The cabin was an outside double, giving him a view of the starboard decks through a window rather than a porthole. De Payns hadn’t realised there was a choice, but now counted himself lucky to have a cabin with an alternative exit should someone come through the door.

Having showered, he sat in the darkness, sitting on one of the single beds but leaning against the wall so he could see the deck when he looked sideways through the curtains. The arrival time in Naples was shortly before 7 a.m., and he was sure no one from that silver Mercedes had followed him onto the ferry. If they really thought Alain Dupuis was a problem, the Sayef Albar operators would use their limited resources to surveil Palermo’s hotels and the airport – the ferry terminus at Naples would probably not be a priority. Taking the ferry gave him the night to think through what he was going to do. He had no phone, no credit card, no gun. The red sticker with the cross through it was a signal from de Payns—he was on his own, expected to reappear at the Bunker without Company assistance.

He pulled his pack from the floor and turned on the cabin’s bedside light. He upturned the pack and an apple and a muesli bar in its wrapper fell onto the grey blanket, along with his wallet and sunglasses, a half-pack of Marlboro Lights and a cheap plastic lighter. He took two bites of the apple and, as he chewed, stood and looked in the mirror of the vanity basin. He was fairly well preserved for thirty-eight; the pale eyes still lively, the sandy blond hair short and swept back and his skin still glowing with outdoors activity rather than being ravaged by the sun. His bare torso showed a couple of scars, and his arms and back contained a map of fights and high school rugby accidents etched into the skin. The white line down his left forearm came from the surgeons’ attempt to put his shattered arm together after a motorbike accident in his last year of boarding school, and the wounds at the base of his spine were reminders of the surgery he underwent after injuring his back as a fighter pilot in the air force. But for someone who was almost forty, he thought, he had at least retained enough muscle to look after himself in a fight.