competitiveness, by the simple urge to prove Dawn and her organisation wrong.
He had dared and George Widdowes had lost.
His failure, personal and professional, was absolute.
He had never felt such despondency. Never felt such icily unquenchable rage.
Dawn made her way downstairs with the doctor, a T-shirted man in his forties with a faint South African accent whom she introduced as Max. Both looked stunned by the slaughter upstairs.
Without hesitation the doctor stripped the sheet from Alex and scanned his body.
Dawn glanced down at his bloodied nakedness and then turned to the wall.
'Shit!' she murmured.
'What afucking mess. I see he almost took your ear off too?'
'Didn't mean to,' said Alex blankly.
'Just slashed at me, going for my eyes. I asked your colleagues to stick the bulldog clip on to hold the whole thing together.'
'Probably saved the ear,' said Max.
'I assume this was all done with a knife?'
'Yeah. Commando type.'
'Had any tetanus shots recently?'
'Three months ago.
'AIDS test?'
Alex closed his eyes.
'He was trying to kill me, not fuck me.
'Get one done. Any other injuries?'
'Couple of good bashes to the base of the skull. Probably with the steel hilt of the knife.'
Max felt gingerly beneath Alex's head.
'Does that hurt?'
'Doesn't feel great.'
'Could be fractured. I'll book you an X-ray. Meanwhile, I'd better get you stitched up. You'll probably find that it hurts less and the time goes quicker if you talk.'
Alex raised an eyebrow at Dawn.
Max caught the look.
'Yeah, you can talk in front of me. I've certified three murdered desk officers as having died of natural causes in the last month, I think I'm suitably compromised.'
Dawn took a deep breath and, as Max selected a suturing needle from a case, moved back a pace or two.
'What happened?' she asked, looking coldly down at Alex.
'He got the jump on me. Basically, I was wrong to have continued with the setup here after you refused me a back-up man.
Dawn caught Max's eye and with a flick of her head indicated that he wait upstairs. Pulling his needle through, the doctor left it hanging.
'So George Widdowes' death was my fault, was it?' Dawn demanded as soon the door had closed above them.
'No,' replied Alex levelly, 'it was my fault. It was an error of judgement on my part. I'm not ducking responsibility for that.'
'So you had a Glock and he wasn't carrying a firearm of any kind?' asked Dawn.
'That's correct,' Alex confirmed.
'Or if he was carrying a firearm he dropped it pretty early on in the game. So we both pulled knives.'
'Go on,' said Dawn.
'I broke his nose, bit his left knuckle pretty deeply and stabbed him a couple of times in the upper body. It obviously wasn't enough to put him down or stop him doing what he wanted to do, but I hurt him, I think. He won't be feeling good right now, and his face and hand will be visibly damaged.'
'How long did this fight go on for?'
'Oh, three or four minutes probably.'
'And how would you rate him, professionally speaking?' she asked.
Alex shrugged and immediately wished that he hadn't.
'Better than me, obviously,' he answered wretchedly.
'It was weird, though. He was totally aggressive, but...'
'But?'
'But when the point came he chose not to kill me.
'Why, do you think?'
'Well, he said something just before he hit me on the head and knocked me out. Something along the lines of.. . oh, killing me would be like killing himself or something. Some psycho bullshit.'
'You saw him clearly?'
'No. For a start he was covered with black cam-cream, for seconds he was wearing a wet suit with a hood.'
Dawn remained expressionless.
'Can you remember anything at all about him?'
Alex looked away. Once again, he saw the icily staring figure at Don Hammond's funeral. Had he simply constructed that image in his mind from the MI-5 photographs?
'He's about my size and build. And right-handed. And he hasn't got a beard or moustache. That's all I'm certain of' 'That doesn't exactly narrow it down a great deal.'
'I know,' said Alex.
'And I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the whole thing.'
Dawn looked at him, shook her head and punched out a number on her mobile.
At the pick-up she relayed Alex's description and the nature of the Watchman's injuries. Afterwards she walked round the cellar, examined the gashed wet suit and the small pile of Alex's belongings.
'We've got people covering the ground for a ten-mile radius,' she told him.
'Helicopters, tracker dogs, everything. Countrywide the police'll be looking for a man in his mid-thirties, around five foot eleven and strongly built, with a broken nose and injured hand. We've put it around that he's a paranoid schizophrenic, armed, who's escaped from the high-security wing of Garton Hill. Do not approach, et cetera.'
Alex was silent. There was nothing useful left to say.
Five minutes later Max whip-finished the sutures on his cheek.
'Right,' he said.
'Let's get on with that ear. Tell them upstairs I'll be at least another forty minutes.' He turned back to Alex with a rueful smile.
'Think sweet thoughts, my friend. This is going to hurt.'
That afternoon Alex was driven in a private ambulance to the Fairlie Clinic in Upper Norwood, London. In theory this facility is available to the paying public;
in practice it is reserved for the use of the security services. Several super grasses Alex had heard, had received reconstructive facial surgery behind its unremarkable doors.
There, he was walked to a windowless private room and his clothes were placed in a locker. A male nurse brought him a cup of tea, a painkilling dose of Volterol and Coproxamol, and the use of a radio tuned to Classic FM. The rest of the day passed slowly.
Shortly before midnight Alex awoke to hear his mobile phone juddering in his locker. It was still switched to vibrate, he realised. He was lying in total darkness against cotton pillows, the painkillers had worn off and his stitches were burning.
'Alex,' came the voice, quiet but insistent.
'It's Stevo, man.
'Stevo?' he asked blankly, then remembered talking to the sniper team leader at Don Hammond's post-funeral
