Time was desperately, worryingly short, but by the end of this weekend Luke needed not just to know everything about his adopted character, Steve Keane, he needed to be Steve Keane, the Jew-hating, BAME-despising, racial supremacist, with a history of punching people whose colour he viscerally disliked. The temporary tattoo of a swastika on the side of his neck was convincing – ‘It won’t wash off in the shower for a good two weeks,’ they told him. And his back story was all there for anyone to see if they cared to trawl through his social-media profile, carefully crafted by the people from upstairs who did this stuff for a living. There were the eulogizing tributes to Anders Breivik in his Norwegian island prison, then the Berlin gunman, the Christchurch mosque attacker, Gary Sloane from Kansas, and so it went on, the trail of verifiable online digital vitriol.

Life had not treated ‘Steve Keane’ well since he had been supposedly ‘dishonourably discharged’ from the Regiment. He had, apparently, drifted from one badly paid security job to another, eventually ending up as an unsuccessful mechanic here in this ‘garage’ at Cowley, on the edge of Oxford. But the man being presented as Steve Keane had something that could be very valuable to the movement. After all those years in the SRR he was a consummate expert at covert surveillance, counter-surveillance, detection and evasion. In fact, it was said, there was not a system in operation throughout the UK that, given the right opportunity, Steve Keane did not know how to evade or disable. And that, right now, made him a very marketable commodity to certain individuals.

It also meant that if Luke was to stand any chance at all of convincing the fanatics in this movement, this cult of extremists, of his usefulness to them, he needed to know his stuff. In the Corps he had done a stint in Brigade Reconnaissance, he had mastered the art of the CTR, the close-target recce, and while at Poole with the SBS he had even done a beginners’ course in covert breaking-and-entering. Plus various types of surveillance in Belfast and the Province that he would never be able to talk about. But nothing had prepared him for what he needed now. This was a whole different game. A very large part of Luke’s day was spent ensconced with the lock-breakers, the counter-surveillance experts and even one retired burglar, all willingly supplied by MI5.

91

Battersea, London

Friday, 18 March, 1901hrs GMT

‘I AM A heartless bitch.’ There. She wrote the words out for herself on a piece of paper and stared at them for several seconds before crumpling it up and tossing it towards the bin. It missed. Elise got up from the table and arched her back, then instinctively stroked her belly. Nothing showing there yet, but it would soon.