“They will now,” Quayle said acidly, pointing to the man who had stopped screaming and now just moaned and sobbed.
“It’s noisy but effective,” Kirov replied. “Come on. Kreski is by the tree where you left her.”
“I want the driver. I want to know who they are.”
“That’s him.” Kirov pointed to the man on the ground. In the distance the sirens had started and were getting closer. “Come on!”
Quayle crossed to the man and bent over. Something he had seen earlier in the day was worrying him. He grabbed the man’s right hand and lifted it.
On the little finger was a ring.
He pulled it off and rolled it in his hand.
It was square.
*
Hugh Cockburn had spent two days reading the files in central registry and, now up to date, he was ready to begin.
Throwing his coat on one of the hard steel chairs in the cheerless little room he’d been allotted, he took a look around. Except for the computer terminal, nothing had changed in here since the ‘60s; he half-expected to see a camp bed somewhere and a map on the wall with one lonely little pin where some man was trying to stay alive. John Le Carré, eat your heart out, he thought. There was a neat stack of jotter pads and six sharpened pencils lined up side by side on one desk and, on the other, an old black bakelite telephone sat in obsolete solitude. On the wall was a photocopied request from accounts to record the number and time duration of all international calls, and a notice about a change in the canteen hours. The small window was grimy and sad little trickles of rain obscured the street lights outside. He shook his head. Home again, home again, jiggedy jig. Fucking magic.
The door burst back open – and there, solid like a rock, black face smiling cheerfully and a hot coffee steaming in her hand, was a person he hadn’t seen before.
“Hi! You must be Mr Cockburn. Milk and no sugar. Right?”
He looked at the cup in her hand.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your dogsbody and bottle washer,” she said, holding out her other hand, “Chloe Bowie. Your assistant.”
“Ah,” he said dryly. “I didn’t know I had an assistant.”
“Well you have. Welcome back to Disneyland. I’m looking forward to working with you.”
“Oh? Why?” Falling back into his chair, he crossed one leg over the other.
“You have a bit of a reputation. Fun to work for, I suppose.”
Cockburn smiled grimly. “Not on this job I won’t be.”
In return, she smiled bravely at him. “It won’t be too bad. You know him well, don’t you? The elusive Mr Quayle. From what I’ve heard, I think I’d like him.”
Cockburn threw back his head and laughed.
“What’s funny?” Chloe asked.
“It’s like liking a Spanish fighting bull. Admire them from a distance, preferably from behind a big concrete wall...” He paused. “No, I’m being unfair. Ti’s OK. His problem is he gets involved. Allows things to become a crusade. Good and evil, it’s all simple to him.”
“And not to you?” she asked, intuitively.
“No. Not to me,” he replied, sipping gingerly at the coffee.
“And you don’t get involved. Become a crusader?”
“Rule number one.”
She studied him for a second. This was the other half of the reputation. Hugh Cockburn was the original ice-man on a job. As a controller he was flawless, his planning was immaculate – and, the worse it got, the cooler he became. Unflappable was the word used by one of the women up in travel.
“I like crusaders,” she said.
“You like the romance. Not the reality. They marched three thousand miles, some of them in bare feet, they starved, they perished from diseases – and, when they arrived in the Holy Land, two or three years later, they took their swords and slew the foe. Blood ran in the streets and the bodies piled up. They were driven by something deep inside them and men like that are dangerous. They don’t lie down and die, they don’t give up. They just keep going.”
“Is Titus Quayle like that?” she asked.
He nodded, sipping the coffee.
“Do you like him?”
He looked at her and smiled, “That’s the bugger of it. Yes, yes I do. Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”
*
“How long had you been onto me?” Quayle demanded.
They had gathered in a small rented cottage that Kirov had found two days before. The furniture was old but functional and a small coal fire burned in the hearth.
“I was not onto you. I knew you would turn up sooner or later at Kreski’s. Once I knew where she was, it was easy. I was following the second group that had tagged her yesterday. Coming across you at the park was a stroke of luck. For them too. It was you they were after. They knew you would come.”
“How did you know I saw Adrian Black?”“
“Because I would have. We are not so different, you and I.”
Quayle smiled at that. “You’re not the run of the mill Kilo man. Not at all.”
“I joined late,” Kirov said, as if it explained everything.
“Militia?”
“Nyet. Army.”
“If you wanted intelligence, why not GRU?”
Kirov tapped his head with his finger, as if to say they were crazy.
“Really? Or did you fail the selection?”
Kirov gave a short dry laugh. “I was Spetznatz!”
Quayle shrugged as if unimpressed, but viewing the little Russian with a new respect. A special forces officer who crossed over the great divide. Army to KGB. The antipathy was legendary and they spent as much time watching each other as they did genuine enemies of the state. That made him a real maverick.
“OK,” Quayle said. “Start at the beginning. What’s the KGB interest in this shit fight?”
“It began,” Kirov said, “with the killing at your safe house in Sussex of a man your people called Yuri Simonov and the team of people from MI6.”
“What do you mean called?” Quayle asked.
Kirov bent over the embers in the hearth and prodded them with a poker. “Its been going on
