The scrutiny didn’t concern Milton overmuch; the photograph on the passport was of him, complete with the scar on his face. The member of staff, dressed in a simple black tunic with a zippered front and the airline logo on his left breast, closed the passport with a practised flourish and handed it back to Milton.

“Any hold baggage?”

“Just carry-on.”

“Could you just read this for me, please?” The man pointed at a laminated sheet of paper on the desk in front of him as he tapped at his computer keyboard. Milton looked at the sheet. It was a standard list of do’s and don’ts regarding what he could—and could not—pack in his luggage.

“I’ve read it.”

“And you packed your bags yourself?”

“I did.”

Milton found his thoughts drifting to the woman who had smiled at him while he’d been queuing. It wasn’t just that she was attractive; there was something enigmatic about her. He pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind. The chances were that he would never see her again. He knew that was the reality, but it did not stop him from being ever so slightly disappointed.

The man directed him to security and Milton set off, groaning a little as he saw he had another long queue to negotiate. He settled in, removed his belt and unlaced his shoes, and took advantage of the pause to think about what he wanted to achieve when he arrived at his destination.

Uppermost on the list was a visit to see Victoria Carmichael. She had worked for Group Eight as an operational support officer. She was what was known in the trade as a cobbler: a very specific kind of forger, with a particular talent for creating legends for field agents and then ‘papering’ them. She provided the official documents that would ease their passage across borders and legitimise their presence in the locales where their targets could be found.

Milton had first met Carmichael as he prepared for an operation that took him into Texas. He had been given the file of a local official who was proving particularly tenacious in his investigation of an oil spill in Galveston Bay following the collision between a British-flagged tanker and a barge. Milton had been impressed with Carmichael’s ingenuity and thoroughness; she had provided him with a set of perfectly aged passports, a driver’s licence and even pocket litter—receipts and tickets and the like—that painted him as a lowly functionary who worked for the owner of the tanker. Milton had entered the country without issue, eliminated his target and then exfiltrated, all without exciting the attention of law enforcement.