Red Notice

25

Laszlo put on the grey overalls over his other clothes while the sky was still dark. With a battered peaked cap pulled down low over his glasses, he took a careful look up and down the street. Satisfied, he closed and locked the shop door and walked away, his pace unhurried.

He stopped at the newspaper stand outside the corner shop. Every paper carried its own spin on what had happened the day before.

An al-Qaeda attack.

An al-Qaeda cell rounded up as they prepared bombs for the Olympic opening ceremony.

Drug-dealers.

Iranian sleeper cells preparing bombs to activate if we went to war over their nuclear programme.

The one thing all the stories had in common was that Laszlo wasn’t mentioned — and the SAS were.

Manual workers on early shifts were pouring down the steps to catch their trains into the city but, seeing the CCTV cameras monitoring the station entrances and platforms, Laszlo did not follow them. Hands in pockets, he kept walking, just another drab, anonymous figure in the grey early-morning light.

Keeping to the side streets, he made his way slowly east, past Chalk Farm and Camden Town, then turned down a street flanking a new industrial estate. Until a few years earlier this area had been a warren of crumbling, almost Dickensian lanes and warehouses, bounded on all sides by railway tracks, but it was now in the throes of redevelopment. The old buildings had been torn down and glass-and-steel mini skyscrapers were rising out of the rubble beside towering cranes.

At the far end of the industrial estate the road crossed over the Regent’s Canal. Laszlo’s pace slowed and he glanced behind him, then stopped and rested his arms on the parapet of the bridge. He reached inside his overalls and slipped out his revolver. He regretted having to give it up. He always felt uneasy without a weapon of some kind. It sank at once. He knew it would be in good company. The police called London’s waterways the biggest armoury in Britain.

He walked on, squinting into the low light of the rising sun.