It was the students who saved him. Three graduates collecting their car ran to the screams and one, holding a doctorate in chemistry, had seen lab accidents happen and immediately recognised the smell. Together they dragged him bodily to the toilets, one pouring his tin of lemonade over the terrible still burning facial skin as they ran. There they held him over the toilet, pushing his face down and splashing water up over his face and neck, one shouting to blink quickly, and the third then running for a phone.
No-one noticed that another sandy haired man had appeared at the scene within minutes, and stood with his long coat trailing over his shoulder, watching with some sadness.
That evening, while a ophthalmic surgeon gently lifted the dressings off the terribly disfigured face, Cambridgeshire Police took an anonymous call. The attack, it said, had been a warning for the fascist to mind his own business.
Later that night, a man dressed as a porter silently made his way towards Black’s room. Smiling, he held up a staff ID card to the policeman guarding the door and walked in. Seeing he was alone, he looked down upon the heavily sedated figure in the bed. What kind of people are these, he thought, who will blind and maim a man for his diligence? In Afghanistan they would do this and worse – but it was their land and they were savages. He then took a crumpled single stem flower from his pocket and placed it, and a small object wrapped in tissue, beside the bandaged head.
“Be brave, Englishman,” he said softly – and, as KGB Major Alexi Kirov turned and walked towards the door, Black’s arm painfully inched upwards until his stiffly bandaged hand could grasp the item and hold it tight, wondering what it was and where the voice had come from.
At Milburn, someone going over Black’s desk came across the Morton file and the ringed reference to a daughter.
“Bring her in for starters,” Burmeister snapped.
The Head of the Fairies, tagged as Oberon in the 60s by an erudite wit, looked at the deployment board and allocated three men, one from Athens Station, and two from Rome to collect Holly Morton.
His deputy, Jonno Smith, had been waiting for the right moment to discreetly advise his boss that there was a single controller deployment not on the board, and instead of telling him verbally had left a time stamped message in the handover file before going on a week’s leave. With all the activity the screen hadn’t been read at the handover time, and now the reference had been dumped onto the history file.
“What if she’s reluctant?” Oberon asked, needing to know the scope of his task, ever conscious of Sir Martin Callows three floors up.
“Just bloody get her here in one piece! She knows something! Anyone gets in the way…”
“Controller?”
“Me. Have them contact me once they arrive... Let’s get this sorted out.”
The man nodded. That was, after all, what the Fairies were good at.
With all the fuss and drama, no-one really noticed the long distance call for Adrian Black, and the caller – who didn’t leave his name – was told he was off Station.
If Mr Pope was the old-fashioned kind of operative, then the three men who had just arrived on Serifos were the new breed.
The leader was a sallow man in his early thirties, who constantly pushed his lank black hair back up from his face as he spoke into the phone. He was from Athens Station and spoke enough Greek to get by outside the tourist areas. The other two were younger and, unlike him, were wearing jeans, training shoes and open-necked shirts with zip-up windbreakers, lounging round a table covered in dirty glasses. The jackets, unnecessary in the warmth, were to conceal the fact they were all armed.
He finished speaking to Burmeister and walked off, the other two rising and following.
Quayle recognised them with some distaste a good seventy yards from the house. Fairies. His eyes narrowed briefly with the thought. He flicked a look up the hill to where he had seen Pope the day before, putting his cup down on the tray. He didn’t recognise any of them – although one seemed familiar as they approached. These were not close protection specialists. Nothing so grand. They were just muscle. Hard men. A rugby team, in the trade jargon. He didn’t like the feel of things. They weren’t here for niceties.
“Go inside,” he said to Holly, draining his tea and again lowering the cup onto the table, this time upside down.
“Why?” she asked, looking up.
He nodded down the path.
“Where?” Her face went pale as she strained to seem normal, trying not to look at the three men now only thirty yards away.
“The loo,” he said, before thinking again. “No, go right out the back. Get in the rocks. Wait for me to come and get you.”
As she stepped past him into the cool shadowed interior, he walked toward the veranda edge, the empty cup back in his hand held as if full.
“That’s far enough!” he called.
But they kept coming, the man in the sports jacket flanked by the other two. He looked at Quayle, recognition flashing through his eyes. The brief hadn’t said to expect an ex-service man.
“I need to talk to Mrs Clements,” he said. “Get her out here.”
He was relieved, in a way, that subterfuge was now unnecessary, but at the same time concerned about the man opposite him. He had seen Quayle once or twice a few years before and certainly heard the stories over tea in the canteen.
Quayle looked at him as if he was something that had been scraped off the bottom of a shoe. “What for?” he asked, his voice low with menace.
“She’s coming back to London with us. They want her.”
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “She has nothing they want. She is a civilian.”
“Hand her over, Quayle.”
As he
