

The guard laughed, then once more tapped on his keyboard. ‘Suze McArthur?’ he asked.

‘That’s my girl.’

‘She’s a temp. Only worked here yesterday.’ The guard scrawled a number on a yellow Post-It note and handed it to Chet. ‘Hope you get yourself some pussy, brother.’

Chet grinned. ‘You and me both, my friend.’

He turned and walked out of the building, the square of paper clasped firmly in his right hand.

It took him half an hour to get back to his car. It would have taken him less, but he went a roundabout way, down quiet side streets where he could look back and check he wasn’t being followed. By the time he’d got back to his vehicle, his leg was killing him — sharp, stabbing pains shooting from the stump up into the thigh, and a nagging soreness where flesh met prosthesis. It was a relief to sit behind the wheel. He drove out of the West End, pulling over on Tottenham Court Road to check he wasn’t being trailed, before heading to Aldenham Street in the maze between Camden and Euston Station. There were modern housing blocks on either side, but the street was deserted at this time of night and he parked in the gloom below a broken street lamp. He recovered his rucksack and removed one of the bulky mobile phones that he’d used to debug the offices earlier.

Seconds later he was dialling Suze’s number.

It rang six times.

Seven.

He was about to hang up when a voice came on the line. It was sleepy.

‘Hello?’

‘Suze McArthur?’

‘What… who is this?’ The girl sounded suspicious. Frightened.

‘Your friend from the roof.’

A pause.

‘How did you get my number?’ Her voice cracked slightly.

‘How did you get your hands on a laser listening device?’

Silence.

‘I let you escape today,’ he said finally. ‘You owe me. I want to know what you thought you were listening…’

‘I’m hanging up.’ Suze’s voice was wavering as she interrupted him.

‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

‘I’m hanging up…’ She sounded like a scared kid standing up to a bully. ‘I’m hanging up now.’

A click on the line, then silence.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Chet muttered. He dialled the number again, but this time it rang out.

He chucked the phone on to the passenger seat, leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. He was dead beat. The beer, the scuffle at the flat, walking too far with his bad leg — it was all taking its toll. He ought to rest, but rest wasn’t on the menu. He’d be insane to go back home, but he needed somewhere to lie low. Where he couldn’t be found. Somewhere to get his head in order. With someone he could trust.

But as far as Chet was concerned, trustworthy people were as rare as a nun in a bikini. If Luke Mercer was in the country, Chet would already be on the way to Hereford. But he wasn’t, and in the absence of his old SAS mucker, there was only one other person he would even think of approaching. He picked up his phone and called a number that he knew by heart.

It rang for several seconds before a voice answered. ‘Who the hell

…?’

‘Doug, it’s me. Chet.’

A heavy sigh. ‘Jesus, Chet. What time is it?’

‘I don’t know — about 01.00? Listen, mate, I need a favour.’

‘Chet, this a wind-up? You been on the beers?’

‘No. Yes, but… look, can you meet me?’

A pause.

‘Now?’

‘Now. It’s important.’

‘Mate, I can’t. I’m out of town. Trains are done for the day. You never called — I went to the girlfriend’s place.’

Chet vaguely remembered Doug saying that his latest squeeze lived somewhere south of town. Mitcham Junction, was it?

‘Plus,’ Doug continued, ‘it’s one o’clock in the fucking morning.’

Chet cursed silently, his brain still racing.

‘Can you RV first thing?’

‘I guess…’

‘Clapham Junction. Platform 15 — one five — 06.30.’

‘Fine. Look, Chet, what the hell’s this all about?’

I wish I knew, Chet thought to himself.

‘06.30,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t be late.’

He hung up before Doug could reply.

Chet threw the phone down again and caught himself checking the rear-view mirror. Checking for what? He didn’t know, but he knew his heart was racing and his mouth was dry.

Fear? Damn right. But that didn’t mean he was going to succumb to it. He kept his gaze on the mirror, and prepared to sit it out till morning.

Suze McArthur stared at her phone like it was a snake. She was shaking. How had that guy tracked her down? Who was he working for?

A chill sickness welled up in her stomach. She found herself shivering, and felt as though all the strength had left her limbs. She pulled her blanket more tightly around her, but that did no good.

A noise in the corridor outside.

Suze heard herself gasp.

It was nothing, she told herself. She remembered being a child, terrified by strange sounds after her lights had been turned out. Her doctor father, when he was not away, would come in and smooth down her hair. ‘There’s no one here, princess,’ he’d whisper. ‘Just Mummy and Daddy, and we won’t let anything scare you. All you can hear is our old house creaking. That’s what happens at night.’

But there was nobody here to smooth her hair down now. Her father was dead, killed by a landmine in Angola when he was out there tending to sick children. Her mother couldn’t look after herself, let alone Suze.

Another noise. ‘It’s just the old house creaking,’ she whispered to herself.

The front door was locked. The windows too.

So why didn’t she feel safe?

It crossed her mind that she could go downstairs. Sometimes she picked up groceries for Vern and Dorothy, the sweet old couple who lived underneath her. She’d become friends with them. They were always on her case, telling her she should be settling down with a nice young man. A week ago they’d gone off on a cruise of the Norwegian fjords, and had left their key with Suze, just in case. But something prevented her even from moving, let alone venturing down the staircase in the middle of the night.

I should get out of here, she thought. Go somewhere else for a few days. Get my head straight.

That’s what she’d do. First thing in the morning. Pack a bag. Get out of London.

But morning seemed a long way off. She glanced over her shoulder at the front door. She had locked it, hadn’t she?

Another chill ran through her. She felt too scared to get up and check.

03.26 hrs.

Chet awoke suddenly.

It took him a few seconds to remember why he was sitting behind the wheel of his car in this dark side street, and he cursed himself for having dropped off. He was frozen. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a police siren. But this street was quiet.

Almost.

He squinted in the gloom. Through the windscreen he could see a figure up ahead. Twenty metres away, max, and walking towards him.

Instinctively, Chet felt his fingers creeping towards the ignition key. The figure was moving quickly. At fifteen metres, he could make out that it was a woman. Slim. He couldn’t see her face, not in the darkness.

The angry features of the intruder in his flat flashed through his mind.

Ten metres. Chet started the engine and put the lights on full beam. The figure stopped, throwing her hands up to her face, alarmed by the sudden glare. When her hands moved away, Chet saw that her skin was elderly and wrinkled, her hair grey and her clothes old. She cast a fearful look in Chet’s direction, then turned heel and hurried off.

Just an old woman wandering the streets at night. Chet turned off the engine and the lights, aware of a damp patch of sweat against his back despite the coldness of the air. He cursed his paranoia. Of course nobody knew where he was.

He checked his watch. 03.28. Three hours till he RV’d with Doug. It couldn’t come soon enough.

06.23 hrs.

Early, but the main roads of London were already crammed with traffic. The bus drivers were beeping their horns in frustration at each other as their headlamps glowed in the semi-darkness.

Commuters were already hurrying into Clapham Junction in their suits and overcoats, beating the crowds as they gripped their briefcases and free sheets and paper cups from Starbucks with plastic lids. Their breath steamed in the cold morning air, and nobody seemed in any way interested in anyone else around them.

Certainly nobody gave Chet a second glance as he queued up to buy a ticket from the machine. He decided to use cash rather than his card — too easy to trace.

Ticket in hand, he walked along the covered walkway from which a number of flights of wide stairs led down to the platforms. The sound of trains arriving and departing was everywhere. Station announcements echoed over the Tannoy. Chet checked his watch. 06.29. Platform 15 was at the other end of the walkway. He limped towards it as commuters hurried past.

He was at the top of the steps leading down to Platform 15 when he heard the sound of a train coming into the station, its wheels making the familiar, rhythmic sound over the tracks, blotting out the sound of a station announcement; and he was just hauling himself down the steps when he heard a man scream.

Chet stopped. He could hear the train braking quickly, then there was shouting. He limped quickly to the top of the stairs, where he saw an already crowded platform. There was a commotion at the end of the platform from which the train had arrived and it sent a sick feeling through Chet’s body. ‘Get out of my way,’ he roared as he barged past a couple of commuters. ‘Move!’

The train had stopped now. Chet turned left, towards the front end. The other travellers were giving each other anxious looks, as if they didn’t know quite what to do; a few made angry remarks as Chet stormed through them.

He was alongside the front carriage when he heard a second scream. A woman. Hysterical. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! ’

Chet continued to push his way through.

‘Someone help him,’ the woman sobbed.

He reached the edge of the platform and pulled the sobbing woman out of the way. There was a streak of blood on the front of the train, and through the windscreen glass he could see the driver with a horrified look on his face.

Chet stared down at the track. It was impossible to make out the features on the mangled body that lay there. The side of the face that was visible was just an oozing welt of gore. One arm was pinned behind the figure’s back in a gruesomely unnatural position, the shoulder joint and the elbow obviously snapped and splintered; the other arm was simply crushed.

But Chet didn’t need to see the face. All he needed to see was the prosthetic leg, almost identical to his own. It was still vaguely attached to Doug’s knee, but pointing out at a ninety-degree angle, and split about halfway down.

Dread and anger seeped through Chet’s bones in equal measure. He staggered back from the edge of the platform to allow two Transport Police officers to take his place. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please step back from the platform,’ one said loudly. ‘Please step back — the emergency services need to come through.’

Chet hardly heard them. He pressed his back against a rail map on the platform wall as the chaos unfolded, trying to suppress the sickness, trying to think clearly.

Was his friend dead by coincidence? Like hell he was.

But with the possible exception of Doug’s girlfriend, nobody knew they were meeting. Nobody knew they were there.

Suddenly Chet felt his blood turn cold. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and stared at it.

Somebody must have been listening in to their conversation.

He cursed himself for being so stupid, then quickly fumbled with the handset’s rear panel and removed the battery and SIM card so that the phone couldn’t be tracked. He stuffed the SIM card into his wallet; the phone he could dump when he found a bin.

Quickly he replayed in his head what he and his friend had said on the phone. Would any eavesdropper have known that Doug was an amputee too? Chet didn’t think so. And there was only one conclusion to draw from that…

‘Jesus, mate,’ he whispered to himself. ‘They were after me, not you. I’m so fucking sorry.’

Then his skin prickled as another realisation hit him.

He’d made more than one call using this phone the night before.

A face rose in his mind. Red hair. A small silver stud in her pretty, turned-up nose.

Suze McArthur.

Chet stuffed the dismembered phone in his pocket and started to push his way hurriedly back along the platform. He had no idea where the young woman lived. He had no idea what she knew. But he had to get to her now. And fast.

Before someone else did.

TEN

Chet had a name. He had a phone number. Ten minutes later, after a call from a public phone box to an old army mate of his who had access to the Police National Computer, he had an address committed to memory.

Flat 6, 124 Wimbourne Terrace, W2. He consulted his mental map of the capital. Suze McArthur, whoever she was, lived on the other side of London. It would take him the best part of an hour to get there, and an hour could easily be too long. He called her number: maybe he could persuade her to get the hell out of her flat. But the phone rang out. Was that good or bad? Chet didn’t know. He slammed the receiver down and limped back to his car. His only option was to struggle through the rush-hour traffic.

It was getting lighter now, but the sky was cloudy and grey. He kept seeing the intruder — her cold face — and Doug’s mangled and broken body. He kept hearing the American voice he’d overheard the day before. Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go.. the Americans are all on board. The question is, how are you going to get it through…?

There was something more to it than that. There had to be. What else had they been saying in that meeting? What was so important that somebody had tried to kill him, and succeeded in taking the life of his friend? There was only one person who might know the answer to that, and Chet had to get to her soonest.

He lost count of the number of cars he cut up, or of red lights that he ran, or of angry shouts from drivers as he forced his way across London. Even with all that, it was still just shy of 07.45 when he pulled into the top of Wimbourne Terrace, a narrow street of mansion-block flats round the back of Edgware Road tube station.

It was a residential road. No shops or cafes, but still a fair number of people walking along either side. Chet drove slowly down the road, looking out for number 124. It would be on the right, and…

He took a sharp breath.

Number 124 looked like all the other blocks with its black and white chequerboard pathway leading up to an ornate red-painted door with two frosted-glass panels. But on the other side of the road, sitting in a white VW Golf, was a woman he recognised. Dark, wavy hair. A beautiful face. The last time he’d seen her was in the rear-view mirror of his own car, as she stood outside his flat, pistol in hand.

Chet lowered his head as he passed. Had the intruder clocked him? He fucking hoped not.

At the far end of Wimbourne Terrace, some twenty metres away, he pulled into the kerb. He realised he was breathing deeply, trying to keep his mind and body steady. Was she alone? Were there others conducting surveillance on Suze McArthur’s flat? What was her strategy — to wait until the girl left, then follow her? Or was an accomplice already inside?

Whatever was happening, Chet couldn’t just walk up to the door and ring the bell. The woman in the Golf was, to Chet’s certain knowledge, armed; he wasn’t. She was able-bodied; Chet was far from it. He considered moving round to the back of the block to see if there was another entrance, but there was no way he was going to take his eyes off the woman. He needed a distraction. Something quick.

There was a public phone in a Perspex booth a few metres from the car. Leaving the car on a double yellow — there was no other choice — he hurried over to the booth. He looked around, checking for CCTV. Nothing jumped out, not that that meant much. Whether he was on camera or not, he had to act quickly.

He could still see the Golf as he picked up the receiver and dialled 999.

A female voice answered after two rings. ‘Which service do you require?’

‘Police,’ Chet replied.

‘Please hold the line.’

A pause, then a new voice. ‘Go ahead, caller. You’re through to the police.’

Chet affected a note of panic. ‘I… I think I’ve seen someone with a gun.’

‘Where did you see this?’

‘Wimbourne Terrace, W2. It’s a woman. I saw her getting into a white VW Golf.’

‘Do you have the registration number, caller?’

‘No… it’s about halfway up the street.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Just up the road. I thought I should call…’

‘Please tell me what number you’re calling from.’

Chet recited the number displayed in the phone booth.

‘Stay away from the area, caller. A patrol car will be…’

But Chet had already hung up.

He knew the police would be there quickly. Any sniff of gun crime and they were all over it like the clap. Would it be quick enough? He’d have to wait and see. Chet walked back towards where the white Golf was parked. He stopped about twenty metres away from it, on the same side as number 124. From here he could see the entrance to Suze’s building, and also the vehicle. If the intruder made a move, he could intervene. But otherwise he was going to wait.

A minute passed.

Two.

It was faint at first, almost indistinguishable from the general hubbub of London, and the roar of traffic on the flyover. But gradually it got louder: the sound of sirens, two of them, maybe three, it was difficult to tell. Chet had to time it right. Too early and he’d announce his presence to the intruder. Too late and the police would be here, stopping him from gaining access to the flat.

He waited until he could see the first car, its blue light flashing, scream round the corner into Wimbourne Terrace before he moved. He covered the distance to Suze’s flat as quickly as he could, keeping his head down so the intruder wouldn’t recognise him until it was too late. But, stepping on to the chequerboard path, he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder.

The driver’s door of the Golf was open. A figure was getting out.

He rang the bottom bell as the sound of the sirens got louder.

Five seconds passed before there was an answer. It felt like five years. ‘Hello.’

‘Police,’ Chet replied, knowing the occupant would be able to hear the sirens. ‘Open the front door and stay in your flat.’

The woman from the Golf had crossed the road.

‘Open the door, now!’ Chet barked.

A buzzing sound and the latch clicked. He pushed the door open and slipped inside. As he turned to close it behind him, he saw her: the woman’s eyes were flashing angrily and she was striding towards the door, no more than five metres away. Chet pushed the door closed, hearing the latch click just as she reached the threshold. Through the frosted glass he saw her silhouette, with the blue lights of the police car flashing behind her.

Chet didn’t linger. He moved along the short hallway, past the door of the ground-floor flat and up the thinly carpeted stairs. By the time he’d climbed three flights, his leg was in agony, but he kept going. Less than a minute later he was standing outside the door to the top flat. Flat 6. He hammered on the door: three heavy thumps, followed by another three when there was no answer. But he could hear movement inside. ‘Suze,’ he shouted. ‘Open the door. You’re in danger and you need to let me in.’

No reply.

Chet spoke quickly. Urgently. ‘Listen to me. One man’s already dead because of yesterday. One of us will be next unless you open this door now.’

At first there was nothing. But then, just when Chet thought he was going to have to break his way in, the door opened just an inch. Warily he nudged it open wider with his foot.

The tiny flat was in darkness. Chet saw a sofa, coffee table, TV, bookshelves, and a window with the curtains closed. The place reeked of incense and panic. At the other side of the studio, by the TV, stood Suze. She looked like she hadn’t slept; her eyes were red and mistrustful; and she was holding a kitchen knife.

Chet stepped inside and closed the door. ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Suze shook her head and raised the knife a little higher. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ she whispered.

He gave her a steady glare, then moved over to the window and opened the curtains. He could see the flyover, solid with rush-hour traffic. Below, and immediately outside, were three police cars, with four officers surrounding the white Golf. Standing about thirty metres away, as though she was just a bystander, was Chet’s wannabe assassin. She’d clearly slipped the attention of the Old Bill. He pointed in her direction. ‘See that woman?’ he said. ‘She tried to kill me last night and she was parked outside your flat when I arrived.’

Suze stared down on the street. Chet could sense her trembling.

‘Believe me,’ he said quietly. ‘If it was me that wanted to kill you, you’d be dead by now. I don’t know who this woman is, but she’s armed, she has access to information and she’s a professional assassin. We have to get away from her, and we have to do it right now. Is there any way out of here, other than the front door? A fire exit? Can you get on to the roof?’

‘No… I don’t think so… no, I’m sure.’ She looked like all her worst nightmares were coming true.

Chet tried to keep a clear head. ‘Do you know anyone else in this block? Do you have friends here? People you can trust?’

It took Suze a moment to reply, as though the question hadn’t quite sunk in. ‘An old couple,’ she said finally. ‘Flat 5. Vern and Dorothy. Not friends, exactly, but… but… they’re not there anyway…’

‘Are you positive?’

‘They’ve gone away… on a cruise… I’ve got their keys.. ’

‘Give them to me. Now.’ Chet looked out of the window again as Suze put the knife down on the windowsill and rummaged in her colourful patchwork handbag. The police had created a cordon around the white Golf; the woman was still loitering thirty metres down the street, leaning against a tree and watching.

‘You’ve got thirty seconds to get ready,’ Chet told Suze as she handed him a set of keys.

‘Thirty seconds… I can’t… I…’ Chet grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards the door. She started to struggle. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘The tape.’ She broke free and scrambled towards the bookshelf where a Dictaphone was lying at an angle. When she came back with the tape, he gripped her arm again and dragged her out of the flat and down the stairs.

By the time they reached the door to the flat below, Suze was crying, but she’d stopped fighting so much. Chet unlocked the door and pushed her inside before quietly closing it behind him. Flat 5 was bigger than Suze’s attic studio. They were in a long hallway, lined with oil paintings and even a small alabaster statue on a pedestal of a cherub peeing. Suze’s sobbing was noisy. ‘Get away from the door,’ Chet whispered. ‘Stay away from all the windows, don’t switch on any lights and don’t make a fucking noise.’

Suze stared at him. She was breathing in short, frightened gasps.

‘Get away from the door!’

She staggered back along the hallway, and collapsed on the thick carpet.

Chet grabbed the figurine. It was small enough to grip in one hand, heavy enough to do some proper damage to someone’s skull. He stayed by the entrance. There was a spyhole in the door, through which he could see the landing outside. He kept his eyes on the exterior of the flat, gripping the statue in his right hand. ‘Shut up,’ he said. When it was clear the girl couldn’t stop crying, he tried to block out the sound so that he could concentrate on any noise that came from the stairwell.

Two minutes passed. There was a brief commotion — voices talking excitedly — that sounded like it came from the floor below, though it was difficult to be sure. It was followed by the banging of the door, and then silence.

‘What’s happening?’ Suze asked.

‘Shut up.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Sshh!’

Someone was coming. He found himself holding his breath.

It was fleeting — the black-clad figure of the woman slipping past like a ghost before heading up to the top floor — but it was enough. Enough for Chet to see the determination on her face and the weapon in her fist.

Chet turned to Suze. She’d recovered a little, but she still looked shit-scared. He tried to sound reassuring, but it was difficult, given what he had to say. ‘She’s going into your flat,’ he whispered, ‘and she’s got a gun. We have less than a minute before she realises you’re not there. We’ve got to go now, and we’ve got to go quietly. OK?’

She looked up at him and nodded. Chet helped her to her feet, and pulled her gently towards the door.

‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

He opened up as quietly as possible, and they stepped out into the landing and towards the stairs. Chet nodded at Suze to go first, and followed close behind as she descended. He was still grasping the cherub. Not much use against a nine-millimetre, but it was all there was. Every four or five steps he looked back over his shoulder, but he saw nothing. The further they got towards the ground floor, the faster and more panicked Suze’s steps became, until it was difficult for Chet to keep up. By the time they were both on the ground floor, she was sobbing again.

‘You’re doing fine,’ Chet said, out of breath, as he opened the street door. ‘Keep going.’

They stepped outside. There were still two policemen by the cordoned-off Golf, but they were talking so casually it was clear they’d found no weapons and didn’t consider the situation serious. Chet kept hold of Suze’s arm and guided her across the street.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘My car.’

‘Where then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why are you limping like that?’

Chet sniffed. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later.’

Suddenly he stopped. He didn’t know why. Just a feeling. An uneasy one. He turned around and looked back towards Suze’s block. He could clearly see the top-floor window, the one he’d looked out of just minutes previously.

There was a face at the window, looking out on to the street. It might have been indistinguishable at this distance, but somehow Chet knew, with absolute certainty, that the face was watching them leave.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. Keep going.’ He continued to walk. And as he walked, his mind turned over. Whoever this woman was that they’d just escaped from, she was skilled and she had resources.

She was dangerous. And she wasn’t the type to give up.

A good thing, then, that neither was he.

Chet’s face was grim as he led Suze to his car and opened the door for her before looking up again at the window in the distance. He could still see the woman there, and that meant she had clocked his car. Nothing he could do about that now, though. He climbed in and drove off.

The woman standing at the window watched her two targets disappear. Her face was expressionless.

She turned away. Things had not gone well at all. She had killed the wrong man at the station that morning. That was a bad error, and as they had drummed into her during her training, one mistake invariably leads to another. A kitchen knife lay on the windowsill. Her fingers sought it out, almost of their own accord, and she gripped the handle. With a sudden burst of rage, she raised the knife in the air and drove the point down so heavily into the sill that the wood split. ‘Ben zonah!’

Her eyes flashed and it needed every ounce of self-control to stop the anger from once more bursting out of her. She took a couple of deep breaths and ran her hands through her hair.

Think, Maya, she told herself. You have to think.

She closed her eyes. She forced herself to become calm.

When she was a little girl, her parents had told her the story of Hansel and Gretel and how they were able to retrace their way through the forest because they had dropped little bits of bread behind them. It frequently struck her that most people dropped bits of bread behind them, even if they didn’t know they were doing it. If you wanted to find the person, all you had to do was follow the crumbs.

She looked around the flat. It was a tiny place — smaller even than her safe house in Tel Aviv — but that didn’t mean it held no secrets. She continued to breathe deeply so as to calm her temper, and started to search.

It took her seconds to spot the two box files marked ‘Stratton’ and ‘Grosvenor Group’. The image of the British Prime Minister rose in her mind, but she gave their contents only the most cursory of glances. That wasn’t the kind of thing she was after.

A photo on the TV showed a young woman and a disabled old lady. So different, yet somehow similar. Now that was a different matter. She ripped off the back of the frame, pocketed the print and continued her search.

She returned to the shelf where she had found the two files, but concentrated instead on the shelves below. There were a few books here, neatly lined up; a small mahogany box with some loose change inside; and on the bottom shelf what looked like a square briefcase with a lockable clasp. She pressed the clasp and it clicked open. Inside the briefcase were approximately ten green foolscap wallet folders, alphabetically arranged with neat, hand-written labels.

Banking. Insurance. Rent.

She ignored all these, and instead focused on a folder labelled ‘Mum’.

To find the person, all you had to do was follow the crumbs.

Smiling now, she opened up the folder and started to read.

‘How much money do you have?’

They were heading up Edgware Road.

‘None,’ Suze snapped, like a moody kid. ‘You made me leave the flat without getting anything, remember?’

Chet grunted. If she was after an apology for saving her life, she’d have a long wait.

‘Who the hell are you anyway?’ she demanded. Chet didn’t answer. He pulled out his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and threw it on to her lap.

‘How much is in there? Count it.’

Suze gave him a harsh look, but started to rummage through the wallet. ‘A hundred and sixty,’ she said finally.

Chet glanced at the fuel-level indicator. Half full. That was thirty quid gone before they’d even started. Not good.

‘We can’t use any credit cards,’ he said, more to himself than to his passenger.

Suze looked confused. ‘Why?’

Why? It was a good question, and now that they’d got safely away from her flat, it was one that was occupying every moment of Chet’s thoughts. The intruder had tracked the girl through the call he’d made to her. That wasn’t straightforward. It took time. Resources. Who was equipped to track phone calls at such speed? Five? The Firm? If so, they’d need to go through GCHQ, and that meant someone high up had given the order. That wasn’t a very comfortable thought. Someone wanted to find them. Really wanted to find them. Tracking their phone calls was just one way of doing that. Following a trail of credit-card payments was another. And there were more. Chet was going to have to make sure he was ahead of the game.

Suze was biting her fingernails. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Out of London.’

‘That doesn’t really narrow it down.’

‘I don’t know yet, all right? Just shut up and let me think.’

Suze looked like she was going to respond, but she thought better of it. Instead she sat in silence, looking out of the window, still gnawing at her thumbnail.

Chet made for the M1. The road was clear, but he kept a steady speed — to get pulled over now would be a really bad idea — and it was twenty minutes or so before they hit the junction with the M25. He took the clockwise carriageway and drove steadily round to just before the Dartford Tunnel, where he pulled off for petrol at Thurrock services. The service station was crowded and they had to queue for a pump. Only when they drew alongside one did Chet speak.

‘Keep the doors locked.’

‘Why? No one knows we’re here.’

‘Keep them locked.’

Chet filled up and went in to pay. He bought a stash of chocolate bars, bananas and high-energy drinks, before stepping back out on to the concourse.

He clocked it immediately: a police car parked up just by the air and water machine. Two uniformed officers next to it, one talking into a radio mike fixed to his lapel, both of them looking at — and now walking towards — the black Mondeo.

Chet put his head down, and continued walking to the car. He was coming towards it at a different angle to the police, and was slightly closer. But he didn’t want to speed up yet, because that would alert them to his presence.

Ten metres to go. He tried to catch Suze’s eye, but she was staring vacantly into space and clearly hadn’t noticed either Chet or the officers.

Five metres.

Chet could hear the crackle of the police radio. He pressed his key to unlock the doors, and the lights flashed twice.

‘Excuse me, sir. Sir! ’

Chet opened the door and climbed in. He was turning the key even before the door was shut. The two officers were right in front of him, one of them holding up his hand, palm outwards, while the other was hurrying round to Chet’s side.

‘Oh my God,’ Suze wailed.

Chet said nothing. He centrally locked the doors, then put his foot on the accelerator and drove slowly towards the policeman blocking his way. At first it looked like the cop was going to stand his ground, but he jumped to one side when he realised Chet wasn’t going to stop. The second policeman managed to rap his knuckles on the driver’s window, but Chet had the space to accelerate now, and that’s what he did, ignoring the alarmed looks from the other customers at the petrol station.

The Mondeo’s tyres squealed as he raced towards the exit. In his mirrors he saw the two police officers running back towards their car.

‘What’s… what’s happening?’ Suze stammered. ‘How did they know where we were?’

Chet swung round the perimeter road of the service station and back on to the northbound M25, pushing the car through its revs until it was touching ninety.

‘Number-plate recognition,’ he murmured, his jaw clenched with determination. ‘Police cameras at all the main motorway junctions. They use them to track stolen vehicles. Gets fed through to the Police National Computer.’

‘Bastards!’

He checked his mirrors. No sign of the police tailing him yet. ‘Someone’s instructed them to bring us in.’

‘But… but if you knew all this, why did you…?’

‘I want them to think we’re heading east out of London, OK?’ Chet explained himself more to keep her quiet than anything else. ‘At least that was the idea.’

‘Well, the idea’s not working…’

‘Thanks. Next time I need someone to state the fucking obvious, I’ll know where to come.’

‘We need another car,’ Suze continued as if he hadn’t said anything. ‘We could hire one, maybe…’

Chet shook his head. ‘Too easy to trace.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

Chet checked his mirror. No sign of the patrol car. He took the exit on to the A13. He knew he was on the money — that to beg, borrow or steal another vehicle would be a beacon to anyone trying to locate them. But they could do the next best thing…

As he drove along the A13, he looked left and right. He knew what he was searching for. It wouldn’t be too long before he found one.

Ten minutes later he saw it: a retail park just off the main road, with all the usual shops and a monstrous concrete car park, six or seven storeys high. A minute later he was pulling a ticket from the automated entry gate and slowly crawling along the parking bays of the ground floor.

‘What are we doing?’ Suze asked.

‘Looking for something.’

‘What?’

But Chet didn’t answer. He was too busy concentrating on the other cars in the multi-storey. Nothing on the ground floor, so he climbed the ramp to the first. Still nothing. He cursed under his breath and headed higher.

They were four floors up before he found what he was looking for: another Ford Mondeo, black. Two years newer than his, but it would do. He selected a parking spot in a corner of the car park, boxed in by a bulky Range Rover, then rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out the screwdriver from his debugging kit. Seconds later he was bending down in front of the car, prising off the plastic screw covers of his number plate and removing it. In under a minute he had both plates off.

‘Get out of the car,’ he told Suze.

‘Why?’

‘Just get out and come with me.’

Suze looked wary as she followed him across the deserted car park towards the other black Mondeo. ‘You see anyone coming, distract them,’ he said under his breath. ‘I’m going to switch the plates.’

‘How?’

‘You’re a clever girl. You’ll think of something.’

‘I can’t… I mean, I…’

One look from Chet, though, and she fell silent.

They approached the car together. Chet crouched down and removed the front number plate quickly enough, but he was just preparing to swap it for his when the banging of a door echoed around the car park.

He gave Suze a sudden, urgent look.

‘Right…’ she said. ‘OK.’ She dug the remains of her fingernails into her palms and started walking towards the stairwell. ‘Um… excuse me… ex cuse me… could you tell me where the nearest…?’

Chet blotted out the sound and concentrated on the plates. A couple of minutes later they were swapped, and he was striding back to his own car, with Suze trotting along behind him. Elsewhere they heard an engine start and a vehicle move away. Then silence again. Chet fixed the new plates to his vehicle, and moments later they were driving out of the car park.

‘This’ll buy us a bit of time,’ he said. ‘Until the owner of the other car realises what’s happened. Or the police catch up with them.’ He paused. ‘Or anyone else does. But we still have to be careful.’

‘Careful how?’

‘We stay off the motorways until we get where we’re headed. The cameras tend to be on the main arteries. It’ll keep us under the radar. Hopefully.’

Suze stared at him. ‘And where are we headed?’ She stared some more, then clutched her red hair in her hands. ‘Christ, you haven’t even told me your name… and how do you… how do you know all this stuff?’

He glanced at her as he drove. She looked exhausted. Terrified. He didn’t blame her. He felt the same. The only difference was that Suze was physically shaking. Chet wasn’t.

‘You did well back there,’ he said, and he meant it.

Suze didn’t reply.

‘My name’s Chet Freeman,’ he said quietly. ‘I know all this stuff because it’s my job to. At least, it used to be. We’re going somewhere out of the way that I know pretty well. And when we get there, you and me are going to have a little talk. You’re going to tell me everything you know, and you’re not going to leave out a single fucking thing. Right?’

Suze looked straight ahead and returned her thumbnail to her teeth.

It took her a moment to reply, and when she did, her voice was quiet. Not meek-quiet, but determined-quiet.

‘Right,’ she said.

ELEVEN

‘Zero, this is Tango 17.’

The red Toyota had its boot up and Luke and Finn were sheltering behind it. That way they wouldn’t stick out on the horizon as the sun rose to the east, and they could operate the patrol radio stashed in the back with the rest of their kit. Their hostages were still in the car, Abu Famir in the front and the second man, now unconscious, in the back.

A couple of miles to the south was the main road that ran from the Jordanian border all the way to Baghdad. Everywhere else was desert. When they’d stopped it had been light enough for them to see the traffic on the road with the naked eye. Busier than last night. Plenty of small cars, indistinguishable at this distance from their own, but plenty of military vehicles too. Luke couldn’t tell from up here if they were moving men, munitions or other supplies. But he could tell there were enough of them for that road to be a very dangerous place for two members of the British Army and two dissident Iraqi hostages, one of them with blood pissing from a gun wound.

The radio crackled, and then was silent.

‘Zero, this is Tango 17.’

A pause.

‘Tango 17, this is Zero. Send.’

‘We have the target, but we got into contact. Two men down, one wounded. We have the casualty in tow. Target claims he’s a fellow dissident. Request further instructions.’

‘Tango 17, wait out, figures 5.’

The line went quiet. Luke looked around. A desert falcon was circling up above. Apart from that, no movement in the immediate vicinity.

After five minutes that felt like a lot longer, the radio came to life again.

‘Tango 17, this is Zero. Proceed to RV with both captives.’

Luke glanced at Finn. He was shaking his head.

‘Zero, we’re in a bad spot here. We need medical assistance. Request pick-up.’

A brief pause, then: ‘Tango 17, pick-up cancelled. No heli assets.’

He heard Finn cursing under his breath. ‘What about Fozzie and the others?’

A pause.

‘Back-up unit compromised. Enemy aircraft in border area airspace. Return via vehicle or foot. Repeat, return via vehicle or foot.’

Luke nodded grimly. ‘Roger that, Zero.’ He replaced the handset of the patrol radio.

‘Fuck’s sake.’ Finn looked towards the main road. ‘I’m telling you, with that guy in the car it’s fucking suicide down there. We should just nail him now, say he died of his wounds.’

For a moment Luke didn’t reply. He walked round and glanced into the vehicle. The wounded man was pale and sweating, despite Finn’s on-the-hoof medical attention. He had a large swab bandaged to his wound, but it was already saturated with blood. He needed serious attention and this wasn’t the place to go looking for it. Maybe Finn was right. Maybe they should just ditch him.

‘You given him a shot?’ Luke asked.

‘Not the kind I’d like to.’

‘Have you given him a shot?’

‘Of course I’ve given him a fucking shot. But he needs more than morphine.’

Luke continued to weigh things up. He didn’t like the sound of the situation at the border. With Fozzie and the others compromised, getting over into Jordan was going to be tough. Maybe they should ditch the car and head across the desert on foot. But it was 100 miles to the border, and that was a big ask even for the two Regiment men. For an old boy like Abu Famir it was an impossibility. And as for the wounded man…

In any case, they had their orders. Luke looked over at Finn. ‘We need to get him into the burka,’ he said. If nothing else it would cover up the guy’s wounds.

‘We need to waste the fucker.’

Luke gave Finn a dangerous look before opening up the front passenger door to talk to Abu Famir.

‘What’s his name?’ he demanded.

The Iraqi academic avoided his gaze.

‘What’s his fucking name?’

‘He needs a doctor,’ Abu Famir mumbled. It was clear he was avoiding the question.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Luke sighed, before opening the rear door and moving his attention to the casualty. Their companion stank of sweat and was shaking. ‘Hey, buddy,’ Luke said — speaking English because he didn’t know what else to speak. ‘How you doing?’

The wounded man opened his eyes, but there didn’t seem to be much understanding behind them.

‘You got a name, buddy?’

When the man answered, it was in a hoarse almost-whisper. ‘Amit,’ he said.

That didn’t sound like an Iraqi name to Luke. He glanced in Abu Famir’s direction, then turned back to the wounded man.

‘OK, Amit, you need to stand up by the car so we can put something over you. Stop anyone paying us too much atten…’

‘Where’s Abu Famir?’ Amit asked. His accent had a strange tinge to it. ‘I need to get Abu Famir out…’ A moment of breathlessness. ‘I need to get him out of…’

‘Abu Famir’s here. We’re taking care of it.’ Luke felt a moment of respect for Amit, if that was really his name. ‘Now come on, buddy. I’m going to help you out…’

Luke could do nothing other than place two strong hands under Amit’s armpits to lug him from the vehicle. The wounded man gasped in pain, but he didn’t resist and moments later he was leaning against the car, his body crooked but his face a little more alert than it had been — even though the dressing of his wound was like a sodden sponge.

‘Your friend wants to kill me?’ he whispered.

Luke gave him a long look. ‘You want to give him a reason not to?’

Amit closed his eyes. ‘What do I need to wear?’ he whispered.

All of a sudden Finn pulled his Sig from under his robe and held the barrel of the gun hard against the man’s forehead. ‘Answer the fucking question,’ he instructed. But as soon as Finn had spoken, Luke knocked his gun away from Amit, and the two Regiment men found themselves staring each other down.

‘Leave it,’ Luke said. ‘That’s an order.’

‘This is insane,’ Finn spat. ‘We hit a roadblock and it goes noisy, half the Republican Guard are going to be on our tail. It’s daylight. They’ll be able to see us from fucking Syria.’

Luke looked back at Amit. The guy was leaning, exhausted, against the car.

‘We’ll find a lying-up point,’ Luke decided. ‘Wait till nightfall and work out what to do. Let’s get him covered up.’

With obvious reluctance Finn fished the burka and headdress out of the boot. Amit didn’t really seem to register what they were doing as the two SAS men struggled to get the robe over him and the headdress on, before Luke helped him into the back of the car again. By the time Amit was sitting down, his head lolling at a slight angle and his face obscured behind the veil of the headdress, it was impossible to tell if he was awake or asleep. Hell, it was impossible to tell if he was even still alive.

Luke put the bonnet down, got back into the car and turned to Abu Famir, who was still in the front passenger seat. The Iraqi had calmed down and was looking defiantly at Luke over the top of his little round spectacles.

‘I will have great influence in the new Iraq,’ he announced with great self-importance. ‘I will see to it that you are well rewarded..’

‘Fuck your rewards,’ Luke replied. ‘Who is he?’

‘My deputy,’ Abu Famir stated flatly. ‘And I will not see him killed. ’

Luke glanced at Finn. You might not get a fucking choice, he thought to himself as he started the engine. Abu Famir was still talking. ‘I know your Prime Minister Stratton well. We have spoken on the telephone. He has great respect for my judgement…’

They set off again. They’d been travelling for five minutes when Luke became aware of a sound from the back seat. He looked over his shoulder. Amit was moving — shaking his head — and muttering to himself. ‘What’s he saying?’ he asked Finn.

‘Fuck knows. Delirious.’

‘He must see a doctor,’ Abu Famir declared.

‘Thanks. I’ll phone for a fucking appointment.’

A couple of minutes later Luke hit the brakes. Something had caught his attention. He and Finn got out of the car. The terrain to the right was rough and undulating, and 500 metres away there was an outcrop of bare rock, about the size of a small house. A thin wadi ran towards it, alongside which was a rough dirt track that fed off the road on which they were travelling about thirty metres forward of their position.

Luke took the wheel again. They trundled slowly towards the track, turned right along the wadi and made their way to the rocks. The closer they drew, the higher the rocks loomed. He stopped ten metres from them.

‘Let’s recce,’ he said to Finn. The two soldiers grabbed their carbines and started walking round the rocks. The sides were smooth and weathered; to start with, they looked like they offered little in the way of protection, but on the far edge, out of sight of the car, they found a crevice about three metres wide and ten high. It was dark inside — from the opening Luke and Finn could only see a couple of metres in.

‘Cover me,’ Luke said.

Finn nodded, and aimed his rifle into the crevice while Luke stepped in.

It smelt musty. The temperature was a couple of degrees lower than outside, but it was dry and the ground was flat. As his eyes grew used to the gloom, he saw that the crevice was about twenty metres deep and — crucially — unoccupied. No doubt the desert dwellers of this area knew of it, but as somewhere to lie up for the day it would do. He walked outside and nodded to Finn. ‘We can get the motor in,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

Finn didn’t look happy, and he started to reason with Luke. ‘Look, mate, don’t tell me you can’t see there’s something strange going on here. We can still ditch him. He could still die of his wounds. Abu Famir doesn’t have to realise, nor do the Ruperts back at base.’

Luke looked back across the bleak expanse of the desert. It looked totally empty, but he knew that danger could appear almost from nowhere: desert patrols, Republican Guard troops investigating the shoot-out back at the village, even innocent Bedouin wanderers stumbling across them. Their situation was dangerous, no doubt about it. Sometimes, though, you just had to go with your gut. This was one of those times, and Luke wasn’t going to waste Amit until he knew exactly who he was.

‘We lie up here till dark, then we go,’ he told Finn in a tone of voice that offered no argument, and the two of them hurried back round to the other side of the rocky outcrop to collect their car and their strange pair of passengers.

Chet and Suze headed west, then north. It was slow going. When Chet first pulled over, Suze looked alarmed. ‘What’s wrong? What are you doing?’

‘Checking for tails.’

He repeated this every twenty minutes. Occasionally he would do a U-turn, retrace his steps and take another route. A good tail, he knew, would drive past him when he pulled over, reduce their speed and then wait for Chet to catch up. He needed to try to scupper any tricks like that. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was the best he could do. Suze only asked him what he was doing once. After that they sat in awkward silence.

They stayed off the main roads, driving south of Oxford then north up towards Birmingham before bearing west towards the Welsh border. When he saw the first sign for Hereford, Chet had to fight the urge to follow it. He had friends there, of course. If he made a couple of phone calls, there’d be a welcoming committee for him at Credenhill. But a welcoming committee wasn’t what he wanted. Chet was going dark — for how long, he didn’t know.

The weather started to change around 15.00 hrs. Big black clouds billowed in from the west and the windscreen started to become spotted with rain.

‘A storm’s coming,’ Chet murmured. Suze didn’t respond.

As they crossed the border, thunder boomed across the sky and the rain fell more heavily. Ten minutes later it was a torrent. Every time there was a crack of thunder, Suze jumped in her seat. She was like a timid animal, ready to bolt but not knowing which way to go. Chet had no words of comfort for her. His mind was on other things. With the windscreen wipers going full pelt and everyone’s headlamps on, it had become more difficult for him to keep an eye on anyone following. Not good — but at least it was equally difficult for anyone trying to tail them.

The light was beginning to fail when he headed south, passing through several grim mid-Wales towns, their streets deserted because of the insistent rain. And it was almost dark when his headlamps lit up a signpost that read: ‘brecon beacons national park’.

‘Nearly there,’ he told Suze, like he was talking to a child at the end of a long journey.

Chet knew the geography of the Beacons better than he knew anywhere. He’d lost count of the number of nights he’d spent there, freezing his nuts off in the months approaching SAS selection, and many times subsequently on exercises. Every peak and valley was familiar to him; every road and every stream. When people are on the run, they return to places they know well. Chet’s pursuer might be expecting him to go back to his little flat off Seven Sisters Road; but in fact the rugged landscape of south-east Wales felt more like home than any shitty little corner of north London ever could.

The quieter and more winding the roads became, the more relaxed Chet felt. There were no cars now. Nobody following. No risk of vehicle identification cameras or unexpected police patrol cars. Just the Beacons, the heavy rain and a few hardy, bedraggled sheep. When he saw their final destination — the lights of a single, solitary farmstead a couple of hundred metres away, he felt more relieved than at any moment since he’d awoken on his birthday. And that seemed like weeks ago.

‘Where are we?’

It was the first thing Suze had said for a couple of hours. Her voice was cracked and quiet.

‘A B amp;B. We should be able to get a room here for the night. Stay under the radar.’

A pause.

‘We’ll tell the owners we’re married.’

Suze frowned. ‘What? Why?’

‘Because nobody remembers boring married couples. And because I want you in the same room as me, where I can see you. And where we can talk.’

Suze swallowed hard. ‘Right,’ she said, and they drove in silence up towards the farmhouse.

The rain was still heavy, and although it was only a short run from the car to the front door, they were half-soaked by the time they got there. They sheltered in a shallow porch where an old sign said ‘vacancies’, and they had to ring the bell twice before anyone answered. The door was opened by an elderly lady — seventy-five, perhaps older — with wispy grey hair, half-moon glasses and hearing aids on both ears. She peered at them suspiciously, as though guests were the last thing she expected at this bed and breakfast, while a floppy-eared cocker spaniel sniffed around her feet.

‘Yes?’

‘We need a room.’ Chet’s voice was abrupt.

‘A room?’ The old woman had a faint Welsh accent. She looked up at Chet’s scarred face with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Chet was about to reply, when Suze butted in. ‘We’ve travelled a very long way,’ she said, in much more friendly tones. ‘Might you have somewhere for us?’

The old lady’s face softened slightly now that Suze was talking to her. ‘Ah well, you’d better come in,’ she said. She took a few paces back, and the two of them walked into the house. ‘You can leave your rucksack in the porch,’ she told Chet. ‘We don’t want it dripping all over the floor now, do we?’

‘It’s dry,’ Chet told her. It was also heavy on account of the alabaster figurine he’d stashed in there.

Stepping into the farmhouse was like stepping into another century. Heavy oak beams traversed the low ceiling of what appeared to be a large reception-room-cum-kitchen, and a fire smouldered in a blackened inglenook. There was a very old gas oven along one wall, tired-looking floral worktops on either side, and a large butler’s sink, cracked and stained yellow. Heavy flagstones covered the floor and the whole place smelt of woodsmoke.

The spaniel started investigating Suze, sniffing round her feet and nuzzling her ankles with its nose. She bent down to scratch its ears and this seemed to please the old lady, who directed her conversation only at Suze. ‘She likes you,’ she said, in the slightly too loud tones of the almost-deaf.

Suze smiled and stood up again. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘How many nights, dear?’

Suze glanced at Chet, who covertly held up a single finger.

‘Just one,’ she replied, and the old lady took a leather-bound guestbook from the heavy mahogany sideboard.

‘I’ll be needing your names.’

‘Carter,’ Chet said quickly. ‘Mr and Mrs Carter.’

The old lady ignored him. ‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said to Suze. ‘I’m a little hard of hearing…’

Suze smiled and helped write the name in the guestbook. Moments later they were being led across the flagstone floor, into an adjoining hallway and up a wide, winding, stone staircase that led to the first floor. The old lady climbed it with difficulty. ‘I can’t be doing with stairs at my age,’ she complained. ‘I only come up here for guests.’

The landing had threadbare rugs and creaking floorboards. They passed one room on the right-hand side of the landing before the old lady showed them into a second room. Suze took one look at it and, still in buttering-up mode, said, ‘It’s perfect. We’ll…’

But Chet interrupted her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not this one.’

‘Why ever not?’ asked the old lady.

He glanced up to the ceiling where there was a removable panel, presumably leading to an attic. ‘What else have you got?’

The old lady looked offended, but she led them back along the landing towards the first door they’d passed. This room was much more basic than the other. Frayed curtains, a lumpy, iron-framed double bed. Next to the bed was an occasional table with a beige, functional telephone on it. The adjoining bathroom had mildewed grout between the tiles and an avocado-coloured suite stained white with limescale.

Chet checked the window. The frame was thin and rotten, but it was locked and it looked out on to the front where he’d parked. There was no attic hatch.

‘This will do,’ he said.

‘I can’t give you anything to eat, you know,’ the old woman announced. It sounded like an accusation. ‘And there’s nowhere nearby.’

‘Please, don’t worry,’ Suze told her. She clearly had a way with the oldies. ‘We’re glad for the room. You’re very kind to…’

‘Is there a key?’ Chet interrupted.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A key?’

The old woman looked at him as if he’d made a lewd suggestion. ‘Oh no… no, there’s no key.’

She shook her head and left the couple, muttering to herself and leaving the door ajar. Chet closed the door, then stood with his back against it. He gave Suze a piercing look — one that she couldn’t withstand for long. She sat on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

‘Are you sure we’re safe here?’

He walked over, grabbed a high-backed chair that was against the wall and lodged it under the door handle. ‘As safe as we can be. But if that woman who’s chasing us is the person I think she is, we won’t stay safe for long.’

‘Who do you think she is?’

But Chet didn’t answer.

She looked up at him again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For helping me.’

Chet shrugged. Suddenly his leg was very sore, and as he stepped into the room his limp was more pronounced than usual.

‘Your leg?’

He frowned. Then, after a moment, he pulled his trouser leg up a few inches to reveal the sturdy black shin of his artificial leg. Suze’s eyes widened but, he noticed, she didn’t look appalled. ‘I didn’t realise…’ she said. ‘How did it happen?’

‘I had a little disagreement with a man called Ivanovic. It was some time ago.’

‘That looks like more than a disagreement.’

‘He wanted to kill me. I didn’t want him to.’

‘Were you in the military?’ Suze asked.

‘You could say that.’

A pause.

‘Does it… does it hurt?’

Chet didn’t want to discuss his disability. There were more urgent topics. ‘Tell me, why were you eavesdropping on that meeting?’

Suze bit her lip and looked as though she was gathering her thoughts. ‘It’s the Grosvenor Group,’ she said at last.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you know who they are?’

Chet walked over to the window and looked out. The rain was still sheeting. It hammered against the window. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Dickheads in suits?’

‘You work for them?’

‘I’m a freelance security consultant. They pay me to debug rooms, that’s all. It’s not like I’m sitting round the board table.’

‘Of course not. You’re not the kind of person they want.’ She took a few deep breaths and looked around nervously. ‘They can’t find us here, can they?’

Chet shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

Suze closed her eyes briefly and carried on talking — slowly and in fragments, as though she was unsure of herself. ‘The Grosvenor Group… it’s an American… a multinational… a kind of.. ’ A look of frustration crossed her face as she searched for the right word. ‘… A conglomeration of venture capitalists. They invest money in other, smaller companies… sometimes they buy them out totally…’ She gave an apologetic little smile. ‘I don’t really understand how all that stuff works.’

Nor did Chet. As far as he could tell, the Grosvenor Group was a bunch of money men. In his book, that meant arseholes.

Another crash of thunder, and the rain gave a renewed burst against the windowpanes. Suze stood up and started pacing the room. Suddenly her green eyes were flashing. ‘The Grosvenor Group mostly puts its money into military enterprises — arms companies, aerospace, that kind of thing.’ She stopped pacing. ‘Basically, they invest in people killing other people.’

Yeah, Chet thought. Welcome to the world.

‘The Grosvenor Group makes a lot of money,’ Suze continued. ‘I mean, like, a lot of money. Billions. You don’t make that kind of cash without influence. Their board is like a… a Who’s Who of Western politics. Former American senators, people with influence in Washington and Whitehall, politicians who might one day return to office. They’ve even got former US presidents advising them.’

Chet shook his head. ‘So some politicians are involved in the arms trade. That doesn’t explain why somebody’s trying to kill us.’

Suddenly she turned. ‘For God’s sake,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t you see? If the US and the UK go to war in Iraq, it’ll be like all the Grosvenor Group’s Christmases have come at once. Arms concessions, reconstruction deals.’

‘People have always made money out of war, Suze.’

She stared at him contemptuously. ‘And for some people, it’s all they care about. My father was killed by a landmine in Angola. He was out there immunising kids. You might think it’s OK to sell shit like that. I don’t. Where’s that bloody tape?’

Chet walked over to his rucksack and rummaged around. He pulled out the Dictaphone and handed it to Suze, who sat back down on the edge of the bed and started fiddling with the controls.

For a while there was no sound in the room other than the rain against the window and the rewinding of the cassette. When Suze pressed play, all Chet heard was the crackly static that had filled his ears when he’d listened in with the headphones the day before, which morphed every ten or fifteen seconds into the sound of distorted, indistinguishable voices. He looked at Suze. She was hunched over the machine, her face intent.

They’d been listening for a couple of minutes when, all of a sudden, the static and distortion evolved into something recognisable.

‘…it’s extremely important that any funds payable now or in the future cannot be traced.’

‘Prime Minister, that’s a given. We’re very good at it…’

‘How do you propose to…?’

The voices disappeared for a few seconds, replaced with a high-pitched whine of feedback. When that faded, the American was speaking again.

‘…worldwide network of business associates. If we ask them, they’ll offer you consultancy fees, speaking arrangements — all highly lucrative, Prime Minister. Highly lucrative. And untraceable to the Grosvenor Group. Hell, you won’t even need to rely on your memoirs for a pension. You could give the advance to charity. You’ll be raking it in from all…’

Static.

Distortion.

Chet stared at the machine as the implications of what he’d just heard sunk in.

It continued to play for another minute, before he heard words that were more familiar to him.

‘Trust me, Prime Minister Stratton. This war is good to go… the Americans are all on board. The question is, how are you going to get it through…?’

More static.

Suze stopped the tape and looked up at him.

Chet had a sick sensation in his stomach. At the same time he felt as though a fog had been lifted. ‘The Grosvenor Group are paying Stratton to take us to war? Paying him personally?’

Suze stared hopelessly at him.

Chet thought about his Regiment mates — behind enemy lines, if his guess was right; he thought of the regular green army troops, preparing to move on Baghdad. How many of them would make it home?

‘Who else knows about this?’

‘Nobody. Only us.’

‘Aren’t you part of some protest group — activists?’

Suze shook her head almost apologetically.

‘Where did you get the laser listening device?’ he asked. The question had been nagging him for a while.

‘The Internet. There’s a guy who…’ She gave him a hopeless look. ‘I spent everything I had…’ It seemed like she was telling the truth.

Chet tried to clear his head. So many things suddenly made sense: Stratton’s meeting on the QT, away from Downing Street; the relentless assassin, tracking down first him, then Suze. The order had clearly gone out to eliminate them, and that order would stand for as long as they stayed alive.

Unless…

‘It’s extremely important that any funds payable now or in the future cannot be traced…’

Chet was trained to make the best use of the materials at his disposal, and right now that tape was their best weapon. Their only weapon. A scant resource, and they had to use it wisely.

‘What are we going to do?’ Suze asked.

Chet looked around the room. Hiding out here was OK for a bit, but it wasn’t a long-term solution.

‘We make it public,’ he said.

Suze blinked at him. ‘Won’t that…?’

‘As soon as this is in all the papers, Stratton and the Grosvenor Group will have bigger fish to fry.’

‘Are you sure?’

Chet gave her a direct look. ‘No. Not really. But we haven’t got a choice. They will find us, Suze. Eventually. Somehow. They will find us.’

She swallowed hard. ‘All right,’ she said, her voice timid.

‘Until then, we stay dark. We don’t contact anyone. We avoid populated areas where we might get picked up on CCTV. We don’t use mobile phones, bank cards or passports. And you stay close to me, you understand?’

Suze nodded, and Chet limped over to the window again. The storm was raging, the rain hammering against the window and the night was black. That was something, at least.

‘I’m scared,’ Suze said.

‘Good,’ Chet replied. ‘Stay scared. That way you don’t mess up.’

He turned to look at her and saw that fear was written clearly on her face. He didn’t blame her, because he felt it too.

The sound of the rain was joined by the sound of the shower in the en-suite bathroom. Chet paced, waiting for Suze to finish. Even though she was only in the adjoining room, he felt edgy not having her in his line of sight.

The shower stopped and the door opened. Suze appeared. Her red hair was clean and scraped back off her face, some of it sticking to the nape of her neck. She wore a towel wrapped around her torso that revealed her slim arms and her slight, sloping shoulders; and she was carrying a little bundle of her clothes in front of her. Her lips were slightly parted. She looked beautiful, but fragile. Like she could break at any minute. Suddenly she was no longer the crazy girl on the roof or the frightened target of a ruthless assassin. She was a young woman — vulnerable, certainly, but attractive and looking at Chet with an expression he understood.

‘I feel better now I’m clean,’ she said. There was a slight tremor in her voice, and Chet could tell she was trying to sound conversational.

‘I can wait in there if you want to get changed,’ he offered.

Suze didn’t answer. Instead she put her clothes in an untidy pile on the floor, then took a tentative step towards him. Another step, and when she was close enough she rested her head against his chest.

They stood there like that for a moment. Awkwardly. Chet could hear her nervous breathing, and feel the beat of her pulse against him. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and then another. Suze felt tiny in his embrace. Her damp hair soaked through his shirt, and its fragrance filled his senses. It smelt good.

A boom of thunder. Suze was startled. ‘When will this bloody storm finish?’ she whispered. As if, in the grand scheme of things, a storm was important.

She looked up towards Chet and he felt her breath against his face. Her body was warm.

‘You should get some sleep,’ he said. ‘Take the bed. I’ll…’

‘I’m sorry about the things I said to you,’ she interrupted him.

‘No…’

He didn’t finish, because suddenly — as if she might lose the courage if she didn’t act immediately — Suze had brushed her lips against his. Chet frowned. It had been a long time since anybody had given him that kind of attention; since anybody had seen past the scars on his face or his awkward gait.

Suze stepped backwards. There was no smile on her face; just a kind of nervousness, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had just done. Especially here. Especially now.

‘I need to wash,’ Chet told her. His words were stilted.

Suze glanced at the floor. ‘Right…’ she said. ‘OK…’ She watched him as he limped self-consciously past her and into the bathroom.

It was still steamy in there from her shower. Chet had to wipe the condensation from the mirror, and he only had a few seconds to look at his tired, scarred face before it misted over again. He unbuttoned his shirt and splashed cold water over his face and torso, hoping it would clear his mind as well as his skin. It didn’t. The words on the tape replayed themselves in his head, and the smell of Suze’s freshly washed hair lingered in his senses. She was scared. Vulnerable. That much was obvious. She was relying on him to protect her. Chet was no psychologist, but it wasn’t too hard to work out that her advances just now were a symptom of that.

Images rose in his mind. The intruder in his room, her face full of steely purpose. Doug, his friend, dead, broken and spattered in his own gore on the railway track. Despite all his setbacks, the guy had been so full of life. And now…

Chet winced at the memory.

The wind howled outside once more, and a fresh wave of rain battered the window. For a moment Chet forgot about shadowy intruders and corrupt politicians. It was bleak outside and they were alone. Why shouldn’t they take comfort in each other’s company? Seize the day — that’s what soldiers always did. He wiped the mirror again. A battered face looked back out at him. Chet grabbed a towel and dried his face and upper body, before slinging it round his neck, taking a deep breath and opening the door into the bedroom.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he barked the moment he saw Suze.

She was sitting on the edge of the mattress, her towel still wrapped around her, and she was fumbling with the beige telephone on the side table, slamming it back down on its cradle.

‘I was just…’

‘Christ, Suze, do you think this is some sort of game? They want to kill us.’

She stared at him, looking like she might cry.

‘I said we don’t contact anyone. Do you know how easy it is to trace a fucking phone call? Who were you calling? I said, who were you calling? ’

‘I… it was… oh God… it was just the Met Office. I wanted to know how long this storm was going to last.’

Chet stared at her, then closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘Just don’t… use… the phone, all right?’

When he opened his eyes, she was standing by the side of the bed. ‘I’m really… I’m really sorry. I didn’t think it was…’ His voice trailed off and she chewed at her lower lip.

Suze took a tentative step towards him, and then another. Before Chet knew it, she was in his arms again, trembling slightly as she pressed her damp hair against his chest. They stayed like that for a minute before she stepped backwards again.

One pace.

Two.

She inclined her head slightly, then let the towel fall. It dropped heavily to the floor to reveal her slim, delicately curved body, her pale skin and her small breasts.

Chet glanced over to the door. It was still wedged shut with the chair. He turned to look at Suze. She was lying on the bed, and finally managed to give him a nervous smile.

‘Look after me,’ she whispered.

Chet hesitated for a moment, but then, without another word, he went to her.

As the rain fell in the Brecon Beacons, it also fell on the southern outskirts of London. It kept most visitors away from the Greenacres Retirement Home, a recently, and cheaply, built establishment next to the main road through Morden. In truth it hardly took freak weather conditions to discourage visitors to this place. The corridors were starkly lit and smelt of disinfectant and hospital food. There were no stairs, but lifts and ramps to enable wheelchairs to move around the buildings. The day room was decorated with floral curtains and dark carpet tiles. Channel Four News was playing on the TV, even though there was nobody there to watch it; at this time of the evening all the clients of Greenacres were encouraged to be in their rooms. It was easier for the poorly paid, often temporary, often Eastern European staff that way.

In Room 213, on the second floor overlooking the main road, an old lady sat in her wheelchair. It was dim in here — only a low-voltage bulb in a bedside lamp lit the room, but she preferred it that way. Her eyesight was deteriorating, and she found that bright lights almost blinded her.

Her right foot and ankle were swollen and wrapped in a bandage to protect the sores on her skin. She had decided a long time ago that it was easier to stay in the wheelchair all day than haul herself in and out of the armchair that was, with the exception of her single bed and a glossy pine dressing table, the only piece of furniture in her sparse room. A pink hyacinth — her favourite flower — was blooming on the windowsill behind her. Its fragrance went some way to disguising the institutional smell of the place, but the old lady wasn’t thinking about that. She was holding the telephone against her ear, and she was clearly flustered and confused.

‘I… I don’t understand dear,’ she stammered. Her voice was as frail as the thin hands that held the receiver.

The old lady frowned as she listened to the voice at the other end.

‘But… but… where are you? What do you mean, you can’t visit me? I don’t understand. Hello? Hello? ’

She looked at the phone. And then, with frightened and perplexed eyes, she let it fall from her hands and squinted up to see the other woman in the room with her, half hidden in the shadows behind the door.

‘Stay quiet, or I’ll kill you.’

It was clear to the intruder that the old woman was confused, struggling to understand who she was and why she was here. It was perhaps the strangeness and uncertainty of her situation as much as the Beretta Model 70 semi-automatic aimed at her head that was now distressing the old lady.

‘Your daughter?’ the younger woman asked.

The old lady shook her head but she was too scared to keep the pretence up for long, and after a few seconds a pathetic little mewing came out of her lips, accompanied by a trembling of her whole body.

The woman put a mobile phone to her ear. She waited a moment before saying a single word. ‘Traced?’

The reply was equally curt. A male voice that belonged to someone she had never met and never would. ‘Traced.’

She put the phone back in her pocket and returned her attention to the old lady. She was still making fretful little noises. Still shaking. But she had the presence of mind to reach for the body of the phone — an attempt, the woman presumed, to call through to reception and alert them to the intruder in her room. It was a moment’s work to pull the phone from her weak hands and place it out of reach on the dressing table. The mewing grew a little more desperate.

She needed to be killed, of course. That much was obvious. She had seen the intruder’s face and knew what she was after. A gunshot was out of the question. Often the best you could do was mislead people about the cause of death. So it came quite naturally for her to look around the room in search of a more subtle instrument than the Beretta.

It didn’t take her long.

The old lady’s dressing table was neatly arranged. Two fading family photographs of a young girl and an older man, a hairbrush, a bottle of Nivea skin cream and a Tupperware box containing an array of medication. The woman looked through the box, discounting the vitamins and the cod liver oil and paying attention to the less benign drugs. The bottle she finally selected was made of brown glass and bore a printed pharmacist’s label. Warfarin. One capsule to be taken once a day, it instructed, and — in stark, bold letters — ‘in case of overdose seek immediate medical attention’. She shook the bottle. It was almost full.

‘I mustn’t take those,’ the old lady whispered. She sounded rather like a child repeating her parent’s instructions. ‘The nurse gives them to me. I mustn’t take them myself… it’s very important.. ’ She nodded rapidly to emphasise her point.

The woman ignored her and, laying her Beretta on the dressing table way out of reach, spilled some of the little pink capsules into the palm of her hand. The old lady started shaking her head as she drew near, and the mewing started again, more panicked than before.

The first capsule was the most difficult to insert into the old lady’s mouth. It meant pinching her papery, wrinkled cheeks with one hand — not too hard, so as to avoid bruising — and using the other to force it past her brittle teeth and on to the back of her tongue. Warm saliva collected around the woman’s two fingers as she forced the old lady’s head back, and inserted two more capsules in quick succession. There was a strangled, gargling sound from her throat, which grew more severe as the capsules were forced down. Now the old lady tried to beat her attacker with her fists, but she was much too weak to make any difference. Another three capsules were forced down her throat.

Then three more.

And another three.

The old lady was choking for breath now, holding her grey, veiny hands around her neck as the woman stood back and examined her handiwork. She didn’t fully know what the short-term effects of a Warfarin overdose were, but that didn’t matter. The capsules were only there in the unlikely event of an autopsy. She stepped over to the bed, picked up the pillow and returned to the wheelchair.

Even through the fog of her confusion, the old lady knew what was about to happen. She looked up with bloodshot eyes and shook her head as forcefully as she could. ‘Please,’ she managed to gasp through her breathlessness. ‘Please, no. My daughter…’

The woman put her lips just an inch from the old woman’s ear. ‘Your daughter will be joining you very soon,’ she whispered. ‘When I kill her, I will explain that her mother died squeaking like a cat.’

The old lady shook her head and a tear forced its way from her withered tear sacs into the corner of her eye. ‘Suze is a good girl,’ she whispered. ‘A good girl. You mustn’t hurt her…’

The woman sneered slightly at these words — the last, she knew, that the old lady would ever utter. She placed the pillow over her face — gently, because she knew that to press too hard could cause bruising around the nose and mouth — and then lightly pressed with her free hand against the back of her head, entwining her fingers in the thin, dry hair.

It was pathetically easy. The old lady’s struggles were feeble; the way she flailed her arms and kicked her thin legs quite ineffectual; her mewing stopped and she was silent. The woman’s eyes shone in the gloom as she went about her work. And because her victim was old and her lungs were tired, the process was quick. After forty-five seconds the flailing had eased off; after a minute and a half the body had slumped in the wheelchair. The woman removed the pillow and put two fingers to the jugular. Nothing. The old lady’s face was still and grey. She replaced the pillow on the bed, then wheeled the chair in front of the dressing table, where she left the Warfarin bottle open just within reach of the fresh corpse.

A new smell hit her senses. Urine. That was no surprise. Now she was dead, the old lady’s muscles were relaxing, and that included the bladder. Sometimes it happened sooner, sometimes later. In this case it had happened almost immediately, and now there was a dripping of liquid from the edge of the wheelchair on to the carpet. The woman was experienced enough to know that the bowels would probably follow, but by the time that occurred, she would be long gone.

It was calm in the room now. The rain continued to spatter against the window; the pink hyacinth remained the only splash of colour in this gloomy place. The woman allowed herself a bleak smile. The staff here would be used to occupants dying. When they found the old lady they would surely assume that she had come to the end of her natural life. If anyone did decide to investigate further, they would discover the overdose of Warfarin and assume that the confused old lady had had one bout of confusion too many.

She opened the door and walked out. The corridor was deserted, and she didn’t encounter a single person until she was down in reception, where nobody paid her any attention anyway. Outside the home, she pulled out her phone and called a number.

‘Mrs McArthur has quietly slipped from our embrace,’ she said.

Then she waited as the voice at the other end read out an address.

TWELVE

For a soldier in the field, the sound a chopper makes is like the sound of Christmas bells. Nine times out of ten it means casevac or exfiltration. One time out of ten it means something more sinister. This was one of those times.

Luke knew from the rough, mechanical sound of the rotary blades it was a Russian MI-8, even before he saw it. ‘Not one of ours,’ he told Finn as they stood quietly by the mouth of the cave, their assault rifles strapped to their bodies. They weren’t expecting an exfil, but if it had been a rescue helicopter it would be travelling low, fast and in a straight line towards them. This one sounded like it was circling above. Searching.

They stayed in the shadows as they looked out and up into the cloudy sky. Two minutes later the MI-8 appeared and circled above the desert just half a klick from their position, low enough for them to be able to see it.

‘Reckon they’re looking for us?’ Finn’s voice was dry.

‘If Fozzie and the others are compromised, maybe it’s just increased security?’ Luke frowned. ‘Put it this way: I don’t think it’s a jolly.’ He checked his watch. Midday. Ample time for word of the firefight back in the village to have reached military headquarters in Baghdad and for them to have dispatched a heli. Did the authorities know that Abu Famir had been hiding out there and was now on the move? Maybe, maybe not. But Luke had to plan for the worst. He had to assume that the Iraqis were coming for them.

He looked over his shoulder into the gloom of the cave. Abu Famir was half kneeling, half lying by the Toyota, deep in prayer. The guy was a pain in the arse — weaselly, whingeing, never stopped talking. No wonder the British and Americans wanted him to be prime minister of the new Iraq: he had all the right qualities.

He turned back to Finn. ‘We better hope that cloud cover stays put,’ he said.

‘Roger that,’ Finn replied. ‘We get a bright moon tonight and it’ll be the shortest E and E in the history of the fucking Regiment.’ He looked back over at Abu Famir. ‘I’d like to put one in the back of that wanker’s head and all,’ he said.

At that moment the noise of the chopper altered. From their hidden vantage point, they saw it change direction and head straight towards the cave. The two men stepped back quickly, taking cover further inside, and Luke felt himself holding his breath as the helicopter hovered almost exactly above them. It stayed like that for a full minute, no more than thirty metres high and now so loud that it was impossible to talk. Then it curled away as quickly as it had arrived.

The two men exchanged a glance. It was clear they were both thinking the same thing: have they spotted us?

Another noise, but from inside this time: Amit crying out in pain. Finn made no attempt to hide his irritation, but before he could speak, Luke told him, ‘Keep stag,’ then stepped back into the cave.

They had driven the Toyota as deep inside as possible, opened all the side doors and turned the back seat into a makeshift hospital bed. Finn had suspended a drip bag from the roof and mainlined it into the back of Amit’s hand, but things weren’t looking good for their companion. He’d lost a lot of blood and they had only one morphine shot left. His bouts of delirium were now more frequent than his bouts of lucidity. All in all, the guy was fucked up.

Luke crouched down by his head. ‘Amit, buddy,’ he said quietly. ‘How you doing?’ His voice was accompanied by the gentle drone of Abu Famir’s muttered praying.

Amit’s eyes shot open. ‘Maya?’ he whispered. ‘Efoh at… Maya…’

Whatever language he was speaking, it wasn’t Arabic. Which meant Abu Famir was lying to them: their companion wasn’t Iraqi. No fucking surprise there. But he wasn’t Jordanian either.

‘Hey, buddy. Nobody called Maya here.’ He looked over at Abu Famir, who was still praying, then back at Amit. ‘You want to tell me who you’re working for?’

Amit took a few shallow breaths before he spoke again. ‘Abu Famir,’ he said. ‘I need to… I need to get him out… It doesn’t matter about me…’

Luke was about to reply when there was a noise from the mouth of the cave. A hiss. Finn was beckoning him over.

‘I’ll be back in a minute, buddy. You hold on, OK?’

He hurried silently over to where Finn was stationed, and he didn’t need to speak to know what the problem was. There was a voice on the wind. A lone voice, singing.

Someone was nearby. Luke held his breath.

Through the mouth of the cave he could see, just coming into view from the right and about fifty metres away, a herd of perhaps fifteen goats. A single person was driving them — a Bedouin, from the look of him, wearing a white dishdash and red headdress. He was looking up at the chopper still circling in the sky about 200 metres away, but there was no doubt that the goats were wandering towards the cave.

‘Shit,’ Luke muttered.

He hurried back inside to find Abu Famir still praying. He nudged the Iraqi with his foot. ‘Shut up,’ he said.

‘But I am…’

‘Shut the fuck up. Someone’s coming.’

Abu Famir scrambled to his feet.

‘Get in the car,’ Luke told him. ‘Now.’

‘No violence,’ Abu Famir whispered. ‘I will not…’

‘Get in the fucking car!’

He returned to the front of the cave. Finn was in the shadows, one knee on the ground and his weapon in the firing position. The goatherd was driving his beasts directly into Finn’s line of fire. He was only twenty metres away now, and from this distance Luke could make out that he was singing in accented English, and gradually the words became clearer. ‘Walk like… an Eee-jyp-shuun… walk like… an Eee-jyp-shuun.’

Luke loosened a knife in his ops waistcoat. ‘If he sees us,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll jump him before he can shout out. If he runs, slot him.’

Finn kept his sights on the goatherd, while Luke took up position in the shadows on the other side of the cave’s mouth, one knee on the ground and weapon engaged.

The singing had stopped and now there was silence. After about a minute, however, another sound reached Luke’s ears: a gentle clanking of the bells round the goats’ necks. An occasional bleat. Then the musty, shitty stench of the animals as they wandered within ten metres of their position.

Luke felt his blood pumping in his veins. It was only a goatherd — no trouble for two fully equipped Regiment soldiers, but that wasn’t the point. If they killed him, he might be missed — they were no more than five miles from the village, and that would mean more people searching the area; but if he saw them, they couldn’t risk letting him go and warning other people of their presence.

The first goat — a scrawny thing with great, bulging eyes — came into view. It stopped just outside the cave and pawed at the dust while several other animals surrounded it.

The goatherd joined them.

Luke could see his face. He was in his early teens, the dark skin of his cheeks coated with bumfluff. He shouted something at the goats in a reedy voice, and made a clicking sound with his throat, but it seemed to have no effect. The goatherd shrugged, then removed a leather satchel from his shoulder and sat cross-legged on the ground. He rummaged in his satchel and pulled something out. Luke examined it through the sight of his assault rifle. It was an old cassette Walkman. The kid fitted the earphones to his head, pressed a button and continue to rummage in the satchel. This time he pulled out a rolled-up flatbread and started to eat.

The Regiment men stayed perfectly still. Luke kept the youth’s head firmly in his sights. Now and then a goat strayed into his line of fire, but that was OK, because he knew Finn had the kid covered too.

A groan from inside the cave. It was Amit, and the sound made Luke’s skin prickle. One of the goats looked up, but the goatherd was lost in the music. Five minutes passed while he finished his meal, unaware of the danger he was in. He licked the fingers of his right hand, removed the Walkman and stood up again. He clicked ineffectually at his goats once more. Then he turned round to peer inside the cave.

Luke prepared to fire.

The goatherd sniffed.

He turned his back on the cave and looked out towards the desert. It was as if he was checking for something. Maybe Luke should nail him now, before he saw them and cried out…

The goatherd looked left and right. Apparently satisfied that he was alone, he crouched down on the ground and raised the hem of his dishdash.

That’s right, buddy, Luke thought to himself. Have yourself a good shit and then fuck off out of here.

Luke was thankful for the stench of the animals, as it masked the waft of the kid’s turd. Neither man moved as the goatherd wiped his arse with his left hand, then stood up and allowed the dishdash to fall back down to his ankles. He shouted at the goats again, urging them away from the cave’s entrance, and started wandering off. The goats followed, but after only thirty seconds the goatherd turned and looked back towards the cave.

Had he seen them? Or was he just checking on the two goats that were straggling?

Two minutes later the kid was out of sight, the noise and stench of his beasts had disappeared and everything was silent.

Luke lowered his weapon and moved over to Finn. ‘Remind me not to shake Abdul by the hand if we bump into him again.’

Finn ignored the comment. ‘There could be more where he came from,’ he said.

Luke nodded, then looked back into the cave. Should he tell Finn his suspicions about Amit? He decided not. His mate was bordering on insubordination as it was, and feeling mutinous. Give him a whisper of an excuse and he’d plug Amit on the spot. Luke didn’t want that to happen until he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

He checked the time. 12.28. Five hours till sunset. When darkness came, they’d need to get on to the road and hope their luck held. And in the absence of luck, they’d have to use force.

He couldn’t really decide if he was looking forward to nightfall, or dreading it.

21.32 hrs.

They were ready to go. The cave was pitch-dark, and Luke and Finn operated by means of NV. Each set had an infrared torch which lit up the cave for them but was invisible to Amit and Abu Famir, both in the back of the Toyota. The Iraqi’s frightened eyes stared blindly in the darkness and glinted in the haze of the night vision, whereas Amit’s were covered by the burka headdress that he was wearing again. A fresh saline drip was hanging from the plastic handle above the passenger door, covered with a spare hanging dishdash by way of disguise.

Amit was shaking feverishly, his wound almost as bad as any Luke had ever seen. The flesh looked like liquidised liver, and the blood had started to congeal around it, crispy in places, thick and wobbly in others. As well as shaking, Amit was talking to himself. Through the burka it was difficult to make out what he was saying, and most of it was in a language Luke didn’t understand anyway. But he caught the name ‘Maya’ more than once, and occasionally a confused reference to Abu Famir; otherwise Amit’s words just sounded like slurred ramblings.

Luke recced outside. Since the goatherd had gone on his way, three choppers had flown over their position. Now the night sky was mercifully cloudy: no starlight, no moon. The temperature was already dropping and there was a slight wind, which once more brought with it the distant howling of the wild desert animals. If there were any patrol vehicles in the vicinity, Luke couldn’t see them. He returned to the cave, where Finn was standing five metres from the car.

‘Ready?’ he asked quietly.

‘Yeah.’

Luke paused. ‘Look, mate,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t agree with my decisions, but the one thing that’s going to screw this up is if we’re not singing from the same hymn sheet.’

Silence. And then Finn asked: ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We’ve got eighty miles of main road to cover before we can turn off. I reckon we’re looking at two hours. We only passed one static checkpoint on the way through, and that was about an hour in, so we should reach it about 11.00. Fifty-fifty they’ll just wave us through, but if not we’ll have to use force then floor it to the border. Maybe swap vehicles if we can hijack another one. You still have the crossing we used marked as a waypoint on the GPS?’

‘Of course.’ Finn paused. ‘We need a Plan B. If we have to get off the road and take Abu Famir across country by foot, we can’t leave his bum chum to tell anyone what we’re up to or where we’re headed. We’ll have to do him.’

‘All right then. Agreed. Keep your weapon at the ready. Let’s move.’

They climbed into the Toyota, where their carbines were stashed by the front seats, and Luke started the engine. It echoed around the cave as he carefully manoeuvred out into the desert night and back along the dirt track to the road.

They drove slowly by the light of their NV. They saw no one. After about twenty minutes on undulating ground, the main highway came into view again, vehicles passing at the rate of about one every thirty seconds. Luke pulled into the side of the road. They removed their NV and Luke double-checked his Sig, which now had a black silencer fitted to the barrel. As he manipulated the gun, he spoke to Abu Famir. ‘If anyone stops us, I’ll do the talking. Right?’

In his rear-view mirror he saw the Iraqi’s spectacles glint in the darkness. ‘No violence,’ he said.

‘No fucking talking,’ Luke retorted.

They pulled out into the main road. Like the previous night, it wasn’t very busy. About one vehicle in twenty was military, but there were sufficient civilian cars for the Toyota to be quite unremarkable.

Luke kept a steady speed. Sixty klicks an hour. Not too fast, not too slow. As he drove, his mind turned over. He remembered the three heli flypasts while they were in the cave. Was that just a coincidence — a standard military manoeuvre in this time of heightened security? Or were they looking for someone specific? Had word of the firefight in the village sixteen hours earlier reached the authorities? They had to assume it was known that somewhere out there was a vehicle with four occupants, one of them injured. They had to assume that the checkpoint guards had been alerted.

They’d been travelling along the main road in tense silence for some fifty minutes when Finn reached out and tuned in the car radio. Arabic music filled the car.

‘Fuck’s sake, Finn,’ Luke snapped. ‘Turn that shit off.’ He reached out and switched it off himself, ignoring the look Finn gave him.

Amit groaned in the back. In the mirror Luke could see that his head had slumped and Abu Famir was looking at his burka-clad neighbour with a worried expression. ‘How far until we…?’

‘Shut it.’

There were lights up ahead. The checkpoint. Vehicles in front of them were slowing down.

A blanket of silence fell over the car, ruffled only by the short, sharp breaths coming from beneath Amit’s headdress. Luke felt for his handgun and sensed Finn doing the same. He looked ahead. On the other side of the road the barrier was down and a long line of vehicles — eight or nine in total, their headlamps dazzling in the darkness — were queuing behind it. The soldiers on duty surrounded around the frontrunner.

‘I’ve got three men on the other side,’ Finn reported. ‘Could be more behind the oncoming headlights.’

Luke nodded and turned his attention to their side of the road. Here the barrier was pointing upwards, and because they weren’t dazzled by the lights of the oncoming traffic, he was able to count the troops more precisely: four guards were manning their side of the road, but they were talking and laughing.

There were five cars between them and the checkpoint, spaced about twenty metres apart and all travelling at a respectful crawl. Directly ahead was a chunky old grey Mercedes, one of its brake lights not working. ‘Put your fucking foot down,’ Luke murmured. But none of the cars increased speed. If anything, they slowed down as they approached the checkpoint. It made sense: nobody wanted to attract any more attention to themselves than they needed to, even if they didn’t have enough gear to start a small war stashed in the boot.

The Merc was just passing through the open barrier when Luke caught the eye of one of the guards. He looked a bit older than the others, and his expression was a little flintier. His AK was hanging diagonally across his body, but he had one hand firmly resting on the handle. He had set himself apart from his three colleagues and was paying more attention to the checkpoint.

Luke looked away, concentrating on the road and doing what he could to appear unassuming; but his peripheral vision was focused on the guard, who was moving towards the barrier. Luke felt his blood chill. ‘Stand by,’ he muttered to Finn.

His mate was already wielding his Sig.

‘Burn it,’ said Finn, his lips barely moving. ‘Just get through..’

Luke accelerated slightly — not fast enough to make him look suspicious. All the while, his mind was calculating. What if the barrier went down before they reached it? Could he crash through? Probably not: the impact would take out their windscreen at the very least. They’d be blinded by glass fragments…

‘Luke, if this goes noisy we’ll have these fuckers on our tail from here to…’

‘Thanks, buddy,’ replied Luke. He trod down a bit more.

The guard was just making to close the checkpoint when they crossed. In the mirror, Luke saw the barrier slam down and the car behind them come to a halt. The guards swarmed, but now Luke was able to speed up, and the checkpoint soon vanished into the darkness.

Finn exhaled hard. ‘Jesus. I thought it was all about to go Tora Bora for a minute back then.’

Luke allowed himself no such expression of relief. In the sky up ahead he could see lights. They were several klicks in the distance and they were circling.

‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he murmured.

22.17 hrs. Distance to the border: thirty klicks.

There was a fit of coughing from the back of the car that morphed into a strangled kind of sound. Amit slumped across the seat, falling on Abu Famir and yanking the drip down from its hanging place. Luke pulled over and opened up the bonnet as cover while Finn opened Amit’s door and pulled him up to a sitting position. He removed the burka. The wounded man’s face was deathly white; his eyes were rolling and an awful smell was coming off his body. Finn reattached the drip and slipped the headdress back on. Then he turned to Luke. ‘Trauma. Massive blood loss. The guy hasn’t got long.’

‘If he dies, he dies,’ Luke said flatly. ‘We can dump the body.’ He looked down the road. ‘It can’t be more than ten klicks till we turn off down towards the smugglers’ route. Bit of luck, we’ll be out of this shitty country by…’

He looked up, suddenly aware of a chopper approaching from a couple of klicks away. The two men exchanged a glance.

‘Let’s keep moving,’ Finn said.

‘Roger that.’

They took their seats again, and continued down the road.

22.31 hrs. Distance to the border: twenty-two klicks.

Finn had his GPS unit on his lap. ‘Two klicks till we turn…’

He stopped.

‘What the…?’ Luke groaned.

Two hundred metres ahead, he could see a line of red brake lights; thirty seconds later they too were part of the queue. Two light-armoured military vehicles were parked up on either side of the road, and Luke counted seven armed Red Berets, three of them standing in the middle of the highway forming a temporary roadblock — newly established since the previous night — while the remaining four were searching each vehicle that passed. Not a cursory glance, either: all the occupants of each car were outside; the bonnets and the boots were raised. And as the Red Berets allowed each searched vehicle through the roadblock, only to repeat the operation on the next car, it became clear that they were stopping everyone.

‘What… what are you going to…?’ Abu Famir’s voice trailed off.

Luke and Finn didn’t reply. They just glanced at each other, nodded once and subtly readied their pistols. Luke felt for his carbine.

Four cars to go before it was their turn to be searched.

Three.

From the back came a murmur. Abu Famir had closed his eyes and was muttering as if in prayer. Luke looked at the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Enough to get them across the border again? It would have to be, because once he put his foot on the accelerator, there’d be no time to stop.

Two cars ahead of them in the queue. Ten metres between them and the nearest guard.

The Regiment men didn’t need to speak. They knew what they had to do. Luke pulled the hammer back on his suppressed Sig and checked the mirrors. Six cars were waiting behind them: all — so far as he could tell — civilian. Each man scrambled to get his M4 ready, poised down by his leg.

‘No violence,’ Abu Famir repeated, but even he sounded unconvinced, as though he knew there was only one way this was going.

One car.

The Merc’s occupants — two elderly men — stood obediently by the vehicle while the Red Berets searched it. It took about two minutes, after which the guards nodded to the driver to get back into the car. They were walking towards the Toyota even before the car in front started moving.

Luke wound down his window. Finn did the same.

Strike hard, strike fast. It was the only way. If they drove through the roadblock without taking out the guards, they’d be showered from behind by a torrent of AK rounds and they wouldn’t be out of range for 400 metres. Not an option.

Now the guards were alongside them, one on Luke’s side, one on Finn’s. They bent down at the same time to look into the car. And they never knew what hit them.

The suppressed Sigs made the dullest, deadest of sounds as Luke and Finn shot each guard once at point-blank range in the face. The rounds entered and exited in a split second, blood spattering the two gunmen as their victims’ faces instantly dissolved into a mash. The guards crumpled to the ground. It happened so silently that the remaining Red Berets didn’t even notice what was going on until Luke and Finn had stepped out of the car and raised their M4s. But by then it was too late.

The firefight was strangely quiet. Very few shouts from the enemy and none from the other drivers, who didn’t exit their vehicles. Just the hum of car engines and the chugging of the M4s and AKs. Finn fired bursts towards the opposite side of the road while Luke dealt with the two remaining guards on his side. They were standing about twelve metres from his position, readying their weapons at the sound of gunfire. It took him a couple of seconds to down them — single chest shots for each man — before he turned ninety degrees to add his fire to Finn’s. By now Finn had dropped three men, but there were two more standing behind a civilian vehicle, distance twenty-five metres, their weapons resting on the top of the car and ready to fire.

‘Go left!’ Luke shouted.

A spark from one of the enemy rifles, and a round hit the side of the Toyota, just forward of Finn’s door. Luke kept calm. He lined up his cross hairs with the head of the man who had fired and took the shot quickly. He knew as he squeezed the trigger that his aim was good, and he immediately switched his attention to the last guard. Finn had taken a shot but instead of hitting the final Red Beret, he’d shattered one of the windows of the car they were using as a shield. Another incoming round, inches above Luke’s head. But then he fired, and as he did so he heard a crack from Finn’s rifle at almost the same time. Impossible to say which of them had hit the last man, but one of them had.

Nobody left the vehicles behind them as Luke and Finn jumped back into the Toyota. Abu Famir’s eyes were wide. ‘No violence… I gave you my instructions!’ Luke didn’t answer. He floored the pedal and the car roared away.

‘You cannot just kill men like that!’ Abu Famir shouted. ‘I will have you reported…’

Finn looked over the back of his seat and pointed his Sig directly at Abu Famir. ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll do you too.’

For once the pomposity seemed knocked out of the old man.

They sped down the highway for a minute. Luke felt the sticky blood of the guards drying on the skin of his face, but he ignored it and kept one eye on the road, one on the mirror. Nothing chasing them yet. How long before the shooting back there was reported by one of the civilian onlookers? Impossible to say. Minutes, probably.

‘Turning in 500 metres,’ Finn said.

Luke nodded. Once they were off the road, they could get out the NV and drive to their covert border crossing. But when they were 100 metres from the turn-off, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be so easy.

‘Vehicles,’ said Finn. ‘They’re offroad — looks like border control.’ He was right. The desert off to the left — which had been all but empty the previous night — was now dotted with headlamps. To make matters worse, another chopper — or perhaps the same one — had turned up. It was hovering over their escape route, only this time it had a searchlight illuminating the road they needed to follow.

‘They’re looking for us,’ said Luke.

‘If we head down there, we’re fucked…’

Finn was right. That route was closed to them. No doubt about it. They sped on past it.

‘How far to the border?’ Luke asked after a moment.

‘Twenty klicks. If they don’t see us heading that way, they’re going to twig pretty soon that we’re taking a different route… We should start thinking about Plan B.’

‘Plan B?’ Abu Famir piped up, his voice nervous. ‘What is Plan B?’

Neither of the Regiment men answered, but Luke glanced in the rear-view mirror at the slumped, burka-clad figure of Amit.

Five minutes passed. Ten. Options and alternatives tumbled around in Luke’s mind, but no other solution presented itself. They were heading straight for the Iraqi border. It would be well guarded, with God knows how many soldiers and how much military equipment. Certainly they were insufficiently equipped to break through.

They saw it from a couple of klicks. The road ran downhill to the border post, so they had the advantage of height. The checkpoint itself was illuminated in the darkness. There were two sections — the Iraqi and the Jordanian — separated, Luke estimated, by about 200 metres of open ground. Even if they could break through the Iraqi side — and given the large number of vehicles and lights and movement, that was hardly a straightforward prospect — it would be open season on them as they crossed that patch of no-man’s-land. The Iraqis would have artillery covering it, especially now. Attempting to cross that border by vehicle was out of the question. Retreating to find their covert border crossing was also off the menu because the chopper and border-control vehicles had eyes on. They had only one option: to ditch the Toyota, travel by foot and try to find a weak point in the border fence. With border control on high alert, that was a dangerous call. They’d find it tough enough with Abu Famir in tow. There was certainly no room for any more stragglers. Especially wounded ones.

A kilometre from the border, Luke pulled over. There was no cover in the vicinity, and he was forced to ditch the car among the brush just four or five metres from the road. He looked at Finn, his face grim, and nodded.

‘Get out!’ he told Abu Famir.

‘What is happening?’

‘Get out!’

‘I refuse to…’

Luke held his Sig up against the Iraqi’s head.

‘I’m not fucking around, old man. If you want to shoot the shit with Allah, stay where you are. Otherwise, get out of the car. Now.’

Abu Famir stared at the silenced Sig, his eyes bulging. His hand felt for the door lever and he quickly scrambled out of the car, slamming the door behind him. He went and stood about five metres away, close enough for Luke to keep an eye on, far enough away to be out of earshot.

There was a moment of silence. And then, from behind the veil of the burka, Amit spoke. ‘You’re going to… to kill me now?’ His voice was thin and shaky. It was clearly a struggle for him to say even a single word.

‘We have to go cross-country,’ Luke said. ‘You’re too weak. You won’t make it.’

Amit’s body was trembling. ‘Take this thing off my head,’ he said.

Luke pointed his weapon at Amit and nodded at Finn to do as the man had asked. Even in the darkness of the car they could tell that Amit was on the way out. His eyes were glazed, his skin corpse-white. He appeared to be staring into the middle distance, every breath an effort, and for a moment Luke thought the delirium had returned. He became horribly aware of the cars passing them, just five or six metres from their position. Each time one went past, the interior of the Toyota lit up, then faded into darkness. It would only take one of them to stop and see if they needed help, and then…

Amit spoke again.

‘Abu Famir has to get out.’

‘That’s the plan, buddy,’ said Luke.

‘You’re… you’re British special forces, right?’ Neither of them replied. It didn’t seem to bother Amit. ‘Can you do it? Can you get him across-country?’

‘We can try.’

A passing car slowed down, but then sped up again.

‘I’m going to die, aren’t I? Of my wounds, I mean.’

A pause.

‘You’re in bad shape, buddy.’ Luke glanced at Finn, then back at Amit. ‘You want me to end it now? It’ll be quick.’

Amit swallowed. His breath became a bit shorter, and he shook his head. ‘It’s my job to ensure Abu Famir is safe.’

‘Who are you working for?’ Luke demanded. ‘You might as well tell us, mate. Seems we’re both trying to do the same thing.’

Amit closed his eyes. ‘For the Institute… Mossad. For Israel.’

Luke’s mind began to click through the gears. Israel was top of Saddam’s hit list. He’d demonstrated that before Desert Storm, when he’d started chucking scuds in the general direction of Tel Aviv.

‘Saddam would bomb my people again if he could,’ said Amit. ‘It’s my duty to ensure that the West invades…’ He opened his eyes again. ‘Perhaps you do not understand…’

It didn’t matter if Luke understood or not. This was only going to end one way. ‘You’re not coming with us, buddy. I’m sorry…’

‘For fuck’s sake, Luke,’ Finn cut in. ‘We can’t hang about.’

Luke nodded. What Finn hadn’t said — what he hadn’t needed to say — was that they couldn’t leave Amit alive. It would be easy for the enemy to torture their plans out of him.

‘Do it,’ Finn said.

‘Wait…’ Amit’s plea left him breathless. ‘I can help you.’

‘You’re a bit past that, mate.’

‘Listen to me. I can drive the car to the border. Cause a distraction.’

Luke and Finn exchanged a glance. ‘Go on.’

‘Do you have explosives?’

Luke nodded.

‘What do you have?’

‘C4. Frags. White phos.’

Amit nodded. His eyes flickered from one man to the other. And then, in his breathless, stilted way, he continued to speak.

Two minutes later Luke and Finn were standing five metres from the car, rifles slung round their necks and frowns on their foreheads. Four or five klicks to the east, they could see a chopper still circling, and on the highway one or two vehicles were still passing every minute.

They spoke in low whispers. ‘Do you trust him?’ Finn asked.

‘We haven’t got much choice.’ He looked towards the border. ‘There’s no way we’ll get through there. We either slot Amit now, or we…’

Or we what? The checkpoint was a kilometre to the west. If he, Finn and Abu Famir headed in a north-westerly direction, they would have to cover about a klick and a half if they wanted to intersect the border a kilometre to the north of the checkpoint. That would take about fifteen minutes, but the choppers and border-control vehicles would have a high chance of finding them. They needed a distraction. Something to focus the attention of the enemy on a position where the SAS men and their Iraqi passenger wouldn’t be. Something to give them a window of opportunity. And it was exactly that which Amit was offering.

‘He’s a good man,’ Luke murmured. ‘Don’t know if I’d have the balls…’

‘We need to make a decision now,’ Finn said.

A pause.

Luke nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’

Abu Famir was standing by the car, waiting for them. ‘What is happening? I demand to know what is happening.’

‘Get ready to walk,’ Luke told him. ‘We’re heading cross-country.’

‘What about my deputy? He is too sick to…’

‘You can drop the deputy bullshit now. He’s come clean…’

Finn was opening up the boot. He started moving all the ammunition, explosives and grenades they had into the front passenger seat, while Luke bent down to speak to Amit. ‘It’s time,’ he said.

Amit grabbed Luke’s arm and turned his ghostly face to look at him. ‘I have a sister,’ he whispered. ‘You must find her. You must tell her what I did, and that I did it for my country.’

‘Course I will, buddy,’ Luke lied.

‘You must. Otherwise she will not understand.’ Amit took a moment to catch his breath. ‘Her name… her name is Maya Bloom.’ His face became anguished. ‘You must find her.’

Luke looked over his shoulder to see Finn standing just by him. He had two white-phosphorus grenades in his hands.

‘Come on,’ Luke said to Amit. ‘Let’s get you into the front.’

It wasn’t easy. Amit’s legs were too weak to carry him, and his knees buckled the moment he tried to stand. Another car slowed down and pulled up alongside them. The driver shouted something in Arabic.

‘Tell them we’re fine,’ Luke instructed Abu Famir, who shouted out a response and the car drove away.

By the time Amit was in the driver’s seat, he was coughing badly — a dreadful hacking, wheezing sound.

‘Get Abu Famir away from the car,’ Luke told Finn, taking the grenades from him and turning his attention back to Amit. The Israeli was slumped forward, his forearms flat against the steering wheel and his body shaking violently.’

‘Quickly,’ he murmured. ‘Quickly…’

Luke turned the ignition key. He wound down the windows, then carefully removed the pin from one of the grenades, but kept the safety lever tightly squeezed.

‘You sure you can grip it?’ he asked. Amit nodded, and Luke curled the fingers of the dying man’s left hand around it. If Amit lost his grip, Luke would only have a couple of seconds to get the hell away. He primed the second grenade, then carefully placed it in Amit’s right hand.

‘OK, buddy,’ he said. ‘You’re good to go.’

‘You will find Maya?’

‘You got it.’

‘In London.’ His weak voice was hardly audible above the noise of the engine.

‘I’ll find her.’

‘Then leave me.’

Luke didn’t need telling twice. He stretched over Amit’s body, put the vehicle’s transmission into drive, then shut the door and sprinted away from the side of the road. He was at least thirty metres away when he turned to look back.

The Toyota had moved off. It was going very slowly, but it had joined the main carriageway and had started on the final kilometre before the border.

Abu Famir stared at the car. ‘He did this of his own free will?’ he asked.

‘Hundred and ten per cent. A lot of people want you out of the country, my friend.’ He watched the car until it disappeared.

‘Think he’ll make it?’ Finn asked flatly.

Luke sniffed. ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘He’s pretty fucked up. But even if he goes bang before he hits the checkpoint, it’ll be a diversion.’ He looked due north-west. It was dark, of course, but he’d seen the satellite imagery and he knew there was open ground here. ‘I reckon we’ve got fifteen minutes. Let’s not hang around.’

‘Roger that.’

The three men turned and started to walk across the desert.

Amit shook.

The pain was everything. It was no longer just the wound that hurt. Now it felt as if the pain had seeped into his blood and melted through his whole body. It was all-consuming. So intense that movement or even speech felt like obstacles he could never scale. He wanted it to be over. Finished. Gone.

But through the pain, one thing was clear to him. If he must die, let it be for a purpose. In a corner of his mind he saw a scene of devastation. It was an image that had haunted his dreams since he was a child: the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bomb on the streets of Tel Aviv, his own parents the victims, torn — quite literally — limb from limb.

If he must die, let it be for a purpose. Not like them.

It took all his strength to clutch the safety levers of the grenades. He steered with his forearms, which had the full weight of his body behind them, but the car required little steering. The checkpoint was straight ahead. He could see it, even though his vision was blurred, but he was too confused to work out the distance. All he knew was that he had to make it, however far it was.

And he had to keep gripping the safety levers.

He couldn’t allow the final remnants of strength to drain from his body too soon…

The rear lights of the cars that passed him drew long, red-neon lines through space. Amit felt as though a mist was gathering all around him. The closer it came, the less strength he had.

A car overtook, the driver beeping his horn at Amit’s slowness. He barely noticed. His concentration was all used up.

How far to the border? Harah, how much further could he last?

Time passed. He had no conception of it.

He saw Maya in his mind. His sister. He saw her as a child, kneeling on the pavement by their mother, shrieks of indescribable grief reaching to the rooftops. And he saw her now. So ruthless. So angry. When she learned what he had done, she would be proud of him. That thought alone gave him a little extra strength. A little extra resolve.

The lights outside were brighter. More numerous. There were people. Uniforms. Men with guns. He removed his foot from the accelerator and pressed the brake a little too sharply. The Toyota juddered to a halt. Ahead of him there was a queue. Three vehicles, perhaps four.

He closed his eyes, panting, trembling. He had to wait until he was closer to the barrier, twenty metres ahead, where he could cause maximum damage. Through the open windows he heard noises. Vehicle engines. Voices shouting harshly to each other in Arabic. Bustle. People. The queue crept forwards. Slowly. So slowly…

There was only one car ahead of him now. His body was shaking even more violently. The strength was leaving his wrists. He mustered his determination and moved one arm down to rest on the ammo boxes on the passenger seat.

The lights were getting dimmer. He could barely breathe — just short, desperate gulps.

The car ahead had moved off. Amit advanced a final few metres towards the barrier.

Figures surrounded the Toyota, shadowy and indistinct. Amit had no idea how many there were. He was past counting. Past caring.

But he knew there were only seconds left.

‘Barukh atah Adonai, Elokaynu, Melekh ha-Olam,’ he prayed with the last remnants of his breath. ‘Barukh atah Adonai, Elokaynu, Melekh ha-Olam…’

It wasn’t a conscious decision to let his grip on the detonation levers slip. His strength had come to the bottom of the tank.

Amit didn’t hear the explosion of the grenades, or of the ammunition stash in the passenger seat. He didn’t see the burning white fluorescence that filled the car and burst out of the open windows, or the way the hot phosphorus sprayed over the faces and uniforms of any border guards within twenty metres of the Toyota.

And he was dead before the car exploded, throwing shrapnel, rounds, fire and burning chemicals high into the air, and raining down on the border post and the soldiers who guarded it.

In the darkness of the desert, Luke, Finn and Abu Famir heard the explosion — a single boom, followed a series of aftershocks. They turned in the direction of the border. It was a little less than a klick away, and they could see a distant glow — the remnants of the Toyota, of their weaponry and of Amit.

Abu Famir shook his head in disbelief, visibly moved. ‘Who was he?’

Luke wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead. ‘A decent guy,’ he replied quietly.

A pause.

‘In your world,’ Abu Famir said, ‘do decent guys always cause such destruction?’

From the opposite direction, they saw the lights of a chopper burning along the highway towards the border. The Iraqis’ resources would now be concentrated on the location of Amit’s makeshift suicide bomb. For a short while, at least. That would leave the three of them free to find a place to cross into Jordan on foot. Luke estimated that the border was now 800 metres north-west of their position. If they could reach the fence in the next ten minutes while the Iraqis were looking the other way, and with a bit of luck, they should be able to find a crossing point.

Luke turned his back on the explosion. He nodded at Finn, who nudged Abu Famir with the butt of his M4.

‘Get moving, sunshine,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a border to cross.’

THIRTEEN

Chet woke up with a start.

It was a thunderclap that had roused him. He was lying on the bed, with Suze’s naked body beside him, one slim arm over his chest. He checked his watch without waking her. 02.23 hrs. He cursed himself for having fallen asleep, but then what did he expect? He’d hardly had any shut-eye for nearly two days.

The room was dark and the rain hammered against the window. Suze murmured something in her sleep. He couldn’t tell what it was, but she was clearly disturbed by her dreams. Her body jolted, like she’d received an electric shock, but she remained asleep.

He lay there, his mind churning. He heard the tape in his head. Stratton’s voice, and the American’s. The evidence that Britain’s Prime Minister was being bribed to go to war.

He remembered the firm handshake the PM had given him thirty-six hours previously.

He saw Doug’s broken body.

He saw the face of the woman who wanted to kill him. The wavy black hair. The black eyes.

It was a noise that brought him back to the here and now. It wasn’t loud. Quieter than the thunder and almost masked by the torrent of the rain. He could easily have missed it. He got out of bed, dressed quickly and went to the window.

What he saw made him feel as if the blood had drained from his veins.

The rain was sheeting down, in thick waves that limited his vision to about twenty metres. But twenty metres was all he needed to see that a vehicle was approaching. Its headlamps were off, but there was the faintest glow from the dashboard, which disappeared as the car came to a halt by the black Mondeo, fifteen metres from the farmhouse, and the driver turned off the engine.

He checked his watch again. 02.31 hrs. Who would be approaching this place at such a time? And driving in this weather without lights?

Only somebody who didn’t want to be seen.

But how the hell…?

Chet looked over to where Suze was still sleeping fitfully. He moved over to her side of the bed, put one hand on her shoulder, one over her mouth, and shook her. She woke up suddenly, looking round as if she didn’t know where she was.

‘I’m going to ask you this once,’ said Chet, ‘and honestly, Suze, you’d better tell me straight. Who did you call earlier?’

A pause. Suze looked at him with wide eyes, but she couldn’t keep that gaze going for long. She lowered her head and Chet removed his hand from her mouth.

‘My mum,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry… I just had to speak to her. She’s in a home and she’s expecting…’

Chet closed his eyes. He wanted to be angry, but there was no time for that.

‘Listen to me carefully,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s dead.’

She stared at him.

‘You’ll be dead too, if you don’t do exactly what I say. Get dressed.’ Suze didn’t move, so Chet grabbed her by the arm and pulled her naked to the window. ‘You see that vehicle? It arrived less than a minute ago.’

As he spoke, a light came on in the car as the door opened and a figure got out.

‘Oh my God…’ Suze whispered.

‘Get dressed. Now.’

‘Is it her?’

‘Now!’

While Suze scrambled to get her clothes on, Chet rummaged around in his bag. Christ, what wouldn’t he give for a nine-milly now? His fingers touched the cold surface of the alabaster cherub he’d stolen from Suze’s neighbours. Hardly a weapon of mass destruction, but it was better than nothing. He moved to the doorway and switched on the light.

‘What are you doing? ’ Suze cried, pulling her jumper on over her head. ‘She’ll know where we are.’

Chet shook his head. ‘She’ll think she knows where we are,’ he said. He grabbed her by the arm again and pulled her out of the room. The landing was dark and it took a moment for his eyes to get used to it; but he didn’t hesitate as he dragged her to the opposite end and quietly opened the door of the other bedroom they’d been shown. The lights were off in here, but Chet knew the layout was much the same as the room they’d just left: en-suite bathroom, double bed, window in the far wall. There was still the loft panel, but he calculated that the intruder would go straight for the room with the light on.

‘Wait here,’ he told Suze. ‘Don’t move.’

From downstairs came the sound of the dog barking. Once. Twice. Each bark seemed to go right through Suze. Chet made for the door, but she grabbed hold of him. ‘Please don’t leave me…’

‘I’ll be right back. Keep the door closed and don’t make a sound.’

‘Chet… I…’

‘Don’t make a sound. ’

He left the room and made his way along the landing again. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and listened.

And listened.

Nothing. Just the sound of the rain battering the house, and a howl of the wind.

And his heart, pumping heavily behind his ribs.

He made his way down the stairs, slowly and very quietly. Something creaked — a beam, perhaps, on the other side of the house. At the foot of the stairs he stopped to listen again; the whole place sounded dead.

It was darker than the barrel of a gun down here. Chet had nothing but the alabaster figurine with which to defend himself, and if their unexpected guest was the woman from earlier, she was armed. He needed the element of surprise.

Creeping away from the stairs, he moved silently along the hallway, barely daring to breathe as he made for the flagstoned room where they’d signed the guestbook. The smell of wood-smoke grew stronger, and moments later he was looking into the room. Even in the darkness he could see that the main door was shut, but there was something on the ground, perhaps two metres in front of the entrance. Still brandishing the cherub, Chet stepped towards it.

He was only a metre away when it started to dawn upon him what it was; bending down, he touched the fur of the cocker spaniel, its body totally lifeless.

He spun round and touched the stone floor. Wetness. Footprints. He hadn’t noticed them before.

He turned back, and followed them back to the hallway. He could just see that instead of turning towards the stairs they had headed left along the hall. He followed. There was a door at the right — slightly ajar — and one at the end. Chet put his back to the wall next to the open door and slowly kicked it further open.

No sound.

He looked inside. A double bed stood against the far wall and he remembered the old lady saying that she avoided climbing the stairs. He stepped into the room, returning the door to its original position and scanning the shadows using his peripheral vision. Nothing. He approached the bed. The old lady was lying there, face up; next to her, her husband. Chet put his palm an inch above her face. No breath. He bent over and pressed two fingers against her jugular. No pulse. She was already going cold.

Movement. Just a shadow in the corner of his field of view, passing the slightly open door. He turned and exited the room in time to see a figure disappear up the stairs at the end of the hallway, then limped after it.

And it was then that the screaming started.

It came from upstairs, and it was Suze: desperate and panicked. Chet ran to the stairs, ignoring the stabbing pains in his leg, and started to limp up. The screams stopped when he hit the fourth tread; by the time he was on the landing, the thick silence of the guest house had returned.

Light was spilling out of the room where he’d left Suze. Chet burst through the open door to see the black-clad figure of the woman. She had her back to him; her hair was wet and so were her clothes. Suze was just in front of her, and she was being throttled from behind.

Chet strode into the room, raised the figurine and brought it crashing down on the side of the woman’s head. She fell against the wall, releasing her grip on Suze, who gasped horribly as she inhaled. Chet bore down on the woman, fully expecting her to have been knocked senseless by the blow. But she hadn’t. Like a cat, she regained her footing, and she turned to face him, pulling a handgun as she did so. In a fraction of a second he took in the bloodied welt on her face, and her expression, filled with a mad fury. Suze was on her knees by the window, her hands at her throat as she continued to gasp for air. The intruder’s weapon — Chet instantly recognised it as a Beretta Model 70 semi-automatic — was in the woman’s fist and she was raising her arm.

Beretta Model 70. Harah! Something clicked in his brain.

Chet lunged towards her. It almost felt like slow motion. Maybe that was because he knew, beyond question, that he was about to take a bullet.

The crack of the Beretta firing was deafeningly loud at this range. Chet managed to knock the woman’s hand as she discharged the round. He felt the bullet nick the flesh on the top of his right arm. No pain yet — the adrenaline was masking it — but he knew he couldn’t stop. Despite his flesh wound, he got one big hand around her neck.

In a grip like that, most people would panic and wriggle. Not her. With her back against the wall, she raised her right leg and kicked sharply into Chet’s groin. He doubled over and released her as his prosthetic leg wobbled beneath him.

Ignore the pain, he told himself. You must ignore the pain…

He hurled himself at her once more, both bodies thumping against the wall. The Beretta went off again, but the round thumped harmlessly into the mattress. Suze screamed as Chet lifted the woman off her feet and threw her out of the door and on to the landing.

She fell skilfully, still gripping her Beretta, and if the fall caused her any pain, she didn’t show it. Her eyes flashing, she scrambled to her feet, and as she saw Chet’s bulky frame staggering through the doorway on to the landing, her demeanour remained calm.

Again she took aim, but Chet managed to launch himself across the metre between them and knock the gun from her hand with one swipe of his left arm. As he did so, the pain from his flesh wound kicked in and for a moment his knees buckled. It gave the woman the time she needed to reach over to where the Beretta had dropped, stoop down and pick it up. But by the time she was standing, Chet was there again, his face twisted with both anger and agony. He grabbed the woman by her upper arms, lifted her off the floor and, with all the strength his damaged body could summon, he threw her down the stairs and on to the stone flags below. There was a dreadful clattering as she tumbled, along with the noise of an accidental discharge from the Beretta.

And then silence.

Chet didn’t wait. He hurried back to the bedroom, where Suze had shrunk into one corner, her pale face terrified. ‘Is she…?’

‘I don’t know.’

He opened the window. Heavy rain, falling at an angle on account of the chill wind, splashed into the room. He looked out. They were just above the front porch, its roof only a couple of metres below the window. Impossible for him to climb out with his leg, but Suze could.

He pulled his wallet from his trouser pocket and pressed it into her hands.

‘There’s money there,’ he said. ‘Go.’

She froze. ‘What about you?’

Chet looked over his shoulder. He could feel his strength sapping away.

‘Just go. Get out of here now. You need to head cross-country, and keep going.’

‘How will you find me?’

‘There’s a cairn on the top of a hill about a mile due north of here.’ He took a moment to get his bearings, then pointed just to the left of the window. ‘That way. I’ll meet you there before sunrise. If I’m not there by then, hide. And don’t stop hiding.’

‘But I…’

A sound from downstairs. Movement.

Chet turned back to Suze. ‘She’s Mossad,’ he said.

‘What? How do you know?’

‘Beretta Model 70 semi-automatic. It’s their signature weapon. Last time we met I heard her speak. I’m pretty sure it was Hebrew. She’s a kidon — an assassin. The best in the world…’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. But believe me — if Mossad have us in their sights, that’s as bad as it gets…’

Footsteps, coming up the stairs.

‘Go!’ Chet hissed. ‘If you ever need any help, track down Luke Mercer, 22 SAS, tell him what you know. But only if you have to, Suze. If you don’t, stay anonymous. Remember what I told you before. Stay dark.’

‘How long for?’

‘Just stay dark.’

He pushed her towards the window. ‘Go. Don’t stop running. Find the cairn…’

She made to kiss him, but he pushed her away.

‘Go!’

She nodded, and started to climb inexpertly out of the window. Just before she disappeared, she turned round to face him.

‘Go!’

Chet heard footsteps on the landing. His mouth was dry, his heart pounding. He headed towards the door. Towards the fight. If he didn’t dig deep, it could be his last.

She had two weapons in her hands: the Beretta in her right, and in her left a brass poker that she had found beside the fireplace downstairs. It wasn’t heavy.

But heavy enough.

Her face hurt. Whatever this man had hit her with had been sturdy. She’d felt the cheekbone crack on impact, and now the pain was blinding. It wasn’t going to stop her from finishing the job, though. It only made her more determined to see this through.

There was silence on the landing now. The light from the bedroom spilled out. No shadow, which meant neither of them was in the line of the doorway. She needed to be prepared for an attack from elsewhere.

She looked into the room. The window was open, rain splattering in, and the latch knocked against the frame. An unpalatable thought came to her. Had they escaped her again?

Carefully, she stepped inside.

He came at her from behind the door, the figurine in his hand and a look of brutal concentration on his face. She was ready for him. One swipe of the poker at the leg he limped on was all it took. Metal met metal with a dull thud, and he crumpled immediately to the ground.

She set about him with the poker, striking him first on the gunshot wound to disable him further. He gasped in pain as the blood started to flow more freely, not only from the wound, but from new cuts that were opening up on his face and neck; but he still attempted to grab her ankles and unbalance her footing. She was nimble enough to avoid that; nimble enough to stamp down on his hands before she whacked him again hard on his wound.

Another gasp, and his body started to shake.

It would have been so easy to shoot him, so easy to put a bullet in his head and be done with it, but she was clear-headed and professional enough, even in the middle of this struggle, to take the more sensible option. For the third blow of the poker, she raised her hand a little higher in the air. When she brought it down on the side of his head, there was a thump and his body immediately went limp.

Silence in the room. Silence throughout the house.

She looked at the figure at her feet. The scarred, ugly face was still contorted with pain; there was a puddle of blood oozing around his head, dark and sticky, and the right leg below his knee was jutting out at an angle. He barely moved — just the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he continued to breathe — and the life blood was draining from him.

The woman walked to the window. Nothing except the rain and the darkness. No sight of Suze McArthur, and she felt anger at the thought that she’d escaped.

‘Kalbah,’ she muttered. ‘Bitch.’

Silently she made her way down to the ground floor. She walked across the reception room, silent and dark, and propped open the door of the greasy old gas oven with a coal scuttle. She turned the oven dial on to full. It would be quicker, of course, to turn all the dials, but that would look less accidental. A hiss, and the smell of gas hit her nose. She took a box of matches from the worktop, removed a few pages from a newspaper and stepped over to the front door — edging round the dead dog — and waited.

The smell of gas grew stronger.

Stronger.

It made her a little light-headed, but that was OK. She could step outside before it really harmed her.

She gave it five minutes before opening the door and stepping outside. Standing in the porch with her back to the garden, she twisted the newspaper to make a torch and lit it. She waited for the flame to catch properly, then opened the door again, casually tossed the blazing paper inside and hurried away from the porch.

The explosion was almost silent, but the heat was intense. She felt it against her back as she ran towards her car, and saw the reflection of the detonation in the vehicle’s windscreen, her own body silhouetted against it. And as she opened the car door, she saw flames licking from the windows: already fierce, despite the rain. She’d set enough fires to know that the house would be an inescapable inferno within seconds.

Why, then, didn’t she feel pleased?

She looked around. Darkness, rain and wind. The bitch could be anywhere out there. It was impossible to find her. A harsh look crossed the woman’s face as she got behind the steering wheel and started the car. It didn’t matter, she told herself. She would finish the job. Somehow. Somewhere. It was only a matter of time before Suze McArthur showed up. And when she did…

And so, as the woman drove away and glanced in the rear-view mirror, she even allowed herself a smile. The flames had already engulfed the building now; they had spread to the first floor; they were quickly turning this old Brecon farmhouse into an enormous funeral pyre.

Suze scrambled.

Her clothes were soaked, and her matted hair was stuck to her tear-stained face. Her body trembled. She was 200 metres from the B amp;B, up a slight incline, crouching down, still clutching the wallet Chet had given her.

A sudden explosion behind her. She stopped and turned, and over the next sixty seconds she stared at the orange flames emerging from the windows of the ground floor.

She was cold, but the effect of the wind and the rain against her skin was nothing compared to the chill she felt inside. She knew she should run, but her muscles wouldn’t obey her brain and she stood there in the elements, barely able to move. Barely able to turn her head away. The woman couldn’t have overcome Chet, she told herself. Any minute she would see him silhouetted against the flames, running towards her.

She stared as the flames rose higher.

‘What have I done?’

Listen to me carefully. Your mother’s dead.

A sob escaped her throat, barely audible above the sound of the weather, and she shook her head as a corkscrew of terror and grief twisted in her heart. What kind of nightmare had she brought upon herself?

The rain fell harder, but it had no effect on the flames. Within ten minutes the whole house was engulfed. When the roof collapsed, she heard the crashing sound even from this distance and over the noise of the wind. She found herself sobbing again, her tears making the conflagration bleary and indistinct. She wiped them away and continued to stare at the fire, desperately seeking the sight she longed for.

It never came. Tears blurred her vision again, and with another sob she turned and stumbled into the darkness.

The terrain started to descend and she found herself in a dip from which, if she looked back, she couldn’t see the flames, only the glow as they lit up the sky. But as she hurried desperately in the direction she hoped was north, the gradient increased again and the farmhouse came back into view. It was completely engulfed.

She continued to climb. He would meet her, she told herself. He would meet her, like he said he would. Her lungs burned with exhaustion but she kept on climbing, and after twenty minutes she found herself at the brow of a hill. She looked around. About thirty metres to her right, she could see the vague silhouette of a small pile of stones.

As she stood there, suddenly, unexpectedly, the moon appeared. Without knowing where the instinct came from, she threw herself to the ground to avoid being lit up against the horizon, then crawled on all fours towards the cairn.

Suze didn’t look back towards the house. All feeling had left her, except the dread that seeped through every cell in her body. She tried to fight it. He would come. He would come. The moon disappeared again. The rain continued to fall. She heard sirens in the distance. Soaked and freezing, she hugged the stones, waiting for a figure to arrive. Waiting to hear his voice.

But the only thing that arrived was the dawn.

She lay there, shivering, crying, knowing she should run, but not knowing where to run to. Chet’s face and words were all she could hear.

Don’t stop hiding…

Stay anonymous…

Stay dark…

She could have managed it with him alongside her. He knew what to do. How to protect them. But he couldn’t protect them any more.

The cold penetrated her bones. The rain fell on her hunched-up body. But only one thought filled her mind: how could she stay hidden — how on earth could she stay hidden — now that the one man who could look after her was dead?

FOURTEEN

London, the following day.

It was cold in Hyde Park. Early-morning joggers pounded the pathways, their breath steaming in the air. There were cyclists too, their white and red lamps glowing in the half light, and their luminous-yellow waistcoats gleaming. None of them paid any attention to the two figures walking north to south from Lancaster Gate, along the still, gloomy waters of the Serpentine. A man and a woman: he with a shiny, balding head and wearing thick-rimmed glasses, a thick, shapeless black overcoat and woollen mittens; she a good head taller, with wavy black hair, an altogether more stylish coat, a fashionable black beret and an ugly red wound on one side of her lovely face.

‘You’ve done well, Maya,’ said the man quietly in Hebrew as they walked. The language sounded out of place here, so far from the streets of Tel Aviv.

Maya Bloom kept looking forward. Her cheek throbbed, but she ignored the pain, just as she had been taught.

‘Not so well,’ she said, and she pulled her coat a little more tightly around her. Her eyes flickered right, towards her handler. Ephraim Cohen was not a man given to paying compliments. He had a soft spot for Maya, though, and she knew it; but she also knew to take him very seriously. Cohen had a reputation as one of the Institute’s most demanding case officers, and plenty of young recruits had had a promising career cut short by a disapproving report from this unassuming-looking man. Which was why Maya couldn’t help but feel surprised that he was congratulating her, and not the opposite. ‘The woman got away,’ she reminded him. Once more, she felt a rush of anger at her failure to eliminate both her targets.

‘We’ll find her,’ Cohen replied with no trace of a smile. ‘The word is out. She can’t hide for long.’

Maya inclined her head. ‘When she pops up,’ she said, ‘I should be the one.’

For a moment Cohen didn’t reply. When he did, his voice was even softer. ‘There is a whisper in Tel Aviv,’ he said, ‘that the kidon Maya Bloom takes too personal an interest in her work. This is a whisper, Maya, that I can safely ignore, isn’t it?’

Maya sniffed disdainfully. ‘I serve Israel,’ she said, ‘and the Institute.’

‘Your allegiance to the Institute is noted,’ Cohen said lightly.

They walked on for twenty metres in silence, ignoring the strident bell of a cyclist, who was forced to swerve off the path and on to the grass to pass them.

‘You understand the importance of what you did last night?’ Cohen asked once the cyclist was gone.

‘I just do what I’m told.’

‘Of course. But I want you to know why, Maya. It will help you in the future. You think the Institute has any real interest in a former British soldier with one leg, or in his girlfriend?’

‘It depends what they’ve been up to, I suppose.’

‘Indeed it does, Maya. Indeed it does. Would you like some coffee?’

They had reached a road running through the greenery, where a small white catering van had parked up. Cohen politely requested two cups of black coffee from the overweight woman behind the serving hatch. He handed one to Maya, took a sip of his own and they carried on walking.

‘The truth is,’ Cohen continued, ‘that I don’t know what they’ve been up to. All I know is this: it was Prime Minister Stratton himself who ordered their removal.’

Maya stopped and looked at him. ‘Are we servants for the British now?’ The thought angered her.

Cohen smiled. ‘Hardly that, Maya. Hardly that.’ He looked around the park. ‘A green and pleasant land,’ he murmured. ‘But every land has its secrets. Britain is not alone in that.’

‘But why us? Britain has its own… resources.’

‘True, it does. But the British intelligence services are reluctant to have their people do what you do on home soil. They feel the scope for errors is too great. It is dangerous for their director to claim innocence in matters of political assassinations if its own people are carrying out such actions. You never know.’ He smiled again. ‘We are lucky, Maya. The Institute makes no real secrecy of its actions. Our own assassinations are personally signed off by our prime minister. It makes life a lot easier.’

‘I still don’t understand why my orders come from London and not Tel Aviv.’

‘Your orders come from me,’ Cohen said, with a hint of sharpness in his voice.

‘And where do your orders come from?’

Cohen didn’t like that. She could sense it. It took a few seconds for him to reply, and he sounded like he was choosing his words with even greater care than usual. ‘We operate on British soil with the sanction of the British Government,’ he said. ‘When we need to do something here, they turn a blind eye — provided we are discreet, of course. In return, if the British have a problem of a sensitive nature on their own soil, they sometimes come to us. These occasional favours we perform for them are of great benefit to us, Maya. They are of great benefit to Israel.’ He took a sip from his coffee and looked straight ahead.

‘Is that all I am?’ Maya asked. ‘Someone who does favours?’

‘Your allegiance to the Institute, Maya,’ Cohen echoed his earlier statement, ‘is noted.’ She immediately understood that that part of their conversation was over. But it didn’t make her like it any the more.

Up ahead, two mounted policemen were trotting towards them. They stepped aside and let them pass. ‘The police presence is high,’ Maya observed.

‘As is the terror threat,’ Cohen replied. ‘London is not quite so dangerous as Jerusalem, but it’s not far off. Everybody knows what is coming.’

‘This war…’ Maya murmured. ‘It makes no sense.’

‘What do you mean?’

Maya stopped and looked around. ‘Find me one British person in this park who thinks Britain should invade Iraq. In Tel Aviv or Jerusalem it’s different. The Arabs would crush us tomorrow if they had the chance. But Britain?’ She made a contemptuous sound from behind her teeth. ‘Why should they care? Why is Stratton so keen to take them into a war that nobody wants?’

‘I don’t know. To be frank with you, Maya, I don’t care. A coalition invasion of Iraq is good for Israel.’

‘I wish I was involved in that,’ Maya said.

‘You are, in your way.’

‘Not like Amit.’

It was the name of Maya’s brother that caused Cohen to stop once more. He gave Maya a serious look, then glanced round until he spotted an empty bench. ‘Let’s sit over there,’ he said. ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘What is it?’

‘Please, Maya. Let’s sit down.’

‘I don’t want to sit down. Something’s happened. What is it, Ephraim?’

Cohen’s brow furrowed. ‘It’s Amit,’ he said quietly.

‘What? What? ’

‘He’s dead, Maya. I’m sorry.’

She blinked at him as a dreadful sensation coursed through her body. She saw her brother in her mind: the short, stocky frame and rumpled dark hair. The only person in the world that she cared about. The only person in the world that she loved.

‘You’re lying,’ she said.

But she could tell from the way that Cohen shook his head that he wasn’t.

Everything fell away: the pain in her cheek, the anger, the cold.

‘You should sit down, Maya. You don’t look well.’

‘How did it happen?’ She turned on him and they were standing so close that he was forced to look up at her.

‘How did it happen?’

Cohen bowed his head. ‘He was behind enemy lines. Iraq. There was a firefight and Amit took a bullet. It killed him instantly. He died bravely, Maya. Serving his country. You should be proud of that.’

His words were like a torch to paper: Maya felt herself burning up. ‘Proud?’ she demanded incredulously. ‘Proud? The fucking Arabs killed my parents, Ephraim.’

‘I know your history, Maya,’ Cohen said mildly.

‘No! All you know is what you read in a file. I was seven years old, Amit was eight. We saw our mother lying in the street in Tel Aviv without her arms. Without her fucking arms, Ephraim! And my father — there wasn’t even anything left of him. And now you tell me I should be proud that these Arab dogs have killed Amit…’

‘Perhaps I chose my words poorly…’

‘Perhaps you did.’ Maya’s face was contorted with terrible pain. If she had been the type of person to shed tears, she would have wept. But her cheeks remained dry even though her insides were burning up with anger and grief. Her body shook, and she stormed away from Ephraim, towards the bench he had pointed out. Sitting down, she put her head in her hands and remained that way for a minute, maybe longer. Gradually she became aware that Cohen was sitting next to her.

‘You have my condolences,’ he murmured.

‘I don’t want your fucking pity.’

‘I didn’t offer you my pity. I offered you my condolences. I shan’t do it again. Sit up, Maya.’

She ignored him.

There was a pause of about ten seconds. When Cohen spoke again, his voice was quieter, but a good deal firmer. ‘If you ignore an instruction of mine once more, Maya, I shall assume that the Institute no longer has need of your services.’

Maya felt herself sneer behind her palms, but she recognised the severity in her handler’s voice, and she knew he was not the type to make threats idly. Slowly she removed her hands from her face and sat up again, though she refused to look directly at him.

‘War is around the corner,’ Cohen murmured, staring out across the park. ‘The Arabs will pay for what they did to Amit. They will pay for what they continue to do to Israel. Saddam Hussein has his missiles pointed at our homeland, Maya. We both know he would fire them if he could. The British and Americans are not going to war to make our lives safer. But that is what they will do, and we must play a part. You must play a part, Maya. For Amit, and for Israel.’

Maya was still trying to quell the rage inside her. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she whispered, looking straight ahead.

Cohen nodded with satisfaction. Then, slowly, he removed a small photograph from his shapeless overcoat. It was a colour portrait of a man in his sixties, perhaps older, with a thin grey beard and glasses. ‘Who is he?’ Maya asked.

‘A British weapons inspector. Well respected, by all accounts. Unfortunately he has taken it upon himself to become a thorn in the British Government’s side. He’s of the opinion that the Iraqis are not in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and certain interested parties are worried that he might go public.’ Cohen removed his glasses and held them out in front of his head, as though checking the lenses for dust. ‘That can’t be allowed to happen, of course.’ He replaced his glasses and turned to look at Maya, who was still avoiding his gaze. ‘MI5 can’t touch him — it would raise too many suspicions. That’s why the job is yours. It needs to look like an accident, Maya. Or, for preference, a suicide. It can be made known that the pressure of work got to him, that he…’

‘I’m not doing it.’

Silence.

‘I don’t believe, Maya,’ Ephraim said in a dangerously low voice, ‘that I offered you a choice.’

She handed him back the photograph. ‘Someone else can go after this guy. It won’t be difficult. I want direct action against the Arabs. They have killed all my family. All of them, Ephraim. I want to hit back.’

Cohen shook his head. ‘You know we can’t put you into the Arabic-speaking world. You’re a woman. You’d be too conspicuous.’

She treated that comment with the contempt it deserved. ‘I’m the best kidon the Institute has,’ she snarled. ‘Do you really think I can’t take care of myself?’

‘No, Maya. I don’t think that. But it still isn’t going to happen and you’d better get used to it. The Institute doesn’t exist so that you can take revenge. Anyway, this is an important operation. We.. ’

Maya stood up mid-sentence. She couldn’t listen to any more. ‘Forget it, Ephraim. I’m not interested.’

They locked gazes. Maya could read Ephraim’s face like a book. He was sizing her up. Working out whether she was serious. Planning his next move. Fine. He could plan all he wanted. Their talk was over.

‘You’re making a mistake, Maya,’ Cohen said. ‘I fight your corner at the Institute. Walk away now and I won’t be able to do that any more.’

She continued to stare at him, but in her mind all she saw was her brother’s face, and the pain of Amit’s death twisted inside her once again. She slowly shook her head. ‘You won’t need to,’ she said.

‘Don’t make the wrong decision, Maya.’

‘The Institute is weak. If it won’t do what needs to be done, I will.’

And then she turned her back on her handler and walked away from the bench. She didn’t look round, because she knew that a man like Ephraim Cohen would take that as a sign of weakness.

Cohen watched her leave. He saw her slim, black-clad figure stride along the banks of the Serpentine, then turn and disappear from view. He didn’t move from the bench.

A second pair of mounted policemen trotted by, the clip-clopping of their horses uncommonly loud. Cohen barely noticed them. His mind was turning over. Replaying their conversation. Deciding what to do next.

He remembered the first time he had met Maya Bloom. It had been five years ago, and he had been aroused by the sight of this beautiful creature — by the curve of her breasts and her hips, by the way her full, glossy lips parted slightly even when she wasn’t speaking. Every member of the Institute knew what a powerful weapon sex was, but that didn’t mean any of them were immune to it, and Cohen could remember the daydreams he had entertained that he and his new agent might become lovers. The thought of her warm skin against his, and the dangerous games they would play.

These, he now realised, were the pathetic fantasies of an ageing man.

So far as he knew — and he had done everything in his considerable power to find out — Maya had no lovers. The sex she exuded was shared with nobody. The body that he lusted after would never be anybody’s. Maya Bloom had only one thought, and that was for her work. This she carried out with an efficiency that sometimes surprised even the more hardened officers back in Tel Aviv.

He had lied to her, of course, about the cause of her brother’s death, but that was a necessity. The information that had come through was sketchy, filtered unreliably through British intelligence. But if it was indeed true that Amit Bloom had perished in a suicide bomb, there was no knowing how Maya would react. It had been important to him — to the Institute — that Maya’s loyalty remained unquestioned. But that wasn’t how things had played out, and he was experienced enough to know that it changed everything.

A kidon was a weapon. The very name meant ‘bayonet’. They were a tool of the state of Israel, just as surely as the missiles housed in silos in the Negev desert. If one of those missiles was faulty, the course of action would be clear: it would be dismantled and taken out of service. And what was true for a missile in the Negev was true for a kidon — especially one as volatile and dangerous as Maya Bloom.

As Cohen pulled his mobile phone from the pocket of his shabby coat, he wondered whether she might have prevented what he was about to do had she shared herself with him at some point over the course of their professional relationship. He was honest enough with himself, as he called a number, to realise that it would probably have made no difference. In their world, loyalties were not forged between the bedclothes. It was more complicated than that.

Yes. A great deal more complicated.

A voice answered the phone. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s me. Cohen.’

A silence.

‘What do you want?’

‘A favour,’ he said. ‘Or rather, the repayment of a favour. I have a little problem, and I need you to take care of it for me…’

As Maya Bloom walked along the Serpentine she could feel Ephraim Cohen’s eyes burning into her. Even once she was out of his line of sight, she could sense his watchfulness, as though he was some invisible spirit gazing over her. She understood the way he looked at her. She recognised the lust. She saw it in almost every man she met. There were exceptions, of course. She thought about the guy she’d killed last night. Even through the mask of his scarred face, she had seen his determination. He had looked at her not with the eyes of a suitor, but with the eyes of a killer. It was an expression she knew well. She saw it in the mirror every day.

Maya knew, however, that Ephraim Cohen was not the kind of man you walked away from without there being some kind of consequence. What she had just done had implications.

She left the park and hailed a taxi. Ten minutes later she was letting herself into an unmarked door in Lexington Street in Soho, and climbing up the tacky carpet of the stairs that led into the operational apartment she had inhabited for these past five years. Central enough to be useful, anonymous enough to be an effective safe house, it was a spartan place. Thick net curtains covered the only windows on to the street below, blocking out much of the daylight, but also stopping anyone from looking in. There was almost no sound from the busy streets, though occasionally, through the thin walls, she could hear the hookers next door servicing their clients.

The flat had three rooms: a living space with a small kitchenette; a bedroom with a large double bed, a dressing table, an armchair and a standard lamp; and a tiny bathroom. There were no personal possessions here, nothing that would ever give a clue as to who occupied it and certainly nothing to suggest that it was a woman. No soft furnishings or items of comfort. Just what was necessary. Even the drawer full of make-up in her dressing table was a tool, and once she was inside, Maya headed straight for the bedroom and opened it.

Lipstick. Mascara. Perfume. Sometimes these weapons were as formidable as any gun, and she needed to apply them with care.

First, however, she showered, washing away the dirt of last night’s job with a tub of Swarfega she kept for that purpose. She noticed a spattering of blood on the inside of her wrist, and remembered bludgeoning the wound of her victim the previous night. It was difficult to scrub off, but soon her flesh was clean. She stepped out of the shower, quickly dried her skin and her hair, then returned to the bedroom. She sat naked at the dressing table, where she powdered her aching cheek so that the swelling was less visible, before fixing her make-up and applying a squirt of perfume to the top of her pale breasts.

The clothes she chose from her wardrobe left little to the imagination. Black hold-ups. Lace underwear. No bra, but a short white dressing gown with two pockets. Once she had done it up, she returned to her dressing table and opened an empty drawer. It had a false bottom, which she removed to reveal her small stash of weaponry. Rounds for her Beretta, a 9mm snubnose and a small knife. She took the snubnose and the knife, and placed one in each pocket of her dressing gown. Having replaced the bottom of the drawer, she took a seat in her bedroom armchair.

And here she waited.

As she waited, she thought. Of Amit, of her parents and of the past. And when those thoughts became too much for her to bear, she thought of the future. All her adult life had been devoted to the Institute, from the day she had been admitted into the training academy until today. Now, of course, was when it ended. She had her own battles to fight. If Mossad wouldn’t help her wage war on the Arabs, she would have to do it herself.

Time passed. The day slipped away and darkness crept into Maya’s flat. She switched on the standard lamp by her armchair and continued to wait. She knew Ephraim Cohen’s methods well. She had carried out his instructions often enough, after all. He would send someone today. If a job needed to be done, it needed to be done quickly. And if she refused to leave this flat, they would have to come to her. That meant she was in control, no matter what anybody else thought.

She heard the first noise a little before ten o’clock. It was very quiet, barely louder than the beating of her heart: the sound of the lock on the street door being picked. She loosened the dressing gown around her cleavage, then slipped her right hand into the pocket containing the snubnose and pointed it through the flimsy material of her gown, towards the door of her bedroom. Perhaps she would need the weapon instantly, but she hoped not. The noise would attract attention.

And besides, Maya Bloom had other plans for her expected, but unknown, guest.

She didn’t hear footsteps coming up the stairs, but then she wouldn’t have expected to. Any hitman worth the name should be able to tread quietly. The first she saw of him was his weapon, a suppressed handgun peeking round the corner of the door as it slowly opened to reveal a shadowy figure silhouetted in the frame.

Silence.

Her finger slowly caressed the trigger of her weapon.

‘Who are you?’ she whispered, injecting a note of fear into her voice. ‘How did you get into my…?’

‘Shut up.’

The figure stepped into the room. Maya saw a young man, perhaps in his mid-twenties, with black hair and stubble on his face. His voice had a cockney twang. She examined his weapon. A matt-black Glock, safe-action trigger.

‘Please,’ Maya whispered. ‘Don’t hurt me. I’ll do what you want…’

The young man took another couple of steps towards her.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything…’ She kept the hidden gun pointing directly at him, ready to shoot at the slightest hint that he was going to use his.

He eyed her up and down. Maya understood the look. She understood that he was already hers.

Feigning timidity, she stood up. Her dressing gown was tied sufficiently loosely for her breasts to be exposed, and she saw the newcomer appreciating the sight. She understood assassins, understood their love of danger and of risk-taking, and that they were devoid of principle. And she understood men too. She knew what was going through this one’s head: that he was going to kill her anyway, so he might as well have her beforehand. It didn’t matter how good they were, they always thought with their dick first and their head second. It was one of the first things she’d learned during her training, and she’d used that knowledge more times than she could remember.

‘Get over to the bed,’ he instructed. ‘Lie down. Maybe I’ll let you live.’ The arrogance, she thought. This was why women made better killers than men.

Maya released the grip on her snubnose — she wouldn’t be needing it now. She was safe as long as this man’s sexual energy remained unspent. She did as she was told, positioning herself so that her knees were bent at the end of the mattress, her feet on the ground and legs slightly open. The man towered above her, lasciviously taking in the sight, then bent down and roughly yanked her knees apart. She felt the cold butt of his weapon being pressed into her right thigh at the same time as she felt herself being exposed by two rough fingers pulling her underwear to one side. And when she felt his tongue inside her, she gasped — feigning the arousal she never felt.

She let him continue for about ten seconds before slowly moving her left hand down to the pocket containing her knife. She moaned as she removed it, just to keep him interested.

‘You like that, huh?’ she heard him say, like some boorish stud in a porno flick.

‘Yeah,’ Maya replied in kind. She’d studied the movies, and she knew what guys liked to hear. But as she spoke, she raised her arm above her head. ‘Yeah, I like that…’

It was a single movement. She used the strength in her stomach muscles to sit up at the same time as she brought the knife arm down with all the force she had. The thin blade slammed into the back of the man’s neck with absolute ease, and with a second sudden movement, she pushed his head with her free hand so that he rolled on to his back. As she stood up, she saw his limbs twitching violently; his tongue, which just seconds before had been so busy, was still peeking out from his lips, surrounded by blood. It looked to Maya as though he had involuntarily bitten into it.

It took him about a minute to die. A minute during which a thick pool of blood seeped from the back of his neck and the twitching of his limbs receded into nothingness. Maya watched it happen, standing above her victim semi-clad and with a flat, dispassionate look in her eyes.

His death, she decided, once the corpse was still, was not enough. Her usual habit was to make things look like an accident, but tonight she had a different intention. She tightened her dressing-gown cord, then bent down and hauled his body on to the bed, ignoring the blood that smeared her hands, her feet and her gown. She rolled him on to his front, pulled out the knife and rolled him back again, before going about the awkward business of undressing him. In the end she found herself cutting strips of material away with the knife. Occasionally she scored the skin, but that hardly mattered now. Her victim was about to look a whole sight worse.

Once he was fully naked, she stepped back and examined him. One cut would do it, from the throat, down his abdomen, to the area just above his groin. The knife pierced the skin easily. With the precision of a butcher she sliced his body open in a single movement. Blood seeped from the incision, though not a great deal because his heart was no longer beating. Maya discarded the knife — it had done its work — and then slipped her fingertips into the incision in the belly and ripped the skin apart.

There was a sucking sound as the warm internal organs loosened and spilled out, bringing with them a terrible, rancid smell. The end result was monstrous and Maya, even though her stomach was turned only by the stink and not by the sight, recognised this. She went back to the bathroom for her second shower of the day, leaving bloodied footprints in the carpet as she went.

This time the blood took longer to clean from her skin. The shower ran cold, but she stayed there until the water spiralling around the plughole was no longer pink. When she stepped out, she was covered in goosebumps, so she dried quickly and put on a clean set of clothes, barely glancing at the mutilated corpse on her bed.

It was time to leave. There was nothing she wanted to take with her, except the snubnose, the Beretta and the extra rounds. She would never be returning to this place. She allowed herself one final look at her handiwork. Did it say what she wanted it to say? Did it warn Ephraim Cohen, and the others at the Institute, what would happen to anybody they sent after her?

‘Ken behekhlet,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Damn right it did.’

Maya Bloom walked out of the bedroom, descended the stairs and stepped out into the cold night air, closing the front door quietly behind her.