Each time Natan looked up chewing relentlessly he saw her. He knew she had flicked through the magazine once, then read it more thoroughly. Now she had started again at the beginning. The man who had been near her had been replaced with another. He had a pad out and was taking notes, which the woman seemed to be dictating. They had a map unfolded before them.

The meeting was breaking up.

There were handshakes, then kisses. A good deal had been done, of advantage to both parties. Grigoriy was close to him.

'Where do we go now?'

'The docks, then into the desert you need to know?'

'Do we come back for the flight on?'

'There are airfields in different places. Why?'

He shrugged. Played indifferent. His mind worked. No possibility of a meeting with the woman when they were inside a restricted area like a port. They had flown over the desert that morning endless arid sand, featureless. There would not be another place.

They were standing around the table. The Major pushed paper into his pockets, and his pad went inside his coat. He smoothed his hair, and was ready for farewells. There would not be another chance.

He told Grigoriy he had to piss.

He broke clear and went towards the toilets on the far side of the lobby. He felt weak, and his resolution was draining. Suddenly it was hard to remember how they had slapped him when the whore's earrings were missing. He could hardly recall how angry he had been at the embassy in Baku, or in the cafe behind Constanta Cathedral.

Natan walked fast, as if his bladder would burst.

He went into the men's room and the door swung shut behind him. He was alone. He waited. The door clattered behind him.

Ruslan laughed. 'A virus spreads. One goes down we all get it.'

He finished. He went to the basin. Ruslan was behind him. He left his hands wet and went out.

She was there with a man, who peeled away from her and went through the door to the men's room. He must have swung it hard enough to catch Ruslan's chest and face. The man, in French, was concerned that he had hurt Ruslan. He had not.

She asked, 'When are you in Marbella with Ivanov?'

'I don't know. I know we go into the desert and-'

'Shit. How will you go from north Africa to Spain? This plane, another one or by boat?'

'I do not know. I have not been told.'

Behind him, apologies and protests that no harm was done. He blinked hard. Her eyes swept his face as if she were trying to register whether he had lied or told the truth. 'Not how, not when?'

'Not told.'

She went into the women's room, and he was out in the lobby. Ruslan followed him, and they walked back to the group.

Neither would let go of it.

'You don't understand what will happen to them. I've said it three times and-'

'Only three?'

'Doesn't matter how many times.'

Jonno reckoned Snapper was used to exercising control, expected to be heard through and then for his suggestions to be endorsed. Before the first coffee break, when Posie had gone down to boil the kettle, Snapper had been relaxed.

Jonno said, 'If you had written permission to be here you'd have shown it. You've broken into Geoff and Fran's home for your own purposes, and the end result is that you're prepared to hazard their safety.'

'And I've told you why.'

'I'm not a complete idiot I read newspapers and I know that in any legal proceedings you have to give evidence of where you were, how you did what you did. That leads to here, and will throw a bright bloody light on the home of Geoff and Fran. Are they going to be able to live here without protection when their home has been integral to the capture of a Mafia leader? It'll be splashed in the papers, on the radio and TV. They'll be scuttling about like refugees. If it was in their interests you would have approached them. It's not so you haven't.'

Loy had gone to make the second coffee and they'd all taken various eyeline points to study. There was a framed photograph above the spare bed showing Geoff with a colourful line of medals on his chest at an Armistice Day service. On another wall there was one of those chocolate-box watercolours from the West Highlands with a stag sniffing at the air. The curtains were awful and his mother wouldn't have allowed that wallpaper in the garden shed, but it was theirs. Their home. He could see them maybe the old man on crutches or in a wheelchair being taken down the drive with elderly friends trying to shift the cases. Their new home would be in one of those tower blocks he saw each time he and Posie had headed for the town, or in a terrace of boxes that looked out on to the next terrace. They would be out of their home, and the years left to them would have been disrupted by the intruders coming into their lives.

'I've told you that we do our best to ensure that minimal information on observation points gets into the public domain. We take very seriously the safety of those who help us.'

'And it's a grown-up world, and bad things happen, and there are casualties yes?'

'I didn't say that.'

'The word you use is collateral, right?'

Sparky brought the third coffee. Jonno was having difficulty in controlling his temper, but Snapper was calm and smiling which fuelled Jonno's anger. Jonno thought he must have been on a course for call-centre staff who handled complaints: they never lost their cool and were always so bloody polite. It wouldn't last much longer, him keeping his temper in check and Snapper being calm. Loy habitually nodded agreement with Snapper. Posie had not moved off the floor since she'd come back with the first coffees, and each time Jonno raised his voice she seemed to slump further. He thought she was near to tears. Jonno couldn't read Sparky and sensed the man was detached from him but also from Snapper and Loy. He would have expected loyalty to drip off the man, but it didn't.

'I'm sorry you feel like that, Jonno, because it's not justified. We have years of experience in this field, and I can pretty much guarantee that there will be no aftershocks for this home-owner.'

'Which is worthless, because it's not cast iron.'

'We know what we're doing.'

'And they don't matter.'

'Easy, young man. Dramatic statements, not supported by fact, don't help. Maybe it's time for me to be full and frank-'

'Spit it out,' Jonno said.

'Full and frank.' The smile was that of a used-car salesman who had offloaded a vehicle and had had it brought back a week later with an estimate for mega-repairs. The eyes beaded on him. 'We're not moving. We're here and we're staying. I'm very sorry that our presence interferes with your holiday. Most of the places we work, trying to take drug importers, terrorists and big-time thieves off the streets, the householders recognise crime and help all they can to put bad men behind bars. They don't bend the issues and pretend they're God's gift to the law-and-order debate. Got me? You are not our problem, and I won't allow you to become our problem.'

An alarm sounded not loud but persistent.

Jonno said, 'It's simple enough for me to realise you have no interest in the welfare of Geoff and Fran Walsh . . . and also for me to know that any police operation in Spain needs the co-operation and agreement of the local authorities. Where are they?'

He thought he'd played a trump he saw Snapper blink. He supposed a boxer knew when he'd landed a good hit. The siren was still blaring and he'd lost his audience: Snapper stared out through the closed window and his eyeline was on the upper part of the garden. Loy was close to him, then pointed in the direction of the villa. Snapper ran his tongue, fast, across his lips, and Sparky frowned. None of them had heard his 'trump'.

There was a gunshot.

A week before, Jonno would not have known the sound of a bullet being fired. Now he did. Posie was cowering, almost on the floor. He heard Snapper's murmured oath.

The alarm cut.

Jonno went behind Snapper and would have leaned against his shoulder but Sparky gripped his arm and kept him back . . . It was the man who had fastened the jump leads from the Range Rover engine to the old Austin Maxi, Marko. He was near to the kitchen door and held an assault rifle in one hand, the barrel pointed high. The other man, Alex, who had told Jonno when to turn on the engine, walked out across the grass.

Snapper said, 'A cat triggered an alarm system not the half-starved bag of bones that lives here, but another must have broken a beam. Means that the garden can only be used when the system's off. The cat's dead a round from an AK47 has that effect. The goon'll be congratulating himself on his shot. Now then, young man, what were you saying?'

He saw the man pick up the cat by the tail and turned away from the window. He stumbled back, and Sparky caught him. He had nearly tripped over Posie.

Winnie had a view of the cemetery. It was the old one, and space there was at a premium. Stood to reason, with the shortage of ground available.

Kenny had said that the Rock of Gibraltar was four miles long and slightly more than a mile wide. The summit where the big communications antennae were anchored, was 1,300 feet above sea level. Most of the colony was either on reclaimed land or clung to steep slopes, the rest of the space taken up by the airport complex, the camp or the cemetery.

The office allocated to them was on the first floor of the block. Beyond it, three rooms had been converted temporarily to sleeping quarters. There was a bathroom, and a kitchenette. She assumed Six used the place . . . but would have needed time to work out why they were in Gibraltar. A typed note had been left on each unmade bed, on top of the pile of neatly folded blankets, sheets and pillows, stating that smoking was forbidden and cleaning was to be done by occupants. Dottie had papered the bare walls with the pictures and maps, fastened with Blu-tack. Pavel Ivanov, the Tractor, gazed down at them and Petar Alexander Borsanov, the Major. Winnie Monks always thought of Dottie as tough, bred rough on a housing estate in Newcastle, with no romance in her life to soften the edges. She'd done time as a clerical assistant, then been assigned to Winnie's section. She had worked for Winnie at the expense of any social life. She had looked mutinous when the Graveyard Team was wound up and a new post found for her. The 'portrait' image of Damian Fenby, from the West Middlesex mortuary, was placed near to the Major's.

Winnie Monks often remembered that homecoming. There had been none of the slow pageantry of Wootton Bassett for the casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan. They'd unloaded him at night, hustled through the paperwork, and brought him by closed van to the hospital. The parents had not been permitted to see him before he'd been tidied. Dottie had made the picture prominent.

Winnie had secure telephones, with scramble devices. Her computer would encrypt any exchange she had with Caro Watson, in Africa, or Xavier, who was installed in a hotel with a view, no doubt, of the beach and also of the Rock. She had nothing to send and nothing came to her.

It was predictable.

Winnie said, 'Baton passed. I can make little corrections, of course and I have one window of possible intervention. Otherwise, I'm sat on my backside with a view of the boneyard and not a lot else.'

Neither Dottie nor Kenny answered her. Dottie went on with her decoration, and Kenny with drawing up his shopping list. Others now controlled the outcome, which lodged right up her nose.

Myrtle and Mikey had been two terriers with a rat.

Where they had come from, the old streets with the back entrances where the bins were kept, a terrier was worth its weight in gold: it did for the rodents in half a dozen yards better than any damn cat. The rat was the nephew. They had talked of nothing else.

Mikey had not been down to the bar and had not met Izzy Jacobs to share it, and Myrtle had not been down to the mini-mart to get fresh bread and a new carton of milk. They had not let go of it since the sun had woken them. She was harder, always had been. She was no beauty now, had been the best-looking teenage girl in the road and all the boys but had been, except Mikey, terrified to ask her out because of who her father was and her brothers' reputation. Mikey had proved himself and won her a bloody long time ago. He was angry that he'd had to stand up Izzy Jacobs and she was annoyed that she was going to miss an afternoon's chat with other women in an ex-pat group but the matter had to be settled.

As he usually did when his determination flagged, he threw it back at her. 'What am I going to do?'

'Nothing.'

'I helped to make the debt. I'm part of it.'

'The little rat can sort it,' she said.

'How? It's millions of euros! We live in this dump, he's sleeping in a car.'

'He goes to the man and tells him.'

'Goes to that man?' Mikey threw his arms wide.

'He has to face it out.'

'You know what you're saying, Myrtle?'

'He has to face it out he's not our responsibility.'

'Myrtle, he's family. All right, mine, not yours, but family.'

'He can't run from those people.' She was decisive.

He conceded. 'I'll tell him.'

Loy had brought more coffee.

'Have you it in your head, is it registered? We're not going.' From Snapper, there was now no pretence of friendliness.

'Mess with me and I can blow you out of the water.' Jonno could hardly believe he'd said it.

Loy was making a list on a notepad, but Jonno couldn't read it. Posie had not drunk her latest mug of coffee, and now had her hands over her ears.

Snapper smiled contemptuously. 'I speak a bit of Spanish used to come down here more often than now. Lo dicho, dicho esta. Since you know so much, young man, you'll be aware that that's about the folly of opening your big mouth, then wishing you could swallow your tongue. Explain. How will you blow me out of the water? I want to hear.'

Jonno looked at the faces. He thought Posie was pleading with him, wanted an end to it. In Sparky's he saw a sort of aloof neutrality. Loy's features betrayed amusement. Snapper peered at him. Jonno could back off. Anything that was sensible demanded a shrug, a grunt, a raising of the eyebrows. Some remark about 'not worth the candle'. Who would have said that Jonno had the streak of bloody-minded obstinacy, and pig-headed contrariness and something that was about doing, first time in his damned life, something awkward but right? No one. Not even his mother.

An engine started up outside.

Loy lifted the camera off the table and passed it to Snapper. Then, he pushed his notepad aside and picked up the big one. The engine beat steadied, and Snapper had the camera to his eye. He held it rock steady, and did focus turns on the lens.

Jonno said, 'You have no concern for Geoff and Fran. You'll use them and chuck them out like an empty fag packet. They'll not be able to live here. If he's Russian, let the Russians take him. If his crimes are in Spain, let the people here do the work. You have no authority. What's so important that you have to come here and destroy the lives of two old people? How do I blow you out of the water? I have a mobile, and there's a landline in the house. There's a police station down the road, someone in there who'll speak fair English. I can go down the stairs, outside, ring the bell next door and speak into their gate system.'

The shutter was going.

Snapper said, quiet and matter of fact, for Loy's log, 'That's it, cat by the tail, cat held over the chipper funnel, cat gone.'

Loy wrote. Posie gave a low moan. The camera went back on the table.

Snapper turned to Jonno. 'Didn't catch the last bit, young man. I was watching them put the cat in the chipper. Something about going out? Loy's made a shopping list, bits and pieces we need. We've a float for what it'll cost, but a receipt would help. Can I give you some advice?'

He was handed the list.

'What?'

'Do the shopping. Relax a bit, and look after the lady. Go with the flow. You're on holiday, here to look after their cat. Enjoy your time in the sunshine. Most days I'm working in people's homes. We get to be part of the furniture, barely noticed. I hate threatening people, but just consider what I might do, or those I work for, what might happen if you disrupt what we're at. Use your imagination . . . '

Jonno bit his lip and gouged his finger nails into his palms or he might have hit the man.

9.

Jonno and Posie had stayed. Neither had checked the flights out, or the bus times from Marbella.

Jonno hadn't used his mobile or the house phone. A day's argument had gone unresolved. An atmosphere of armed truce separated them: he and Posie were on the ground floor; they were up stairs and allowed access to the kitchen and bathroom.