‘I keep it in the casing of my CB radio,’ the driver said. He led Tadeusz round to the lorry cab and pulled the radio free of its housing. It left a gap large enough to hold four sealed cakes of compressed brown powder.

‘Thank you,’ Tadeusz said. ‘There’s no need for you to be troubled with that on this trip.’ He reached inside and extracted the packages. ‘You’ll still get your money, of course.’

Krasic watched, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d crossed a frontier with so much as a joint of cannabis. Driving across Europe with four kilos of heroin seemed like insanity. His boss might be suffering from a death wish, but Krasic didn’t want to join the party. Muttering a prayer to the Virgin, he followed Tadeusz back to the limo.

Chapter 2

2

Carol Jordan grinned into the mirror in the women’s toilet and punched the air in a silent cheer. She couldn’t have had a better interview if she’d scripted it herself. She’d known her stuff, and she’d been asked the kind of questions that let her show it. The panel – two men and a woman – had nodded and smiled approval more often than she could have hoped for in her wildest dreams.

She’d worked for this afternoon for two years. She’d moved from her job running the CID in the Seaford division of East Yorkshire Police back to the Met so she’d be best placed to step sideways into the elite corps of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS. She’d taken every available course on criminal intelligence analysis, sacrificing most of her off-duty time to background reading and research. She’d even used a week of her annual leave working as an intern with a private software company in Canada that specialized in crime linkage computer programs. Carol didn’t mind that her social life was minimal; she loved what she was doing and she’d disciplined herself not to want more. She reckoned there couldn’t be a detective chief inspector anywhere in the country who had a better grasp of the subject. And now she was ready for the move.

Her references, she knew, would have been impeccable. Her former chief constable, John Brandon, had been urging her for a long time to move away from the sharp end of policing into the strategic area of intelligence and analysis. Initially, she had resisted, because although her early forays into the area had given her a significantly enhanced professional reputation, they’d left her emotions in confusion, her self-esteem at an all-time low. Just thinking about it now wiped the grin from her face. She gazed into her serious blue eyes and wondered how long it would be before she could think about Tony Hill without the accompanying feeling of emptiness in her stomach.