‘Right,’ Sam nodded. He would never have admitted it to Bland, but it felt good to be active again. Good to have something to occupy his mind. Good to forget about the events of the previous day.
The fox sprinted suddenly away. Sam saw Bland jump. The old man was nervous. He had good reason. Sam remained silent.
The Georgians appeared, wearing coats that were too heavy for the time of year. Beridze’s assistant carried his briefcase, but the ambassador carried nothing other than a pair of leather gloves. They wordlessly approached and joined them under the yellow light, where Beridze’s badger-like hair look almost golden.
‘Give me your phones,’ Sam demanded.
‘Absolutely not,’ Beridze replied.
Sam was in no mood to argue. He grabbed the ambassador by the coat and pushed him up against the car. ‘Give me your fucking phone!’ he repeated.
The startled man plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a thin mobile. Sam grabbed it and turned to the assistant. ‘You too,’ he said. The assistant plonked his bags on the ground and quickly relinquished his handset. Once Sam had them both, he bent down and dropped each one through a drain cover in the gutter. ‘Just in case you were thinking of telling anyone where we’re going,’ he told the startled Georgians. ‘Get in the car. Now.’
The two men hurried into the back seat, leaving Sam and Bland alone in the lamplight. They exchanged no words, but the tension between them was drawn on their faces. Sam turned and headed to the driver’s side of the car. He was opening the door when he heard Bland’s voice.
‘Sam.’
‘What?’
‘Keep them alive.’
Sam shot him a look, nodded, then climbed into the car. He started the engine and drove off without even a glance at the two frightened Georgians sitting in the seat behind him, and leaving Gabriel Bland alone in the yellow light of the lamp.
Sam drove carefully through the London night, checking his mirrors as often as he looked at the road ahead. The headlamps of every car, unnaturally bright as they flashed across his vision, were beacons: a potential trail. At the Holland Park roundabout he completed four full circuits, checking that no one was following. It wouldn’t drop a skilful trail – there could be a number of cars following, one waiting at each exit for him; but if he was being followed by more than one vehicle it would stretch their resources.
On the Westway he took the fast lane, veering quickly off the road at the Paddington turn-off and slicing his way through residential streets, before turning back onto the Westway and heading further up into town, past Euston and King’s Cross, then up to the heart of North London. Having memorised the location of the safe house back at MI6 HQ, Sam drove almost on autopilot.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Beridze and his assistant had remained silent for the entire journey, just giving Sam ashen-faced glances in the rear-view mirror.
‘Somewhere safe,’ Sam snapped.
Beridze didn’t look convinced. His assistant jabbered something in their own language, but he was cut short by his boss. They continued to drive in silence.
There was more rubbish than there were pedestrians along the Seven Sisters Road. He kept driving. They weren’t far now and he would feel better once there were walls around him.
The safe house was in a side street off the main drag of Tottenham Hale, but Sam didn’t stop nearby. He drove instead into the large car park by the Tube station. As he turned off the engine and the car lights, Beridze spoke again. ‘Where are we?’
‘Shut up.’ Sam looked around for any sign of another car coming to a halt, but there was nothing. He glanced over his shoulder and pointed at Beridze’s assistant. ‘Does he speak English?’
‘Badly,’ Beridze replied.
‘I want you both to get out. When I say “walk”, you walk. When I say “stop”, you stop. Tell him.’
Beridze translated. His assistant gave a nervous nod and the three men got out of the car.
Sam felt naked without a weapon. His skin prickled as he looked around, scanning the area for signs of anything suspicious. Beridze’s assistant held his briefcase close to his chest as he looked anxiously around; both men were peculiarly out of place in these bleak, suburban surroundings. As though they were a long way from home.
‘Walk,’ Sam told them. He pointed back towards the main road. ‘That way.’
The two Georgians shuffled off. Sam took the rear, constantly checking around him. At the main road he made them wait, like an anxious parent, until there really were no cars – a road ‘accident’, he knew, was the easiest way to carry out a hit. When the road was clear he hustled them across.
‘How far?’ the ambassador asked, already out of breath.
‘Keep walking,’ Sam told him.
They arrived at the safe house in a couple of minutes. To look at it, you wouldn’t think it was anything special, just another in a long line of run-down, three-storey terraced houses. The windows were obscured with net curtains and there were no lights on inside. Further down the street there was an unmarked white van. Sam nodded. ‘We’re here,’ he said.
The three men stood in the street. ‘Well?’ Beridze asked, his voice sharp with impatience. ‘What now?’
‘We wait to be let in.’
‘But nobody knows we are here.’
‘Oh, they know,’ Sam replied. And at just that moment the front door clicked open. Sam pushed past the two Georgians, opened the door a little further and peered inside. Darkness. ‘It’s me,’ he called quietly. ‘Sam.’
A pause. And then from the silence emerged a figure. Tall, wide-shouldered, a weapon in his hand and a comms earpiece over one ear. Sam recognised the hook nose and the heavy eyebrows, of course. Steve Davenport. ‘Morning all. Got some packages to deliver, then?’ His voice was flat; immediately Sam picked up on a sense of unease, as if his SAS mate was less than pleased to see him.
‘Special fucking delivery,’ Sam replied. He turned round to the Georgians. ‘All right, you two. Get inside.’
The door was closed and they headed upstairs in near darkness. On the first-floor landing Sam saw a strip of light underneath one of the doors. Davenport opened it and they filed inside.
It was a sparse, unwelcoming room, but then Sam hadn’t been expecting the Ritz. A good safe house needed to be basic and free of furniture – the more stuff there was in it, the harder it would be to tell if the place had been tampered with. There was one window in this room, but it was blocked off by a large sheet of black tarpaulin in order to stop any light escaping from a single bulb that hung from the ceiling. A steel flight case of weapons was propped up against one wall, and sitting cross-legged in a corner, packet of cigarettes in front of him and one in his mouth, was Luke Tyler, Craven’s Cockney friend and the one who had taken his death the worst. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Welcome to the party,’ he drawled. ‘These the strippers?’
Beridze looked incensed; Sam just ignored it. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Cullen’s upstairs watching the garden. Means he has to stand on the shitter, but he’s got a mouth like a toilet, so he’s probably at home. Webb’s up there watching the front and Andrews is on the ground floor doing the same.’ Tyler took another drag on his cigarette, without taking his eye off Sam. ‘Think he saw the milkman earlier on. Nearly shat himself.’
Beridze looked from one man to the other. Even though English wasn’t his first language he was clearly picking up on the tension in the room. Sam looked down at Tyler. ‘Get to your fucking feet, Luke,’ he said. And when the younger man had done so: ‘You got a problem, spit it out.’
Tyler dropped his cigarette onto the bare floorboards and stubbed it out with his boot. ‘Lot of rumours going around, Sam. Plenty of us want to know what your chat with the spooks after the Kazakhstan job was about.’ He set his jaw and stared at Sam.