Ben picked up some Lavazza coffee beans on the way home, and when he reached the safehouse he threw a handful in the grinder, brewed himself a cup of dark roast, lit a cigarette and got on the phone. His first call was to Jeff Dekker at Le Val, to say something had come up and he’d be delayed getting back. Jeff didn’t ask what, and Ben didn’t need to explain. Jeff was like that. But Ben knew that if he’d asked, his friend would have been ready to drop everything and join him without hesitation.

Jeff was like that, too.

Ben’s second phone call was to a guy he knew in London, with whom he hadn’t spoken in a long, long while. The guy’s name was Ken Keegan, and he was the director of a small but strangely lucrative firm called Simpson Associates Ltd, based in Canary Wharf. Needless to say, no real individual by the name of Simpson was, or had ever been, involved in the business. The company acted like a talent agency, fielding top-dollar PMC assignments and farming them out to the operatives best suited for the job, in return for a hefty commission. Keegan was a wealthy man, and worked eighteen hours a day. For years after Ben left the SAS the guy had constantly been pestering him with offers of lucrative contract work in Sudan or Sierra Leone or whichever high-risk hotspot happened to be attracting soldiers of fortune like sharks to blood that week. Ben had turned them all down, and eventually the phone had stopped ringing.

Keegan answered his direct line in less than two seconds, all eager and raring to go. Ben said, ‘I like to see a man who’s happy in his work.’

‘Fuck me. If it ain’t the one and only Ben Hope.’ Keegan spoke in the piping, breathless voice of the seriously fat. Which he was. Probably the largest man Ben had ever seen, on the one occasion when they’d eaten out together at a pub in London and he’d watched in morbid fascination as the guy consumed a steak and kidney pie the size of a wagon wheel. That was at least ten years ago. Keegan was probably twice as big now.

‘Still not dropped dead of a coronary, then,’ Ben said.

‘Take more than that to stop me, mate. So what brings you sniffing around my door? Let me guess, had enough of the soft life and feel like doing some real work for a change?’

‘I need something from you,’ Ben said.

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Relax. Just a number, that’s all I’m after.’

Keegan sounded suspicious. ‘Okay, but whose?’

‘You still in touch with Roth?’