The whiteboard had accumulated even more dates, places and photographs of key players, all connected by a plethora of arrows in a big spidery diagram. Frank was standing next to it, gesticulating with a marker pen.

‘Strike day is just over one week away,’ he was saying. ‘The ninth of March. Next Saturday. We’ll have a meeting the day before where we’ll coordinate plans with the strike team leader and the rest of his crew. There’ll be a lot of people present at the bust. This is a big operation and there’s a lot at stake.’

‘And the seven hundred and fifty thousand?’ said Bailey.

‘I’ll give that to you on the day itself, just beforehand,’ he said.

‘He’s worried that you might run off with it,’ joked Dale.

Bailey shot him a droll smile.

There was a large question mark in a circle on the whiteboard. Frank tapped on it with the end of his pen. ‘All that remains to be known is the location of the transaction.’

Bailey nodded at the question mark. ‘Rick said he’d confirm the location on the day itself. He said it would be indoors. So with a quantity of weapons of this size, I’m guessing the venue is likely to be somewhere big and fairly secluded, like an empty warehouse or a disused aircraft hangar.’

She knew the reason Rick was keeping the location to himself until the last minute was so if he thought he was being followed he could call the whole deal off.

So far though, seeing as she’d heard nothing from the Molloys since the interrogation of Marcus, she was presuming no news was good news, and it saved her the trouble of having to dance around them. But from another more worrying perspective, she knew they’d probably been spending their time searching for Mister Snigiss, and despite Jennifer’s claims she could look after herself, the thought of them catching up with her terrified Bailey as she was acutely aware of the lengths they’d be capable of going to in order to quench Nancy’s thirst for revenge.

‘Well, wherever he ends up taking you,’ said Frank. ‘We’ll have eyes on you the whole way. From beginning to end.’

‘I don’t want to know where they’ll be though,’ retorted Bailey, aware that an unconscious flicker of her eyes in the direction of the strike team could alert the Molloys to their presence and thus blow the whole operation.

‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘And I’ll make sure they keep an extra-low profile as well.’

‘Presumably I’ll be wired up,’ she said.

Frank nodded. ‘As well as a microphone, you’ll also be wearing a miniature camera. We want to catch Rick on film conducting the transaction. That’ll ensure he definitely won’t be able to squirm out of it like he normally does.’

‘So how will the strike team know when to take action?’ asked Dale.

Bailey had already given this some thought. ‘Basically, when I come out to give the signal to my man to hand the money over to Rick’s man, that’s when the strike team will know whether to move in or not. If the weapons are there as planned, I’ll be wearing my sunglasses. But if I’m not wearing my sunglasses, then that means that the weapons aren’t there, and that the strike team should hold off for the time being. It means that Rick might be holding the weapons in a secondary location just to be on the safe side.’