He spent the time either sleeping, with his mouth opening and shutting, or awake, playing solitaire on a small plastic travelling board he kept in his jacket pocket. When he slept, his head did not tilt forward but lay back against the cushion behind his head. Sometimes he did genuinely seem to be asleep, but most of the time I had the feeling he was watching the compartment through tiny gaps in his eyelids.

I pointed the tip of my ball-point pen back up towards the Gucci briefcase, and once more the digits on the tiny dial in the barrel began to rotate crazily. Whilst the pen was actually capable of writing, its primary function was not the business of writing at all. It was a Geiger counter that could detect radiation within a radius of several hundred yards. Right now, it detected a lot of radiation in the Gucci briefcase. It would have been stretching the laws of coincidence too far to have considered that the content of that briefcase might be anything other than an AtomSled-manufactured fuel bundle.

For twenty-four hours, none of the three men. other than Harvey Sparrow, with whom I wasn’t concerned, had lifted a finger towards their briefcases. In my phone call to Martha of yesterday, she had warned me that whilst Sleder was arranging to take a fuel bundle on the train, his main intention was to have me bumped off long before we got to Montreal.

The best way to thwart this not particularly pleasant plan, I had decided in the short while it took me to figure out, was to kill his hit man before his hit man killed me. But to do that, I had to find him first. As neither the hit man nor I had met each other before, we both had the initial problem of identification.

In case he thought of the bright idea of taking a look at his travelling companions’ wallets, I had switched mine with Sparrow’s. I had a feeling Sleder would use the hit man as his bag man, and all I had to do was fit the face to the bag to be in a definite position of one-upmanship. But the three did not make life easy for me; none of them would open his bloody briefcase. My arrangement with Sparrow was that one of us would be in the carriage at all times, and by facial signals he would indicate to me if I had missed the opening of a briefcase while I was out. In theory it was a simple process of elimination: the man who had the fuel bundle would not be opening his briefcase at all.