"I'm sorry?" said Angela, "I didn't quite .
The woman repeated a name her husband's, she explained and Angela signed and then abruptly stopped. Where the hell did she know that face from? The features were wind-roughened and the clothes dirty but there had been a time, she was sure, when this man had been somebody.
But then so many people had been somebody once.
The horsy woman retired and the man handed Angela his copy of A Career Less Ordinary. He was smiling, he smelt of beer and the streets, and there was something both intimate and expectant in his smile.
Am I meant to know him?
"What name?" she ventured.
"You don't remember?" he said quietly.
"Angela, I'm disappointed! It's Joe, Joe Meehan."
Beyond thought, but not yet connected to terror, she started to take the book, to open it to the title-page. And then, gasping, she saw its starched covers close over her hand. She had lost control of her fingers. It was as if they were frost-bitten.
Her whole body was frozen.
It had been she Angela who had ordered Dawn to take a foot soldier and eliminate Temple when he had called in to say that he had captured Meehan on Pen-y-Fan. The chances that the former agent had told the SAS officer the truth about Operation Watchman were just too great.
And then, just hours later, Dawn and her back-up man had been found dead. Of Temple and Meehan there had been no sign. Well, she'd found out Temple's whereabouts soon enough but Meehan Joseph Meehan was dead and buried.
He had to be.
She'd believed it and not believed it. When she left the Sewice she'd been stripped of the close protection team that had surrounded her for so many years. And, now here was the irony there was no one she could go to and say: this man may be alive. And ~f he is alive he will try and kill me.
The weeks had become months and the months had become a year, and still there had been no sign of Meehan, and finally she had begun to relax. Her official security had been stepped down to just one officer and she had begun to tell her seW that the Watchman was indeed dead.
Dave Holland, recognising at some unconscious level that things were wrong, that the moment was horribly out of joint stared at the desk. His eyes narrowed as the bearded man held his principal's gaze. What the fuck was going down?
Angela Fenwick, he belatedly realised, was terrified. Paralysed with terror, like a bird faced by a cobra. She couldn't even move.
At Holland's side the photographer had realised something was up too. The big F3 Nikon was already moving up towards his face. Beside the desk the Daily Telegraph writer stared in puzzlement at the motionless tableau. Then Meehan pulled out a Browning automatic and jammed the point of the barrel beneath Angela Fenwick's chin.
Mayhem. Dave Holland was aware of a distorted screaming, of panicked bodies falling in slow motion to the floor, of the languid chakka-chakkachakka of the Nikon's motor-drive.
He dived for the gun, but impeded by the press of bodies around him fell disastrously short. A shot, meanwhile, rang out simultaneously with the Nikon's final exposure. This image, which British newspaper picture desks would suppress but which would be syndicated worldwide, showed Meehan in profile. He looked almost courteous. Angela Fenwick's expression, by contrast, was one of in comprehending terror as a spectral tiara of skull fragments and other matter leapt from her head.
The moment after the shot rang out although no one would remember this afterwards Joseph Meehan turned to a man in a battered leather jacket who was standing at the back of the crowd. A long look passed between the two men, a look identical to that which had once passed between them in St. Martin's churchyard, Hereford. Then Meehan placed the barrel of the Browning automatic into his mouth, pulled the trigger for a second time and blew his brains into the fiction shelves.
No one noticed the man in the battered leatherjacket slip out through the heavy glass exit doors into Jermyn Street. In his hand was the edition of the Evening Standard in which the signing session had been detailed. Climbing into the passenger seat of a silver Audi TT convertible which was idling at the kerb, he reached out and, after a moment's hesitation, touched the chestnut-brown hair of the girl behind the wheel. She, in her turn, fractionally inclined her head towards him. A close observer might have detected a certain wariness between the two of them.
But there was no observer. The car pulled quietly away and by the time the first police sirens were audible, the couple had vanished.
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Chris Ryan was born near Newcastle in 1961 and joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years~ service he was involved in both overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. During the Gulf War, Chris was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal.
Chris Ryan wrote about his experiences in the bestseller The One That Got Away (1995) which was also adapted for screen.
He is also the author of the bestsellers Stand By, Stand By (1996), Zero Option (1997), The Kremlin Device (1998), Tenth Man Down (1999) and The Hit List (2000).