Spy or Traitor Book 1 | gabbylanespy.com

Spy or Traitor - the first Gabby Lane Spy novel

SPY OR TRAITOR

A BLACKHAWK NOVEL

Other books by M.F.Kelleher

Gabby Lane Spy Series:

2: The Kill Order

3: Official Denial

4. Double Agent

Remastered and Reproofed in February 2025

Fifth Edition

The right of M.F.Kelleher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or transmitted into any retrieval system, in any form, or by means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any authorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 9798800131062

Cover artwork by Claire Meczes

CHAPTER ONE

The first glow of dawn hangs in the air and the lightness of the sky creates breaking flecks across the walls of the bedroom. The man next to her is naked under the quilt. She silently rolls out of bed, pulls on her clothes and stuffs her handgun into the back of her jeans.

Gabby Lane is never sure if she enjoys deep cover operations or not. Part of her likes the pretence, likes the idea that you can be anyone you want to be; all you need is the MI6 Communications Branch to knock up a fake passport, some fictional photos for your phone of your family, maybe an Instagram account of your false life, and someone new has been created out of thin air.

But every minute of the waking day, she is clear that her job is to meet the objectives of the operation, monitored continually by London to ensure she delivers whatever the needs are of the British Government.

She watches the sleeping man. He’s not all bad, she thinks. His mother would no doubt say he had got in with a bad crowd. But he’s a killer, and his mother doesn’t know that.

She turns to go and hears the covers rustle faintly behind her.

“Going already?”

She turns and smiles at him. “I need to get to work, I told you.” Her German is good enough for her to adjust her vowels to speak in a Berlin accent.

“Come here,” he says.

She walks to him and sits on the edge of the bed. He raises an arm and his hand grasps the back of her neck. He tries to pull her towards him but she resists.

“Don’t Franz.”

“I know who you are.”

“What?”

“I know you’re not who you say you are,” he says, his eyes betraying some sadness.

“Don’t be silly, I’ll be back tonight.”

“What did the guy tell me?” Franz says. “She’s called Gabby Lane. Is that right? Your real name? And he said you work for British Intelligence.”

“What are you on about?” She leans in and kisses him. His hand moves to her windpipe; he starts to squeeze and doesn’t stop. “Franz, you’re hurting me!”

She brings her arm up; her fingers are already in a fist. She hits him hard on the side of the head, and again, and she keeps going until the skin is broken on his face.

Franz pushes up from the bed and his blood drips down onto the bed clothes. He pushes her, her centre of gravity drives her backwards but she shifts her weight and recovers. He raises a fisted hand to her. Gabby reaches behind her back and her fingers feel the coldness of her handgun. Then she sweeps her hand round, pulls the trigger, and a single red spot appears on Franz’s forehead, dead centre. He stops mid punch, sways, then collapses into her, his full body weight hitting her hard and pushing her to the floor. She pulls herself out from under him and stands up. For a second, Gabby stops and looks at him. Then she turns and walks out to the street.

Twenty minutes later, in another flat on the other side of Berlin, the peace is broken by the sound of a key in the lock. Gabby Lane, senior field officer in the British security service, MI6, opens the door and walks in. She heads straight to the bathroom and spends too long under the warmth of the shower to remove the sweat from the previous night.

She wraps her dark hair in a light towel, makes coffee in and pushes the sliding door to her balcony. This was the reason she insisted with London that they rent this flat for her. The balcony is wide, and stretches along the entire width of the flat. It’s her place to escape, if only for a few minutes, to get away from the job.

Deep undercover takes its toll over time, you don’t know who you are. But the core requirement of the job is total immersion in another life. You have to believe in your cover story or they see through it. She sips her coffee and looks across the city. Berlin excites her still because it sits strategically between East and West and is the crossing point of so many spy networks.

She wonders how long she can go on doing field operations. Maybe she has been doing this job too long already. One day she knows she will reach the end of what is bearable. One person can only take so many deaths, violence and pain. Nearly all of the field agents who she considers to be good spies say the same. Maybe it’s the only escape you have in field operations. Inside your head you can get away, but never in real life.

Gabby started her training in an SAS camp in Ireland. The sergeant had tried to break her. Too pretty, he had said. What’s a girl like you want to be here for? Give it up and go back to shopping. On the last day she had gone into his office and delivered a sharp blow to his testicles. She wasn’t going to be forgotten quickly.

Gabby thinks about the people she has killed in her decade in the field. All have been justified in her mind. They were all violent men and women. The world is better off without them. She regrets only one death, a 17-year-old bomber. She had been turned by a gang who were much older than her and she genuinely believed in what she was doing. But Gabby had a job to do and shot her where she knew the girl would die immediately in the least amount of pain.

There is no more time to sit and think as she has work to do. The old school luxury of an agent being allocated to only one case at a time is long gone. She checks her encrypted messages and a new job has come in while she was in the shower. There are three broad areas of work allocated to field officers – intelligence gathering, infiltration and kill orders. Death is the weapon of last resort for British Intelligence. Only when all other options have been exhausted is approval given to end a life. Authority for kill orders only comes from one place, a secret committee, N19. It only meets when it needs to consider requests that come up from both MI5, the British spies who operate inside the UK, or from MI6, the spies based in countries across the world.

The new job is a kill order. The man who is the target is Herbert Klingerfeld. He started as a gang master of foreign labour and worked his way up to extortion and eventually arms trading. Herbert sold surface to air missiles to terrorists four years ago and now he is planning a deal with the North Koreans, selling automatic weapons, and more importantly parts for a dirty bomb. N19 has deliberated and approved the job.

Gabby dresses in black jeans, black jumper, a green army jacket and Doc Marten’s boots. She walks out to her car and drives out to the very edge of East Berlin where the city ends and the fields take over. This is where Klingerfeld has a large mansion, surrounded by five acres of land with a large fence all around. Gabby drives the roads that border the estate but there’s no weaknesses in the security that she can see and rejects the idea of an assassination at his home.

She heads back into the centre of Berlin and drives around near Klingerfeld’s office on Mittelstrasse then parks in a side street and walks the pavements for three blocks, working out what might be possible.

Spying isn’t a lone occupation, no matter how much it feels like that sometimes. In her mind, half the people she has worked with have been trustworthy. Some were just lazy, some only worked to make sure their bosses noticed their contribution, and a small number had been spies for other countries who had been planted inside MI6. All countries spy on all countries. You just have to know who are the double agents and then you’ll be fine.

She pretends to be on a call, puts her phone up to her ear and acts out talking to someone. This gives her the cover to explore the layout of the reception area of the office block. A security guard sits reading a paper and doesn’t even look up at her.

A close-in attack is out of the question, she concludes. There is a small road for cars to pull in and drop-off their passengers, and a wall and security gates on the roadside to protect Klingerfeld or anyone else from an attacker. The street has tall buildings along both sides and this always means that sniping is a good option. It is getting dark when she returns to her flat. She goes online and puts in an order for a sniper for the next day. Gabby can’t remember how much she slept the previous night and crashes out fully clothed, then wakes at 1am, takes off her clothes and retreats beneath the duvet.

Her phone buzzes at 10am the next morning.

“Hello, Gabby.” She recognises the voice immediately.

“Mac! A proper killer, thank God! I never know if I’m going to get some 25-year-old with a gun they’ve never used.”

“Always happy to be wanted, old thing. Got this order on my phone at five this morning and knew I couldn’t let you down. Berlin looks sunny but slightly cold, not unlike your good self.”

“Where are you?”

“Military airport in the north,” he says. “Can’t remember the name.”

“I know it. I’ll come and pick you up.”

Mac is a veteran of Afghanistan, one of the top three snipers in British military intelligence. They have worked together on four previous operations, and he is one of the few people who she trusts absolutely.

He is sitting on a bank on the right-hand-side of the main airport entrance as she pulls up, his black hair is short and his large limbs are sprawled over the grass. They drive to a pub in the countryside and she orders beers and huge German sandwiches. They sit in the September sun and talk about their lives.

“Remember that woman in Hungary?” he says almost absent-mindedly.

“Hanna Matto.”

“That’s the one op I almost abandoned. I found it very difficult to kill her.”

“She was young and beautiful, but dangerous. We had to stop her.”

“I guess.” His voice drifts away. They sit in silence for a moment and his hand moves across his two-day-old beard. “You know why I chose to be a sniper?” he says.

“Why?”

“You’re a long way from death, you can pretend that you’re not part of it.”

“Why choose it at all? You could have been a bank manager.”

“It’s all I can do,” he says, looking at her and gently smiling.

“How long are you going to keep doing this?” she says to him.

“As long as they want me.”

“They’ll always want you.” She narrows her eyes and tries to see more from his face but can’t.

“Maybe,” he says, but keeps looking at the valley in front of them.

A breeze stutters up the grass bank to the table where they sit. She watches his face. For a second, he had let her inside his protective shell. The thing that makes it possible for him to kill and not have nightmares. Now, the barrier has come back down but there is a bond between them. He raises his glass to her.

“To us, Gab,” he says.

After they finish lunch, she drives them to the location and they take seats on the pavement outside a local café. She talks through her plan and he is attentive as she speaks.

After half an hour, they finish their drinks. His hand reaches down to his sports holdall at his feet containing his rifle.

They stand up and walk along the pavement and she kisses him on both cheeks. They turn away in different directions and Gabby walks to her car and drives back to her flat.

It is in the early evening, that she gets a message on her phone saying that Mac has been shot dead.

CHAPTER TWO

Gabby’s first thought on hearing about Mac is that he is not dead at all and this is a cover. But half of her thinks that he would have told her if that was the case. Gabby goes back over the words he used earlier to see if he was trying to tell her something, but nothing seems obvious.

She picks up the TV remote control and pushes the buttons 4-7-6. A section of the lounge wall slides back, and she walks through and descends a set of metal stairs behind the wall, two at a time. At the bottom of the flight she pushes a large steel door and enters a grey equipment room with one red emergency light providing the only illumination. She flips a power button and the four screens light up in front of her. As she types in her passwords, she looks up at her reflection in the monitors, and she thinks she looks strained but she ignores it. Gabby spins round on the chair to a side panel with a mass of buttons and switches. She flicks switches and turns dials until a ringing tone pushes out from the speakers at both ends of the room. The words ‘Encrypt Request’ are displayed on the screens in front of her. She says the daily code words and the screen changes to ‘Voice Recognition Accepted’.

Five seconds later the video screens flicker and the image of an Ops Controller in London Centre appears.

“Hello, Anglesey,” she says.

“Agent Blackhawk, how are you?” The man is in his thirties with curly hair and tiny wire glasses.

“I had a message about Asset Stranraer,” she says, referring to Mac’s field code name.

“Yes, asset lost in the field,” he says without emotion.

“What happened?”

“GISS called it in about an hour ago.”

“The Belgian security service?” says Gabby. “Why them?”

“They were on the scene, apparently,” says Anglesey.

“In Berlin?” She sounds incredulous. “Why?”

“No intel on that, sorry, but Stranraer was killed at his shoot position, they said.”

“I personally vetted the site,” says Gabby more emotionally than she intended. “It was secure.”

“Evidently not.”

“Is anyone actually fucking doing anything to find out what happened, Anglesey?” She is angry now.

“We know you and he were close, Blackhawk.”

“Which means what exactly?” she says.

“Take a break, Gabby,” he says. “We’re moving as quickly as we can. You know these things have protocols.”

“Asset down in the field should be a bloody top priority.” She can feel her heart beating. “There’s only one explanation with this sort of event.”

“And that is?”

“We’ve got a leak,” she says.

“Network status is secure, Blackhawk,” he says officiously.

“Someone must have leaked,” she continues. “I only confirmed the location at 10pm last night. It was accessible to anyone with Top Secret clearance.”

“There’s a briefing at twenty hundred hours with Scarlett. You should be on it,” says Anglesey. “Got to go. Speak later.” The screen goes blank.

Anglesey was patently keeping something from her. She knows the protocol after losing someone in the field is to clamp down on communications, particularly to those junior staff who are connected in any way with the death. As a senior officer, she should be kept across all the information. If they’re not being open with her, they must suspect something or have some sort of evidence. But she’s not going to sit back and wait, and if they’re not going to tell her, she’ll have to find out for herself.

She drives out in the darkness to the river district of Berlin where bars and cafés light up the sky. The River Spree runs through the centre of Berlin and out to the countryside beyond, winding its way north and eventually to the sea. On this part of the riverside, Schiffbauerdamm Strasse sits directly on the bank. She parks her car and looks out at the street, looking for anyone behaving suspiciously. She is trained to do this if she suspects there may be any sort of risk and it’s starting to feel as though things are getting more risky. Her eyes flick across the passers-by, but all seems normal. She pulls the door handle and steps out.

The Mett Bar has been an MI6 haunt for years. It was here before the fall of the Berlin Wall and was part of the escape route from the East into the West and used by hundreds of people. Gabby pushes the door and walks inside. The long, low room before her is populated with tables and chairs that have seen better days. The décor is decidedly retro but is still here from the first time it was fashionable. A dozen men sit in twos and threes at the tables, talking over mostly beer. She checks the faces as she passes but there’s no one she knows.

She sits on one of the tall stools at the bar and nods upwards to the barman by way of greeting. He picks up a bottle of beer from the shelf behind him, levers off the top and puts it down in front of her.

“How’s business, Hans?” she says.

Agent Hans is Gordon Rathbone in real life, a graduate of Oxford, then the British Army and now a field operative for MI6. He is a fixed deep cover agent. Officially, he has no information given to him and it is against the rules to give him any. He is supposed to be a one-way source from the street into the security services. Informally however, he is a mine of useful intelligence and another one of the few people in the service who she trusts.

“It’s been the busiest week ever,” he says, which is code for, ‘it’s safe to talk.’

“I thought you might have heard what’s going on.” She takes a gulp of beer.

“One thing I do know is that you’re on restricted comms after the Stranraer thing,” he says and raises his eyebrows.

“Why, though?” She looks concerned. “I should be kept across it.”

“They think you were involved in some way, Gab. There have been two other cock-ups recently, not here but across Europe.”

“We’ve lost three field assets?”

He nods. “Two agents, and now an assassin. London are getting worried.”

“I wasn’t involved,” she says, looking indignant.

“I’m not the one you need to convince,” he says.

“There’s a mole, Gordon. London will take weeks to find them. I’m not going to sit around on my arse waiting for Investigations Branch to find out I had nothing to do with it.”

“Have a holiday, they’re not going to give you any juicy work until they know you’re in the clear.”

She takes a long breath out and another mouthful of beer. “In that case, I’m going to disappear,” she says. “Off-grid.”

“And do what?”

“Find out what happened, for Mac’s sake,” she says.

Gordon smiles.

“I might need your help too,” she adds.

“You know I’ll help you in any way I can. I could do with something more exciting than just being a fictional bartender.”

“You know that drop point we set up last year?”

“Site Carlo?” he says.

Gabby nods. Check Carlo every day at 4pm Berlin time. It’s the only way I’ll communicate. When I need you, I’ll tell you.”

She finishes her beer and beckons him with her forefinger. He leans in close. She kisses him on the cheek and presses a USB stick into his hand. “Look after the baby for me,” she says and turns away toward the door. As she pushes out into the street a rush of northern air makes her eyes water, but only for a moment. Then she has gone. Hans leans down beneath the counter and lodges the storage device in a crevice against the underside of the bar.

When she wakes the next day in her flat, Gabby packs a bag and leaves her MI6 phone switched on by her bedside so they can’t track her. She opens her safe and removes a brand-new mobile, plus cash in Euros and Pounds and stows it all in her bag. She slams the front door shut and walks to the nearest tram stop. She goes east and checks into a hotel on Mohrenstrasse, then dumps her bag and heads out to get breakfast.

Within five minutes, she registers that she is being tailed by a guy in a blue jacket and a severe haircut. She doesn’t recognise him and needs to know if he is from the German intelligence service, the BND, or something more difficult to manage. She deploys a set of simple techniques to test if someone is following her or whether it is just her own paranoia. He passes the tests - he is indeed a tail.

Gabby returns to the hotel but instead of going up to her room she walks straight through the building and out of the back door into a small square yard. A set of external stairs are bolted to the back wall of the hotel as a fire escape and she climbs up as far as it will go. At the top, a metal gate gives access to the roof. She kicks at the lock until the bracket holding it breaks away and the gate swings open. Gabby walks over to the front edge of the flat roof and peers over. Her tail is waiting at a café table across the road. She takes her phone out and photographs him then runs the image against the MI6 database of known people but it doesn’t match with anyone and she swears under breath.

The hotel is not connected to the buildings either side. She picks one side and takes a run up, then leaps into the air to the next block. For a second, she is airborne, flying towards the next roof. She hits it hard and rolls across the surface to within a few inches of the next edge and a drop of five stories. Her hand grabs out at a rod set into the roof and her sinews strain as her body momentum pulls against the few fingers that have a grip. Then, he hand latches, she takes the weight, and she stops.

Gabby breaks into the access door for the lift shaft before climbing down to reach the floors of the block. Outside in the street, she turns west. After a minute she checks for her tail in a shop window. She has lost him. She walks on, finds a café and orders a coffee and crepes.

It takes her tail fifteen minutes to find her. It means that the BND have satellite tracking deployed on her. Someone must really want to know where she is, but she can’t let this get in her way. She finishes her food and leaves ten euros on the table then saunters across the street to an alleyway that she scouted while sitting in the café from behind her sunglasses. Gabby turns into the narrow passage and drops back into a doorway recess a few feet from the road entrance. She can see the tail arrive at the mouth of the alley, pause, and turn into the narrow passage. She is suddenly conscious of her breathing and slows it down.

As he passes her hiding place, Gabby delivers a high kick to his stomach, winding him. He bends over forwards but then rights himself more quickly than she expected. This is a professional who can cope with some onslaught. She leans back and kicks again, this time to his kidney. Gabby still has the upper hand. He groans and she grabs an arm, twists it behind him and pushes him down.

“Time to talk,” she whispers in his ear, pressing him into the road. But his strength is enough to allow him to have some leeway and he reaches out and pushes his thumb into one of her eyes. She is caught off guard. Gabby manages to pull away and falls back, he follows her and tries to regain his grip on her body. Her brain is running at double speed. It takes all of her energy to bring her knee up to his groin. He is stunned for less than a second, but that is enough. She pushes him hard, he falls back and hits his head on the ground. She gets up and kicks him. He rolls away, gets to his feet and runs back up the alleyway and around the corner.

She yells a scream of frustration that she let him go. It’s not winning the fight that matters, it’s getting the information from him that she failed to do. The risk level is her mind just ratcheted up another notch.

By the time she gets back to the hotel, Gabby is still annoyed that she doesn’t know, and can’t think who is tracking her. She needs to get out of Germany, that, she knows. She packs up, then pays cash for a taxi to Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The station is bustling with people walking in every direction. The tannoy shouts departures and Gabby only just manages to catch her train as the whistle blows and the doors hiss their closure.

Gabby reaches London St Pancras Station as the light is fading across the city. She walks through the streets, following her mapping app. After half an hour she can see the Regent’s Park tube station ahead of her and turns down into Park Crescent, a half-moon of Victorian mansions that sit facing north. She punches in a number code to a panel on one side of the door to Number 12 and walks through. On the first floor, there is a second number panel and she enters another code. This is Location B-6, an MI5 safe-house that she used five years ago for an operation to rescue the kidnapped wife of the Belgian Ambassador. There is one person who she needs to visit in London who will tell her more about what has gone on, as long as the woman has not been already got at by someone, but that’s a risk that Gabby will have to take.

CHAPTER THREE

The woman who Gabby has come to see in London is Marjorie Allardice. She was an Operations Controller in MI6 on the day that Gabby had started, and they soon became friends. Now, Marjorie is doing the same job but in MI5.

From her vantage point in the coffee shop opposite Thames House, Gabby can see the main doors and the two side doors used for access. At exactly 3:32pm, Marjorie emerges into the daylight from a ten-hour shift leading an op in the North of England. Gabby waits, then gets up and follows Marjorie as she walks across Parliament Square and disappears into the entrance of Westminster tube station.

The vast hallways and good sight-lines of the station make it very easy to follow people. Gabby can see Marjorie all the way down the escalator to the lower level. They stand, thirty feet apart on the Jubilee Line northbound platform. Gabby steps back behind a group of tourists for camouflage. The train arrives, Gabby waits for Marjorie to move, which she does. Gabby takes the next car along from her target.

They reach daylight as they step on to the street at St John’s Wood. Marjorie navigates the busy road junction and walks quickly toward the mansion flats that border the streets from here down to Abbey Road. Gabby speeds up and, as Marjorie turns into one block of flats, she draws level with her friend.

“Marjorie?”

The woman doesn’t turn her head but slows to a saunter.

“I saw you Gabby, back at Westminster.”

“Can we talk?”

“I thought I might hear from you. Your name has been buzzing about on the network today.”

“What did you hear?”

“That you have disappeared.”

“I have,” she says.

Marjorie takes a sidelong glance at Gabby, the first time she has looked at her. “You’d better come in,” she says.

A flock of pigeons bursts up in front of Stuart Palmer and a cloud of flapping wings make the only significant sound in the small square where he sits at a café table.

It is rare for him to take any time off but his boss had insisted on him taking some days leave before the end of the year. He pushes back his blond hair from his forehead and tries to relax. His face is kind and has an innocent air.

Stuart surveys the view in front of him. There’s a woman twenty feet away exploring her mobile phone with an intensity. She looks up at him for a moment, then back down at the device. There’s a man on another table drinking some sort of yellow liquid from a tall glass. He is about forty, well dressed and looks nervous as though he is waiting for someone. He picks up the glass and empties it in one go, then collects his belongings and walks away to the far side of the square before disappearing up a side street. Stuart vaguely thinks that he recognised the man but can’t place him.

A small car arrives in the square and stops at the far side, next to the tables from a restaurant where a solitary old man sits reading a newspaper. Stuart sees this but inside his head he is thinking about what he’ll do next on his day off. He does notice the rear door to the car open though, and a man gets out dressed in an orange overall and a woollen scarf pulled up around his features. The man approaches the seated old man and without ceremony pulls a handgun from his pocket and fires at close range. The old man slumps over onto the table in front of him and the newspaper, caught by the wind, rises into the air above his head. The small car with the gunman back inside screeches away and disappears into the maze of connecting streets around the square.

Screams ring out from people around Stuart. A man and a woman run over to the old man who has slipped quietly onto the ground. Stuart wants to rush to help but he sits completely still, unable to move. He has never witnessed anything like this in his years on the planet. His brain says move but his body isn’t listening.

He can feel sweat on his body and a pulse in his throat. At last, Stuart’s leg moves, then the other. Now he’s running. He runs to the nearest side street, then steams round the corner into a narrow street that slopes away to the main road fifty yards ahead. A man in a dark coat is coming the other way, Stuart steps to one side to avoid him and the man steps the same way, Stuart steps the other way, so does the man. Stuart and the man are two feet away from each other now. The man brings his arm up, there’s something in his hand. Stuart is in a panic, then feels something cold push into his skin and the vision in his eyes darkens to blackness.

Sir Stephen Laughton stops writing and looks up at the clock directly opposite his desk on the third floor of MI6 headquarters. The building known as Vauxhall Cross sits on the south bank of the Thames, fifteen minutes by chauffeur driven Jaguar to the headquarters of MI5, which is nearer to Downing Street.

His salt and pepper hair sits on top of a tall, thin frame and his body is hidden beneath a three-piece suit that has echoes of past times within the security service.

One of the three telephones buzzes in front of him on his large, mahogany desk. He presses the flashing button on the base unit.

“Stephen?” says Sir Bernard Mackintosh, Head of Global Operations for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

“Hello, Sir Bernard.”

“I have had a red flag reported to me from Control about Agent Blackhawk,” says Sir Bernard.

“We’ve lost connection with her, temporarily, sir, but it should be back on soon.”

“What’s she playing at, Stephen?”

“Fall-out from the Stranraer loss, sir. She seems to have taken it upon herself to disappear.”

“Have you got resources trying to find her?” says Sir Bernard, getting mildly annoyed at Laughton’s casualness.

“Top priority, sir.”

“Has anyone spoken to her since the incident, and understood what’s going on in her mind?”

“As soon as we find her, we’ll have a detailed chat, Sir Bernard,” says Laughton. “Rest assured, we’re putting everything into tracking her whereabouts.”

“Keep me across it, Stephen. She’s an excellent agent and I don’t want more losses.”

“Sir.”

The line goes dead.

Laughton gets up and goes to his drinks cabinet between the two bay windows in his office. He pours a single malt whiskey and looks out across the running tide. He notices that his fingers are shaking on one hand. All of this used to seem so simple. He puts his hand in his pocket and he can feel the hard-plastic coating of the standard issue arsenic capsule, that is to be carried on your person at all times. You never know when you might be caught. Every day is a high wire act, all the people who you meet that you have to lie to, and Moscow has become increasingly demanding in the last few months. He’s not sure how much more he can cope with.

Laughton can tell that something is happening inside MI6 but he’s not part of it. It feels like an eyes-only operation is bubbling through the organisation, Because he’s heard nothing, it makes him wary. Laughton has been very careful to leave no trace of his leaks over the years, but that doesn’t mean his luck might run out one day. He drinks the malt straight down and pours another.

The nurse lifts Stuart’s wrist and feels his pulse. Steady now after a few hours of touch-and-go. She lowers the limb back down onto the bed covers, turns to the intravenous drip and taps the outside of the casing. She makes the slightest glance towards the door and takes a syringe from her pocket. She removes the cap and injects a clear liquid into the intravenous tube before silently gliding out of the room and back along the corridor.

Palmer’s breathing is steady, the lights on the monitors indicate his heartbeat and vital rhythms are within the acceptable range. The afternoon sun floods in through the window next to his bed and the sounds of the hospital hum away in the background.

The first sign that something is wrong is a silent flashing light on one of the monitors by his bedside. After another minute, an alarm blares out. Two nurses come running in and check the monitors. One starts immediate resuscitation, the other goes to the corridor and calls for the duty doctor. Within another minute, a tall, dark woman in her fifties arrives and inspects Stuart. His breathing is shallow and his body starts to convulse. He vomits and it stays in his mouth. They turn him, the Doctor calls for drugs and a syringe. She pushes it into his right arm. The convulsions reduce then stop. Stuart cries out in pain for a full second and his body arches up off the mattress. Then he settles and the alarms close off one by one, as the monitors start to return back to normal levels.

The doctor pulls out the patient records from a hanger on the end of the bed. “What was it?” asks the nurse.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” says the Doctor, reading the pages. “These results show all clear only an hour ago. Has anything been administered and not recorded?”

“We’ve been at the nurses’ station, right outside, all day.”

The Doctor says nothing but goes back to Stuart and looks at his face. “What are you all about, Herr Palmer?” she says under her breath.

Marjorie puts her forefinger to her lips as they enter the flat. They make their way down a long corridor and into the conservatory of 17A Carlisle Place.

“You remember Gabby?”

Lady Fiona Allardice turns her aged head and peers at Gabby.

“Oh yes. How are you, my dear?”

“Very well, thank you, Your Ladyship.”

“Don’t bother with all that, call me Fiona.”

“What have you been up to, mother?”

“I was just tracking some Chinese websites,” says the old lady. “They are issuing statements apparently independent of the Government, but it’s all bloody obviously coming from the Chinese security service. Think we were born yesterday.”

“Mother was in MI5 for thirty years and she can’t quite let it go,” says Marjorie with a wistful smile.

“What are they saying, Fiona?” says Gabby.

“Just reeling off names of individuals of interest to the authorities, making out they are trying to protect them,” says the old lady. “I invented this technique in ’68, we used it against the Soviets very effectively. Brought in a large number of their double agents that they were running in London by appearing to be a pro-Soviet newspaper. Fell right into it.”

“How do you find the sites?” says Gabby.

“Easy for me, my dear. This technical chap I know set my computer up with something that allows me to track all this. Easy nowadays that it’s all on the internet, I must say. We had to set up special networks to capture all this.”

“There’s something I need to find out, Fiona,” says Gabby. “Could I use your computer for a couple of minutes?”

“Be my guest, my dear. Second door on the left, back towards the front door.”

Gabby finds the study and sits in front of the desktop computer. She pulls out a micro drive from her pocket and plugs it into a socket on one side. This will isolate any tracking devices on the machine and hide her activity. She needs to get into the Oberon system that MI6 uses to record all of the operational detail, but Tech Branch will spot the activity within 60 seconds so she has to get in and out before the alarms trigger. She starts a timer on her watch and logs in.

She needs to know who was messaging who from the time Mac received his reporting instructions to the moment he died. She runs a search against the criteria and a huge volume of data is displayed on the screen, far too much to glean anything useful with a cursory glance. Gabby starts to download the file back onto her storage device. As the percentage moves along the progress bar, she checks her timer. Twenty seconds. She needs to destroy all traces of her being on this machine before the alarm sounds. Ten seconds. The file completes its download. She logs out, runs the MI6 Strike App and wipes the machine. As the software completes, the alarm sounds on her wrist, and she breathes out.

Marjorie cooks dinner and towards the end of the meal, Fiona entertains them with stories that her daughter has heard many times before about the old days of British intelligence. Then, after Lady Allardice goes off to check her horse racing results, the younger women talk on and Gabby relates the events surrounding Mac’s death.

“What are you going to do now, Gab?” says Marjorie quietly.

“I need evidence,” she says. “He was a good friend of mine and I just want to know what happened. The evidence is out there, I just have to find it and piece it together.”

The time ticks on and eventually Gabby looks at her watch. “I need to go,” she says. “I was never here, Marj, I don’t want you and Fiona to get caught up in my mess.”

“You can trust us, Gab,” says Marjorie. They walk to the door. She walks down the stairs and pushes out into the dark. Inside the flat, Marjorie goes to the study and starts to file her contact report with London Centre with an update on Gabby’s latest state of mind.

CHAPTER FOUR

There are only a few dozen people who have been accepted into the elite snipers C9 Branch of MI6. And Kate is one of them. They are all trained in both long range and hand to hand lethal combat.

She pulls her fingers through her blonde hair and takes a sip from her coffee cup in a café that in five minutes form her flat in Zurich.

Kate is allocated to Northern Italy and Switzerland. The dedicated patch strategy is a change from the old days when people were deployed anywhere across the world and had to fly long haul to complete an order. Long haul isn’t the best experience just before you have to work, and you have to be fit in this job, almost like an athlete.

She takes care of her diet and only eats things that will keep her weight within four pounds of her optimum. She goes to the gym every other day and can outrun all the men on the treadmill.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. Kate taps in the decrypt key. It’s only a personal message from her boyfriend Rich, sending pictures of his new flat on Park Street, Mayfair.

Rich doesn’t know what she does for a living and she’s not going to tell him anytime soon. He was vetted by the MI6 Communications Team when he became her boyfriend, but she doesn’t trust him and is sure he’s cheating on her. When she visits London this weekend, she’ll test him, she thinks.

Another message pings into the device. “Damn it,” she says under her breath. She has been hoping for no more work this week. The screen shows a subject line “653/6.1.”

She opens the message and it contains the usual instructions, a grid reference and time, 6:30pm tonight. The location is a villa on the outskirts of Zurich. She picks up her weekend suitcase and walks back to her flat around the corner.

She drops down into the basement car park and starts her Jaguar F-Type. Kate drives out of the town and up through the hills, then parks in the woods off to one side of the mountain road. She gets out and makes a wide sweep on foot of the valley where the house lies. Kate checks a map of the area surrounding the house as well as the floor layout of the property that has been sent from London.

She is wearing camouflage leggings and a running jacket, her hair swirled up and hidden beneath a woollen beanie. She gets back to her Jaguar and drives further up the road then dives down a track that leads to the edge of the land owned by the house. She walks through the trees until she reaches the top of a wooded slope that leads down to the rear of the property. There are two guards that she can see, one on each side of the terrace, but she can tell that they’re amateurs from the way they stand. No military training is apparent. They mostly stay in the same spot, but one of them occasionally retreats to a corner of the building for a cigarette.

She re-positions herself along the slope so she can see the smoking place. As one of the men walks there, she silently drops from the top of the rise. She moves quickly, almost flying. Kate appears from the wood, ten feet from the man, runs up behind him and pushes a knife silently between two ribs. The lights in his eyes dim instantly and he slumps to the ground.

She checks where the other guy is, but he’s on the far side of the land and has seen nothing. Kate runs to a side door that will give her access to the villa. She tries the handle and it’s unlocked. She opens the door, draws her silenced Beretta handgun from the holster on her back and steps inside. She can hear a man talking on a telephone in the next room. Kate treads gently across the room until she is against a doorframe and within twenty feet of him. She has one shot to make this work as the other guard could hear and block her exit route.

The man on the telephone is pacing the room, talking about arrangements for importing something or other. He is facing the doorway where she is hiding.

“Come on, Marco,” she whispers under her breath, “Just move around a tiny bit.”

He does move around. She takes three paces, pushes the Beretta into his torso and pulls the trigger. A dull thud echoes around the room. He tries to call out. She takes the weight of his body as his eyes close and his limbs collapse onto each other. Kate lays him down on the wooden floor. He opens his eyes for a second and looks at her, but there is no emotion, and they close before he can say anything.

She turns back and runs to the side door. The other guard is nowhere in sight and she sprints across the garden and up into the wood. Kate stops at the top of the slope and checks for the guard, but he’s not there. She jogs back to her car and her body slips down into the driver’s seat. She stows her Beretta in the hidden housing on the dash. The engine roars and she drives back through the lanes until she reaches the junction on the main road. Kate turns the car back towards the town and accelerates away from the scene.

She gains speed along a straight stretch of road and steams around the next corner. As she passes a side road, a Porsche pulls out behind her but initially she thinks nothing of it. The Porsche more than keeps up with her speed and slowly closes the gap between them. At each straight section, the Porsche gets closer, until it is thirty feet from her back bumper. She tries to see the face of the driver, but they have their visor down and sunglasses on.

At the next corner, the two cars scream around the bend at over sixty miles per hour, then the Porsche accelerates and starts to pass her. The next bend is no more than ten seconds ahead. The Porsche draws level with her window and maintains the position. As Kate starts to think that the Porsche won’t make the next corner, the side window rolls down and a handgun is raised by the driver.

Two shots ring out, the first smashes the side window and the second hits the inside of the door beside her. Kate brakes right at the start of the curve in the road but the Porsche doesn’t slow and barely makes the corner before regaining control and speeding off. She pulls over and sits motionless, taking in the events of the past minute. A trickle of blood drops down her cheek from glass fragments that have grazed her skin. She looks in the rear-view mirror, she has three or four cuts across her face.

She stabs a button on the car’s console.

“Voice Message to London Centre,” she says out loud, a red light flicks on in the panel above her head. “Agent Coniston. I have completed job 653/6.1 successfully. The job itself was fine but afterwards I was followed by an assailant and sustained fire, two rounds and no injuries. The assailant appears to have been waiting for me, and I can only think that the kill location was leaked, suggest you explore any network security issues. Message ends.”

She wipes the blood from her face, drops the clutch and heads for the airport.

The light from the upper window moves across Stuart’s face. He opens his eyes for the first time in what seems like months but isn’t. He looks around the hospital ward as it comes into focus. Lying still, his brain automatically starts to go through what he can remember of the events that led to him being in this bed; the café, the car, the running, the man with the knife.

“Herr Palmer.” A voice comes from the doorway and a nurse walks in. “How do you feel?”

“Tired, but not in pain,” he says. She smiles at him and checks his pulse. “Am I alright?”

“A little infection in the wound,” she says. “You’ll need to stay here for a couple of days but you should be alright to go home after that.”

“Can I make a telephone call?” he asks.

It is Geraldine who answers the call. She seems very pleased to hear from him and tells him that everything had been sorted out in the office while he’s been away. Malcolm took on the policy paper about trade and Sally from accounts found someone else to do the analysis of health care services for British expats in Germany. She speaks as though he has been away on a business trip rather than the victim of a stabbing.

“How do you feel, Stuart?” she asks eventually.

“Not bad,” he says. There is a British pause as they struggle to find any words that show some caring without being too forward.

“We’ve all missed you, Stuart.”

“Thank you, Geraldine, it will be good to get back and see you.”

“When are you coming out?” she says.

“A while yet, there’s an infection apparently.”

“Do they allow visiting?” asks Geraldine.

“Yes.”

“I might come to see you then.”

“That would be nice,” he says. They hang on the telephone line, each wanting to hear themselves say something more deeply felt.

“I’ll come in tomorrow,” she says.

“Right.”

They ring off and, in the office, Geraldine is lost in her thoughts.

Jim is late. He arrives in a fluster, having been held up by some last-minute analyses needed before the opening of the Asian markets.

Gabby hasn’t seen Jim Cartwright for six years. They worked together in the Metropolitan Police Specialist Decryption team which was part of her training. Jim borders on genius when it comes to numbers and finding patterns in data. He left the police and moved into international banking analysis in London’s Docklands area. She booked a table at Elephant Royale Restaurant as she knows he likes Thai food.

They chat for an hour about people they know and what they’ve been doing. With Jim, she uses her real name, but her cover story has always been that she works in a law firm as an investigator. She has a fictional boyfriend, Ralph, and they have a flat together in Fulham. Over the months and years, she has become quite fond of some of the fictional people in her stories. When in Berlin, she has a particularly lovely fictional uncle who lives in Munich who she visits regularly. He sounds so kind and the sort of person she wishes she knew in real life.

After a while, Gabby thinks the time is right to move the conversation on to what she came for.

“I wanted to ask you something, Jim.”

“Fire away.”

“We have a case running currently,” she begins. “And I have to find out if there are any patterns to the emails that were sent between various people in this client’s company.”

“What sort of data?” he asks.

“Strings of messaging data and time-codes,” she says, pulling out a USB stick from her pocket and placing it down between them. “We anonymised it all so we’re not breaking any Data Protection Act stuff.”

“How much data is on here?” He picks up the stick.

“Four terabytes.” He widens his eyes. She adds. “How long would it take?”

“A week?”

“Can you do anything in three or four days? We’ve got a court date coming up.” She flicks her eyes up to his and smiles.

“I’ll do my best, Gab. But I need to go back, sorry. Chinese markets are having a big announcement and I’m needed.” He pauses. “Really nice to see you again.”

“You too, Jim. Look after yourself.”

“I’ll message you when this is done,” he says, then he walks away.

Gabby raises her hand to order another glass of wine as she wants time to just think. She has started to feel lonely for the first time in a long while and gets out her phone. She flicks through her contacts, chooses one and autodials. A man answers.

“Rich, it’s Gabby. What are you doing tonight? Fancy a drink?” A pause while she listens. “Great, new flat? Ping me the address. I’ll be over.”

She sits staring for a few moments thinking about her life. The waitress comes up; she cancels the wine, pays the bill and goes out to the street.

Gabby clambers into a waiting cab. “Park Street, Mayfair please.”

CHAPTER FIVE

A London dawn lingers across the sky as Gabby gets back to the safe house just before 9am the next day. She packs her bag and takes the tube to Heathrow Terminal 5, buys a ticket and boards a flight immediately.

Brussels airport is bathed in sunshine as the plane swings round to make the final descent. She takes a cab to Rue Souveraine in the centre of the city. It is like a hundred other roads in Brussels with grand houses from la belle époque lining either side.

She finds the building she needs and pushes at a large door which leads to a roofless square with steps to the flats above. She finds the staircase to number 12, silently makes her way up to the second floor and uses skeleton keys to let herself in through the front door. The sitting room has a panoramic view of Brussels, rooftops stretching out north-west to the Parc du Cinquantenaire. Gabby walks through the whole place with her handgun drawn to check that nobody is sleeping late, but she is alone.

She flicks through some paper files next to a small rosewood desk that sits squarely across one of the windows in the lounge, but there’s nothing there of interest. The owner of the flat won’t be home for a few hours, so she settles in a chair to wait for his return. At some stage she raids the fridge to see if there is any food and takes meat and cheese then sits back down. After last night she is tired and closes her eyes.

Gabby is woken by the sound of the front door opening. The chair she is in is high-backed and she is invisible to whoever is coming in. She waits. A man arrives and makes his way to the kitchen. He starts to make coffee and she gets up silently from her hiding position. She forgot about the food plate and it clatters to the floor. The man turns and draws a handgun but Gabby is quicker than him and before he has made one step to investigate the sound, she has raised her Smith & Wesson to his temple.

“Long time, Jonas,” she says.

“Gabby, it has been a very long time,” he says. “What brings you to the world’s greatest city?”

“We’re not in London, Jonas, but I’ll let it pass. Put the gun on the floor.” He does so. “Sit down in the chair by the desk.”

Jonas Geelan steps across the room with his hands showing, and sits down.

“What can I do for you, Gabby?” he says calmly. She keeps the gun trained on him.

“Information, Agent Geelan. Information about an op that your GISS Security Team carried out a few days ago.”

“Any particular operation?” he asks. He smiles then so does she.

“I need you to take me to your HQ and we’re going to do some research together.”

“You want to come with me to Rue Royale?”

“Oui,” she replies.

“Why would I do this, Gabby? You can’t just walk into the headquarters of the Belgian security service.”

“You are going to do this because I know that you’re running an unofficial double agent in London, and I know her name, and I know that you wouldn’t want that to get out because London and Brussels would be very annoyed.”

“I don’t know anything about a double agent.” He holds her gaze.

“How dull,” says Gabby. “I thought you would be more of a man about this. Do I have to show you the evidence?”

“I don’t know anything about a double agent,” he repeats and blinks slowly.

She reaches into her jacket, pulls out a sheet of paper and unfolds it. “Names, dates, locations,” she says, holding the paper in the air so that he can read it.

He is silent for five seconds. “OK,” he murmurs eventually.

“That’s my boy. The master copy of the information on this piece of paper is in a letter that has already been posted to the Director General of your security service and is on the back of a motorbike coming from Berlin,” she says. “It will take that bike about two hours to arrive. That’s how long we have to get the information I need. The motor cyclist will call my mobile when he arrives at the address to check whether he should deliver the letter or not. No answer from me will mean he will deliver the letter. If I answer, I can tell him to go ahead or stop. That is the only way he will abort the delivery. Also, just in case you’re thinking, the motorcyclist is a field agent from MI6, armed and with orders to kill on sight if he is attacked or stopped en route.”

Geelan is silent. She lowers the gun. “Shall we go?” she says.

They take a cab to the GISS building and emerge from the lifts on the fourth floor. Jonas lets Gabby into his office and they sit in front of the computer.

“Give me the keyboard,” she says and he moves it over.

“Stand over there,” she orders, typing a string of characters in. She hits enter and a list of flies comes up on the screen.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for…,” he starts to say.

“No need for you to know anything more,” says Gabby. “What does the suffix Ge-26H mean?

“It’s a hard disc location downstairs, Guerlain archive room, Row 26, Location H.”

“Right, and so La-83D is another archive room?”

“Laborde,” he replies. She writes down the two references.

“Let’s go to the archives.” They take the stairs to the basement and enter a labyrinth of connected rooms crammed full of paper files for the old cases and hard disc storage devices. They pass three rooms before they arrive at Laborde.

“Here,” he says. They go down one of the long rows of shelving, lined with eight-foot-high cabinets. Section 83 is on the corner.

“Location D,” she says under her breath. She reaches up to pull out the drive. At that moment, he grabs her arm and twists it behind her back, pinning her face against the cabinet. Gabby’s body is more athletic than Geelan’s and she could get out of the hold but refrains.

“Don’t be stupid, Jonas.”

“Be quiet.”

“You don’t want to throw away a twenty-year career,” she says gently. “You’d be ruined, and relations with London screwed for a generation.”

“I can’t be seen to leak this information,” he whispers. “The file access is all on my security profile.”

“I don’t need the whole file, I just need to look at them and copy certain things,” she whispers back.

They stand locked in the position for a few seconds, then he relaxes his hold on her.

“Just copies,” he mutters, his eyes showing defeat.

They find the other location and drop the drives into a reader terminal in one corner of the archive. She finds the content she needs and takes pictures with her phone from the terminal screen then they replace the devices in their shelf positions, and he escorts her to reception.

“Thank you, Jonas.” He says nothing and swipes his key card on the exit gate to let her out. She walks through the revolving doors and disappears into the crowds walking along the street.

Laughton walks up Dean Street in London’s Soho district from where the taxi dropped him. This area always seems to be busy, no matter what the time of day or night.

Despite his nervousness about getting caught as a double agent and his feeling of tiredness with it all, he is oddly proud of both of his two spying careers. He had been recruited as a Russian agent at Oxford in the early 1990s, soon after the old Soviet KGB had morphed into the Russian SVR intelligence service. He had studied Russian and Slavonic Culture as an undergraduate and, in his mind, had simply fallen in love with Russia and all she stood for. The SVR had adapted their recruitment approaches in the 1990s to target both Russians living in the UK and British nationals with a love of the Mother Country.

After a first, late-night conversation in a pub in Oxford with a man who he never saw again, various meetings were set up with increasingly senior Russian operatives. Covert visits to Moscow followed, all arranged through his Russian handler, Ivan. A name that Laughton has always been amused by. He can’t believe that the Russian security services chose such an archetypal cover name. After university, Laughton easily got a job in the Home Office and made the application to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office at the behest of Ivan when he was twenty-four. Once inside the FCO, with his Oxbridge background and cut-glass accent, it had not been difficult for Laughton to speed through the levels of seniority. He had joined MI5 as a Higher Executive Officer and was a key part in the Northern Ireland operations for which he was promoted. He moved to MI6 the following year.

He knows that Moscow likes to think they have not demanded a great deal from him. They encouraged him to ‘live like a normal man’ and he met Caroline in his early thirties. Neither of them wanted children and Linny, as he calls her, is a successful barrister in the Inns of Court. They travelled to New York and Bali to celebrate her becoming Queen’s Council, as the job was called then. They live happily in Highgate, overlooking Hampstead Heath. His biggest regret is that Linny knows nothing of his Moscow connections. He has spent a lifetime lying to the woman he loves so much that he would lay down his own life to save hers.

Laying down his life is not so far-fetched an outcome, he thinks, it would put an end to the strain of pretence and the deaths that he has been responsible for – the men and women from MI6 who he has leaked information about and so put them in danger. Moscow completed the task and killed many of them. A vision of another Stephen flashes momentarily across his mind, the one who declined the offer of a drink in Oxford, the one who followed a career in journalism and then as a writer, the one who has not been lying to Linny for decades.

He turns right into Quo Vadis, a restaurant where he has met Ivan many times over the years. Ivan is sitting in the corner, just as he always is.

“Ivan.”

“Petrov,” says the Russian, using Laughton’s SVR code name. “I ordered the sea bass for us, I know you like it.”

Laughton sits. “How are things?”

“Interesting activities going on that you don’t need to know about, but good for Russia.”

“How long have we known each other, Ivan?” says Laughton.

“Many years, Petrov.”

“For all those years, I have done everything you have asked of me, haven’t I?”

“You have, Petrov.”

A moment’s silence languishes between the two men.

“I want to stop, Ivan,” says Laughton without emotion. “I have had enough.”

The Russian is silent for a few moments. “I’m not sure what to say; you see, there isn’t a way to stop.” He pauses, selecting the right words. “This is a job for life.”

“Nevertheless, I want to stop. I want you to arrange it.”

“Go on a holiday with that beautiful wife of yours,” says Ivan.

“Keep Caroline out of this.”

“You need to rest.”

“I need to stop, Ivan.” Laughton is dead serious now. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard,” says Ivan. “But they won’t like it.”

“Tell Moscow, they have had many years of loyalty,” Laughton drops his voice. “And now that is coming to an end. I’ll do one more op, that’s it. Then it must stop.”

“Alright,” says the Russian, holding up his palms to Laughton. “I will tell them, one more operation.”

“I need to go,” says Laughton.

“The sea bass, you have to stay for that.”

“Give it to your contacts in Moscow, Ivan.” Laughton gets up and strides out of the restaurant.

The Novotel in Brussels sits on the Rue de la Vierge Noire. Gabby registers under a cover name. She takes a cab to the narrow back streets around the east of the city where there are fewer tourists and EU civil servants. She doesn’t want to be seen just yet.

She finds a little French restaurant and realises how hungry she is. When she emerges, the pavements are wet but the night is warm, and she decides to walk back to the hotel. The vast bulk of the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula is silhouetted against the darkening sky as she crosses the giant courtyard in front of the building. From one corner of the square comes the whine of a moped, distant at first then ever nearer. Gabby notices that it is suspicious when it is forty feet away and heading straight towards her. There are two people on the machine, the rear passenger has a baseball bat hanging down beside him. It moves in quickly until it is only feet away. The passenger lifts the bat and swings at her legs. She dodges and starts to run across the cobbles in the direction of the cathedral’s main doors. The bike circles and they come again, faster this time. She pulls out her hand gun and the driver swerves away as he catches sight of it. The bike skids on the cobbles and the whole thing slides sideways. The two riders roll, and she can see their young. The boy with the bat gets up and faces her. The driver draws out a knife from his back pocket and comes for her too.

The first man swings at her body and hits her in the ribs, she bends with the impact and has no time to recover. She can see the knife glint in the moonlight as it comes down on her shoulder. She kicks the guy with the bat and he falls to his knees, she takes a step back and kicks again. This time, his grip on the bat loosens and it clatters way across the cobbles. She kicks a third time and at his head and he falls with a congealed thud. The knifeman swings for her, she pushes the blade up and away to the right, twists his arm back and spins him to the ground. She pushes the barrel of her Smith & Wesson to his face.

“Who sent you?” she says in French. He groans. “I will kill you if needs be.” Her voice is dead calm. “Who was it?”

For two seconds, she pushes him down on the ground.

“Ulrich,” says the boy eventually.

“Sebastian Ulrich?” she says. He grunts. “Were you supposed to kill me?” He nods. “Go and tell him…” She thinks for a second. “Go and tell him that I’m not scared. He won’t win,” she says. Then stands up and walks off.

In the security of her hotel room, she lays on the bed. Sebastian Ulrich, she knows. Ex-Russian military, he made several million from the sale of state assets after Perestroika, now he is one of the big players in arms sales to the Middle East and has connections to illegal migration into Europe. A violent man, he personally shot his number two after the guy did a deal without Ulrich knowing about it.

Her question is, why would Ulrich target her? She flicks back through her memories and where her path and Ulrich’s could have crossed. She has never met him but his tentacles of crime spread far and wide across the continent and she may have unconsciously upset a plan of his. She will need to find out, as having a contract out on her from Ulrich will mean that other assassins will come calling. The two at the cathedral were amateurs, but Ulrich has the money to fund some of the best. Her mind is racing and keeps her awake. After too long, her brain finally lets her fall asleep but only once she has decided that her next step must be to find Ulrich before he finds her.