The Watchman

The thought of whisky made his gorge rise, and he staggered to the bathroom and the cold tap. On the way he trod heavily on his old Casio Neptune watch it had survived worse and arrived at the sink just in time to throw up. Don Hammond, an enthusiastic drinker who had always tried to persuade Alex to put in more pub hours, would have been proud of him.

It wasn't until he had showered and dressed that he remembered the Glock. It was still there, thank God, as were all the heavy little boxes of 9mm ammunition.

What would have happened if any of it had left the flat in the pocket of a girl he'd picked up in a pub, he shuddered to think. He'd always been the first to take the piss out of those Box clowns who had their laptops nicked from their cars.

The Glock that he had chosen was the model 34. In the past he'd used the 17, the most popular 9mm Glock model. It held up to nineteen rounds, hardly ever jammed and in general was a dream to use. The 34, developed for competition use, was basically the same gun but with the accuracy advantage of another inch of barrel. It wasn't the easiest weapon to conceal, but it still weighed in at just under two pounds fully loaded and if it came to aimed shots, Alex had decided, that extra inch between the sights might just make all the difference. He had fired off a few magazines on the range and had been stunned by the weapon's performance, given that the general rule for automatics was that at a range of more than twenty yards you were lucky if you could hit anything smaller than a front door.

From the armoury he'd also drawn a silencer and a laser dot-marker sight, which he reckoned ought to cover most eventualities.

And a knife. A standard-issue Government Recon commando knife with a 6.25-inch blade. The instinct that Alex had about Meehan was that he wasn't a firearms man. Firearms were crude, noisy and remote he would regard it a failure to have to resort to them. Meehan, Alex was sure from his modus operandi so far, was a close-up man. A blade man.

Retrieving his watch, he saw that it was almost 9.30 and rang Dawn. She was no party girl. She would be up and about.

Her mobile rang twice and then she answered it.

"Up and about, Miss Harding?" he asked her.

"Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?"

"Is that Captain Temple?" she enquired in a brisk, businesslike way that told Alex immediately that she was not alone.

"Yes. It is. Can I talk, or are you .

"No, I'm not. What do you want?"

"I just wanted to make sure you were enjoying this' he peered through the curtains 'rather damp morning. And not fooling around in bed. Did you tell me what his name was, by the way?"

"Look, Captain Temple, if you've got something to say..

"I thought I'd let you know where I was. In case you were missing me."

"In your dreams. Where are you?"

"Hereford. I'm chasing up one of our man's ex-teachers."

"You think that'll be useful?"

"I think it's all we've got, for the moment. I'll keep you abreast."

"You do that. Oh, and, um, the object we found. It was the age we thought it might be. And bearing the right prints. Congratulations, Captain."

The phone went dead. Why did he have this irresistible desire to wind Dawn Harding up? Alex wondered. Because she was such a straight arrow? Such a company girl? And whom had she been sleeping with, anyway? Some keen young computer buff from Thames House, no doubt. Some pillar of the Orienteering or Mountain Biking Club. Alex could just see him, weedy and pale, leaning back against the pillows, having a moody post-shag Dunhill. Except that he wouldn't smoke. He'd probably be a vegetarian. A vegan. Drink ground-up acorns instead of coffee.

By ten, having gulped down a half-pint glass of lager from the store in the fridge (an old morning-after trick of Don Hammond's) Alex was feeling a little better. Ready, in fact, to undertake part two of the standard hangover cure a full English fried breakfast.

More cheerful now, and gratified that the fingerprints on the pencil stub had conclusively linked Meehan with the killings, Alex made his way to a cafe. The downside to the discovery was his certainty that the find had been intended by Meehan. It had almost been a greeting to his pursuer.

For all his instincts concerning the Watchman, Alex mused, he really had no idea where the man might be holing up. One possibility was that he was moving around the fringes of one of the larger cities with transients and unaccountables squatting, perhaps, or moving between cheap hostels and bed-and breakfast houses, or hanging out with travellers. If in trouble, the rule went, seek out those who also have something to hide. The Watchman, however, also had to avoid the Irmh Catholic communities among whom visiting PIRA players moved, so perhaps he was avoiding the cities.

A second possibility was that he had constructed himself a completely false identity driving licence, bank accounts, credit cards and the rest of it and was living in a rented flat and passing himself off as a salesman or some other itinerant professional in a small provincial town.

But something told Alex that this was not the man's style. Frank Wisbeach's words reinforced the idea of Meehan as the victim of some grandiose delusion. A man of unwavenng seriousness, the old NCO had said. No detectible sense of humour. A 'true believer'. Alex had met 'true believers' before. The phrase was used to describe soldiers who believed that the purity of their calling somehow singled them out from the rest of humanity. They tended to subscribe to ideas of 'the warrior's path' and 'the mediocrity of civilian life'. "Green-eyed boys' they'd called them in the Paras. This didn't stop them being good soldiers quite the opposite in many cases but it did mean that their behaviour could get a bit weird if unchecked. The Watchman's murder project definitely had the 'true believer' edge to it and it was for this reason that Alex didn't quite believe that the man was pretending to be Mister Average and driving a Ford Escort. It didn't go with the apocalyptic nature of his actions. If he saw himself as some mystical bringer of vengeance (as so many of these nutters seemed to) then he would ensure that his surroundings were appropriately Gothic and elemental. A forest, perhaps.

Something like that.

Did he own a vehicle? Probably, but Alex guessed he would use it only sparingly. Vehicles showed up on CCTV, people noticed and remembered them and they were powerful transmitters of forensic evidence. Stolen cars were especially bad news if you wanted to keep your head down.

Alex addressed his breakfast black pudding, bubble and squeak, eggs, beans, mushrooms, two fried slices and a mug of tea. The business.

He was just supposed to do the chopping, he reminded himself Fine, except that the only time Five were likely to get anywhere near Meehan was when the former MI-5 agent had finished his killing spree and was ready to give himself up. Killing Meehan at that point would be little more than a gesture.

Right now Meehan would be watching Widdowes, just as he had watched Fenn and Gidley. He'd be lying up nearby, entirely aware of the lookalike and the rest of their strategies, waiting for the moment when they stopped fully believing that the attack would come. The moment when they persuaded themselves they had won.

And then, with blinding and brutal speed, he would strike.

Alex had to persuade the Box team to let him take over or at least participate in the guarding of George Widdowes. He'd have to get the MI-5 officer back into his house so that, like a tiger to a tethered goat, Meehan would be drawn to his prey.

The idea was a good one. It could work. He'd have to talk to Dawn about it. They would have yet another row. He discovered he was rather looking forward to it.

Don Hammond's funeral was the usual sombre affair. There was an obvious police presence, some blocking off the traffic, with many of the officers carrying side arms.

Less obvious was the standby squadron, who were waiting in Range Rovers at several of the surrounding crossroads, armed with MP5 Heckler and Koch submachine guns.

Alex arrived in the dark Principles suit that he used for Regimental funerals and metropolitan area surveillance, and was nodded through by the adjutant, also suited.

In the church there were somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred people. There were several rows of soldiers from the Credenhill base, all looking uncharacteristically smart in their Number Two uniforms, and in front of them a tight group of friends, relations and other uniformed soldiers surrounded Karen Hammond, Don's widow, and Cathy, his daughter.

Moving hesitantly forward, Alex met Karen's eye. She smiled and beckoned him, and a place was made for him in the row behind her. Silently she reached out her hand and equally silently Alex took it. She's as brave as Don was, he thought, turning to the coffin which stood, flag-draped, in the aisle. On it lay his friend's medals, his blue stable belt and his sand- coloured SAS beret.

144w dares wins.

Not every time, thought Alex, catching sight of eight-year-old Cathy Hammond's grief-whitened face. Not every time.

In the churchyard Alex allowed his attention to wander as the chaplain spoke the now familiar words of the funeral service. His eyes travelled over the bare heads and the bemedalled uniforms, and the relatives' dark coats and suits. Karen and Cathy were both weeping now, and Karen's family pressed protectively around them. The eyes of the other soldiers, for the most part, were dowutumed.

Alex himself felt empty. Tears were not what he owed Don Hammond.

And then, as the three shots were fired over the open grave, Alex's wandering gaze met a pair of eyes that were not downturned that were levelled with deathly directness at his own. The man, who was wearing a nondescript suit and tie, and had a curiously ageless appearence, was standing on the other side of the grave behind Karen's family, and Alex realised with stunned disbelief that he knew this narrow face and pale unblinking stare, that he had seen photographs of this man in Thames House, that he was standing just three yards away from Joseph Meehan, the Watchman.

As their eyes locked, Alex felt his scalp crawl and his heart slam in his chest.

No, it was impossible.

Impossible but true. It was Meehan and he had come to scope out his pursuer.

In the icy flame of his regard was a challenge, a statement of ruthlessness and contempt. I can come and go as I please, it said even here, even now, in the secret heart of your world and there is nothing that you can do to prevent me.

And Meehan was right. At that moment there was nothing in the world that Alex could do. Sympathy for Karen Hammond and the dignity of the occasion paralysed him. He couldn't speak, let alone jump over the open grave and grab the man by the throat.

There was a loud clatter overhead as three Chinook helicopters flew past in formation. Alex held Meehan's pale gaze, but the ranks of mourners shifted as they looked upwards, and when they re-formed, moments later, the cold-eyed face had vanished.

Alex peered desperately over the open grave as the churning helicopter blades faded away, but the fly-past had marked the end of the service. As the Hammond family and their friends moved away from the graveside, the regimental personnel held back, Alex among them. Short of elbowing his way through the uniformed men he was trapped.

Finally, the crowd began to disperse. Moving as fast and as forcefully as he was able, given the circumstances, Alex made his way to the churchyard exit.

There was no sign of anyone resembling Meehan either inside or outside. Running to the head of the road he challenged the two uniformed troopers on duty there.

Had a man in his mid-thirties just passed them fair-skinned, dark-haired, five ten, grey suit tough-looking... The words spilt out but the troopers shook their heads. No one like that. No one on his own.

Ignoring the curious stares of the exiting mourners, Alex ran on ahead of the roadblock to the nearest Range Rover and repeated the questions.

Same answer. No one answering that description.

Shit. Shit. Had he imagined seeing Meehan? Had the image of the man been preying on his mind to the point where he was beginning to hallucinate? Was Meehan now stalking him?

Tucking himself into the roadside, Alex called Dawn on his mobile and in guarded terms, given that he was using an open line reported the incident.

"How sure are you that it was him?" Dawn asked.

"Not a hundred per cent. And if it was he could be anywhere by now."

"Why would he want to show himself like that?"

"Check me out, perhaps. Let me know he can come and go as he pleases."

Dawn was silent. Alex could tell that she was unconvinced that the man had been Meehan.

"Look," he went on, "I've got a possible regimental lead. It's not much but it's a possibility. Someone who knew our man. Someone he might have talked to."

"Do you need my people's help?"

"No. Leave it to me."

"OK, then. Keep me informed."

She broke the connection and Alex looked around. Several people were staring at him and he self-consciously brushed down his suit. He had meant what he said to Dawn. Meehan could be anywhere by now. There was no chance of catching him without involving the entire Hereford and Worcester police forces and probably not even then. And, if he was honest with himself, he hadn't been a hundred per cent sure it was Meehan.

Much more constructive to work out where his base was. There had to be some secret location he returned to between the killings. An inner-city flat? A hostel or bed and breakfast? A caravan park? The only person who might possibly have a clue as to the whereabouts of that location and it was still a hell of a long shot was Denzil Connolly. Of those who trained Meehan, according to Frank Wisbeach, Connolly was the only man who really got to know him. If he could find Connolly, Alex reflected, he was in with a chance of finding Meehan. He might, at the very least, learn something about the man he was pursuing.

"Looking for a lift back to camp?"

It was the driver of one of the Range Rovers and Alex accepted gratefully. At the Credenhill base he made his way to the sergeants mess, where he was formally invited in as an officer, he no longer had the automatic right of entry.

After an SAS funeral there was always a big piss-up. Alex had been to more of these than he cared to remember and if there were ever times that the Regiment genuinely resembled the family it claimed itself to be these were they.

The mess was a large room dominated by a bar and furnished with oxblood Chesterfield furniture. The floor was carpeted in regimental blue and the walls were hung with paintings of former SAS soldiers, captured flags and weapons, and the plaques of foreign units. An impressive collection of silverware was also on display.

Men poured in in groups, animated now and relieved that the austerity and the tears of the funeral were behind them. A sheepishly grinning Ricky Sutton arrived on crutches, newly released from hospital, and was greeted with a ragged cheer.

Most of the men headed straight for the bar, and by the time the Hammond contingent and the other wives and relatives were ushered in there were the makings of a fine party.

Alex, still shaken by the incident at the funeral, did not immediately move to join his friends. Seeing Bill Leonard, he cornered him and asked him if he had any idea of Denzil Connolly's whereabouts.

The burly lieutenant-colonel did not look best pleased to be questioned on this subject. Curtly he assured Alex that the Regiment had no contact information of any kind on Denzil Connolly. Then, excusing himself, he moved away.

The Hammond family came in, and Alex was among the group who moved to greet them.

"Don really loved looking for trouble with you fellers," said Karen, teary-eyed and shaky but somehow still smiling.

"I'd never have tried to take him away from all that."

"He was the best," said Alex gently.

"Best soldier. Best mate."

She wept against his shoulder for a few moments, then wiped her eyes and put on a brave grin.

"Where's that posh girl of yours, then? Don told me she was a smasher!"

"She couldn't come," said Alex.

"She got stuck in London. Work."

Karen smiled.

"Well, don't leave it too long. You'll need a nice smart wife when they make you a general."

"Yeah, well, it hasn't quite got to that yet."

"Don't leave it too long, Alex. Promise me.

He smiled.

"I won't, Karen. I promise."

For now, though, there was something he had to follow up and he made his way to a knot of old lags who were clustering around the RSM at the bar.

"Afternoon, Alex, you warry old bugger. I mean sir," said the RSM, addressing his beer glass.

"Word is you enjoyed yourself last night!"

The others smirked.

"I may have taken a drink," admitted Alex.

"Or two."

"In mixed company?"

"That's not impossible either."

The RSM nodded.

"Well, you look like shite today. Serves you right. Poor old Don, eh."

"Poor old Don," Alex echoed.

"He had a very bad last minute and I hope Karen never hears the details of that. But you should have seen him hanging out of that chopper with the SLR and Kalashnikov rounds screaming around him, blazing away with the old five point five. Talk about Death from Above."

The RSM nodded approvingly.

"I hear you didn't do so badly yourself?"

Alex shrugged.

"We were lucky. We could easily have lost a lot more guys.

Next time they should just let the hostages get eaten or chopped to pieces or whatever."

"You said it," said the RSM, wordlessly handing his glass back for refilling. He glanced at Alex's suit.

"Heard you'd been pulled out of Freetown ahead of time.

Spooky business, I heard."

"That sort of thing. I'm trying to get hold of someone you may be in touch with. Denzil Connolly."

The NCOs looked at each other.

"Long time since I heard that name," said a sniper team leader named Stevo.

His tone was careful.

Alex said nothing. There was no communications web more intricate, secretive and subtle than that which existed between British army sergeants. He had been part of it once, but it was closed to him now. He could only file his request and wait.

"There was some strange stuff with Den Connolly," said the RSM, glancing at Alex.

"And that looks like an empty glass in your hand. I thought you officers were supposed to set an example."

For the time being, Alex knew, that was as far as things would go. An overfull pint glass was handed splashily over. Someone spoke through a microphone over the laughter and hubbub. There was going to be an auction of Don Hammond's kit, with the proceeds going to Karen and Cathy.

Two hours later Alex's head was singing with Stella Artois and the shock of seeing Meehan at the funeral had receded. Stepping out into the sudden silence of the evening drizzle, he made his way across the tarmac to the guardhouse. After the original Sterling Lines barracks in Hereford, the Credenhill camp seemed a vast high-tech sprawl more like a software park or an airport than anything else.

Sticking his head into the guardhouse, he asked if someone could ring for a minicab to take him back into Hereford. As it turned out, one of the duty policemen was going that way and offered him a ride.

Denzil Connolly. The name bounced back and forth in Alex's mind. In case anyone just happened to remember anything, he'd left his mobile number with Stevo and the

RSM.

There were two ways to catch a predator like Meehan. One was to peg out a bait and lure him into the open, the other was to find his lair and stake it out.

If necessary, Alex intended to try both.

Back at the flat; he rang Sophie. Her home number was engaged, her mobile switched off. Depressed by the afternoon's events, fuzzy-headed with alcohol, he considered giving Gail a ring. For a long and tempting moment he felt her body against him, soft and unresisting.

At the last minute he decided otherwise. Changing into a sweat top and shorts, he made his way outside to the pavement and began jogging towards the outskirts of the city. It was raining harder now, the light was beginning to go and most of the shops were closed. The pavements were all but deserted, but once again Alex was visited by the unpleasant suspicion that he was being watched.

Get a grip, he told himself Paranoia isn't going to help.

Soon he was on an empty road leading southwards. The rain, cold and clean, lashed his face and hands, his breathing steadied and found its rhythm, and his mind began to clear. He had to watch his step, he told himself, or at least be a bit more discreet. Last night he would probably get away with on the grounds that his best friend had just been killed and everyone was entitled to go crazy from time to time, but if he made a habit of it people were going to start thinking he was losing his grip. And when that occurred, well, you only had to look at Frank Wisbeach to see what happened when a good soldier started to unravel.

Fired with a new resolve, he pushed himself hard on the five miles or so back to Hereford. The rain continued, it was lancing down now as the light faded, and he could feel the beginnings of a new blister on one heel.

Back in the flat he showered and tried Sophie again. Same result: home engaged, mobile switched off. Quickly he dressed, packed a suitcase, locked up the flat and climbed into the pearl-white Kaman-Ghia. Pointing the bonnet towards the Ledbury Road, he set out for London. He was glad to have the car back and to feel the cheerful growl of the 1835cc engine as the rain lashed the windscreen in front of him. Ray Temple had accepted the thirty-year-old shell in lieu of a debt two years earlier and rebuilt the car from the wheels up, selling it to his son for the altogether bargain price of,~50OO.

The car could really move, but on this occasion Alex made sure to keep well within the speed limit. Whatever the alcohol limit was these days, he was uneasily certain that he was in excess of it. He'd only had a couple of pints at the funeral well, perhaps it had been three but there had probably been a fair bit left over from the night before. Having said that, he'd run the best part of ten miles before starting to drive, which would have burnt off a few units, surely?

Best to take no chances, to take a leaf out of the Dawn Harding school of motoring. While waiting at traffic lights outside Cirencester he dialled her number.

"So what are you up to?" he asked her.

"What business is that of yours?"

"What's his name, Harding?"

"Grow up, Temple."

"Can we make a date for tomorrow morning?"

"Any particular reason?"

"Nothing I can talk about on an open line. How about breakfast?"

"OK. Eight o'clock outside my office building."

The phone went dead.

In Western Avenue, as he entered London, he spotted a rose seller standing in a lay-by. He was unlikely to find any florists open, Alex thought, so he bought twelve quid's worth the rest of the man's stock. Mindful of Dawn's words, he took off the cellophane wrappers and bunched the blooms all together. The roses were pretty knackered-looking and certainly had no scent to speak of- they still looked as if they'd been bought in a lay-by, in other words but they were better than nothing.

Half an hour later he was parking the Kaman-Ghia in Pavilion Road, off Sloane Street. The rain had stopped and the pavements and the roads shone silver beneath the street lights. Tucking the roses under one arm and tidying his hair with the fingers of the other hand, he made his way towards the building containing Sophie's flat.

Glancing up at her window he saw her, wearing the white to welling bathrobe 'that she'd stolen from the Crillon Hotel in Paris. She was in her bedroom, staring out eastwards over the city. And then a second dressing-gowned figure appeared beside her, placed an arm round her shoulder.

Who the fuck was that, Alex asked himself, his heart plummeting. Stella, perhaps? But he already knew it wasn't Stella. Running back to the car he rummaged inside his travel bag, pulled out a pair of image-stabilised Zeiss binoculars and focused on the two figures.

It was a bloke. Some fashionably stub bled fucker. And very much at home, thank you very much, with his arm round

Sophie, who looked like the cat who'd had the cream. Well, she certainly hadn't wasted any bloody time, had she?

Stupid bastard, he thought, hurling the roses up the middle of Pavilion Road.

Stupid bastard!

SEVENTEEN.

"So," said Dawn, stirring the cup of brick-red tea that the cafe owner had just placed in front of her.

"Is this going to be a long argument or a short one?"

"I've paid for a long one," said Alex.

She regarded him bleakly. His call to her after the funeral, Alex realised, had counted as a mark against him. She thought that he was getting flaky, that he had started seeing things.

"Look, I've got a hell of a lot to get on with. What is it you want?"

"I want to talk to you about George Widdowes. I don't think your lookalike idea is going to work. I think the only way we're going to stop Meehan is by setting a trap. By putting the real man back into the house as bait."

"No way. We're on top of the Widdowes business. The man we've got looks very like George indeed. He's wearing George's clothes, driving George's car into London every day..."

"Meehan will have guessed that you'd try that," said Alex impatiently.

"He'll have checked him out."

"Only from a distance, going by our find at the Gidleys'. That tree must have been a hundred and fifty yards from the house. He'll never know the difference from that sort of range

"The tree was a general OP for watching security procedures and checking out the dogs. He'll have had a closer look than that at Craig Gidley before killing him, believe me. Probably set himself up at the side of the road earlier in the day and checked him in through the gates. He knew Gidley, just like he knows Widdowes. A glance would have been enough. And a glance has probably been enough to tell him that you're using a lookalike right now.

That's why nothing's happened. That and the fact that the area is almost certainly swarming with Box employees with sniper's rifles. You have to remember that our man's served in Belfast and South Armagh. He's got a nose for that sort of thing."

Her silence told him that he was right about the concealed marksmen.

She placed her teaspoon carefully in her saucer and frowned.

"Look, at least as things stand we're keeping George Widdowes alive."

"Sooner or later Meehan's going to discover where you're keeping him," said Alex.

"He'll follow him back from work. There are only so many exits from Thames House and yes, I know about the underground car parks and the tunnel and the rest of it and so, sooner or later, will he. Meehan will stake them all out, one by one. It may take a month, it may take him a year, but sooner or later he'll do it. He'll catch Widdowes leaving the building and follow him back to wherever it is you've put him. Where is it that Widdowes lives, officially?"

"Hampshire," said Dawn.

"All these guys tied up in Hampshire while Widdowes goes off his head in some crummy safe house in Docklands or Alperton or Gants Hill, waiting for a bullet between the eyes? At the moment Meehan's calling all the shots we've got to stop retreating and take control of this thing."

Dawn pursed her lips thoughtfully.

"At least put the idea to Fenwick," Alex continued.

"And if she agrees in principle, then let's go down to Widdowes' place and check out the possibility of setting up an ambush."

"I can't promise anything," she said eventually.

"But tell me what you want to do and I'll put it to the deputy director."

"Can you please slow down," said Dawn, 'we're not going for the land speed world record."

They were heading up the M3 to Hampshire, this time in the Kaman-Ghia.

Alex had told her that he didn't think he could take another journey with her at the wheel and she had retorted that she was perfectly happy to be driven it would make a change, in fact.

To Alex's surprise and to Dawn's irritation, he suspected -Angela Fenwick had agreed to his request to recce Widdowes' house with a view to returning the agent there and luring Meehan into a trap.

George Widdowes lived a short distance outside the village of Bishopstoke in the Itchen valley. Longwater Lodge, where he lived alone, had once been attached to the much larger Longwater House, now a management college. Surrounded by trees and shrubberies, and set back some fifty metres from the road, the lodge was bordered at its far end by a carrier stream of the River Itchen, which flowed through the grounds of the main house.

Alex and Dawn had parked a quarter of a mile away outside the Pied Bull pub in the village's main street and had ambled out towards Longwater Lodge as if they were a young couple who, on impulse perhaps, had taken the day off. After the rain of the previous day the fields had a summery freshness and the steady hum of bees rose above the grumble of the distant main road.

The Lodge looked empty. The curtains were drawn, no cars stood outside it and a brand-new For Sale sign stood at its gate. The sign had been Dawn's idea and she had somehow ensured that it was up within the hour. Any enquiries to the London estate agent whose name it bore would have been met by the explanation that while the owner of the property wished to announce his intention to sell in the near future, the agency had not yet received full instructions.

Alex had been surprised by the speed with which the idea had been implemented and that Winchester estate agents were quite so receptive to sweet talk from the security services.

"Oh, we've got friends everywhere," Dawn had glibly informed him.

"We're quite big players in the property market."

The purpose of the sign had been to enable her and Alex to reconnoitre the property. If we want to have a good look, she had told him, then we might as well do it the easy way and walk straight up the drive. Anybody watching will simply assume that we're a couple who are interested in buying.

Turning his back on Longwater Lodge, Alex scanned the surrounding countryside. Still green cornfields bordered by hedgerows and oak trees on the higher ground; water-meadows in the valley, with willows and poplars shading the river. Hundreds of acres visible and a thousand places where an experienced man might be lying up. The Watchman was out there somewhere, keeping the house under observation, but you could send in a battalion of paratroopers with dogs and helicopters and still not find him. With the first indications of a search he would simply fade away.

Alex stared over the road into the sunlit green valley. He knew he would never be offered an obvious give-away like the flash of a binocular lens, but for an optimistic moment or two he stared anyway.

From the humpback bridge crossing the river, the two of them examined the Lodge and its surroundings. The property comprised about an acre and a half in total. The road on which they stood swept right-handed round the front of the garden, and was separated from it by a wall of about five feet in height and a neatly clipped yew hedge.

"That's where our people go in at night," Dawn told him.

"They climb over the wall once it's dark and keep the place under surveillance through night-vision goggles."

"How do they get here?"

"By Land Rover. Park up a hundred yards away round the corner.

"He'll have sussed them out on night one," said Alex.

"You can count on that."

Dawn shrugged.

"You may be right."

"I am right," said Alex.

"He's almost certainly watching us right now. Give us a kiss!"

"In your dreams."

"I mean it. That's what normal couples do when they're looking at houses.

They hold hands. They kiss each other. It means they ..

"I know perfectly well what it means." Turning, she kissed him glancingly on the left cheek.

He frowned.

"Oh, come on, Bunnykins, you can do better than that. Think how happy we could be here. Think of little Bethany and Jordan and Kylie running into the house with bunches of flowers and bouncing on our bed on Saturday mornings.

Think of the songs you'll sing as you bake the bread and scrub the floor. Think of the jam you'll make."

"You're sick, Temple."

"I'm not sick, Bunnykins, I just want a proper kiss. I'm not necessarily talking tongues at this stage, but I do think it should be convincing."

"Don't be disgusting. And stop calling me Bunnykins."

"I will if you kiss me right now, mouth to mouth, for a minimum of five seconds. If not, I'm afraid you go on being Bunnykins."

With a long-suffering sigh she turned to him and placed her arms round his neck. Her mouth was very soft. She even closed her eyes.

"There," he said finally.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I've had worse," she said.

He placed his arm round her waist, sensed her body stiffen, then felt an answering arm creep unwillingly round his waist.

"How many marksmen?" he asked.

"Most nights two, I think. One somewhere in the front here, one round the back of the house. I doubt anyone could get past them to the house without being seen."

"I'm not so sure," said Alex.

"Let's walk around the garden. Lots of pointing to the ground, please. Lots of saying that's where we'll have the sweet peas and let's put some crocus bulbs in here and oh dear, we'll never get camellias to grow in this chalky soil."

"You're really determined to make me look and feel absolutely as stupid as possible, aren't you," she murmured.

"No, I'm not. I'm just trying to stop you looking like an MI-5 desk officer someone Meehan would suss at a glance. Like I

said, he's probably watching us right now. If I were him, I'd be. Let's look round the back."

"What are you hoping to find, exactly?"

"He'll have scouted the place, looking for a way in at night. Somewhere he can get into the property without being bumped by the security people. I'm searching for that way in.

"Do you know how you'd do it?"

"I'm pretty sure I do but I'd just like to walk around for a bit. What about you?

How would you get in?"

"Shoot the guards, perhaps? Silenced rifle with night sights?"

"That'd certainly do it," said Alex, pointing at the house as if discussing a loft conversion, 'but he hasn't killed anyone except his targets so far."

"He killed Gidley's dogs."

"Dogs are just security products. Everyone kills dogs. But my take on Meehan is that he doesn't want to leave a trail of supplementary human corpses. Pride in his work would prevent that."

"Is this you identifying with him again? Is this the way you see killing? As work to take a pride in?"

He laughed.

"You're the one who's hiring the hit man. You tell me. And follow this path round, please. I want to have a quick look at the river bank."

"You think he'll come by river?"

"That's the way I'd do it. Quick cuddle here, I think, under the weeping willow."

"Must we?"

"I'm afraid so. It's just too romantic a spot to miss.

"Oh, yeah? And just what constitutes a romantic spot, in your view?"

"I think anywhere can be, if you're with someone you really, really ..

She folded her arms.

"Go on."

"Kiss me, Harding!"

Her eyes were as flat as a snake's. Slowly, she placed her arms round his neck and her lips against his. Through his shirt and hers he felt the small pressure of her breasts. Then she stepped back.

"That didn't register very high on the Richter scale," he protested.

"We're supposed to be married," she said, turning to look at the house.

"Not in love."

They continued along the bank. The river was slow and deep, its shining surface almost viscous-looking in the sunlight, the bank-side foliage perfectly reflected. Six feet below, emerald weeds wavered and trailed over polished gravel and chalk.

He's watching us, thought Alex with absolute certainty. And he's saying to himself: are these two the nice young couple that they seem to be, or have they come to hunt me down and kill me?

"Here," he said.

"This is where he'll come.

Don't stop. Keep walking. He'll approach silently from a couple of hundred yards upstream no one will see him in a black wet suit once the light's gone and he'll climb out between these two banks of bull rushes

"Are you sure of that?"

"I'm positive. It's exactly where I'd do it. You're covered by the bushes on the bank and the rushes in the water, you're the minimum distance from the house you definitely don't want to have acres of lawn to cross plus there's a sort of underwater chalk bar like a step you can use to climb out. He's already tried it.

When we walk back past you'll see a boot scrape in the algae on the chalk bar and a couple of reed clumps that look as if they've been twisted by someone pulling himself out. He's rehearsed it.~ Dawn crouched to examine a clump of yellow flag iris.

"How do you know it was him?"

"Well, who else is going to have been climbing in and out of the river in George Widdowes' garden? He'd probably have been wearing a weight belt to counteract the buoyancy effect of the wet suit and keep himself low in the water on his approach. There was a snapped root where he might've tried hanging the belt in the dark. He wouldn't want to leave the water wearing it."

"You spotted all that in the time it took us to walk past that bit of bank?"

"I knew what I was looking for. What I expected to see." He thought of Sierra Leone and the frothing brown torrent of the Rokel.

"I've made the odd river approach myself. Bit rougher than this, but the principle's the same.

"So what are you suggesting? That we have one of the marksmen up a tree, waiting for Meehan to climb out. Sort of a hippo shoot?"

"While your shooters are here he won't come," said Alex.

"It's as simple as that. Plus he already knows about the lookalike. Probably knows his name, address and home phone number by now.

"So what are you saying?"

"Get rid of the shooters, the lookalike, everything. Pull them all out and move George Widdowes back in. I'll move back in too, along with a back-up guy, and we'll set up an ambush of our own a proper killing team. Sooner or later Meehan will have to come and then we'll waste the bastard."

"What back-up guy?"

Alex's immediate thought was of Stan Clayton.

"Someone from Hereford. One of my people."

"There's no question of any other non-Five people being involved, I'm afraid.

This is a top-secret operation, not a get- together of your barrack-mates."

"Listen," he said quietly.

"They aren't just my barrack mates, they're the people with the best training and experience of this kind of close-up surveillance in the world. Guys who've spent days at a time lying up in the undergrowth next to IRA arms caches, or waiting for Bosnian war criminals. With all due respect to your guys, I've seen them in action and they stick out like the bollocks on a dog. One other guy from my RWW team, that's all I'm asking."

"I can pass on the request, but I can tell you right now what the answer's going to be."

Alex shook his head.

"You still don't get it, do you?"

"I get it only too well. You want to turn this into a Regiment operation. Well, I'm afraid it's all a damn sight too sensitive for that."

"What you mean is that you don't trust anyone else to keep his mouth shut about what is basically one of the most disastrous fuck-ups in your service's history. You're afraid that if word gets out that one of your agents not only turned into one of PIRA's top nut ting boys but crowned his brilliant career by torturing and killing a choice selection of your desk officers, that people just might start asking questions about your service's competence to handle intelligence affairs in the province. They might decide the Treasury got better value for its money from some other agency. The Firm, for example."

At the mention of MI6, Thames House's hated rival, Dawn Harding all but bared her teeth.

"You are out of your depth by some distance, Captain Temple.

You have been placed under the authority of my service and you will kindly respect that authority."

"Even when its orders are illegal?"

Dawn's expression tightened.

"Let's behave like grown-ups, shall we? We both know what has to be done, we both know why. Like I said, I will pass on your request but I can tell you now what the response will be: if you need back-up, MI-5 will provide it. Assuming, that is, that they go along with your plan at all."

Alex nodded expressionlessly.

"Let's go and check out the house."

She nodded and followed him towards the Lodge.

"After all," he added drily, 'we have to make sure there's going to be room for the children's play area."

Half an hour later the two prospective buyers of Longwater Lodge were sitting in a quiet corner of the Pied Bull. On the walls framed photographs of local cricket teams were displayed, along with horse brasses, winnowing fans, malt shovels, scythe handles and other redundant rural artefacts. A truce had been agreed between them.

"It strikes me," said Alex, when their sandwiches and drinks had been served to them, 'that your deputy director is probably in the clear. That there's a good chance she's not one the Watchman's targets."

Dawn narrowed her eyes.

"What makes you say that?"

"Fenn had his tongue cut out, OK?"

"OK."

"And Gidley had his eyes cut out?"

"Yup."

"Widdowes, if he gets him, will have his ears cut off."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, I figured it might be that three wise monkeys thing. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil."

She nodded.

"I thought of that as soon as I saw what he'd done to Craig Gidley. The suggestion being that when they were alive they saw, spoke and heard evil, and only now that they're dead..

Alex nodded. He had thought it was a pretty brilliant deduction on his part and was rather disappointed that she had reached the same conclusion, and reached it first.

"The thing I was going to say," he pressed on, 'is that there are only three wise monkeys. So assuming your man Widdowes is supposed to be the third, that puts Fenwick in the clear."

"Two points," she said.

"One, we're dealing with a psychopathic murderer here.

Assigning logic or structure to his actions and assuming that he will abide by this logic and structure is asking for trouble. He will do what he will do, period. Two, look at this. I did an Internet search for the expression wise monkeys".

From her jacket pocket she took a folded piece of paper. It was a printout, Alex saw, a printout of a London auction house web page.

Lot 42 - "Four Wise Monkeys'. Netsuke, Thirteenth Century This is a highly rare and important piece, in that it shows four wise monkeys, rather than the more coventional three. The monkeys were introduced into Japan from China in the eighth century AD by a Buddhist monk of the Tendai sect, and are believed to have been associated with the blue-faced god Vajra.

Originally there were four monkeys, namely Mizaru (see no evil), Mazaru (speak no evil), Mikazaru (hear no evil) and Iwazaru (know no evil). As in this piece, Iwazaru was always represented with his hands placed over his heart. By the fourteenth century, however, the fourth monkey was absent from most representations, as he is from the best-known example, the seventeenth-century carving over the doorway of the Sacred Stable in Nikko, Japan. The presence in this early piece of the fourth monkey emphasises the essentially ambiguous nature of the traditional instruction. For while at one level the refusal to see, hear and speak evil will afford spiritual protection, at another level it lays the postulant open to charges of moral disengagement of a closing of the heart.

Alex read the sheet and handed it back to Dawn.

"Four monkeys, then," he muttered.

"Do we reckon that our Watchman knows about the fourth?"

"It took me less than a minute to find this on the web."

"I guess you're right," said Alex.

"And there's another thing," Dawn went on.

"Do you remember the pictures of Meehan you saw in Thames House?"

Alex nodded.

"Do you remember the one in the kitchen of their house in Derry? The one with both his parents in it? Well, if you enlarge it you can see that there are some brass ornaments on the shelf. There's a bell shaped like a Dutch girl, and a miniature camel, and a little square thing that I'd bet a month's salary is a statuette of the wise monkeys."

Alex nodded.

"Well, that does seem to wrap it up," he said.

"And to put your Miss Fenwick squarely in the frame as the fourth monkey."

"That's rather what we feared."

"You might have mentioned it," said Alex.

"Like I said before, anything that helps me to know him better will help me to deal with him."

"We were rather hoping you might deal with him before the projected number of his victims became .. . an issue.

That evening he was changing into a tracksuit in the Pimlico safe house, preparing to go for a run, when his mobile rang. It was Dawn, although she didn't announce her name.

"You've got what you wanted," she said peremptorily.

"Our friend returns to his house in Hampshire the day after tomorrow."

"Do I get any of my people?" asked Alex.

"No. You either use ours or you go without."

"Understood." He frowned.

"Look, you don't fancy a drink or something, do you?"

"Didn't the roses work, then? I forgot to ask." Her tone was amused.

He paused. Took a deep breath.

"Do you fancy a drink or not?"

But the phone had already gone dead.

EIGHTEEN.

"So," said George Widdowes.

"You're really sure about this? You're sure that you'll be able to tackle Meehan when he comes?"

"Yes," said Alex.

"I am. So far he's had everything his own way. He's been able to pick the time and the place. Now we re going to force his hand."

The MI-5 desk officer and the SAS captain were sitting in the ante-room to Angela Fenwick's office in Thames House.

"Tell me," said Widdowes.

"Basically," explained Alex, 'we bait a trap. As you know, there's a For Sale sign outside your house. What's going to happen is that you're going to move back there for a few days and in three days' time you're going to supervise the loading of all your stuff into a removals van. Is the place very full?"

Widdowes shook his head tiredly.

"Not very. This is strictly necessary, is it, all this house-moving routine?"

"We've got to do it properly. And it'll make sense to Meehan. You're afraid and you feel isolated out there by yourself, so you're moving back to London.

Maybe you've even been ordered to move back to London. Whichever, you're going to miss the place and, given that there are a couple of armed policemen patrolling the property, you decide it'll be safe to stay there for the last few nights."

"You reckon that'll bounce him into having a go?"

Alex nodded.

"I reckon it will. And if he doesn't come in the next forty-eight hours he certainly will after he sees the furniture van being filled. He'll know that this is his last chance that if he doesn't take you now all his surveillance has gone to waste and he'll have to start from scratch again."

"You think we can set the whole thing up without spooking him?"

"Well, that's the question. Anything smells funny and he won't come he's PIRA-trained, after all. If you just moved back into the place without any security, for example, he'd be very suspicious indeed and let the whole thing go. My guess, though, is that when he sees those armed cops he'll think that you reckon you're safe."

"The armed police won't put him off?"

Alex smiled and shook his head.

"So why won't he just wait until that evening and follow the furniture van?

Follow it to my supposed new house or flat?"

"Because it won't be going anywhere. The loading'll finish about six, and then the van will be driven a couple of hundred yards down the road and parked up in a lay-by to wait for the next morning. Local removal firms often do that so that they don't have to pay their crews overtime."

"Why not wait until the next day and then follow the van?"

"Because it might go anywhere a storage facility, for example and then he'll have to start searching for your new place from scratch. Besides, he'll know that wherever you go will be ultra secure in comparison with your present place. He'll know that the Hampshire house offers by far the best chance he's likely to get."

"And you'll be waiting for him?" said Widdowes doubtfully.

"Basically, yes. I'll hide up by the river and when he comes I'll shoot him at short range with a silenced weapon.

"How will you make sure he doesn't know you're there waiting for him?"

"He won't know," said Alex quietly.

"Count on that. I've set up ambushes before."

In the car park beneath Thames House, a little over twenty-four hours later, Alex squeezed into the boot of the car that was to masquerade as Widdowes'. The BMW saloon had been customised with a boot-fitted surveillance lens and bulletproof windows.

"Are you going to be all right in there?" Widdowes asked.

"Yeah, I'll be OK. Hand us in my kit, could you, and put your own stuff on the back seat."

The drive took an hour and a half in total and by the end of it Alex was feeling light-headed and nauseated from the exhaust fumes. When Widdowes finally sprang the boot open, it was in the near darkness of the garage at Longwater Lodge. Illuminating his watch, Alex saw that it was a few minutes before 5 p.m.

"Right," he said, when he had stretched his legs for a moment or two.

"This door leads directly into the house?"

"Yes."

"And is there a room without any windows?"

"There's a cellar, yes.

"Perfect. I'll set up my stuff down there. Can you get me there without leading me past too many windows?"

Widdowes nodded and opened the door to the house. Alex, feeling slightly ridiculous, followed the tall Barbour-coated figure on his hands and knees. They reached a door, which Widdowes opened. Alex swung himself on to a descending staircase and took his bag from the older man, who then flicked a light switch and followed him down into the cellar.

It was a decent-sized place, and not too damp. In front of him was a large Potterton boiler, switched off. Against the other walls stood a wine-rack, a carpentry workbench, several bundles of magazines bound with baler twine, a case of Eley shotgun cartridges and a battered travelling trunk.

"I've got a camp bed," said Widdowes.

"I'll bring it down for you.

While he was upstairs, Alex unpacked his case. He left the clothes inside, and arranged the weaponry and kit on the carpentry workbench. There was the Glock 34, its silencer, the laser dot-marker sight on its factory-fitted slide, a spare lithium battery for the laser sight, two boxes of twenty-five hollowpoint 9mm rounds and the Recon knife. There were also a sleeping bag and a tin of black waterproof cam-cream from a survival shop in Euston, a pair of fisherman's felt soled boots from Farlow's of Pall Mall, and an all-black Rip Curl wet suit,

weight belt and jet fins from a diving equipment store in Fulham. For Alex, not usually an enthusiastic shopper, the knowledge that he'd been spending MI-5's money had made for a pleasant morning.

When he reappeared with the camp bed Widdowes appeared disconcerted by this array. In fact, he looked badly scared. His features were flushed and his eyes flickered uneasily about him. Hardly surprising, thought Alex. It couldn't be anything but terrifying to know that you were next on the list of a proven psycho like Meehan.

"Are you OK?" Alex asked.

Widdowes nodded.

"Yes, I'm OK." He laughed nervously.

"You've certainly brought the full armoury with you.

"I'm not taking any chances with this bastard," said Alex.

"He's going straight in the fucking ground. Have you got your own weapon?"

Widdowes reached inside his jacket, withdrew a Colt .38 revolver, spun the chamber and returned it to the shoulder holster.

Alex nodded. Privately he thought that if it ever came to a one-on-one between Widdowes and Meehan the MI-5 man was as good as dead, but he guessed that the heft and weight of the Colt were a good confidence booster. He turned to Widdowes.

"Look, I know you're an experienced field agent and I don't want to get your back up, but a handful of rules for the duration, yeah?"

Widdowes nodded.

"Avoid windows. I doubt he'd try and shoot you but better to be safe than sorry, so if you must go past a window keep moving. Whether inside or outside the house, don't ever present a static target and don't whatever you do speak or shout out to me don't worry about warnings, if he comes anywhere near here I'll see him before you do. I'll have him covered. Behave at all times as if you were alone in the house. Have you met up with the two police guys?"

"Yes. They're MI-5 people, in fact, in police uniforms."

"That's fine. Basically what we need them to do is mooch around the front of the house. Just wander about between there and the road, and stick their necks into the back garden every so often. They should stay together most of the time, smoke the odd fag, that sort of thing. They've got to look like lazy and incompetent jobs worths out to grass and no threat to anyone. Can you make sure they understand that?"

Widdowes nodded again.

"Otherwise, just observe your usual routine. It might help if you put an empty bottle or two out each night give the impression you're hitting the old vino.

That'll encourage him to think..."

"Yeah, I know what you're saying. Nerves shot, soft target..." Alex looked at Widdowes. His darting glances, uneven colour and paper-dry bps confirmed that he was very frightened indeed. He put a hand on the older man's shoulder.

"George, mate, we re in this together and I'm fully aware that your part is the harder one. Honestly. If you can think of a better way of nailing this fucker I'm on for it, believe me.

Widdowes pursed his lips and nodded.

"I'm also sorry to put you through a non-existent house move, but again..."

"That's OK," said Widdowes, forcing an unconvincing smile.

"I've been meaning to sort through all this junk. Get my life into some sort of order. What do you want to do about eating?"

"Well, it gets dark at about eight o'clock and I want to get into position about then. So if we have a feed at sevenish

"I'll knock something up. You're going to wait for him in the river, aren't you?"

"That's the idea."

"Have you considered how you're going to get into position without him seeing you? I mean, we have to assume he's watching the area around the house. Quite possibly from close up.

"You're going to have to drive me downstream to somewhere I can get into the river and work my way back here. Somewhere he won't see me get out of the car.

"That's no problem. I can take you up to the next road bridge and you can get back through the grounds of Longwater House. There's no one there at the moment, the place is closed up." Widdowes frowned.

"But how do you know Meehan won't be down there? How do you know you won't run into him?"

"Because he won't want to go in blind. He'll come from the direction he can watch the house and the guards from, which is upstream. You can't see anything at all from where I'm going, except trees."

Widdowes slowly nodded.

"Right. Got you.

"Is there a pub in the downstream direction? Some reason you might be going that way?"

"There's an off-licence in Martyr Worthy. If I come back ten minutes later with a Thresher's bag..

"Good enough. Now I'd suggest you get upstairs. Maybe take a cup of tea to the two cops give you an excuse to brief them about looking useless."

"What will you do?"

"I'll be OK, don't worry. See you at seven.

Widdowes nodded and smiled wryly.

"I'll tell you one thing," he said.

"If this guy Meehan succeeds in taking me out there are going to be some long faces at Thames House."

Alex looked at him.

"Angela Fenwick, for a start," continued Widdowes.

"She's in line for the directorship, that's why the deaths of Fenn and Gidley have pissed her off so royally. If she loses any more of her desk officers it's going to start looking very much like carelessness. Her star and that of her familiar could well start to decline."

"Her familiar?" asked Alex, surprised by the bitterness and vehemence of his tone.

"Dawn Bloody Harding. Zulu Dawn. Dawn of the Living Dead. From the moment she joined the service she hitched her wagon to Angela's that's why her progress has been so meteoric. For as long as Angela's riding high, Dawn's up there with her. But if Angela falls, then Dawn goes down too. Don't overlook the political side of all this, chum. You've been brought in to safeguard the upward mobility of a political cabal."

"I'm here to safeguard you, George. The rest doesn't interest me.

Widdowes nodded philosophically and shrugged.

"I'm sorry. You're right it's not your worry. Getting cynical in my old age, that's all."

When he had gone Alex unrolled his sleeping bag on the camp bed, lay down and stared at the cellar's plasterboard ceiling. Eventually he closed his eyes. It was going to be a long night and he would do well to get some rest. In his pocket, his mobile throbbed.

"Yeah?"

"It's Dawn Harding."

"Zulu Dawn!"

There was a silence.

"Where did you get that name?" she asked accusingly.

"Have you been ..

"It's one of my favourite films," said Alex breezily.

"How are you?"

"Fine," she said curtly.

"Is everything OK down there?"

"So far, yes.

"How's George holding up?"

"He's under a bit of stress but he's keeping it all together."

"You think Meehan will come tonight?"

"Might. Bird in the hand and so on."

There was a pause.

"Are you ... OK?" she enquired.

"Do I detect a note of concern?" asked Alex, unable to keep the smile from his voice.

"No, you don't!" she snapped.

"I simply need to know you're in good shape. I don't want any more corpses on the pathologist's slab."

"Don't worry," said Alex, the vision of Dawn suspended high above the ground in her scarlet underwear flashing past his eyes.

"I'll keep myself in good shape for you."

She disconnected. Alex returned his gaze to the ceiling and his smile faded. He had ninety minutes in which to rest up. He closed his eyes.

Shortly after seven Widdowes woke him. The MI-5 officer was carrying a plateful of cheese and ham sandwiches, a Granny Smith apple, a Mars bar and a two-litre bottle of still mineral water.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's not quite up to Gordon Ramsay standard. I assumed you'd want mustard on the ham?"

"Yeah. Great."

"I meant to ask. What do you want to do about washing?"

"I don't," said Alex.

"You can smell toothpaste and soap on the air. I won't be using either until Meehan's dead. And hopefully I won't be needing a crap till then, either. As far as pissing's concerned, well, from time to time you'll find this Evian bottle on the stairs."

"Got you," said Widdowes without enthusiasm.

Alex ate and drank for five minutes in silence, then loaded the Glock's magazine with nineteen rounds and slapped it into the butt. Pointing the handgun at the wall, he pressed the button activating the laser sight. A small red dot appeared on the wall, scribbling fine lines of light as Alex moved the weapon. Satisfied, he thumbed the system off again. Then he stripped, pulled on the wet suit and buckled the sheathed Recon knife round his calf. The Glock went into a plastic thigh holster on a lanyard. Blackening his face and hands with the cam-cream, he pulled up the neoprene hood of the wet suit. The clothes that he had just been wearing went into the waterproof stuff sack that had previously held the wet suit. The boots and fins went into a carrier bag.

"OK," said Alex.

"Let's do it. What's the light like outside?"

"Going fast," said Widdowes.

They made their way back to the garage, Alex climbed into the boot and Widdowes drove off, stopping briefly to converse with the uniformed men at the gate. The ensuing drive took no more than three minutes, but took them well out of the sight of anyone who had been observing the house. Quickly, watching out for other cars, Widdowes let Alex out of the boot, handed him the stuff sack and drove on. The whole operation had taken no more than ten seconds.

Crouching in the cow-parsley on the river bank, Alex peered around him in the fading evening light. Above him was the road, which was narrow and unlikely to see too much traffic between now and tomorrow morning. To his left was the road bridge. He could just make out a narrow walkway beneath this, but access to it was largely obscured by nettles, elder and other roadside vegetation. Sliding down the bank, Alex pushed through undergrowth into the darkness beneath the bridge and cached the stuff sack of clothing there. Attaching the weight belt round his waist, he undid the Farlow's boots and tied them to the belt by the laces, then pulled on the jet fins and lowered himself into the water.

The carrier stream was about six feet deep at the edge and deeper, he guessed, in the middle. Despite its smooth surface, the current was considerable. Cautiously, he began to move forward. The boots at his waist dragged a little, but this was more than compensated for by the powerful jet fins, just as the buoyancy of the wet suit was compensated for by the weight belt. With it he was able to move silently with only his head above the surface, without it he would have been wallowing about on the surface, leaving a wake like a speedboat.

Tucking in to the side of the river, trailing his arms at his side, he concentrated on moving with absolute silence and the minimum of water disturbance. After fifty yards he passed a high fence, which he guessed was the boundary of the Longwater estate. A few hundred yards, Widdowes had said. He swam silently on. At one point the river shallowed, running over a broken bottom no more than a couple of feet deep and Alex was forced to leopard-crawl six inches at a time against the weight of the tumbling water. With relief, however, he soon felt the river bed falling away beneath him.

After a hundred yards, he grabbed on to an overhanging root, swung himself into the bank and took stock. Soon he would be coming into the area that he had to assume was under night sight surveillance. Meehan might be several hundred yards away, scoping out the property from a concealed hide, or he might be much closer.

He could be lying up in the river as little as fifty yards upstream. From now on Alex would have to move with extreme caution.

A couple of yards ahead there was a faint splash. A small sound, but enough to set Alex's heart racing. Something had been thrown or dropped into the water.

Was Meehan waiting on the bank above him? Had he seen him? Shrinking into the knotted roots beneath the river's mud and chalk banks, Alex froze, his heart pounding. Slowly, an inch at a time, he reached for the knife, withdrew the razor sharp blade from the scabbard, held it inches beneath the surface. And then, against a faint patch of light, he saw the questing head of the otter, cutting an arrowhead wake through the water. Going hunting, he guessed with dizzying relief When he had caught his breath he moved on, keeping hard in to the bank, driving against the current with the fins. Through the trees to his left he could see the vast dim bulk of Longwater House, now, and ahead of him the lights of the Lodge. What was Widdowes up to? he wondered. In the short time they had spent together he had developed a sympathy for the man. Not much in Widdowes' manner suggested it now, but he'd probably been a competent enough operative in his time. Box's Belfast agent handlers were not fools, for the most part (although one or two of them were and Michael Bettany had been a traitor too, jailed for spying for the Soviets), nor were they cowards. No one who had seen what had happened to Fenn and Gidley, though, would be anything but afraid.

Alex was suddenly filled with a loathing of Meehan. They all moved in a dirty world, that much was accepted, but to do what he had done, well, that was something else. Chopping bits of people's faces off, hammering nails into them.. .

What the last hours of those two poor bastards from the FRU must have been like was beyond imagining.

Alex moved silently upriver in the deep black shadows beneath the bank. He was invisible now, a creature of the night. He came to a halt beneath the slender curving trunk of a willow, a place he had noted when he visited the house with Dawn. Above him was the yellowish haze of the lights from the Lodge, five to six yards ahead of him was the silhouette of the reed-bed and the bushes through which he had calculated that Meehan would make his exit.

Feeling beneath the water, Alex found a sturdy root and, quickly exchanging his fins for the Farlow's boots, attached the fins to the root by their straps so that they hung in the current a foot beneath the surface. Could he find them again? Yes, they were just below this willow root. Should he take the weight belt off? He tried it, felt himself rising in the water and hastily reattached it. Where to go? Inching forward, his feet found a shelf that would take his weight. Gratefully he sensed the thick felt soles of the fishing boots grip the slippery chalk. If he'd settled for commando-soled boots, as he'd originally considered, he would have had a hard night ahead of him. His right arm found a corresponding elbow of willow root to hook through. He was now facing the current and the direction that Meehan would come. Between him and Meehan's projected exit point was a clump of sedge and the outer skirt of the willow's foliage. As long as he kept still, he would be invisible, even if Meehan was using night sights.

For his part, Alex had decided against night sights. Partly because of their unwieldiness in the water, partly because the intensified green images would compromise his night vision. He knew what he was looking for and he knew where to look. Even when the lights went off in the house there would be a close to full moon. And it would be when the lights went off that Meehan would come.

For an hour Alex remained there, unmoving, his eyes scanning the river ahead of him. In low light conditions, he knew, you saw better with your peripheral than your direct vision. Very slowly, a limb at a time, he kept himself moving underwater, gently contracting and relaxing his muscles. Partly to stave off cold and avoid cramping, which despite the wet suit was a very real threat, and partly in order to remain alert.

Of all the ambushes that Alex had ever set up, this was by far the least satisfactory, in that he was operating alone and without back-up. He would go for a heart shot as Meehan pulled himself out of the water, he decided, when both his hands were occupied. The silenced double tap would punch the life out of the former agent before his brain had had a chance to take in what was happening. He'd be dead before his knees bent and the Watchman's rule of terror would be over.

The first man Alex had killed had been during the Gulf War in 1991.

He had been part of a four-man Sabre team tasked to knock out a Scud missile dump at al-Anbar, west of Baghdad. Under the command of an NCO named Neil Slater they'd been choppered in by night and left to forage for cover. The cold had been extreme they'd been sent in wearing little more than lightweight 'chocolate chip' battle dress and shirts and there had been no cover of any kind. Within the hour they were frozen to the bone. The four of them Alex, Neil Slater, Don Hammond and Andreas van Rijn had made a quick recce and Slater had made the decision to lie up for the rest of the night in a disused berm a couple of hundred yards from the dump. None of them had slept; instead they had huddled together against the cold and the wind-borne snow that whipped mercilessly about them.

The next morning, half-frozen, they had seen a convoy of Iraqi T-55 tanks rumbling towards them the most terrifying sight Alex or indeed any of them had ever witnessed. Desperate, they had buried themselves in the detritus at the bottom of the berm Iraqi ration tins, ammunition boxes, rubble, old tyres, discarded cam netting and the decaying corpse of a goat and prayed. The Iraqi tank crews, anxious to relieve themselves after several hours in their T-55s, had surrounded the berm. The Sabre team were pissed on, they were shat on and Alex's thigh was agonisingly burnt by a discarded cigarette end, but they were not discovered. And eventually, after four ghastly hours, the tanks had rumbled away into the desert.

As soon as the SAS team had judged it safe to move Slater had radioed in the tanks' position and direction of travel, and called in the air strike on al-Anbar. Its purpose was twofold: to destroy the missiles grouped there for transportation to mobile missile launchers and to kill a man known as Marwan.

"Marwan', to the Allied intelligence forces based in Saudi Arabia, had for several weeks been little more than an occasionally occurring code name in the welter of enemy radio traffic. It was thought from the contexts in which he was mentioned that he might be a senior technician of some sort. Then an intercepted transmission between the al-Anbar base and Baghdad command had suggested that "Marwan' might be a man known to the Allies as "Guppy' an Iranian scientist who had changed sides during the Iran-Iraq war and now ran the missile research plant at Sa'd 16, in north Iraq. It was the Sa'd 16 team who had developed the alHusayn the long-range version of the Russian Scud that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads. According to the transmission, "Marwan' was due at the al-Anbar base that evening, suggesting that the missiles might be about to be checked over and dispersed.

If'Marwan' was indeed "Guppy', then it was essential that he be killed, just as it was essential that the missiles should be destroyed while they were all in one place. Neil Slater's instructions were to call in the air strike, assess the subsequent damage and ensure that there were no Iraqi survivors.

The air strike was at the same time the most dramatic and the most appalling event Alex had ever witnessed. The Tornados had screamed in, their missiles drawing a deceptively faint diagonal trail, and the Scud jet-propellant had gone up in an eyeball-searing roar of light and heat, hurling vehicles, machinery, weapons and human body parts in all directions. The explosions had been followed by a terrible screaming and by the sight of disjointed figures writhing on the charred ground. And by the smell, the meaty stench of burning human flesh.

"Go!" Neil Slater had screamed.

"Go, go, go!"

And they had gone. Above them the sky was black with smoke, as if a solar eclipse were taking place. Initially Alex had thought that they would encounter little or no resistance, that the entire Iraqi strength had been killed or maimed in the air strike. But this was not the case, as rapidly became clear. As the team advanced, moving in skirmish order across the twilit noon landscape, they came under sustained fire from a slit trench. A group of Iraqis must have been lying up in a bunker and escaped the firestorm unleashed by the Tornados.

The four SAS men hurled themselves into cover behind a Panhard Landcruiser which had been blown on to its side by the blast. From directly in front of them the Iraqi fire team immediately brought a withering hail of 7.62 rounds to bear on the vehicle from their Kalashnikovs. Between the two sides lay the charred, twisted and smoking bodies of the missile support crew, the lingering screams of those who had not yet died cutting through the stinking air. Thirty yards in front of them was an anti-aircraft gun emplacement, surrounded by the bodies of the men who had manned it. To twenty-six-year-old Corporal Alex Temple, who had never been on a full-scale battlefield before, it was a scene straight from hell.

"What range do you reckon?" Neil Slater asked him calmly, as Kalashnikov rounds screamed and ricocheted against the Landcruiser's blackened and twisted flank.

"I'd say fifty metres," said Alex, struggling to keep his voice steady.

Slater nodded and removed a grenade from his bandolier. The grenade's gold top told Alex that it was the high-explosive type, rather than anti-personnel or white phosphorus.

From the other side of the Landcruiser came the whoomfing crack of a Russian grenade. Hand-thrown, guessed Alex, but not quite far enough.

Calmly Slater checked the sextant sight on his weapon s carrying handle and slid the HE grenade into the 203 launcher tube beneath the barrel of his M16.

"Fifty metres it is," he said.

"Cover please, lads. Time for a delivery of Gold Top."

"Pasteurise the fuckers," whispered Andreas van Rijn, Slater's second-in command

As the three of them poured aimed shots from their Mi6s at the Iraqi position, Slater leaned coolly from cover, glanced down once at the sextant sight and fired.

The egg-shaped grenade hit the ground a few feet beyond the trench, bounced once and exploded noisily but harmlessly on the desert floor, shredding a thorn bush.

Quickly, Slater reloaded. This time the grenade fell short, but close enough to blow a half-hundredweight of sand and scrub into the trench.

The fire from the Iraqi trench intensified, and it was at that moment that the SAS team guessed they were facing elite troops and "Marwan' was in the enemy trench. This was the only possible explanation for the Iraqi team's failure to surrender, given that they faced almost certain obliteration: they had been ordered to defend the missile scientist with their lives.

A second Russian pineapple grenade bumped laboriously towards the Landcruiser, exploding deafeningly up against it. A spatter of Kalashnikov fire followed.

"Our turn, I think," said Slater grimly, shaking his head against the blast. This time the gold-top 203 grenade fell straight into the enemy trench and Alex watched as a shattered assault rifle flew into the air alongside the severed arm that, until a moment earlier, had held it.

"Full fat!" murmured Andreas van Rijn appreciatively.

"Full fucking fat!"

The firing did not cease. At least three Iraqi soldiers were still capable of manning a weapon and were bravely continuing to do so, forcing the SAS team to remain flattened behind the wrecked vehicle. At intervals Alex and the others were able to squeeze off a few rounds, but not to great effect. In small-arms terms it was a stalemate. But the SAS had their 203 grenade launchers.

Inexorably Slater reloaded. He had the range now, and dropped a fourth HE grenade into the Iraqi trench. This time the explosion was followed by silence and then a low groaning sound.

With his hand, Slater ordered absolute stillness. The SAS team froze. Nothing, just that long-drawn-out groaning. All of them were uncomfortably aware that sooner or later more Iraqi troops would converge on the place. Probably sooner.

The destruction of al-Anbar would certainly not have passed unnoticed.

Quickly, Alex switched magazines and as he did so his eye caught a blurred movement behind the anti-aircraft emplacement to their left. A fraction of a second later a tall khaki figure was sprinting towards the Landcruiser, holding a Kalashnikov and Alex noted in something like slow motion a pale-green Russian cylinder grenade.

From a kneeling position Alex pulled the heavy M16 203 to his shoulder. The moment seemed to go on and on. He saw the courage and the blazing intention in the Iraqi's eyes, heard his sawing breath and the desperate driving of his feet, dropped his foresight to the oncoming man's chest, saw his upper body half turn to accommodate the grenade throw only twenty-five yards to go now aimed, smoothly exhaled and punched six high-velocity 5.56mm rounds through his sternum.

For a moment, as a little over a pound of bone, muscle and lung tissue leapt from the Iraqi soldier's back, his eyes met Alex's. There was surprise there and perhaps a measure of disappointment, but not much more.

Is that all, Alex asked himself wonderingly? Is that all it is to kill a man?

The volley pitched the Iraqi backwards on to his own grenade, from which he had withdrawn the pin before starting his run. Untypically of the item in question and of exported Russian grenades in general, it worked perfectly, shredding the soldier's heart through his ribs after a delay of exactly four seconds.

A fris son passed through Alex as he clenched and unclenched his toes in the Farlow's boots. He had been in the river outside Widdowes' house for nearly three hours now, his dark-accustomed eyes endlessly quartering and scanning the space ahead of him, his senses pricked for any noise or smell that was in any way foreign to the place. He was cold, but not critically so a layer of body-temperature water lay between his skin and the wet suit's neoprene lining. The stiller he kept, in fact, the warmer he was.

The MI-5 men had played their parts perfectly, pacing loudly around the grounds with cigarettes and torches, announcing their flat-footed presence to any who might be observing. You certainly wouldn't need night sights to know that the Thompson Twins were in town.

But of the Watchman there had been no sign. A heron, broad-winged and graceful, had lowered itself from the sky a little after nine o'clock and taken up residence among the reeds close to where Alex expected the Watchman to exit the river. The perfect early warning system, thought Alex. Not even Joseph Meehan could shimmy past a heron without disturbing it.

He'd felt nothing at the Iraqi's death. And nothing afterwards, when they'd killed all of those still alive. In most cases the double taps that they had delivered had represented a merciful release from the terrible burns caused by the Tornado's incendiary missiles and the exploding Scud propellant.

They'd found a man who might or might not have been "Marwan' in the trench, dead from shrapnel wounds to the head and blast injuries. He'd been unarmed and wearing khaki overalls of a different design from the others. In his pockets they had found a Tandy calculator, an ID card and a wallet containing pictures of his family. All these, along with a half melted Toshiba laptop computer found near the anti-aircraft emplacement, had been bagged and returned to base. The operation had been judged a one hundred per cent success.

Alex had felt nothing and thought he'd got away unscathed.

NINETEEN.

The Watchman did not come and with first light Alex swam silently downstream to the bridge, exited the water and redressed himself in the clothes that he had left hidden there. The cold of the river and the length and intensity of his eight-hour vigil had left him desperately tired, and for a long time he could not stop himself shaking. He couldn't even bring himself to think about further nights spent the same way.

In truth, it had always been unlikely that the Watchman would come on the first night of Widdowes' return. He would want to watch and wait, to weigh up the chances of the whole thing being a set-up. In Meehan's position Alex wouldn't have come on that first night.

But now, hopefully, Meehan would have had a chance to see that the arrangement was exactly what it seemed to be: a nervous public servant guarded by a pair of competent if rather dilatory policemen. Widdowes was getting the sort of protection that an important criminal witness might get, or the senior officer of a regiment that had served in Northern ireland.

Alex sat beneath the bridge for a further couple of hours. Slowly the darkness became wet grey dawn, and at 6 a.m. he heard a car come to a halt above him and a voice quietly call his name. Hurrying out with his kit, he dived into the boot of the customised BMW and lay there while Widdowes went through the motions of going for an early-morning drive.

Back in the garage the MI-5 man looked at him with concern.

"You look completely knackered," he said.

"Are you OK?"

"I'll live," replied Alex.

"How are you?"

"I did what you said: cooked myself supper, watched Newsn~iht, and hit the sack. Even managed to sleep." Widdowes hesitated.

"I'm grateful for this, Alex," he said quietly.

"Man to man and forgetting all the inter-service bullshit, I'm really grateful. You're putting yourself on the line and that means a lot. Is there anything I can do in return?"

"Yes," said Alex wearily.

"Stay alive. And sort us out some breakfast."

"Any preferences?"

"Everything," said Alex.

"The full bollocks."

"My pleasure. Would you like a bath?"

"When Meehan's dead," said Alex.

Widdowes nodded. From the drive came the sound of a car on gravel and voices. The MI-5 'policemen' were handing over to a new pair.

In the cellar, meeting his exhaustion head-on, Alex pushed himself through a hard exercise routine followed by a series of stretches. The wet suit, the boots and the rest of the kit were laid out to dry a pointless exercise, really, but one which imposed a level of formality and routine on the situation.

When the breakfast came, preceded by the smell of fresh coffee, Alex ate fast and in silence.

"You're sure you want to stay here while I go to work?" Widdowes asked eventually.

"He won't try to kill you in the car," said Alex with certainty.

"And I doubt he'll even bother to follow you. He knows where you're going, he'll know from the cops on the gate that you're coming back here. Just keep the windows up, the door locked and head straight for Thames House. You'll be fine the guy has to sleep some time."

Widdowes nodded.

"I'd better make a move. Sure you'll be

OK?"

"I'll be fine."

The two men shook hands and Widdowes departed. Placing the Glock 34 on the ground beside the camp bed, Alex climbed into his sleeping bag, closed his eyes and slept.

For the next two nights the Watchman did not come. Each evening Alex lowered himself into the river by the bridge, swam upstream and began his long vigil. He went to exactly the same position each time, hooked his arm round the underwater root, lodged his feet on the chalk shelf and waited.

Time passed with unreal slowness. As his eyes searched the gloom ahead for any sign of movement, his mind seemed to separate itself from his body, to undertake journeys of its own. Sometimes it seemed as if he were not in the river at all, but flying, or sleeping, or driving. He was visited by the familiar ranks of ghosts the Iraqis with their charred faces and smoking chest cavities, the bullet shattered IRA volunteers, the bloodslicked Colombians and RUF men, the frost-stiffened Serbs. All of them milled about him in an ever-changing tableau, gravely displaying their wounds, endlessly reprising the instant of their deaths. To kill a man, Alex had long understood, was to fix a moment in time, to have that moment with you for ever.

And now, with considerable formality, he was planning another death. A death that, in his mind's eye, he had seen many times. The Watchman, carried downstream by the current, would surface in the moonlit water three or four metres away and begin his silent ascent of the bank. With his right hand Alex would thumb on the infra-red sight, move the red dot to the centre of his target's chest, fire and keep firing. The coughs of the silenced Glock would be all but inaudible.

The body would fall back into the water, swing towards him on the warm stream.

That was how it would be.

But the Watchman didn't come. Alex waited, primed to kill, but the river remained just a river, a place of gnats and weed and flag iris. And with each grey morning he doubted his sanity more, wondered whether despite all his experience he had miscalculated. Would the BMW come and collect him once more? Or had his instincts finally deceived him? Was Widdowes even now lying mutilated and dead on the floor of Longwater Lodge?

Each morning, however, the car did come and the routine was the same. Breakfast, coffee and then sleep. A heatwave struck, and the windowless cellar became stifling and airless during the hours of daylight.

Daylight that Alex never saw. He woke each afternoon at around three, exercised, cleaned the Glock and prepared himself all without leaving the cellar. Dawn Harding usually rang at about five thirty, shortly after she had seen Widdowes leave Thames House. Their conversations were brief beyond discussing the ups and downs of Widdowes' state of mind there was little to say.

When Widdowes returned he would cook supper for the pair of them, take Alex's food down to the cellar as if the SAS officer were a medieval prisoner and then at Alex's insistence eat his own in front of the TV upstairs, as he had always done.

On the fourth day the furniture van arrived and the loading-up began. Alex managed to sleep through most of the bumping and swearing that was taking place on the floors above, but was still awake by 2 p.m.

Tonight, he thought, squinting through the 5.32-inch barrel of the Glock at the smooth curl of its rifling. Tonight the bastard has to come.

And if he doesn't?

If he doesn't then I bow out. Apologise. Kiss Dawn's stillettos. Submit to whatever grim routine she and her department choose to inflict on me.

It was a full moon that night as Alex waited for his prey and the sky was cloudless. Even after midnight a little of the heat of the day seemed to hang about the river and above Alex's head a cloud of insects danced on the warm air. In front of his hooded, blackened and immobile face water-boatmen made tiny dashes over the surface film.

The lights had been switched off in the house for more than two hours when he saw the faintest of dark shapes drifting downstream towards him. It was about thirty yards away and a foot or two out from the bank. An otter? he wondered. No, too large and immobile. Too dead. A log, then? Maybe. Or maybe just a large clump of weed. River keepers had been cutting the weed on the fisheries upstream and great rafts of it had been drifting downstream earlier that night.

But weed was usually lower in the water than this. Quickly, Alex scanned the area to either side of it, allowing his peripheral vision to play on the shape. Nearer now, he saw that it was a large branch, splayed and leaved. But a branch which was holding hard to the bank and moving steadily towards him.

Behind his cage of roots and reeds, Alex narrowed his eyes. Was the branch going to barrel into him? Why was there a branch in the river at all in the middle of this breeze less night? Adrenalin began to trickle into his system. He pressed the Farlow's boots hard into the chalk and stealthily withdrew his arm from the grip of the underwater root. His hand held the Glock now and the safety catch was depressed for action.

Opposite the reeds, several yards upstream, the branch seemed to catch and halt. Alex's heart slammed against his ribs and his left hand joined his right on the butt of the Glock. Inch by inch he raised the weapon.

Nothing.

No movement of any kind.

Certainly no sign of anything human making for the bank.

Perhaps the branch was just a branch. Perhaps it had just happened to snag itself at the exact spot that he had been watching. Perhaps... Alex blinked. Before his dark-accustomed eyes the moonlit ripples jazzed and swung.

And then with blinding, heart-stopping force a shining black figure exploded out of the water just inches from Alex's face. Its teeth were bared in subhuman fury, a blade was whistling downwards in its fist.

Instinct wrenched Alex from the knife's path, but a moment later a rock-like fist slammed into the side of his jaw, white light burst before his eyes and he tasted blood. Alex went down, dropping the Glock, but somehow managed to draw the commando knife from its sheath on his calf. Twisting as his attacker's blade sliced through the water, desperate to regain the initiative, he hurled himself straight at the other man's throat.

The other's reaction was identical: defence by attack. The two met in a ferocious dogfight of stabbing and flailing limbs and Alex felt an icy sharpness rip down his thigh. He was losing this fight, a part of him realised dispassionately, and it was a novel experience. His opponent was at least his equal in speed, determination and sheer savagery.

If not his superior. Alex struggled to get his knife arm out of the water and into his opponent's face but the other seized his wrist and forced it down with vicious and almost inhuman strength. A knife flash in the moonlight, a desperate swerve and the neoprene hood was flapping loose at the side of Alex's head and his cheek was hot with blood. The two men's legs locked taut stalemate and then in the moment before they bore each other underwater Alex drew back his head and slammed it into his opponent's nose, felt the smashing crunch of breaking bone.

Desperately swinging at the broken nose with the heel of his free hand, Alex attempted to drive the shattered bone chips backwards into his opponent's brain, but managed only a glancing blow. For a fraction of a second the eyes of the two men met and they were each other's mirror image: hooded, bloodied and snarling like wolves.

Underwater now, throwing his whole weight into the attempt, Alex wrenched desperately at his own knife arm, but the other's grip on his wrist was as inexorable as a steel vice. Baring his teeth, Alex bit into the fist that enclosed him until he felt his teeth meet through the gristle, but still the grip did not weaken.

Instead, the blade flashed past his face again and although he wrenched his head away he felt the icy burn of its passage through his cheek. He should shout for the MI-5 men, he realised numbly, but then there was a second explosion of light as his opponent's knife hilt hammered into the base of his skull, his face was forced underwater and there was no longer any breath to shout with.

Soon his lungs were screaming and his legs flailing beneath him, kicking at the Glock as it swung on its lanyard. He grabbed for the other's knife hand, couldn't reach it, punched at where he thought the smashed nose ought to be and clawed blindly for the eyes. But the grip on his head was as immovable as that on his knife arm, he'd had no chance to grab any air and finally his mouth gagged open to admit a choking inrush of water. Anoxia came fast and he felt his hands sleepily release their grip on the commando knife.

And then, in some dim, drowning corner of his consciousness, Alex sensed that he was being dragged upwards. Retching, he vomited up the best part of a litre of river water and as he struggled for air he was aware of a hooded face poised above him.

"So," said the face quietly.

"You're the one." There was a hint of a Belfast accent.

Alex said nothing. His chest was agony and points of light danced in front of his eyes "Do it," he rasped contemptuously.

"Kill me and be on your way.

"I'll not kill you," the Watchman murmured, reversing his knife in his hand.

"That'd be too much like killing myself' The Watchman's arm became a blur, a third blinding whip crack of pain bloomed behind Alex's eyes and this time he lost consciousness altogether.

TWENTY.

Dawn Harding arrived at 5 a.m. with a Service doctor and the same forensic pathology team that had attended to the body of Craig Gidley. Above him, Alex heard them take the stairs up to George Widdowes' bedroom at a run, heard the abrupt halt of their footsteps as they discovered the horrendous carnage there.

Alex himself was lying naked on the camp bed wrapped in a single blood sodden sheet. The MI-5 security duo who had found him unconscious on the bank had removed his wet suit and dressed his wounds as best they could from their first-aid kits, but in the end he'd told them to leave it for the doctor. His left cheek had a deep transverse gash along the line of the bone and his right ear had been almost cut in half two hours after the event blood was still welling down both sides of his face. With the left arm he'd been exceptionally lucky the cut was deep but the knife had missed the subcutaneous muscles and his hand function seemed unimpaired. The wound to the left thigh was over a foot long and had bled copiously but again no important muscle function seemed impaired. Alex guessed that the tough double-layer neoprene of the wet suit had gone a long way towards preventing more serious damage.

He supposed that he ought to be a bit more worried about his skull. He'd always been a thick-headed bugger his dad and several of his instructors had told him that but he had received two very violent blows indeed and the pain when he tried to move his head was excruciating: of a different order even from his gashed face.

But the pain at the back of his head shrank into insignificance when he considered the scale of his failure to protect the life of

George Widdowes, who now lay upstairs in a three-foot-diameter pool of clotting blood with a gag in his mouth, a six-inch nail through his right temple and his severed ears on his pillow.

As soon as he could move Alex had insisted that the security men help him up there and the huge blood loss had told him immediately that Meehan had cut Widdowes' ears off before ending his victim's life with the hammer and the six inch nail.

What can those last moments have been like? Alex wondered speechlessly.

What had been the order of the fear that Widdowes had felt when faced with Meehan and his knife? And the pain as the ears were sawn through? What had that been like, coupled with the knowledge of the obscene killing that was to follow?

Impossible to imagine. And whatever the nature of these experiences, it had been he Alex Temple who had gifted them to George Widdowes.

Arrogance had overruled caution. He had placed himself in the front line without back-up and by doing so put another man's life at risk. In part, he realised with appalling clarity, his actions had been driven by sheer competitiveness, by the simple urge to prove Dawn and her organisation wrong.

He had dared and George Widdowes had lost.

His failure, personal and professional, was absolute.

He had never felt such despondency. Never felt such icily unquenchable rage.

Dawn made her way downstairs with the doctor, a T-shirted man in his forties with a faint South African accent whom she introduced as Max. Both looked stunned by the slaughter upstairs.

Without hesitation the doctor stripped the sheet from Alex and scanned his body.

Dawn glanced down at his bloodied nakedness and then turned to the wall.

"Shit!" she murmured.

"What afucking mess. I see he almost took your ear off too?"

"Didn't mean to," said Alex blankly.

"Just slashed at me, going for my eyes. I asked your colleagues to stick the bulldog clip on to hold the whole thing together."

"Probably saved the ear," said Max.

"I assume this was all done with a knife?"

"Yeah. Commando type."

"Had any tetanus shots recently?"

"Three months ago.

"AIDS test?"

Alex closed his eyes.

"He was trying to kill me, not fuck me.

"Get one done. Any other injuries?"

"Couple of good bashes to the base of the skull. Probably with the steel hilt of the knife."

Max felt gingerly beneath Alex's head.

"Does that hurt?"

"Doesn't feel great."

"Could be fractured. I'll book you an X-ray. Meanwhile, I'd better get you stitched up. You'll probably find that it hurts less and the time goes quicker if you talk."

Alex raised an eyebrow at Dawn.

Max caught the look.

"Yeah, you can talk in front of me. I've certified three murdered desk officers as having died of natural causes in the last month, I think I'm suitably compromised."

Dawn took a deep breath and, as Max selected a suturing needle from a case, moved back a pace or two.

"What happened?" she asked, looking coldly down at Alex.

"He got the jump on me. Basically, I was wrong to have continued with the setup here after you refused me a back-up man.

Dawn caught Max's eye and with a flick of her head indicated that he wait upstairs. Pulling his needle through, the doctor left it hanging.

"So George Widdowes' death was my fault, was it?" Dawn demanded as soon the door had closed above them.

"No," replied Alex levelly, 'it was my fault. It was an error of judgement on my part. I'm not ducking responsibility for that."

"So you had a Glock and he wasn't carrying a firearm of any kind?" asked Dawn.

"That's correct," Alex confirmed.

"Or if he was carrying a firearm he dropped it pretty early on in the game. So we both pulled knives."

"Go on," said Dawn.

"I broke his nose, bit his left knuckle pretty deeply and stabbed him a couple of times in the upper body. It obviously wasn't enough to put him down or stop him doing what he wanted to do, but I hurt him, I think. He won't be feeling good right now, and his face and hand will be visibly damaged."

"How long did this fight go on for?"

"Oh, three or four minutes probably."

"And how would you rate him, professionally speaking?" she asked.

Alex shrugged and immediately wished that he hadn't.

"Better than me, obviously," he answered wretchedly.

"It was weird, though. He was totally aggressive, but..."

"But?"

"But when the point came he chose not to kill me.

"Why, do you think?"

"Well, he said something just before he hit me on the head and knocked me out. Something along the lines of.. . oh, killing me would be like killing himself or something. Some psycho bullshit."

"You saw him clearly?"

"No. For a start he was covered with black cam-cream, for seconds he was wearing a wet suit with a hood."

Dawn remained expressionless.

"Can you remember anything at all about him?"

Alex looked away. Once again, he saw the icily staring figure at Don Hammond's funeral. Had he simply constructed that image in his mind from the MI-5 photographs?

"He's about my size and build. And right-handed. And he hasn't got a beard or moustache. That's all I'm certain of' "That doesn't exactly narrow it down a great deal."

"I know," said Alex.

"And I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the whole thing."

Dawn looked at him, shook her head and punched out a number on her mobile.

At the pick-up she relayed Alex's description and the nature of the Watchman's injuries. Afterwards she walked round the cellar, examined the gashed wet suit and the small pile of Alex's belongings.

"We've got people covering the ground for a ten-mile radius," she told him.

"Helicopters, tracker dogs, everything. Countrywide the police'll be looking for a man in his mid-thirties, around five foot eleven and strongly built, with a broken nose and injured hand. We've put it around that he's a paranoid schizophrenic, armed, who's escaped from the high-security wing of Garton Hill. Do not approach, et cetera."

Alex was silent. There was nothing useful left to say.

Five minutes later Max whip-finished the sutures on his cheek.

"Right," he said.

"Let's get on with that ear. Tell them upstairs I'll be at least another forty minutes." He turned back to Alex with a rueful smile.

"Think sweet thoughts, my friend. This is going to hurt."

That afternoon Alex was driven in a private ambulance to the Fairlie Clinic in Upper Norwood, London. In theory this facility is available to the paying public;

in practice it is reserved for the use of the security services. Several super grasses Alex had heard, had received reconstructive facial surgery behind its unremarkable doors.

There, he was walked to a windowless private room and his clothes were placed in a locker. A male nurse brought him a cup of tea, a painkilling dose of Volterol and Coproxamol, and the use of a radio tuned to Classic FM. The rest of the day passed slowly.

Shortly before midnight Alex awoke to hear his mobile phone juddering in his locker. It was still switched to vibrate, he realised. He was lying in total darkness against cotton pillows, the painkillers had worn off and his stitches were burning.

"Alex," came the voice, quiet but insistent.

"It's Stevo, man.

"Stevo?" he asked blankly, then remembered talking to the sniper team leader at Don Hammond's post-funeral piss-up.

"Stevo, yeah, tell me! How are you?"

"Fine, man listen, I don't know what you want Den Connolly for but I can tell you we've had all manner of lairy buggers asking after him recently."

Box people, thought Alex. Might have guessed it.

"Basically the lads have kept schtumm," Stevo continued.

"But I'll tell you what I know."

"Go on."

"He left after the Gulf and hooked up with some outfit doing marine security in the Mediterranean. Don't know the details, but apparently he started hitting the Scotch or the job went arse up or whatever and the next thing anyone heard was he was into armed robbery."

"Yeah?"

"Word is, he was the trigger man on that job off the North Circular."

"Park Royal?" murmured Alex.

"A security van? Something to do with cash points

"Yeah. Basically three of them did the Bank of Scotland for a million and a half Not a massive take, but good enough for Den and he fucked off to Spain."

"D'you know where?"

"A village outside Marbella called El Angel. One of the lads went down there last summer. Apparently Den got some Spanish front guy to buy a bar for him and hangs out there."

"What's the bar called?"

"Pablito's. Nice little place, apparently. Den's in a bit of a downward spiral, though."

"And officially no one knows about this place?"

"Bill Leonard certainly doesn't, because he called us in a week ago and asked if anyone had any ideas where to find him. Then there were a couple of obvious Boxheads in Saxty's asking after him. We all assumed it was something to do with the Park Royal job."

"How do you know it isn't?"

"I don't know. I reckon you'd tell us the form if it was anything like that."

"I promise you, I'm not going to grass him up."

There was a brief silence.

"The RSM was wondering: is it anything to do with a certain former student?"

Alex smiled and, as so often before, marvelled at the subtlety and accuracy of the Regiment's NCO grapevine.

"Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil," he said eventually.

"Like that, is it? Wise monkeys?"

"Something like that. Thanks, Stevo."

TWENTY-ONE.

He offered Dawn his resignation the next day.

"You can't just ... walk out!" she protested.

"You're the only one to have seen Meehan face to face."

"He's the one who's seen me, not the other way round, and I don't look exactly anonymous with these stitches all over me. I won't be able to get within miles of him."

"And Angela Fenwick? What's going to happen when he comes after her?"

"Your people are going to have to stop him," said Alex.

"It's as simple as that."

She stared at him.

"Alex." She hesitated over the use of his name.

"Please.

Don't make me beg you to finish the job."

"It's more likely to be Meehan who's finishing the job," said Alex wryly, touching his bandaged face.

"Alex." she lowered her voice.

"You can catch him and you can kill him.

You're the best. That's why we came to you.

He glanced over at her. Today she was dressed completely in steely grey the grey of her eyes.

"What would it take," she murmured, 'to keep you on the case?

In charge of the case, calling the shots?"

Would you credit it, he thought. She's actually schmoozing me. He closed his eyes. He'd never yet walked away from a challenge.

"You could have whatever..

"Spain," he intermpted her flatly.

She stared at him.

"We have to fly to Spain. There's someone we need to see." He gave her a censored version of the facts. She listened in silence.

"I don't see why you can't simply tell me who this man is, so that I can send someone over to talk to him."

"He won't talk to you or to anyone you send," said Alex firmly.

"It's got to be me. Once I've talked to this guy I'll hand the information over to you and you can do what you want with it. You brought me in for my speciali sed knowledge you might as well get your money's worth."

She looked at him uncertainly and he shrugged. If he could help MI-5 nail Meehan it might make up in some small way for his negligence towards George Widdowes. It was all that he had left to offer.

"If anyone knew Meehan," Alex continued, 'it was this guy. Day after day, week after week, down at that bunker in Tregaron .. . You get to know someone pretty damn well under those circumstances. You talk to each other because there's nothing else to do. Blokes I've trained I know things about them their wives certainly don't."

She nodded, took her mobile from her bag and left the room. By the time she returned he had finished the coffee. Her eyes travelled over the ugly, black scabbed stitches that cut across his face.

"Angela's flying to Washington this morning for two days and I think we can assume she'll be safe from Meehan during that time. But it means we have to get to Spain pretty much immediately and be back within forty-eight hours. Do you think you can travel in that state?"

They went first-class that afternoon. At the Fairhe Clinic they knew all about short recovery times, and the male nurse who had attended Alex the day before gave Dawn a swift tutorial on the care of knife wounds and packed a kit containing all the bandages, dressings and painkillers that she would need.

At Heathrow, at Alex's insistence, they had bought a beach bag and swimming kit. In Alex's case this had meant a pair of blue shorts, in Dawn's a red bikini that Alex had exchanged for the severe one-piece she herself had chosen.

"We've got to fit in," he told her as the plane circled Malaga airport.

"The more official we look the less he'll tell us. If we look like a couple of civil servants on expenses I can guarantee that he won't even speak to us. And we both know you look good in red!"

She'd ignored the last comment and reluctantly agreed, as she had agreed that no official mention would be made of their contact's name or location, and that whatever she learnt from the visit no criminal prosecution would be set in motion.

"The other thing you have to remember," Alex had told her, 'is that the world our man occupies is not run by Guardian readers but by hard-core criminals. The deal with girlfriends is that they wear a lot of lipstick, they're treated like princesses and when it's time to talk business they make themselves scarce. So when I feel that point's coming I'll expect you to do just that, OK?"

"I don't know why you need me along at all," she complained.

"To make the whole thing kosher. Our guy's sure to have some sort of woman in tow and a single male visitor unbalances the household. He constitutes a threat, a sexual challenge, a physical invasion all sorts of negative things. A man with a girlfriend, however, is quite another matter. You and his chi ca can push off and talk about blonde highlights or vibrators or whatever and leave the men to put the world to rights over a bottle of ten-year-old malt."

"I can't wait."

"Look, we want a result, we've got to press the right buttons." She narrowed her eyes.

"And all that male-heroic, bimbo girlie stuff is a million miles from your own enlightened, neo feminist views, right?"

"Absolutely," said Alex.

"I'm the original new man, me.

The seat belt sign came on and a broad swathe of brilliant Mediterranean blue appeared beneath them. It was 4.15 local time.

The drive from Malaga airport took the best part of forty minutes in their hired Mercedes. It was a beautifully clear day, the air was warm and the pace of the traffic on the coast highway leisurely. From Malaga to Marbella seemed to be one long strip of holiday, golfing and marina developments. Some of these were completed, some were still at the bricks-and-mortar stage and all offered extravagantly generous terms to potential buyers.

"We should put a deposit down on a condo." Alex yawned contentedly as they bypassed Marbella.

"We can retire here and play golf when we finally hang up our shoulder holsters."

"Endless boozing with retired villains," said Dawn acidly.

"I think not."

"Oh, get a life, girl! The sun's shining. We're on the Costa del Sol. Let's at least try to enjoy ourselves."

"There's something very creepy about this place. Where are all the young people, for a start?"

"Having sexy siestas would be my guess. That or lying on the beach."

"Hm. Planning the next Brinks-Mat robbery more likely."

"Look," said Alex, 'there's the sign for El Angel."

They drove past the turning and on to Puerto Banus, where they had booked accommodation for two nights. The Hotel del Puerto, they discovered, was a class act. A fountain surrounded by dwarf palms played in the reception area and their luxurious balconied room overlooked the port.

The room was a double. Alex had no reason to suspect that Connolly would check their accommodation, but he knew two singles would definitely spook him in the unlikely event that he did bother. Dawn had not been enthusiastic about a shared bed and Alex had drily promised to sleep on the floor.

And here they were. Beneath them sparkling white yachts rocked gently at anchor, and on the quay side expensively dressed holiday makers sauntered past the bars and shops. Even Dawn brightened at the prospect before them and when Alex suggested they went down for a snack she readily agreed.

He unzipped his bag on the double bed, stripped uncomfortably to his boxer shorts the wound in his thigh was particularly painful after the journey and replaced his jeans and T-shirt with lightweight chinos and a Hawaiian shirt printed with dragons. The stitches he covered up with Elastoplast.

"How do I look?" he asked Dawn.

, "Like a beaten-up pimp," said Dawn.

"If you'll excuse me, I'll change in the bathroom.

She re-entered in a short cocktail frock in her signature dove-grey and the faintest suggestion of scent. Her hair and her eyes shone. Alex stared at her.

"You look..

"Yes, Captain Temple?"

I as if you're on holiday."

"Good," she said.

"Let's go."

They chose a bar more or less at random. It was a little past five in the evening, and the glare had lifted from the sea and the gin palaces in front of them. The tables near them held middle-aged men in yachting gear and much younger women with implausibly huge breasts.

Their food arrived, plus a couple of Cokes. Alex had warned Dawn that some fairly serious drinking lay ahead. From his pocket he took a small plastic container holding a dozen ephedrine tablets. These, drawn from the Fairlie Clinic, had the dual effect of sharpening the senses and keeping drunkenness at bay.

"Bottoms up!" He grinned, downing two of them and handing the container to Dawn.

"Cheers!" rejoined Dawn rather more soberly. She took two and placed the container in her bag for safe keeping.

"Glad to see you're taking deodorant," observed Alex, peering A down into the bag.

"Things could get a bit sweaty."

"Funny guy," said Dawn.

"It's actually a can of Mace. Anyone tries any monkey business including you they go down."

"Riot girl, huh?"

"You bet."

The drive took fifteen minutes.

El Angel was a very different proposition from Puerto Banus. Not so much a village as an arbitrary strip of land between the highway and the sea, it comprised a clutch of new and not-so new hacienda-style developments. The largest of these a bowling and fast-food centre was windowless and uncompleted, and from the weathered appearence of its plaster work had clearly been so for some time. A large painted sign showed the development as its architects had envisaged it~ bustling, youthful and cosmopolitan but in truth it looked merely forlorn.

Parking the Mercedes on the highway, Alex and Dawn followed the track towards the sea. This passed through low scrub and between areas which had clearly once been intended to be gardens.

Now, however, they only contained builders' rubble, rusting angle iron and other construction detritus. The evening breeze carried a strong smell of dogshit.

Dawn winced as thistles tore at her ankles.

"Perhaps I'm not so ideally dressed after all," she remarked, glancing down at her strappy sandals.

"You look fine," said Alex.

The path led on to a custom-built road flanked by white-rendered houses. Some of these were occupied and had cars on their drives and defiant little gardens of bougainvillea and hibiscus in front of them, but most stood empty.

Alex was struck by the desolation of the place. These deserted villas were, in a very real sense, the end of the road. You would come here and slowly forget everything.

Dawn must have been feeling the same, because to his amazement she slipped her arm through his.

"In every dream home a heartache," she murmured.

"Yeah. I'm beginning to feel seriously in need of a drink."

"This bar is actually on the sea, is it?"

"That was the impression I got," said Alex.

"Shall we ring one of these bells and ask?"

They looked at each other, laughed nervously, then Dawn strode over to the nearest house. The sign read "Tangmere'.

The door was opened by an elderly man in a cravat and an RAF blazer. A vague house coated figure, presumably his wife, peered nervously behind him.

"We're looking for Pablito's," began Alex, shielding his stitched-up ear with his hand.

"Over the road, face the sea, track at eleven o'clock between Sea Pines and Casa Linda. ETA three minutes. Calling on young Denzil?"

"Yes."

"First-rate chap. Darkish horse, of course, but then that's the rule rather than the exception out here. Tempt you inside for a minute or two? Raise a lotion to the setting sun?"

"Perhaps some other time," said Alex guiltily, seeing the poorly concealed desperation in the other man's eyes.

"Very good. Dunbar's the name. Usually here."

Alex and Dawn set off down the track and saw the bar almost immediately. It was a blockhouse of a place, finished in a rough brownish render which matched the stony seashore. A neon design, not yet illuminated, showed palm trees and a sunset. Around the building stood half a dozen wooden benches and plastic topped tables. A rusting motorcycle leaned tipsily against one wall.

"I am definitely overdressed," said Dawn, picking her way awkwardly over the shingle.

"Whereas my pimp's outfit is spot on." Alex grinned.

As they approached Pablito's they saw that they had taken a very indirect back route and that, in fact, a narrow road led straight to the front entrance. The swing doors in front of the building were half open. Inside, the place looked more spacious than its exterior suggested. A bar ran the length of one wall and on one of its stools a fat, heavily tanned man in a sarong, perhaps forty-five, was watching football on a wall-mounted television. Behind the bar a twenty something woman with bleached blonde hair polished lager glasses. A cigarette smoked in an ashtray at her elbow.

As Dawn and Alex peered over the swing doors, the woman assumed a practised smile.

"Come on in, loves. We're still in injury time, as you can see, but make yourselves at home. What can I do you for?"

Alex turned to Dawn. From the corner of his eye he could see the blonde woman staring at the dressings on his face.

"What's it going to be, pet?"

Dawn smiled sweetly at him.

"Ooh, I think a Bacardi Breezer might just get me going!"

"One BB coming up. And for you, my love?"

"Pint would be nice."

The man on the stool scratched his stomach and looked up.

"Tell you, that Patrick Viera's a bloody liability. Someone's going to put his lights out one of these days. Staying locally, are you?"

"Puerto Banus," said Alex.

"Very nice. Come over on the 1615?"

Alex nodded, helped Dawn on to a bar stool and with due consideration for his lacerated thigh, sat down himself "Exploring the area, then?"

The features were pufFy with alcohol, but the eyes were shrewd. And beneath the gross brick-red body, Alex saw, were the remains of a disciplined physique.

On the broad forearms were the marks of tattooes removed by laser.

"We wanted to get away from things for a few days." Alex winked at Dawn and allowed his hand to stray to the dressing on his cheek.

"And as you can see, I've had a bit of a bang-up in the motor. We reckoned we were due some quality time."

"Well, you've come to the right place for that." The fat man's eyes flickered over the knife wounds.

"What game you in, then?"

"Den, love, leave the poor man alone," said the woman, clattering over to the optics in her high-heeled mules.

"He hasn't set foot in here more'n two minutes and already you're.

"No, it's OK," said Alex.

"I'm a physical training instructor. And Dawn, well, Dawn's one of my best customers, aren't you, pet."

She giggled.

"I hope so."

This was the explanation that they had agreed on. If pressed, the suggestion was to be that Dawn was mar ned to someone else.

The fat man nodded and returned to the football, shaking his head at intervals to mark his disapproval of Arsenal's failure to wrest control of the game from Sturm Graz. As the final whistle blew he swung round on his bar stool and extended a large hand to Alex.

"I'm Den. Big Den, Dirty Den, Fat Bastard, whatever." He moved behind the bar and slapped the woman s tight, white-denimed rump.

"And this is Marie. Pull us a bevvy, love.

"Leave off! And for Gawd's sakes put on a bleedin' shirt." The woman reached for a lager glass and winked at Dawn.

"He wouldn't stand for it if I went about with my chest hanging out - I don't see why I should when he does!"

"When you've got a body like mine," said Den, 'you should share it with the world."

He emptied a half-glass of Special Brew in a single swallow, slapped his vast belly, reached for his cigarettes and leant confidentially towards Dawn.

"You know, I'm known locally as something of a fitness guru," he murmured.

Dawn giggled again.

"Well, I approve of your gym," she said, looking around her at the football pennants and the signed Eas tEnders posters.

Other customers began to arrive. Alex and Dawn nursed their drinks at the bar and listened to the amiable banter around them. Everyone else, it was clear, was a regular. Equally clear was that this unremarkable beach bar was a meeting place for expatriate criminal aristocracy. For the most part they were expensively if a little garishly dressed. The women looked a lot more like Marie than Dawn, favouring bleached-blonde feather cuts and uncompromising displays of orange cleavage. The men went for Ross Kemp buzz cuts pastel leisure wear and extensive facial scarring.

Den acted as host, drinking steadily and determinedly himself and ensuring that others' glasses were full. To Alex there seemed to be no clear line between paid for and complimentary drinks. No money was demanded of him and he assumed that he and Dawn were running up a tab.

At nine o'clock on the dot the Dunbars appeared, nodded courteously to Dawn and Alex, shook hands all round, drank a whisky and soda and a gin and tonic respectively, and left.

"The old boy flew Spitfires over the Western Desert," Den told Alex afterwards.

"Ten confirmed kills. Now he's living on twenty-five quid a week. I let him run up a tab and then cancel it when Remembrance Sunday comes round. Least I can do."

Alex nodded.

"I get him talking sometimes," Den continued, lighting a cigarette.

"Dogfight techniques. Aerial combat. And I tell you, get him on to all that stuff and you see the old hunter-killer light come back into those eyes. Know what I mean?"

Alex nodded again. He could feel the ephedrine now, racing through his system. Beside him Den ashed his cigarette and took a deep draught of Special Brew. The big man was sweating. Behind them the wives shrieked, Dawn among them.

Alex excused himself He needed a piss.

Edging through the crowd he made his way outside into the neon twilight and peered around. By the palm trees would do. Behind him he heard feet crunching on the shingle some other bloke on the same errand, he guessed.

Then something determined in the tread some grim regularity told him that it wasn't. As he half turned, glimpsing a heavy-set silhouette topped with the shine of a shaven head, a massive forearm locked chokingly round his throat.

"Forget the fitness bollocks, chum, who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?"

The voice was low almost a whisper. Alex struggled desperately to break free and lashed back with heels and elbows. The blows landed on flesh and bone but without result. The arm at Alex's throat was as solid as teak and tightening.

Pinpoints of light appeared before his eyes and there was a rushing at his ears. His attacker clearly didn't expect an immediate answer.

It was probably the ephedrine that gave Alex the extra couple of seconds of consciousness in which his scrabbling fingers found the other man's crotch.

Grabbing a sweaty handful of trouser, he clamped his left fist tight over the other man s scrotum and squeezed with all the force he could muster.

A high-pitched gasp of pain sounded in his ear and the arm at his throat loosened a fraction. Enough for Alex to whirl around, still clutching and twisting the other man's groin in his left hand, and hammer two rock-hard punches into his lower ribs with his right.

Evading a furious, windmilling series of counter-punches Alex staggered back, gagging for breath. He could see the man clearly now, a muscle-bound enforcer with a spider's-web tattoo inked across his thick neck. Alex had vaguely registered him in the bar earlier. The tattoos were certainly prison work.

His face distorted with pain, the gorilla advanced on Alex, who backed away fast. This wasn't about interrogation any more, it was about revenge. At that moment a slender figure rose from the shadows beside the entrance and a jet of spray cut the air.

The enforcer roared with the unaccustomed shock, pain and anger. His hands clamped themselves to his eyes, and Alex took advantage of the moment to kick him as hard as he could in the balls. With an agonised sigh, the man crumpled to the shingle.

"Can't leave you alone for a moment, can I," said Dawn, stepping into the light from the neon sign and returning the Mace to her bag with a self-satisfied smile.

"I guess not," said Alex, his heart pounding with adrenalin. He looked down at the groaning figure at his feet.

"Did you follow me out?"

"Put it like this I thought all that traditional East End hospitality was a bit too good to last."

"Well... Thank you!"

"What the bloody 'ell's goin' on 'ere, then?"

Framed in the bar's entrance was Connolly, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. From the surprised look on his face the scenario was not at all the one he expected. I was supposed to be the one on the ground, thought Alex. Begging for mercy and admitting to being a police officer, presumably.

Connolly's look of surprise was quickly suppressed and he gave the fallen man a brisk kick in the guts.

"Get up, yer big fuckin' nelly!"

The enforcer writhed and Connolly turned concernedly to Alex.

"Sorry, chum, was Key here being impertinent?"

"He asked me a question and then tried to strangle me before I had a chance to answer.

Connolly shook his head, marched into the bar and returned with a jug of water, which he emptied over Key's head.

"You just can't get decent help for love nor money these days..."

Slowly and unsteadily Key dragged himself to his feet, clutching his groin. His T-shirt was sodden and a dark orange stain covered the left side of his face, where the Mace pepper spray had struck him. He managed a rueful grin, his eyes still streaming, and extended a shaky hand to Alex.

"Sorry, mate, overreacted a bit there!"

"No problem," said Alex, amazed that the man was able to stand at all. Now that the adrenalin from the fight was ebbing away the stitches on his own face were beginning to throb.

"All friends again?" asked Connolly with a dazzling smile.

"Marvellous. Key, take the lady inside, open a bottle of champagne the Moat, not that dago muck and make her comfortable. And wipe yer boat race while you're about it!"

The gorilla nodded meekly and signed that Dawn precede him through the swing doors.

"I'm sorry about that, mate," said Connolly, turning back to Alex.

"But you'll understand I've got to keep an eye on the security side of things."

Alex nodded.

"You're not Old Bill, I know that much. But you're something. That's no sunlamp tan on your hands and neck, any more than those are car crash injuries on your face and arm. And I didn't see the rumble just then, but..."

"Stevo sent me," said Alex quietly.

"I didn't want to alarm Marie."

Connolly emptied his glass.

"Stevo? I don't know any Stevo."

"Jim Stephenson from "B" Squadron in Hereford. That Stevo. I'm Regiment, Den."

"Go on."

"I'm in "D" Squadron. Seconded to RWW, like you were.

"So when did you join?"

For five minutes Connolly subjected him to a series of questions about Regiment personalities, extracting details that only an insider would have known.

He slipped in a trick

VI

question, asking if that idle short-arse Tosh McClaren was still around and Alex confirmed that yes, Tosh McClaren was still around, and he was still 6 foot 2 tall.

After a time, Connolly appeared satisfied that Alex was who he said he was.

Sensing this, Alex looked him in the eye.

"Listen, Den, I'm not trouble, OK? I just want to talk."

Connolly stared at him in silence. He looked tired, pufFy-faced and a little sad.

And strangely vulnerable, thought Alex, for a man who had once been known as the SAS's toughest

NCO.

"You're not a talker, son, you're a shooter. It's written all over your face."

"I'm looking for someone, Den, that's all. Help me and you can rest easy about the Park Royal job. No more cover stories, no more looking over your shoulder for the cops."

"What the fuck's the Park Royal job?"

"Den, I'm family. Trust me.

"Oh, yeah? So who's the girl? Well handy with the Mace, it looked like."

"She's just a girl. Nothing to do with anything."

Den stared at his empty glass in silence, flipped his cigarette into the gathering darkness and nodded. For a moment, behind the flushed features, Alex saw the taut wariness of the Special Forces soldier. Then the dazzling smile returned and a large hand was placed on Alex's shoulder.

"Come on, son, we re wasting good drinking time. Tonight's on the house, yeah?"

He steered Alex back inside and moments later Marie was sliding Alex a glass of champagne and a shot-glass of Irish whiskey. Someone, to applause and laughter, began to sing "My Yiddisher Momma'.

Some time later Dawn reappeared beside him. Her cheeks were flushed and she seemed to be genuinely enjoying herself Under the circumstances it seemed natural for Alex to slip his arm round her waist, and for her in response to incline herself against him. For a moment he felt the soft pressure of her breast against his side.

"Thank you," he said again.

"That could have turned nasty, one way or another. How are you getting on with the gangster wives?"

She placed her champagne thoughtfully on the bar.

"They're good fun. I like them. Any progress?"

"I've dropped a name or two. Told him who I really am. Not who you are, though. Far as he's concerned, you're just my girl."

"Mm. Lucky me."

"The main problem is that he thinks I'm some sort of hit man. Possibly even come over here to whack him. He's very jumpy. I think the best thing I can do is to tell him the real reason I'm here and hope that calms things down."

"I agree. And this is looking like a rather serious conversation if I'm supposed to be some no-brain blonde bimbo." She pouted.

"Which I clearly am!"

He ran a finger down her cheek.

"It's just that you play the part so well."

"Now why am I suspicious of a compliment like that, I wonder?" she asked.

There was another burst of singing from the floor of the room. Someone had sat themselves at a piano and was banging out old Cockney songs.

"Are we within earshot of Bow Bells here, do you think?" mused Dawn, throwing back the remains of her drink.

"Basildon, maybe," said Alex.

"Not that I've got any quarrel with that, as an Essex man myself' Den Connolly suddenly appeared beside them, sweating and massive.

"Before I'm too pissed to understand a word you're saying," he asked Alex, 'who exactly was it you was after?"

Alex dismissed Dawn with a nod of his head and a pat on her dove-grey behind.

"Joseph Meehan. Code-named Watchman. You finished him for Box."

Connolly nodded.

"I ain't officially here," he said eventually, his words slurring.

"I ain't officially anywhere. But you know that."

Alex nodded.

"I know the score from Stevo. No one hears your name. Ever.

And if you can give me what I need you can rest easy about that other business."

"You gimme your word on that?" Connolly glanced meaningfully down at the assembled company.

"My friends'd be very pissed off if... They're my family now, y'understand -forget fuckin' Hereford, RWW, all that old bollocks."

Alex looked him in the eye.

"I give you my word."

Connolly pursed his lips and nodded slowly and vaguely to himself "Tomorrow. Lunchtime.

Bring your..." He gestured vaguely towards Dawn, who was whispering confidences to Marie.

"Meanwhiles, order anything you want. Open bar, like I said."

They left around 2 a.m. Not because Alex thought that Connolly might relent and talk to him that night, but because he felt that he needed to prove his credentials to the ex-NCO. He had to show proper respect. Leaving early would have been regarded as very graceless. So he had stuck around, downing drink after drink, and looking suitably impressed by the tales of blags, slags, grass-ups, fit-ups, bent coppers, unnumbered shooters and all the rest of the hard-man mythology.

Dawn meanwhile rested wide-eyed at his side, with her arm draped lightly round his waist. They looked, in short, like any impressionable young couple who happened to have stumbled into a bar full of criminals.

When the last goodbyes had been said and they'd finally reached the car, Dawn blinked hard several times and reached in her bag for the key.

"You OK to drive?" asked Alex blearily.

"I've actually drunk comparatively little," said Dawn.

"I always get rum and a Coke in that situation that way you can just keep your glass filled with Coke and no-one's the wiser.

Well, ephedrine or no, I'm well and truly bladdered, I'm afraid," Alex slurred.

"But mission accomplished, sort of' "Get in," said Dawn.

At the hotel they stood together for a moment in front of the open window. The port and the yachts were lit up now, and the sea was an inky black below them. A tide of drunken benevolence washed over Alex.

"You were great," he said feelingly, placing a hand on her warm shoulder.

"Especially Maceing that bonehead of Connolly's."

She smiled and inclined her cheek to his hand.

"You've already thanked me for that. I enjoyed myself What d'you think tomorrow holds?"

"Dunno. All that lunch invitation stuff was just to buy himself time. The more of his hospitality he can persuade us to soak up, the less bad he's going to feel about us leaving empty-handed. At the moment he accepts that I'm kosher and you're just the sweet thing I happen to be travelling with, but he's worried about who comes after me. Where it's all going to end."

"What's he got to hide, Alex?" she asked gently.

"Enough."

"So what promises did you make him?"

Careful, Alex told himself woozily. She doesn't know about the Park Royal job.

"Oh, I strung him along..."

"You think he'll talk to you tomorrow?" Dawn asked sharply.

"Because tomorrow's all we've got. In thirty hours Angela gets back from Washington and any time after that..."

Alex nodded. She didn't need to spell out the danger that Meehan posed. Privately, he was far from convinced that Connolly would talk to him, but he couldn't see how else the situation could have been handled. The alcohol was pounding at his temples now and the knife cuts were beginning to pulse in unison.

"Why don't I get those dressings off?" she asked him.

"Let a bit of fresh air at your poor face.

Lie down on the bed?"

He could quite easily have removed the dressings himself, but lay there breathing in her jasmine scent and her smoky hair, and the faint smell of rum on her breath. She was OK, was Dawn, he decided. A bit of a bitch at times and the most irritating bloody driver he'd ever met, but what the hell? She had a tough job. He could live with her downsides.

And she really was quite seriously pretty with those cool grey eyes and that soft, secretive mouth. Without especially meaning to, and with a vague stab at discretion, he glanced down the grey linen front of her dress as she inched the dressing from his cheek.

She didn't seem to be wearing any sort of bra and he recalled with a rush of pleasure the feel of her breasts against him in the bar.

"That's not fair," she said reproachfully.

"What's not fair?"

"Here I am, doing my big Florence Nightingale number and all you can do is stare down my front, panting like a dog. You're supposed to be an officer and a gentleman."

"No one ever said anything about being a gentleman," said Alex.

"And I'm not panting, I'm breathing."

"Well, stop it. And shut your eyes, or I'll rip your ear in half again and you wouldn't like that, now would you?"

Alex smiled, and tried not to think about George Widdowes' ears lying grey and bloodstained against the pillow. The same thought evidently occurred to Dawn, for her movements abruptly hardened and became businesslike.

When she had finished she stepped out on to the balcony with her mobile phone.

"Can you give me a moment?" she asked, punching out a number.

"Personal call."

He took himself into the bathroom. The boyfriend, he thought, and felt a sudden urge to hit Dawn's unknown lover very hard in the face. Several times, preferably.

He glanced in the mirror, at the angry black stitch-tracks across his face. You look like shite, Temple, he told himself You'd be lucky to trap some swamp donkey from Saxty's looking like that, let alone this foxy little spook. Get real.

By the time she returned he was down to his boxer shorts and looking for the Nurofen.

"Turn round," she said.

"Let me look at that thigh."

Alex obeyed. Five minutes later she folded her arms.

"OK," she began.

"This is the deal. You get the bed and the blankets from the cupboard, I get the quilt on the floor."

"I'll go on the floor. You take the bed."

"Normally I'd accept like a shot, but given the extent of your injuries I've decided to be generous. No arguments, Temple,

OK?"

Alex inclined his head and climbed into the bed. Dawn went into the bathroom. When she returned to the quilt on the floor she paused for a moment in front of the window, a slight and entirely feminine figure in her white T-shirt and knickers.

Alex groaned. For the first time that day he found himself in severe physical pain.

TWENTY-TWO.

"You're not going to throw up again, are you?" Dawn enquired.

"I don't think so," whispered Alex.

"But you couldn't just ask that waiter for a half of lager, could you?"

"Are you insane?"

"No, I know it sounds bad but it works. And since it seems to be impossible to get a decent fried breakfast in this hotel ..

"This is Spain, Alex, not the Mile End Road. Why don't you just lie back and get some sun, and stop being so scratchy?"

It was 10.30 and they were on adjoining sun loungers by the hotel pool. Dawn was wearing the red bikini they had bought at Heathrow, but not even this could raise Alex's spirits. A bad hangover had coincided with an acute bout of guilt and depression concerning George Widdowes.

The day before had been enjoyable and there had been an air of promise about things a sense that the mistakes of the past might somehow be redeemed by a little energetic detective work.

Now, everything seemed curiously pointless. If he weighed up his career and balanced the harm he had done and the deaths he'd caused against the long-term good, he was unable to state as he'd once been able to that on balance the good came out on top. It didn't. The bad came out on top.

Den Connolly had clearly felt that moving from unattributable operations for the RWW to boosting security vans on the North Circular Road was little more than a side shuffle. It wasn't a question of going into crime you were already there. You had already spent so much of your career so far outside the normal boundaries of behaviour that almost anything seemed logical and reasonable.

The trouble with crime, though, was criminals. They were stupid, for the most part, and greedy. And boastful, judging by last night, and sentimental, and seriously lacking in taste. No, he decided, you'd have to put your own outfit together. A few good, reliable blokes. Apply military standards of security, planning and execution.

And then what, assuming you did the bank and made your wad?

Buy a bar and a big telly, and listen to war stories and get fat? Dawn raised her head from the sun lounger and peered at him irritably. Her face was shining with sunscreen.

"What was it you said yesterday? Cheer up? Get a life? The sun's shining?"

Alex turned to face her and felt the day's first pale flicker of lust. The red lycra strap of the bikini top hung undone on either side of her and a single pearl of sweat lay in the small of her back. For a moment he stared at it, wondering how her skin would taste, then a waiter with a tray approached.

"Una cerveza para el Senor, por favor," murmured Dawn.

"Y un naranjafresca para mi, gracias."

"Si, Senora." The waiter nodded and disappeared.

"That sounded very fluent," said Alex.

"Yes, I told him you needed an enema for your bad mood."

"What I need is not to have drunk so bloody much last night."

"I expect you've done worse in the service of your country."

He grunted. The knife wounds were beginning to heal, and in consequence to itch like crazy.

"I

forgot to ask did you manage to rescue my weapon from the river?"

"The Glock? Yes. Plus your knife and a silenced Sig Sauer that Meehan must have been carrying. And while you were out for the count, by the way, we managed to get tissue scrapings and a couple of hairs from under your fingernails."

"Well, I certainly held on tight. But surely you don't need any proof of who you're dealing with?"

"Every confirmation helps. But our main hope is that we might be able to learn something about his whereabouts. The Forensic Science Service can tell you a hell of a lot from a hair."

Alex looked at her doubtfully.

"Good luck with that. The hair may well turn out to be more helpful than laughing boy down the road."

"If he's not going to tell us anything, why ask us to come back?"

"He'll probably produce something just to swing the immunity deal I promised him. The question is whether we'll be able to rely on what he produces."

Dawn frowned at him.

"Look, about this immunity deal...?"

"Dawn, the chances are that if you've got nothing on him now then nothing's going to come up in the future. And you can swing it, can't you, if he leads us to the Watchman?"

"It's a hell of a big "if"."

The drinks arrived. Alex drank down his beer in three long swallows, thought it probable for several minutes that he was going to vomit, then suddenly felt better.

Dressed, they strolled through the port, where Dawn bought herself a scoopneck top and a pair of skin-tight white jeans, and high-heeled mules. To look the part, she explained. Basic tradecraft.

Back at the hotel she changed into it all, adding a Wonderbra.

"Blimey!" said Alex, impressed.

"All you need now is a forty-a-day Rothman's habit and a boyfriend on Crimestoppers!"

"If we hang around at Pablito's long enough I'll probably end up with both."