The pavement was crowded and the old coffee shop was busy. As soon as the current walker was momentarily separated from his vehicle, Quayle moved into the shop.
He scanned the room quickly but could not see her. He waited for a few minutes outside the ladies, aware he was losing valuable time, and when she finally appeared he breathed a slow sigh of relief. He was about to move forward when the driver of the watcher car walked through the doors. They had changed roles. Swearing to himself, a bitter little curse, he waited until a woman with a baby and some shopping was moving his way and quickly jumped in to offer to help. Relieved, the lady agreed. He took two of her packages and, as they brushed past Gabriella’s table, the woman with the baby thanked him and said the car wasn’t far. Quayle smiled easily. It was the normality of appearance he wanted. He would have to try again later.
As they pushed their way through the front door, he glanced back and took a good look at the man who had driven the watcher car all day. As Quayle looked, the man raised his hand to his face to scratch at something and he fixed the image in his memory.
From opposite the coffee shop, he watched through the windows of a store. The watchers were all out on the pavement – waiting for something to happen. Come on, Gabriella, he thought. Do something soon. Go home, go to a friend’s, do bloody something! You’re an old lady now. You must be tired. Go home. Please. I’m getting exposed here…
The field craft lecturers would have marked him as blown within a hour of starting, even changing his jacket and cap as he did. One watcher – tag, tail whatever you wanted to call them – was only good for an hour, and then only if they were very talented, changing the way they walked with heel lifts or introducing a change in the gait or even a limp. Quayle had never been one of the best watchers ever passed out of Norfolk – he was to big to melt into crowds – but at least he was competent. MI5 had the real experts who could watch a party for weeks and never be suspected. The danger was that he had been on the job now for over five hours. The other team were obviously not expecting to be watched themselves, or he would have been blown hours ago.
He trailed Gabriella and her fan club for another three hours, the old woman calling on her brother at the University, and finally visiting a friend. Nightfall was rapidly approaching when she stepped back out of her friend’s door to begin what Quayle hoped was her way home. There were still four watchers in the other group and, since they hadn’t seen him by now, he was gaining confidence. The dark would be his ally. As she moved off up the street, he moved up closer, eventually overtaking on a parallel road to work from the front.
They had moved only three hundred yards when Quayle, moving catlike through the trees just inside Stephens Green, noticed the change of pattern. There were now two watchers walking and, up ahead, a car began to move. He watched it pull over further up the road and the last man and the driver get out – supposedly to look under the bonnet. They were boxing her in, Quayle realised. They were going to snatch her.
Gabriella had noticed it too, stiffening and slowing in her walk. She was onto them at last.
Cross over, he willed her. Cross over the road, come to me Gabriella! In all her training sessions she had stressed the tried and tested method of breaking out of a box. Two front and two back, no flankers. Break to one side and see which group reacts first, see who leads them, see who hesitates. She turned ultra cool now, watched the traffic and stepped onto the road to cross over onto the park side. Good girl, he said softly, keep coming. You won’t want to because the park will make it easier for them.
The watchers had looked up and the trailing pair hesitated for a second. Gabriella was half way over now and, as a big bus roared past behind her, Quayle called low but loud enough to be heard over the noise from the bus. “Keep moving Gabby, keep coming!”
It was the name Teddy Morton had always used for her.
He saw her look for a second, half fearful as she heard the call. Then resolution set in and she stepped onto the pavement. To her credit, not once did she look into the dark of the trees from where the voice had come from. Instead, she just walked purposefully about her business.
The two tail watchers were only thirty feet behind her now, almost abreast of Quayle in the trees. One of the other pair had left the driver closing the car bonnet. Soon, he too had crossed – but was now directly to her left.
Unless someone began to run, she had broken the box, moving two halves of the threat into one area, just like the lectures always said to do. But suddenly there were two new men further up. Jesus, Quayle thought, now six. They are serious.
One of the tail men dropped his hand into his coat pocket and Quayle moved.
He came out of the tree line onto the leafy pavement like a shadow, only feet behind the trailing pair, and took the man on the right first. Putting a full contact punch into the base of the man’s neck and as he began to fall, Quayle
