Gavin pulled to the right and stopped. There was no room for following cars to pass and almost immediately a horn blared.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Everything up there.’
He got out, opened the rear doors of the van and gestured to a small passage where stone steps led up to a gate of iron bars. A woman was unlocking the gate. Lona.
‘Buona sera,’ Lona said. ‘Welcome to Positano!’
Silva nodded. She understood what was going on here. No point in trying to be clandestine in a tiny seaside town packed with tourists. Best to hide in plain sight. She smiled and moved forward to greet Lona, hugging her and hoping her mannerisms didn’t seem too awkward. Lona acted like a welcoming hostess, dropping little phrases for any neighbours who might be eavesdropping, and then they all mucked in to carry the luggage up the steps and inside to a small courtyard.
Once they’d unloaded, Gavin disappeared to park the van while Lona showed them into the house. The interior was a succession of little rooms jigsawed into three storeys. The only room of decent size was on the top floor, a large living area with a balcony that looked out across the bay.
‘You’ll set up here,’ Lona said. The friendly facade had gone, replaced by a cold professionalism. ‘Perfect, right?’
Silva strode across the room. The doors to the balcony were open and she stepped out. Their position was on the east side of Positano and the town was a maze of little streets off to the right, houses jumbled everywhere. She tried to recall the location of Brandon Hope’s villa, but she couldn’t make it out.
‘It’s there.’ Lona was beside her. She pointed. ‘The far side of the town, the third house down from where the road curves away from the bay. You’ll need optics to see it properly.’
Silva shielded her eyes from the glare of the low evening sun. The distance didn’t seem any less now she was looking for real and not merely at a map. In fact, all of a sudden, the shot appeared almost impossible to pull off.
‘Easy.’ A hand rested on her shoulder. Itchy. He gestured back into the room. ‘We’ll set up well inside. In the dark, nobody will be able to see in.’
‘It’s the dark I’m worried about,’ Silva said. ‘We’ll have trouble picking out the villa.’
‘Nonsense. I’ll spot it up with the scope while it’s light and get the exact bearing and elevation using the range finder and GPS. We just dial that in and bingo!’
Bingo.
Silva liked Itchy’s confidence. In Afghanistan he’d been the same. Nothing was impossible, no problem couldn’t be broken down into its basic elements, each then approached and dealt with.
‘It’s cos I’m not clever,’ he’d once said to her. ‘Not like you. I need to work at stuff. One and one is two. Two and two is five.’
One and one…
‘You’re not having second thoughts?’ Lona had picked up on Silva’s misgivings. ‘About killing Hope?’
‘She murdered my mother.’ Silva could see the villa now. The house clung to the cliffs on the far side of town, facing the sea. The angle was acute and at this distance – around three quarters of a mile – there was only a speck of green wall and a smudge of terracotta roof. ‘I just want to make sure we do this right.’
‘Good.’ Lona turned and left the room.
‘I’m thinking ditto,’ Itchy said. ‘About the second thoughts. You still good to go?’
‘Yes. Like I said to Lona, she killed my mother. It’s just…’
‘It’s not like picking off random Taliban fighters? They’re nameless, brutal killers. If we don’t slot them they slot one of our mates or plant an IED and a British soldier goes back home to his wife and kiddies with no arms and legs. You want to take it to its logical conclusion, Hope’s no different. Worse, in fact. The people she had killed were innocent non-combatants.’
‘You’re right.’ Silva turned away from the vista and smiled at Itchy. ‘We’ve gone over this before. I’ll shut up before you think I’ve gone soft in the head.’
‘I’ll admit for a minute I was worried about my twenty-five K.’
‘Well, then,’ Silva gestured back outside. ‘We’d better start doing some two plus twos while we can still see.’
On Thursday Holm and Javed took a flight to Schiphol, touching down a little after four p.m. local time. The inside of the airport was cavernous and sterile and the Avis desk could have been anywhere in the world. The assistant spoke impeccable English and had impeccable make-up, teeth and manners. The car was an equally perfect Audi A4 in bright red with virtually nothing on the clock. Holm had to concede Javed had done well with the model, but he wasn’t so keen on the colour.
‘If we’re following a lorry, don’t you think the driver’s going to spot us in the mirrors?’
Javed shrugged. He’d had a word with the woman at the desk and it was the A4 or a white, bottom-of-the-range Micra.
‘Never mind. Let’s get going.’
They headed south for Rotterdam, but there wasn’t much to look at. The countryside was flat and boring and half of it seemed to be covered with tarmac. Despite the highway system, or perhaps because of it, the traffic was appalling and they arrived at the port one and a half hours after they’d left the airport.
They drove in beside a railway line, beyond which lay stacks of containers. The quayside was over a mile and a half long and several huge ships were berthed against it, cranes moving back and forth, loading and unloading containers.
‘This is…’ Holm’s voice trailed off. He’d thought Felixstowe was big, but Rotterdam was another order of magnitude larger.
‘Twelve million containers a year,’ Javed said. ‘Three times the throughput of Felixstowe.’
As with Felixstowe, security appeared lax, a chain-link fence was all that protected the port area. They pulled up at a
