Who Dares Wins

EIGHTEEN

Vaziani Airbase. Georgia. Sixty miles from the Russian border. If anybody had been looking into the dawn sky, they would have seen the lights of the RAF C-17 Globemaster glowing in the distance as it made its approach. But nobody was watching. Aircraft were hardly a curiosity here, either for the Georgian nationals that manned the base or for the small platoon of British troops who kept themselves to themselves, but were not welcomed with much enthusiasm by their hosts.

So it was that the Globemaster, which had made its way from the UK over commercial airline routes – only to stray off piste towards Vaziani at the very end of its journey – was little more than a blip on the air-traffic control screens until it thundered towards the runway, its emissions causing the air all around to wobble and become hazy. As it turned off the runway and started taxiing towards the hangars, it passed an area of bombed-out land, scars of the attack on the base by Russian fighter jets in the late summer of 2008. The attack had not been so bad as to damage the infrastructure of the base itself, and the Globemaster came to a halt without any problems.

The engines had almost wound down to silence by the time three forklift trucks had trundled up to the aircraft. Unusually, though, they were shadowed by two military vehicles. The Georgian airbase staff were unimpressed with the British troops’ insistence on accompanying them every step of the way; but the troops themselves had their orders, and that was to make sure they were present at all times during the unloading of the Globemaster’s cargo.

It didn’t take long. It was a small cargo for such a large plane. Eight cases, each of them about the same size as a small van; wooden, and with the words HUMANITARIAN AID emblazoned on the side in big black letters. Under the watchful eye of both the troops and the loadies from the Globemaster, the forklift operators carefully transported each box into one of the nearby aircraft hangars. When they had completed their task, they left with their vehicles, without even a gruff nod at any of their guests.

The hangar doors were swung shut. It was a huge, cavernous space lit by industrial strip lighting, and in which the voices of the troops echoed and rebounded. They had made the place their own in the weeks that they had been here. In one corner of the hangar were low tables with full ashtrays; a few mattresses were unfurled on the ground; someone had even cadged an old black and white TV set, but it was largely unused. Russian-language TV didn’t hold much interest for them.

In the centre of the hangar, just metres from where the crates had been unloaded, stood a man. He was the only person in the place who wasn’t in army camouflage gear; instead he wore perfectly ordinary civvies, and not very fashionable ones at that. He was approaching middle age, wore rimless glasses and had a balding head, which he disguised by careful brushing of what remained of his thin hair. The guys called him ‘Doc’. Their standard joke was to ask him for remedies for imaginary ailments that they’d made up on the spot – usually some grotesque affliction of the genitals. The Doc took it all in good humour. He had long since given up telling them that the letters after his name were not a medical qualification but a scientific one. After all, there weren’t so many jokes to be made about the scientific engineering that was his particular area of expertise.

The Doc held a clipboard with an inventory list. Eight cases. He ticked them off. Then he turned to the nearest three soldiers and waved his pencil vaguely at them. ‘Would you mind?’ he asked politely.

One of the soldiers grinned at him. ‘Don’t know what you’d do without us, Doc,’ he said good-naturedly. He strode to one corner of the hangar before returning with a large metal crowbar. The wooden crate made a splintering sound as the guys forced it open, revealing its contents.

‘That what you ordered, Doc?’ None of the soldiers appeared remotely surprised that the contents of the crate, whatever they were, were most decidedly not humanitarian aid. There were several long, wide-calibre metal cylinders; there were conical warheads and various other intricate bits of machinery. The Doc ticked these items off on his list before asking for the crate to be sealed once more, while the others were opened and checked.

‘Hope you know how all this stuff fits together, Doc,’ a voice called from behind him. ‘Looks like a fucking overblown Meccano set to me.’

The Doc didn’t take his eyes from the clipboard. ‘Yes,’ he said vaguely, before turning round and peering at the soldier over his glasses. ‘You might want to put that out,’ he said, indicating the cigarette hanging from the soldier’s lips.

The soldier blinked, then dropped the cigarette on the floor as if it were suddenly red hot. He ground it out with his foot.

The Doc nodded with approval, then turned back to his clipboard with a faint, unnoticed smile. A cigarette, of course, would cause no damage whatsoever to the components that had just been delivered. But the guys were keen enough to take the mickey out of him. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t have a bit of fun of his own.

He continued with his inventory. It took the best part of an hour to check all eight cases, but at the end of that time he was satisfied that everything was present and correct. He cleared his throat and issued his polite instruction.

‘All right,’ he called to the assembled company. ‘Everything’s here. You can load the cases up and move them on. And please, be gentle with them. You might all have the heart and soul of Spanish baggage handlers, but we really don’t want to be throwing these things around too much, now do we?’

You’ll be sent a package. It will contain everything you need. Only open it when you’re alone. Don’t let anybody else see what’s in it. The abrupt instructions of his handler, the dark-featured former soldier who had trained Jamie Spillane and the others in Kazakhstan, had scarcely left his head since he had called a few days ago.

The package had arrived two days later. Jamie Spillane didn’t know who had sent it, but he decided not to think about that too much. The landlady who owned the bedsit where he was staying had been unable to disguise her interest in the box. She brought it up to his room and stood in the doorway for far too long a time after she had placed it in his hands and received a curt word of thanks from Jamie, who had been forced to shut the door in her face. Nosy bitch.

He had looked at the package for a good long time before opening it: half because he was waiting for the landlady to piss off, half because he was nervous. It just sat there on the bed in its tightly wound brown packing tape and neatly typed label. Jamie smoked a cigarette, locked his door from the inside and paced the room before he even attempted to open it.

It took a while. His chewed nails were not up to the task of unpeeling the packing tape. He was forced instead to use a key from the bunch in his pocket to tear into the tape and open up the box. The contents were cushioned in a roll of protective plastic, the type that as a kid he had liked to pop between his fingers. Jamie discarded it without so much as a squeeze and stared for a moment at the contents inside.

He removed the camera first. It was heavy. Chunky. Not a lightweight little gizmo for taking random snaps, but a serious piece of kit. Included in the box was a telephoto lens. It took Jamie a while to work out how to fit it to the body of the camera, but once he had managed it he was pleased with the result. He took the camera to the small window which looked out over the street and into the attic rooms beyond. While he had been looking out the previous night, he could have sworn some chick had been undressing in one of those windows. It was too far to be seen and enjoyed with the naked eye, but now that he had a bit of help…

She wasn’t there. He sniffed, then pulled down the blind and dumped the camera on to his bed. Only then did he turn his attention back to the box. It wasn’t as deep as it had looked from the outside and his hands were trembling with excitement as he unpacked the compartment at the bottom. Excitement and a little apprehension. As he pulled out the small, black handgun, his mind flashed back to the training camp. If you need a weapon, it will be supplied to you. Don’t fuck things up by trying to get hold of one yourself. People will just start asking questions.

He liked the way it felt in his hand. A Colt. He felt pleased with himself for recognising it. He aimed it towards the door and discharged a silent, imaginary bullet. Then another. And then, laying the handgun on the bed next to the camera, he removed the final item from the package: a box of rounds. Only then did he go about choosing a hiding place for his new toys…

And now, two days later, he was making use of one of them.

He had arrived in Russell Gardens, West London, at 6.30 a.m., the earliest the Underground would allow. He could have taken a cab, of course, but that would not have been secure. Don’t let anybody know where you are or what you’re doing. Much better to take advantage of the anonymity of the Tube. The building he wanted, couched between the relative bustle of Kensington High Street and the Holland Park roundabout, was totally unremarkable. Had it not been for a small plaque by the door which read Embassy of Georgia to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland it would have been impossible to say what function it served. Jamie loitered, but not too close. He couldn’t see any CCTV, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t any. Anyway, he didn’t need to be too close. That was what the telephoto lens was for, after all.

It was cold in the early morning, so Jamie was pleased with the hooded top he wore underneath his coat. It kept him warm as well as going some way to concealing his face. Even so, he had to stamp his feet as he waited. They arrive between eight and ten in the morning. It meant he could be waiting for some time. Jamie didn’t mind. Quite the opposite. He was excited. His fingertips tingled. He was looking forward to executing the first part of his assignment. He thought about the people who were always so quick to think the worst of him. Mum. Dad. Even Kelly. If they could only see him now. His mouth was dry with the thrill of it.

He took a seat on a bench on the opposite side of the road, making sure that he had a clear view of the embassy. Removing his mobile phone, he started fiddling with it to blend into the background. Just some kid obsessed with texting, people would think. He continued to wait. Now and then he would put one hand into his pocket. The Colt was there and he would grip it. It felt good.

No more than twenty-five metres to the main entrance, he calculated. It would be fine.

He waited some more.

In the event, it was just after nine when a car pulled up outside the embassy. It was chauffeur driven, but it wasn’t a particularly grand or impressive vehicle – a bog-standard Renault Laguna. Its hazard lights flashed as it double parked, while the chauffeur stepped out and opened the back door. Two men emerged. They were both rather fat, one clearly older than the other. As they squeezed through the parked cars, on to the pavement and up to the steps of the embassy, it was the older man who took the lead, walking with a kind of brusque impatience. The second man followed several steps behind. His gait was a little less ostentatious and he carried in his right hand a quite ordinary-looking briefcase.

Jamie raised his camera, zoomed in and started to snap. He managed to take a substantial burst of photographs before the younger of the two men stopped, turned and looked behind him. Through the zoom of the camera, Jamie saw that the man was staring straight at him.

He felt his blood freeze. He lowered the camera and instinctively pulled his hood down. If they see you, don’t panic. Just walk away. They’ll assume you’re the Press. He turned heel and walked to the end of the road. Adrenaline surged through him. Any moment now, he thought to himself, I’m going to feel a hand on my shoulder. They’re following me.

He upped his pace.

Jamie turned the corner, into the busy main street. He ran across the road, ignoring the beeps from the cars, which had to brake and swerve to avoid him. On the opposite pavement he stopped and looked back.

No one.

He grinned as he felt a sudden exhilaration. It had gone well. He put his hand over the screen at the back of the camera and flicked through the images he had taken. They were good. He’d got what he wanted. That evening, having changed his clothes and therefore his appearance, he would repeat his performance, this time outside the Georgian Orthodox Church further west of here, where he had been told these two men worshipped regularly. From a randomly chosen Internet café he would e-mail the best of his photographs to the address he had been given.

And then he would lie low and wait. Wait for another package, and for the opportunity to carry out the second part of his instructions.

Dolohov’s wounds were bad. He kept asking for vodka, but Sam refused to give him any. He needed to use the alcohol to keep the stumps disinfected, a rough and ready way of stopping his captive from developing fever, but the best he could come up with. Dolohov managed not to scream when he plunged the wounds into a bowl of vodka, but that was more out of exhaustion, Sam sensed, than bravery. He found codeine in the bathroom cabinet and kept the Russian dosed up on that. It was hardly going to remove the pain, but it would take the edge off for as long as the supply lasted.

They sat in silence, Dolohov still restrained by the electrical flex. It was clear that the Russian knew how close he had come to death. When he had uttered Jacob’s name, a madness had come over Sam. He knew what people looked like when they thought they were about to die. Dolohov had that look.

But Sam had calmed himself at the last moment. And he had done his best to keep calm during the slow hours before morning. Apart from during Sam’s painful makeshift medical attentions, the two of them had sat in silence, Dolohov obviously trying to manage the pain and Sam trying to manage the implications of what he had just learned.

After Bland had collared him and spun him the MI6 line, Sam had simply not believed him. There were too many things that just didn’t add up and Jacob’s parting words had never been far from the front of his mind. But Dolohov had no reason to lie to him. On the contrary, he had every reason to tell the truth. What was more, Dolohov did not know Sam’s name. He did not know his relationship to Jacob. Bland might have been playing mind games; Dolohov almost certainly wasn’t.

And then there was the evidence of the laptop. It was Jacob’s – at least, it had been taken from Jacob’s things – and he had e-mailed details of the dead red-light runners to someone. Whichever way he looked at it, Dolohov’s story stacked up.

Except for one thing. If the Russian was telling him the truth, his brother was no longer the man he once knew. He had become someone else.

Sam turned to the big windows at the end of the room and parted the curtains. The low, crisp sun of dawn shot in. Sam winced, but did not move the curtains. The morning sky was red and scudded with lean pink clouds. There was a chorus of birdsong. In Kazakhstan it would be later in the day, but the same sun would be shining down. Shining down on Jacob. What would his brother be doing now?

What the hell would his brother be doing?

Treason. It’s not a terribly fashionable word is it? Bland’s voice was as clear in Sam’s head as if he were actually there. I would say, in circumstances such as this, that a man might become bitter.

Sam found himself having to control his anger again.

They’ll tell you things, Sam. Things about me. Don’t forget that you’re my brother. Don’t believe them.

How could he forget that? How could he believe them? Jacob was his brother. He deserved the benefit of the doubt. But he also had some explaining to do. For a moment, Sam considered contacting Bland again, telling him what he knew. But he put that thought from his mind. The memory of the Spetsnaz troops in Kazakhstan, of Craven’s death, was still fresh. Nobody had yet explained to him with any degree of satisfaction how the Russians knew they were coming. The Regiment had been expected and in Sam’s book that meant one thing: a tip-off. Go singing to MI6 and the chances were that every word of his conversation would end up on a transcript roll somewhere in Moscow. He shook his head as he continued to look out at the night sky.

Sam needed to see Jacob. Face to face. To ask him the questions that needed asking. His brother deserved that at the very least. And mole or no mole, he needed to do it without the interference of MI6. They would be heavy handed in their questioning. They would more than likely torture him to get the truth. They would do to Jacob what Sam had done to Dolohov, or something like. And he wasn’t prepared to let that happen.

He turned to Dolohov.

‘Can you contact him?’ he asked abruptly.

Dolohov, bleary eyed, raised his head. Jesus, he looked like shit. ‘Who?’ he demanded.

‘Jacob Redman.’

Momentarily, a wily look crossed Dolohov’s face. It disappeared as soon as it had arrived, to be replaced by that sombre expression; it did not, however, go unnoticed by Sam.

‘Yes,’ Dolohov replied. ‘I can contact him.’

‘How?’

‘By e-mail.’

Sam nodded. He thought for a while longer before speaking again. ‘Do you often contact him?’ he asked.

Dolohov gave him a contemptuous look, as though it were a stupid question. ‘It has never happened yet.’

‘But if you asked for a meeting, would he come?’

Dolohov shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He could be anywhere in the world.’ A pause. ‘But yes, I think he would come. I am a man of a certain importance.’

Sam approached the chair. ‘I’m going to untie you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got your gun and mine. One of them will be pointing in your direction all the time.’

The Russian sneered.

‘I mean it, Dolohov. You won’t even be able to take a shit without me being there. Just in case you had any plans to play silly buggers.’

‘To play what?’

‘Just do what you’re told, Dolohov. If you want to make it through the day, that is.’ Sam walked round to the back of the chair and untied the flex. It fell from around Dolohov’s body. The Russian raised his arms and for the first time looked at his hands. They were a mess. The skin was stained and smeared with blood and the stumps where his fingers used to be glistened painfully. Dolohov looked bilious.

‘Count yourself lucky you didn’t go the way of the red-light runners, Dolohov,’ Sam told him, pointing his gun nonchalantly in the Russian’s direction. ‘But there’s still time, so let’s not fuck around. Where’s your computer?’

Dolohov looked towards the main doors of the room, out on to the hallway. ‘In my bedroom,’ he said.

‘Get moving.’

The Russian pushed himself weakly to his feet. He was unable to walk in a straight line as he staggered out of the room with Sam following behind – close, but not too close. The guy was a trained assassin, after all.

The bedroom was large and high-ceilinged. It was dominated by a big iron bed with an elegant patchwork quilt. There was a fireplace in this room, too; and next to it, against the wall, a large oak desk with a laptop computer neatly placed upon it.

‘Sit down,’ Sam instructed. ‘Open up the computer.’ Dolohov did as he was told. Sam paused as a thought hit him. ‘If you send e-mail from here, is it secure? Can anyone tap in?’

Dolohov shook his head. ‘Of course not. I have a virtual private network. I can communicate with Moscow, or anyone, without the risk of my communications being intercepted.’ He placed his wounded hands flat on the table. ‘I assume from your question,’ he said shrewdly, ‘that you are not involved with the security services.’

Sam remained dead-eyed. He put his gun against the back of his captive’s head. ‘Just do what you’re told, Dolohov. Write it now. Request a meeting. As soon as possible.’

He watched as Dolohov slowly and painfully used one of his remaining fingers to type a message. With each stroke of the keyboard he winced, leaving a moist trail of red where the stumps brushed against it. The message was short and to the point. MEETING NEEDED. URGENT. REVERT WITH TIME AND PLACE. DOLOHOV. The Russian slid one finger over the mouse pad, inserted an e-mail address into the address field, then directed the cursor towards the send button.

‘Stop,’ Sam said.

Dolohov froze.

‘Put your hands on the table. Both of them.’

Sam removed the gun from the back of Dolohov’s head, walked round to his side and pressed the weapon against the back of the Russian’s right hand. Dolohov looked up at him in horror.

‘You think I’m stupid?’ Sam growled.

‘What do you mean?’ Dolohov’s voice was little more than a breath.

‘I think you might have forgotten something,’ Sam pressed; and from the way Dolohov jutted out his jaw involuntarily, he could tell his suspicion was on the money. Dolohov would have some way of raising a distress signal in a situation like this. A phrase to be inserted into any communication or, more likely, a phrase to be omitted. ‘Are you going to alter that message so that it doesn’t raise any alarms?’ Sam demanded. ‘Or are you and I going to start talking about how useful your thumbs are again?’ He pressed the gun down harder. ‘It’s up to you, Dolohov. But I think you know I’m not fucking around.’

A pause. And then, slowly, Dolohov’s free hand slid once more to the keyboard. At the beginning of the e-mail he typed an extra sentence: ALL IS WELL AT THE UNIVERSITY. His breath was shaking as he waited for further instruction from Sam.

Sam gave it a few seconds. Then he raised the gun and put it to the side of Dolohov’s head. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, his voice grim.

Dolohov’s body slumped. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Either he was a brilliant actor, or Sam had scared all the remnants of duplicity out of him.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Send the thing.’

It looked to Sam as if it took all of Dolohov’s energy to raise his hand again. But he did it and with what looked like a superhuman effort, he moved the cursor once more to the send button.

And then he clicked. The window disappeared. The e-mail was sent.

It could be an hour before they received a reply. It could be a day. It could be a week. All they could do now was wait.

NINETEEN

FSB Headquarters. Moscow.

In the era of Communism, the huge, austere yellow-brick building on Lubyanka Square had housed not only the offices of the KGB, but also their prison. Many people who came to the attention of the secret police could expect to end up in this building, where torture and forced interrogation were commonplace. Not far from the centre of Moscow, it served as a constant reminder that the state would accept no dissent. Now, however, its reputation was less severe. It was still an administrative building, and no doubt it harboured many ghosts for those Muscovites who still remembered those dark days, but people could now walk past it without feeling a nervous chill that was nothing to do with the weather. Without feeling that the building itself was watching them.

Jacob Redman, emerging from the car that had been waiting on the tarmac for him at the airport, looked up at it. The car’s windows were tinted, so he squinted as the bright daylight hit his eyes. He’d managed to get some much needed shut-eye on the plane that had transported him directly from Baikonur to Moscow, under the watchful eye of the two Russian soldiers that had accompanied him. Even now they were escorting him from the car up to the main entrance of the building that now housed part of the FSB’s offices. Jacob walked briskly and with purpose. The heels of his shoes echoed on the hard floor of the cavernous entrance hall, which still bore signatures of its past – a lack of natural light and a kind of facelessness that hid the terrible things that had once gone on here. A suited official recognised him immediately and, with a nod first at Jacob and then at the two soldiers – an indication they were no longer required – he led the Englishman silently up three flights of stairs, along a corridor, which Jacob knew looked like every other corridor in this building, until they reached a door. The suit knocked, then held the door open and Jacob walked in. The door was closed tactfully behind him.

It was a large office, more comfortable than might perhaps have been expected given the basic nature of the rest of the building, but hardly luxurious. Thin carpet tiles on the floor. A leather sofa, but old. And a functional desk in the centre of the room, behind which sat a man. Nikolai Surov was a thin, sallow-faced man with sharp eyes and perfectly white hair. It was impossible to judge his age. Fifty? Sixty? Seventy? Any of these were possible. He was reading a report of some description; as Jacob entered, he raised his eyes. There was no expression in them, but that was usual. Jacob had met the director of the FSB enough times to know that he played his cards very close to his chest.

Surov indicated a chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Sit down,’ he said. His English was thickly accented, but very good. Jacob took a seat as Surov laid his report on the table and gazed at him with his inscrutable eyes.

‘We had not expected to see you in Moscow for a long time,’ Surov said finally.

‘Thanks for the warm welcome.’

His sarcasm was lost on the director. ‘They did not offer you a shower and some clean clothes at Baikonur?’

Jacob was unshaven and dirty. ‘I guess they must have forgotten their manners. They told you what happened at the training camp?’

Surov nodded. ‘How can you be sure it was the SAS?’

‘I recognise their handwriting.’ He hadn’t mentioned Sam in his report. There were some things the man sitting opposite him didn’t need to know. ‘What happened to your Spetsnaz boys who were supposed to be keeping watch in case something like this happened?’

‘Dead,’ the director said shortly. ‘Along with all the recruits. Your former colleagues did their work well.’

Jacob remained stony-faced. ‘I told you a four-man unit wouldn’t be enough.’

The director appeared not to hear. He sat silently for nearly a minute before he spoke again. ‘Your agent in London…’ He scanned his desk for another piece of paper. ‘Jamie Spillane?’ His rendition of the name, couched as it was in his thick Russian accent, made it almost unrecognisable.

Jacob nodded.

‘He has been activated. We have supplied him with what he needs. You are sure he is…’ Surov’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are sure he is fitted for the task?’

‘As well as any of them,’ Jacob said shortly.

‘He will be discreet?’

Jacob shrugged. ‘Who knows? As discreet as any of them can be. Once you hand him over to the Georgians, he can be as indiscreet as he likes.’

‘And you are confident he believes he is working for MI5?’

‘He has no reason not to.’

‘Good. This is a very important operation for the continuing security of the Russian people. There will be a medal for you.’

‘I’m not interested in medals. Just the money.’

Surov nodded. ‘There will be that, of course. The assassination will be the last operation for your students. Now that the British know what is happening, I am ordering the immediate elimination of all unactivated agents in the field.’ He smiled. ‘All except Jamie Spillane, of course.’

Jacob remained expressionless. ‘Sounds like Dolohov’s going to be busy.’

Again Surov nodded. ‘Dolohov. Yes. We need to speak about Dolohov. You have received a communication from him.’ For a split second Surov’s eyes showed signs of amusement at Jacob’s flicker of surprise. ‘You did not know that we monitor your e-mails? Of course we do.’

‘Of course,’ Jacob replied flatly. ‘What does Dolohov want?’

‘To meet you.’

Jacob raised an eyebrow in suspicion. ‘Bit of a coincidence?’

‘It is worrying. We can rest assured that Dolohov does not know the details of the Georgian operation. But it is unusual for him to make any contact with us at all.’

‘Any distress signals?’

‘On the contrary, he included his identification code with the message. It’s definitely from Dolohov.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Jacob replied. ‘If I wanted to get him to do what I said, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.’

The director looked perplexed. ‘Tricks up your sleeve?’ he asked before shaking his head in momentary annoyance at his lack of understanding. ‘There is,’ he said, once he had regained his composure, ‘every possibility that Dolohov has been compromised.’

‘Then you need to take him out,’ Jacob said. ‘Now.’

Surov’s eyes narrowed. He put his arms in front of him and pressed his fingertips together. ‘Dolohov is a valued agent,’ he said. ‘He has worked for this service – and the service that preceded it – for many, many years. Even before glasnost and perestroika.’ He smiled. ‘Especially before glasnost and perestroika. In the days of the old regime, he was a most committed patriot. That is not a quality you value highly, I know…’

Jacob gave him a dark look. ‘Patriotism’s a two-way street, Surov.’

‘Dolohov performed many…’ He inclined his head. ‘Many operations.’

‘Perhaps he just likes killing people.’

‘Perhaps,’ Surov acknowledged. ‘But he continues to be of great use to us even now. If he has truly been compromised, then yes, I would agree that action needs to be taken. But we owe him the courtesy of finding out. As you say, patriotism is a two-way street.’

‘Fine,’ Jacob said shortly. ‘Good luck.’

The director looked at him meaningfully. ‘Dolohov is an unusually skilled operator,’ he continued. ‘If he has requested a meeting with you, then a meeting with you is the only thing that will satisfy him. Anything else will scare him off. The Georgian operation will reach its conclusion in five days’ time. And with the end of your operations in Kazakhstan, it would seem that you are available to us for other purposes. Assuming, that is, that you remain committed to helping us?’

Jacob looked away for a moment. He felt the muscles in his face tense up. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Surov didn’t take his eyes from him. ‘Go to England,’ he said. ‘Determine whether Dolohov has been compromised. If not, speak to him. If he has, in that case you know what to do.’

‘So much for your two-way patriotism,’ Jacob muttered.

The FSB director answered immediately. ‘We are at least giving him a chance. That is more than the British government ever did for you, is it not?’

Jacob stood up. Already his mind was turning over. Getting to England would not be child’s play. He didn’t want to risk a fake Russian passport with UK immigration. If the alert had gone out about him, his likeness would have been distributed to all the ports of entry. No. He’d have to do something different. Get entry to another country using false papers and make his own arrangements from there.’

‘Can you get me to France?’ he asked the director.

‘Of course,’ Surov said mildly.

‘Then tell Dolohov I’ll meet him. Three days from now. 10 p.m. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly.’ He stood up and made to leave.

‘Sit down, please.’ A hint of steel in Surov’s voice.

Jacob hesitated, then retook his seat.

‘You have not been to the UK for some time.’

‘Six years.’

‘Many things change in six years. We informed you of your mother’s death. You were wise enough to stay away, not to let sentiment cloud your judgement.’

Jacob remained silent.

‘You will continue to do the same, I hope.’

Again, silence.

‘Your father is unwell,’ Surov said. Jacob could sense he was waiting for a reaction; he gave him none. Surov handed him a photograph: a bleak-looking building with lots of cars parked outside. Jacob thought he recognised it. ‘Very unwell. He is in residential care here. I am telling you this in case you feel the urge to go asking questions. The urge to hunt him out. You do not need me to tell you that this would be a very bad idea.’

Jacob put the photograph back down on the table. ‘He’s dead to me,’ he told the Russian.

Surov reclaimed the picture. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good. We will supply you with a passport and tickets to France within the hour. You need money? We will arrange it. You will be on the next flight out. Is there anything else you need from me?’

Jacob shook his head. ‘Nothing else,’ he said, before turning and leaving the director of the FSB alone with his thoughts.

Jacob Redman had not been gone more than a minute when there was another knock on the door of the office of Nikolai Surov. ‘Prikhoditye,’ the director intoned. ‘Come in.’

The man who entered was a good deal younger than Surov. He wore a neat but inexpensive suit, though the tidiness of his clothes was more than offset by the unruliness of his hair. He had sharp eyes and an unsmiling face. Surov indicated that he should sit down, but the younger man preferred to stand.

‘You were listening, Ivan?’

Ivan nodded. ‘Of course.’

Surov raised an eyebrow to encourage Ivan to continue speaking.

‘I do not trust Jacob Redman,’ Ivan said. ‘I have never made a secret of that.’

Surov inclined his head. ‘Of course not,’ he accepted. ‘But then, you do not trust anybody. That’s why you are good at your job.’

If Ivan took Surov’s comment as a compliment, there was no indication of it on his stony face. ‘I have a friend,’ he said. ‘He got himself a new woman. She left her husband for him. And now she is cheating on my friend. I asked him if he was surprised. He said, “Not really.”’

Ivan had earned the right to speak his mind, in Surov’s view. He had a natural aptitude for intelligence work and was running networks all over the world that were of paramount importance to the FSB. One day, Surov knew, if politics didn’t get in the way, Ivan would be running the service.

‘That’s a charming parable, Ivan,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘I suppose it has some sort of relevance to our discussion.’

Finally Ivan took a seat. ‘Jacob Redman betrayed his country. That makes him untrustworthy by definition.’

Surov pressed his fingertips together. ‘That is one way of looking at things,’ he conceded. ‘But there are others. Jacob Redman is, I think, more complicated than you imagine.’ He stood up and started to pace the room. ‘Your friend’s lover,’ he asked. ‘The one who is cheating on him. I wonder what her former husband thinks of her?’

No reply from Ivan.

‘He hates her, I would imagine. Perhaps he wishes her dead, I don’t know. Make no mistake, Ivan. Jacob Redman hates his country. He served them well, but he was badly treated. Humiliated. Oh, I do not blame them – the British, I mean. Some things are more important than the embarrassment of a soldier, no matter how good he is. But the British made a dangerous enemy in him. Outcast by his country and outcast, too, by his family. Jacob Redman is clever and he is ruthless. His only allegiance now is to the money we pay him.’ Surov stopped pacing and looked directly at Ivan. ‘People find it very hard to question their allegiance to money. And you cannot deny that Jacob Redman has proved his worth to us many times over.’

‘In my opinion,’ Ivan replied gruffly, ‘that only means he has good cover.’ He changed the subject. ‘You would really have Dolohov eliminated?’

Surov did not allow any emotion to cross his face. ‘If he has been compromised, I see no other option. I would regret it deeply, but he has too much information that we do not want falling into the hands of the British.’

‘The Georgian operation?’

‘No. He knows something is planned, but not who, or when. Certainly he does not know it so soon.’

‘And Redman? It is one of his recruits that is preparing the assassination; but does Redman himself know why we are ordering it?’

‘Of course not,’ Surov replied. ‘The British have a phrase: never let the right hand know what the left is doing. It is important always to remember that in our work.’ He smiled again. ‘But you know all this, Ivan. You don’t need me to remind you of the basics.’

On one wall of Surov’s office was a map of the world. He approached it and, for a long moment, found himself staring at the thin line that marked the Russian-Georgian border. When he spoke again, it was almost to himself. ‘The Kremlin will not permit the British to interfere with affairs so close to our border. They are fools to try. The operation will occur in five days’ time.’ He smiled. The twenty-sixth of May. Georgian Independence Day. A celebration for these people.

He turned back to Ivan. There was a glint in his eye now. ‘This will be Redman’s last operation for us,’ he announced suddenly. ‘He has served us well, but there comes a point when people like him start to have an inflated sense of their own importance to us. I will let him deal with Dolohov and after that, Ivan, you may dispatch one of your people to deal with him however you see fit. That should put your mind at rest, should it not?’

Ivan nodded.

‘Good,’ said Surov. ‘See to it that Redman has everything he needs. And keep me informed of any developments. I want to know exactly what’s going on with Dolohov. And the Georgian operation must not fail, Ivan. It’s too important to our security for that.’

Silently, Surov took his seat once more and picked up the papers he had been reading before Jacob arrived. Ivan understood that the meeting was over. He stood up, and left without a word.

TWENTY

Time was passing painfully slowly. Sam had kept the curtains shut everywhere in the flat, so when day turned into night it was barely noticeable.

Dolohov was crucial to Sam’s plans. But he was fading on account of his wounded hands, so Sam did his best to patch the Russian up. The codeine tablets had run out, but he found clean gauze and tape; he tied Dolohov to the chair once more before applying it, and he allowed the Russian a little alcohol at regular intervals to keep the shock and the pain at bay. He found bread in the kitchen, and cold meat. There was tinned food too – stews and soups, thick Eastern European stuff. Sam didn’t want to stay here any longer than he had to, but he needed to wait for a response and he was prepared to dig in for as long as that took.

Dolohov slept sitting down. Sam allowed himself the occasional bout of shut-eye too – he hadn’t slept since the flight back from Bagram and was feeling it – but not before checking that the Russian was firmly tied to the chair. He kept both handguns on him at all times. Dolohov was exhausted and in pain, but he was a sneaky little bastard and Sam didn’t trust him not to have a go.

Every hour, he checked Dolohov’s computer. And every hour he came away disappointed.

Dawn arrived. Sam awoke from a half-drowse with a shock. His hands automatically reached for his weapons and he looked around him, momentarily confused. Then he saw Dolohov, bound and nodding, and he remembered where he was. The tension he had been living with over the past few days returned. He stood up and walked to the bedroom where he checked the computer. His heart gave a little lurch.

A message had come through.

For a moment something stopped him clicking on it. An unwillingness to receive yet more confirmation that Jacob was involved in things Sam didn’t understand. But the moment passed. He was grim-faced and suddenly alert as he brought the message up on to the screen.

There was no greeting. No pleasantries. Just a time and a place.

WEDNESDAY. 22.00 HRS. EROS. PICCADILLY.

Sam absorbed the information. Then, unwilling to leave Dolohov alone for more than a few minutes at a time, he returned to the main room.

The Russian stirred as he entered. He looked blearily up at Sam, distaste and contempt carved into the lines of his face. His eyes followed Sam across the room as he sat opposite Dolohov, grabbed the vodka bottle and gave the Russian a swig.

‘Any plans for Wednesday night?’ he asked once his captive had taken a mouthful of alcohol.

Dolohov looked confused.

‘Statue of Eros, 10 p.m. You and Jacob Redman. Looks like you’ve got a date, my friend. Looks like you’ve got a date.’

Gabriel Bland paced. He didn’t want to seem on edge in front of Toby Brookes, his subordinate, but he couldn’t help it.

Brookes looked tired. As though he hadn’t slept in days, which was probably true. Running a surveillance team was often as arduous for the pen-pushers as it was for the men on the ground. But that didn’t make Bland inclined to go easy on him. Quite the contrary. He needed to know that the heat was on. ‘How long have they been in there?’ he demanded.

Brookes repeated the information he had given Bland on an almost hourly basis over the past day or so. ‘Redman arrived there about midnight on Saturday, May 21. Our man followed him there from the Abbey Court Hotel in Hanwell, where he’d holed up with Clare Corbett for two hours.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s 9 a.m. now, May 22. So I make it thirty-three hours.’

‘And you’re sure he’s still in there?’

‘We have an SBS team monitoring every exit to the building, just as you ordered, sir. Unless he can walk through walls, Redman hasn’t moved out of that place.’

‘Clare Corbett?’

‘Back home, sir. Hasn’t left. Three telephone calls, all from her mother.’

‘And this Dolohov individual in Maida Vale?’ Bland pressed. ‘Have they come up with anything at all about him? Any reason why Redman might suddenly find him such captivating company?’

‘Nothing, sir. He teaches Russian at a London University college in Bloomsbury; been living here for thirty years and keeps himself to himself. Lily white, sir. Penchant for Tolstoy, if his library record’s anything to go by. Not even a parking ticket to his name.’

Bland scowled. ‘Nobody’s that clean,’ he said. Toby nodded politely in agreement.

The older man turned and look out of his office window over the skyline of London. What was Redman playing at? This long period of silence, of disappearance, was disconcerting. Redman was up to something; Bland just didn’t know what.

‘The SBS unit. They’re on standby? Ready to go in?’

‘We just have to give them the word, sir. We can have Redman and Dolohov in custody in minutes.’

Bland breathed out deeply. In the absence of the SAS – he’d learned his lesson in terms of sending them in after their own – their sister regiment was the next best thing. But it was a hard call to make. He had to keep his eye on the most important things. Strip away what was not relevant. He was gambling on Redman making contact with his brother. It was crucial that Bland got his hands on Jacob, to turn him upside down, shake him and see what fell out. Maybe he should just stick to his instinct that, eventually, Sam Redman would lead them to Jacob.

He closed his eyes. In this job, he had learned, there were two kinds of doubts. The big ones, about the rights and wrongs of what he had to do. They were the ones to ignore. But the little doubts, the little nagging ones… Something was going on in that Maida Vale flat. Something was afoot. Gabriel Bland needed to know – he decided at that moment – what it was. And he needed to know now.

He turned to Toby.

‘Send them in,’ he said. ‘Immediately. I want to sweat them both today. I want to know what’s going on.’

Toby nodded and made for the door.

‘And Toby?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Make sure they know who Sam Redman is. Make sure they know he’s SAS. He’s not going to come quietly.’

Toby nodded his head, as quiet and unflappable as always. ‘We’ll bring them in safely, sir. I’ll see to it personally.’

The younger man left. Gabriel Bland continued to pace the office, those little doubts darting around his mind.

09.30 hrs. Sam had rummaged through Dolohov’s cupboards and found a shoulder bag which he had filled with the remainder of the food from the fridge, another bottle of vodka and some more gauze for the wounds. Now that they had an RV time and place, there was no reason to stay here. In fact, it would be stupid to do so. Anybody could come knocking – innocently or otherwise – and that could be a disaster. They needed to stay anonymous.

‘We’re leaving,’ he announced once the bag was packed.

‘Where?’ Dolohov breathed.

‘Somewhere safe.’

‘Safe for you, or safe for me?’

‘Just safe,’ Sam muttered. He would find a hotel, pay for it with cash. Sit it out with Dolohov until the RV time. ‘You got a car?’ he asked.

Dolohov nodded.

‘Where are the keys?’

‘In the kitchen. There is a…’

A sound.

‘Shut up!’ Sam hissed. He pulled his gun just as his eyes flickered to the closed curtains. ‘Did you hear that?’

Dolohov scowled at him. ‘I heard nothing.’

But all Sam’s senses were suddenly alive: his eyes were narrowed and his hearing acute. He backed away from Dolohov, towards the fireplace, then started edging over to the window. It was probably nothing – a bird fluttering against the glass – but he wasn’t going to take the risk.

Silence. Unnatural silence. It seemed to ring in Sam’s head. His mouth went dry.

Gun at the ready, he held his breath and waited. Waited for the silence to settle down. Waited for his paranoia to pass.

It didn’t.

Far from it.

The noises seemed to come from all directions at once. An explosion from the door; a thumping from the bedroom. And here, the room in which they were standing, the shattering of glass. Dolohov shouted in sudden surprise and fear; there was movement behind the curtains. Sam fell to a crouching position, pointing his gun in the direction of the curtains and waiting for a figure to show itself.

Voices. Muffled. ‘Hit the ground! Hit the fucking ground! NOW!’

An object flying through the air. A sudden bang and a blinding white light. Sam had discharged enough flashbangs in his time, so it was hardly a fresh experience; but they were always a shock when you weren’t expecting them. He cursed and shook his head, trying to reorientate himself after his senses had gone to pot.

But by that time it was too late.

A boot against the side of his face. He fell to the floor and felt another boot pressed heavily against the wrist of his gun hand, grinding it into the rug. He struggled blindly, scrambling to stand, but at that very moment he felt the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against the side of his head. His vision returned. He was being held at gunpoint by a balaclava’d man with an ops waistcoat and an M16.

‘Don’t… make… a… fucking… mistake,’ a low voice growled, pronouncing each word clearly. ‘We know you’re Regiment. We’ve got you covered.’

Sam froze. He counted two other guys with their M16s trained on him. A third was untying Dolohov, and he knew there would be more in other parts of the flat, checking there was nobody else there, securing the entrances and exits. Multi-room entry. Textbook stuff.

‘Drop your weapon.’

Sam released his fingers and allowed the gun to fall from his hand.

‘Flat on the floor,’ he was ordered. ‘Hands behind your back. You know the drill. Do it. Now. Do it fucking now!’

Sam had no option. These guys weren’t trained to fuck around, they were wound up like tightly coiled springs and they’d nail him if he so much as put a fingertip out of place. He did as he was told – slowly, so they wouldn’t think he was making any sudden movements.

‘Flat’s clear,’ another voice announced. ‘Cuff them both.’

His head against the floor, Sam could see nothing but the feet of the unit. A moment later, he felt a set of Plasticuffs being firmly attached around his wrists, tight so that they dug into his skin.

‘Jesus.’ A muffled voice from near where Dolohov was sitting. ‘What the fuck’s this sicko been doing?’

Sam was pulled roughly to his feet. M16s all around pointing at him. Two of the guys were looking at Dolohov’s hands.

Dolohov spoke. Desperation in his voice. ‘He has held me captive for two nights. He has tortured me. He is insane. You have to take me to a hosp-’

‘Shut up, Boris, or we’ll finish the fucking job for him.’

‘Just cuff him and get them both in the van.’ The instruction came from a guy with a Geordie accent, standing in the entrance to the room, clearly the unit leader. He pointed at Sam. ‘Any shit from you, my friend, and we’ll start making holes. Got it?’

Sam jutted his chin out and didn’t reply. A fist in his stomach. He doubled over, winded. ‘Got it?’

‘Got it,’ he gasped. He nodded and glanced over at Dolohov, who was having his own wrists bound behind his back. The Russian gave him an evil look, as though he was enjoying seeing Sam get a dose of his own medicine. He didn’t get much chance to enjoy it: he was pushed by one of the unit towards the hallway. Dolohov almost fell; at the last minute he regained his balance, but he looked a mess as he staggered towards the door.

Sam was nudged by the barrel of a gun in the same direction. He walked.

‘Regiment?’ he asked grimly.

‘You taking the piss?’ a voice hissed. ‘Now shut the fuck up and keep walking.’ He sounded insulted. Sam guessed it was the SBS. Always walking round with a chip on their shoulders about the SAS, always feeling they’re somehow the superior service and angered by the glory the Regiment boys got.

‘Who the fuck sent you?’ No reply. Sam was bundled down the stairs. Every synapse in his brain hunted for a way out; but four men had their guns trained on him and there was nothing he could do. As they stepped out of the mansion block, he saw a woman and recognised the fox fur round her neck. To say she looked shocked was an understatement. ‘What on earth…?’ she started to say; but she was ignored as the unit pushed Sam past her and on to the pavement.

Two plain white Ford Transits awaited them, the stock-in-trade of a special forces pick-up team, double parked against the other residential traffic in the street. Sam was forced into the back of one of them. All the seats had been ripped out to make a big open space in the rear. Two men were already up front and as Sam was pushed onto the hard metal floor of the van, he heard the engine rev.

‘Move up front,’ a voice instructed. Sam shuffled along the metal floor and ended up with his back against the front seats. There were four SBS guys in the back with him now – Dolohov was clearly being transported in the other van. One of them slammed the door shut and the van screeched out into the road.

It had been a neat pick-up, Sam had to give them that. He watched as the guys pulled off their balaclavas. Sam had worked alongside the SBS any number of times, but he didn’t recognise these men with their dishevelled hair and, he couldn’t help thinking, smug faces. It would be the talk of the town at SBS HQ in Poole that they’d been sent in to lift a Regiment guy. Sam did his best not to think about that. He kept his mind calm and, almost by reflex, started to check what assets he had at his disposal. Each of the SBS men wore ops waistcoats with flashbangs and fragmentation grenades. Their weapons were lowered – it would be stupid to discharge them in the back of the vehicle unless absolutely necessary. Rounds could easily ricochet off the metallic sides of the van and mistakes could always happen in a moving vehicle. But all this was academic. With his hands cuffed behind his back he was as good as useless.

The van stopped and started through the streets of London. Behind him, fixed to the back of the chair against which he was pressed, there was something sticking upwards. He didn’t know what it was – a rivet of some kind, perhaps there to stop the front seats from sliding too far back on their runners.

‘Looks like the Firm want you off the street pretty bad,’ one of the guys piped up. ‘You must have been a very naughty boy.’

Sam sniffed. Keep them talking, he told himself. Keep them distracted. ‘I’ve had my moments,’ he said.

‘What did the Russki do? Shag your missus?’

‘Caught her giving him a rusty trombone,’ he said with a forced grin. ‘I told him he was lucky I didn’t cut his dick off.’ He looked around him. ‘So, where are we going? Don’t tell me: curry and a few beers followed by a strip club?’

‘All right, you lot,’ one of the SBS men announced. He had blonde hair and Sam thought he recognised the voice as being that of the unit commander. ‘Let’s all shut the fuck up. You’ll find out where we’re going when we get there.’

Sam smiled at him. It took all his effort. ‘Suppose there’s no chance of stopping for a slash, then.’

By now, Sam had deduced that the rivet behind him was just small enough to slide between his Plasticuffs and his wrists. He did it slowly, so nobody could see what was going on. And then they sat in silence.

The driver was skilled, Sam could tell that. SF trained. He weaved in and out of the traffic, causing plenty of horns to beep as he cut up angry commuters. It still took him a long time, though, to get up any kind of proper speed. Half an hour, maybe? Sam knew he had to bide his time, wait for his moment. He imagined they were on the outskirts of London by now.

He tried to work it all out. Damn it, he’d been careful not to pick up any trail. Maybe he’d been too preoccupied to take the right precautions; or maybe the Firm had put so many spooks on him that he didn’t stand a chance. He cursed himself, and as he did so the sallow features of Gabriel Bland rose in his mind. This was his gig, that much was clear. He wanted to get his hands on Jacob, and with Dolohov in his possession he now had the means to do it. Sam closed his eyes. He had given the Russian details of the RV. Now that was stupid. It meant that Bland and his goons would be there to welcome Jacob the moment he arrived at Piccadilly Circus; Sam wasn’t going to let that happen.

‘So we off to Poole?’ he asked. ‘I could do with a dip.’

His attempt to cajole information about their destination was met with silence. Where were they headed? SBS HQ? Hereford? Somewhere else? He did his best to stay calm. To look subdued. If he was going to get himself out of this mess, the first thing he needed to do was lull his guards into a false sense of security. Sam hung his head on his chest and closed his eyes. He wanted to look tired. Defeated. The Plasticuffs were still wrapped around the metal rivet. It would take a hell of a pull to split them. It might not even work. But he had to try. Wherever he was being taken was bound to be a hell of a sight more difficult to break out of than a moving van. He just had to wait for the right moment.

It took a while to come.

The van was moving steadily. Not too fast, but steadily. That was good. It would be better if he could see out of a window, check the surroundings. But that was not possible. He waited, breathing deeply, preparing himself for the manoeuvre that he had planned out in his head.

He waited.

‘Looks like someone had a late night,’ one of the unit said in mock-motherly tones. A couple of the others laughed.

He waited some more.

The van swerved, slowing down into a bend. The SBS men leant into the curve, their balance momentarily precarious. Now or fucking never, Sam told himself. He tugged his hands away from the attachment; the Plasticuffs dug into his skin. This was going to hurt. It didn’t matter. He had to do it.

Now.

He yanked his wrists with all his strength.

It was the plastic digging into his flesh that he felt first. Cutting it. He ignored the stinging sensation. The muscles in his arms burned as he continued to pull. And then, with a sudden snap, the Plasticuffs broke.

For a moment, no one seemed to know what was happening. Sam hurled himself towards the nearest guard and grabbed a flashbang from his ops waistcoat before throwing it to the back of the van. Confusion. He shut his eyes and – as he prepared for the noise – jumped to his feet, spinning round so he was facing forward.

Impact. White light against the inside of his eyelids before he opened them again. He was deafened and slightly disorientated, but he reckoned he had the advantage. Ten seconds before the others were back to full capability. He had to work fast. With brute force he pressed the driver’s head flat against the steering wheel. The horn beeped loudly.

Shouting all around. With his free hand – bloodied from the deep cut on his wrist – he reached down and unclipped the seat belts of both front passengers. He grabbed the steering wheel; and only then did he check the road.

They were in a country lane. Long. Straight. Just them and an area of woodland on either side. He felt hands on his shoulders. ‘Get on the fucking floor!’ a voice shouted. ‘Get on the fucking floor, now!’

Sam ignored the instruction. He twisted the steering wheel sharply, towards the forest on the right-hand side. A tree fifteen metres away: he headed towards it. In the rear-view mirror he saw a jumble of bodies. The sudden change in the vehicle’s direction had knocked his guards off balance. The guy in the passenger seat put one hand in his face and grabbed his arms, trying to push him away from the driver. But Sam held firm. He continued to drive the van straight towards the forest, then braced himself firmly against the driver’s seat, waiting for impact.

When it came, it sent a vicious shockwave through his whole body. He jolted harshly and painfully. The hand came away from his face, but not willingly; it only moved because its owner had moved too.

The windscreen shattered. Blood and glass as his assailant’s head slammed into it. The four-man unit in the back lurched forwards in a confused mess. But they wouldn’t stay confused for long. Sam threw himself forwards, past the bloodied face of the guy in the passenger seat and headlong through the shattered windscreen. Shards of glass needled his skin, but he did what he could to ignore them as he slid down the steep, crumpled bonnet of the Transit and hit the ground to one side of the tree they’d crashed into.

Shouts behind him. Orders barked. He couldn’t hesitate for a single second. Sam powered himself up to his feet and ran. Hot blood from his cut-up face pumped into his eyes, half-blinding him. Still he ran with all the force in his body.

There was a copse of trees up ahead. Ten metres. If he could make it there in the few seconds before the others were out of the van, he had chance. He sprinted, half-expecting to feel a bullet slam into him. But he didn’t, and he just kept running.

The urgency of the chase surged through him. The SBS guys could be one metre behind or fifty, he just didn’t know and he wasn’t going to slow down to find out.

The forest passed by in a blur. Sam didn’t know where the hell he was or where the hell he was going. He only knew he had to run. If the unit got him in their sights, they’d open fire; an M16 round slamming into his back and it would be game over.

He weaved and threaded randomly through the trees. Under different circumstances he’d have taken more care, covered his tracks. But he couldn’t do that now. The only thing he had on his side was whatever speed he could muster.

And if that speed failed him now, it would be end of story…

TWENTY-ONE

Jacob’s flight – a charter that carried about thirty Russians, but which had been put in the air, he suspected, especially for him – had landed in Marseilles earlier that morning. He entered the country using his false identity of Mr Edward Rucker, an IT contractor, without difficulty; and within half an hour of landing, Mr Rucker had hired himself a Laguna and a GPS navigator from the AVIS office just opposite the terminal building. He had paid the extra few euros to waive his damage excess, even though he knew he would never be returning the vehicle. A man stealing a hired motor doesn’t pay any more for it than he has to – it was just a way of diverting suspicion.

From the airport he drove to the outskirts of Marseilles, a concrete mess of low-rent high-rises. Gangs of kids – North African, mostly – hung around in groups, smoking and drinking. Jacob navigated the streets swiftly. Surov’s man had given him the name and address of a contact round here and he wanted to get the meet over and done with.

He pulled up outside one of the concrete towers, pocketed the GPS and stepped out into the humid exterior before locking the doors and glancing skywards. Thirteenth floor. A bastard to break out of in an emergency. He made his way into the building. The lift was broken and the stairwell, covered in graffiti, smelled of piss and spices. He trotted up hurriedly, aware of some voices down below that hadn’t been there when he entered. Had he attracted attention from the dealers and the drunks? Probably. But it didn’t matter. He could handle them.

The entrance to Flat 207 was the fifth in a long line of doors along an external corridor. The paint was peeling away. Jacob banged a fist against it and then stepped to one side. He waited tensely.

A voice from the other side.

‘Oui?’ A man. Gruff. Unfriendly.

‘Edward Rucker,’ Jacob called. ‘Vous m’attendez. Je veux acheter quelques trucs.’

Another pause. The door clicked open slightly. Jacob gave it a moment, then used his foot to open the door further. He peered in. Gloom. No noise from inside.

He stepped over the threshold.

As his eyes grew used to the dimness, he saw there was someone standing in another doorway at the end of the corridor. Black skin. Patchy stubble and a scarred face. As soon as their eyes met the man disappeared into the room, leaving Jacob to shut the door behind him and follow.

It stank in the flat, a mixture of marijuana and sweat. As Jacob entered, his mind instantly catalogued what was there. Thin, frayed curtains against the windows. Yellowing walls. A bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a flex and a woman, mixed race, crouched in the corner. Asleep? High? Impossible to say. Upturned milk crates – chairs, Jacob supposed. A sofa, threadbare. Several flight cases. None of them open. The man stood in front of them. He wore a brightly coloured woollen top, but his face was a lot less friendly. He scowled at Jacob.

‘English?’ he asked in a heavily accented voice before taking a drag on a roughly rolled cigarette.

Jacob nodded.

‘What is it you want?’

Jacob looked at the flight cases. ‘Open them,’ he instructed.

The man’s lip curled. He raised one finger and shook it. ‘Show me your money first, mon ami.’

Jacob gave him a flat look. ‘Forget it,’ he said, before turning to leave. Instantly the man was all over him, pulling him back into the room. He stank intensely of body odour. Jacob swatted him away, but stayed. The man, suddenly faintly obsequious, scurried back to the flight cases without another word.

Even Jacob was impressed by their contents. Assault rifles, sub-machine guns, handguns. Rocket-launcher attachments, tear-gas canisters and grenades. One of the flight cases was filled with boxes of rounds of all types. As weapons stashes went, it was a good one.

‘Who do you get this shit from?’ Jacob asked. The man just smiled, revealing an incomplete set of teeth. He didn’t answer. He did, however, step aside to let Jacob examine the merchandise. Jacob knew what he was after and it was no surprise that his attention was immediately caught by one weapon in particular. It was a suppressed Armalite AR30, a sleek bolt-action weapon with a twenty-six-inch barrel. ‘Serial numbers ground off?’ he demanded.

‘Of course,’ the man replied, as if slightly insulted. ‘I show you how to use it?’ He sounded excited by the prospect.

Jacob shook his head and rested the weapon carefully on the floor. ‘Shut up and let me look.’

From another case he selected a bipod and a telescopic sight, before turning his attention to the handguns. There were eight or nine to choose from; he felt most comfortable with a Sig 226, a Regiment stalwart. He added this to his stash, then examined the rounds. 7.82s for the Armalite. Enough to go through body armour and still make a fucking big hole. They came in sleek boxes of ten, about twice the size of a cigarette packet. The AR30 had a five-round magazine. Jacob took two boxes. Twenty rounds. Enough for a test fire to zero the weapon in; and enough for the op. ‘Match rounds,’ the dealer said. ‘Very good, very…’ He fished for a word. ‘Accurate.’

A box of.357s for the Sig and Jacob was done. He turned round to the seedy arms dealer. ‘How much?’

The guy looked like he was plucking a figure out of thin air. ‘Three thousand,’ he rasped, before flashing another of his unpleasant grins. He folded his arms.

Jacob knew he was being ripped off, but he didn’t care. He pulled out his wallet, peeled off the notes and threw them dismissively on to the couch. ‘I need a bag,’ he said.

The dealer scooped up the money. In the corner the woman stirred. She looked over at them, bored, before seeming to notice Jacob. Something lit up in her face. ‘Salut…’ she said, pathetically trying to make her rasping, addled voice sound seductive. She patted down her clothes and found a cigarette. ‘As-tu du feu?’

Jacob turned away. ‘The bag,’ he repeated. He didn’t want to stay in this dump any longer than he had to. The dealer disappeared to find something, while Jacob stripped down the Armalite. Minutes later he was walking back down the stairwell, the dealer’s insincere ‘Enchanté’ ringing in his ears and the weapons stashed in an old canvas holdall. On the ground floor, some youths had congregated. They had a lairiness about them, and gave Jacob the eye; but they soon noticed the canvas bag and backed off. Clearly they knew why strangers arrived in this building, and what they were carrying when they left.

Jacob stowed the weapons in the boot of the Laguna, climbed into the driving seat and got the hell out of there. He had a long journey ahead of him and he needed to get started.

Gabriel Bland walked quickly, Toby Brookes trotting behind.

Bland had never been to this interrogation centre, a deserted farmhouse in the middle of the Hampshire countryside. It had a well-protected basement where matters were discussed that would never make it on to The Archers. Better all round for him not to visit, though he had made use of plenty of the information that had been extracted here by various means – some of them legal, others decidedly not. Today, however, he had no time for coyness.

‘I want to know everything he’s said,’ Bland told Brookes as they walked through the farmyard, past a faceless security guard and into the house proper. ‘Miss nothing out, Toby.’

‘Redman broke into his house, sir. Tortured him.’

Bland stopped and looked at Brookes, his eyes flashing dangerously. When he spoke, it was in an emphatic whisper. ‘How, Toby?’

Brookes glanced at the security guard, clearly embarrassed by his boss’s rebuke. ‘Removed his fingers, sir. Two of them.’

Bland showed no sign of shock.

‘Seems like Dolohov sang like a canary, sir. Still singing. I guess he doesn’t have the stomach for any more interrogation. That and the fact that we’ve hinted that if he plays ball, we won’t send him back to Moscow.’

Bland didn’t bother to remark on how unlikely that was. ‘Go on,’ he instructed, allowing Brookes to lead the way through the farmhouse kitchen and down a set of cellar steps into the basement. He listened as Brookes detailed what he knew about Dolohov, an intricate story of assassinations and intrigue, with Jacob Redman at the heart of things. The meeting at Piccadilly Circus two days from now.

They walked down a long corridor with a concrete floor and uniform doors on either side. ‘One other thing, sir,’ said Brookes. ‘Dolohov told Sam Redman that he thinks one of the red-light runners has been activated to carry out a hit. Major political figure. No details on who or when, but we’ll get our inquisitors to sweat it out of him.’

Bland stopped in his tracks for a second time. He blinked and looked at Brookes – who sensed that he had once again said the wrong thing – with evident exasperation. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

Brookes kept quiet, like a schoolboy receiving a telling off.

‘Listen carefully.’ Bland pronounced his words slowly, as if to a child. ‘I want increased security for all members of the Cabinet. Special forces bodyguard assigned to the PM. Alert COBRA and tell them we take this threat extremely seriously. Level 1. Cross reference this information with any other intelligence chatter. Have you got that, Toby, or do I need to repeat myself?’

‘No, sir. Now, sir?’

‘Show me where he is first.’

They walked to the end of the corridor, then turned right. On their left-hand side a pane of glass looked into a room. Next to it was a door above which a red light was illuminated. ‘One-way glass, sir. He can’t see you.’

Bland nodded and Brookes disappeared to make the calls, leaving his boss alone to stare into the room. It was sparse. Just a table and two chairs. At one of them sat a man. His head nodded, as though he kept falling asleep and awakening himself at the last moment; his hands were palm down on the table. They were heavily bandaged.

Brookes returned, a little red-faced and out of breath. ‘All done, sir.’

‘Good,’ Bland replied. His previous frustration had left him and now he felt strangely pensive. ‘Do you believe him, Toby?’

Toby Brookes hesitated.

‘I, ah… I only ask,’ Bland continued, ‘because he gave you a great deal of information in a very short amount of time and with almost no, ah… persuasion. Does that not strike you as odd?’

‘Redman cut two of his fingers off, sir. Cauterised the wounds with a blow torch. Tore off a fingernail. God knows what else he threatened. If someone did that to me, I don’t think I’d be in the mood to play games.’

‘Indeed not,’ Bland murmured, still not taking his eyes of Dolohov. ‘Indeed not.’ His voice trailed off. ‘To think,’ he resumed suddenly, ‘this man has been working under our very noses for all these years.’

‘He hardly looks like an assassin, sir.’

Bland nodded slowly. ‘You’re too young to remember the Cold War, Toby. It was a lesson well learned in those days that the person you were looking for was likely to be the last person you expected. The char ladies. The postman.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘The Cold War is supposed to be a distant memory,’ he said. ‘But you know, Toby? Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I really do wonder.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Brookes said, obviously uncomfortable with his boss’s moment of reflection, looking like he didn’t know whether to stay or go.

They continued to stand in silence, still looking at the nodding foreigner.

‘I find myself,’ Bland mused, ‘in the curious position of having to readjust my opinion of Sam Redman. If it weren’t for him, we’d still be groping in the dark. Speaking of which…’ He looked hopefully at Brookes.

Brookes shook his head. ‘No sign of him, sir. The SBS made chase, but he got away. We’ve got eyes out in Hereford and Clare Corbett is still being trailed, but I don’t hold out much hope. He just seemed to vanish.’

‘Nobody just vanishes, Toby,’ said Bland angrily. ‘I think we can safely say where he will be in two nights’ time.’

‘Piccadilly Circus, sir?’

‘Piccadilly Circus, sir. Along with Mr Dolohov, ourselves and, of course, Jacob Redman. It sounds to me like quite a party.’ He continued to gaze through the one-way glass at Dolohov.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Jacob Redman has to enter the country somehow. No doubt he will have a false passport. You are sure that his photograph has been disseminated to all the ports?’

‘Quite sure, sir.’

Bland sniffed. ‘Then let’s hope our immigration officials are feeling alert.’ He bit his lower lip. ‘I think I’d like to have a little chat with our friend Dolohov, as he’s feeling so compliant. I’ve been playing cat and mouse with the FSB for some time now. I’m absolutely positive that we’ll find plenty to talk about, aren’t you? And in the meantime, Toby…’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘In the meantime, I want to make sure everything is done to catch up with these infuriating brothers. They are running rings round us and it’s becoming embarrassing, not to mention dangerous. Find Sam Redman, Toby. And I want his brother the moment he sets foot on UK soil.’

It took ten hours hard driving up the autoroute to reach the bland flatness of northern France. At one point Jacob took a detour and drove off into the middle of nowhere. In a deserted field, far from any sign of habitation, he test-fired the Armalite, zeroing it in to his eye. Thanks to the suppressor, the weapon barely even disturbed the birds in the trees. Back on the autoroute, he paid for his petrol and tolls with cash; when he pulled off the motorway into some faceless French town to buy a sturdy rucksack, a high-quality windproof Goretex jacket and waterproof trousers from a camping shop, plus a pair of heavy-duty lopping shears from a DIY place, he paid cash for them too. It raised an eyebrow or two in the camping shop, but that was better than leaving an electronic trail with Edward Rucker’s credit cards, no matter how safe he believed the identity to be.

Night had fallen by the time he started seeing signposts for Boulogne. He eased off the accelerator. Nothing was going to happen before midnight. He had a few hours to kill.

He headed for the centre of town. Parking up outside a small épicerie he bought bananas and chocolate for energy, as well as water. Not much. Just enough to see him through till morning. Back in the vehicle he ate ravenously, sank a litre of water, then drove off. He followed signs for the marina and it only took him minutes to arrive.

There were hundreds of boats here. Yachts, motorboats, some of them old, some of them expensively new. Jacob parked up, shoved his hands in his pockets and – with the air of a tourist enjoying a late evening walk, while ogling at the pastimes of the idle rich – he headed down into the throng of vessels. The salty air was filled with the sound of halyards clattering against their masts – a good sound because it meant there was a decent wind; lights glowed from a nearby clubhouse, reflecting on the shimmering water; there were very few people about and those that were nodded at Jacob in a friendly, comradely way. He felt relieved that he had cleaned himself up before leaving Moscow. Had he looked a state among these well-heeled boat owners, he’d have stuck out; but in his Goretex he felt he fitted right in. He nodded back. In another life and under other circumstances, this would have all the hallmarks of a relaxing holiday stroll.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The boardwalks extended a good fifty metres out into the bay. Jacob sauntered along them, but as he did he examined each vessel he passed. There were plenty of expensive yachts moored here – sleek, white beasts that were no doubt more comfortable inside than most people’s homes. They were no good to Jacob. Too difficult to steal. He needed something small, but robust. Something with an outboard, but also with sails – the chances of there being enough fuel on board were small and he didn’t want to alert himself to the port authorities by carrying canisters of diesel around when he was an unknown face.

Ignoring a sign warning members of the public off continuing along the boardwalk and stepping over a metal chain acting as a feeble cordon, Jacob eventually found his baby. It was the polar opposite to the grand yachts he had seen elsewhere: an Enterprise, the kind of thing a kid could sail in the right conditions. The chances of this vessel having been fitted with some kind of tracking device by a wealthy, paranoid owner were slim. But as far as he could tell, it looked seaworthy, and Jacob had a better chance of handling this vessel than something bigger and more complicated. Most importantly, the boat was already rigged, the sail tied to the boom and protected from the elements by a thick blue canvas. The centreboard lay in the hull, as did the rudder and tiller; and there was a small outboard motor. This little boat was far from glamorous, but it was well suited to Jacob’s needs.

He turned, strolled back along the boardwalk and returned to his car. A quick look at his watch: 22.38 hrs. He would wait till 01.00 when there were fewer people to see him go about his business. Then he would make his move.

He sat. He thought about the journey to come. It would be tough. Maybe he should have done it another way. Travelled under the tunnel with the illegal immigrants. Paid a lorry driver to hide him in the back of his vehicle. He shook his head. No. Too dangerous to leave things to the incompetence of others. He needed to get entry into the UK by himself. By sea was the only method.

And then? What?

He thought about Sam and the urgent look on his face.

He thought about Sam.

Time passed.

A knock on the window. Jacob tensed. He looked out. A policeman. ‘Défense de stationner ici.’ No parking. He looked at his watch. Gone midnight. No point arousing anyone’s suspicion for the sake of a good parking spot. He nodded at the cop and started the engine. Round the corner he found a better place to park. No streetlights.

He continued to wait.

12.58. Jacob stepped outside with his rucksack containing the hired GPS unit, the garden lopping shears and a bottle of water. Opening the boot his hands groped for the weapons bag. It was heavy. He felt the muscles in his arm tense as he lifted it from the boot and locked the car. The bag firmly in his hand, he walked back towards the marina.

The halyards were still tinkling, but there was nobody around now. A reassuring breeze carried the sound of a car ferry from nearby Calais. Jacob stepped confidently along the boardwalk until he reached his boat. He stashed his gear in the hull, then took the lopping shears and went to work on the small chain that moored the boat to the pier. They cut through the metal without much problem. The boat was free in under a minute.

Jacob started the outboard motor with a tug of the starter cord; it purred easily into life. The boat nudged its neighbour as he moved it out, but before long he was heading inconspicuously towards the port entrance. Two green lights up ahead indicated that the exit was clear. Jacob held his course and directed the vessel out into open sea. It was suddenly much colder here and Jacob was glad of his wet-weather gear. Bringing the boat momentarily to a halt, he grabbed his rucksack and pulled out the GPS unit, before altering the scale on the screen so that the coastlines of both France and England were visible and he himself was a small green dot between the two. Forward throttle and he was heading north again.

There were no lights on the boat, but even if there had been he wouldn’t have turned them on, preferring to benefit from the cover of darkness. The swell of the sea itself was illuminated only by the ripple of the moonlight; in the distance he could see the glow of cross-channel ferries and other fishing traffic. He concentrated on keeping clear of them and heading as straight as possible into the impenetrable darkness of the ocean and towards the south coast of England.

The fuel lasted for half an hour before the engine spluttered and stopped, leaving the vessel to bob impotently in the middle of the sea. The swell was bigger here; Jacob’s clothes were wet from the spray as it lapped against the side. The GPS indicated he’d travelled a third of the distance in that time. More than he’d hoped; but now it was time to sail. It had been a long time since the Regiment had given him his Yachtmaster training and it had come in handy a few times since then. Never in a million years would he have thought he’d use his knowledge for purposes such as this; but times had changed and Jacob had changed with them.

His fingers were cold out here. Cold and numb. He detached the outboard motor and pulled it into the boat. Untying the canvas from round the boom was a slow business. When it was off he folded it neatly and stowed it in the hull, weighted down under the weapons bag, then turned his attention to the main sail. It was wound tightly round the boom and tied with a sturdy cord. Jacob unwound it carefully: a rip in the main sail and it would be a long swim back to Boulogne. He pulled on the halyard and his fingers felt for the cleat, a small metallic U with a screw that closed up the open end. His cold fingers grappled with that tiny screw; once it was finally off, he threaded the cleat through the ring at the top of the mainsail, reattached the screw and prepared to hoist the sail.

Jacob felt for the wind. He was square to it. The moment he hoisted the sail it would billow up and the vessel would start moving. He needed to prepare everything before that happened. He attached the rudder to the back of the boat, fixed the tiller then slid the centreboard through the hull. A quick check of the weapons bag, which he stowed underneath a bench at the fore end of the boat; then a good swig of water. He relieved himself over the side, checked everything was okay with his GPS, then prepared to sail.

He tugged hard on the halyard and braced himself. The sail slid easily up the mast and started flapping in the wind. Grabbing the mainsheet – a thick rope that was now flapping around in the hull – he tugged. The sail billowed and filled with wind. Almost immediately he felt a crash of spray as the boat lurched forward and slammed into the swell of the sea. With his other hand he grabbed the tiller and held the rudder square to the vessel. The GPS was in his lap. The boat had turned slightly to the west, so he pulled the tiller and readjusted the sail so that he was heading north.

He was already soaked, so the spray didn’t bother him. It was cold out here at sea, but he was concentrating too much on manoeuvring the boat to feel uncomfortable. He needed to keep the thing steady. He needed to keep her on course. He needed to keep her upright.

Jacob Redman put all other thoughts from his head as he set his jaw and his course. With nothing around him but darkness, it was impossible to sense how quickly he was moving. A fair rate, he deduced, from the sound of the wind screaming in the sails and the tilt of the boat. Occasionally there was a gust; whenever that happened, Jacob spilled some wind by letting out the mainsheet a little until the gust had passed. He kept half an eye on the GPS unit. Slowly the little green dot grew closer to the northern shoreline.

He kept a careful track of time, knowing how easy it was to lose a sense of such things at sea. 02.00 passed.

03.00.

04.00.

And then the sky started glowing with a faint pink light. Morning. And with it, in the distance, the sight that Jacob had been waiting for.

Land.

The wind was behind him now, urging him onwards. The tiredness that he felt from being awake for nearly twenty-four hours fell away as Jacob looked carefully towards the shore, his eyes searching for unpopulated areas and deserted stretches of beach. Only when he was a couple of hundred metres out did he see a likely target. He adjusted his course and started tacking towards it.

His body was aching with cold and tiredness. Exhaustion. It took all his effort, as he approached this rocky inlet, to lean forward and pull the centreboard, first halfway and then, when he was only a few metres out, fully up. The boat wobbled precariously; Jacob braced himself just as she slammed on to the pebble-strewn shore. The wind was still screaming in the full sails; he crawled to the centre of the boat and tugged the halyard down, bringing the sail with it.

All of a sudden the noise stopped. He was surrounded by an almost silence. Just the lapping of the waves and the calling of a seagull. Without giving himself a moment to rest, however, he grabbed the weapons bag and his rucksack, then climbed out of the boat.

And for the first time in six long years, Jacob Redman stepped out on to English soil.

TWENTY-TWO

May 23. 07.45 hrs. Mac was at home. At home, and glad that his wife Rebecca had let him back after his recent misdemeanours. Not before time. The atmosphere back at base was horrible. Porteus’s departure had caused a weird air of mistrust among the men. Moreover, word of how Sam had been asked to stay behind with the men from the Firm had got around. It didn’t take the guys a great deal of head scratching to work out that the two events were related and, as everyone knew, Mac was Sam’s closest mate in the Regiment. They went way back. He could barely show his face without someone trying to pump him for information. Truth was, Sam had gone off the radar. Mac had tried to call him any number of times; he’d even gone round to his flat. He felt half-worried, half-angry. There was no doubt about it: Sam Redman had some explaining to do.

Back home, nobody knew anything of this, and so it was that he found himself at the breakfast table of the unim-posing two-up two-down in Hereford, listening to the chink of his kids’ spoons against their cereal bowls, while nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover. Rebecca, sitting in her dressing gown with her long hair mussed, cast him an occasional kittenish look. Amazing what a night of drunken passion could do. He smiled at her.

‘Are you back for ever now, Dad?’ asked Jess, his nine-year-old daughter.

Mac smiled at her. Not for the first time he felt a pang of guilt about his less than perfect parenting skills. ‘’Course I am, love,’ he said.

‘Except for when you go away to kill baddies,’ Huck butted in, his mouth still half full of Weetabix. Huck was seven, and although he knew nothing of the SAS, the fact that his dad was a soldier with lots of guns had caught his imagination. ‘How many baddies did you kill last time, Dad? Loads, I bet.’

‘Huck!’ Rebecca admonished him. ‘Stop asking your father silly questions and eat your breakfast. You’re going to be late for school.’

‘You’re not even dressed,’ Jess observed sulkily.

Rebecca opened her mouth to deliver another reprimand, but Mac gave her a subtle shake of the head. ‘I’ll take them,’ he said.

‘Yeah!’ Huck cried. He jumped down from the table and rushed to find his school things.

It was just gone eight-thirty when the kids were ready. Mac pulled on his jacket, kissed Rebecca on the cheek and led them outside. It was a ten-minute walk and he hoped the fresh air would clear his head.

He didn’t even make it out of the front garden before he stopped.

The figure standing on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamppost, looked like a ghost. Mac’s sharp eyes saw that his face was cut up; his eyes were haunted.

‘Sam,’ he said under his breath.

Sam said nothing. He didn’t even move. He just continued to stare.

‘Come on, Dad!’ Huck shouted. He was out of the gate now, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder. Jess was kicking her heels.

Mac looked over at Sam. ‘Wait there.’ He mouthed the words silently and pointed a finger to emphasise what he was saying. ‘Wait there!’

Sam nodded.

The walk to school was a brisk one. Huck talked nine to the dozen, but barely received a response from his dad – just a ruffling of the hair at the school gates, and a kiss on the cheek for a slightly embarrassed Jess. They sloped off into the playground and Mac ran back home. As he turned on to his street, however, and looked over at the lamppost, he saw that Sam was no longer there.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath.

‘Language, language.’ A voice from behind.

Mac spun round. Sam, right behind him.

‘Jesus, Sam. What happened to your face?’ Close up he could see just how bad it was. The skin was sliced and splintered, all the way from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his neck. A couple of the larger cuts had been closed up with steri-tape, but the treatment had a distinctly homemade feel about it. Sam touched his fingers to his face; as he did so, Mac noticed that his wrists were also deeply cut.

‘Head-butted a windscreen,’ Sam said. ‘Long story.’

‘You’d better come back to mine,’ Mac replied. ‘Becky’s good at this stuff. She can patch you up a bit better.’

Sam shook his head. ‘Let’s walk.’

They headed to a nearby park. Mums with kids played at the swings, but the two men took a seat on a park bench at a good distance from them. Sam looked like something from a horror movie, after all. They sat in silence for a moment. Mac deduced that Sam would speak when he was ready.

‘Jacob was there,’ he said finally. ‘In Kazakhstan. I warned him off.’

Mac took a deep breath and nodded. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it took a certain effort to dampen down his anger with his old friend. ‘That what you told the Firm?’ he asked.

Sam shook his head.

‘They believe you?’

‘No. Listen, Mac. All sort of shit’s gone down since then. I need to know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.’

‘Fucking hell, mate. Everyone’s asking questions.’

‘Can I trust you?’

Mac closed his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘Course you can.’

Sam gazed into the middle distance and then he started to speak – quickly, as if the words were painful for him. Mac listened in rapt attention as his story unfolded: Porteus’s letter, the red-light runners, seeing J. Then Sam described his interview with the Firm – how Bland had called his bluff about going out to rescue Jacob and how Sam had denied everything. He told Mac about the laptop, Dolohov, escaping from the SBS. And, finally, the meet.

‘When is it?’

‘Tomorrow night. Piccadilly Circus. The Firm will be there, Mac. Dolohov knew the time and place. And they’re hardly going to give J. the benefit of the doubt.’

Mac took a deep breath. ‘Mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but J.’s got a lot of questions to answer.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Are you sure he’s not in cahoots with the Russkis? He was treated like shit you know…’

Instantly Sam lost his temper. ‘You think I don’t fucking know that?’ He slammed his wounded hand against the arm of the park bench.

‘I’m just saying,’ Mac flared. And then, more quietly, ‘I’m just saying, all right?’

Sam was breathing heavily to regain his composure. He stood up and started walking. Mac walked with him. ‘These red-light runners,’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘You know what? They don’t sound so different from me when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for Jacob, I’d still be like that. It was him that put me on the right track, you know? Not my parents – they’d washed their fucking hands of me. Not my friends – they were a bunch of shitkickers. It was Jacob.’ He stopped and looked intensely at Mac. ‘I don’t know what Jacob’s up to,’ he said. ‘I just don’t fucking know. Half of me thinks he’s working for the FSB, some kind of gun for hire. Half of me thinks there’s got to be more to it than that. I’m not going to know until I ask him, Mac. Face to face. If the Firm get their hands on him, that’ll never happen. You know what those bastards are like, Mac – they’ll make what I did with Dolohov look like a tickle under the armpits.’

Mac stared at his old friend. He could feel his anger and his confusion, like heat from an oven. And somehow – he wasn’t quite sure how – he knew what was coming.

‘I need help, Mac. At the RV. The place is going to be crawling with spooks and ham-fisted coppers. I need another set of eyes. I need a weapon. I can’t ask anyone else, Mac. I can’t trust anyone else.’

Mac looked down to the ground. He felt torn – torn between his loyalty to Sam and… And what? Had Jacob turned? Was he a traitor? It seemed impossible; and yet…

He sighed, then looked back up at his friend. ‘You remember Baghdad?’ he asked quietly.

‘’Course.’

‘Before it happened, during that raid. We could have been goners if Jacob hadn’t turned up.’

Sam nodded.

‘Do you remember what he said, when you two crazy fuckers were persuading me we could take the house by ourselves?’

Sam narrowed his eyes.

‘“You’re a long time looking at the lid.” I’ve never forgotten that. Thought about it a lot.’

‘It was something he used to say.’

Mac took another deep breath and looked over Sam’s shoulder, into the distance. He could just make out the back of his house from here. He allowed himself a moment of silence.

‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Count me in. What do you want me to do?’

In a small bedsit in North London, a young man sat alone. Two more anonymous packages had arrived. Jamie Spillane once again took the precaution of locking his door before opening them. He needn’t really have bothered, for the contents of the first package would have been quite uninteresting to the casual observer. Just a briefcase. Not even a new one. This was brown and scuffed. The casual observer, however, would not have understood its relevance. They would not have realised that this briefcase was an exact copy of the one Jamie Spillane had taken such pains to photograph. He had e-mailed the images from an Internet café to a perfectly unremarkable and innocent-looking e-mail address; and now it had arrived, each mark and scratch perfectly replicated. He set it to one side on the bed and turned his attention to the second package.

It was well sealed. He struggled to get it open. Once he did, he removed the contents gingerly. A mobile phone, brand new, with a sticker on its back detailing its number. Jamie placed the phone gently on the briefcase, then removed another object. A wire, with a jack plug at one end and two metal prongs at the other. The sort of thing that, if you found it lying at the bottom of a drawer, you’d probably throw away. A set of lock picks and a tension wrench.

The package was still not empty. There was one item left. He closed up the box and slid it under his bed. Then, after a few moments reflection, he pulled it out again. There would be something slightly uncomfortable, he decided, about sleeping above a stash of high explosive. He stashed it in the corner of his room, draped a jumper over it, then stowed the mobile phone and lock picks in the briefcase and placed it back in its box.

Jamie Spillane often wondered where these items came from. Don’t worry about that, he’d been told. It’s better you don’t know. Still, he did wonder. It was lonely work, doing this by himself. But if the job went well and MI5 saw that he was a good asset for them, maybe they’d find more for him to do. He smiled at the thought.

Three days now. May 26. It had to be that day. Jamie didn’t know why, but his instructions had been quite specific. Before then he still had things to do. Preparations to make. They weren’t straightforward, but he was trained for this. Everything had gone well so far and he saw no reason to think that it wouldn’t continue to do so.

Jamie found his mouth going dry with excitement at the very thought.

Evening fell. Jacob Redman looked out on to the streets of North London.

He had bought himself jeans and a couple of shirts from a charity shop in a bland town somewhere on the south coast. From a greetings card shop he had bought a roll of bright red ribbon, the kind used for wrapping gifts – though Jacob had something very different in mind. By now he had stashed the weapons in his rucksack, which he didn’t let go of as he travelled by train into Victoria. He checked into a Travelodge near the station, where he stowed the rucksack under his bed and allowed himself a couple of hours’ sleep. His body ached from the strains of the night crossing; but when he awoke and showered he felt invigorated. Leaving the weapons where they were, he headed out of the hotel and into the Underground. Victoria line to Green Park; Piccadilly Line to Manor House. Then a 20 minute walk. Now, as the light was failing, he found himself at the seedier end of Stamford Hill. He was stalking something and he knew this would be a fertile hunting ground.

He sat in the warmth of a café on the corner of a huge crossroads. The roads were busy – commuters coming home from work – but he knew they would soon calm down. That was when he would take to the streets. He sipped on his coffee slowly, closing his eyes as the caffeine surged through his veins, and carefully going through in his mind everything that was supposed to happen in the next twenty-four hours. It had to go smoothly. It had to. He had seen the suspicion in Surov’s eyes. He knew that if anything went wrong, he’d be dodging the FSB’s hitmen for the rest of his life.

He continued to wait.

Jacob was kicked out of the café just before 9 p.m. He didn’t make a fuss. Instead he took to the streets again. He walked down a main road that headed west from the crossroads, then left into a network of residential streets. A number of them were dead ends, with signs declaring them to be NO ENTRY between the hours of ten and six. To enable the residents to get a decent night’s sleep without the noise of cars? Jacob knew better. The NO ENTRY signs were intended to dissuade kerb crawlers. Hookers were rife in this part of town. Get rid of the punters and you get rid of the problem – that was the theory. It didn’t work. As the clock ticked towards 10 p.m., the women started to appear, as though drawn to the moon and the stars.

Their attention was attracted by Jacob – a lone man, clearly giving them the eye. ‘Looking for a bit of business?’ one of them asked – a hefty girl, perhaps in her late twenties, the veins on her legs visible beneath her short skirt. Jacob bowed his head and walked on. She wouldn’t do. Not nearly. It didn’t seem to bother her – she took a bored drag on her cigarette and waited for another fish to bite.

Jacob wouldn’t be rushed. Each hooker he passed, standing sentry on their own street corners, he eyed up. He looked lascivious, no doubt, but he didn’t care. They were too old, too small, too fat, too thin. But after about half an hour of searching, he saw one girl who looked like she might fit the bill. She was tall – about as tall as Jacob – and had short dark hair. She was comfortably in her forties and nobody could say she was pretty. As Jacob eyed her up and down, she addressed him. ‘Looking for a trick, darling?’

Jacob looked around, checking that he wasn’t being watched. He moved closer to the girl. She stank of cigarettes, but her eyes seemed sharp enough; sharp enough to make him believe she wasn’t a junkie.

‘Yeah,’ Jacob replied. ‘Kind of.’ He flashed her a smile. ‘Something a bit different.’

That didn’t seem to surprise her. ‘Different is more expensive, love. Money up front, too.’

Jacob pulled out his wallet. As the hooker looked greedily on, he pulled out four fifty-pound notes and put them firmly into her outstretched hands. ‘Must be proper different,’ she muttered as she tucked the money away into her clothes. ‘Where we going?’

Jacob shook his head. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘Be here tomorrow, you’ll get the same again, plus a decent tip if you do well.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘What exactly you got in mind, love? Us girls have got to be careful, you know.’

Jacob smiled again. Friendly. Reassuring. ‘Just an appointment with a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Nothing kinky. Likes a bit of dressing up. Bit of role play. You don’t mind that, do you?’

The hooker shrugged. ‘Four hundred smackers,’ she said, ‘I’ll dress up like Orville the bleedin’ duck. What time you want me?’

‘Eight o’clock,’ Jacob replied. ‘Don’t be late. If you’re late, I’ll have to get one of your friends to join us.’

And with that he turned away, leaving the girl to reflect on her good luck, and hoping she’d stay sober enough to keep their rendezvous the following evening. In the meantime he had another job to do. He felt in his jacket for the roll of red ribbon, then started heading back towards the Underground where he jumped on a train for Piccadilly.

There were preparations to be made, and he had to make them well in advance.

May 24.

Sam hadn’t been able to stay in Hereford for any longer than was necessary. It wasn’t safe there. Too many eyes. The Firm would have his house under surveillance, that much was sure; and Credenhill was out of bounds. Much better to get out of the city and back up to London. Even there he would attract the attention of passers-by with his cut-up face. He had suppressed the desire to go and see Clare – no doubt they’d be scoping her place out too – so he’d bought himself a hooded top to conceal his features as best he could, then laid low in the small room of the Heathrow Holiday Inn, where he hoped he’d be able to merge into the background.

Mac arrived at 12.30. One look at him told Sam he hadn’t slept. He dumped a bag on the bed. It contained two Browning Hi-Power pistols with a box of 9 mm rounds and a couple of ops waistcoats to conceal the weapons and ammo. ‘Best I could do,’ he said shortly. Sam didn’t know where he’d got the gear and he didn’t bother to ask. He strapped on the waistcoat and loaded the Browning. It made him feel a lot better.

‘What time’s the RV?’ Mac asked when they were tooled up.

‘22.00,’ Sam replied. ‘The Firm will have shooters in place already, though.’

‘Damn right,’ Mac agreed. He looked serious. ‘The place is going to be crawling with them, Sam. If they get their sights on J. before we can pick him up…’

Sam shook his head. ‘They won’t shoot to kill.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They’ll have pumped Dolohov for everything he knows. He’ll have told them about the hit this red-light runner’s going to make. If they think J. knows something about that, he’ll be no good to them dead.’

‘Wounded is fine, though,’ Mac said. ‘I think we can expect them to engage him.’

‘Which is why we’ve got to scope him out first. But we can’t just hang out around Eros. The Firm will be expecting me to turn up. We have to keep hidden until the last moment.

Mac’s eyes narrowed. ‘Not we,’ he said. ‘You.’

Sam furrowed his eyebrows.

‘Think about it,’ Mac urged. ‘They might be expecting you, but they’ll never be expecting me. I can probably stand right next to Dolohov and get away with it.’

Sam didn’t like the sound of it. It would be putting his friend right in the line of fire. But it was almost as if Mac knew what he was thinking. ‘Fuck’s sake, Sam, I’ve done worse. And I’ll have the advantage. I’ll just look like some tourist feeding the pigeons. I know the Firm are morons, but even they won’t want to start shooting up innocent civilians.’

‘Yeah,’ Sam agreed. ‘Much better to leave that sort of thing to us.’

‘You’re not going soft on me, are you, mate?’

Sam put the thought of the red-light runners in Kazakhstan from his mind. ‘No. Course not. All right, Mac. You wait by the statue. There’s a newsstand on the north corner of Piccadilly. I’ll stay there. When Jacob approaches Dolohov… If Jacob approaches Dolohov…’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know the building that used to be a record shop?’

‘Tower Records?’

‘The newsstand is just outside it. The moment you ID Jacob, you hold up five fingers. I’ll put a round into the front window of the shop. Should cause quite a bang. Glass will shatter. I reckon that’ll be enough to distract everyone’s attention, don’t you?’

Mac nodded and pulled at what remained of his right ear.

‘Think it’ll give you enough time to warn J. – to get him away?’ Sam asked.

‘Yeah,’ Mac nodded. ‘But what about you?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘The Firm might think you’re Jacob, making a distraction. You might get some incoming.’

‘You got a better idea?’ Sam snapped.

A pause. ‘No, Sam,’ Mac replied. ‘I haven’t got a better idea. We’ll do it your way.’

And without another word, Mac turned his back on his friend and started fiddling with the straps on his ops waistcoat. Sam couldn’t help thinking that he was tying them tighter than they really needed to be.

TWENTY-THREE

Piccadilly Circus

It looked like just another night. The huge neon billboards flashed high overhead: an advert for The X Factor. Then the weather: dry but overcast. The date: May 24. And then the time: 9.50 p.m. On the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue a man with a guitar sang old pop songs, but was mostly ignored by the passers-by. The air was filled with the smell of fried onions; buses and cars swung round the roundabout, dodged by half-drunk pedestrians. Japanese tourists, looking at everything through the lens of a camera. There was a lot of pissed totty out on the streets, tarts dressed in mini-skirts shorter than the average belt, belching, stubbing out fags in the road and screaming at nothing in particular. On their flanks stalked hordes of horny, Brylcreemed blokes trying to look hard in their fake Ralph Lauren tops and identical black shoes. They were burping and swigging from alcopop bottles, ready for a fight, gasping for a shag. Just another night in London town.

Toby Brookes sat in the back of a black cab at the north end of Lower Regent Street. The windows were not blacked out, but were heavily tinted. Opposite him sat an MI6 field agent, a much older man, whose work name was Gillespie. Gillespie would be giving orders to the surveillance and pick-up team; Brookes would be giving orders to Gillespie.

‘Dolohov’s in place,’ the field agent said.

Just then there was a knock on the window. Brookes looked out to see a policeman indicating that he should roll it down. ‘Not the best place to park, sir,’ the copper said. Brookes didn’t reply. He just held up some ID. The policeman’s eyes widened. ‘Sorry to disturb, sir,’ he said, much more quietly, before turning and walking away.

Brookes glanced out of the window of the cab. He could just make out the figure of the Russian on the west side of Eros, facing south towards Brookes’s cab. He wore a big overcoat and his wounded hands were plunged into the pockets. He barely moved. Dolohov knew he was being surveyed from every possible angle; that there was enough firepower aimed in his direction to take out everyone milling about on the steps around the statue: the group of eight or nine schoolchildren posing for a photograph; the couple snogging; the guy with half his ear missing, sitting a couple of metres away slowly munching on a burger.

Brookes’s stomach twisted. Bland was furious that it had come to this. Not furious in a loud, explosive way, but in that calm, wordless manner that was so much more threatening. But what else could he have done? Sam Redman had gone dark; Jacob Redman had not been picked up at any of the ports. They didn’t have any other hands to play. If it all went pear-shaped tonight, Brookes could expect to leave the table. Hell, he could expect to leave the casino.

Gillespie put two fingers to his earpiece. ‘All units ready,’ he told Brookes. Then he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, son. We’ve been here before. It’ll be a walk in the park.’

‘Just keep your mind on the job.’

Gillespie inclined his head. He obviously didn’t like taking orders from someone younger.

‘I mean it, Gillespie. If this doesn’t go like clockwork you’ll be drawing your pension before midnight.’

And so will I, he thought to himself. He dug his fingertips into the palms of his clammy hands and went through everything in his head. Piccadilly Circus was surrounded by rooftop snipers. All the watchers had been supplied with the target’s likeness. The moment Jacob Redman approached Dolohov, they’d move in. Ten vehicles were on standby – black cabs, white vans, sports cars, nothing suspicious. They would block off each of the six exits to the Circus, while an armed response unit of fifteen men closed in on the statue of Eros. Instructions: shoot to wound, not to kill.

Christ. If that wasn’t enough, nothing would be. Redman was only one man, after all.

Brookes looked at his watch: 21.54.

Six minutes to go.

He stared out of the window, and waited.

21. 55.

Mac swallowed the last mouthful of his burger. It was cold. He’d spent too long eating it. Crunching up the packaging he dropped it on the floor. Some kid gave him a hard stare, but he ignored it and lit a Marlboro Light. He wasn’t a regular smoker, but it gave him a reason to be sitting alone, here on the steps of the statue of Eros.

Two metres away from the man Sam had called Dolohov.

He did not look directly at the short fat man, but even from the corner of his eye Mac could tell that Dolohov was nervous. He was standing too still for a man who was at his ease. The Russian had his hands deep in his pockets. Mac allowed himself a smile. He knew why that was.

Mac checked his watch: 21.56. He took another unwanted drag on his cigarette. Across the road, leaning up against the window of what used to be Tower Records, but which was now closed down, its windows misted from the inside, he saw Sam, hooded to stop people gazing at his cut-up face. If anyone looked at him too closely, they’d think from his face that he was just some drunk, his scars a residue from a fight. As disguises went, it wasn’t a bad one.

Mac looked about, as casually as he could. There were probably thirty people milling around the statue of Eros, tourists mostly. He didn’t know why they felt the need to be there. His eyes scoured the late-night crowds spilling into Piccadilly Circus from Regent Street. Hundreds of people. This place was like a jam jar. The people were like wasps. They swarmed to it.

It had been six years since he last saw Jacob, but Mac felt confident that he would recognise him. The dark hair. The serious eyes. His stomach turned. Nerves. Nothing to do with the operation. He could handle that. But seeing J. again. Especially when he had so many questions to answer.

And if Mac was nervous, what the hell was Sam feeling?

He took a last drag on his cigarette before stamping it out on the ground. Dolohov hadn’t moved.

He wanted to look at his watch again, but stopped himself. Clockwatching would make him look suspicious. And anyway, Jacob would come when he came.

It was only a matter of minutes now.

The neon billboards flickered on the edge of Mac’s vision.

He lit another Marlboro Light, and waited.

Sam held a copy of Nuts magazine in front of him as he leaned against the shop window. Plenty of naked flesh on the pages, but had anyone asked him what he was reading, he wouldn’t have been able to say. His eyes didn’t even brush the text or pictures in front of him. In the distance, on the other side of the statue, a neon digital clock counted down the seconds.

21.57.

Dolohov was in position. It had almost been a relief to see him – it meant at least that Jacob had not yet fallen into the Firm’s hands. But Sam’s mouth was dry, his blood hot with anticipation. He double-checked Mac: there he was, lighting another cigarette. That was two, now. He cursed under his breath. Two cigarettes in two minutes. Damn it, Mac looked like a guy waiting for something to happen.

He breathed deeply. He kept watching. His fingers felt for the Browning strapped into his ops waistcoat underneath his loose, hooded top. It was comforting to have it there.

21.58.

His brain burned with concentration, with the strain of trying to stop the crowds morph into one impenetrable blur. He looked for evidence of the Firm, but saw nothing suspicious. That figured. Unmarked cars, plain-clothed agents – they’d have pulled out all the stops to make sure they looked like part of the scenery.

21.59.

Mac had finished his second cigarette. He was blowing into his hands as if to warm them. But it wasn’t cold. Or maybe Sam was sweating for other reasons. His eyes darted around. He could taste the anticipation. His brother was here somewhere. He had to be.

Damn it, Jacob. Where are you? Where in the name of…?

Sam’s breath caught in his throat.

Everything around him – the noise of the cars, the chattering of the people – dissolved into silence. The world went by in slow motion.

Someone was approaching Dolohov.

In the distance the neon clock announced the time: 22.00 hrs.

Sam could only see the figure sideways on. He wore a black raincoat. Long. Down to his knees. It had a hood, pulled up to cover his head. Dark glasses. He stepped confidently. He was five metres away from Dolohov.

Everything happened so quickly; and yet, in Sam’s mind, so painfully slowly.

Dolohov looked up, recognition in his face. He knew he was being approached.

From two metres away Mac took a step towards the Russian. As he did so, he looked across the road and directly at Sam. Sam waited for the signal. Five fingers. But Mac was hesitating. Dark glasses and a hood – they stopped him from giving a positive ID. He looked unsure. Sam’s hands slipped into his top, ready to pull out his Browning. Ready to defend Jacob from whatever was to come.

A bendy bus blocked Sam’s vision for three or four seconds. He cursed. When the bus slipped out of view the figure was only a metre from Dolohov; and Mac was looking at Sam in panic. Fuck it, thought Sam. We need the diversion. Now! He put his hand to his gun.

But before he could spin round to blast out the shop window, he stopped. For three reasons.

The first, a screeching of tyres. Vehicles everywhere. A crunch as two cars hit each other. Men sprinting across the road and towards the island. Weapons being pulled.

And the second, a sudden, twisting realisation that something was wrong. The figure, dressed in black. It was the same height as Jacob. Almost the same build. But something wasn’t right. The gait? The slope of the shoulders? Sam didn’t know what, but he did know one thing.

The figure in black wasn’t his brother.

It was a dummy. A decoy.

The third reason, that was something he should have seen. Something he should have noticed. It had been right there staring him in the face all the time, after all. It was a small thing. Just a length of red ribbon, tied to a lamppost to the right of Eros and fluttering in the wind.

A sickening feeling in his stomach. He knew what the ribbon was, of course. A wind marker. There to make sure a sniper knew exactly what kind of breezes he was up against.

‘Mac!’ he screamed at the top of his voice. ‘Shooter!’ But too late. Mac had already realised something was wrong. He stepped back, then looked over at Sam as if to say, ‘What the hell do I do now?’

But Sam couldn’t answer. He didn’t have the time. All he could do was watch what happened…

21.57.

From the roof of the former record store, Jacob Redman looked down on to the statue of Eros. By his feet there was a dead body.

It had been dead for ten minutes and blood still flowed from its head wound. The corpse’s comms set was now fitted to Jacob’s head, and it was Jacob who responded into the microphone every two minutes, when the sniper unit’s commander checked that all was okay. And when the commander had reminded them that if Jacob Redman was positively ID’d they should shoot to wound, he had replied with a curt ‘Roger that.’

Through the telescopic sight attached to his Armalite, he viewed the red ribbon. It fluttered slightly to the south-east. A steady wind. Gentle. But enough to swerve a round off-course. He redirected his aim towards Dolohov, then moved it fractionally to the left. Experience told him that this would be a direct hit.

The Russian appeared frozen. Fear? Jacob didn’t care. It made it easier for him to keep his target in his sights.

Earlier in the evening he’d visited the hooker again. Another two hundred quid in cash and the promise of a third payment once the job was done. In the back of his mind there was a niggling worry that she wouldn’t show. He suppressed it. Jacob had seen the way the girl’s eyes had lit up at the prospect of more cash.

Money. Sometimes it was the only thing you could trust. She’d be there.

21.58.

It had been straightforward getting up here. An external staircase – a fire exit – leading down into a small alley off one of the mews streets between Piccadilly and Regent Street. If you didn’t know these places were there, you’d never notice them; but Jacob had been party to enough rooftop stakeouts to know how to gain access.

He kept his gun trained on Dolohov.

21.59.

He had told her to be on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. They had synchronised their watches. Jacob pulled away from the telescopic sight and looked down with the naked eye. An ordinary London scene. No sign of spooks or police of any kind. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe Dolohov was clean. Safe. Uncompromised. If that was the case the girl would lead him away to the RV point. If not…

Jacob put his eye back to the telescopic sight.

Only seconds to go.

His hand was steady, his breathing regular.

22.00.

He saw her, bang on time.

Dolohov looked up. His eyes narrowed, a look of bemusement. He had realised something was wrong. Another figure came into his field of view. For a split second Jacob thought he recognised him, but his attention was too focussed on other things to give his brain any time to work it out.

Too focussed on Dolohov.

And too focussed on the sudden flurry of activity that was occurring around him.

Cars storming up on to kerbsides all around. Men running towards Dolohov from every side. A net closing.

Surov’s question had been answered. The Russian was compromised. It didn’t take a genius to work that out. Jacob knew what he had to do.

His first shot was accurate. It slammed into Dolohov’s skull, even as the muffled crack from the suppressed firearm dissolved into the hubbub of the city. A flash of red as the fat man toppled, but by that time Jacob had already moved his sights towards the girl. She had opened her mouth. A scream, though he couldn’t hear it up on the rooftop.

There was no hesitation. No quickening of the pulse. The girl could identify him. She would talk. She had to go the same way as the Russian.

He fired. Once more his aim was true. One side of her head exploded, spattering the man who had grabbed her at that very moment before she too fell dead to the floor.

Chaos down below. Jacob surveyed it briefly through his telescopic sights. Terrified pedestrians, running from the scene and screaming. A flood of men pulling their weapons, surrounding the dead bodies like a ring of steel. They aimed their firearms outwards; but none of them aimed upwards.

None of them except one.

He knew exactly where the shots had come from; he was looking directly up, though he didn’t bother aiming his handgun, because he no doubt realised he didn’t have the range. It was the man Jacob had thought he recognised. And now that he had him in his sights, he realised why.

‘Mac.’

Mac continued to look up.

Jacob almost felt as if he was staring his old friend in the eye.

The ground was covered in bits of pulverised brain and bone. The air filled with screams, partygoers and pissheads who’d just been given a nasty dose of reality. Mac tried to ignore them all. He looked up to the rooftop above Sam. That was where the shots had come from, no doubt about it, and now he thought he saw a flash of movement. All around him was chaos. Men barked contradictory orders at the horrified pedestrians and each other alike. A black cab with tinted windows pulled up and two ashen-faced guys jumped out. They started shouting too, but their voices were lost in the melee.

On the other side of the street, Sam had frozen. Mac slipped away from the pandemonium around him and ran across the road to where his friend was standing. ‘Shooter on the roof!’ he shouted. ‘He has to come down on Piccadilly or Regent Street. You take one, I’ll take the other.’

‘Did you see him?’ Sam’s face, despite the cuts, was grey.

Mac shook his head. ‘I saw a figure, that’s all. Too far to ID.’ In the distance, the sound of sirens. ‘Move, Sam. I’ll take Piccadilly, you take Regent.’

Sam nodded and in an instant they parted.

Mac sprinted. Word that something was up had clearly spread quickly – pedestrians were flocking towards Piccadilly Circus and he was running against the tide. As he ran, he took in everyone around him. None of them were Jacob.

Thirty metres. Forty metres. Fifty. To his right, a mews. He turned into it, then stopped a moment. To his right again, an alleyway between two shops. Narrow. Dark. Big metal bins and a rear loading-bay entrance to one of the shops on Piccadilly. At one end, a tall, spiral metal staircase. Mac gripped his weapon. Without any more hesitation, he ran towards the steps and started to climb. He looked upwards and pointed his gun in that direction too, half expecting to see the shooter descending at any moment. He tried to go quietly, but that was impossible, not at speed. His footsteps made the metal of the staircase echo and ring.

The roof onto which he emerged was perhaps thirty metres by thirty. At one end, heading towards Piccadilly Circus, was a low wall and a gap; then an almost identical roof beyond, and another one beyond that. Around the edges were disused chimney pots, brick turrets with vast television aerials and more low walls. Good cover for anyone who needed it.

It was quiet up here. The noise of the traffic and sirens from down below was audible, but faint. Looking around he saw nobody. The sound of traffic and sirens drifted upwards; but they were somehow disjointed. He felt as if he was in another world.

Mac gripped his Browning. He held his gun hand out and stepped forward, his eyes narrow.

‘Jacob!’ he called. His voice echoed.

Jacob.

Jacob.

He stepped forward again, checking left, checking right, moving ahead. His senses were alive. As sharp as glass. But he never even heard the footsteps behind him.

‘Drop the gun, Mac.’ And as he heard the words, he felt hard metal against the back of his head. He closed his eyes. He didn’t need to turn round to see who it was. The voice was instantly recognisable.

‘I said drop it.’

Mac let the weapon fall from his hands.

‘Walk.’ Jacob’s voice was clipped. ‘Now.’

Mac stepped forwards. Ten paces. Fifteen.

‘Hands on your head.’

He did as he was told. And then, slowly, he turned round.

Jacob looked older. Older than he should have done. His dark eyes were darker, his face more intense. His handgun didn’t falter in its direction: it was aimed directly at Mac’s head. A silence as the two men looked at each other.

‘A long way from Baghdad, J.,’ Mac said.

No reply.

‘I was there,’ Mac continued. ‘In Kazakhstan. Sam risked a lot to warn you. Me too. Reckon we deserve to be told what’s going on.’

Still no reply. Mac lowered his hands from his head. Keep talking, Mac told himself. Keep talking.

‘I don’t think anyone’s going to be mourning Dolohov. Not from what Sam said.’

‘Where is he?’ Jacob demanded.

‘Close,’ Mac replied. ‘He’ll be here any moment.’

‘He should have stayed away. Both of you should have stayed away.’ Jacob sounded unsure of himself. It wasn’t like him. Mac couldn’t remember ever having seen doubt in his friend’s eyes; but he saw it now.

He stepped forwards. ‘Put the gun down, J.,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to shoot me any more than you’re going to shoot your brother.’

‘Don’t move.’

Mac ignored him and continued to walk slowly.

‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ he repeated. ‘What’s going on, Jacob? Put the gun down and talk to me.’

But Jacob didn’t put the gun down. And he didn’t talk to Mac. Not any more. His lip curled. Almost as though he was just an observer to the scene; it crossed Mac’s mind that it was an expression of pure anger and dislike.

The first shot from Jacob’s handgun slammed into Mac’s right shoulder. It felt like a heavy punch at first, and he fell to the ground as a hot wetness seeped into his clothes. Fuck. The round hadn’t exited. He could feel the bullet lodged in his shoulder. It felt like someone turning a slow, sharp knife into his muscle. He could even feel how hot the round was. He looked up. Jacob was there, staring down.

‘Cocksucker!’ Mac spat. ‘We fucking saved your bacon…’

‘You should have stayed away, Mac,’ he said as he stretched out his gun arm again and aimed it at his old friend’s skull.

Mac shook his head, desperately, violently. But he knew he was properly cunted. He thought of his wife, Rebecca. He thought of Jess and little Huck. He opened his mouth to speak, but words wouldn’t come.

‘You should have fucking stayed away.’

Mac Howden didn’t hear the shot that killed him. The bullet entered his head before he even had a chance. Nor, as he fell to the ground with one side of his head shot away, and miniature fountains of blood spraying upwards, did he see the look on the face of his killer.

A grim look. A horrified look. A wild-eyed look. A look of utter, brutal self-loathing. The look of a man covered in bits of another man’s brain tissue and blood.

The look of a man who could not believe what he had just done.

Sam ran along Regent Street, his gun in his fist. He collided with two men – big, burly and drunk. They wore jeans and football shirts, sporting joke orange beards. They yelled obscenities at him in broad Scottish accents and pushed him in the chest. Sam didn’t even bother to warn them. He whacked the gun against the side of one man’s face, which softened into an angry red welt. The other man he kneed in the groin before continuing to run.

His mind burned with impossible thoughts. He tried to keep his focus, to look for somewhere to access the rooftops. But he had run a hundred metres. Two hundred. He turned left, but found himself lost in a complex of side streets between Regent Street and Piccadilly. His blood raced with urgency. Like in a childhood dream he felt he couldn’t run fast enough.

He was on Piccadilly now, running east. Finally, to his left, he saw a small mews road. He ducked into it. To his right an alleyway, and a set of metal fire-exit stairs running up. Sweat poured from him, but he didn’t slow down. Three steps at a time. Four. He hurtled up, stopping to catch his breath only when he was on the roof.

He looked around, his gun at the ready. With a sense of nauseous anticipation he almost expected Jacob to be there. Half-formulated phrases buzzed around his brain. He felt a curious mixture of excitement and blind anger.

But Jacob wasn’t there. He was nowhere to be seen. As he stared out over the rooftops, however, Sam became aware of something else. Firmly gripping his gun, he stepped forward until he was standing right by the body.

Sam didn’t need to check it was dead. The face was unrecognisable, just a shredded, bloodied pulp. He knew it was Mac, though. He recognised the clothes and even if he hadn’t… He just knew.

Time stood still.

Sam bent down. He stared at the damaged corpse of his friend. His blood turned to ice in his veins. He couldn’t move.

They’ll tell you things, Sam. Things about me. Don’t forget that you’re my brother. Don’t believe them. What had sounded before like a warning now sounded nothing but a deceit.

‘Jesus, Mac,’ he whispered. And then, with a sudden outburst of violence. ‘Jesus!’

He stood up and looked around for something to kick, something to punch. There was nothing and so Sam found his arms flailing uselessly in the air, like some animal twitching violently in its death throes. He heard a voice. It was a hollow, hoarse scream.

‘NO!’

Only when the scream had echoed away into nothing did Sam realise it had come from his own throat.

He looked around helplessly, as if by searching on this lonely rooftop he could do something about the terrible events that were unfolding. But there was nothing to do and his eyes fell on the body of his friend, unnervingly still in the way only corpses can be. As he looked he heard Mac’s voice in his head, repeating Jacob’s words:

You’re a long time looking at the lid, Sam.

Blood was still seeping from his friend’s wounds. It oozed up against the sole of his foot.

You’re a long time looking at the lid.

Sam stepped back. And as he did so, he realised the whole world had changed. That he had changed. Jacob had always made him feel like a kid. The younger brother, always looking up. Respectful. In awe.

Not any more. Things were different, he saw that now. He stretched himself to his full height and jutted his jaw at Mac. ‘He’s not going to get away with it, Mac,’ he said, his voice still raw from the scream. ‘I fucking promise you, he’s not going to get away with it.’

Sam drank in the sight of Mac’s body – the last time, he knew, he would ever see him – then turned his back. It was wrong to be leaving his corpse here, but he had no other choice.

Not if he was going to do what he needed to do.

Not if he was going to avenge his friend’s death.

Not if he was going to find his brother and put a stop to this, once and for all.

TWENTY-FOUR

Toby Brookes’s voice was strained and emotional. Gabriel Bland had to press his confounded mobile phone hard into his ear in order to hear him above the sound of shouting and sirens. With each piece of news he found his fury doubling. Dolohov dead. Another civilian casualty and all this in front of a city full of witnesses. Worst of all, no sign of Redman – of either Redman. No leads, no nothing.

When Brookes had finished telling him everything, he was silent for a moment. ‘I, ah… I suppose I don’t need to tell you,’ he said eventually, ‘that you are in a very, very grave situation, Toby.’

‘I’ve just seen two people shot.’

‘I don’t believe I need that statistic repeating.’

A pause. And then Brookes again, angrier than Bland had ever heard him: ‘Fuck this! Just… just fuck this!’ A click, and the line went dead.

Bland stood in his office with the phone to his ear for a good while after Brookes’s voice disappeared. Brookes had cracked. That much was clear. Bland couldn’t let that distract him. There were more important things at stake than a young man who couldn’t take the pace. He had the unnerving sensation of everything unravelling around him. His breath came in deep, nervous lungfuls. Then, suddenly, with an uncharacteristic burst of violence, he hurled his phone against the window of his office, which looked out over London. The toughened glass of the window was entirely unharmed; the phone, however, shattered. He stormed to his desk and buzzed through to his assistant. ‘I need to speak to the chief,’ he said. ‘Now.’

And what a conversation it was going to be. This was turning into the biggest balls-up the service had seen for years. They could issue all the DA notices they wanted, but with so many witnesses to the shootings it was probably all over the Internet already. And things were going to get worse. A major hit, Dolohov had said. Political. Jacob Redman was their only link. Without him they were blind men in a dark room. If things were bad now, they were going to get a whole lot worse.

Gabriel Bland headed towards the door, steeling himself for the encounter to come. It promised to be ugly. He knew that if anyone was going to take the rap, it would have to be him.

Five minutes later, the Chief of MI6 was staring up at him with a look of blank astonishment.

Bland had never appreciated the experience of taking orders from someone his junior. He had seen the service’s chiefs come and go. He had disapproved of none of them quite so much as this one, with his ridiculous ideas of making the service more ‘open’ – interviews with the media and advertising for posts on the Internet. This obsession with image, however, was just a distraction from the nitty gritty of their day-to-day work.

But right now, Bland had to put all that from his mind as he stood in front of his boss, who could quite clearly see an early retirement looming. ‘Who’s your agent on the ground?’ he demanded.

‘Toby Brookes, sir.’

‘Fire him. Fuck-ups don’t come bigger than this, you know. I’ve already got the PM asking me why he can’t take a leak without one of our guys looking over his shoulder. Now you’re telling me our only lead is missing and our collateral’s dead on the ground at Piccadilly Circus.’

‘Yes.’

The Chief banged his hand on the desk. The coffee that was sitting there sloshed out of its cup. ‘Our analysts are crying into their files,’ he fumed. ‘None of them can tell me why the Russians would order a hit on one of our politicians. Things are frosty with Moscow, but there’s no point to it. Nothing to be gained.’

Bland cleared his throat. ‘The Russians are a law to themselves, sir,’ he said. ‘Especially after Litvinenko…’

The Chief’s face hardened at the memory of the former Russian spy assassinated on British soil – another big embarrassment for the service. ‘That’s what happens when you put a former KGB hood in charge of the fucking country, Gabriel,’ he said, neatly batting the implied criticism away. ‘Moscow’s a liability at the moment. God knows what they’re trying to do.’ He frowned. ‘These Redman brothers. They’re our only chance of getting some sort of clue as to what’s happening. Where the hell are they?’

Bland didn’t reply. He had nothing to say.

The Chief gave him a dark look. ‘Listen to me carefully,’ he said. ‘You’ve got every asset this agency can throw at it. Find them, Gabriel. And when you’ve found them, do whatever it takes to get everything they know. Whatever it takes, Gabriel. I’m sure you understand what I mean. No comeback.’

Bland nodded, his eyes dead. ‘I understand, sir.’

‘Good. Now get the hell out of my sight. I don’t want to hear from you unless it’s to tell me that you’ve got one or other of those bastards in custody. And if you haven’t done it within twenty-four hours, I’ll find someone more capable who can.’

In another part of London, far away from the bloodshed of Piccadilly and the panic at MI6 – and completely oblivious to both – Jamie Spillane was breaking into a house.

It was a small house. In order to make his way up to the back door, the young man had climbed through several adjacent gardens. His fingers were splintered from climbing up and down wooden fences – he felt slightly foolish for not having worn any gloves and made a mental note to do so in the future – and the contents of his rucksack jutted uncomfortably into his back.

There was a small patio outside the back door. It was a bit of a shit heap – bags of rubbish, an old barbecue, a rusty bike. The paintwork on the door was peeling and the wooden frames of the two external windows were rotting away. Each window was covered from the inside by a blind, and the glass of the back door was mottled and frosted. The young man couldn’t see which room he would be entering. He looked at his watch. A quarter to one. Silence from the house and no lights from the upstairs windows. The occupier was fast asleep.

He felt inside his jacket pocket. The lock picks and tension wrench were there. The young man licked his lips and bent down to the lock. As he prepared to insert the picks, he gently tried the door handle.

It moved. He pushed the door open. Nobody had thought to lock it. He shrugged slightly and mastered a little twinge of disappointment as he realised he had rather been looking forward to picking the lock, to using one of the skills he had learned.

No matter. He quietly stepped inside and shut the door behind him, then stood perfectly still for a few seconds while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

He was in a kitchen. It smelled of food that he didn’t recognise and imagined he wouldn’t find very good to eat. There were dirty plates in the sink and most of the work surface in this small room was crowded. How strange, he thought to himself, that someone working in an embassy should live in such squalor. An archway led into another room. A street light from the front window illuminated it. There was a thick carpet in here, and a tiny table at one end, pressed against the window – one of those that looked out on to the back garden. At the other end, a two-seater sofa in front of a television, with a coffee table in between the two.

A creak. He jumped.

Beyond the sofa was a door, closed, that he assumed led upstairs. He found himself staring at it, half-expecting someone to burst through. But no one came. The creak was just that, he realised – the joists of the house relaxing. Still, his breath came in deep bursts. His skin felt hot and cold at the same time. He dragged his eyes away from the door and looked at the object lying on the coffee table.

The object he was looking for. The brown briefcase.

He forced his muscles into movement, removing his rucksack from over his shoulder and starting to undo it. His fingers were shaking slightly; it seemed to take an age to unbuckle the straps. The more he hurried, the slower he seemed to go, but eventually he got it open. Next he pulled out the replica suitcase and opened it. The original case contained a few papers. He flicked through a few of them. They were written in an alphabet he couldn’t understand, but as he scanned through, his eyes fell upon the words Kakha Beridze in English lettering. He nodded with satisfaction. There was also a pen clipped to the interior and a used paper napkin, crumpled and stained where its owner had wiped their mouth. The young man meticulously removed each of these objects and transferred them to the replica case. He then rifled through the original to check there was nothing he had missed. It was empty, apart from a few crumbs, which he carefully picked up and dropped into the replica. Then he closed both cases, placing the replica back on the table in exactly the same position that the original had been and stuffing the original into his rucksack.

The young man stood up. As he did so, his attention was caught by something he hadn’t noticed before. A picture on the wall. In the foreground a meadow, green and dotted with little yellow flowers; behind that, a line of snow-capped peaks. The sky, deep blue and dotted with puffy white clouds. Below the picture, in bright, tacky writing, the words Beautiful Georgia.

He looked at that picture. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was being asked to do this. He was not into politics and he struggled every time he tried to work out the consequences of this operation. But, as he had done so many times before, he let it go. He was just a small piece in the bigger intelligence jigsaw, he knew that. Maybe if he did his job well, if he proved he could be trusted… well then, maybe something else would come his way.

Hoisting the rucksack over his shoulder, he stepped back towards the kitchen. On the table at the end of the room, something caught his eye. A wallet. He approached it and saw several notes peeking out.

Somewhat unnecessarily he looked over his shoulder. It would be so easy to steal the contents of that wallet. Just a couple of notes. Who would notice? He struggled with himself. Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to steal anything. It’ll raise suspicion. You mustn’t do anything to give away the fact that you’ve been there.

He took a deep breath. The temptation was difficult to control, but he managed it. Just. He stepped through to the kitchen, then out into the back garden, closing the door quietly behind him. Squeezing his splintered hand open and closed, he prepared to scale the garden fences again. He allowed himself a brief smile. It had gone well. In an hour he would be back home and then there was just one more part of the operation to complete.

And that would be the easy bit.

Sam sat in the unwelcoming surroundings of his hotel room. He looked numbly at the bag Mac had brought with him. How long would it be before they found his body? Hours? Days? Weeks? Every impulse urged him to go to Mac’s family, explain to his wife what had happened. But he couldn’t do that. He was a wanted man. Rebecca was going to have to suffer her husband’s unexplained absence a bit longer until she heard the news that would turn her world upside down. It sickened him to think about it.

And it sickened him to think about his brother. He didn’t doubt that Jacob was the shooter. The whole scenario had his fingerprints all over it. The ribbon. The decoy. It was the way his mind worked. Sam knew that better than anybody.

And better than anybody he knew what a mess he’d made of things. He should never have got Mac involved. Dolohov’s death was just the beginning. Jacob’s red-light runners were planning something. Something big, but he didn’t know what and he was no closer to finding out. Go to the Firm now and they’d stick him in the deepest hole they had. They’d be panicking. They’d know they had to find Jacob and they’d know Sam was their only link. Half the fucking service would be out there looking for him. Anywhere they thought he might be – his flat in Hereford, Clare’s place. And of course, he couldn’t show his face at SAS headquarters. His passport would be flagged and his mobile phone bugged.

All this because of his brother.

Jacob’s dark features flashed before his eyes. Jacob was a real soldier, his dad had said.

‘We’re all real soldiers.’ Sam muttered out loud the reply he had given his father. We’re all real soldiers, and sometimes we do things we’re not proud of. He thought of the red-light runners in Kazakhstan, turned from unknowing stooges to cold corpses at the squeeze of a trigger. In the darkness of the night, when it was just Sam and his conscience, he knew he would be haunted by those young men. He was a soldier, but he wasn’t without feeling.

Jacob was a real soldier.

Was Jacob proud of what he had done? Was his own conscience pricked? Was he without feeling? Could he kill one of his closest friends and not be haunted by it for the rest of his days? Or was he too far gone for that?

Sam felt himself sneering at the thought, the anger welling up in him once more. Half of him wanted to see his brother; the other half didn’t know what he’d do when he caught up with him.

He looked over at Mac’s bag once more. Solitary. Ownerless.

Jacob was a real soldier.

His dad’s voice echoed in his head.

Sam stopped. His brow furrowed. Through the fog of his tired mind he remembered the last time he had seen his father. It had only been a few days ago, but it seemed like half a lifetime. Fragments of that conversation seemed to float in the air around him.

Jacob was a real soldier.

You know what those bastards are like. Jacob was an embarrassment to them. We both know how easy it is to get rid of people who are an embarrassment.

He always looked out for you, Sam.

You talk about him like he’s dead.

If your brother was still alive, what’s the one thing he’d do if he knew I was cooped up in this shit hole, pissing into a pipe and wasting away to a fucking skeleton? What’s the one thing he’d do?

Sam hadn’t answered. He hadn’t had the heart. He knew too well that nothing would have kept Jacob away.

Nothing would have kept Jacob away…

Nothing would have kept Jacob away…

And suddenly, in that dingy hotel room, it was crystal clear what Sam had to do. He looked at his watch: 3 a.m. The night was slipping away. He only had one chance to catch up with Jacob. If he missed that, he knew, without any doubt, he would never see his brother again.

His ops waistcoat was on the bed. He strapped it to his torso, secreted the Browning pistol into it, then covered himself with his hooded top. He looked around the room. Nothing to take. Just Mac’s bag, and he didn’t need anything from that. It would only slow him down. He left it there as he slipped out of the room and surreptitiously left the hotel. In the hotel car park, he felt as though a million eyes were watching him. He ignored them. They were imaginary. Kill the paranoia, Sam. You haven’t time for it. He started examining the cars on offer. Nothing modern, he told himself. Nothing with an alarm or immobiliser. Get your collar felt by the Old Bill now and you’ll have some serious explaining to do.

He walked. He kept alert.

It was an old Fiesta that caught his eye. A dent on one side, with rust creeping round it. A shabby, unkempt interior. Sam looked around to check that he was alone. Nothing. Nobody. He walked round to the passenger’s side where, with a sharp jerk of his elbow, he smashed the window in. The glass shattered onto the passenger seat. Leaning in, he stretched out to open the driver’s door, then walked round and climbed in.

The vehicle belonged to a woman or a short-arsed man – he had to move the seat fully back in order to sit properly. His fingers groped for the panel under the steering wheel and, with a sharp tug, he pulled it off. With both hands he felt for the wires underneath; in less than a minute he had hotwired the engine into life.

Another time check: 03.15. Assuming the car’s owner awoke no earlier than six, Sam had three hours. It was enough. In three hours’ time he would be long gone.

In three hours’ time he would be back in Hereford.

TWENTY-FIVE

Hereford, May 25. 04.55.

Max Redman awoke.

His room was dim, almost dark, with the morning light just beginning to bleach the air. As always happened, it was the confusion that hit him first. Where was he? What was this place? And then the pain. The dull, insidious ache that weakened his thin limbs and reminded him, with a shock that never grew less brutal through familiarity, that he was imprisoned – both by his illness and by the four walls that surrounded him.

He groaned, then lay there listening to his own rasping breath. It was only gradually, and with a creeping sense of unease, that he realised he wasn’t alone.

With difficulty, he moved his head to one side. A figure by the door. The old man couldn’t make out who it was. He squinted, but it was no good and he felt the anxiety of the infirm.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, his aggressive voice neutered by his weakness. ‘It’s too early for breakfast. I’m not fucking hungry.’ Deep down, though, he knew it wasn’t someone bringing him food. He struggled to stretch his thin arm out for the control that would move his hospital bed into a sitting-up position. His fingers touched it, but it slipped from his grasp. He swore and tried again. By that time, however, the figure was moving. Stepping towards him. And the closer it got, the clearer its features became.

Max Redman’s weak limbs became weaker. His breath rasped all the more. The figure stood by his bedside and looked down. Neither man said anything.

It was Max that broke the silence. ‘My God, Jacob,’ he breathed. ‘What’s happened?’

His son’s face was ravaged. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes and a frown on his forehead that reminded Max of when Jacob was a little boy and had been scolded. But his eyes themselves had the thousand-yard stare, that look of numb shock that Max knew from the battlefield.

Jacob didn’t reply. He just continued to look down on his father.

For a brief, irrational moment, Max wondered if he was being visited by a ghost; he wondered if his own eyes looked as haunted as his son’s. Max Redman was not a man who was easily scared; but he felt fear now, creeping down his spine and making his extremities tingle and burn. If this wasn’t a ghost, why would Jacob not speak?

‘What’s happened?’ he repeated. His voice sounded unsure. Max would never have been anything other than dominant in conversations with his sons, but now the tables had turned. He was frightened of Jacob. It took courage for him to stretch out his hand towards his son’s, an unprecedented gesture of timid affection. Their skin touched.

And then, slowly, like a man in church preparing to pray, Jacob lowered himself to his knees. He looked to the floor and allowed his father to place his thin hands on his head. They stayed like that, father and son, for nearly a minute. They might have stayed longer, had they not both been disturbed by the faint sound of wheels screeching in the car park outside. Jacob stood quickly. His eyes had narrowed, but his face had lost none of that troubled expression. He walked backwards until he was halfway across the room and his face was once more shrouded by the half light. Then he turned and walked to the door.

‘Your mother couldn’t live without you, Jacob,’ Max said. Jacob stopped, but didn’t turn round. His father’s difficult breathing filled the room. ‘Neither of us could live without you.’

A thousand thoughts suddenly emerged in Max’s mind, like the dead rising from their graves. A thousand emotions. A thousand apologies. But he didn’t have the energy to speak any more, even if he had had the skill to articulate them. And so they went unsaid, lost in the dark silence between the father and his son.

Max closed his eyes. He heard the door click open, then fall quietly shut. When he opened his eyes again, Jacob was gone.

It was precisely three minutes past five when Sam’s stolen Fiesta screamed into the car park of his father’s care home. There were barely any other vehicles there, just those belonging to the night staff. He stopped at an angle across two parking spaces and sprinted towards the building.

The receptionist on duty looked startled as he burst in. The man shouted something, but whatever it was didn’t register in Sam’s mind as he hurried past, along the corridors that smelled of disinfectant as he followed the familiar route to his dad’s room. As he ran, he put his hand under his hooded top and loosened the Browning that was nestled in his ops waistcoat. A strange sense of calm fell over him, an other-worldliness. He didn’t know quite what would happen when he reached the room, but with an almost emotionless detachment he knew he would be ready for it.

His father’s door. Closed, just like every other one along the corridor. He paused briefly, pulled out the Browning and, weapon at the ready, opened it slightly.

No sound. He kicked it open further and stepped inside.

His father was lying there, just where he always was. The bed was flat, the curtains closed. But Max’s eyes were wide open. Sam pointed his gun quickly to all four corners of the room. There was just the two of them, so he approached his father’s bedside.

Max’s face was grey. Tired. His eyes were red and the rough skin on his face was dabbed with moisture. Sam had never seen his father cry. Not even when Mum had died. It didn’t happen. There was no doubt about it, though. Max Redman had been crying and Sam knew why.

‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

Max stared at his younger son. He looked like he was struggling to control his emotions. ‘Why the piece?’ he asked, his eyes flickering to Sam’s gun.

Sam grabbed the control for the hospital bed. It seemed to move in slow motion, to take half a lifetime to bring Max upright. When finally his father was in a sitting position, Sam spoke again. ‘I know he’s been here, Dad. Where’s he gone? What did he say?’

Like a petulant child, Max pursed his pale lips.

‘Damn it, Dad! It’s important.’

Max’s chest rattled as he breathed. ‘Is he in trouble?’ he asked, before collapsing into a fit of coughing. As the fit subsided, he closed his eyes. ‘He looked like something had happened.’

The image of Mac’s dead body flashed across Sam’s mind, like a hot iron branding the skin of a live animal. He felt the muscles in his face tightening involuntarily, giving away his emotions. Max’s eyes narrowed. He might be old and sick, Sam thought, but he wasn’t stupid. His father looked away resolutely.

Sam took a deep breath. He couldn’t tell his father the truth. It would kill him. But he had to know what had passed between Max and Jacob. He had to know what his brother had said. ‘Listen, Dad.’ His voice low, urgent. ‘I don’t know what he told you, but yes, he’s in trouble. I can help him, Dad. I can get him to safety. But I’ve got to know where he is. If I don’t find him, someone else will.’

A noise outside the door. Commotion.

Max’s face hardened. He refused to talk. It was all Sam could do to stop himself grabbing his father’s nightclothes in his fist through frustration. ‘For God’s sake, Dad! For once in your life don’t be so fucking stubborn. Jacob’s not the golden boy you think he is.’

‘Stay out of it, Sam,’ Max replied, wheezing as he spoke. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’ More coughing. ‘All right, so Jacob came to see me. What’s wrong with a son wanting to visit his parents?’

As Max said those words, two things happened. In a sudden flash of insight, Sam knew where Jacob would have gone. And just as that thought hit him, the door burst open. ‘That’s him!’ a breathless voice said. Sam spun round. In the corridor he saw the receptionist he had so abruptly ignored on his way in; and in front of him, entering the room, was a security guard – broad shouldered, grim-faced and rushing towards him.

Sam acted on auto-pilot. A violent kick in the groin and the security guard doubled over. Seconds later, Sam had one of his arms crooked around the man’s neck and his Browning pressed up against his head. Sam pulled him into the corridor.

‘Get in the room!’ he shouted at the receptionist. ‘Get in the fucking room or I’ll kill him!’ The frightened receptionist did as he was told. As Sam stepped backwards he heard his dad shouting weakly. ‘Stop him. He won’t do anything.’ But the receptionist was too terrified.

‘Don’t make a fucking mistake,’ Sam told his hostage, ‘and you won’t get hurt.’ He hustled him along the corridor and down the stairs. They echoed noisily, but it was early and nobody else was awake. The guard was crying with fear. am just ignored it. They hurried through the reception area. By now the receptionist could have called the police. Sam didn’t have any time to lose.

Outside the building, he dragged the guard halfway to the car, then stopped. ‘Get on the ground,’ he instructed. The guard, frozen with fear, did nothing. ‘Get on the fucking ground!’ He pushed him down and the guard hugged the tarmac. ‘Move an inch and I’ll fucking kill you,’ Sam told him, before sprinting to the car. He was sweating profusely despite the early-morning chill, as the car coughed into life. Speeding from the car park, he looked in the mirror; the guard was still prostrate on the ground.

All notions of care and secrecy had evaporated from Sam’s mind. He drove furiously, screeching round corners and ignoring red lights. The few cars that were on the road at this early hour swerved away from him; horns blasted then faded away. Sam ignored them all. He knew the road he had to take, even though he hadn’t driven it for four years.

The graveyard was surrounded by black iron railings topped with spikes. Sam’s Fiesta came to a halt just outside the entrance, two wheels up on the kerb. He grabbed the gun that had been sitting on the passenger seat, jumped out and sprinted in among the graves. It was a large cemetery; as Sam ran among the stones, images of the last time he was here flashed in his mind like punches. The coffin being lowered into the ground; a small group of people standing around, barely protected from the biting cold; Sam himself standing next to his father; and the absence of one person keenly felt by everyone there.

What’s wrong with a son wanting to visit his parents?

Jacob was there, just as Sam knew he would be. He stood on the unkempt grass in front of the simple tombstone, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, his back towards his brother. Sam halted some thirty metres away. He caught his breath and extended his gun hand. And then he walked forward.

He didn’t expect Jacob not to hear him; he just wanted to be prepared when his brother turned round. Sam was barely ten metres away when he did.

Sam stopped. Jacob also held a gun. Both brothers faced each other and Sam couldn’t take his eyes from Jacob’s face. He looked like he was wearing a mask – a mask of anxiety and hate. He didn’t appear at all surprised to see Sam.

‘Long way from Kazakhstan, Sam,’ he drawled.

An unnatural silence surrounded them.

‘Is that what you said to Mac?’ Sam asked. ‘Before you killed him.’

Jacob’s face wrenched itself into an agonised expression. His hand, Sam noticed, started to shake. ‘Mac got in the way,’ he said. ‘It was his own fault.’ Sam didn’t reply, so Jacob repeated his words, as though trying to persuade himself that it was true. ‘It was his own fault.’

‘You know that’s not true, Jacob.’

Now it was the older brother’s turn to be silent.

‘Mac was helping me. Helping you, actually. Trying to stop the Firm from sticking a bullet in you.’

‘I didn’t need your help.’

‘Clearly not.’

They stood.

‘You should have been here four years ago, J.,’ Sam said. ‘When we buried Mum. You should have been here.’

Those dark eyes bored into him. ‘She wouldn’t have missed me. Not her, or the old man.’

‘You’re wrong.’

Jacob snorted with contempt.

‘Jesus, J. What the hell’s happened to you?’

‘You should put the gun down, Sam. You’re not going to shoot me.’

Sam looked meaningfully at Jacob’s own weapon. His brother shrugged, then stowed it inside his jacket. Sam lowered his gun arm, but he kept the weapon in his hand. ‘I’m waiting for you to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong, J. That you didn’t kill Mac. That your red-light runners…’

Jacob interrupted him sharply. ‘How did you know about them?’ Then, almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he nodded in understanding. ‘Dolohov,’ he said.

‘We had a little chat.’

‘Good for you. I’m going to leave now, Sam. Why don’t you go back to the old man’s bedside. Talk about what great soldiers you both are.’

Sam’s eyes narrowed. ‘You honestly reckon that’s what he thinks?’

Jacob didn’t reply.

‘Since you went dark, he’s talked about no one but you. I mean it, J. I can’t spend five minutes in his fucking presence without hearing how much better you are than me. Or were. He thought you were dead, J., because you never came to see him.’ Sam looked over at the grave. ‘Mum too. If you hadn’t left, she wouldn’t have given up.’

Jacob’s lips had thinned. ‘Shut up,’ he said quietly.

‘No, Jacob. You don’t know what I’ve been through to catch up with you.’ He found himself breathing deeply, trying to keep his anger under control. ‘Mac had two children, you know. Cute kids. I don’t suppose you thought about that when you plugged him.’

‘It was his own fault,’ Jacob half-shouted, repeating his mantra.

‘And Rebecca, too. Wonder how she’s going to cope? You know, Mac risked a hell of a lot in Kazakhstan to stop the Regiment nailing one of their own. And in the end you nailed him.’

‘Fuck the Regiment!’ Jacob flared. ‘I stopped being one of them the day they kicked me out.’

‘And then you felt a burning desire to work for the Russians, is that right?’

‘I felt a burning desire to work for whoever paid me,’ Jacob retorted. ‘And don’t try to tell me it’s anything different to what you do. We kill people for money, Sam. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter which people, or whose money.’

It doesn’t matter which people. Mac on the roof, blood oozing from his fresh, fatal wound.

Sam felt like he was in the control of some other force, as though his limbs weren’t even doing his own bidding. He strode towards Jacob, who didn’t move from that spot in front of their mother’s grave. He raised his gun hand. Some tiny part of his mind observed that Jacob barely moved to defend himself, and he wondered why just as he brought the hard metal of the gun down forcefully on the side of Jacob’s face. A crack – the breaking of bone – and a sudden welt of blood. Jacob staggered, then drew himself up to face Sam.

The two brothers stood, damaged face to damaged face, eyeball to eyeball.

‘Feel better, Sam?’ Jacob whispered. His words were arrogant; but his eyes were disturbed.

Fury still burned through Sam’s veins. He pressed the Browning against the side of Jacob’s head. ‘You’re going to tell me about the hit,’ he said.

Jacob jutted his chin out, but didn’t say anything.

‘Dolohov told me one of the red-light runners is planning a hit,’ Sam persisted. ‘He didn’t know where or when. You’re going to tell me who it is, Jacob, otherwise I swear to God I’ll kill you.’

The two brothers stared at each other. Then, slowly, Jacob stepped backwards. In the background Sam heard the sound of sirens. Somewhere deep down he supposed it should worry him; but it didn’t.

‘You won’t kill me, Sam,’ Jacob said. A calmness appeared to have descended over him. ‘I’m your brother.’

He turned his back on Sam and started walking away. No hurry. In fact, there was a slowness to his gait. A heaviness.

The sirens grew louder.

Sam’s body went cold. Once more he felt himself in the grip of some other power, as though he were a puppet being controlled by invisible strings from above. He raised his gun hand.

‘You’re not my brother,’ he heard himself say.

Jacob stopped. He was five or six metres away now. When he turned again, there was an animal expression in his eyes.

The brothers stared at each other.

And then, Jacob came at him.

It happened so quickly. Jacob launched himself at Sam with his arms outstretched, going for his throat. It was a clumsy movement, the result of rage, not training. But Jacob was a big guy, and the impact knocked Sam backwards. He fell to the ground and Jacob fell on top of him with the barrel of Sam’s gun awkwardly pressed into the hard flesh of his stomach. The elbow of Sam’s gun hand crashed against the grass.

Sam never felt his trigger finger move. He heard the shot, though. It rang out across the graveyard, scaring the birds in the trees and causing them to rise up in flocks. He pushed Jacob away from him, but already he was spattered with the blood that had exploded from his brother’s stomach.

‘Jesus, J.,’ he whispered. And then louder: ‘Jesus!’

Jacob lay on his back. His breaths were short and irregular. Blood flowed from his abdomen.

His body was shaking and his skin was white. He looked up at Sam and for the first time ever, Sam saw fear in his brother’s eyes. Jacob started to say something, but all that came out was a weak cough and a trickle of blood that spilled over his lower lip.

Another cough and another gush of blood. In the distance, the sirens became louder and suddenly stopped. The crying of the disturbed birds dissolved into nothing and silence surrounded them.

Jacob closed his eyes. His skin became a greyer shade of pale and Sam knew what that meant.

‘Dad never forgot about you, Jacob,’ he breathed. ‘Not for a single second of a single day.’ Jacob winced and Sam sensed it was nothing to do with the pain. It was as if that one fact was too much for him to bear.

His chest started to rattle.

‘You have to tell me,’ Sam urged. ‘Tell me what you’ve set up. Who’s the target, Jacob? Who do the Russians want dead?’

The sound of shouting from the edges of the cemetery. Sam looked over his shoulder. Movement in the distance. He turned back to his brother. ‘For Mac’s sake, Jacob. And for Dad’s. If he thought you were a traitor, it would ruin the rest of what life he has left…’

Jacob’s eyes were rolling in their sockets. Fresh blood spewed from his mouth. He choked on it as he spoke. ‘You can’t stop it. It’s in motion.’

‘Who?’ Sam urged. ‘Just tell me who?’

The shouting grew louder. Half of Sam wanted to shake his dying brother; the other half wanted to hug him. ‘Who?’

A pause. It lasted forever. When Jacob spoke again, his voice was so weak Sam had to strain to hear it. ‘Beridze…’ he said.

He heaved again.

‘Kakha Beridze.’ Sam wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. The words were meaningless to him. A deep breath from his brother. Jacob gained control of his vision and stared him straight in the eye. ‘His assistant… tomorrow night…’ His body jerked, as though an electric shock had passed through it. On the edge of his consciousness, Sam became aware that he was surrounded. A harsh voice shouted at him. ‘Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head.’ Sam ignored them. He grabbed his brother’s arm. ‘Don’t tell him,’ Jacob whispered, and Sam knew what he meant. ‘For God’s sake, Sam, don’t tell him…’

Jacob struggled to draw another breath, but it stopped suddenly. There was a horrific silence. And then, with a gruesome, aching slowness, the sound of his lungs deflating. Jacob’s eyes glazed over; his body stopped shaking and relaxed on to the grass like ice beginning to melt.

Sam stared at him in lone shock.

‘Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head. You’re surrounded by armed police.’

He was numb. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother’s tombstone. He felt as though her eyes were upon him.

‘This is your last warning. Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head. If you do not drop your weapon, we will shoot.’

Slowly, Sam laid the Browning on Jacob’s chest. He raised his arms in the air and placed them, fingers clasped together, on his head. Before he knew it, he became aware of three flak-jacketed police officers with MP5s trained directly at him. He barely gave them a second glance; Sam could not take his eyes off the body of the brother he had just killed.

He spoke. His voice sounded separate from his body. Monotone. Emotionless.

‘You need to contact MI6,’ he said. ‘Gabriel Bland. Tell him that Sam Redman has some information for him.’

The armed response unit closed in. With their black body armour and grim faces, they looked for all the world like an army of shadows gathering round his brother’s corpse.

TWENTY-SIX

The cell in the basement of the Hereford police station was tiny. A single bunk with a thin mattress and a yellow-and-brown-stained toilet without any seat were all the comfort it offered, but that didn’t matter to Sam Redman. There were no comforts that would ease what he felt inside.

He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the yellowing wall opposite. How long he had been in there he couldn’t have said. An hour? A day? They were both equally likely. His head was filled with ghosts. Memories of his brother when they were kids, which were unavoidably chased away by the one image that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. The image of Jacob, motionless on that cemetery ground, dead by Sam’s hand. It didn’t feel like it could possibly be true.

A policeman brought in some food. Sam didn’t even look at it. ‘Where’s Bland?’ Sam demanded. The policeman – a young guy – gave him a look of contempt. He didn’t answer.

Sam continued to stare. Continued to think. He supposed he should weep, but tears wouldn’t come. Perhaps he didn’t deserve them. Every now and then his guilt would be replaced by something else. Anger. Anger at his brother. Anger so deep and so hot that it felt as if it would consume him. And with it a desire – no, a need – to put everything right. He couldn’t undo everything Jacob had done, but if he could stop things getting worse, maybe the anger would go. Or at least subside.

The peephole of the cell door opened. ‘I’m not talking to you,’ he called. ‘I’ll only speak to Gabriel Bland.’

The peephole slid shut, then the door opened. A familiar voice. ‘Leave us alone.’

Sam turned to look at his visitor. He was accompanied by the young police officer. ‘I should stay, sir. He’s dangerous…’

‘I shan’t repeat myself,’ Bland said. He stared at the policeman.

‘No, sir,’ the young officer said, withering under the heat of his gaze. Bland stepped inside and waited for the sound of the door locking.

‘Hello, Sam,’ he said when they were alone.

‘Where is he?’ Sam demanded. Bland raised an eyebrow. ‘Jacob. His body. What have you done with it?’

‘It’s, ah… It’s dealt with. I’m sure you can understand that we don’t want any more dead bodies cropping up in public places.’ A pause. ‘You’ve, ah… You’ve been busy since we last met, Sam.’

Sam ignored his visitor’s obtuse comment. ‘Dolohov told you about the hit?’

Bland’s face gave nothing away. ‘Mr Dolohov told us lots of things, Sam. He was extraordinarily talkative. It, ah… It seems that a few hours with you can loosen a man’s tongue.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Either that, or silence it forever.’

Sam looked away.

‘I, ah… I understand you have some information for me,’ Bland continued. ‘I trust this is true and isn’t just a way of trying to wriggle your way out of…’

‘Shut up, Bland!’ Sam snapped. ‘Just shut up and listen to me!’ He rose to his feet and noticed that the MI6 man flinched slightly. ‘Jacob gave me a name before he died.’

Bland nodded slowly, his sharp eyes wary. ‘And?’

‘And before I tell you who it is, I want some assurances.’

An insincere smile spread across Bland’s face. ‘I hardly think you’re in a position…’

Sam gave him a stony look. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Throw the book at me.’

An awkward silence filled the cell. It was broken by Bland.

‘What would these assurances be?’

Sam sniffed. ‘Number one, Mark Porteus back in charge. Number two, your heavies leave Clare Corbett the fuck alone. Number three, Mac Howden’s family get properly looked after – no bullshit with the insurances, they get the full payout. And number four…’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Number four, not a word about my brother’s death leaks to anyone.’

‘Ashamed, Sam?’ Bland asked mildly.

‘No,’ Sam lied. ‘I don’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks. But if my father finds out that Jacob’s dead…’ He hesitated. ‘And how…’ His voice trailed away.

Bland surveyed him with dead, emotionless eyes. ‘I’m sure those things could be arranged,’ he said quietly.

Sam scowled. He didn’t trust the Firm and he didn’t trust Bland. But at some point he was going to have to trust someone and he’d run out of options. ‘Kakha Beridze,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know who the hell he is, but Jacob mentioned his assistant. And the words “tomorrow night”.’

Bland nodded, absorbing the information. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘It’s all I know.’

Bland turned and knocked on the inside of the door.

‘Wait,’ Sam said, and the MI6 man turned. ‘In Kazakhstan, at the training camp. Spetsnaz were waiting for us. They could only have known we were there if one of your lot tipped them off.’

The door opened and the young policeman appeared. Bland looked as if he was going to say something, but instead he marched out. ‘Be careful who you tell!’ Sam shouted after him. And then, even though the door was shut and locked, he repeated himself. ‘You’ve got a mole! Be careful who you tell!’

His voice echoed around the cell. He kicked the bed in frustration, then sat down to wonder if he’d done the right thing.

Somehow, Sam slept. It wasn’t a refreshing sleep. The bunk was hard and his dreams were haunted. When he awoke in that windowless room he was confused. No sense of time or place. He pissed in the rank bog, then scowled when it wouldn’t flush. Then he went back to sitting on the bed. Waiting. He didn’t know what for.

The door opened. Two police officers entered and cuffed his hands behind his back. Sam didn’t bother to struggle. He could sense their hatred – the hatred of a policeman for a murderer – but he could also tell they had been instructed not to talk to him about the events of the past few hours. ‘What time is it?’ he demanded.

‘Time for you to fuck off out of it,’ one of the officers replied.

He was roughly led out of the cell, along an institutional corridor and up some steps. At the main entrance to the police station he drew stares from members of the public: whether that was to do with the cuts on his face, the handcuffs or the armoured police van with flashing siren that was parked just outside, he didn’t know. And he didn’t care. On the wall there was a clock that told the time and date: 18.38, May 25. Sam was wordlessly escorted into the back of the van, then left alone as the doors were shut. He was encased in steel and there was no way to get out, even if he wanted to.

The journey was long and uncomfortable. Sam endured it sitting in the corner of the van, ignoring the bruising jolts that bumped through his body, and brooding on everything that had happened. An idle corner of his mind wondered where he was being taken, but he didn’t really care much about that either. He’d find out soon enough.

Having driven at speed for a couple of hours, the van began to stop and start. City driving. He felt it going down a long ramp, then coming to a halt. The doors opened and an armed escort of four men awaited him.

‘Where am I?’ he demanded, but he received no reply. Just a flick of an MP5 telling him to get out. He was in some sort of subterranean car park, the kind that echoed when you walked. He was taken through a guarded door, along a network of corridors and finally into a room. It was sparse: a table, chairs bolted to the floor, strip lighting and a black window – one-way glass, he presumed. The door was locked and once more he was left alone.

This time, however, he didn’t have to wait long. The door opened and two men marched in. One of them was Gabriel Bland. He looked tired. Much more tired than he had been earlier that day. Haggard, almost. With him was a small man. Thick glasses. Dumpy. He was short of breath, had sweat on his wide forehead and carried a thick file. The door was locked behind them and the two men sat down opposite Sam.

‘Thank you for joining us, Sam,’ Bland said without a hint of irony. He closed his eyes and smoothed his eyebrows with one hand. As he did so, he continued to speak. ‘This is Julien Batten. One of our analysts.’

‘Where am I?’ Sam asked.

Bland’s eyes popped open. ‘Didn’t they tell you? MI6 headquarters. You didn’t think we were going to leave you in a Hereford police station, did you?’

Sam shrugged.

‘Julien’s been processing the, ah… the information you gave us. I wanted you to hear his conclusions directly from him.’

Sam couldn’t understand what was going on. Bland sounded worried, but he was talking to him like an old and trusted friend. He kept quiet.

‘Carry on, Julien,’ Bland instructed.

The bespectacled man cleared his throat. ‘I hardly need say this falls under the auspices of the Official Secrets…’

‘Just get on with it,’ snapped Bland.

The analyst readjusted his glasses before carrying on. ‘Kakha Beridze,’ he said, pulling a photograph from his file. ‘Georgian ambassador to London. His personal assistant, Gigo Tsiklauri. Beridze’s been two years in the job. Hardline anti-Russian, but a good relationship with Number 10.’

‘I’m very happy for him,’ Sam retorted, before turning to Bland. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Just listen,’ Bland told him.

‘Ordinarily, we would have put Beridze low on anyone’s list of assassination targets,’ Batten continued. ‘But the information we have about the FSB’s activities in Kazakhstan puts a rather different light on things.’

The memory of Kazakhstan forced Sam’s stomach into a knot. He kept listening.

‘We’ve constructed a scenario,’ the analyst continued. He waved one hand in the air. ‘Just a theory, you understand. Beridze is assassinated by a young man who believes he is working for MI5. The Russians feed this information to the Georgians. Maybe they even deliver the assassin. Clearly it will create a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Georgia.’

Sam scowled. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘Nothing the men in suits can’t sort out.’

Bland interrupted. ‘I’m, ah… I’m afraid it’s a little bit more complicated than that, Sam.’ He stood up and, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had asked the sweating analyst to explain what was going on, continued talking. ‘For the past nine months,’ he said, ‘the British military has been constructing a missile launch facility on Georgian territory. The materials are covertly flown in under the guise of humanitarian aid for those Georgian nationals displaced by Russia’s military intervention in their country. The Georgian government is happy to help us. With the Russians on their doorstep, they, ah… they need all the friends they can get. As for us…’ He looked sharply at Sam. ‘As for us, we really need that missile base.’

Sam shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. You’re never going to launch a missile strike on Russia.’ He ignored the analyst, who was frowning impatiently.

‘No, Sam. Not the Russians. Our conflict with them remains strictly, ah… cold.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Iran.’

Sam blinked. He didn’t understand.

‘We’ve known for some time that their nuclear enrichment programme has been ongoing, despite their occasional claims to have halted it. They’re a long way down the line to becoming a nuclear power.’

‘Weeks away,’ the analyst butted in, and this time he received no reprimand from Bland.

‘The Americans know this, of course,’ Bland continued. ‘They talk a good line about peaceful diplomatic relations with Iran, but believe me, the moment the Iranians become a threat, we’ll see a US military surge in that part of the world.’ He paused. ‘Where the Americans go, the British follow. But we can’t afford another war in the Middle East. Georgia is the closest, safest friendly territory we have to Iranian soil. It’s only the threat of our missile launch capabilities in that area that’s keeping the Iranians at bay. If the Georgians think that MI5 have assassinated their top man in the UK, we can kiss goodbye to the facility.’

Bland paused, then sat down again. ‘If that happens, Sam, the Iranians will complete their nuclear programme. The Americans will invade and we will be dragged into it.’ Beside him, the analyst was nodding in agreement, his skin even sweatier now than when he had entered. ‘We don’t need another war in the Middle East, Sam. But if your brother’s little plan comes to fruition, that’s what we’re going to end up with.’

At the mention of Jacob, the familiar conflict of emotions burned through Sam’s blood. ‘Jacob wouldn’t…’

Bland interrupted. ‘I, ah… I rather doubt Jacob Redman was even aware of the wider implications of his actions, Sam. The FSB have put a lot of time and effort into this. I think it unlikely that they would have entrusted him with any more information than he needed.’

A silence fell over the room. It was Sam that broke it. ‘I still don’t understand why the Russians would want another war in the Middle East.’

The analyst replied. ‘The Russians want to avoid a British military facility on their doorstep. War in the Middle East is a happy sideline for them. It keeps the West’s hands full, while they pursue aggressive military policies on their own doorstep.’

‘In short,’ Bland concluded with stinging understatement, ‘the assassination of the Georgian ambassador would be a disaster.’ He fixed Sam with a meaningful stare. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said, ‘that we are unable to speak to your brother about this.’

Sam felt like he had been stung. ‘What’s the problem?’ He knew he was being obtuse, but he couldn’t help it. ‘You know who, you know when. You can stop it happening. And even if the red-light runner gets lucky, you just tell the Georgians the truth.’

‘And if you were the Georgians, Sam, would you believe the truth?’

Sam looked away. ‘I’ve done what I can,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I’ve told you everything Jacob gave me. It’s up to you now.’

Bland surveyed him calmly. Then, without any warning, he stood up and left the room. The sweaty analyst avoided Sam’s eye, choosing instead to burrow himself in his file. When Bland returned he had another man with him. The newcomer silently walked up to Sam, undid his handcuffs, then respectfully left the room.

Sam rubbed his wrists. It felt good to be free.

‘I’m going to put my cards on the table, Sam,’ the older man said. ‘I hope you’re listening carefully.’

Sam gave him no indication that he was.

‘The FSB has run rings around this service. I, ah… I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that’s largely due to your brother. And what’s more, I’ve underestimated you. You’ve been one step ahead of us all the way. It would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that.’

Bland let that sink in before he continued. ‘Kakha Beridze is due at a function tomorrow evening. A dinner. May 26. Georgian Independence Day, to add insult to injury. Two hundred guests. It’s been planned for months. I think we might safely say that this is where the assassination attempt is to take place, don’t you?’

Sam nodded, despite himself.

Bland didn’t take his eyes off him. ‘You know how your brother thinks, Sam. You were on ops with him in the Regiment for years. How would he pull it off?’

‘I don’t know. With two hundred people there, any number of ways. The guy’s a sitting duck.’

‘Think, Sam. I don’t need to impress upon you how important it is.’

‘I don’t know, all right?’

Bland nodded thoughtfully, then stood up. He paced a little, before stopping by the one-way window, his back to Sam. ‘Just at the moment,’ he said, ‘as we speak, Clare Corbett is being taken into custody. We have all sorts of powers to detain her under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but ah… frankly we don’t really need them. Mark Porteus, of course, is at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and it really won’t take long for our friends in blue to construct a murder charge for you that will earn you a life sentence. Just think of the effect that will have on your father.’

He turned round and smiled thinly at Sam. ‘Oh,’ he added, ‘and I, ah… I suppose it barely needs to be said that we have DNA evidence that puts you at the scene of Mac Howden’s death. I wonder what his family will think when they learn about that…?’

It was as if something had snapped inside Sam. He jumped to his feet and, in two big strides, he approached Bland, grabbing the older man by the scruff of his neck and thrusting him up against the glass. ‘You fucking dare…’ he hissed, ignoring the shouts of help he heard from the frightened analyst behind him. ‘You fucking dare and I swear I’ll kill you!’

Bland looked down on him. His thin body was light and he was clearly alarmed, but he said nothing. He just stared. And then the sound of the door opening. Men with guns. ‘Put him down!’

Sam hurled Bland to one side. The old man stumbled, but did not fall. He turned to the guards. ‘Get out,’ he ordered. Then, seeing that he needed to repeat himself, he shouted: ‘GET OUT!’ He looked at the analyst. ‘You too.’ The little man didn’t need telling twice.

Only when they were alone did Bland speak again, his eyes tough and determined as the two of them stood barely metres apart, warriors in some kind of duel. ‘If you think for one minute, Redman, that I won’t do whatever it takes to stop our national security from being compromised, think again.’

Sam stared him down, his breath short and angry.

‘I need to get inside the head of this assassin,’ the older man continued. ‘You’re the only person I know who can do it. Work with me and I’ll put you in charge of the operation. But I’m telling you, Sam – if Beridze gets killed tomorrow night, I’ll do all those things and more.’

Silence. Sam felt nothing but hatred and frustration. Yet he knew when he was in a corner. He closed his eyes and did his best to calm down. Only then did he speak.

‘Cancel the event,’ he said. ‘You could put an entire fucking squadron in there – Jacob would know how to get past them.’

Bland nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Put him in a safe house. Regiment guard. His assistant too.’ He looked over at the glass. ‘Nobody in the Firm’s to know where it is.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Bland demanded.

‘I told you,’ Sam said. ‘When we hit the training camp, we were expected. Spetsnaz. Where else would the information have come from other than inside the Firm? For all I know, the mole could be you.’

Bland’s lips thinned. ‘There’s no mole, Sam. You’re seeing shadows. Spetsnaz were there as a precautionary measure, not because they’d been tipped off.’

But Sam didn’t want to hear it. ‘You want to do this my way, then we’ll do it my way. If not, you might as well put me back in that police van. I’ve lost a brother, a friend and a colleague in the last few days and I’m not going to lose any more. Truth is I don’t even know if I can trust you, but I don’t really have much choice.’ He jutted out his chin. ‘I want the same team that hit the training camp. What’s left of them, at least.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘Tyler, Cullen, Andrews, Davenport and Webb. They were there when Craven died.’

‘I didn’t have you down as the sentimental type, Sam.’

‘I’m not. If this hit is connected to Craven’s death, they’ll want to make sure it doesn’t happen. That makes them the best men for the job. That’s my bottom line, Bland. Take it or leave it.’

Bland fell silent. He looked at Sam for what felt like an age, his head nodding gently and his body swaying slightly like a snake.

‘All right, Sam,’ he said finally. ‘You’ve got yourself a deal. But please don’t think I’m bluffing. If Kakha Beridze dies, you’re going down. And I promise you – you’ll take the people you care about down with you.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

The Georgian Embassy, London. May 26.

Kakha Beridze stared across the desk. He was plump and heavy set, with thick, badger-like hair. He had a thick, dense moustache, the kind that always seems so popular amongst dodgy Eastern European men, and his fat fingers were adorned with gold rings. If he truly had any diplomatic skills, they had deserted him: the Georgian ambassador to London was clearly furious to have been woken up at 3 a.m. by two insistent MI6 spooks. He was furious at having been dragged into the distinctly shabby embassy, and furious at the implacable way in which he was being spoken to by Gabriel Bland.

‘Impossible,’ he said in his almost impenetrable accent. ‘The event has been organised for many months now. I am entertaining Georgian nationals from all over this country. I will not cancel it.’

Bland sat at the opposite side of Beridze’s desk. Sam stood behind him, grim and silent. Occasionally, Beridze would glance up at him. His presence clearly made the Georgian nervous. To Beridze’s side stood another man, also plump, but younger. He bent down and whispered something into Beridze’s ear. The ambassador brushed him off and turned his attention back to Bland. ‘Impossible,’ he repeated.

Even though he couldn’t see Bland’s face, Sam could imagine the thin smile on his lips as he spoke. ‘It would be perfectly possible,’ the older man said, ‘for us to be, ah… heavy-handed in order to stop the event from taking place, Mr Beridze. But I thought it would be more politic for us to give you the opportunity to make your excuses.’

Beridze blinked.

‘A security threat, you say? What manner of security threat? I demand not to be kept in the dark about this…’

‘I have no intention of keeping you in the dark, Mr Beridze.’ He paused. ‘We have very good intelligence that an attempt will be made on your life tonight. Not only on your life, but on that of your, ah… assistant.’ He held a hand up to the man standing by the ambassador who gave no reaction – he clearly didn’t understand what was going on.

‘Intelligence?’ the ambassador scoffed. ‘What sort of intelligence?’

‘Good intelligence. From a reliable source.’

Beridze licked his lips. ‘Then we will employ security,’ he announced. ‘Everyone to be searched before they enter. Bags, clothes…’

A silence. ‘Sam?’ Bland addressed him without turning round. ‘Off the top of your head, perhaps you could suggest one way of infiltrating Mr Beridze’s event, despite such, ah… extensive precautions.’

Sam sniffed. ‘Pen gun,’ he said. ‘.22 calibre. Looks like a biro. Realistic. No one would know what it really was until the target was down.’

Beridze shifted in his seat a little uncomfortably.

‘You see, Mr Beridze, Sam is a professional. He has an imaginative way of looking at these things and I’m sure he could come up with any number of, ah… variations on the theme. Of course, the person sent to assassinate you will also be a professional. Have I made my point?’

Beridze scowled. ‘I will not be bullied.’

‘Sam.’ Bland continued almost as if the ambassador had said nothing. ‘Perhaps you could escort Mr Beridze and his assistant off the premises.’

Beridze stood up, his eyes full of fury. ‘I hope I do not need to remind you, Mr Bland, that you are technically on Georgian territory. I will not be spoken to like that in my own embassy.’

Bland stood too. ‘Mr Beridze, if you refuse to listen to what I have to say, then there will be a new ambassador in this embassy very soon. To be quite frank with you, that would be a matter of supreme indifference to me. But if you are the subject of an assassination attempt, the implications would be wider than you could possibly know. Your refusal to do as I ask puts the security of this country at risk. I have a number of legal means at my disposal to force you to do what I’m suggesting, which will be embarrassing for you and awkward for our two countries. I would rather not resort to these, but one way or another you will be going with this man to a place of my choosing. The manner of your departure is up to you.’

Beridze’s heavy eyebrows became furrowed and he tried, without success, to hide his fury. Bland’s words, though, had clearly sunk in. The ambassador turned to his assistant and delivered a curt instruction in his native language before returning his attention to Bland. ‘I am not happy about this,’ he said. ‘You may be sure that complaints will be made to the relevant authorities.’

‘No doubt they will be in touch with me if it seems appropriate,’ Bland murmured, and for a moment Sam felt a creeping respect for him. ‘Sam has a car waiting outside,’ he continued. ‘I suggest we meet you there in, what, ten minutes?’

Beridze gave him a dark look. ‘Ten minutes,’ he agreed.

Together Sam and Bland walked back out on to the street. It was quiet here. Ominously quiet. Sam looked around for a hidden pair of eyes, but the only ones he saw belonged to an urban fox that stared at them from the middle of the road. They stood under the light of a yellow lamp, waiting for the two Georgians to join them. ‘It’s a mistake for me not to have MI6 coordinating this,’ Bland scowled as they stood by the kerb.

‘Forget it, Bland,’ Sam said, just as the MI6 man’s phone rang. He answered it, listened intently, then hung up. ‘Hereford. Your unit is already at the safe house.’

‘Right,’ Sam nodded. He would never have admitted it to Bland, but it felt good to be active again. Good to have something to occupy his mind. Good to forget about the events of the previous day.

The fox sprinted suddenly away. Sam saw Bland jump. The old man was nervous. He had good reason. Sam remained silent.

The Georgians appeared, wearing coats that were too heavy for the time of year. Beridze’s assistant carried his briefcase, but the ambassador carried nothing other than a pair of leather gloves. They wordlessly approached and joined them under the yellow light, where Beridze’s badger-like hair look almost golden.

‘Give me your phones,’ Sam demanded.

‘Absolutely not,’ Beridze replied.

Sam was in no mood to argue. He grabbed the ambassador by the coat and pushed him up against the car. ‘Give me your fucking phone!’ he repeated.

The startled man plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a thin mobile. Sam grabbed it and turned to the assistant. ‘You too,’ he said. The assistant plonked his bags on the ground and quickly relinquished his handset. Once Sam had them both, he bent down and dropped each one through a drain cover in the gutter. ‘Just in case you were thinking of telling anyone where we’re going,’ he told the startled Georgians. ‘Get in the car. Now.’

The two men hurried into the back seat, leaving Sam and Bland alone in the lamplight. They exchanged no words, but the tension between them was drawn on their faces. Sam turned and headed to the driver’s side of the car. He was opening the door when he heard Bland’s voice.

‘Sam.’

‘What?’

‘Keep them alive.’

Sam shot him a look, nodded, then climbed into the car. He started the engine and drove off without even a glance at the two frightened Georgians sitting in the seat behind him, and leaving Gabriel Bland alone in the yellow light of the lamp.

Sam drove carefully through the London night, checking his mirrors as often as he looked at the road ahead. The headlamps of every car, unnaturally bright as they flashed across his vision, were beacons: a potential trail. At the Holland Park roundabout he completed four full circuits, checking that no one was following. It wouldn’t drop a skilful trail – there could be a number of cars following, one waiting at each exit for him; but if he was being followed by more than one vehicle it would stretch their resources.

On the Westway he took the fast lane, veering quickly off the road at the Paddington turn-off and slicing his way through residential streets, before turning back onto the Westway and heading further up into town, past Euston and King’s Cross, then up to the heart of North London. Having memorised the location of the safe house back at MI6 HQ, Sam drove almost on autopilot.

‘Where are you taking us?’ Beridze and his assistant had remained silent for the entire journey, just giving Sam ashen-faced glances in the rear-view mirror.

‘Somewhere safe,’ Sam snapped.

Beridze didn’t look convinced. His assistant jabbered something in their own language, but he was cut short by his boss. They continued to drive in silence.

There was more rubbish than there were pedestrians along the Seven Sisters Road. He kept driving. They weren’t far now and he would feel better once there were walls around him.

The safe house was in a side street off the main drag of Tottenham Hale, but Sam didn’t stop nearby. He drove instead into the large car park by the Tube station. As he turned off the engine and the car lights, Beridze spoke again. ‘Where are we?’

‘Shut up.’ Sam looked around for any sign of another car coming to a halt, but there was nothing. He glanced over his shoulder and pointed at Beridze’s assistant. ‘Does he speak English?’

‘Badly,’ Beridze replied.

‘I want you both to get out. When I say “walk”, you walk. When I say “stop”, you stop. Tell him.’

Beridze translated. His assistant gave a nervous nod and the three men got out of the car.

Sam felt naked without a weapon. His skin prickled as he looked around, scanning the area for signs of anything suspicious. Beridze’s assistant held his briefcase close to his chest as he looked anxiously around; both men were peculiarly out of place in these bleak, suburban surroundings. As though they were a long way from home.

‘Walk,’ Sam told them. He pointed back towards the main road. ‘That way.’

The two Georgians shuffled off. Sam took the rear, constantly checking around him. At the main road he made them wait, like an anxious parent, until there really were no cars – a road ‘accident’, he knew, was the easiest way to carry out a hit. When the road was clear he hustled them across.

‘How far?’ the ambassador asked, already out of breath.

‘Keep walking,’ Sam told him.

They arrived at the safe house in a couple of minutes. To look at it, you wouldn’t think it was anything special, just another in a long line of run-down, three-storey terraced houses. The windows were obscured with net curtains and there were no lights on inside. Further down the street there was an unmarked white van. Sam nodded. ‘We’re here,’ he said.

The three men stood in the street. ‘Well?’ Beridze asked, his voice sharp with impatience. ‘What now?’

‘We wait to be let in.’

‘But nobody knows we are here.’

‘Oh, they know,’ Sam replied. And at just that moment the front door clicked open. Sam pushed past the two Georgians, opened the door a little further and peered inside. Darkness. ‘It’s me,’ he called quietly. ‘Sam.’

A pause. And then from the silence emerged a figure. Tall, wide-shouldered, a weapon in his hand and a comms earpiece over one ear. Sam recognised the hook nose and the heavy eyebrows, of course. Steve Davenport. ‘Morning all. Got some packages to deliver, then?’ His voice was flat; immediately Sam picked up on a sense of unease, as if his SAS mate was less than pleased to see him.

‘Special fucking delivery,’ Sam replied. He turned round to the Georgians. ‘All right, you two. Get inside.’

The door was closed and they headed upstairs in near darkness. On the first-floor landing Sam saw a strip of light underneath one of the doors. Davenport opened it and they filed inside.

It was a sparse, unwelcoming room, but then Sam hadn’t been expecting the Ritz. A good safe house needed to be basic and free of furniture – the more stuff there was in it, the harder it would be to tell if the place had been tampered with. There was one window in this room, but it was blocked off by a large sheet of black tarpaulin in order to stop any light escaping from a single bulb that hung from the ceiling. A steel flight case of weapons was propped up against one wall, and sitting cross-legged in a corner, packet of cigarettes in front of him and one in his mouth, was Luke Tyler, Craven’s Cockney friend and the one who had taken his death the worst. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Welcome to the party,’ he drawled. ‘These the strippers?’

Beridze looked incensed; Sam just ignored it. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Cullen’s upstairs watching the garden. Means he has to stand on the shitter, but he’s got a mouth like a toilet, so he’s probably at home. Webb’s up there watching the front and Andrews is on the ground floor doing the same.’ Tyler took another drag on his cigarette, without taking his eye off Sam. ‘Think he saw the milkman earlier on. Nearly shat himself.’

Beridze looked from one man to the other. Even though English wasn’t his first language he was clearly picking up on the tension in the room. Sam looked down at Tyler. ‘Get to your fucking feet, Luke,’ he said. And when the younger man had done so: ‘You got a problem, spit it out.’

Tyler dropped his cigarette onto the bare floorboards and stubbed it out with his boot. ‘Lot of rumours going around, Sam. Plenty of us want to know what your chat with the spooks after the Kazakhstan job was about.’ He set his jaw and stared at Sam.

The accusation hung in the air.

Tyler deserved to know the truth. They all did. But that meant telling them about Jacob and Sam couldn’t bring himself to do that. He walked over to the weapons stash and, almost absent-mindedly, picked up a Sig. ‘Get the others,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Cullen, Andrews, Webb. Get them.’

‘They’re on stag.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Get them now.’

Tyler shrugged, then disappeared. Two minutes later the others filed silently in, all of them wearing NV goggles up on their foreheads and with comms earpieces on one side of their heads. Only when they were all assembled did Sam speak. ‘Sounds to me like Hereford’s turned into a WI meeting.’ He looked at each of them in turn. Tyler, lairy and aggressive. Webb, a vicious fire in his eyes. Cullen, his lips pursed in an expression of mistrust. Andrews, his black skin glowing despite the early morning chill, his face calm but watchful. And Davenport, older than the others, but no less wary.

‘Craven’s dead,’ Sam continued. ‘You think I know something about it that you don’t. Well you’re wrong. You really think the Firm are going to confide in me?’ He let that thought sink in before he dropped the bombshell. ‘Mac’s dead too.’

The men looked at each other. Someone hissed the word ‘shit’, but Sam didn’t see who it was.

‘Shot,’ he continued. ‘Point blank. Night before last. Mac was my best friend. So while you’re all throwing your toys out of your pram, you might want to give that some thought.’

The men looked a bit less sure of themselves. ‘What’s the craic?’ Cullen asked. ‘What the hell happened to him?’

‘The Firm haven’t told me much. Just that he fell foul of the Russians. Like Craven.’ He pointed at Beridze. ‘And just like our man here will, if the FSB get their way.’ The unit looked towards the Georgian. At the mention of so many deaths, the ambassador had grown a little paler. Sam wondered how much he should tell them – about the missile base and the Iranians. Nothing, he decided. All that meant very little to these guys. Craven and Mac were dead and they wanted to pay someone back for it. Sometimes it paid to keep things simple. And sometimes it paid not to tell the whole truth.

‘They’re sending someone,’ he continued. ‘Tonight, we think.’ He looked them each in the eye. ‘Someone good. I asked for you lot because I knew you’d want this chance.’

A thick silence in the room. The two Georgians shuffled nervously.

‘Who knows we’re here?’ Davenport asked.

‘The Firm,’ Sam replied. ‘No one else.’

Davenport glanced over at the Georgians. ‘Our friends didn’t tell anyone?’

Sam shook his head.

‘Then the chances are we’ve sidestepped the hit, that no one’ll come.’

Sam was about to answer, but Tyler got there first. ‘Unless the same person who tipped off Spetsnaz decides to shoot his mouth off about where we are. That what you’re thinking, Sam?’

Sam didn’t know what he was thinking. Bland’s words kept coming back to him. There’s no mole, Sam. You’re seeing shadows. Jesus, he thought to himself. I probably am. It would make sense for Spetsnaz to have been guarding the FSB’s little secret in Kazakhstan. With a flash of insight he suspected he’d been wrong. But mole or no mole, one thing was sure: if this hit had Jacob’s fingerprints on it, things would be complicated. Very fucking complicated. It was a dark thought, but Sam couldn’t shake it.

‘Someone will come,’ he said, somehow very sure that he was right. One glance at the men and he knew they took him at his word. And one look at the Georgians did the same. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Back to your positions and keep your fucking eyes open. These bastards have already nailed two of ours. Let’s make sure they don’t make it a third, hey?’

Daylight came, and with it the ability to walk around the house without alerting anyone outside to their presence. Sam was glad to leave Beridze and his assistant under Davenport’s protection to check the place out. It ticked all the boxes. Exits at the front and the back in case they needed to leave in a hurry – there was a gate at the bottom of the garden and from behind the net curtains in the top-floor toilet he could see an alleyway winding back round on to the street. All the exits could be clearly surveyed from the watch points where the men stood guard with their sniper rifles pointing directly at the windows. Sam’s pep talk had done the trick – they were alert and watchful. Even Tyler’s previous sarcasm had been replaced by a crisp tension. These men were like loaded weapons, ready to be discharged at any second.

Back in the main room, Beridze was sitting on the bare floor while his assistant propped his abundant backside on his briefcase. ‘I demand that you find me a chair,’ Beridze instructed when Sam walked back in.

‘I’m not a furniture removal man.’

‘I am the Georgian ambassador…’ Beridze flared, but he was interrupted by Sam.

‘If tonight’s festivities don’t go the way we want them to, Beridze, you won’t need a chair. You’ll need a box. Now shut the fuck up and let us get on with our job of keeping you alive.’

Beridze scowled at him, but he fell silent.

10.00 hrs. They ate chocolate and drank sugary Coke from the stores the unit had brought with them – and which Beridze, from the look on his face, found distasteful – and waited. Sam attached his own comms, then continued to wait. Long stretches of silence filled the house, broken only by the occasional cough from one of the guys over the comms and the incessant barking of a dog nearby. Sam knew that the buildings on either side of the safe house would be empty, so whenever the silence was disturbed by some indistinguishable noise, everyone jumped. As morning became afternoon, even Beridze had stopped his brusque comments. Something had changed in him. Tiredness? Or had the fear notched up a level as evening approached?

Sam looked over at the ambassador. It was probably a bit of both.

He crouched opposite the two Georgians, his back leaning against the wall as he turned the Sig round in his fingers. The fear, he realised, was rising in him too. Not fear of a fight. Far from it. But a different kind of fear. He felt there was something on the periphery of his vision. Off to one side. And when he tried to turn his mind to see it, it slipped away again. He closed his eyes and tried to zero in.

‘Something wrong, Sam?’ Davenport asked. Sam opened his eyes to see his colleague checking him out.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

But it wasn’t true. The shadow on the edge of his vision was there. He knew he should be able to see it, but he couldn’t.

All the entrances and exits were covered. He had the cream of the crop guarding the Georgians. But despite all that, despite everything, Sam Redman couldn’t help thinking he was missing something.

14.20 hrs.

Jamie Spillane wasn’t far away. He paced the streets, the faint nausea of excitement churning inside. He kept one hand in his pocket and, with his fingertips, turned the fifty-pence piece that he was carrying over and over. It was stupid, he knew, but like a kid making sure he had his lunch money, Jamie had been holding on to this coin for the last two days. He liked to know that everything was arranged as it should be.

As he walked, his mind replayed his instructions. 21.00 hrs. Do nothing till then.

How many times had he performed the calculation in his head, just to be sure? 21.00 hrs: that was nine o’clock in the evening. He looked at his watch. Half-past two. The intervening hours seemed like days, an impossible bridge to cross before he could finally complete his operation.

Make sure your face is hidden. Wear a hood, a balaclava, something like that.

‘Roger that,’ Jamie had replied, attempting to sound military.

Make sure you know where you’re going. Work out your route in advance.

Jamie had known his route for days. An anxious father-to-be, plotting the fastest way to the hospital, couldn’t have been more fastidious.

He walked faster. On the other side of the street he heard somebody shout at him: ‘Wanker!’ He ignored it. He didn’t need a kerbside brawl to get his kicks any more. He had something else. Something better.

Looking at his watch again, he saw that it was only two thirty-five. He bit his lip, turned and then headed back to his bedsit, where he would wait out the remaining hours. His fingertips continued to roll the fifty-pence piece round in his pocket. Faster and faster. It dug into his skin.

How amazing, he thought to himself, that you can kill a man using just a coin…

18.30 hrs.

It grew dark. Sam visited each of the observation posts. The men had reattached their NV goggles. They were like statues in the gloom and about as talkative as they watched out of their windows.

‘It could happen at any time,’ Sam told each of them. And from each of them he got only a brief nod in return.

Back in the main room, Beridze was pacing. He gave Sam an irritated look as he entered, then muttered something under his breath. His wide-eyed assistant remained crouched on the floor.

Silence in the room. The incessant barking of the dog outside.

And at the edge of Sam’s mind, the shadows that wouldn’t go away.

He tried to concentrate. To remain professional. But his mind wandered, no matter how much he tried to steer it back on course. He thought of his father. At that very moment Max would be lying frail in his bed, perhaps reliving old glories in his head, perhaps rejoicing in the son that had come back to life. Jacob was a real soldier, he heard the old man saying. If it wasn’t for your brother, God knows where you’d have ended up.

‘Movement!’ Hill’s voice on the comms. Sam stood up quickly, pointing his gun towards the door. He sensed Davenport training his M16 at the black tarpaulin that covered the window.

‘What is it?’ Beridze whispered. Sam heard the two men shuffle into a corner. ‘What is it?’

Neither SAS man moved.

A breathless few seconds. And then, over comms: ‘It’s nothing.’

Sam lowered his gun, but only slowly. ‘False alarm,’ he stated. He looked at his watch. 18.56. Beridze spat something in his own language. Sam felt like doing the same. The shadow on the edge of his mind grew darker, but no more distinct.

If it wasn’t for your brother, God knows where you’d have ended up.

20.15 hrs.

Jamie Spillane had put his hooded top on fifteen minutes ago and spent the intervening time looking at himself in the cloudy mirror. The hood hung over the top of his face by a good couple of inches. In the dark, he satisfied himself, it would be almost impossible to make out his features.

Keep your face hidden. CCTV cameras are hard to spot.

He walked over to his bed. From under the mattress he pulled one of the boxes that had been supplied to him. Inside was the small, black handgun. He placed it in the pocket of his hooded top. Back in front of the mirror, he noticed that it bulged slightly; but no one would know what it was. He smiled to himself. It felt good carrying a weapon. He liked it.

20.19. Forty-one minutes to go. It would only take him ten to get there, but he didn’t want to be late. He tugged the hood one final time down over his face, then left his tiny bedsit, making very sure to lock the door behind him as he went.

Sam paced.

He’d lost count of the times he had walked through the darkness of the safe house, checking each observation point and receiving nothing but curt responses from the watchful guys. They could sense he was on edge. That much was clear.

Back in the main room, the two Georgians were arguing. About what, Sam didn’t know. Their voices sounded harsh and guttural. Davenport was looking at them like they were mad; when they saw Sam, however, they quietened down.

‘Anything?’ Davenport asked.

Sam shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ the ambassador announced. ‘Nobody knows where we are. How can anybody find us?’

Neither of the SAS men replied. But Sam could tell from the look Davenport gave him that he was thinking a similar thing.

And maybe he was right.

Sam looked at his watch. 20.36. Damn it, he didn’t even know what he was waiting for.

Thoughts collided in his brain. He tried to organise them. Jacob had told him to stay away. You can’t stop it. It’s in motion.

Think, Sam, he told himself. Just think.

Davenport was looking at him again. So were the Georgians.

His brother wouldn’t let this fail. Sam knew him too well. He was clever. Just because he was dead – and the very thought twisted inside him – it didn’t mean he hadn’t trained his red-light runners to think like him.

You can’t stop it. It’s in motion.

Sam tried to think what he himself would do. But as he stood in that room, his mind was suddenly flooded with other things: images of his brother. As a kid, playing. As a young man, joining up and persuading Sam to do the same.

A fizzing sound. Davenport had opened a can of Coke. He downed it, looking at Sam over the can as he did so.

Sam blinked. Then he stared. Not at Davenport, but at the can of Coke.

The shadow on the edge of his memory had suddenly grown more distinct.

He saw Jacob again; but this time it was in Iraq, six years ago. The day when it all went wrong.

Suddenly Sam was in the Al-Mansour district of Baghdad again. He, Jacob and Mac were preparing to storm a house, to apprehend a wanted Ba’athist. Their tout had dropped a tracking device outside the house in question, hidden in an old fizzy drink can, so they knew where it was. But they needed a diversion. Something to distract the guards while they raided the building.

Standing in that room, with Davenport and the Georgians, Sam heard his dead brother’s voice as clearly as if he was right there with them. Tense. A bit self-satisfied. The very words he had spoken that day so long ago.

I gave the Coke can a bit of extra sugar.

They’d needed a diversion outside the house. Thanks to Jacob’s forward planning, there was an improvised explosive device already there.

An IED, already there.

‘Jesus,’ he breathed. ‘We’re fucking sitting on it.’

Davenport looked alarmed. ‘What’s wrong, Sam?’ But Sam didn’t answer. His eyes had fallen on Beridze’s assistant, Gigo. Jacob had mentioned him, but why? Bland’s analyst had assumed he was a target, like the ambassador. But he was a nobody. Why would they target him?

Like a balloon being burst, the shadow on the edge of his vision disappeared and Sam saw clearly. His assistant. Jacob had been trying to tell Sam something. At the moment of his death, he’d been trying to warn him. The assistant was the shooter. He strode over to the younger of the two Georgians and with one tug of his clothes yanked him to his feet before pressing him against the wall.

‘Where is it?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s your fucking weapon?’ He pressed the gun up against the man’s head.

Gigo’s eyes bulged. He tried to speak, but was mute with fear.

From behind him, Davenport’s voice. ‘For fuck’s sake, Sam, what are you doing?’

Sam hurled the assistant into the middle of the room. ‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. Then, over his shoulder at the boss, ‘Tell him to take his fucking clothes off!’

Davenport started to say something, but Sam waved his handgun in his colleague’s direction. ‘Shut up,’ he said.

Commotion over the comms. ‘What’s going on?’ Sam didn’t answer.

Gigo was stripping, slowly because of his shaking body. ‘Hurry up,’ Sam barked at him. He went a bit faster, then stood wearing nothing but his underpants, a pair of gartered socks and a humiliated, incensed expression. He was fat, with a hairy stomach. But there was no concealed weapon.

‘What the hell’s going on, Sam?’ Davenport demanded. Sam’s breath came in short, nervous gasps. He looked around. He was missing something. Damn it, he was missing something.

And then his eyes fell upon the briefcase, still on the floor where Gigo had been using it as a seat. He felt a cold sickness oozing through his body. ‘Open it,’ he told the stunned assistant. ‘Open it!’

Gigo walked over to the briefcase, unable to keep his eyes from Sam’s gun. He bent down and fumbled with the clasps. When it was open, he stood back.

Sam approached. It looked perfectly ordinary: a few papers inside, nothing more. Gingerly, he picked it up and upturned it. The papers wafted to the floor like autumn leaves, leaving him with nothing more than an empty box.

‘You need to calm down, Sam.’ Davenport’s voice. Tense. Urgent.

Sam looked back at the assistant. His expression was still horrified. But confused too. Gigo obviously didn’t know what the hell was going on.

‘You sure this is his briefcase?’ he demanded of the ambassador.

‘Of course it is his briefcase,’ the ambassador replied. ‘For God’s sake, what is…?’

He didn’t finish his sentence. He just watched as Sam ran to the weapons cache, pulled out a knife, then cut into the lining of the briefcase. Two slashes, then he dropped the knife and started using his hands.

I gave the Coke can some extra sugar.

Moments later, the extra sugar was revealed.

A thick penetrating silence. Sam held the briefcase in his hands. He stared at it.

Taped to the inside shell of the case was a mobile phone. It was on, but it had been tampered with. From the back of the handset led a wire, connected to several blocks of plastic explosive. A bomb, and a remote detonator.

The world slowed down. He turned to Davenport, whose wide eyes showed that he quite clearly knew what he was looking at. Davenport’s voice: ‘Jesus, it could blow at any second!’

And then Sam yelled.

‘GET OUT! GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE! EVERYONE… NOW… GET OUT!’

20.59 hrs.

Jamie Spillane waited outside the phone booth, his head bowed and his features obscured by his hooded top. Booths like this were scarce in these days of mobile phones and he had scouted out this one days before. And he had been here earlier. Twice. To check it was operational and that nobody had vandalised it.

He looked at his watch. It was time.

Stepping into the booth, he pulled from one pocket his fifty-pence piece and from another a slip of paper. On it, he had scrawled the number of the mobile phone which he had used to create the detonator. The one inside the replica briefcase he had swapped over just a couple of nights before. Vaguely he wondered where it was now. Near? Far? He shrugged. It didn’t matter to him. He just kept thinking of his instructions. This is an important job for the British government. Don’t get clever. Don’t start improvising. Just do what I’ve told you and everything will run smoothly.

He felt a little tremor of excitement as he stepped into the booth. He thought of Kelly, and how she hadn’t believed him. He thought of his mum and dad, and how little they thought of him. It brought a small sneer to his lips and a heat to his blood.

He picked up the handset, waited for the dialling tone, then pressed the fifty pence into the slot.

And then he punched in the number…

‘GET OUT! GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE! EVERYONE… NOW… GET OUT!’

Davenport was already moving, but the two Georgians were frozen with shock. Sam suppressed his urge to hurl the briefcase away, instead laying it softly on the floor. Then he put the gun to Beridze’s head. ‘Get out!’ he repeated and pushed the ambassador to the door. His alarmed assistant tried to start putting his clothes back on, but Davenport grabbed the semi-naked man, lifted him from his feet and threw him towards the door.

Chaos over the comms. The rest of the unit were talking over each other. ‘Just get the fuck out of here!’ Sam bellowed over the top. ‘This whole fucking place is going to blow!’

They were on the landing, then the stairs. Beridze tripped; he fell headlong down the steps, ending up in heap on the hallway. Sam launched himself down, covering the entire staircase in two big jumps. At the bottom he didn’t bother to stop and see if the Georgian ambassador was injured; he just picked the heavy man up, his strength increased by adrenaline, and dragged him to the door. It was locked. Sam fired at the lock, emptying the chamber of his Sig with a succession of blasts that tore the air in two as they splintered and split the door open. It was a fucking hair-raising manoeuvre, because if the round hit the lock at the wrong angle it could ricochet off the metal and back into the discharger’s face, and Sam would be properly fucked. But he had only a split second to act. Then two solid kicks and he was out, the bruised and terrified Beridze was with him.

Gigo came next, rushed out by Davenport and his M16. Sam was briefly aware of Tyler’s features, but he didn’t stop to count the rest of the unit into the street. There were pedestrians in the road – only a few, but too many. ‘Run!’ he yelled at Beridze. ‘Fucking run!’ And then he waved his Sig in the direction of the pedestrians. ‘Get away from this house. Now!’

The terrified members of the public didn’t need telling twice: they joined the waddling ambassador and ran away from Sam.

More shouting over the comms before a voice shouted, ‘Clear!’ He turned round to see the rest of the unit sprinting the opposite way down the road. ‘We’re clear!’

Sam jumped over the bonnet of a parked car and hurled himself onto the other side, landing heavily on the tarmac, but protected by the metal shell of the vehicle.

He felt the force of the blast almost before he heard it, like a hot, dry wind that scorched his hair and made him grind his face into the ground. And then the sound of the explosion, a flat, deep thump that blew out the windows of the safe house and rocked the car.

A wave of cordite-bleached fog followed, like a giant, thick burnt cloud passing over them. Sam held his breath and closed his eyes, but thick, hot dust filled his nostrils and singed his eyes. He accidentally inhaled and coughed till he was red in the face. It was like he’d smoked fifty tabs in a row.

Shrapnel showered onto the ground.

Then silence.

It didn’t last long. From either end of the street, the sound of shouting. Panicked members of the public. Doors opposite the safe house opened. Alarmed residents spilled into the streets. In the distance, sirens.

Sam pushed himself to his feet. His whole body ached. Squinting, he looked down the road and saw Beridze. The Georgian ambassador to London was open-mouthed and shocked. But he was alive, and that was all that mattered.

Then, over the comms, a voice. One of the unit, he didn’t know who. ‘Mission accomplished,’ it said. ‘Mission fucking accomplished. Christ, Sam. Try and make it a bit closer next time, will you?’

Sam drew a deep breath. ‘Yeah,’ he replied. His voice was dry and croaking. ‘Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.’

And with that, he ripped the comms earpiece from his head and threw it to the ground. He didn’t give the safe house a second look. He just walked down the road, gun in hand, and as he walked he had the unnerving sensation that two ghosts were walking alongside.

Sam Redman didn’t try to shake that feeling. He didn’t try to run from those spectres. He knew they would be with him for a long time to come.

He carried on walking, past Beridze, past the curious, alarmed members of the public: a brooding, solitary figure.

A man who knew how lucky he was not to be a ghost himself.

Barely a mile away, Jamie Spillane replaced the handset. He had only heard a single ringing tone before the line had been cut off. And he knew what that meant.

The operation had been a success. He had been a success. His limbs were trembling with the thrill of it all. Now that he had shown what he was capable of, maybe he would be asked to do it again. Maybe his country would call on him once more. The idea made him shiver with excitement.

Jamie Spillane turned, walked out of the phone booth and made for home, smiling broadly as he went.