‘You’re going tomorrow,’ said Danni.

Porter nodded.

‘To where Katie Dartmouth is being held?’

‘That’s why I need a drink.’

Danni flashed a smile. ‘Christ, I’d need a drink too if I was going there,’ she said. She reached in her bag, pulling out a half-bottle of white wine. ‘This do?’

Porter reached for the bottle. It was one of the Australian whites you buy at Tesco to take home with you when you pick up a ready-meal on the way home from work. It wasn’t what he usually liked to drink, but right now he was desperate for anything. This was the first alcohol he’d seen since he’d set foot in the place thirty-six hours ago, and he wasn’t about to turn it down. ‘Care to join me?’

Danni shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said.

Porter unscrewed the cap, pouring the wine into two tumblers he’d grabbed from the washbasin. He took a sip, allowing a moment for the alcohol to hit his bloodstream. It was hard for him to remember the last time he’d gone this long without a drink. Living on the streets, he was almost always too short of cash to put a roof over his head, and often too short to get anything to eat either. But he always found money for a drink.

‘What happened to you?’ asked Danni.

She took a sip of the wine, and sat down just a few feet from him on the end of his bed. As she crossed her legs, Porter noticed the seam of her black tights, running up the side of her shapely legs, and disappearing into the tempting folds of her crisp white skirt. Suddenly, he was aware she was noticing the way he was casting his eyes up her legs, and snapped them away. Stop kidding yourself, he reminded himself. She can’t be more than twenty-four or -five. Young enough to be your daughter. And let’s face it, mate, even the women your own age aren’t interested in you. Don’t even think about the young ones.

‘I had some bad breaks, that’s all,’ said Porter.

Danni shook her head, tossing aside her blonde hair as she did so. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she said. ‘You were Regiment once. The best of the best –’

‘How’d you know that?’ said Porter.

Danni laughed, taking another sip of wine. ‘This is a very small place,’ she said. ‘And nobody gossips like an office full of spies. This lot love to know what everybody else is up to.’

Maybe that’s why someone tried to kill me, thought Porter. Maybe word leaked out somehow. Maybe it got through to some al-Qaeda or Hezbollah guys in London, and they wanted to take me out before I had a chance to get out to Lebanon.

‘You have to be tough to get in, don’t you?’ said Danni. ‘I thought there were special tests?’

Porter could feel his mind flicking back almost two decades. There were special tests all right. He’d spent weeks of his life tabbing through the Brecon Beacons, with a deadweight on his back, and with the Welsh rain lashing into his face. He’d done the rock climbing, and the abseiling, learnt how to fly a plane and drive a tank, and he’d done enough hours running around the killing house to last a man several lifetimes. He’d watched men die as well: two guys had bought it on the selection courses he’d been on, good lads both of them who just wanted to prove they could hack it, but who must have been cold in their graves for almost twenty years now. And for what? A few years taking orders from some jumped-up public schoolboys, before they toss you back on the scrapheap, and walk straight past you on the street when you ask them to help you out with the price of a beer.