Tom smiled, pressed his transmitter and muttered back, his lips barely moving, ‘I always try not to kill people, Buster. It just happens.’

‘That’s why none of us want to work with you. You’re a shit-magnet,’ Buster countered.

‘That’s unfair. I haven’t killed anyone for ages.’

‘That’s because we haven’t let you out on your own for ages.’

Tom smiled again at his friend’s banter as he entered the café. ‘Anyway, I’m going in, so shut the fuck up, you cockney twat. I’m a busy man,’ he whispered, his lips only moving slightly.

The Metro Café was a large establishment mostly occupied by groups of men chatting, smoking, drinking tea and playing dominoes. Tom sat at a small table with an overflowing ashtray that afforded him a clear line of sight to the barber shop and the green-doored entrance to the meeting place.

No one took any notice of him; he was one of a million people just going about their business as normal. The words of his surveillance instructor still rang in his ears, even after all those years. ‘You’ve as much right to be there on the street as anyone else so, if you act normally, no one will notice you. It’s only when you bob and weave and skulk about that you stand out like a bull dog’s bollocks.’ It was true; nothing attracted the eye more than someone peeping, known in the trade as ‘chadding’, around a corner.

A waiter approached him, a groaning tray of small glass cups balanced on his hand and a cigarette dangling from his lips. The man did not speak, instead raising his bushy eyebrows questioningly.

‘Mint tea, please,’ Tom said in Arabic. He’d completed an intensive course in Arabic prior to deployment to Iraq. He wasn’t fluent by any means, but his aptitude for languages meant he was confident he could manage the level of interaction required for the job at hand.

The waiter disappeared without a word. The place was busy, and the deafening roar of the traffic made conversation pointless anyway. Tom found the buzz of the café almost comforting; his confidence rose that it would be pretty easy to remain anonymous. He produced some Islamic prayer beads and began to finger them absent-mindedly, further assimilating into the tableau of the café.

The waiter returned as quickly as he’d departed and unceremoniously deposited a small glass of dark tea full of mint leaves, sugar crystals visibly sinking into the depths. Tom sipped the scalding-hot amber liquid, trying not to screw up his face at the overpoweringly pre-sweetened flavour. He picked up an Arabic newspaper from the empty table next to him and settled in, while he watched the door and waited. Through his jeans pocket he pressed the transmitter tone switch twice to indicate to control that he was in position.

‘Two tones received; do you have a clear eyeball?’