Not many tourists, thought Porter. I’m going to stand out like Victoria Beckham in the local Primark. I’m probably the first white guy mad enough to come here in years.

He checked the bus schedule. The Sidon bus had rolled into town ten minutes late, but he still had twenty minutes to spare before the next bus headed out to Anjar. Take in the sights, he thought to himself with a grim smile.

Walking across to the shop, he took a bottle of water from the cooler cabinet, chose a couple of bars of chocolate, and handed across a Lebanese twenty-pound note to pay for them. He didn’t say anything, and although the woman serving could see he wasn’t local, she didn’t seem to care. A small boy was emptying out his pockets, seeing if he had enough coins to buy a packet of sweets. He glanced suspiciously at Porter, then looked away. Porter took the coins he’d been given in change, and handed them down to the boy. He started to say something in Arabic, but Porter just shook his head and turned round.

No need for the thanks, mate, thought Porter as he walked back towards the bus stop. Where I’m going, I won’t be needing any loose change.

I’m dealing in a harder currency.

Blood.

Another hour, another bus station.

Porter stepped down from the ten-year-old Mercedes vehicle and glanced around. It was gone six now, and the skies were growing darker: back in England it would be pitch black by this time, but the days were longer out here. The journey had taken longer than expected. His bus had left twenty minutes after the scheduled time, and had taken fifteen minutes longer than it should have done to get to Anjar: the driver had picked one woman up, then turned round and gone back again when it turned out she had forgotten something. The waiting was driving Porter crazy. Just get on with it, he muttered to himself. I want to get stuck into this mission.

There were two food stands at the far end of the bus station, and a couple of guys were hanging around the ticket office. One of them, Porter noted, very obviously had some kind of gun tucked inside his leather jacket. They glanced at Porter, but neither seemed very interested. All through the journey, Porter had been watching, wondering whether the Firm had put some kind of tail on him. It was, he well knew, their most obvious move. After all, he was going to lead them straight to Katie Dartmouth’s kidnappers. Follow him, and they’d find her. All they would have to do then was rustle up a crack unit from Hereford to go and get her out. The only risk was, if the tail was spotted, Porter would be killed on the spot. Then they would have nothing. If there was a tail, he had to spot it before Hassad did.

As much as he scanned the bus and the streets for evidence of anyone keeping tabs on him, he felt certain he hadn’t seen the same face twice throughout the whole journey. He hadn’t seen anyone acting suspiciously. There was nobody lurking in the shadows. And no passing of the watch from one person to another. Not that he could see anyway.