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.