The lawyer pushed the open diary across his desk, then tilted it so that Mikey Fanning could see his nephew's name was not on any of the pages that were flicked over. It was closed. The lawyer clasped his hands and lifted his eyebrows.

Mikey Fanning persisted: 'Sorry and all that, but he said he was coming here for you to set up a meeting with Mr Ivanov.'

'As he did not come here, I know nothing of any proposed meeting.'

'To talk about an investment's collapse know what I mean?'

'I cannot help you.'

'And he promised, after the meeting, he would call me.'

'May I be very frank with you, Senor Fanning? Many years ago you and I met, we did a little business. Because of that I was prepared to provide a loose introduction for your nephew. What happened after that, between your nephew and Senor Ivanov, I do not know. I made no arrangement for your nephew to visit the Villa del Aguila. Perhaps he has run away. Did you say his circumstances were difficult? I heard a rumour that he was running for his life an involvement with Irish felons. They say that Costa Rica is a favoured destination for fugitives.'

'And you have nothing else to say to me?'

'Believe me, Senor Fanning, if I could help I would. My regards to Senora Fanning. Can I offer a little advice? Leave this matter. Do not chase it. Forget it. Perhaps he ran to find new challenges.'

The lawyer stood. It was like Mikey had been told to get up and head for the door. There would be a loose handshake and a smile that meant less than nothing. Mikey Fanning was always tired, often forgetful, but he could recognise a lie when it was oiled at his face. He knew where his nephew, Tommy King, had been.

'I think he's crazy.'

He had Marko sweeping the patio round the pool for ash and butts, and he had Alex on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the alcohol stains. He manoeuvred the long pole with the net used for taking leaves and drowned moths out of the water and fished for the bottles and cans they had thrown there.

'He will expect to find peasants here, but he'll show us respect or leave. He can shout all he likes that he has the ear of the siloviki and a supreme roof, but without respect, he goes back out of the door.'

He thought the men who came would be thugs, but that he was stronger now. He had been hardened by ordering a man into the chipper. He caught the last can.

'He lives as a rat does,' the Major said. He was speaking of a man he had never met, who in a few hours would play host to him. It took his mind off the sheer cliff that dropped away from the road, the absence of a steel barrier to prevent them plummeting a hundred metres and the loss of the Gecko. Early that morning they had been shown farms on a plateau that produced saffron, and told that an army of peasants was available to harvest the deep orange stigmas. The street price was in excess of 5,000 euro for a kilo. The Gecko would have been able to tell him where the best markets were, the best chemical substitutes to mix with the pure powders, and the principal laboratories that attempted to ensure purity. He had been good to the Gecko, thoughtful.

'I think he's frightened of his own shadow.'

The sea was far away on the horizon. The next day they would cross it. He would meet Ivanov and dominate him.

'Frightened. Hiding. He will show us respect because we still live while he's in hiding.'

She was about to leave her office when the yellow phone rang. The answerphone kicked in. It rang so rarely that Caro Watson halted in her tracks. She had her coat on, a pair of heavy leather boots and a wool hat. Her bag was slung on her shoulder. She stopped by her cubicle door.

The voice said, 'You there, Caro? Be a good girl, don't faff about with me. It's Jimmy and I'm calling you from Dakar. Come on, Caro.'

She picked it up. Agents were given that number. It was the one Natan had loaded. Brisk: 'Yes?'

'Great! Contact at last. Good to hear you. Want an update?'

'Shoot.'

'Your boy did a tombstone. He went out of a plane. There was a herdsman on the ground, minding his sheep. The aircraft came in low and he was bombed by your boy. A phone came down with him. The herdsman brought him back trekked all the way to an airfield, hitched a ride south, and delivered the body to Police Headquarters in Nouakchott in the hope of a reward for his efforts. The boy was a mess but the phone was good. I took it back to Dakar and chucked it at our communications people in the embassy. They opened it and the only number listed was this one. The boy's in the icebox at the Grand National Hospital. They want to know if I'm shipping him out or burying him. Not coming out of my budget. You want to cough up, Caro? Or is it the corporation rubbish tip?'

She said she had a train to catch.

The Latvian policeman escorted a senior Finnish detective to a meeting with the deputy director. The talk, as they ambled the corridors and climbed stairs, was of Russians.

'If you in Helsinki can keep the Mafiya out of Finland, you'll have achieved what the French, the Italians, the Spanish, the British and the Germans have failed at. Any half-profitable racket in Western Europe has a Russian footprint. There was a time when we thought the Albanians had ascendancy but it was a transient time, and passed after some blood-letting. The Albanians now know their place. The biggest inroad, we have found, is on the Iberian hub, in particular the resorts between Gibraltar where the British government permits unfettered money-laundering and Malaga. The Russians there are dominant. We note many examples of their "systemic violence". Also, there are examples of the corruption of local officials. The Russians are the only players in the property market there, investing at knock-down prices. I think all the north Baltic states should watch that Spanish coast very closely, for fear of similar Russian incursions: women for the sex trade, money to be cleaned, illegal migrant workers coming on to the labour market, importation of class A narcotics, counterfeiting, fraud . . . The old Russia is gone, but the new version frightens us. The Kremlin offers no co-operation in our law-enforcement activities. Do I sound too grim?'

He left the guest with the deputy director. He liked to shock visitors and was rarely accused of painting too black a picture of that coast.

Jonno had come in from the garden. He was in the hall, with the number scribbled on the pad in front of him, about to reach for the telephone. The door at the top of the stairs must have been a little ajar.

'God's truth and I don't care who knows it I'm wobbling.'

Snapper's voice. There were murmurs from the others but Jonno could not pick up their words. He listened hard.

'It's out of hand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not the one that's going to tell her we're past the tipping point.'

He had been in the garden, had slipped behind the shed and sat there wishing he smoked. Rain was in the air, and the dream of a holiday was long gone. Petunias were growing wild from a couple of pots swamped with weed. He'd picked half a dozen and put them on the earth where he'd buried the cat. Then he had come back in and gone to the hall to make the call.

'I'm not happy. At home, with this scene, we'd have armed back-up two minutes away. Here we should have a liaison with us and half of a SWAT team of the UDyCO crowd on stand-by. I'm not being rude, Sparky, but all you've been issued is sprays. There's an assault rifle next door and they're carrying handguns. I get my camera up, there's one flash sunshine on the lens and where are we? I can offer an informed guess because I saw that gear and what they did with it.'

Now he heard Loy. 'Too right, Snapper.'

'Anything else, and we're gone. A cup of tea would go down well, love.'

Posie came through the door. Their eyes met, then averted. He didn't know what he should say, what he wanted to say. She came past him. They might have been strangers at the bus station, each going in separate directions.

Snapper started again: 'One more thing and I'm calling her. I mean, we don't know how long we're here. Another day or three? I knew we were dealing with bad guys, but not how vulnerable we were.'

Jonno hadn't heard Sparky offer an opinion. He was confused: the paratrooper had been a marksman. He had no weapon, yet was supposed to provide protection for Snapper and Loy.

Jonno had the telephone in his hand and dialled the number for Malaga International. He was answered by a menagerie of accents, voices, languages: he was told in Spanish, English and German that his call was important to them but they were experiencing a heavy volume of enquiries so he was in a queue.

He was still hanging on when she came from the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches. She didn't look at him as she went by.

'What are you saying to me, Mikey?'

'I'm saying, Izzy, that I have a problem.'

'And are you saying to me that I can help with it?'

'I think I am.'

'Is the problem about money?'

'No.'

There was a pause. Izzy Jacobs ruminated on what he had heard. Mikey Fanning thought his friend was relieved that 'money' wasn't the issue. Most subjects were easy with Izzy, but not money: he was a pawnbroker who fenced burgled property. Mikey and Myrtle had been robbed a couple of years back; the last of his wife's half-decent jewellery had gone. Izzy would have known what she had because he'd have seen it on her when they'd gone out. A hair-drier, the video and a silver-plated brush set had disappeared as well. If the items, of negligible value, had been offered to Izzy, would he have flogged them on, or would he have bought them and returned them to Mikey and Myrtle? He could be as hard as flint where money was concerned, could Izzy Jacobs.

'How can I help, Mikey?'

'Could you do me a Rolex?'

'A real one? A good fake from Naples or a bad one from Montenegro?'

'I can't pay for it. I need a good-looking one on my wrist, for effect.'

'Are we into a shopping list?'

'I've one decent suit stinks of camphor, but it's alright. I want some flash cufflinks, a silk shirt and a good tie. It's a business meeting, Izzy.'

'How long are we talking about?'

'I'd be grateful if I could collect them in the morning, go to my meeting, come back in the afternoon and drop them all off.'

'And make a good impression at your meeting?'

'I'd reckon so. Be a man with a bit of substance. Not a chancer.'

'This meeting, Mikey . . . want to talk about it?'

'Nothing you need to hear know what I mean?'

It had never happened before. Friends for forty years . . . They sat out the front under a parasol and the rain fell lightly. They were close enough to the table not to be spattered. Izzy Jacobs put a mottled, veined hand over his friend's and squeezed it. 'You look scared half to death, Mikey.'

'Things you have to do, meetings you have to go to.'

'Don't misunderstand me, Mikey, but might it not be better to go down the Policia Nacional and pass the problem to them?'

'Never have and never will. Surprised you even thought of it, Izzy.'

Izzy Jacobs told Mikey Fanning when and where he could collect the fake Rolex, a silk shirt and tie, and the cufflinks from his business days that he hadn't redeemed. 'Just for the day, mind you. Where's the meeting?'

'Don't ask and you won't get a lie. Best left alone, Izzy, believe me.'

Xavier followed her advice and let his friend from Cadiz order.

She talked, was earnest, serious and a little sad. 'We say that the Costa del Sol is now under the control of organised-crime groups. We're talking about a whole megalopolis that stretches along 120 kilometres of prime coastline. There is a population there of an estimated three million, but only just over a million are actually registered and the rest are unseen. Extraordinary but true. It's a haven for foreign criminals. The relationships between local government and property speculation are the quickest link to corruption. A policeman, whose honesty I'd swear by, told me that the job of tackling financial crime on the Costa was like fighting an army of elephants with a few ants. And there's Gibraltar, of which you British should not be proud. Now our coast is vandalised by concrete and can never be returned to nature.'

His mobile rang. He saw the number calling him, flicked the key pad and had security. She eased back in her chair, as if to give him space, and waved for the waiter to take the order fish.

He listened to what Winnie Monks told him. He had thought that an operation with the name of the Boss on it would be substantial, solid. Now he realised that she had built a house of cards. He had been an undercover, had hidden behind manufactured identities. The motivation driving him was the certainty that those directing him had not taken short-cuts, were rock steady. When should they be told? If it could be left until the morning it would . . . In fifteen years of working for the Boss, Xavier had not known her faint-hearted. Oh, and she made it sound like a small matter: some kit was on its way overnight from her to Sparky; the courier was from 'that other shower'. He understood that it was being transported by a Six officer. He was surprised they'd agreed to it. She'd chuckled and said they didn't know yet that they were going to play errand boy.

'The kit?'

'Will be delivered to you tomorrow and you should have arrangements in place to get it up to the Paradise place soonest.'

'Yes, Boss. And the news of arrests, when should I pass that on?'

'Hopefully that'll keep for tomorrow too.'

He snapped his phone shut.

The criminologist across the table would have recognised that disaster had struck him, but she was way too experienced in law enforcement to ask about it.

He smiled. 'How do you survive? You're unarmed and unprotected, a witness to criminality and corruption. You name names and you name deals. You denounce the fraudsters. Are you the walking dead?'

'I can bawl off the rooftops but I'm ineffective. In Russia, Mexico or Colombia I would have been shot dead. They don't bother to silence me. I'm unimportant and they're too powerful.'

Xavier felt crushed.

Their food was brought. He had believed in a big victory, handcuffs, cell doors slamming. His hope had been dashed. He was an experienced counter-intelligence officer. He would have reckoned he could field disaster and disappointment, take them in his stride. He would also have believed that discretion was the basis of his professional life. He had never confided the black moments of his work to his wife.

Leaning forward, Xavier said, 'I have a boss who embarked on a crusade. We're on the extreme edge of legality. Years ago a colleague was killed and now we're supposedly all fired up for revenge. The idea was for your people to jump when we told them to and arrest the man we believe to be the killer of our officer. It won't happen. I don't know what my boss has in mind as her fall-back plan but it will be beyond the boundary of legitimacy. Sorry and all that, but I don't want any more of it. The colleague was at best eccentric and at worst a show-boater. He didn't go out on field operations, but was good with the screens and co-ordinating. This time he went out because there was a diarrhoea bug doing the rounds and a conference had been called on laundering. He went with a girl who didn't know her arse from her elbow. He was murdered and became a saint. Some never moved on, and it's all ending in tears. When that happens, the sensible thing is to pack your bags and call it a day.'

She let her hand rest on his, then poured wine into his glass and they started to eat.

'I'm not a cadet from the Military Academy,' Dawson had said. He'd looked at the room they'd shown him. An iron-frame bed, with a wafer mattress, a sheet and a regulation blanket. A communal wash-house doubled with the toilet down the corridor. A window with sagging blinds looked out on to a cemetery.

He'd used his mobile, booked into the Rock.

'Two options. I can take whatever it is I'm to deliver and eat on my own quite a decent dining room, I'm told. Or you can come with the packet and join me.'

She'd hesitated. He'd rolled his eyes. He'd already let them know that the drive from Madrid was a bastard, that taking the vehicle through Spanish Customs and the colony's immigration stretched the protocols of CD plates, but he had not asked what he was to collect and where he should take it. There were two others there, camp-followers and disciples of their boss, both of whom seemed to regard him as a threat to her: one was Kenny, the other was an unexciting little thing, Dottie. She'd said it wasn't a big deal to her, that she'd take the meal and do the handover. He'd gone.

His room was on the first floor.

He was on the balcony and the storm had passed. The lights were on around the anchorage. He nursed a gin. A sign beside the door warned guests not to leave the balcony door open when vacating the room or an ape might enter and fall asleep on the bed. Titbits should not be left out even if the room was occupied. Their car came up the hill and turned into the car park.

She'd smartened herself up a good sign. Skirt, black. Blouse, white. Jacket, charcoal with silver embroidery. The 'little thing' was dragging a package out of the back, big, awkward.

Dawson shouted, 'I'll come down, Winnie. I expect your colleagues'll want to man the phones and do the paperwork. A taxi'll drop you back to your boot camp.'

He downed the gin, straightened his tie, flicked imaginary fluff from his shoulders, brushed the caps of his shoes on the backs of his trouser legs and went to meet her.

She was in the hall, clutching the package to her chest.

She grinned. 'Come on, Dawson, you idle sod. Come and get it.'

'There's a petrol station, he says, on the main drag out to Puerto Banus. A BP one, on the right.'

He had his hand between her thighs and moved his fingers gently. 'Winnie, can we sort out delivery afterwards?'

'No,' she gasped. 'That's the right side for him, but the left side for you, the BP petrol place.'

She had dressed smartly, then endured Dottie's sharp glances and the blank expression Kenny always put on when he was pretending to notice nothing while seeing everything. Dawson had been elegant, attentive, had talked the head waiter through the menu, and not hung about afterwards. They had gone out of the dining room and he had entwined her fingers in his, then led her to the lift.

'Is that good?'

'Course.'

He kissed her lips, then her chin and under it, near the little pearl set in gold that had belonged to an aunt, wife of Monks the Bread. The small bakery had gone bankrupt in 1973, and the aunt had died the next year. Winnie had been given the pearl suspended on its chain and always wore it . . .