"And this man,~ Alex asked Dawn, indicating the expressionless figure of Meehan.
"Can you begin to imagine what your people have forced him to do? To torture and kill British agents? To stand back and watch as bombs that he has designed cut women and children to pieces?"
Alex's question was designed to allow him to turn to the former agent.
Catching the other man's eyes, he glanced downwards once, saw from the swift flicker of response that Meehan had understood him, felt the first unmistakable rush of adrenalin.
Prepare. Breathe. Only the target exists. Hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing. Only the target.
Without warning, Alex propelled himself forward. He rolled once, his wounded back smashing with agonising force into the granite rock face, then the air screamed and ruptured as rounds from the MP5 impacted around him. The back-up man's first shots had been fired from the hip and as Alex tightened on the trigger of the Glock -foresight, backsight, focus, exhale he saw the familiar movement as the weapon was pulled to the shoulder.
The back-up man had just closed his left eye in preparation for the aimed killing shot when both the Glock's 9mm rounds punched through his chin and thence his cerebellum, spraying the rocks behind him with red and ending his life in less than a third of a second.
Dawn's Walther was swinging towards Alex and the back-up man was still falling to the blood-shined granite when Meehan fired. The single round took Dawn in the centre of the chest,
dropping her to her knees as if praying. As her Walther fell from her fingers, Meehan instinctively lowered the Browning for the double tap to the head.
Alex signalled for him to hold his fire and scrambled back up the hillside towards her.
"Dawn?" he said quietly, making safe and pocketing the Walther.
"Can you hear me?"
But Dawn Harding was very close to death. Meehan's shot had taken her through the sternum, and oxygenated lung blood was frothing at her mouth.
"Dawn?" he repeated, feeling beneath her T-shirt for the sucking chest wound and sealing it with his thumb.
"Dawn!"
She raised her head and managed a painful smile, showing reddened teeth.
"Tell Angela .. ." she began.
"Tell her I ..
She fell silent, and tears ran down her cheeks. Then the blood came with a rush, pouring from her mouth on to her chest, and her head sank down and she died.
Switching off all feeling, Alex wiped his Glock on his shirt and placed it between Dawn's unresisting fingers. Taking the Browning from Meehan, who handed it over without hesitation, he cleaned it and placed it in the dead back-up man's right hand. The scenario wouldn't hold up for very long, but any investigation would lead the police straight back to MIS, at which point the case would disappear from the register anyway.
He turned to Meehan.
"Thank you," he said.
"She was going to kill you," said Meehan quietly.
"Don't go through the rest of your life wondering."
"I won't," promised Alex.
The ghost of a smile touched Meehan's pale features.
"We'd have made a good team, you and I," he said.
Alex looked at the man who had shot Dawn Harding.
"We probably would," he said emptily.
"How badly are you hurt?"
"Does that make any difference to anything?"
Alex didn't reply. Staring over the valley he watched as sunlight and shadow raced each other across the flank of Fan Fawr. Then, taking the MP5 from where it had fallen beside the dead MI-5 agent, he searched the corpse for spare magazines.
Finally he turned back to Meehan.
"Do you think you could ride a motorcycle?" he asked.
THIRTY
The members' writing rooms at the Carlton Club are reached by means of a corridor leading off the Small Library, and overlook St. James's Street. There are four of them, and each contains a desk surmounted by a blotter and a sheaf of the club's writing paper. The walls are lined with books, and in reading room number four the majority of these are blue-bound records of the club's minutes and proceedings from the Second World War to the present day.
It was now a fortnight since the events on the western slope of Pen-y-Fan.
Walking a half-mile up the road from the wrecked BMW, Alex had stolen a battered Fiesta from outside a hill walkers hostel, driven to north London an area with which he had no connection booked into a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Tottenham under a false name, and spent the days that followed allowing his wounds to heal and planning his next move. His single trip into Central London had been an underground journey to Oxford Circus to withdraw cash from a dispensing machine and he had been back in Tottenham within the hour. On the tube he had read the Daily Telegraph's elaborate account of the "Civil Servant love tryst' that had 'ended in tragedy' in the shadow of the Black Mountains.
The shot that had creased Alex's back had been acutely painful for several days and would certainly leave a spectacular scar, but had not required any medical attention that he himself had been unable to administer with the help of Dettol and bandages. The knife cuts, with their stitches finally removed, were now no more than pale and occasionally uncomfortable reminders of the fight outside George Widdowes' house. On his thirteenth day at the bed and breakfast he had rung the offices of MIS.
As Alex entered number four reading room at the Carlton Club, he heard the clock in the library strike 11 a.m. Angela Fenwick rose from the desk facing the window, turned and extended her hand to him.
"Captain Temple," she said, nodding dismissal to the elderly club servant hovering at the door.
"Right on time."
Alex inclined his head, shook her hand in silence and seated himself in the proffered armchair, a tautly upholstered object of oak and azure leather. Fenwick herself resumed her place at the desk, angling her chair towards Alex. She looked older, thought Alex. Sharp lines had been incised at the corners of her mouth and her skin had a dry, desiccated quality that had not been apparent at their last meeting.
She steepled her fingers, a gesture that Alex remembered from his first briefing with her.
"Given that you have just killed two well-liked members of my Service, Captain Temple, I thought it advisable that we meet on neutral territory rather than at Thames House. I thought it might be more .
comfortable for you."
Neutral territory, thought Alex, glancing around him. Like fuck.
"I have no regrets whatsoever about killing Dawn Harding and that other amateur trigger man of yours," he said coldly, 'given that they were trying bloody hard to kill me.
Presumably on your direct orders. And you might as well know right now..
"Captain Temple..
'that I will do the same to any... "Captain Temple! I have not come here to argue with you. I fully accept that circumstances led you to defend yourself. Reciprocally, I would ask you to accept that agents Harding and Muir acted as they did towards yourself in the belief that it was in the best interests of national security."
"Trying to murder a serving SAS officer?"
"Put it how you like." Fenwick's gaze was ice and her voice was steel.
"The point is that these events have happened and you and I must now discuss .. .
modalities."
"Does that mean that you want to hammer out some kind of deal?"
"That's exactly what it means, Captain Temple, so let's get right on with it. Be assured that I am enjoying this meeting no more than you are. Firstly, do you wish to continue with your army career.
Alex shrugged.