Sweat dribbled down my face, but my mouth was dry and rough like sandpaper. It was only with some effort that I breathed slowly and silently. The Department would gloss over the man I'd shot downstairs, especially if I wrote the report to make it sound as if I was protecting Bret. Protecting highly placed top-floor staff at London Central was not something the Department wanted to discourage. But they would not gloss over the inconvenience of untangling me from the clutches of the Metropolitan Police. Particularly not when our present relationship with the Home Office was decidedly turbulent.

Ah… keeping very still paid off! This was him. He leaned forward and the glint of light from the hall below caught his forehead. I am not a vindictive man, but I was frightened and angry. I wasn't going to let some hoodlum dynamite one of our cars and push a shotgun under my nose and try to kill me like they'd killed Ted Riley. This one wasn't going to slip away into the night. I raised my gun slowly and took careful aim. Maybe he saw me or the movement of the gun. He ducked back as I started to squeeze the trigger. Too late. I stayed very still, gun uplifted. I counted to ten and I was lucky. My inactivity encouraged him to lean forward again, this time more cautiously, but not cautiously enough. I pumped two shots into him. The silenced gun twisted in my hand and its two thuds were followed by a scream and a crash and the sound of a door banging, as he tumbled back into a room on the landing above me. They must have been using a room here. Maybe one, maybe all of them, had been upstairs waiting for us. That's why we got no warning from our men positioned across the street.

For a moment I hesitated. I wanted to look at their hideout, but time was pressing and the consequences too serious. I ran downstairs, through the office – knocking the cashbox to the floor as I went – and pushed open the swing door into the launderette. Coins and paper money scattered over the floor; perhaps that would convince the cops it was a bungled robbery. It was blindingly bright under the fluorescent lights after the darkness of the stairwell, bright and steamy. I half closed my eyes to try to retain some of their adjustment as I went out onto the street.

The street was lit by the flames from the car. I saw a third man now. He was also dressed in a pea jacket. He was astride a motorbike and got it started as I brought the gun up and fired. But he was quick. And he was strong enough to swing the heavy bike round in a tight curve and open the throttle to roar away. I chanced one more shot at him, but after that I could see him only as a dark smudge against the fronts of the houses. Too dark, too much deflection and too much chance of putting a few rounds into someone's bedroom. So I went back into the launderette to see what Bret was doing.

Bret was doing nothing except holding his bundled-up laundry bag tight under his arm and watching the masked boy bleeding bright red frothy blood. The boy was still clamped over the washing machine, holding it tight as if he was trying to move it to another place. His feet were wide apart and there was blood on the white enamel, blood on the glass, and blood mingling with the spilled soapy water that had leaked onto the floor.

'He's had it,' I said. 'Let's go, Bret.' I stuffed my gun back into my overcoat pocket. Bret was in shock. I gave him a short jab in the ribs to bring him back into the real world. He blinked and shook his head like a boxer trying to clear his brain. Then he got the idea and ran after me to where my car was parked on the corner.

'Stay in the car,' I said, opening the door and pushing him into the front seat. 'I've got to look at the others.'

Bret was still holding the bag with the money and the laundry. He was like a man in a trance. As he settled into the car seat, the bag was on his knees and he had his arms round it tight, as if it was a body. Across the road the Ford Escort in which Stinnes and the minder had arrived was still burning, although the flames were now turning to black smoke as the tyres caught fire. 'He's here,' said Bret, meaning Stinnes.

'Shit,' I said. Because, to my amazement, Bret was right. Stinnes had survived the bomb under the car. He was standing by the door of my Rover waiting to be let in. 'Get in the back seat.' His minder was standing close to him. It was only when they were awkwardly climbing into the back seat that I noticed they were handcuffed together. A minder that cuffs himself to his subject is a minder who takes no chances, but he'd saved Stinnes from certain death. Craig was huge and muscular; shackled to Craig, even King Kong would have to go where Craig went.

I started the car and pulled away before there was any sign of a police car. I suppose that respectable part of Hampstead doesn't attract a big police presence at three o'clock on a Tuesday morning. 'What the hell happened?' I asked.

'I saw them coming,' said Craig. They were amateurs, real amateurs.' He was very young, no more than twenty. 'So I put the cuffs on and we got out.' He had a simple outlook: most good minders are like that. And he was right; they'd behaved like amateurs, and that puzzled me. They'd even missed Craig and Stinnes escaping from the car. Amateurs. But the KGB didn't use amateurs in their hit teams and that worried me. We passed a police car at Swiss Cottage. It was doing about seventy on the wrong side of the road, with the blue light flashing and the siren on. They were doing it the way they'd seen it done on late-night TV.

By this time Bret was coming back to life. 'What was that you were saying, about how they would arrive very nervous?' he said. His voice was shaky; suddenly he'd experienced life at the sharp end of the Department and he was shocked.

'Very funny, Bret,' I said. 'Does that crack come before you thank me for saving your life or afterwards?' From behind us I heard young Craig coughing to remind us that the rear seats were occupied by people with ears.

'Saving my life, you son of a bitch?' said Bret in hysterical anger. 'First you shoot, using me as a shield. Then you run out, leaving me to face the music.'

I laughed. That's the way it is being a field agent, Bret,' I said. 'If you'd had experience or training, you would have hit the deck. Better still, you would have taken out that second bastard instead of leaving me to deal with all of them.'

'If I'd had experience or training,' said Bret menacingly, 'I would have read to you that section of the Command Rules that applies to the use of firearms in a public place.'

'You don't have to read it to me, Bret,' I said. 'You should have read it to that bastard who came at us with the sawn-off shotgun. And to the one who tried to part my hair when I went after him upstairs.'

'You killed him,' said Bret. He was still breathing heavily. He was rattled, really rattled, while I was pumped with adrenalin and ready to say all kinds of things that are better left unsaid. 'He bled to death. I watched him.'

'Why didn't you give him first aid?' I said sarcastically. 'Because that would have meant letting go your four grand? Is that why?'

'You could have winged him,' Bret said.

'That's just for the movies, Bret. That's just for Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. In the real world, no one is shooting guns out of people's hands or giving them flesh wounds in the upper arm. In the real world you hit them or you miss them. It's difficult enough to hit a moving target without selecting tricky bits of anatomy. So don't give me all that crap.'

'We left him to die.'

'That's right. And if you had followed me upstairs with the shotgun I kicked over to you and tried to give me a little cover, you would have seen me kill another of those bastards.'

'Is it going in your report?' said Bret.

'You're damn right it's going in my report. And so is the way you stood there like a goddamned tailor's dummy when I needed backup.'