NINETEEN

THE WATCHMAN DID not come and with first light Alex swam silently downstream to the bridge, exited the water and re-dressed himself in the clothes that he had left hidden there. The cold of the river and the length and intensity of his eight-hour vigil had left him desperately tired, and for a long time he could not stop himself shaking. He couldn’t even bring himself to think about further nights spent the same way.

In truth, it had always been unlikely that the Watchman would come on the first night of Widdowes’ return. He would want to watch and wait, to weigh up the chances of the whole thing being a set-up. In Meehan’s position Alex wouldn’t have come on that first night.

But now, hopefully, Meehan would have had a chance to see that the arrangement was exactly what it seemed to be: a nervous public servant guarded by a pair of competent if rather dilatory policemen. Widdowes was getting the sort of protection that an important criminal witness might get, or the senior officer of a regiment that had served in Northern Ireland.

Alex sat beneath the bridge for a further couple of hours. Slowly the darkness became wet grey dawn, and at 6 a.m. he heard a car come to a halt above him and a voice quietly call his name. Hurrying out with his kit, he dived into the boot of the customised BMW and lay there while Widdowes went through the motions of going for an early-morning drive.

Back in the garage the MI5 man looked at him with concern. ‘You look completely knackered,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’ll live,’ replied Alex. ‘How are you?’

‘I did what you said: cooked myself supper, watched Newsnight, and hit the sack. Even managed to sleep.’ Widdowes hesitated. ‘I’m grateful for this, Alex,’ he said quietly. ‘Man to man and forgetting all the inter-service bullshit, I’m really grateful. You’re putting yourself on the line and that means a lot. Is there anything I can do in return?’

‘Yes,’ said Alex wearily. ‘Stay alive. And sort us out some breakfast.’

‘Any preferences?’

‘Everything,’ said Alex. ‘The full bollocks.’

‘My pleasure. Would you like a bath?’

‘When Meehan’s dead,’ said Alex.

Widdowes nodded. From the drive came the sound of a car on gravel and voices. The MI5 ‘policemen’ were handing over to a new pair.

In the cellar, meeting his exhaustion head-on, Alex pushed himself through a hard exercise routine followed by a series of stretches. The wetsuit, the boots and the rest of the kit were laid out to dry – a pointless exercise, really, but one which imposed a level of formality and routine on the situation.

When the breakfast came, preceded by the smell of fresh coffee, Alex ate fast and in silence.

‘You’re sure you want to stay here while I go to work?’ Widdowes asked eventually.

‘He won’t try to kill you in the car,’ said Alex with certainty. ‘And I doubt he’ll even bother to follow you. He knows where you’re going, he’ll know from the cops on the gate that you’re coming back here. Just keep the windows up, the door locked and head straight for Thames House. You’ll be fine – the guy has to sleep some time.’

Widdowes nodded. ‘I’d better make a move. Sure you’ll be OK?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

The two men shook hands and Widdowes departed. Placing the Glock 34 on the ground beside the camp bed, Alex climbed into his sleeping bag, closed his eyes and slept.

For the next two nights the Watchman did not come. Each evening Alex lowered himself into the river by the bridge, swam upstream and began his long vigil. He went to exactly the same position each time, hooked his arm round the underwater root, lodged his feet on the chalk shelf and waited.

Time passed with unreal slowness. As his eyes searched the gloom ahead for any sign of movement, his mind seemed to separate itself from his body, to undertake journeys of its own. Sometimes it seemed as if he were not in the river at all, but flying, or sleeping, or driving. He was visited by the familiar ranks of ghosts – the Iraqis with their charred faces and smoking chest cavities, the bullet-shattered IRA volunteers, the blood-slicked Colombians and RUF men, the frost-stiffened Serbs. All of them milled about him in an ever-changing tableau, gravely displaying their wounds, endlessly reprising the instant of their deaths. To kill a man, Alex had long understood, was to fix a moment in time, to have that moment with you for ever.

And now, with considerable formality, he was planning another death. A death that, in his mind’s eye, he had seen many times. The Watchman, carried downstream by the current, would surface in the moonlit water three or four metres away and begin his silent ascent of the bank. With his right hand Alex would thumb on the infra-red sight, move the red dot to the centre of his target’s chest, fire and keep firing. The coughs of the silenced Glock would be all but inaudible. The body would fall back into the water, swing towards him on the warm stream. That was how it would be.

But the Watchman didn’t come. Alex waited, primed to kill, but the river remained just a river, a place of gnats and weed and flag iris. And with each grey morning he doubted his sanity more, wondered whether despite all his experience he had miscalculated. Would the BMW come and collect him once more? Or had his instincts finally deceived him? Was Widdowes even now lying mutilated and dead on the floor of Longwater Lodge?

Each morning, however, the car did come and the routine was the same. Breakfast, coffee and then sleep. A heatwave struck, and the windowless cellar became stifling and airless during the hours of daylight.

Daylight that Alex never saw. He woke each afternoon at around three, exercised, cleaned the Glock and prepared himself – all without leaving the cellar. Dawn Harding usually rang at about five thirty, shortly after she had seen Widdowes leave Thames House. Their conversations were brief – beyond discussing the ups and downs of Widdowes’ state of mind there was little to say.

When Widdowes returned he would cook supper for the pair of them, take Alex’s food down to the cellar as if the SAS officer were a medieval prisoner and then – at Alex’s insistence – eat his own in front of the TV upstairs, as he had always done.

On the fourth day the furniture van arrived and the loading-up began. Alex managed to sleep through most of the bumping and swearing that was taking place on the floors above, but was still awake by 2 p.m.

Tonight, he thought, squinting through the 5.32-inch barrel of the Glock at the smooth curl of its rifling. Tonight the bastard has to come.

And if he doesn’t?

If he doesn’t then I bow out. Apologise. Kiss Dawn’s stillettos. Submit to whatever grim routine she and her department choose to inflict on me.

It was a full moon that night as Alex waited for his prey and the sky was cloudless. Even after midnight a little of the heat of the day seemed to hang about the river and above Alex’s head a cloud of insects danced on the warm air. In front of his hooded, blackened and immobile face water-boatmen made tiny dashes over the surface film.

The lights had been switched off in the house for more than two hours when he saw the faintest of dark shapes drifting downstream towards him. It was about thirty yards away and a foot or two out from the bank. An otter? he wondered. No, too large and immobile. Too dead. A log, then? Maybe. Or maybe just a large clump of weed. River keepers had been cutting the weed on the fisheries upstream and great rafts of it had been drifting downstream earlier that night.

But weed was usually lower in the water than this. Quickly, Alex scanned the area to either side of it, allowing his peripheral vision to play on the shape. Nearer now, he saw that it was a large branch, splayed and leaved. But a branch which was holding hard to the bank and moving steadily towards him.

Behind his cage of roots and reeds, Alex narrowed his eyes. Was the branch going to barrel into him? Why was there a branch in the river at all in the middle of this breezeless night? Adrenalin began to trickle into his system. He pressed the Farlow’s boots hard into the chalk and stealthily withdrew his arm from the grip of the underwater root. His hand held the Glock now and the safety catch was depressed for action.

Opposite the reeds, several yards upstream, the branch seemed to catch and halt. Alex’s heart slammed against his ribs and his left hand joined his right on the butt of the Glock. Inch by inch he raised the weapon.

Nothing.

No movement of any kind.

Certainly no sign of anything human making for the bank.

Perhaps the branch was just a branch. Perhaps it had just happened to snag itself at the exact spot that he had been watching. Perhaps …

Alex blinked. Before his dark-accustomed eyes the moonlit ripples jazzed and swung.

And then – with blinding, heart-stopping force – a shining black figure exploded out of the water just inches from Alex’s face. Its teeth were bared in sub-human fury, a blade was whistling downwards in its fist.

Instinct wrenched Alex from the knife’s path, but a moment later a rock-like fist slammed into the side of his jaw, white light burst before his eyes and he tasted blood. Alex went down, dropping the Glock, but somehow managed to draw the commando knife from its sheath on his calf. Twisting as his attacker’s blade sliced through the water, desperate to regain the initiative, he hurled himself straight at the other man’s throat.

The other’s reaction was identical: defence by attack. The two met in a ferocious dogfight of stabbing and flailing limbs and Alex felt an icy sharpness rip down his thigh. He was losing this fight, a part of him realised dispassionately, and it was a novel experience. His opponent was at least his equal in speed, determination and sheer savagery.

If not his superior. Alex struggled to get his knife arm out of the water and into his opponent’s face but the other seized his wrist and forced it down with vicious and almost inhuman strength. A knife flash in the moonlight, a desperate swerve and the neoprene hood was flapping loose at the side of Alex’s head and his cheek was hot with blood. The two men’s legs locked taut – stalemate – and then in the moment before they bore each other underwater Alex drew back his head and slammed it into his opponent’s nose, felt the smashing crunch of breaking bone.

Desperately swinging at the broken nose with the heel of his free hand, Alex attempted to drive the shattered bone chips backwards into his opponent’s brain, but managed only a glancing blow. For a fraction of a second the eyes of the two men met and they were each other’s mirror image: hooded, bloodied and snarling like wolves.

Underwater now, throwing his whole weight into the attempt, Alex wrenched desperately at his own knife arm, but the other’s grip on his wrist was as inexorable as a steel vice. Baring his teeth, Alex bit into the fist that enclosed him until he felt his teeth meet through the gristle, but still the grip did not weaken. Instead, the blade flashed past his face again and although he wrenched his head away he felt the icy burn of its passage through his cheek. He should shout for the MI5 men, he realised numbly, but then there was a second explosion of light as his opponent’s knife hilt hammered into the base of his skull, his face was forced underwater and there was no longer any breath to shout with.

Soon his lungs were screaming and his legs flailing beneath him, kicking at the Glock as it swung on its lanyard. He grabbed for the other’s knife hand, couldn’t reach it, punched at where he thought the smashed nose ought to be and clawed blindly for the eyes. But the grip on his head was as immovable as that on his knife arm, he’d had no chance to grab any air and finally his mouth gagged open to admit a choking inrush of water. Anoxia came fast and he felt his hands sleepily release their grip on the commando knife.

And then, in some dim, drowning corner of his consciousness, Alex sensed that he was being dragged upwards. Retching, he vomited up the best part of a litre of river water and as he struggled for air he was aware of a hooded face poised above him.

‘So,’ said the face quietly. ‘You’re the one.’ There was a hint of a Belfast accent.

Alex said nothing. His chest was agony and points of light danced in front of his eyes ‘Do it,’ he rasped contemptuously. ‘Kill me and be on your way.’

‘I’ll not kill you,’ the Watchman murmured, reversing his knife in his hand. ‘That’d be too much like killing myself.’

The Watchman’s arm became a blur, a third blinding whipcrack of pain bloomed behind Alex’s eyes and this time he lost consciousness altogether.