Chapter Fifteen

The restaurant was rudimentary. They took a table near the window with a view across a parched lawn to the concrete blocks that had been deployed to stop car bombers from getting too close to the main building. The hotel was inhabited by plenty of Westerners, and it would have been a fine prize for the insurgents. Private guards, armed with automatic rifles, were stationed outside. Beatrix watched them for a moment and was not impressed. It would have been a simple thing to get past them.

To the left was the river, where motorboats and fishing skiffs churned through the sluggish brown silt. There was a freighter that had turned turtle off the main dock and bullet-marked buildings on the foreshore were reminders that this was until recently a city at war.

They waited for the waiter to bring them their menus.

“What’s your story?” Beatrix asked him.

“What? Before the Group?”

“Sure.”

“Special Boat Service.”

“And before that?”

“Just a grunt. Did my time, here and there. Nothing special.”

“You must have something. You made Special Forces.”

“Must have gotten lucky.”

False modesty. She ignored it. “What have you done so far for Pope?”

“Nothing. I’ve been training for six months. This is the first thing.”

Beatrix had realised that he was green, but there was green and then there was green. She wasn’t interested in babysitting a rookie.

Faulkner must have read her concern.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said, a little indignantly.

“I’m sure you do,” she said, although she knew from experience that a career in Special Forces and a career in Group Fifteen were very different things. The former did not adequately prepare for the latter. It provided minimum baselines for physical and tactical capabilities, but active service in the Group required a certain mental state, an ethical flexibility, that came only with experience. It was something that was absorbed, the way that radiation seeped into the bones, slowly mutating the cells until the agent became something else entirely. It was a contamination. Faulkner, young and used only to stark blacks and whites, would not yet have been exposed to enough of it. She would have to remember that.

He was looking at her curiously. “What happened in Russia?”

“How much do you know?”

“I know half the Group were killed.”

She nodded.

“And that you were involved.”

She looked at him, as he was looking at her, and she nodded again. “Group Fifteen had a serious problem with vermin. An infestation. The man who was Control before Pope was the worst of all. He tried to kill me. He killed my husband and kidnapped my child. He tried to kill the agent who was Number One after me, too.”

“John Milton?”

“That’s right. You’ve heard of him?”

He gaped. “Of course I have. He’s a legend.”

Beatrix smiled. Green and starry-eyed.

“How many did he send?”

“He sent six to take us out. We sent six back in body bags. I expect Pope is working hard to replace them.”