10

Black walked at a steady pace across the concourse of the Gare du Nord, aware that his senses remained on full alert. He saw each face, heard every footstep, registered colours, smells and the tiniest flickers of movement, even those from the pigeons roosting on the great iron beams of the station’s vaulted roof. The violent encounter in the hotel room had flung him straight back into the vivid hyper-reality from which he had banished himself nearly five years before. And like a wise, dry alcoholic who had inadvertently taken a drink, he attempted to observe his altered state from one remove. He told himself it was a temporary condition, an aberration forced on him by circumstances beyond his control. Equilibrium and normality would soon return.

The shift in consciousness was seductive, nonetheless. Along with ultra-acuity came a sense of invulnerability and physical prowess; he felt like a leopard walking among sheep. Supreme self-confidence is what the army had termed it. It was present in the smile of a psychopath and in the eyes of a paratrooper during the moments before a drop. It was the quality capable of being expressed by a small percentage of human beings who, in life-threatening circumstances, are able to harness both intellect and aggression to the exclusion of fear. All Special Service personnel possessed it, and it was both their blessing and their curse.

With no conscious effort, he picked out the numerous armed police officers moving among the bustling crowds as clearly as if they were dressed in high-vis jackets. The names of their weapons sprang unprompted from dormant recesses of his memory: the St Étienne M12SD submachine gun, the Mousqueton AMD select-fire carbine and the Sig Sauer P2022 handguns holstered at their waists. His eyes scanned the human tide for plain-clothes detectives, each tell-tale signal firing like a point of light: female, late twenties, athletic build, no luggage; male, forties, shaved head, sunglasses; a second male, thirty, touching a hidden receiver in his right ear. The station was crawling with them, but none gave him a second glance. They were hunting for lone-wolf killers and their darkest fear: another gang of marauding home-grown jihadis. A suited Englishman faded as surely into the background as chewing gum into the pavement. He passed through the ticket barrier and passport control without hindrance and made it to the platform.

Only once the train had cleared the Parisian suburbs and was heading towards the north coast at 200 miles per hour did Black feel himself begin to unwind. He closed his eyes and in a deliberate attempt to limit the stimulus to his brain, felt his right forearm resting heavily on his thigh. He turned his focus inwards and tried to hear only the steady rhythm of his heart. Two years of cognitive behavioural therapy had achieved less than a long weekend retreat in a Yorkshire monastery, where an elderly Cistercian monk had imparted the simple techniques that had guided him through a lifetime of inward contemplation.

Black’s body relaxed but his brain stubbornly refused to quieten. An image of Finn’s mutilated corpse, photographic in detail, refused to leave him. Resisting the urge to force his attention elsewhere, he followed the monk’s stern counsel never to shrink ‘but always to look Satan in the eye’ and confronted the picture of his dead comrade. Against the gentle, rocking rhythm of the carriage, he took in every detail: the waxy skin drawn across the cheekbones, the bruised and punctured muscles of his chest, the fading tattoos criss-crossed with defensive wounds on his thick forearms and the bloody stubs of fingers.

By slow and painful degrees the raw horror receded and with it the fury and blind urges to revenge it had provoked. In their place came the numb sensation of shock and disbelief that accompanies sudden and unexpected loss. A bitter residue of anger still remained, but cool and rational thoughts returned to hold it in check. Satisfied that he had regained as much balance as he was able, he opened his eyes to be greeted by the patchwork fields of the Kent countryside.

He glanced at his watch: more than ninety minutes had passed. He sank back into his seat and glanced at the nearby passengers, smiling, talking and tapping on their phones. He envied their lives lived in a single and predictable reality. Until the incident at the George V he had convinced himself that he had left his past behind and rejoined them. He slowly exhaled and silently prayed that it would never happen again.

The train pulled into St Pancras station. Black disembarked and merged once more into a shifting sea of travellers, unaware that his reassuring sense of anonymity was an illusion. The concealed cameras of the UK Border Force picked out his face and logged his presence. Once detected, he was unerringly followed by other unseen electronic eyes that would track him through the London Underground to Paddington station, watch him drink a large whisky at the bar, and follow him on to the nine p.m. train to Oxford. Microseconds after it was gathered, the surveillance footage was processed by software that analysed the minutiae of his body language and facial expressions, piecing them together to form a more accurate appraisal of his mental state than any he could have articulated himself.

The man watching the results on his computer screen was heartened by what he saw. It had cost him much of his diminishing supply of goodwill to keep the French from detaining Major Leo Black following his unfortunate fracas, and he badly needed a return on his investment.