"Did Richard know about the attack on the tinkers?" Killian asked.

"Not a thing. Plausible deniability."

"So he's not sitting up waiting for a phone call?"

"No. Although that place is a b.l.o.o.d.y fortress."

"Yeah, I know. It's going to be tricky."

Tom sniffed and bit his lip. He repressed a couple of sobs. He had a German father and an Ulster Presbyterian mother. Not the most demonstrative of combinations. "There's really nothing I can say?" he asked.

"No."

"Please."

"No."

"Please, Killian."

"No."

Killian didn't want to torture the man. He lifted the .45.

Tom put up a finger. "Wait! You don't have to actually shoot me, do you?"

"Yes, I do."

"What if I overdosed? What if I injected myself," he asked.

"You take it intravenously too?"

Tom laughed. "Not since the bad old days, not for years, but as you'll find with your lady friend the hunger never leaves you."

Killian walked him to a compartment in the floorboards. An iron lockbox with a pa.s.sport, money, bags of unrefined heroin and cocaine, a bag of sterile needles.

"I've been saving this. For a rainy day," he said.

He was excited now.

All he could think about was the hit. The adrenalin would make it all the sweeter.

"Do you need any help?" Killian asked.

Tom shook his head.

He cooked the heroin with a lighter, made a speedball with the cocaine, sucked up a dose to kill an elephant, tied off an arm, lay down on the sofa and injected himself.

He closed his eyes and a look of ecstasy pa.s.sed across his face.

Fatal respiratory depression occurred when the cocaine wore off and the heroin was felt in isolation. His breathing became laboured and finally he stopped breathing all together. There was no death rattle, no heave.

Killian checked for a pulse, found nothing and left the house.

He drove the Merc back to Whitehead and parked it on a side street just before the Bla Hole cliff.

It was half a mile from here to Knocknagulla.

He got the spare tyre from under the cloth in the Mercedes' boot. He put the tyre under his arm, turned up his funny-looking raincoat, rolled up the balaclava until it was just above his eyebrows and walked along the road.

The night was clear.

The Bla Hole cliff afforded a view over all Belfast Lough, North Down and Scotland as far as the distant town of Girvan.

Belfast itself was stretched ahead of him under the surrounding hills like an upturned mirror. The old girl winking at him through the lights at the shipyard and the Cave Hill.

Killian carried the tyre to the lodge at Coulter's house.

It was a one-storey, pokey wee building right on the road. He must have driven by it a hundred times, never once considered it.

A light was on. He didn't have much of a plan. If he could get in and out without a positive ID or camera angles - the peelers could, maybe, pin this on Ivan. It was his gun. His fingerprints. Maybe.

Killian knocked on the lodge window.

No answer.

He knocked again. Someone moved apart a Venetian blind and looked at him. A young guy running a bit to fat and baldness.

Killian lifted the tyre.

"What's the matter?" a voice said over a concealed intercom.

"I've got a puncture. And you are not going to believe, but spare has a puncture too. Could let me use phone?" Killian said in an vague Eastern European accent.

"Why are you carrying the tyre?" the voice asked. He was a Brummie, which pleased Killian. He liked Birmingham and he liked Brummies. He wouldn't kill this guy if he could help it.

"I thought I would leave car here. I park it up road at corner. I call for taxi to take me to hotel in Belfast."

"You're going to leave your car?"

"I get sleep, have spare fixed in morning and get taxi back tomorrow," Killian said with an embarra.s.sed grin.

"Where'd you park your car?" the man asked.

"On corner, at cliff," Killian said, catching the man's drift.

"Are you mental? That's a blind corner. Someone ploughs around there, hits your car and they're over the f.u.c.king edge!"

"Oh no," Killian said, sounding foreign and clueless.

"You're a b.l.o.o.d.y idiot!" the man said and Killian watched him leave his perch behind the bulletproof gla.s.s. A moment later he came out of the lodge. He was a chubby fellow but then a lot of ex-blades piled on the pounds after their military service was done. Eliminate that ten-mile run every morning and suddenly all the sausages, chips and beer took their toll. "You're going to get somebody f.u.c.king killed mate. You're gonna have to move your car."

Killian took Markov's silenced Colt .45 from behind the tyre and pointed it at the man's heart.

"Let's go inside and talk about this," he said in his normal north Belfast burr - maybe the most unlovable and menacing accent on the planet.

He pulled the balaclava down over his face. The Russian accent and the funny games were over. "Take it easy mate, take it easy," the Brummie replied.

"Hands on the top of your head and if you squeak the wrong way you better hope that the atheists are wrong."

The man put his hands on his head.

They went inside the lodge.

It was a small single-room affair with a lot of camera monitors, a desk and a set of pigeonholes for the mail. There was a door to a toilet, a microwave and a kettle for making tea and Cup-a-Soup. Some of the monitors were infrared which impressed Killian as did the man's Heckler and Koch MP5 a.s.sault rifle which was lying on the desk.

"Nice place you've got here," Killian said.

"Mate, please, please, don't top me. I'm just a f.u.c.king lackey. You know?"

Killian looked about the room for rope or string or a long piece of electrical cord that he could strip.

"I'm lucky to be alive, I know that, I was f.u.c.king blown up in Mosul. RPG in the side of the Rover. f.u.c.king Sergeant Haider bought it. I have burns on me left arm, to this day it hurts in the winter and..."

Killian couldn't see anything that he could use.

He remembered the play of his mentor, one Michael Forsythe. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Viv."

"Well, Viv, you don't have any gaffer tape do you?"

"What?"

"Gaffer tape, duct tape, you know the stuff I'm talking about?"

"I think we do. Top drawer." Viv said.

"Great. Now, tell me where all the other guns are."

"No other guns, just the MP5," Viv said with a depressing attempt at cunning.

Killian shook his head and tutted. "And I thought we were getting on famously," he said and shot Viv in the left ankle.

Viv crumpled to the floor. He didn't cry out - which must have been that vaunted SAS training - but instead groaned and said between gritted teeth: "In the black drawer, under monitor number one, there's a police special .38, a Smith and Wesson 9 millimetre semi-automatic and you can see the MP5 for yourself."

Killian opened the drawer and took out the handguns. He shoved them into his coat pocket. They were useful but without question the MP5 was going to be his weapon of choice.

"What about that duct tape?" he asked.

"Drawer next to the kettle."

"Next to the kettle? Ahh, I see."

Killian strapped the MP5 over his shoulder, inserted the long 9 millimetre magazine and got the duct tape.

He bent over Viv. "Flip over on your stomach, there's a good chap," Killian said.

Viv flipped. "Please don't kill me, please..."

"I suppose you've got a wife and kids?"

"No, I don't, but I've got a season ticket to Villa Park. Mr C lets me go every home game. This is going to be our year," he said.

Killian was impressed by this piece of bulls.h.i.t. It was just the sort of thing that the guy thought might impress someone like Killian.

"Gimme your paws," Killian said.

He rolled up the man's sleeves and duct-taped his wrists tightly together. Killian had a look at Viv's ankle. It was nasty. Bone sticking through the skin and the bullet had awkwardly travelled down through the man's foot.

"This is going to hurt, I'm afraid," Killian said.

He rolled up Viv's jeans and duct-taped his ankles together, wrapping the tape around a dozen times.

Viv grunted but was still flying with this stiff-upper-lip stance.

Your standard Mike Forysthe move now would be to hog-tie him or beat him unconscious or lock him in a cupboard, but Killian reckoned that that was going overboard. Viv would just need a good talking to near the end of the convo, to impress upon him what kind of a man he was dealing with.

"You did well, Viv. We're done," Killian said.

Viv grunted and lay there on the floor blinking back the waves of pain. And he wasn't alone. Markov had given Killian a good beating and anything around the ribs smarted for a long time.

"Okay now, this is how it's going to go: I'm going to ask you a series of questions and you're going to tell me all the answers. If I find out that any of your answers were incorrect or incomplete I'll come back here and put a bullet in your brain. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," Viv said.

"Okay. Let's do this fast and I'll get you a smoke. How many other guards are on duty tonight?"

"Two. Ginger's in the grounds and Bobby's in the house. Ground floor."

"Where on the ground floor?"

"There's an ante-room off the entrance hall. Little cubby. He sits in there, reading, w.a.n.king."

"You must have a plan of the house, somewhere," Killian said.

"Over there on the noticeboard, there's a fire exit evacuation plan, that's got the whole house except for the greenhouses and the hangar."

Killian looked at the plan, memorised it.