The Watchman

Alex raised an eyebrow.

"I thought you were already taken. Mr. Lucky-boy in London."

Dawn rolled her eyes and swung her bag over her shoulder.

"Let's go."

Pablito's appeared deserted. The swing doors were locked, the tables untenanted and wasps swung threateningly around an overflowing litter bin.

Checking his watch, Alex knocked at the entrance. The door was opened by Marie, who was wearing a pink velour tracksuit.

"Come in.

"Fraid Den's still sleeping it off. You look a treat, my love. Cup of Nes?"

"Lovely," said Dawn.

When the coffee was ready they carried it upstairs. Above the bar was a small landing giving on to a bedroom and bathroom, and a sun-baked roof terrace. On a large rectangle of plastic matting at one end of this, naked but for a faded pair of Union Jack underpants, lay Denzil Connolly, snoring. An ashtray had overturned at his side and a nine-tenths-empty bottle of Bell's whisky lay just beyond the reach of his outstretched arm.

"He likes to sleep under the stars," said Marie.

"I had to put down the matting 'cause the bottles kept smashing and then he'd roll on the pieces in the night. He's a big feller, as you can see." She folded her arms in a long-suffering gesture.

"Den, love, we've got company.

The sleeping figure stirred and the eyes half opened in pull~ suspicion.

"Wha' the fuck you..." Seeing Alex and Dawn, he closed his eyes again, groaned and writhed like a hippopotamus.

"Wha's fuckin' time?"

"Twelve. And Alex and Dawn are here."

"Who? Oh, yeah, right. Give us a hand up."

He struggled to his feet and Marie led him inside. There were unpleasant noises from the bathroom.

By the time they sat down to lunch on the terrace half an hour later, however, Connolly appeared fully recovered. Bullish, even, in his vast shorts and polo shirt.

They ate fish and oven chips with vinegar and mushy peas cooked by Marie and drank ice-cold Spanish beer.

"You two should get a place over here," Connolly said expansively. He winked at Dawn.

"Can you cook, love?"

"You betcha."

"Well, then. Sorted."

"It would be nice, wouldn't it, Alex?" said Dawn.

"I'm afraid I'm not quite in the early-retirement league," said Alex.

"Maybe I could set up a little security outfit, though. Country clubs, golf clubs..."

"Protection?" asked Marie brightly.

"Well, I wouldn't put it exactly like that ..

The meal, and later the afternoon and early evening, wore on pleasantly enough. Alex had taken a couple more ephedrine tablets at the hotel and so was happy to maintain a steady intake of cold beer. Connolly drank Scotch from the start, occasionally topping up his drink with a splash of mineral water, and by mid-afternoon Alex estimated that the big man had sunk a good third of a bottle. This, he knew, was when you got the best of a heavy drinker: in the five- or six-hour window following recovery. The whisky seemed to have little effect on Connolly other than to cheer him up and he proved a vastly entertaining host, telling story after story about the criminal fraternity who were the bar's main if not only clientele. No mention was made of his own exploits, however, nor of his military past.

At four o'clock Marie drove them to San Pedro, where Connolly was a member of a country club. In practice this simply meant a change of bar and Alex tried to moderate his alcoholic intake. Dawn did her rum-and-Coke trick, always managing to have a full glass at her side, but for Alex it was harder. Connolly, he sensed, needed to know that he was in the presence of a kindred spirit. He needed company on the long alcoholic journey that would end in oblivion in the early hours of the morning. He needed to see Alex keep pace with him. This was the price for the information that he had to offer.

At six they returned to El Angel, where Maria prepared the bar for the night's trade and microwaved a frozen chicken-and-pineapple pizza to keep them all going. Despite having drunk more than two-thirds of a bottle of Scotch, Connolly appeared solid as a rock and capable of continuing for ever. Alex, by contrast and despite the ephedrine, was beginning to feel decidedly light-headed. It was a very hot day and he had downed a good dozen beers in half as many hours.

Surreptitiously palming a glass and a salt cellar from one of the tables he disappeared into the Gents. There he poured a good teaspoonful of salt into the glass, added water and waited while it dissolved. Gritting his teeth, he took a hefty swig. As soon as the salt hit the back of his throat he retched convulsively, bringing up the last few drinks in a warm gush. Twice more, he forced himself to repeat the exercise. By the end of it he was white-faced and nauseated, but reckoned he had probably bought himself another couple of hours of drinking time.

Soon, the first customers started to arrive and the routine of the night began to repeat itself. Connolly appeared to be in expansive form again, greeting every new arrival with huge enthusiasm, roaring with laughter at their jokes and dispensing drinks liberally.

Alex began to despair of ever getting him alone. Had the big man, he fell to wondering, remembered a single detail of their conversation the night before? Or had he and Dawn simply been two vaguely recognised faces who, for reasons unknown, had turned up to keep him company?

The evening passed in a beery, pissed-up blur. He had drunk himself sober, Alex found, and with every minute that passed his irritation grew. He should have known better than to force through this trip on the word of a known head case like Stevo. All that he had done was compound his failure to protect Widdowes by promising information that, when push came to shove, he couldn't deliver.

"I'm not confident about all of this," he confided to Dawn at about 11 p.m.

"Last night I was convinced he had something to tell us but now I think he's just stringing me along. That is, if he remembers what I said to him last night, which I'm seriously beginning to doubt."

"I think you're wrong," said Dawn.

"I think he's trying to come to a decision. I think we're in the best place we could be right now."

Alex stared at her, amazed. Her tone was both comp licit and intimate. Her usual operational scratchiness was nowhere to be found.

"Trust me, Alex," she added, turning her back to the bar and placing a proprietorial hand on his shoulder.

"I've seen this sort of thing from informants before. It's a sort of dance they do, like cats walking round and round a place before they sit down."

"I'm glad you think so," said Alex, pleasantly conscious of the small pressure of her hand.

"I was going to say that I thought we'd blown several grand of your agency's budget on a wild goose chase. That you might have some serious explaining to go through when you get back to Thames House. Swanky hotels and bikinis and all the rest of it."

"Oh, the bikini won't be wasted," said Dawn airily.

"But take my advice. Let Connolly come to you. He knows why you're here, all right." She winked.

"Trust me!"

"I do trust you.

"Well, I'm not sure if I should trust you with all these Costa Crime femmes fatales. I've seen a couple of real vampires eyeing you up.

"Well, then your observational skills are better than mine, girl, because I haven't clocked them."

She tapped the mobile phone in her jeans-jacket pocket.

"Would it surprise you that there was a call made to the hotel this morning asking to be put through first to your room and then to mine?"

"And?"

"And the caller discovered what he wanted to know, which is that we had the same room number. That I'm really your girlfriend, not some scalp hunter from Box or Special Branch."

Alex smiled.

"Well, I'm glad we've got that straight."

She gave him a long, cool glance.

"Will you do something for me?"

"What?" he asked, inhaling the smoky jasmine of her scent.

"If we get anything from Connolly will you go all the way for me?"

He narrowed his eyes.

"What exactly do you..."

She leant towards him, took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit him. Not hard, but not softly either.

"Stay on the case. You and me together. As equals. No more bullshit, no more fighting. After all," she murmured, 'we are supposed to be sleeping together."

He stared into her level grey eyes, dazed by her closeness.

"So, lovebirds, whassup?"

It was Connolly, swaying in front of them.

And Marie.

"Dawn, love," she said, "I've come to borrow you. You know the words to "Stand by Your Man", don't you? We need more chorus members."

"Ooh, lovely," trilled Dawn.

Connolly waited until the women had gone, then nodded towards the stairs.

On the roof terrace they drew up chairs. A bottle of Paddy's whiskey, two glasses and Connolly's cigarettes were arranged on a low table. The fat man poured the drinks.

"Joe Meehan, then," he said, raising his glass.

"What's the story, morning glory?"

"How much do you know about what you were finishing him for?" asked Alex, sipping the whiskey, feeling the dark burn of its descent.

"Officially, nothing. Except that it was clear he was going over the water. And going in very deep, given the attention he was given. And I also knew that he was very good. Almost certainly the best man I ever trained."

"No one told you anything?"

"No, we were left to draw our own conclusions. I'll tell you something, though.

They made a big thing about the secrecy of the operation. It was an RTUable offence even to mention it."

"Well, notes are being compared now."

Connolly waited, his glass steady in his hand, immobile.

Alex leant forward.

"You were right about Ireland, obviously. He went in deep, joined the Provies, worked his way up.

"Brave lad."

"He was," agreed Alex.

"Until the whole thing went arse-up. They turned him, Den."

"Not possible," said Connolly flatly.

"They never turned that lad, I'd bet the bar on it. He was the best I ever saw. The most committed. He'd never have fallen for all that tin pot Armed Struggle bollocks."

"They turned him, Den," Alex repeated.

"He joined Belfast Brigade's Nutting Squad. Made bombs for them. Personally tortured and murdered those FRU blokes - Bledsoe and Wheen."

"Not possible, mate," said Connolly again matter-of-factly, tapping the filter of a cigarette on the table and lighting it.

"I just don't believe you.

"It's true and it's verified. The province's worst nightmare, and the Regiment and Box put him there."

Connolly shook his head in disbelief. Closed his eyes, briefly.

"So now you're after him, yeah?"

"Look, I don't know what happened over the water, Den, but the man's certainly killing people now. Three in the last couple of months."

"And so you've been pulled in to kill him." Connolly took a drag of his cigarette, sipped reflectively at his whiskey and stared out over the sea.

"I need to find him. Put any spin on that you like."

Connolly shook his head.

"You can fuckin' whistle, chum."

"Den, mate, you've got a nice set-up here, and you've been good to me and Dawn. But do you really want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, worrying that someone's going to grass you up? Worrying that every new customer might have an extradition order and a warrant in his pocket? Armed robbery, Den. Think about it. It pulls down a heavy score.

From the other man's expression Alex could see that he had thought about it, often.

"Are you threatening me?"

"No. What I'm saying is that I can make that worry disappear. For ever. But I'm going to have to have something very solid to offer in return. If you've nothing to give me I'll disappear, and everything will carry on as it was before."

He emptied his glass and poured himself another.

"I'm not threatening you, Den, I'm just making you an offer. Take it or leave it.~ For several minutes they both stared out at the sea. From below them, in the bar, came the muted sound of singing and laughter.

"There was a thing Joe told me once, about his childhood," Connolly began abruptly.

"He spent his teens, it must have been, with his dad in the West Country Dorchester, was it, somewhere like that and every summer they'd go caravanning. Lake District, New Forest, Norfolk Broads, all over. Just the two of them. Now on one of those trips, he told me can't remember which his dad parked up the caravan and they set off for a hike across country.

"Usual enough story they went a bit too far, weren't quite sure of their bearings, weather turned nasty on them, so rather than foot slog it back they decided to try and find a bed and breakfast. No B&B for miles, as it turned out, but what they did find was the entrance to a big old house. Deserted, with boarded-up windows and that kind of thing. The place had obviously been secured at some point, but the padlocks and the notices on the gate had been vandalised and it was pouring with rain and in they went. It was getting dark by then, and the plan was to shelter for the night and make tracks back to the caravan park in the morning.

"So anyway they got inside, found a dry corner and got their heads down. The old man's a bit worried by this point, being a law-abiding sort of bloke, but the boy's in heaven: he and his dad are having the adventure of a lifetime! Morning comes and they find that there's not just the house there's a ruined church and a river and some falling-down cottages and a couple of shops a whole village. All completely deserted. Obviously been locked away for years."

"Like Imber, on Salisbury Plain? Or what's that Royal Armoured Corps place in Dorset Tyneham?"

"Exactly. Just like that. So they have a bit of an explore. The dad's still a bit jumpy but as I say, the boy's having the time of his life. He climbs into the church through a window, jimmies a door open and finds his way down to the crypt. Now I can't remember the exact details but somewhere down there, locked away in boxes or cupboards or something, is all this antique gear."

"Gear?"

"Covert resistance stuff. Transceivers, morse sets, one-time pads, time-pencil detonators that sort of thing, all packed away in grease proof paper. So he takes some bits and pieces up to his dad, who can't believe his eyes, because although the gear's all World War Two vintage it's still in mint condition."

"A cache in case of enemy invasion," suggested Alex.

"That's what they eventually figure. And they find other stuff, too, hidden away beneath the other houses. Electrical bits and pieces, radio components, ironmongery, what have you. A real Aladdin's cave for a young lad."

"So how come no one had found this stuff before them?"

"I dunno. I'm guessing that it was because the only other people who'd been near the place for decades had been dossers and tramps. A few bikers, perhaps, and maybe the local satanist coven but..

Alex nodded.

"Go on."

"Well, the boy's all for helping himself to the gear but the old man puts his foot down. They haven't committed any offence yet, he says it's not trespassing to walk through an open gate, after all and he doesn't object to their having a look at all this stuff, but they're not taking it away. So they poke around, Dad explains how it all works, and then they pack it away again, reseal the boxes and off they go, make their way back to wherever they left the caravan.

"Anyway, to cut a long story short, Joe persuades the old boy to shift the caravan to a farm a couple of miles away and they go up to the old house every day creeping around like a couple of commandos, Joe said, and having a good old sticky beak at all this secret resistance gear. Happiest time he ever knew, Joe says. Best days ever. And when it's time to go home, he tells me, he does a funny thing. He goes and buys his own padlock and chain, and locks the place up properly. Puts up all the old notices again MOD Property, Strictly no Entrance to the Public and so on.

"Why does he do that?"

"Not sure. My guess is that it was something to do with deep-freezing the experience. Sealing it away. And also to do with the fact that his dad could have made a lot of money out of flogging the gear without anyone being any the wiser but chose not to out of principle. There were a few of the old Mark III transceivers down there, apparently the SOE suitcase jobs. They'd have to be worth a few grand apiece now. I suppose Joe didn't want anyone else having them away.

"You know what I'm going to ask you next, don't you?" said Alex.

"Yeah and I'm afraid I honestly don't know the answer. I really don't. All I can remember is that the place was on the edge of one of the national parks Peak District, Snowdonia, Dartmoor.. . You must've trained people yourself- you know how you listen to what they say and you don't quite listen, and sometimes you deliberately forget."

Alex nodded. He knew what the other man meant. Part of you kept friendship at arm's length when you were sending a man into a situation of acute danger.

"So why was he telling you all this?"

"It was a place we went in Wales an MOD property in Eppynt Forest we were using for an escape and evasion exercise. There was a line of clapped-out cottages there and he said it reminded him of this place he'd once discovered with his dad, and told me the story." Connolly frowned and blinked, and downed his whiskey.

"There was one other thing. The last time I saw him before the Box people came to take him away, we were up at the camp at Tregaron. We shook hands and I wished him luck, and he smiled and held up a key. At the time I had no idea what he was on about, but..."

"You think it was the key to that property?"

Connolly shrugged.

"Who knows?"

"And you can't think of any detail that might point to where this place was?"

"Alex, it was a dozen years ago. Anything was possible in those days and everyone you met had a weird story to tell. These things wash over you.

"Happiest time he ever knew?" mused Alex.

"Best days ever," confirmed Connolly and flicked his cigarette butt over the low parapet on to the beach. 1 "Leaving out Scotland for the moment," said Alex, thoughtfully kicking off his deck shoes, 'you've got the Lake District, the Peak District, the Cheviots ..

They had been back from Pablito's for less than ten minutes. Marie had called them a taxi and they'd left the hire-car at El Angel. the North York Moors, the Dales, Kielder..

"Alex," said Dawn quietly, turning to the open hotel window and the twinkling lights of the port, 'could you please shut the fuck up and kiss me?"

Alex blinked. A warm tide of ephedrine-tempered alcohol raced through his bloodstream but for some imponderable reason his mind was clear. He stared at her. The Dawn Harding that stood before him now was no relation whatever of the vengeful bitch that he had been so unwillingly paired with in London. This Dawn Harding's face was flushed, her eyes were bright, her posture was challenging and expectant. A warm breeze touched her hair. With great care this was definitely no time to fall flat on his face he crossed the room towards her. His hands found the small of her back. Her eyes closed at his touch, her lips parted and she pressed against him, breathing hard. Wanting all of her at once mouth, eyes, neck, breasts -he practically lifted her off her feet.

"Quick," she murmured, her fingers in his hair.

"Get me out of these clothes."

Alex kissed her again until she was gasping and her fingers had left his hair and were scrabbling at the buttons on his shirt.

She tore the last two, but by then he had pulled the tight white top over her head and unsnapped the fierce little Wonderbra. Her breasts were pale, their upper curves touched by a slight pinkness from the morning's sun and very faintly damp.

She tasted of sweat and smoke.

Falling to his knees, he forced himself to slow down, explored her stomach with his mouth, ran the tip of his tongue down the line of tiny translucent hairs that descended towards the gilt stud of her jeans. Popping the stud, he eased down the zipper and began to pull down the jeans.

They stuck. He pulled again and she staggered, giggled drunkenly, and fell on to the bed with her legs in the air and the white Versace jeans around her knees.

Taking one of the legends, he tried to pull it over her feet.

"They're too bloody tight," he breathed, swaying.

"Come on, Captain," she said, looking up at him archly.

"If you can take down a Scud launch site behind enemy lines, surely you can manage my jeans in a hotel bedroom!"

Bracing his foot against the edge of the bed, Alex gave an extra-hard tug. They jeans came off in a rush and he fell heavily backwards on to his stitched thigh. The pain was intense and for a moment he lay there on the floor in his own half-undone trousers, swearing and laughing.

After a moment Dawn peered over the edge of the bed and saw the blood rapidly beading through the cotton. Lowering herself to Alex's side, she eased the trousers off and then hurried to the bathroom for cotton wool and surgical spirit.

"That's rather blown the romantic mood, hasn't it?" she murmured, pressing a swab to the wound.

"Still, while I'm down here I might as well have a look at the rest of the damage."

As she poured and dabbed, Alex said nothing. The surgical spirit was cold against his skin. The sway of her small, neat breasts over his body proved a very effective anaesthetic.

He lay there as she eased off the dressings on his face and arm. He had been right in his early guess that a sensuous body lay beneath all that formal puritan grey. Her palely curvaceous form was overlaid with the faint musculature of one who exercised when there was nothing better to do with her time, but not otherwise. Her stomach was flat but soft, tapering towards the dark-blonde scribble of her pubic hair.

To tend to his arm she hunkered down over his hand. As bees to honey as she must have known they would his fingers moved upwards to meet her. She closed her eyes, pressed herself briefly and slickly against his palm, then continued in a businesslike way with her ministrations.

"Wait," she told him a moment later.

"I'm concentrating."

"So am I!"

"Let me get these bandages off I'm not into sex with Egyptian mummies."

To remove the dressings from his face, she sat astride him so that Alex could feel the damp heat of her crotch against his chest. But her expression was serious, and when he reached for her breasts she frowned absently and slapped his hands back down to his chest.

"I hope you don't behave like this with all those army nurses.

"We don't get nurses in the SAS," breathed Alex.

"We get some sweaty corporal called Dave or Ginge."

"I told you to leave them alone. I'm going to have to be very rough with you if you don't."

"I've been roughed up by experts." Alex grinned.

"I can take it.

A moment later she straddled him and lowered herself on to him. For a moment she was still, then he felt a series of hot, up drawing waves. Nothing mattered except the absolute intensity of the feeling that for all their antagonism he knew they shared at that moment. And then, with a desperate dying cry which might have come from either or both of them, it was over and Dawn gently subsided on top of him. She seemed very young almost childlike with her scrubbed face and sleepy eyes.

"That was fun," she murmured.

"Wasn't it?"

"It beats arguing."

She settled herself against his shoulder.

"Please, will you be nice to me from now on?" she asked.

"I mean really, really nice?"

"I promise," murmured Alex.

"And will you kill for me?"

He looked at her.

She wrinkled her nose at him and grinned.

"Well?" she asked.

"Will you?"

He smiled.

"OK."

TWENTY-THREE.

"OK," said Angela Fenwick.

"The position is this .

It was 10.30 a.m." and Alex and Dawn were seated with the deputy director in her office. Florence Nightingale looked benignly down from the walls; the cafetiere steamed on the table between them.

Despite her overnight flight from Washington Fenwick looked fresh, groomed and alert. Alex and Dawn, by contrast, who had taken an 8 a.m. flight from Malaga, were looking rather less impressive. Alex, in particular, had a raging thirst and a cracking headache that reminded him of its presence with every step that he took. The knife cuts, well on the mend now, were itching crazily.

Dawn, for her part, was paler and quieter than usual. They had not discussed the events of the night before their departure from the hotel to the airport had been a hurried one nor had her behaviour towards him changed greatly. But there had been little things. In the queue for Customs she had turned to him and pressed her face into his shoulder. In the taxi from Heathrow she had settled herself, catlike, beneath his arm. There was a complicity between them.

And for all that he was feeling lousy, the time spent with Dawn and the few hours spent in bed with her had reshaped things in Alex's mind. He didn't want to back out now, he wanted to go all the way, whatever the cost. He wanted to see the Watchman dead at his feet.

And it was possible more than possible. Meehan had seemed uncatchable but he wasn't uncatchable. He was a man and men sooner or later made mistakes.

Confiding his childhood memories to Denzil Connolly had been Meehan's first mistake and sparing Alex's life had been his second.

"We got the analysis of those Meehan tissue samples back yesterday evening from the Forensic Science Service labs," Fenwick continued.

"And they told us something rather interesting."

She opened her briefcase and removed a paper.

"The hair that Captain Temple extracted for us has been confirmed as Meehan's against DNA samples from the other crime scenes, and it showed abnormally high medium-term traces of a substance known as perchloroethylene. Known as PCE, perchloroethylene is a solvent used in the tanning process. Due to its high toxicity I won't bother you with the details PCE is on the European Community's black list of chemicals whose use is strictly controlled. In this country, however never a front-runner in environmental terms these controls are regularly ignored by industry and run-off from tanneries into rivers is often accompanied by excess PCE levels.

"Now we've been on to the various ministries overnight, and we've talked to the National Rivers Authority and all the water companies this morning, and between them they've provided us with a list of nine tanneries from which high levels of PCE run-off have been ..

There was a knock at the door, and a hurried entrance by a young man holding a folded document and a book.

"Excuse me, ma am,~ he said, handing the articles to her.

"These have just been couriered over from Room 1129 at the MOD."

"Excellent," said the deputy director.

"Thank you." She glanced at the document - a map, as it turned out.

"Dawn, would you be so good?"

Taking the map, Dawn rose from her seat and pinned it out on the display board opposite them. It was a map of England and Wales, flecked with larger and smaller areas of red.

"Following your call early this morning about the possibility of our man holing up at an old MOD property," said Fenwick, "I spoke to a couple of people in Whitehall. This map apparently shows everything, large and small, that they own. Quite a portfolio, isn't it? Billions of pounds' worth of land."

Alex stared at the map, daunted by the sheer scale and number of the holdings.

There had to be several hundred of them.

"If we could add the tanneries, please, Dawn," said Fenwick, handing the younger woman a printed list.

Dawn stared at it, and reached for the first black mapping pin.

"Hurley, Staffordshire," she read out.

"On the River Blithe."

And the second: "Mynydd, Powys, on the Afon Honddu."

And the third: "Beeston, Lanes on the River Douglas."

She continued to the end of the list.

She stood back and the three of them stared at the map. The pins were spread erratically over the country, with a slight cluster detectable between Birmingham, Coventry and Northampton.

"From what the FSS people say," Fenwick went on, glancing down at the report, "PCEs in this sort of concentration would only to be encountered within a few miles of source. So in the case of somewhere like Hurley, for example, we don't have to follow the river system seventy miles across country to the coast. We can just draw a circle of a few miles' diameter around the plant. The ESS figure was three miles, so let's say six to be on the safe side. Any of these locations strike anyone as the sort of area you might take your son on a caravanning holiday?"

"The mid-Wales one looks good," said Alex.

"So does the north Yorkshire and the Dartmoor. Any of those three, definitely."

Fenwick nodded.

"Dawn, take all the data down to the computer people. We need Ordnance Survey printouts of the tannery areas, with all suitable MOD properties highlighted. It's almost certainly safe to eliminate airfields, working bases et cetera the details of the various properties seem to be listed in this book they sent over.

Dawn nodded briskly and gathered up the materials.

When she had gone Fenwick turned enquiringly to Alex.

"Everything healing satisfactorily? I understand you put up quite a fight in poor George's defence."

"The Watchman did what he came to do," said Alex shortly.

Fenwick pursed her lips and looped an errant gunmetal tress behind one ear.

She was a handsome woman, Alex thought, if a bit on the cold side. Those blue eyes could freeze you to the bone in seconds.

"It doesn't take a Nobel prize winner to work out that the next in line for Mr. Meehan's attentions is myself," she said with a slight smile.

"I'm afraid it looks that way," Alex agreed.

"What precautions are you taking?"

"As few as possible, I'm afraid. I have to continue doing my job and I have to continue to be seen to do it."

"Have you moved house? Varied your routine at all?"

"There's no point, I'm afraid. I live as if expecting an assassin as it is and I have done ever since I inherited the Northern Ireland desk. I know you have your doubts about some of our people, Captain Temple, but I assure you the arrangements in place are good. Apart from anything else I have to receive ministers and diplomatic visitors and, well, all sorts of people. I can't just up sticks and move to some suburban safe house."

"Bet you wish you could at times," said Alex. The image flashed into his mind of Fenwick lying in a pool of blood with a nail through her head. She was certainly keeping up appearances, he thought. Perhaps she's worried that if she looks rattled or fails to show up for work she could lose out on the directorship.

"Perhaps I do, Captain Temple." Fenwick folded her hands in her lap for a moment, then one of the phones on her desk started flashing, and she marched over and picked it up.

"I'll wait outside," said Alex and left the office.

A minute later Dawn reappeared in the ante-room. In a couple of sentences Alex told her of his concerns for her boss's safety.

"She lives in a private block in a gated estate in Chelsea," said Dawn.

"It's one of the most secure addresses in London. There's CCTV everywhere, a security guard on the entrance, passes to get in and out, everything.

No one no window cleaner, no visitor, no one gets within fifty yards of the building without security clearance. The whole place is fully modified for at-risk personnel one-way windows, departure from an underground car park, the police a couple of minutes away in Lucan Place .

"He'll be checking the place out," said Alex.

"Probably even as we speak."

"I know," said Dawn.

"And that's why we're checking out anyone who goes near it and pulling in anyone who can't be personally vouched for by a resident or security staff member. Believe me, the job is being done and done properly."

"Does she live alone?"

"Drop it, Alex, please," Dawn said sharply.

"Our job now is to find the wasp's nest the place he always returns to and kill him there."

He nodded.

"OK. Just wanted to..

"I know. Let's go back in."

For a couple of minutes Dawn's fingers raced over one of the keyboards on Angela Fenwick's desk and the large flat-screen display on the wall opposite them flickered into life.

First, an enlarged area of Ordnance Survey map came up, with the village of Hurley, Staffordshire at its centre.

"No National Park or particular tourist area nearby," said Dawn.

"There's Blithfield Reservoir, but I don't think Meehan Senior would have driven a caravan halfway across the country to see that. Otherwise, the area on the screen is at the central point of a square formed by Stoke, Derby, Wolverhampton and Telford.

Not high on the list of tourist must-sees, I'd say." She struck the keyboard and two small areas of red appeared on the screen. Vis-~-vis suitably sized MOD properties in the area, we've got an RAF storage facility here near Yoxall and an old TA depot outside Colton but neither of them is less than a couple of miles from the River Blithe." She looked up at Alex.

"I'm assuming that the conclusion we're drawing is that he is staying beside the river and using it for drinking water, rather than gathering water from the river and drinking it somewhere else."

Alex nodded.

"He's probably got some sort of filtration system, but obviously nothing too sophisticated. Could well be using standard issue Puritabs. In the UK you tend to allow for water-borne bacteria and pesticides but not for heavy-duty chemical toxins like these PCEs or whatever they're called. And yeah, he'll definitely be holed up somewhere with its own water source rather than transporting a heavy canteen several miles across country. He'll be on the river itself- we know he likes them."

Angela Fenwick nodded grimly.

"Next possibility?"

Another section of map flashed up.

"Mynydd, Poxvys. Much more deserted, obviously. Area of outstanding natural beauty and definite tourist area in the summer months. Good for fishing, too, and we know Meehan and son enjoyed that. But no MOD properties nearby. The army and marines pass through the place pretty regularly on exercise but we don't actually own anything in the catchment area at all. Not so much as a Nissen hut on the Afon Honddhu."

"Go on," said Angela Fenwick.

"Beeston, Lancashire, on the Douglas, halfway between Wigan and Southport.

No MOD facility on or near the river. Nothing touristy about the area, particularly."

"Go on."

They went through all nine of them. For Alex's money there was one definite front runner a small tanning plant on a stream named the Hamble, which ran off Black Down on the western boundary of Dartmoor. This was the one he would have chosen this or the Mynydd one in Wales. Both were remote but served with metal led roads; both were close to popular tourist destinations; both offered vast areas of wild country in which, if need be, an experienced soldier could survive for weeks.

"It'll be one of the two, I'm sure of it," he said.

"We've got nothing registered to the MOD on either river,~ said Dawn doubtfully.

"Suppose the MOD has recently sold the property," suggested Alex.

"For the last hour we've been looking for MOD properties and for a small village with a church, because we know that Meehan specifically mentioned the existence of a church. But if the property was classified secret, at some point, and so not marked on any map, and was recently sold..."

Fenwick nodded.

"Yes, that's true. There's no reason to suppose that it's marked on current maps I can't believe the MOD bothers to inform Ordnance Survey whenever it sells and declassifies property. And of course it wouldn't be included in the MOD's current portfolio either."

"From Meehan's story," said Dawn, 'doesn't it sound as if this place, or at least its original purpose, has been forgotten? That nobody really knows why it was classified in the first place? It can't have been set up much later than 1940 and there's been a lot of inter-departmental paper shuffling since then."

Fenwick reached for a phone, pressed the scramble button and dialled a number.

"Is that 1129? Jonathan? Angela Fenwick here... Yes, bless you for that, Jonathan. Look, I want you to do something further for me. Go back five years and check for top-security-rated but untenanted MOD properties abutting the following rivers and within five miles downstream of the following grid references. Got a pencil?" As Dawn scrolled back through the maps, Fenwick read out the tannery locations.

"And if five years doesn't throw anything up," she continued calmly, 'then try ten and then fifteen .. . Yes, soonest, please. Ring me back the moment you find anything."

Replacing the phone, she turned to the others.

"With a bit of luck he won't be too long," she said.

"Shall we call up for some more coffee and some sandwiches?"

In the event, they finished the sandwiches before the call from Room 1129 came in. As she listened, Fenwick took notes.

"And that's the only one?" she concluded.

"Right. I'm grateful. Thank you." She turned to Dawn.

"Can you get the Hamble map back up?"

Alex felt a sharp prickle of excitement.

From her chair, Fenwick aimed a red laser pointer at the screen display.

"Right," she said.

"A

recent source of perchloroethylene pollution is this building here a small tanning plant presently engaged in litigation with the National Rivers Authority. One and a half miles downstream of the plant is Black Down House and its outbuildings, including the shell of a church, standing on some forty acres of land. Evacuated in August 1940 by order of the War Office for reasons pertaining to national security and later classified as a secret location under the Act in relation to Operation Gladio. For the last eighteen months, following sale by auction, Black Down House and its outbuildings have been the property of Liskeard Holdings, an Exeter-based property development company. Their present condition is unknown."

The three of them looked at each other.

"What was Operation Gladio?" asked Alex.

"An anti-communist stay-behind network set up immediately after the war by SOE and MI6, and funded by the CIA. To be activated in the event of a Soviet invasion. The idea was that agents should be put in place and materials hidden at secret locations so that any Western European country that was rolled over would be in a position to resist, communicate with the outside world et cetera."

"And Black Down House was one of those locations?"

"So it seems," said Fenwick.

"So all that kit Meehan found as a kid has sat there for fifty years, waiting for an invasion that never came?"

"Longer, probably. Britain established a stay-behind force as early as 1940 in case of German invasion. After the war a lot of the facilities were simply reassigned. Everything to do with Gladio and the stay-behind units has been classified top secret ever since, although bits and pieces have come out, particularly in Italy. Returning to the present day, however, it looks as if we might have found our man's base. Congratulations, captain."

"How do you want to handle it?" asked Dawn.

"I think I should just get down there as soon as possible," said Alex.

"Stake the place out, try and identify him, and, uh, kill him, basically."

"Killing him would be best," confirmed Angela Fenwick.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Dawn drove. They were carrying too much unusual baggage, she insisted, for them to risk being picked up for speeding. And Alex, sooner or later, would nudge the car up to 80 or 90 mph. It was in his nature.

Alex shrugged and sat back, and with the Range Rover tucked well into the slow lane, they made their steady way westwards. Their purpose, Alex had reluctantly agreed with Angela Fenwick, was to recce the area and determine their next step. There were to be no cowboy heroics or one-man initiatives as there had been at Longwater Lodge. If further manpower was needed then MI-5 would provide it. And with this Alex had had to content himself On his right he could see Stonehenge, like an assembly of frozen NAAFI chips.

"I'm beginning to enjoy our little trips away together," said Dawn.

Alex squeezed her thigh.

"This might not be quite the honeymoon that Spain was," he warned her.

"Worst-case scena no we could run into a contact. Have you had any time on the range recently?"

"Just the odd twenty-five rounds at lunchtime," she answered.

"And then mostly for fun. I did my time on a watcher team, though, and I can't imagine surveillance has changed much since then."

"So what weapon did you draw this morning?"

"A Walther PPK. Call me old-fashioned but..

Alex was surprised. The PPK was a highly serviceable weapon but famously unforgiving in the hands of a beginner. As a straight blow-back pistol it had a very stiff recoil spring and a pretty snappy perceived recoil as well.

"You don't have any trouble racking the slide?" he asked her.

"Or working the double action trigger?"

"I've got nice strong fingers," she replied, flexing them on the steering wheel. She glanced at him sideways and he smiled.

Turning, he cast an eye over the rear of the vehicle. He had tried to think of everything and if in doubt he had over specified. There were sleeping bags, a stuff sack of spare clothing, dry boots, maps, compasses, binoculars and ajumble of other articles that a couple on a hiking holiday might carry with them. Mounted on a steel frame on the back of the Range Rover was a trail bike. It hadn't occurred to Alex to drive a motorcycle down to Dartmoor, but the moment he saw it in the MI-5 vehicle pool he realised just how useful it might prove in that terrain. For that reason two sets of motocross goggles and helmets lay among the hiking gear.

There were also a handful of rather less common items: two pairs of night-vision goggles for a start, and a box each of 9mm and .38 hollow-point rounds. Had the car been stopped and searched by the police there would certainly have been a raised eyebrow or two.

"When we get there," said Alex, "I want you to promise to do what I say. If I say pull back to the vehicle, for example, I want you to do just that, OK? No arguments, no bullshit."

"Fine by me. Just run through the schedule."

"We'll do a single pass past the place, see what we can see. Then push on for a couple of miles and park up I've chosen somewhere on the 1:15,000 map a car park by a transport cafe. Then we'll cut back across country there's a streamside path that should take us to the boundary of the estate work our way round, and see what there is to be seen."

"You think we'll find him?"

"Who knows what we'll find. Or how long we'll have to wait."

"This is just a recce, right? You're cool with that?"

"Just a recce," Alex confirmed.

"On the other hand, if you get him bang to rights..

"You don't get men like Meehan "bang to rights"," said Alex flatly.

"Negative thought leads to negative action," said Dawn.

"Spare me the fucking zen, Harding." He intertwined and cracked his knuckles. The slow drip of adrenalin into his system had begun.

"Don't worry, you'll get a corpse, one way or another."

Two and a half hours later they were driving north from Tavistock across the western plain of Dartmoor Forest. The roads were narrower now, and Dawn edged the Range Rover carefully between high banks edged with fern, hawthorn and bracken as a solitary kestrel pinwheeled above them. At intervals, as the banks fell away, a vast and baleful reach of heather revealed itself.

"Follow the sign for North Brent Tor," said Alex, 'and then for either Chilford or Hamble."

To their left a series of rocky outcrops stood like iron teeth against the sky. This was the Watchman's terrain, Alex was sure of it.

"We should pass Black Down House on our right any minute now," said Alex.

"Take it as slowly as you can without looking suspicious."

They drove for ten minutes down a side lane which was little more than a farm track. Not many people came down here, Alex reflected, noting the lane's poorly maintained surface and overgrown verges.

And there the house finally was, set well back from the road, its windows boarded and its decades-old paintwork weather-streaked and flaking. Beyond it the ground fell away sharply towards the river. There was no sign of any other buildings. Nor, apart from a temporary steel baffler which had been erected in front of the former gateway, was there any indication that the property had been developed in any way since its sale. No structural supports had been erected, and the overgrown trees and bushes surrounding the building had clearly been untouched for years. The air of neglect surrounding the place was palpable.

"Not the most inviting place in the world," said Dawn as the property slid from view.

"I think that's rather the point," Alex observed.

"Like the fact that you can't see much of it from the road. There's a church and several outbuildings down there somewhere, plus twenty-odd acres of woodland."

"No vehicle anywhere near it."

"No. Which makes me think he might not be around. After all, he'd have no particular reason to to hide it."

"But it does beg the question as to where the hell he is," said Dawn worriedly.

"First things first," said Alex.

"If we're going to recce the place I'd much rather he wasn't around.

As long as your boss goes straight from Thames House to the Chelsea flat she should be safe enough assuming the security's everything you say it is."

Five minutes later they parked the Range Rover on the cinder forecourt of the Cabin Cafe. For appearance's sake they went in for a cup of tea and a slice of sponge cake. There were several other people in there, the majority of them wearing brightly coloured anoraks and carrying map cases.

Alex's and Dawn's appearance, by contrast, was decidedly sombre. Alex was wearing grey wind-proof trousers and an old combat smock; Dawn had on black jeans and a lightweight forest green jacket, and her hair was concealed beneath an army surplus jungle hat. Both were wearing nondescript hiking boots.

When they had paid, Alex and Dawn began to walk back up the road in the direction from which they had come. Both were carrying rucksacks and Alex now had a pair of high-powered binoculars round his neck. Once out of sight of the cafe, the pair cut left-handed into a field and descended the few hundred brambled yards to the river.

Or to the stream, for the Hamble was hardly a river. Not at this time of year, anyway. Such water as it contained tumbled quietly from pool to shallow pool, brimmed darkly for a moment and hurried on. A sheep path ran above it, disappearing at intervals but soon reprising its dry erratic track. Hanks of wool hung from a barbed-wire fence.

They slid down the nettled bank to the water and for twenty minutes Alex set a fast pace up the stream bed. The day was a warm one, despite the fact that afternoon was swiftly becoming evening, and soon they were both sweating.

Alex's thigh swiftly began to throb where the stitches pulled at the wound, but he consigned the discomfort to a distant part of his mind.

They covered the ground fast. The banks of the stream were eight or nine feet high and the foliage had clearly not been cut back for years, allowing them to stay well-concealed from any watching eyes. Despite the absence of any vehicle, Alex was not convinced that the Black Down estate was unoccupied and a careful study of a large-scale map had convinced him that this was the safest approach. Meehan could not watch the entire half-mile perimeter, he could only patrol it, and Alex suspected that he slept through the day.

The estate, they soon discovered, was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. This was not new long streaks of rust discoloured the galvanised metal but at ten feet high it was still effective enough. The banks flattened at the point the stream met the perimeter, so that the lowest chain-linked strands went to within inches of the stream bed. The fence continued in both directions and there was every reason to suppose that it surrounded the estate entirely. It was clearly not proof against determined assault, but it would undoubtedly have deterred the curious over the years.

Alex and Dawn crouched in the shadows beneath the bank.

"What d'you reckon?" asked Dawn.

"I reckon I'm going to have to go in underneath it," Alex answered.

Removing his rucksack, he took out a lightweight folding shovel and began digging in the stream. After ten hard minutes, and having hauled out several large rocks by hand, he had cleared a twelve-inch space beneath the lowest strands of the fence and the stream bed.

"OK, all clear?"

They looked around them and Alex quickly undressed. Naked, he burrowed up the stream bed and under the fence.

The water was surprisingly cold. When he was through Dawn wrapped his clothes in a bin liner and threw them to him over the fence. The other kit followed.

"Remind me to take those stitches out," she hissed as Alex re-dressed.

Quickly, they ran through their contingency plans. She would wait where she was and call him on his mobile if there was anything to report, and he would attempt a search of the Black Down estate. Switching his mobile to vibrate, he melted into the woods. His progress was slow. He moved in total silence, continuously scanning the ground in front of him for trip wires and booby traps, and the landscape as a whole for any sign of surveillance.

Soon he was at the edge of the woods and from a well-concealed position among a patch of overgrown thorn bushes was able to rake the area with his binoculars. There was no sign of life and as far as he could see the area of tall grass, nettles and cow-parsley in front of him was untrodden.

Slowly, and with infinite care, he moved from the cover of the woods into the shadowed stream-bed. The water was deeper here and he was soon soaked to the waist. It wasn't the approach route he would have chosen, given a choice, but unlike the nettle-choked field, the exposed rocks would leave no trace of his passing. The day was still warm. The sugar in the tea that he had drunk had made him thirsty and with a flash of irritation Alex realised that he had not filled his canteen. Drinking the stream water, as they had discovered from the forensic samples, was probably inadvisable.

Rounding a corner he saw the church. It had a square tower and a blankly ruined look. Where there had once been windows there were now gaps around which, at some long-ago point, mortar had been roughly tro welled. At one time a road had led past the main house and down alongside the river. The church and its small graveyard lay at the end of this road, or what remained of it. Trees and bushes had forced their way through the dried-out surface and long-unchecked vegetation pressed from both sides. Beyond the church was a line of dilapidated single-storey dwellings.

Having noted the layout of the place, Alex drew himself back into invisibility beneath an overhanging alder bush. With his binoculars he used the slowly failing light to scour the area around the church and then rang Dawn.

"I'm in position," he murmured.

"Since I've got no idea where our man sleeps or even if he's here, I'm just going to hang back and sit tight. How are you?"

"OK. Nothing to report here."

Where would Meehan stay, Alex wondered. In the house? In the church? In the crypt, underground? Did the house have cellars? Wherever it was, it would be somewhere where he would have plenty of warning of any arrivals.

By the property's new owners, for example. Angela Fenwick had discovered that Liskeard Holdings were having trouble securing planning permission for the hotel and conference complex that they hoped to build on the site, and that was why the property remained in its ruined state. But presumably there had been a fair amount of coming and going by architects and others.

Alex reasoned that Meehan probably slept and concealed himself somewhere beneath the church. The chances were that if the house had a cellar it would be damp and uncomfortable, and subject to occasional visits the church was much older and much more securely built. Church crypts were stone-walled. They were usually dry.

At 8 p.m. Dawn rang.

"Still waiting for Godot?" she asked.

"Yup, you?"

"The light's almost gone, as you can see. I was thinking I should get back to the Range Rover. Twitchers don't twitch in the dark."

"OK. Be in touch."

Two hours later his thigh was itching unbearably and his back aching from immobility. How many hours have I spent lying up like this, he wondered. A hundred? More? And how many times has the whole thing ended in failure, in merely getting up and going back to base?

He was going to have to make a decision, sooner or later, about whether to risk taking a closer look at things. Was Meehan due back tonight? Was he already there? Was he, at this minute, watching Alex the hunted turned hunter?

Alex shuddered, both at the thought of being scoped out by Meehan and at the memory of the former agent's terrifying strength.

No, he thought. I'll go in now.

Slowly he eased himself from cover and continued the silent passage upstream that he had started hours earlier. In his pocket, fully loaded, was the Glock.

Soon, the house was in view above him. The ruins of a flight of steps led down from the road fronting the house to the stream at the bottom of the slope. If he started to climb, he would greatly increase the chance of being spotted if Meehan was in residence. If he stayed where he was, however, he would never learn anything.

A step at a time, he moved up the slope. With the passage of years and neglect, the brickwork steps had cracked and he could feel their uneasy shift beneath his feet. Finally he reached the top and the front door. Was it locked? No, the lock had been kicked in and the flaking door swung open easily. Glock in one hand, Maglite torch in the other, Alex went in. He was in a front hall, a place of rotting floorboards, fallen masonry and the smell of dead animals. Fag ends and empty bottles greyed with plaster dust lay about and there was an old coat in the fireplace. Anything of any conceivable value had been stripped away -there was nothing there except walls and floor.

Taking a pair of thick socks from his rucksack, Alex pulled them over his boots. They would muffle the crunching sound of his movements and help conceal the tracks of his Danner boots on the floor. Quickly he moved from room to room on the ground floor, but found nothing. A few empty tins and a gutted mattress lay around, but there was no sign that the place had been occupied by anyone other than tramps and vagrants -and that a long time ago. There was no cellar.

Upstairs the story was the same: gutted rooms, fallen plaster- work and the darkness of the boarded-over windows. At some point a pigeon had trapped itself in there and its half-feathered skeleton lay on a bedroom mantelpiece.

Where had Meehan and his father slept that night all those years ago? Wherever it was, there was no sign that he had bothered with the place since.

Outside, it was now quite dark. Pulling on his night-vision goggles so that the scene leapt into eerie green daylight, Alex descended the slope again. At his ear was the tiny mosquito whine of the goggles' battery-powered electronics.

Carefully he made his way towards the dilapidated cottages. As with the church, a rough attempt had been made to make these safe by slapping mortar around the gaps where there had once been windows. One of them the only one with an intact roof- seemed to have been designated a store of some kind, and its back room proved to be packed with ancient cardboard boxes containing electrical and woodworking items. Raising the goggles and flicking a pen torch beam on these, Alex identified dark-brown bakelite transformers and junction boxes, rows of dusty radio valves, plaited electrical flex, fibrous early Rawlplugs and other items whose use he could only guess at.

And nails, of course. From half-inch to six-inch. Alex pocketed a couple for the forensics team, flicked off the pen torch, lowered the goggles and went outside again.

The mobile throbbed against his thigh.

"You OK?" asked Dawn.

"Looking around," murmured Alex.

"No sign of him yet. This is definitely the place, though I've found a stack of those old nails. You OK?"

"Fine. Take care."

"Sure."

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and moved towards the pale bulk of the church. This time the door was locked. Alex considered climbing in through a window, dismissed the idea as too likely to attract attention and reached into one of the chest pockets of his smock.

It was a couple of years since he'd done the lock-picking refresher course at Tregaron and the goggles didn't help, but Alex's movements were reasonably confident as he inserted a pick into the church door. The lock was a standard pin-tumbler type and it was no more than a few minutes before the door swung inwards.

Pocketing the pick and the torque wrench in favour of the Glock, Alex scanned the place. As in the house, anything of any value as architectural salvage had been removed and above him only a few roof beams remained. Broken tiles and mounds of pigeon shit littered the stone floor.

The door was to one side, low and arched. Again, it was locked, and this lock was no high street Yale. It took Alex almost half an hour of delicate work with the spring-steel pick to solve all the pins and bring them to the shear line, and he breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief when he felt the plug's smooth rotation beneath his torque wrench.

Beyond the door was a descending spiral staircase. The stone treads felt worn beneath Alex's soles as he crept downwards, peering before him through the goggles. There was very little ambient light for them to magnify and he seemed to be descending into a dim green haze.

The crypt appeared to be empty but for a wooden bier of the type once used in funerals. Lifting the goggles, Alex risked a quick sweep with the Maglite torch, only to have his initial observation confirmed. There was nothing else no chests~ no cupboards, no sign of habitation merely walls and floors carved with memorial inscriptions and a cool stone emptiness. Nor were there any doors to further chambers.

Think, Alex told himself. Go back to basics. Meehan told Connolly that the equipment he found was in the church. The Operation Gladio hiding place had to be proof against sophisticated enemy search teams and a locked door would have constituted no protection whatever against a determined GRU or Spetznaz outfit.

Once again, he searched the place with his torch, running its beam over the walls and floors, and the inset stone tablets with their florid carvings.

He almost missed it, and he would never have found it had he not known that it had to be there somewhere. A memorial brass inlaid into the floor in one corner of the room. Worn, as if by the passage of many feet, and inscribed "To the memory of Samuel Calvert, born 1758, laid to rest 1825. My sword, I shall give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage."

Gladio, thought Alex. The word means a sword, doesn't it?

The brass lifted with a knife tip. Beneath, supporting it, was a heavy iron grille. And beneath the grille were steps.

TWENTY-FIVE.

Alarm screamed in Alex's mind. He was getting himself deeper and deeper into a situation from which retreat was impossible.

His plan, to which Angela Fenwick had agreed, had been that he should make an initial sortie into the property to search for evidence of Meehan's presence and then pull back, so that an MIS team could replace him. If Alex encountered Meehan while undertaking his recce, however, he was to kill him on sight. From Fenwick's point of view, Alex knew, this would be the ideal outcome. No more Watchman, no more complex and expensive deployment of Service personnel, no more threat to herself or to her ambitions.

And to be honest, thought Alex, it would suit him too. It would balance the books for George Widdowes' death. There was also the undeniable truth that a happy Angela Fenwick meant a happy Bill Leonard, and a happy Bill Leonard could mean promotion.

Plus, of course, the world would be rid of a psychopathic murderer. If Meehan were waiting in the darkness at the bottom of those steps, or if he were to return to the church right now, Alex would be trapped. Better by far to pull back, to get Fenwick to send reinforcements.

Pulling out his mobile he tried punching in Dawn's number. The sudden beep indicating that there was no signal strength made him jump and his heart race, and he realised just how on edge he was.

Meehan could come back at any moment.

Pulling the grille and the brass plate back into place from below the gaps in the grille had deliberately been made wide enough to allow this Alex began to descend the steps. The room at the bottom, he saw with a quick, relieved sweep of the goggles, had no human occupant. It was a burial chamber and the rectangular stone slab at its centre had probably once supported a tomb.

But not now. Now the walls were piled deep and high with green-sprayed steel cases whose contents, according to the white stencilled legends on their sides, included time pencils and other varieties of detonator, delay fuses, carborundum grease, pocket incendiaries, Eureka beacons, S-Phones, Mk III Transceivers, Welrod pistols and an assortment of grenades and mines. It was a far more comprehensive list than Connolly had described, thought Alex, staring for a wondering moment at the scores of cases. Overcome by curiosity, he prised open the lid of a case marked "Grenades Gammon type'.

Inside, neatly packed, were a dozen bizarre-looking appliances, each consisting of a bakelite fuse housing and a cotton bag. The idea, Alex assumed, was that you filled the bag with plastic explosive maybe chucking in a handful of nuts and bolts for good measure and lobbed the whole thing into the middle of an enemy patrol. Very nasty indeed.

The transceivers packed into their little leather suitcases, by contrast, were objects of great fascination, with their miniaturised sockets and grilles and dials. If I get through this in one piece, thought Alex, I'm coming back for a few of these, and perhaps a couple of the Welrods too. Take them up to Sotheby's or Christie's... This sub-crypt, it was clear, was where Meehan lived. At one end of the room were cardboard boxes containing new own-brand supermarket tins soups, beans, spaghetti, peas -chocolate bars, and packet foods. A packing case held fresh oranges, potatoes and green vegetables. No onions, probably because of the strong smell they gave off while cooking. Among the food was a small plastic rubbish bag containing crushed tins, sweet papers, withered orange peel and a brown apple core. The last two looked less than forty-eight hours old.

There was also a plastic water-purification system, a tiny MSR stove and fuel bottles, a pair of mess tins, plastic cutlery, a comprehensive medical kit the suture-set recently used, Alex noted and a wash bag. In the corner of the room above this area a fresh-air duct led upwards into the darkness, presumably voiding behind some decorative element on the tower.

At the other end of the chamber, folded neatly on the floor, were Meehan's clothes nondescript camping-store items for the most part, and a pair of worn cor dura hiking boots. From one of these an inexpensive Suunto compass trailed a para-cord lanyard.

On the slab, weighed down at each corner, was a good-quality photocopy of an architectural blueprint. The building in question was entitled Powys Court (Block 2), Oakley Street, London 5W3. A roll of similar blueprints lay to one side and a flash of the Maglite served to confirm that all related to the same building.

What was it that Dawn had said about Angela Fenwick's flat? A private block? In a gated estate? One of the most secure addresses in London?

Heart pounding, Alex scanned the place, felt through the modest pile of clothing. There was no sign of any weaponry -Meehan had it all with him. He tried thumbing Dawn's number on his mobile but couldn't get a signal.

Shit!

Racing up the steps, he hurriedly replaced the grille and the brass plate.

Moments later, pulling the crypt door shut behind him, he was running from the church towards the main gate. Meehan was about to move on Angela Fenwick he was sure of it.

He was over the gate in less than a minute and, having got well clear of the premises dialled Dawn again. This time he got a tone and she picked up immediately.

"Powys Court mean anything to you?"

"Yes, it's Angela's place. Why?"

"Meehan's got the architectural blueprint. He's probably there right now."

"Where are you?"

"Couple of hundred yards beyond the entrance to the house there's a lay-by and a sign saying Chilford."

"OK. Two minutes."

Packing the night-vision goggles into the rucksack, he waited impatiently for the headlights of the Range Rover.

She was closer to five minutes.

"I've rung Angela," she told him.

"Told her to get out."

"And go where?"

"Safe house. She's agreed to stay there for the next twenty-four hours and surround the place with Special Branch people."

"Can she get there without being followed?"

"She was on her way home from Downing Street. The driver will throw in every move in the book, make sure they're not followed."

Alex looked dubious.

"Don't worry," said Dawn.

"He's very good and very experienced. Ex-army, as it happens."

"Go on."

"She wants me up there soonest. I have to help her run things from the safe house."

Alex nodded.

"And I'll stay down here. Sooner or later this is where he's going to come back to and when he does I'll be ready."

"I'd have liked to stay with you.

"I could certainly have used an extra pair of eyes and ears," said Alex, unloading the gear from the back of the Range Rover.

"Is that all I am to you?" she asked with a half-smile.

"A handful of body parts?"

"You know what I mean."

"Have you got everything you need?"

Alex patted his smock pockets and checked the rucksack.

"Torches, lock-picks, Glock, ammo, night sights, knife, scoff, first aid, spare clothing, waterproofs, cam netting .. . Looks OK. To be on the safe side I might take the bike and some petrol. Don't like being without a vehicle. Oh, and some drinking water I'm not poisoning myself with that shite from the stream."

He opened the back doors and collected a couple of bottles of water and the helmet, goggles and ten-litre fuel can that went with the motorcycle.

"Sure you'll be OK?" Dawn asked as he lifted the bike from the transportation frame on the back of the Range Rover and rolled it towards the pile of supplies.

"Yeah. He's not getting the drop on me twice, don't worry.

"Professional pride." She smiled.

"Honour of the Regiment!"

"Something like that."

She nodded.

"OK, then. Take care. And remind me about those stitches."

"They can wait."

She kissed him on his good cheek.

"So can I. Be careful, Captain Temple."

"On your way, Harding," he said, touching his hand to her hair.

He hid the bike in the woods opposite the entrance to Black Down and covered it with bracken and pine branches. The machine was an Austrian KTM 520cc EXC, and had been sprayed a matt khaki. The green plastic fuel can was full, and attachable to the rear of the seat by means of a rucksack and bungee cord. He left a helmet and pair of goggles attached to the handlebars. Then, shinning backwards and forwards over the steel barrier, he moved the rest of the kit into the grounds of Black Down House.

No cars passed. There had been traffic on the road earlier in the evening but now it seemed to have dried up. Crouching by one of the gate piers, he checked his watch. It was twenty minutes before midnight.

Quickly Alex considered his position. His target could arrive at any time, and the sooner he got himself out of sight and into position the better. But into which position Meehan was far too security-conscious simply to climb over the barrier each time he wanted to get into the property and might approach the church from any point along the half-mile or so of boundary fence.

But whichever direction the man was coming from, Alex knew it was to the church that Meehan would go.

He settled himself to wait. He had chosen a position in daylight in the long grass midway between the woods and the church. The Watchman would return tonight, he was sure.

This was the end game.

TWENTY- SIX.

As the night progressed the temperature fell. Dampness enclosed the Black Down estate, the waning moon clouded over and shortly after midnight the first drops fell. Within the hour the grass was bowed and the stream hissing with rain.

Alex tried to ignore the increasing cold and the sodden weight of his clothing. He was lying on uneven ground behind a fallen and rotting tree with the rucksack cached at his side. His face was blackened with cam-cream, long grass surrounded him and cam-netting covered his body. Rain streamed down the grip of the Glock 34. The rain would conceal him, but it would also conceal Meehan.

"Come on, you bastard," he murmured.

"Come on.

He prayed that Meehan would return. Surely the man didn't have a place in London. London was a very tightly regulated city, it was next to impossible to sleep rough without some helpful cop or social worker directing you to the nearest shelter. And asking for your name. And having a bloody good look at you.

Nor would he be able to return to his Kilburn haunts. Irish London was far too dangerous a place for him to approach since MI-5 had spread the word that he'd been touting for them. Every Provo sympathiser would know his face, unless he'd had it altered beyond all recognition and that was a damn sight harder to do than was popularly supposed.

No, he'd come back down here, lie low for a bit, catch his breath. He'd been successful so far by dint of extreme caution, he wouldn't want to blow it now with only Fenwick left to kill.

And something told Alex that the tide had turned. Something about the sight of those supplies the tinned supermarket food, that austere little pile of kit told Alex that the Watchman was nearing the end of his watch. And when that happened he Alex Temple would be ready. He welcomed the hardness of the earth beneath him and the cold sting of the rain. It kept him on edge.

Shortly after 4.10 he had just checked his watch there was the low sound of a vehicle passing by on the road and the brief flicker of headlights. The sound was swallowed by the falling rain, the lights faded to nothingness.

Ten minutes passed. Alex hunkered down beneath the cam-netting, his body taut with anticipation, his eyes narrowed against the rain which streamed from his forehead. In front of him the foresight and backsight of the Glock were aligned on wet darkness.

"Come on," he mouthed, adrenalin jolting through him as he thumbed down the safety catch.

"Come on."

Nothing.

It had just been a passing car.

The sick ebb of anticipation.

Or had it been Meehan? Had he parked up nearby and made his way back over the fence? Alex scanned the darkness in front of him through narrowed, night accustomed eyes, methodically quartering the jigsaw of interleaving grey shapes.

From the subtle difference in tones, he identified the faint outline of grasses, ground foliage and tree branches, and noted their sodden, rhythmic response to the driving rain. All was movement, but movement of an inanimate regularity.

And then a blur of grey within many blurs of grey, Alex's peripheral vision caught a movement that was irregular, hesitant, pulse-driven. He looked directly at it, lost it, looked away and had it again. The shape was frozen now, as if scenting the breeze.

And now moving again. Could it be a fox? A badger?

Not that shape. That animal was human.

Adrenalin kicking in.

Heart-rate increasing.

Thumb to safety catch. The Glock streaming rain. Range what? Perhaps thirty-five yards?

Come on, you bastard. Come on .

Thirty, perhaps, but the rain dramatically reduced visibility. Shit! As the foresight and backsight wavered into grey alignment so the target seemed to disappear.

Come closer.

Should he charge him. Just race over there and try and drop him as he ran?

No. His target had the advantage. Knew every inch of this... The figure crouching now, half standing.

Alex hugged the sodden ground. Come on, he prayed. Come this way.

But the figure seemed to be in no hurry. Infinitely cautious, it moved against the monotone backdrop of the woods, seemed to dissolve, reappeared further away. Alex could hear movements now, footfalls through the undergrowth.

He decided to follow.

Leopard-crawling through the wet grass, he made his way slowly to the edge of the woods. The figure was standing beneath a tree now, scanning his surroundings.

Five more yards, thought Alex, and I'll be close enough for a shot. There was a broad beech trunk in front of him and Alex used its cover to stand up. In front of him the figure had moved away again.

Silently, Alex followed. They seemed to be on some sort of grass path; their progress was soundless.

Grandmother's footsteps.

He had him now. The figure it had to be Meehan was standing motionless against some dark evergreen bush. Three more silent paces and the kill was a certainty. Alex raised the Glock in front of him, straightening his arms, minim ising the distance.

First pace. Fast. Step it out.

Second pace. Keep going.

A split second before the trip flare exploded, Alex felt the wire just below his knee, ligament-taut, and then the world around him exploded into blue-white light.

Out of sheer instinct he hurled himself sideways to the ground. Blinded, and with his hard-won night vision destroyed, he could see nothing outside the area lit by the phosphorous glare. All beyond it was black.

Shit!

The flare smoking and crackling. The sound of running feet and Alex stumbling blindly after them, Glock in hand, face whipped by branches.

Meehan was making not for the church, but the house. Fifty yards behind him now, Alex tried to blink away the searing blast of light imprinted on his retinas.

But it stayed there, dancing in front of his vision so that he could barely see as he ran.

He slipped in the mud, went down hard and, picking himself up, ran straight into a tree stump and fell again, setting the knife wounds screaming in protest. A hundred yards ahead of him he saw the other man race into the house. Meehan's night vision was unimpaired he had deliberately kept his back to the trip flare.

Somehow Alex reached the front door. Behind him, in the wood, the flare was no more than a popping smoulder on its steel picket. His night vision was shot and he was following a presumably armed man into a lightless house.

Shit, just when the Maglite could have helped him, he'd left it outside in the rucksack. On the other hand the torch would betray his own position... Crouching motionless just inside the front door in the musty darkness, Alex listened intently.

The crunching of feet on fallen plaster, then silence except for the rain on the roof tiles. Meehan was above him.

How did the layout of the house go.. . Think.

Twenty stairs up, that much he remembered. The top corridor T-branching to left and right Meehan was in the left wing, his location confirmed by a dull thump. What did he have up there?

Do or die, thought Alex. Let's go and see.

As silently as possible he crept up the stairs. The photo imprint of the flare was still in front of his eyes, but the beginnings of night vision were returning to him. He could see the top of the stairs now and the corridor. To the left were three doors, one of them opened.

He had left them all closed, he remembered.

Bracing himself, readying the Glock, he burst into the room. It was empty, but the boards previously covering the window opening had been booted outwards and rain was spattering the floor. Alex raced over towards the opening, guessing that Meehan had had some sort of rope or other escape route readied there. The thump must have been Meehan hitting the roof of the porch below.

An instant before Alex reached the window, however, the floorboards collapsed beneath his feet with a desiccated sigh. There was a burst of dust and crumbling lath and plaster, and then there was no support at all and Alex felt himself pitched downwards through the choking darkness. He hit the hall floor below hard and unevenly, smashing on to one elbow and the back of his skull.

Son of a bitch Meehan had booby-trapped the floor with rotten boards and cut out the beams. Painfully, Alex got to his feet. His parachute training had ensured that he had automatically rolled with the fall and saved himself a broken limb but he was badly shaken.

Had Meehan made a break for his vehicle, or was he waiting outside with his weapon cocked, ready to blow his pursuer away?

A distant scream of tyres on the wet road gave Alex his answer. Still dazed, he shook his head, dislodging a gritty cloud of dry plaster. Time to go, he whispered mechanically to himself. Time to go. Meehan already had a clear two minutes' start.

The rucksack. Run. Find it.

He slipped on the wet ground again, wrenching the stitches, but was beyond pain now. Safety-locking and holstering the Glock, pulling the rucksack of kit to his shoulders both sets of actions seemed to take for ever he forced himself in the direction of the main gate. The fall through the floor seemed to have affected his balance and he had to concentrate hard in order to place one foot in front of the other. Keep going, he repeated to himself, desperately attempting to order his thoughts. Not dead yet. Not dead till you're dead. Keep going.

It took him a clear minute to climb the gate and he managed to gash his thumb badly on the barbed wire while doing so. When he finally made it to the top, he sucked the blood from his shaking hand and looked blearily around him. To his left, perhaps a mile away, a tiny thread of light showed for a moment. The Watchman had gone east.

Keep going.

Even pushing the bike was difficult to begin with, but eventually he got it to the road, hauled off the night-vision goggles and pulled on the motorcycle goggles and helmet. With the aid of the pen torch his hands were still shaking badly he checked the tank. It was full and probably held nine or ten lit res of unleaded petrol. The jerry can in the cotton rucksack bungee corded to the rear of the seat held approximately the same again.

The KTM had an electric start and bur bled immediately into life. Cautiously, Alex let out the hydraulic clutch and moved forward. The power was there, smooth and immediate, but the knobbly motocross tyres gave him the sensation that he was riding on marbles. The seat was hard, narrow and unyielding. This was not a machine that lent itself willingly to road riding

Go, he ordered himself. No lights. The roads were empty and Meehan had to be allowed to think that he had got away. Alex had no night vision, though.

He had been wearing the image-intensifying goggles for too long.

Too bad. Drive. And fast.

No lights.

At speed, it was like riding a road drill. The KTM could do 80 mph on tarmac but it wasn't what it had been designed for, and the knobbly tyres shook Alex to the bone, blurred his vision, made the teeth dance in his mouth. And with no lights... Faster. Risk everything.

Rain lashed his face, the white lines on the road were barely visible and when the front wheel touched them the whole machine seemed to twitch and skate.

Accelerate into the bends. Find speed.

The main road. North to Okehampton, south to Tavistock.

Roulette: 50-50; red or black.

South. His fists tight on the domino grips, his body ice-cold in the sodden clothing, the black sutures biting into the knife-cuts.

Ignore the pain.

He saw nothing for two miles and then, far ahead of him, a tiny worm of light travelling not south, but east. If it was Meehan, he had turned off the main road at right angles. He was heading for the centre of Dartmoor and taking the narrow road at well over 70.

Shit. Bastard still had at least four miles on him. Once he made it to a road with a bit of traffic on it he'd just vanish.

Taking a deep breath, Alex swung the KTM left-handed off the road and into the wild darkness of the open moor. His only chance of staying with Meehan was to cut across country. As the crow flew Meehan was only a couple of miles away, but by road he was more than twice that.

Alex accelerated aggressively, felt the near sublime sensation as the tyres bit hard into the rough moorland. Doing the job it was designed for, the bike seemed to gather Alex up, to bind him furiously to itself. The super cross suspension had been set at a very harsh level with a minimum of compression and rebound, but Alex was soon glad of this when the front wheels hit a rock. For a moment man and machine were flying through the darkness, then the wheels came down with a testicle-crunching double smash that would have consigned a non-performance bike to the scrap heap and a less blindly determined driver to an Intensive Care ward.

But with body and brain screaming vengeance, Alex didn't give a fuck. The pain and fatigue were distant things now all that mattered was that he dominate this leaping, howling beast of a motorcycle. He could see nothing. He was aware of a track of sorts beneath him and the glow-worm thread of the vehicle ahead and to his right, and that was all. The rest the whipping cold, the shotgun volleys of rain and mud, the desperate grip of his hands and heels barely registered.

In a rational state of mind he would never have been able to do it. In the event, instinct grabbed the controls from fear and good judgement. Instinct looked ahead, instinct held its line, instinct squared the front wheel into the rain-slicked rocks and hummocks, and as the four-stroke engine screamed beneath him Alex knew a crazy, weightless release. What the fuck, he thought. If I smash myself to pieces, then so be it.

Gradually, he closed the gap between them. Did the Watchman have a plan, he wondered, or was he just distancing himself from Black Down with all speed.

Almost there. Almost within safe range of him. The road across the moor was about twenty miles long, and Alex needed to be well locked on to Meehan before they encountered any more traffic. As things stood he didn't even know what sort of vehicle the other man was driving.

But he could at least see his lights now, all the time. Assuming that it was the man he was after. If it wasn't, well, that was the end of it.

Shit. Another vehicle had joined the car that he hoped was Meehan's. Swinging hard right-handed, Alex made for the road. Within the minute the front wheel of the KTM had dived into a cut and Alex found himself flying over the handlebars to land in an awkward heap in the marshy heather. He was not badly hurt, but his confidence in his bike-handling abilities took a dent. And by the time he had got himself up and righted, and restarted the KTM, neither car was in sight. More carefully now, Alex steered the bike to the road.

After the thrill of flying over moorland, it was back to the murderous vibration of the road. Speed helped a little, but only a little. Throttling back, Alex pushed the KTM up to 85 mph, and after five minutes, to his vast relief, tail-lights appeared in front of him.

The rear of the two cars was a nwish red Toyota driven, as far as Alex could see through the rainswept rear window, by a man in a hat. A Countryside Alliance sticker showed in the back window.

Swinging outside the Toyota, Alex peered through the rear window of the front car, a battered-looking dark-blue BMW. This driver seemed to be bareheaded. The car was much muddier than the Toyota.

It could be either of them. Alex stayed hard on the tail of the rear car, his eyes locked to the driver. The hat looked like a tweed one, the sort habitually worn by Inspector Frost on TV.

Both cars slowed down and Alex fell back fifty yards. They were approaching a village a sign read Two Bridges. The Toyota driver seemed to be waving his right hand about inside the car what the fuck was he up to?

And then something about the patterns he was inscribing suddenly made sense to Alex. He was conducting! He was listening to a classical music station and conducting it with his finger.

Nothing anyone had said about Meehan had suggested that he was a music fan.

Nor was it credible that, at a moment potentially fraught with danger, he would be allowing his concentration to be dispersed in this way. Joseph Meehan was, as Frank Wisbeach had said, a 'true believer'. He had just survived an expert assassination attempt. Under the circumstances he was hardly going to be singing along to Classic FM.

Meehan had to be the guy in the BMW.

Alex was glad he had reached a decision because the two cars separated on the eastern side of the village. The Toyota swung right towards Ashburton, the BMW forked left to Mortenhampstead.

The first fingers of light were now visible at the horizon, and Alex braked and waited at the roadside as the BMW pulled away from the village. He had no intention of being spotted in Meehan's rear-view mirror. As long as he kept his lights off, he told himself... As soon as the BMW was out of sight Alex restarted, gritting his teeth against the pulverising vibrations and dropping back the moment the red tail-lights came into view again. The signpost indicated that it was ten miles to Moretonhampstead and he very much doubted that Meehan was going to turn off the main road.

More worrying was the petrol issue. Meehan, it was logical to suppose, had just returned from London when he appeared at Black Down House. He must have had some nearby place to park the car. Would he have a full tank of petrol? Was he carrying any with him?

The KTM's tank probably held about nine lit res. Four-stroke engine, thirty miles to the gallon.. . say a hundred miles, max, before he needed to fill up again. If Meehan needed a refill before then, fine. Alex could ride in and shoot him with the silenced Glock at the petrol station. Ride away before anyone realised what had happened.

If Meehan didn't need petrol before Alex did, then Alex was in trouble. Meehan would simply outrun him.

He came to a decision. He would follow Meehan until his own petrol gage indicated half-full. Then he would call Dawn Harding on his mobile, give her Meehan's position and let her Service's people take over. This was their speciality, after all.

The arrangement was professionally responsible, but also gave him a reasonable chance of sorting the whole thing out himself, which he very much wanted to do. He needed closure, as he suspected did Meehan. Their destinies had intertwined. One of them had to kill the other.

TWENTY- SEVEN.

From Moretonhampstead the dark-blue BMW took the Exeter road and then turned sharply northwards up the valley of the river Exe towards Tiverton. Hanging well back in the half-dark, Alex was still fairly certain that he had not been seen.

At Tiverton the BMW turned eastwards again. He was making for Taunton, but it seemed that caution was leading him to avoid motor ways in favour of much smaller roads. From Taunton, Alex guessed, he would work his way across country to Salisbury.

At first it appeared that Alex was right. Meehan drove through Taunton and continued eastwards on minor roads for twenty-five minutes. And then, a mile or two short of the village of Castle Cary, Alex rounded a corner to see the BMW at a lay-by three hundred yards ahead of him. Meehan must be taking a piss, he thought, braking sharply.

Shit! The fact that he had stopped on seeing Meehan's car rather than driving straight past would unquestionably have set alarm bells ringing.

As nonchalantly as he could, he wrenched open the cotton bag, pulled out the jerry can and filled the KTM's half-empty petrol tank. Then he slipped the jerry can back in the bag, bungee-corded it to the back of the seat and stretched as if he'd only woken up ten minutes earlier. With luck, Meehan would mistake him for a local. The muddy trail bike was hardly the most likely pursuit vehicle.

A palely anonymous figure a figure that Alex had last seen lit by a trip flare exited the roadside hedge. Unhurriedly, Alex swung his leg over the KTM and pressed the start button,

intending to pull level with the car and shoot Meehan where he stood.

When he was still forty yards away, however, he saw Meehan turn towards him, handgun at full stretch. A series of rounds whipped past Alex's head, and as he desperately braked and ducked he saw Meehan leap into his vehicle and accelerate at high speed down the road.

Pulling out the Glock, Alex fired half a dozen rounds after him, but without visible effect. Right, he thought. Gloves off. Let's cock, lock and rock.

There was no hanging back now. As Meehan took the BMW screaming through the village at close to 80 mph, Alex followed close behind. For the first time in his life he prayed for a police vehicle. A whooping siren and a set of flashing blue lights and his problems would be over.

But of course there was no police vehicle to be seen. Instead, Meehan hurled himself northwards, pulling every trick out of the evasive driving handbook that he could remember. But Alex had done the same course with the same instructors and was driving the more manoeuvrable if also by far the more dangerous vehicle.

He quite simply locked on and stayed there, dropping back and outwards a few yards every time the road straightened in case Meehan slammed on the brakes at high speed generally considered the most effective countermeasure against a following motorcycle.

In this fashion Meehan racing ahead, Alex hanging grimly on to his tail they screamed up through Radstock and Weston to the M4. Still no police and precious little traffic. It was Saturday, Alex realised belatedly. And it couldn't be more than six thirty. Seven at the latest.

At junction 18 of the M4 Meehan pulled hard over on to the motorway and joined the slow-lane traffic at 70 mph. Flattening himself to the KTM's narrow seat, eyes streaming behind his goggles, Alex followed as the BMW swung across to the fast lane: 90 mph, 95. The vibrations from the KTM's tyres were turning his muscles to Plasticene. His body ached, he had a cracking migraine and was having difficulty focusing his eyes.

Touching 100 mph now.

Just hang on. One of us, sooner or later, is going to run out of petrol.

There was nothing, now, beyond staying with Meehan. It was all he had to do.

Just stay on.

The Severn Road Bridge. At breakneck speed, Meehan crashed the baffler and Alex followed. He had a momentary impression of a man in a fluorescent yellow rain jacket peering from a cabin, then the tableau was far behind them and they were swerving through the buffeting winds and rain of the westbound motorway towards Newport.

A screaming turn north next, up the Usk valley. Alex was all machine now and all pain. There was no thought beyond pursuit. At times it seemed as if he and the Watchman were one, controlled by the same hand, racing to a final rendezvous that they both craved.

Which of them would last longer? They roared through Usk, Abergavenny, Tredegar and Cefn Coed. And still the unearthly emptiness and the sense of driving the dawn before them. They were in the Black Mountain country now, among hills known by name to every SAS member, past and present. There was Cefn Crew, rearing blackly over the reservoir, there was the foreshortened bulk of Fan Fawr, there was the jagged ridge line of Craig Fan-ddu. These were the rocks that they had trained over, month after month, sweating and freezing and cursing as they dragged their aching bodies and their rock-filled Bergans over the windy granite peaks.

And then, as the dark blue BMW hurled up the thread-like Cwm Taf valley ahead of them, Alex suddenly knew where the story was going to end. For there, towering over them all, was the pitiless mother of all the Black Mountains Pen-yFan. Every SAS selection cadre knew Pen-y-Fan they were harassed up and down its grey, shale-strewn sides until they hated every unyielding inch of it. One of the final elements of selection into the Regiment was named 'the Fan Dance', as it started and finished with an ascent of the mountain.

The track briefly straightened. On the wet, potholed surface the trail-bike was coming into its own and the gap between the two vehicles was narrowing. Slamming to an angled halt, pulling out the Glock and wrenching the goggles from his eyes, Alex released a fast volley of shots at the disappearing BMW. The first few missed, ricocheting from the roadside shale, but then as Meehan threw the car into the approaching bend his rear driver's-side tyre was suddenly shredded rubber.

The BMW's overturning was both appalling and beautiful. The right-hand side of the car seemed to tuck into the shale-strewn verge for a moment and then the black guts of the machine were suddenly skywards, the roll completing itself with a shuddering crash back on to four wheels.

The vehicle came to a smoking rest beside the road, its windows glassless, then Alex saw the wiry figure of Meehan drag himself painfully out. The former agent was obviously injured, perhaps seriously, but he began climbing immediately, scrambling desperately over the rocks and fallen slates up the western face of the mountain. Slowly, warily, Alex rode the KTM towards the abandoned car.

Reloading the Glock and unscrewing the silencer silencers tended significantly to reduce muzzle velocity he set off after the fleeing figure.

The two men climbed for several minutes, Alex remaining a steady fifty metres behind Meehan, until the vehicles were toylike on the road below. As they climbed so the wind's roar grew, dragging at them, deafening them, and punching at their clothes. Meehan, despite his injury he seemed to be dragging a leg was setting a ferocious pace and Alex felt the sweat streaming down his back as he followed.

At a thousand feet a shadowy rain squall crossed? the face of the mountain.

Meehan turned, his face pale and contorted with pain, and sent several rounds spattering about his pursuer.

Granite chips flicked lethally about Alex's face and then a rogue shot, deflected by a rock, punched through the cor dura rucksack on his back. Ricocheting from the Maglite torch, the 9mm round tore downwards and outwards through the flesh of the SAS officer's back.

Shit. Shit!

It felt as if someone had laid a block of ice across him. There was no pain, although he knew that the pain would come. He could feel the blood coursing down his back.

Ignore it. Eyes on the target.

Flattening himself against the rock face, Alex saw Meehan's progress was becoming erratic. He was flailing around the shock and the injury sustained in the BMW shunt were taking their toll.

Finally, in a shower of flaky shale, he fell, rolling limply down the hillside to a grassy outcrop a little above Alex's position. His automatic dropped spun past Alex on to the rocks below.

Warily, Alex approached Meehan, who lay face down on the springy turf.

Correct procedure would have been a double tap to the back of the skull, but he felt he owed this man more than a dog's death.

He turned the fallen man over. The thin, pale features were instantly recognisable and twisted themselves into a wry smile. Blood oozed from a cut in his head.

"Lucky shot, boyo, blowing that tyre."

The accent took Alex straight back to Belfast.

"I've no doubt of it," he said and quickly began to search the fallen man. There was a sheathed Mauser knife and several spare magazines, and a pocketful of loose 9mm rounds, but no other firearm.

Meehan pursed his lips.

"Did I hit you back there?"

Alex felt around his back. The hand came back bloody.

"Yeah. Another lucky shot, I'd say."

Meehan looked away.

"So are you going to waste me or what?"

Alex didn't answer. Reaching for his mobile he dialled Dawn's number.

She answered on the first ring.

"Alex. Thank God. Where are you?"

He told her.

"And Meehan?"

Something made Alex hesitate. He looked down at Meehan.

"Dealt with."

A faint smile touched the former agent's lips.

"Stay there," Dawn ordered.

"Don't move. I'll pick up a flight to Brecon be with you in an hour."

"We're not going anywhere," said Alex wearily, and rang off.

"So," Meehan repeated, almost bored.

"You goin' to follow orders, soldier, and waste me?"

"You didn't waste me when you had the chance. Why?"

"Wasn't part of the plan."

"Can we talk about that plan?"

Meehan was silent for a moment, then the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Good place for us to meet, don't you think?"

Alex smiled and nodded.

Curiosity touched the pale features.

"How did you find out about Black Down?"

"A conversation you had," said Alex.

"Connolly?"

"Yup."

Meehan nodded.

"I never told Den Connolly where the house was. Something stopped me, even then."

Briefly, Alex explained how forensic analysis had discovered the solvent in his system.

"Poisoned, was I?" said Meehan thoughtfully, looking across the valley towards Fan Fawr.

"I hadn't allowed for that, I'll admit."

"Connolly said you never turned tout."

"Nor I did. Not ever."

Alex stared at him.

"So what Meehan looked wearily away.

"Just do your job, man, and give us the double tap. Get the fuck on with it."

"I want to know."

"Just do it."

"None of it makes sense. Don't you at least want it to make sense?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"I might."

The two men stared at each other. Around them the wind scoured the rocks and flattened the grass. The place was theirs alone.

"How much do you know?" asked Meehan eventually.

"I know about Watchman. I know what you were sent over the water to do. I know that the whole thing went bad, agents were killed, all hell broke loose."

Meehan nodded.

"Whatever you've been told by Five, who I'm assuming you're working for right now, remember that it had a single purpose: to persuade you to kill me. Would it be fair to say that?"

"I guess so," said Alex.

"Right. Well, remember that. And remember too that I'm a dead man. I've no need to lie."

"I'll remember," said Alex and moved down the slope to collect Meehan's weapon.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

"The first thing you have to understand," said Joseph Meehan, 'is just how much I've always hated the IRA. My father was a good man, religious and patriotic, and they crippled him, humiliated him and expelled him from the country he loved.

Drove him to an early grave. And there have been thousands like him -innocent people whose lives have been destroyed by those maniac bastards. Whatever else I tell you I want you to remember that one fact. I hate the IRA, I always have hated them and I will take that hatred to my grave.

He paused and the lids narrowed over the pale, fathomless eyes.

"I'm assuming that Fenwick and the rest of them told you the background stuff- the Watchman selection process and the rest of it?"

Alex nodded.

There was a curious blankness to Meehan's words. They were passionate, but delivered without expression.

"When I got over there I started off living in a flat in Dunmurry and working at Ed's they tell you about that?"

"The electronic goods place?"

"That's right. Ed's. Ed's Electronics. And I was dating this girl called Tina.

Nice girl. Grandparents came over from Italy after the war. Had a loudmouth brother called Vince who worked in a garage and fancied himself as God's gift to the Republican movement. Tried the bullshit on me a couple of times but I told him to fuck off- said I didn't want to know.

"That pissed him off, and he made sure that the local volunteers found out that I'd served with the Crown forces -thought they might give me a good kicking or something.

Course they did no such thing, they're not that stupid, but a couple of them started watching me and asking the odd question, and they soon found out I knew my way around an electronic circuit."

Meehan touched his head and regarded his bloody fingertips.

"I'll spare you the details but there was the usual eyeing-up process and I started to hang out with these half-dozen fellers who thought of themselves as an ASU. They weren't, of course they were just a bunch of saloon bar Republicans. I did a couple of under-thecounterjobs for them radio repairs and then a much heavier bunch showed up.

Older guys. Heard I was interested in joining the movement. I'd said no such thing, but I said yeah, I was sympathetic more sympathetic than I'd been in the past, anyway.

"And?" asked Alex.

"And they didn't fuck around. Asked straight out if I wanted in. So I said yeah,

OK."

"Must have been satisfying after all that time."

"Yes and no. These guys were pretty hard-core. I knew there'd be no going back."

"So what happened next?"

"There was a whole initiation process. I was driven to a darkened room in north Belfast and interviewed by three men I never saw. What was my military history with the Crown forces, what courses had I done and where had I been posted?

Was I known as a Republican sympathiser and had I ever attended a Republican march? Had I ever been arrested? Where in Belfast did I drink.. . Hours of it. And why the fuck did I want to join the IRA?

"I told them I was fed up of living as a second-class citizen simply because I was a Catholic. I told them that I'd been in the Brit army and felt the rough edge of discrimination over there. Said since my return to Belfast I'd come to feel that the IRA spoke the only language the Crown understood. Parroted all the stuff I'd learnt from the Five instructors, basically."

"And they bought it?"

"They heard me out and it must have gone down OK,

because I was told that from that moment on I was to make no public or private statement of my Republican sympathies, not to associate with known Republicans, had to avoid Republican bars et cetera. I was put forward for what's called the Green Book lectures a two-month course of indoctrination which took place every Thursday evening in a flat in Twinbrook. History of the movement, rules of engagement, counter-surveillance, anti-interrogation techniques ..

"The old spot on the wall trick?"

"All that bollocks, yeah. And at the end of it I was sworn in.

"How did that feel?"

"Well, there was no going back, that was for certain sure. But I was finally earning the wages I was being paid."

"Go on."

"I started off as a dicker. I was told to hang on to my job so my volunteer activities were all in the evenings and at weekends. And this started to cause problems with Tina. She was a sympathiser, but not to the point where she was prepared to give her life over. She wanted to do what other girls did go out in the evening, go round the shops on a Saturday .

Anyway, I arranged a meet with Geoff, my agent handler you would have known him as Barry Fern and he just said do whatever the fuck makes the bloody girl happy. Buy her a ring, get her up the duff, whatever. He felt it was vital for what he called "my integration into the community" that I stuck with her.

"So we got engaged, which was fine by me. And almost immediately afterwards I'm told I'm spending my two weeks' summer holiday in a training camp in County Clare in the Republic. So Tina hits the fucking roof. Me or the movement choose. So of course I chose as I had to and she walked, and that was the end of it."

"Was that .. . difficult?"

"I saw it as a sacrifice. A sacrifice for the greater good, which was nailing those PIRA bastards." He paused for a moment, then the toneless voice continued:

"At that time I thought that all the evil was coming from the one direction."

Alex watched him thoughtfully. Squaddies, by and large, did not express themselves in such abstract terms. Even the average regimental padre tended to steer clear of words like 'good' and 'evil' and 'sacrifice'. For the first time since they had found themselves face to face, Alex wondered about the other man s sanity.

"How was the camp?"

"Pretty basic. Weapons drills, surveillance, interrogation scenarios. I had to wind down my skills to volunteer level, which is a fuck's sight harder than it sounds."

"I can imagine. Were you upset at the break-up with Tina?"

Meehan looked away.

"There was something I only found out later. She was pregnant at the time. She had the child a boy but never let me see him..."

Alex nodded, letting Meehan take his time.

"After I came back from Clare I was either working at Ed's or on call for the movement. I did a year or so's dicking and then I was seconded as a driver to one of the auxiliary cells, which is what they call their punishment squads."

Alex grimaced.

"Shit!"

"Yeah shit! exactly. In theory we were supposed to be keeping the streets safe for Catholics to go about their business, in practice we were kneecapping teenage shoplifters. It was fucking evil especially since I'd seen the same thing done to my dad. But that was the point. To make it as horrible as possible. To see if I had what it took. A bit of interest was being paid to me by then."

Alex raised his eyebrows.

"A man called Byrne. Padraig Byrne. CO of Belfast Brigade at that time and later on the Army Council."

"Yeah. He'd been told I'd been a Royal Engineer and had bits and pieces sent to me for repair. Computers, mostly. There was one job where some information had to be recovered and it turned out to be details of a bank security system."

"Fenwick told me about that."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't too difficult to figure that one out as a plant if the security was beefed up, they'd know that I was passing the information on.

"But you did pass it on.

"I passed everything on. But London's policy was not to move on anything that might compromise my cover. Which at that stage I was bloody grateful for, because my impression was that the Provos still didn't a hundred per cent trust me.

Especially Byrne. It was like.." have you ever done any fishing?"

Alex shook his head.

"It was like when you've got a fat old carp nosing at your bait. He wants it, he's desperate to believe that it's safe, but his instinct tells him no. And that's how Byrne was. I could tell that he wanted to believe in me, but .. ." Meehan shrugged.

"I'd been doing a lot of driving. Scouting jobs mostly, with me in the lead car keeping an eye out for trouble and the players or weapons or whatever in a second vehicle following behind. Important, I guess, but still auxiliary stuff. I was never allowed anywhere near any operational planning.

"And then in late 1990 early 1991 things moved on. I was contacted by Padraig Byrne at Ed's and told that I was part of a weapon-recovery team. We were to dig up an Armalite from a churchyard in Castleblayney and deliver it to a stiffer back in Belfast some ex-US marine sniper, I think it was. I reported all this to Fenn via a dead-letter drop and he told me to go ahead and not to worry, they'd jark the weapon and follow it in.

"Well, they followed it in all right, but they didn't jark it and the stiffer used it against a patrol in Andytown a couple of days later. Luckily for all that he was supposed to be a real deadeye he missed, but that was more to do with the patrol spotting him than there being anything wrong with the rifle. We returned it to the cache the next day, it was never jarked and as far as I know it's still in circulation .

For a moment Alex saw an expression of murderous bitterness flash through Meehan's eyes, then the blankness was back.

"Whatever I must have passed some sort of test in Byrne's eyes, because immediately afterwards I was sent to join a bomb-making cell who were working out of a basement on the

Finaghy Road. The cell had a problem. What they were trying to do was to get bombs into police or army bases, which could then be detonated remotely and the problem was that the Crown forces maintained a twenty-four-hour radio-wave shield around every vehicle, building or installation that could possibly be of interest. They needed someone to work out a signal that could penetrate the shield.

"Well, I found one. I found a frequency they hadn't thought of, and as soon as I had, and it had been tested by a feller we had working as a cleaner in one of the police stations, I passed it back to Fenn and told him to factor it into the installation de fences. The next thing I knew I was being congratulated by Padraig fucking Byrne. They'd had a success down in Armagh, detonating a remote-controlled bomb inside a base there. Bessbrook. Three soldiers had been seriously injured and a cleaner a Catholic woman, as it happened had been killed. And serve the bitch right, according to Byrne, for taking Crown money.

"I rang Fenn that night from one of the public phones at Musgrave Park Hospital and asked him what the fuck was going down. He told me they'd had to let the bomb go by. There had been several failed detonations in the previous few months and there was suspicion at the top levels of the organisation that a British agent was defusing them. I told him it was more likely that the button men were so fucking solid they couldn't do the job properly and that was why the bombs hadn't been going off~ but he just changed the subject. I was to carry on as usual. The O'lliordan woman the cleaner was an unavoidable loss. The soldiers would be well cared for. Finish.

"I realised that part of what Fenn said was true. There was no question mark in Byrne's mind now I was well and truly in. That's how it seemed at the time, anyway. Looking back, I can see that I was so preoccupied with the O'lliordan woman s death that I missed the single vital fact I'd been .. ." Meehan doubled up and bared his teeth. For several long moments he was silent, neither breathing nor moving. Finally he seemed to relax and slowly straightened.

"Are you OK?" asked Alex, aware of the question's ludicrous inadequacy.

Meehan managed a smile. There was now a dark, wet stain on his shirt-front.

"Never better!" he gasped.

"Top o' the world!"

Alex waited while Meehan drew breath.

"I worked with the cell for about eighteen months. There were five of us. A QM, an intelligence officer, two general operators one of whom was a woman and myself. We were a bomber cell, which is why we had Bronagh with us. It was reckoned that a woman was better for planting devices in public places.

"And all the time you were reporting to back to your London handler?"

"I was."

"What sort of stuff?"

"Names and addresses of volunteers, registration numbers of cars, possible assassination targets, anything."

"By dead-letter drop? By phone?"

"By e-mail mostly, from about 1991 onwards, using machines that had been brought into the shop. I'd bash away in my back room and no one took a blind bit of difference: I was just the anoraky bloke that fixed the computers. Dead-letter drops and meets are all very well, but if you're discovered you're dead. This was perfect: I'd transmit the information then delete all traces of the operation. And I was usually able to make sure that the owners of the machines I used got a cash deal, so there was no record of their having passed through the shop."

"Sounds as if you were earning your Box salary."

"Fucking right I was."

"Fenwick said you lost your nerve.

Meehan closed his eyes for a moment. The accusation didn't merit a reply.

"Our cell was involved in shooting an RUC officer at the off-licence in Stewartstown Road. I scouted in the stiffers and drove them away from the scene.

London knew the hit was going to happen because I'd told them a couple of days earlier what the score was in fact, I e-mailed them a detailed warning but the hit went ahead."

"I heard you gave less than an hour's warning."

"Bollocks. They had forty-eight. And an hour would have been enough anyway.

No they let it happen and that was when I understood that something strange no, let me rephrase that, something fucking evil was going down. That the reason I thought I was there to get intelligence out to where it could save lives and do some good wasn't the reason at all."

"So what was the reason?"

"I'm getting there. Does the name Proinsas Deavey mean anything to you?"

"No."

"Proinsas Deavey was a low-level volunteer who occasionally did some dicking and errand-running. A nobody, basically. I saw him about the Falls from time to time and the word was that he was involved in low-level drug-dealing. Anyway, apparently he tried flogging the stuff to the wrong people and he was picked up by the auxiliaries, who gave him a good kicking. Bad idea, because by that stage Proinsas has a habit himself. He's desperate for money. So when he gets a call from the FRU he's a pushover."

Alex nodded.

"Now I don't know about any of this until I get a call at work from Padraig Byrne. Some time around Christmas 1995, it must have been. Padraig was what they call a Red Light by then, meaning he was known to the Crown forces as a player, so he had to keep a very low profile. I was told to go round to his place after closing time, making sure I wasn't followed.

"When I got there he told me that Proinsas had got drunk, turned himself over to one of the nut ting squads and confessed he was touting for the FRU. In theory PIRA's always run an amnesty system for touts spill your guts and you're off the hook but in practice it's more likely to be a debriefing followed by two to the head. In this case, untypically, the nut ting squad was bright enough to consult Byrne and he told them to hang on to Deavey he'd debrief the man himself.

Which he did and then set up Proinsas to feed disinformation back to the FRU.

"Now at this stage you have to remember what's going on politically. The Crown forces don't know it yet, but the cease fire is at an end. Southern Command's England Wing is about to detonate the Canary Wharf bomb and Padraig Byrne -a very ambitious man, remember, keen to move from the Army Council to the Executive sees a chance for a spectacular of his own. He's going to take out a pair of FRU agents.

"He tells me this. He tells me something else. I'm a junior member of PIRA GHQ staff by then a sort of assistant to the Quartermaster General. There's been a major technical updating and I've had to play a big part in that training operators and so on.

"Byrne wants me to kill the FRU guys. In person, in public, in front of a big volunteer crowd. The ultimate commitment, the ultimate statement of loyalty. Do that, he says, and you're on the Army Council, guaranteed. You can forget all that paper chasing at GHQ you'll have proved yourself heart and soul. So of course I say yes what the fuck else can I say and ask for details. And he fills me in. Tells me exactly what's going to happen.

"So the next day I work late at Ed's. File an encrypted report to London on a client's machine, wipe the hard disk people are wising up to the insecurity of email by then and hope to God that the FRU people are pulled out in time. I ask to be pulled out too: the finger's going to be pointed straight at me if these guys are miraculously whipped off the streets just days before they're due to be whacked.

Byrne, like I said, is a very sharp, very switched-on operator.

"The next day I got a call from the rep of a company called Intex, saying they'd ceased production of the software I'd enquired about. Intex was Five, of course, and the call meant that my message had been received and I was to sit tight."

Alex stared at him.

"Let me get this right. Are you saying that Five knew that Ray Bledsoe and Connor Wheen were due to be picked up, tortured and murdered, and did nothing?"

"Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. A bunch of us were driven down to a farmhouse on the border that the nut ting squad often used for interrogations and executions a horrible bloody place, stinking of death. The boyos, needless to say, were pissing themselves with excitement at the chance of seeing a pair of Brit agents chopped at close range. The hours passed and I tell you I have never prayed like I prayed then: that London would pull those boys out in time.

"They didn't, of course, and Bledsoe and Wheen were brought down to the border that evening. I had drawn a Browning and a couple of clips from the QM, so that I could at least make it fast, but in the event I wasn't even able to do that."

Meehan fell silent. His eyes were as cold and blank as pack ice.

"They had a generator there and one of those heavy-duty compressed-air staple guns .. . Do you have any idea what happens when you fire one of those things into someone s eye?"

Alex opened his mouth to speak, but found that he could say nothing.

"As the eye explodes and it goes fuckin' everywhere the staple blasts its way out through the roof of the mouth. The guy's kicking, meanwhile, and pissing himself, and generally going berserk, but the thing he can't do is make any sound, because his blood and his sinuses are pouring out of his nose and mouth. The pain has to be beyond anything you can imagine..."

"You did that?" whispered Alex disbelievingly.

"No, thank God, some other volunteer did it to Wheen. But the point is not who did it, the point is that Five, knowing what Byrne and his nut ting squads do, allowed it to happen. They had the information and they deliberately failed to act on it.

"So what happened next?"

"Byrne figured that Wheen was the tough guy and Bledsoe -if he scared him enough was going to do the talking. Well, he scared him all right. The guy was out of his head with sheer terror. But just to make sure, Byrne had the volunteer do Wheen's other eye. And then just to make the point that it was Bledsoe who was going to do the talking he cut Wheen 's tongue out. Have you ever heard a man trying to scream when his tongue's been cut out?"

Alex shook his head.

"It sounds like percolating coffee. Anyway, I stood there, my brain fuckin' turning itself inside out at this sight terror, horror, disbelief, whatever the fuck and telling myself one thing: smile, or go the same way yourself And everyone else was smiling, but I tell you they were all pretty quiet at that point."

Alex nodded.

"So then Byrne told me to do Wheen once and for all so I pulled out the Browning ready to give him one. And Byrne says no. Hands me, of all things, a fuckin' lump-hammer and a six-inch nail ..

"And you did him with that?"

"It made this kind of .. . pl inking sound," said Meehan reflectively.

"The guy died immediately."

"And Bledsoe?"

"Bledsoe coughed. Told them everything. Every last thing he knew. It took hours almost light by the time he was finished."

"And?"

Meehan nodded expressionlessly.

"Yeah, I did him too. Same way. And as I did so I promised myself that the people responsible would know the pain and the terror that these brave men had known. Whatever it took whatever it fucking took -I would make them understand."

"Surely the people responsible were Padraig Byrne and his Provos," suggested Alex quietly.

"Those people were evil," said Meehan, 'but they knew they were evil. They looked evil in the eye, they embraced evil and they knew themselves for what they were. Fenwick and her people, though, were evil at a distance. They never saw the floor of that PIRA abattoir running with blood and shit, never had to look at brave men like Wheen and Bledsoe dying in indescribable terror and agony and tell themselves: yeah, I did that .

"Wise monkeys," murmured Alex.

"For every action, there's a reaction," said Meehan.

"My father taught me that. The universe demands balance. For as long as the lives that I had taken were unavenged, there would be no balance."

Alex stared at Meehan. Was this insanity? he wondered. Or was it logic? Or both?

"Within the week I had been promoted to the IRA's Army Council and Padraig Byrne to the Executive. I continued to file reports to London, but I no longer had the slightest confidence they would be acted upon. I warned them of two bombs:

one in a Shankhill pub, one in a Ballysillan supermarket. Both were made by men I had trained, both were set by Bronagh Quinn. Five dead, in total, and over twenty injured. Women and children mostly, in the supermarket. One little girl was blinded when the lenses of her glasses were blown backwards into her eyes.

"There are seven people on the Provisional IRA's Army Council. At the first meeting I attended I looked round the other six faces and I realised that I had done at least as much for the movement as any of them. I had dicked, trailed, scouted, bugged, planned, organised, designed, strategised and taught. I had brought the movement's bomb-making skills into line with the best in the world. And finally, with my bare hands, I had killed. By ignoring every warning I ever sent, Fenwick and her people had made me part of the thing I had dedicated my life to destroying. Can you imagine can you imagine what that feels like?"

Alex said nothing. Didn't move. Carried on the buffeting wind distant at first and then louder was the pulse of an approaching helicopter. If Meehan heard it he ignored it.

"At that first meeting a former OC of the Armagh and Fermanagh Brigade got up. Nasty bastard, name of Halloran."

"Dermot Halloran," said Alex.

"The same," confirmed Meehan.

"And he didn't fuck about.

He told us, "Boys .. . We have a problem. We have a mole."

There had been indications for some time, he said, that information concerning upcoming operations was reaching the Crown. Top-level information, not foot-soldier stuff. In recent days, he said, these suspicions had become cast-iron. MI-5 had an agent in place an agent whose minimum possible level of seniority was membership of the GHQ staff. That put every man in the room squarely in the frame. The Executive had men on the case, he went on. It was a process of elimination, and until that process had run its course it had been decided that all operations and meetings should be suspended."

The rhythmic beat of the helicopter's engine and the slash of its rotors was very close now, filling their ears. The sound seemed to hold its volume for a moment, then died away. Again, Meehan showed no sign of having heard it.

"Presumably," said Alex, 'they wanted to see who cut and ran."

"That was my calculation. If they'd been sure they were going to identify the mole they would have just let the wheels turn. Said nothing."

"So what did you do?"

"I drove back to the city and went home. There was a nut ting squad waiting for me and I knew then that Five had sold me out. Well, I'll spare you the details but there was a fuck of a battle. I dropped a couple of them, dived through a window and drove like fuck for Aldersgrove."

"The airport?"

"Yeah. I was on a flight to the mainland within the hour. From that point I was totally on my own. The next morning I cleared the account MI-5 had been paying money into all those years and set about establishing a new identity."

"Did you contact MI-5?"

"Are you joking .. . If I'd contacted them they'd have dropped my co-ordinates to PIRA. Within the week of my leaving Belfast every Provy stiffer in the Command was on my tail as it was. No, Five didn't want me alive and compromised -my story would bury them."

"But why do you think they ignored all those warnings and let Wheen and Bledsoe and the rest of them die?"

"I thought for a long time that they simply couldn't risk me. That if they'd started acting on my warnings they'd have had to pull me out, whereas as things stood I was their man inside the IRA, the justification for their budget, their meal ticket from the Treasury. That was what I thought at first."

"Go on."

"And then finally I figured it out. There had to be another British mole. An agent who had been in place not for years but for decades. A man I'd been set up to take the fall for."

He fell silent for a moment.

"It was something Barry Fenn had said years earlier about there being suspicion in the senior ranks of PIRA that a British agent was defusing the bombs the organisation was making. At the time, all that I heard were the words that applied to me i.e. "suspicion", "PIRA" and "British agent". I didn't stop to ask myself the vital question: how the fuck did Barry Penn know what the senior ranks of PIRA were thinking? I didn't know, so how did he?

"They had someone all along. One of the very top men, is my guess. And in case such a man ever came under the faintest suspicion of providing information to the Crown forces, it would be necessary to have a decoy set up. Another agent who could be exposed, proved to be the real source and fed to the wolves."

Alex shook his head and sank back against the granite.

"Enter the Watchman," he murmured.

"Congratulations!" said Dawn Harding.

"I do believe you've got there at last."

She was standing above and to one side of them, and her Walther PPK was levelled straight between Alex's eyes.

TWENTY-NINE.

She had brought back-up with her, a blank-faced man in a flying jacket carrying an MP5 Heckler and Koch sub-machine gun.

Had the two of them found Meehan dead, Alex knew, there would have been no problem. Anything that Meehan might have told Alex would have been cancelled out by the fact that Alex had killed him the SAS officer could hardly broadcast a story that culminated with a murder committed by himself.

But with Meehan alive and Alex in possession of the facts about Watchmen even just the basic facts the position was hopeless. A glance at Dawn and the icy flatness of those sea-grey eyes told him that she was prepared to watch him die rather than risk him telling the story. Their one-night stand, and that is all it had been, after all, counted for nothing less than nothing.

You stupid.

She and her back-up man would kill the pair of them, and place their disposal in the hands of a cleaner team. One thing was certain: neither body would ever be found.

Having said that, he was still holding the Glock. Still had Meehan's Browning in his pocket.

"Why isn't this animal dead?" Dawn asked, glancing scornfully at Meehan.

"I wouldn't worry yourself," said Alex coldly.

"I don't think he's going to grow much older."

She shook her head sorrowfully.

"You idiot," she spat.

"You arrogant fucking idiot, Alex! Why didn't you do as you were asked? Can't you see what you're forcing me to .

She continued, but Alex was no longer listening. He was holding his Glock in his right hand; with his left, which was concealed beneath his smock, he was trying to inch Meehan's Browning from his waistband. His only chance of escaping what would effectively be an execution was to trust Meehan. The man was two parts insane to one part brilliant soldier, that much was obvious, but... The Browning was clear of the waistband, now, and heavy in his hand. With infinite slowness he lowered it to the ground beneath his smock.

"And this man,~ Alex asked Dawn, indicating the expressionless figure of Meehan.

"Can you begin to imagine what your people have forced him to do? To torture and kill British agents? To stand back and watch as bombs that he has designed cut women and children to pieces?"

Alex's question was designed to allow him to turn to the former agent.

Catching the other man's eyes, he glanced downwards once, saw from the swift flicker of response that Meehan had understood him, felt the first unmistakable rush of adrenalin.

Prepare. Breathe. Only the target exists. Hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing. Only the target.

Without warning, Alex propelled himself forward. He rolled once, his wounded back smashing with agonising force into the granite rock face, then the air screamed and ruptured as rounds from the MP5 impacted around him. The back-up man's first shots had been fired from the hip and as Alex tightened on the trigger of the Glock -foresight, backsight, focus, exhale he saw the familiar movement as the weapon was pulled to the shoulder.

The back-up man had just closed his left eye in preparation for the aimed killing shot when both the Glock's 9mm rounds punched through his chin and thence his cerebellum, spraying the rocks behind him with red and ending his life in less than a third of a second.

Dawn's Walther was swinging towards Alex and the back-up man was still falling to the blood-shined granite when Meehan fired. The single round took Dawn in the centre of the chest,

dropping her to her knees as if praying. As her Walther fell from her fingers, Meehan instinctively lowered the Browning for the double tap to the head.

Alex signalled for him to hold his fire and scrambled back up the hillside towards her.

"Dawn?" he said quietly, making safe and pocketing the Walther.

"Can you hear me?"

But Dawn Harding was very close to death. Meehan's shot had taken her through the sternum, and oxygenated lung blood was frothing at her mouth.

"Dawn?" he repeated, feeling beneath her T-shirt for the sucking chest wound and sealing it with his thumb.

"Dawn!"

She raised her head and managed a painful smile, showing reddened teeth.

"Tell Angela .. ." she began.

"Tell her I ..

She fell silent, and tears ran down her cheeks. Then the blood came with a rush, pouring from her mouth on to her chest, and her head sank down and she died.

Switching off all feeling, Alex wiped his Glock on his shirt and placed it between Dawn's unresisting fingers. Taking the Browning from Meehan, who handed it over without hesitation, he cleaned it and placed it in the dead back-up man's right hand. The scenario wouldn't hold up for very long, but any investigation would lead the police straight back to MIS, at which point the case would disappear from the register anyway.

He turned to Meehan.

"Thank you," he said.

"She was going to kill you," said Meehan quietly.

"Don't go through the rest of your life wondering."

"I won't," promised Alex.

The ghost of a smile touched Meehan's pale features.

"We'd have made a good team, you and I," he said.

Alex looked at the man who had shot Dawn Harding.

"We probably would," he said emptily.

"How badly are you hurt?"

"Does that make any difference to anything?"

Alex didn't reply. Staring over the valley he watched as sunlight and shadow raced each other across the flank of Fan Fawr. Then, taking the MP5 from where it had fallen beside the dead MI-5 agent, he searched the corpse for spare magazines.

Finally he turned back to Meehan.

"Do you think you could ride a motorcycle?" he asked.

THIRTY

The members' writing rooms at the Carlton Club are reached by means of a corridor leading off the Small Library, and overlook St. James's Street. There are four of them, and each contains a desk surmounted by a blotter and a sheaf of the club's writing paper. The walls are lined with books, and in reading room number four the majority of these are blue-bound records of the club's minutes and proceedings from the Second World War to the present day.

It was now a fortnight since the events on the western slope of Pen-y-Fan.

Walking a half-mile up the road from the wrecked BMW, Alex had stolen a battered Fiesta from outside a hill walkers hostel, driven to north London an area with which he had no connection booked into a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Tottenham under a false name, and spent the days that followed allowing his wounds to heal and planning his next move. His single trip into Central London had been an underground journey to Oxford Circus to withdraw cash from a dispensing machine and he had been back in Tottenham within the hour. On the tube he had read the Daily Telegraph's elaborate account of the "Civil Servant love tryst' that had 'ended in tragedy' in the shadow of the Black Mountains.

The shot that had creased Alex's back had been acutely painful for several days and would certainly leave a spectacular scar, but had not required any medical attention that he himself had been unable to administer with the help of Dettol and bandages. The knife cuts, with their stitches finally removed, were now no more than pale and occasionally uncomfortable reminders of the fight outside George Widdowes' house. On his thirteenth day at the bed and breakfast he had rung the offices of MIS.

As Alex entered number four reading room at the Carlton Club, he heard the clock in the library strike 11 a.m. Angela Fenwick rose from the desk facing the window, turned and extended her hand to him.

"Captain Temple," she said, nodding dismissal to the elderly club servant hovering at the door.

"Right on time."

Alex inclined his head, shook her hand in silence and seated himself in the proffered armchair, a tautly upholstered object of oak and azure leather. Fenwick herself resumed her place at the desk, angling her chair towards Alex. She looked older, thought Alex. Sharp lines had been incised at the corners of her mouth and her skin had a dry, desiccated quality that had not been apparent at their last meeting.

She steepled her fingers, a gesture that Alex remembered from his first briefing with her.

"Given that you have just killed two well-liked members of my Service, Captain Temple, I thought it advisable that we meet on neutral territory rather than at Thames House. I thought it might be more .

comfortable for you."

Neutral territory, thought Alex, glancing around him. Like fuck.

"I have no regrets whatsoever about killing Dawn Harding and that other amateur trigger man of yours," he said coldly, 'given that they were trying bloody hard to kill me.

Presumably on your direct orders. And you might as well know right now..

"Captain Temple..

'that I will do the same to any... "Captain Temple! I have not come here to argue with you. I fully accept that circumstances led you to defend yourself. Reciprocally, I would ask you to accept that agents Harding and Muir acted as they did towards yourself in the belief that it was in the best interests of national security."

"Trying to murder a serving SAS officer?"

"Put it how you like." Fenwick's gaze was ice and her voice was steel.

"The point is that these events have happened and you and I must now discuss .. .

modalities."

"Does that mean that you want to hammer out some kind of deal?"

"That's exactly what it means, Captain Temple, so let's get right on with it. Be assured that I am enjoying this meeting no more than you are. Firstly, do you wish to continue with your army career.

Alex shrugged.

"I want to be in the position to choose to, if that's what you mean.

"Very well. I give you my word that you will be left alone. No complaint will be made about your conduct. All that I require is that you never speak of the events surrounding Meehan and the Watchman operation. Not to your colleagues, not to Bill Leonard, not to anyone.

"And meanwhile you work out how to get rid of me," said Alex with an ironic smile.

"What's it going to be, an accident on the firing range? A climbing fall?

Some mystery virus?"

"Captain Temple, I ..

"Because let me tell you, if anything happens to me -anything fatal, that is a package will be delivered to the offices of a certain national newspaper. That package will contain an MP5 machine-gun together with various expended cartridge cases all bearing fingerprints, an affidavit sworn before a solicitor by me and a recording of a conversation I had with Dawn Harding on the drive down to Black Down House, in which she discusses in some detail the trapping and killing of Joseph Meehan. It's not watertight, but it's enough to sink you."

Fenwick pursed her lips but otherwise remained expressionless.

"I've got a copy of the tape here," continued Alex, taking a Sony Walkman cassette player from his pocket. He pressed the play button.

"Negative thought leads to negative action .. . came Dawn s distinctive voice.

"Just promise me that ~f there's any chance of taking Meehan out..

$

To Alex's amazement he saw Fenwick's eyes sharpen with tears. She turned away from him instantly and pretended to examine her notes. When she looked up again, steely as ever, it was as if the moment had never been.

"Very well, captain. I take your point and I acknowledge that you have the wherewithal to do us serious damage. Let me respond by saying that if you ever discuss or disclose details of this matter preemptively without provocation from my Service then we will move to defend ourselves in the most.. . vigorous way. Certain accusations will surface deeply damaging accusations, both of a criminal and sexual nature. You will lose your pension, your credit rating and your reputation. Serious doubts will be cast upon your state of mind. We will do, in short, whatever is necessary to discredit and ultimately ruin you.

Alex nodded. He believed her.

"Mutually assured destruction," he murmured.

"Quite so, Captain Temple. A highly effective deterrent in my experience. Do we have a deal?"

Alex met her unwavering gaze, saw in it an iron determination the equal of his own.

"We have a deal."

They shook hands and there was a long silence. Fenwick stared down at the traffic.

"Are you in contact with Meehan?" she asked eventually. Alex shook his head.

"No."

"Rest assured we will pursue him."

"I'm sure."

"And we will find him."

The ghost of a smile touched Alex's features.

"If you say so.

Fenwick hesitated.

"Captain, would you like to know the real purpose of the Watchman operation?"

"Meehan worked that one out. He was a fall guy there to take the drop for some longer-established mole. If the shit ever hit the fan and your senior man was threatened, there had to be someone else who could be revealed as a British agent.

Meehan was that man.

Fenwick nodded.

"That's correct. And the longer he stayed in place, the more believable it would be that he was the only mole if he had to be exposed."

Alex stood up, closed his eyes in frustrated disbelief and shook his head.

"But you sent.." how many is it now, must be at least a dozen soldiers and civilians to their deaths? To terrible deaths, mostly. And all for the sake of a single intelligence source? Do you honestly think that's a price worth paying?"

"Look, captain, given what we know about each other I think I can trust you with this. The point is that the man the Watchman was dummying for was not just a mole, he was the mole. The ultimate intelligence source. Have you heard of an agent code-named Steak Knife?"

Alex's eyes widened.

"I've heard about Steak Knife and read about him in the papers all that stuff about Brian Nelson and the FRU handing over PIRA players' addresses to the UVF -but I didn't know that he actually existed. I assumed that was all black propaganda."

"Well, of course it is, in part," said Fenwick with a pale smile.

"But Steak Knife exists all right. And when the history of espionage finally comes to be written, our running of him as an agent will be seen as the greatest coup of them all. He's the very top man, Temple an international household name and he's working for British Intelligence."

"You mean .. ." Into Alex's mind swam the now statesmanlike image of the figure he'd seen a thousand times on magazine covers and on television.

"I do mean," said Fenwick.

"I'm not prepared to sit here and actually name him to you, but yes. He's ours.

She looked over at Alex who, still standing, was staring bleakly out of the window over St. James's.

"Do you begin to understand the scale of the field of battle now, Temple?

Forget the casualties you always get those. At the end of the day, as you well know, there's always the equivalent of the boy left tied to the tree in the Sierra Leone bush. You have to see the big picture."

Alex closed his eyes. Felt his fingernails cutting into the flesh of his palms.

"The point to grasp," continued Fenwick, 'is that having a direct handle on IRA policy has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands ..

"I can't," said Alex flatly.

"Can't what?"

"I can't forget the casualties. I can't forget the Wheens and the Bledsoes, and the women and kids blown to smithereens in the supermarkets. I can't forget the boy tied to the tree. The human level the level on which that stuff happens is the only real level as far as I'm concerned. The rest is bollocks."

"Well, that's hardly a very adult attitude. Your Service career's unlikely to prosper if that's how you think."

"I'm sure you're right," said Alex. He pulled a book from the bookcase at random, opened it, stared sightlessly at the page for a moment and returned it.

"You were lovers, weren't you? You and Dawn?"

Fenwick said nothing.

"I always used to tease her. Who's the lucky bloke you wake up next to, I used to say, missing the obvious by a mile."

Fenwick sat unmoving, as if carved from stone.

"And now she's dead," Alex continued.

"I watched her drown in her own blood on the side of Pen-y-Fan, and the last thing that she said before she died was your name. And you still you still think that this whole thing was worth it ..

He moved towards the door, glanced back at the motionless figure.

"Have a good life, Fenwick. I'd tell you to go to hell, but I reckon that you're probably already there."

Marching through the dining room and down the main staircase with an alacrity rarely seen in that august institution, Alex departed the Carlton Club. It was midday and after an unpromising start the sun was making a go of it.

Pausing for a moment at the club portals, Alex took out his phone and scrolled through the numbers stored in its memory. After a moment's hesitation he selected one.

"Yep?"

"It's Alex.

There was a long silence. In the background he could hear the sound of female voices, shrieks, laughter. In the foreground, her breathing.

"Sophie?"

"Yes," she said quietly.

"I'm still here."

POSTSCRIPT.

London.

By 4 p.m. it was already dark and the rain-slicked pavements of Mayfair gleamed beneath the streetlights. As the driver nosed the big Jaguar into the electric glare of Piccadilly, Angela Fenwick turned to the HarperCollins publicity girl for a final confirmation that she was looking presentable, that everything was in place. Swivelling her head so that both sides of her face could be assessed, she received the publicity girl's smiling confirmation. Presentation, Angela knew, was everything at these affairs. Photographers would do anything to catch celebrities off guard even a new-born celebrity like herself, who had only emerged blinking into the flashlight of public regard a week earlier.

The launch at the club last night had gone wonderfully well, she mused, but then it wasn't every day that a senior member of MI-5 went public with her memoirs. Everyone had come: Tony and Cherie - Cherie looking lovely, as usual Gordon and Sarah of course, Patrick Mayhew, Mo Mowlam looking like something out of the Arabian Nights, Salman Rushdie (and boy, did that man owe her a favour), Tony Parsons .. . And Peter of course dear Peter with head held high since his vindication in the Hinduja passport business. The evening had been a triumph, with the only sour note struck by a scuffle between the security people and a rather tiresome group of civil rights demonstrators. In a way even that little embarrassment had worked in their favour. A paparazzo had been at hand to photograph the incident and the picture had made the cover of the Evening Standard.

The publishers had been marvelous, all in all, pulling out all the stops, footing the not inconsiderable bill without a murmur.

"We can only sell your memoirs once, Angela," they'd told her.

"So let's go for broke!"

And they had. Naturally she hadn't put in any of the really top-secret stuW that went completely against the grain. But there had been plenty of colour, plenty of telling detail and plenty of human touches. She'd even managed to include a couple of David Trimble's famous 'knock, knock' jokes, a good Martin McGuinness fishing story and the account of how, on April Fool's day 2000, Jack Straw had officially requested that she tap Ali G's phone.

On a more serious note she'd well and truly stuck it to those bastards over at Vauxhall Cross. That had been the real pleasure kicking MI6 in the teeth. Without ever saying so directly, she'd managed to paint a picture of smug, pin-striped, public-school, all-male arrogance an arrogance that spilt over with wearying regularity into reckless free booting on the international stage. Bosnia, Russia, Serbia, Iraq .. . What the sacked MI6 whistle-blower Richard Tomlinson had started with his expos of Britain's overseas Intelligence Service, Angela Fenwick had finished.

The career-ending deal had been presented to her shortly after Downing Street had been presented with the facts concerning the violent deaths of four Service employees. Her failure to protect her people, she had been told, indicated a dangerously cavalier attitude. Resign, she had been told. Go now, honourably and with a full pension. Jump before you're pushed.

It wasn't just the murders, she'd guessed. The Home Office had wanted one of their own sort at the helm at Thames House it was as simple as that. A white, heterosexual, privately educated male. Someone who spoke their language. Someone they could do business with. Someone who'd behave in a civilised manner concerning Security Services budget deals rather than fighting tooth and nail for every penny. It wasn't to do with the Watchman murders, ultimately. The murders were just an excuse.

So she'd jumped. They'd won. And she had started collecting up all the notes she'd made over the years. And A Career Less Ordinary had been born.

Annabel, the HarperCollins publicity girl, had been particularly sweet and in the run-up to publication the two of them had become quite close. Not quite close enough to fill the aching void left by Dawn, of course eighteen months after Dawn's death Angela still thought of her prot~g& every day -but close enough for Angela to look forward to the upcoming publicity tour, and the nights c~ deux in the big provincial hotels.

The tour itself would start tomorrow; today was the big London signing.

They'd decided to do just the one, at Waterstones in Piccadilly. The event had been well advertised and according to Annabel, who'd phoned ahead to the shop, there was a good crowd building.

The driver swung the Jaguar across the traffic in a swashbuckling U-turn, pulled up outside Waterstones, and hurried round to open the passenger door.

Dismounting, Angela noticed a tramp in a grease-shined windcheater lounging by the bookshop's main entrance. As she passed him the stub bled wild-eyed figure raised a can of Special Brew to her in ironic celebration. To add insult to injury he was sitting immediately beneath a poster of herself and her book. The former civil servant averted her gaze in displeasure. The PM hated the sight of derelicts in upscale shopping areas he'd told her so himself and yet one still saw sights like this. Weren't Waterstones responsible for their own stretch of pavement? she wondered irritably. She'd get Annabel to have a word with the manager.

Inside the shop Angela was shown to a staff room where she left her coat, shook hands with the Waterstones floor manager, declined a cup of coffee and greeted Dave Holland, the exRMP officer responsible for her personal security.

"Your fans look docile enough," said Holland, who had just returned from a recce of the shop floor.

"I'm happy if you are.

"OK, David, let's do it," said Angela, briefly unsnapping her handbag to check that she had a pen. She had an old MIS-issue Pentel.

The signing desk had been arranged at the centre of the shop floor, facing the Jermyn Street exit. It was flanked on one side by dump bins of A Career Less Ordinary and on the other by an array of photo floodlights. Behind a rope barrier a dozen photographers waited with Nikons primed. The big photo opportunity involved a handshake withJudi Dench, who played "M' in the James Bond films.

There was a new picture upcoming, and even though "M' was actually supposed to be the director of the hated Six, Angela was forced to admit to herself that the showbiz association was a flattering one. There was Judi now, approaching from the opposite side of the shop. They'd met once before, at a small dinner at the Ivy.

As the actress approached the desk, and John Barry's Goldfinger theme played over the shop's PA system, Angela's heart quickened. This was fun!

The two women greeted each other and sustained a long handshake for the cameras. Angela ritually presented the actress with a signed copy of A Career Less Ordinary and told her -truthfully, as it happened that she'd always been a big James Bond fan.

At the photographers' request there were more posed shots. Then Judi Dench took her leave of the event with an actressy twinkle and a flutter of her fingers, Angela sat down and the signing session began.

Soon she was into the routine of it. Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile... Angela was enjoying herself, enjoying the attention and the curiosity of the public. There were old-school types in Royal Artillery ties, purple-haired goths, spook-watching journalists, hygiene-deficient conspiracy theorists, radical feminist academics and a host of other London types. One by one, beneath the watchful gaze of Dave Holland, who stood to one side of the desk, they moved forward with their copies of the book.

At the author's side Annabel beamed proprietorially, keeping an eye on the Daily Telegraph profilist who was due to interview Angela after the signing. With the exception of a single freelancer the photographers had departed.

Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile, ask the name A pair of Waterstones assistants kept the pyramids of books around the desk stocked from packing cases.

"Geoffrey!" Angela murmured to a particularly well-connected political commentator.

"How sweet of you. How are Sally and the children?"

The writer replied courteously and moved away. His place was taken by a horsy woman in a Puffa jacket.

"What name?" Angela asked mechanically. In the queue behind the horsy woman she caught sight of the stub bled face of the tramp she had seen outside the shop. To her surprise, despite his wild appearence, he was carrying a copy of the book. The horsy woman's lips moved soundlessly.

"I'm sorry?" said Angela, "I didn't quite .

The woman repeated a name her husband's, she explained and Angela signed and then abruptly stopped. Where the hell did she know that face from? The features were wind-roughened and the clothes dirty but there had been a time, she was sure, when this man had been somebody.

But then so many people had been somebody once.

The horsy woman retired and the man handed Angela his copy of A Career Less Ordinary. He was smiling, he smelt of beer and the streets, and there was something both intimate and expectant in his smile.

Am I meant to know him?

"What name?" she ventured.

"You don't remember?" he said quietly.

"Angela, I'm disappointed! It's Joe, Joe Meehan."

Beyond thought, but not yet connected to terror, she started to take the book, to open it to the title-page. And then, gasping, she saw its starched covers close over her hand. She had lost control of her fingers. It was as if they were frost-bitten.

Her whole body was frozen.

It had been she Angela who had ordered Dawn to take a foot soldier and eliminate Temple when he had called in to say that he had captured Meehan on Pen-y-Fan. The chances that the former agent had told the SAS officer the truth about Operation Watchman were just too great.

And then, just hours later, Dawn and her back-up man had been found dead. Of Temple and Meehan there had been no sign. Well, she'd found out Temple's whereabouts soon enough but Meehan Joseph Meehan was dead and buried.

He had to be.

She'd believed it and not believed it. When she left the Sewice she'd been stripped of the close protection team that had surrounded her for so many years. And, now here was the irony there was no one she could go to and say: this man may be alive. And ~f he is alive he will try and kill me.

The weeks had become months and the months had become a year, and still there had been no sign of Meehan, and finally she had begun to relax. Her official security had been stepped down to just one officer and she had begun to tell her seW that the Watchman was indeed dead.

Dave Holland, recognising at some unconscious level that things were wrong, that the moment was horribly out of joint stared at the desk. His eyes narrowed as the bearded man held his principal's gaze. What the fuck was going down?

Angela Fenwick, he belatedly realised, was terrified. Paralysed with terror, like a bird faced by a cobra. She couldn't even move.

At Holland's side the photographer had realised something was up too. The big F3 Nikon was already moving up towards his face. Beside the desk the Daily Telegraph writer stared in puzzlement at the motionless tableau. Then Meehan pulled out a Browning automatic and jammed the point of the barrel beneath Angela Fenwick's chin.

Mayhem. Dave Holland was aware of a distorted screaming, of panicked bodies falling in slow motion to the floor, of the languid chakka-chakkachakka of the Nikon's motor-drive.

He dived for the gun, but impeded by the press of bodies around him fell disastrously short. A shot, meanwhile, rang out simultaneously with the Nikon's final exposure. This image, which British newspaper picture desks would suppress but which would be syndicated worldwide, showed Meehan in profile. He looked almost courteous. Angela Fenwick's expression, by contrast, was one of in comprehending terror as a spectral tiara of skull fragments and other matter leapt from her head.

The moment after the shot rang out although no one would remember this afterwards Joseph Meehan turned to a man in a battered leather jacket who was standing at the back of the crowd. A long look passed between the two men, a look identical to that which had once passed between them in St. Martin's churchyard, Hereford. Then Meehan placed the barrel of the Browning automatic into his mouth, pulled the trigger for a second time and blew his brains into the fiction shelves.

No one noticed the man in the battered leatherjacket slip out through the heavy glass exit doors into Jermyn Street. In his hand was the edition of the Evening Standard in which the signing session had been detailed. Climbing into the passenger seat of a silver Audi TT convertible which was idling at the kerb, he reached out and, after a moment's hesitation, touched the chestnut-brown hair of the girl behind the wheel. She, in her turn, fractionally inclined her head towards him. A close observer might have detected a certain wariness between the two of them.

But there was no observer. The car pulled quietly away and by the time the first police sirens were audible, the couple had vanished.

__________________________________________

Chris Ryan was born near Newcastle in 1961 and joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years~ service he was involved in both overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal.

Chris Ryan wrote about his experiences in the bestseller The One That Got Away (1995) which was also adapted for screen.

He is also the author of the bestsellers Stand By, Stand By (1996), Zero Option (1997), The Kremlin Device (1998), Tenth Man Down (1999) and The Hit List (2000).