‘I’m still working on that. Frank was really worried about it. Laffont was too—’ I stopped in my tracks. Another piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place. Frank hadn’t just left me the blueprint to find in the safe-deposit box. He’d also talked specifically about Minerva in the green room, the night before he was killed.

I pictured him rotating his laptop screen, the way Luca had done. And this time I saw what was on it.

Instead of grainy shots of Albanian mobsters, he’d shown me detailed multi-coloured specs of a variety of different vessels. Vivid blues, greens, reds and yellows, representing the configuration of containers in the load space.

I’d been amazed by how many of those lumps of metal you could fit in the hold, and how many more you could put on the deck without tipping the whole thing over.

He said I’d missed the point. The vein above his temple had started to pulsate. I wasn’t looking properly. He’d tapped the images of Minerva. ‘Look again …’

He hardly ever raised his voice. I could still feel his frustration now. But it wasn’t a patch on mine. Once again, the harder I tried to remember what it was that he’d spotted, the further our exchange swam out of reach.

‘Nico?’

I wrenched myself back into the present. Luca was wearing the kind of expression you save for people who have really lost the plot. ‘Sorry. I won’t bore you with the details, but I got a bang on the head when this whole thing kicked off a few days ago, and some stuff got buried. I think a bit of it has just shaken itself loose.’

I picked up my day sack and extracted Hesco’s HP. ‘There’s something else I could really use your help with. I took this off the third of the Uran brothers. Maybe the answer’s in it.’

Luca reached across and powered it up.

‘I have the pass code: baab al jihad. Lower case. No gaps.’

His smile returned. ‘The second of the eight gates to Jannah. If only it were always this easy to find your way into Paradise …’

‘The problem is, it doesn’t work for the individual files. I’ve already tried all the other gates I could remember, and hit a brick wall every time.’

He picked an icon at random and tried to open it.

‘Have you got a tame geek who could crack them? Quite a few seem to have been downloaded from Frank’s laptop. I think we should start with those.’

I watched his fingers dance across the keys and his frown deepen as he ran through five or six different strategies and none of them worked. Eventually he shut the thing down. ‘If we can’t do it at the office, there is a guy I know.’

I handed him Hesco’s iPhone. ‘Maybe he can have a crack at this too. I’ve tried the second gate. And a few of the others. Got me nowhere.’

As he put Hesco’s gear in his shoulder bag, alongside his own, the door opened. The lad who’d been behind the till poked his head through and made the sort of noises you make when you want to fuck off home. They’re the same in any language.

I checked the Suunto. We’d passed last light. ‘How many ways out of here?’

‘Two. Front and back. That’s one of the reasons we’re here. And the boy tells me he’s padlocked the roller shutters at the front.’

I asked him when he thought he might have some answers about Minerva and Hesco’s data.

‘Perhaps tomorrow evening. More probably the day after. If the vessel isn’t registered on the Automatic Identification System, it won’t be easy. And the computer?’ He sighed. ‘We live in hope.’

‘Fair one. But I need to go east. That’s where it’s heading. I can’t just hang around at the Romeo’s virtual driving range all day.’

In fact I couldn’t hang around at it for thirty seconds. I’d never picked up a golf club in my life. Except when I’d nicked some kind of iron from a sports shop in Peckham when I was a kid. I only managed to fence it for 25p. I hadn’t realized you needed the whole set.

He nodded. ‘Ring me at the office. If I’m not there, your call will be forwarded.’

All the lights were now off in the store apart from the ones in the rear corridor. At the end of it I could see a door with a push bar to enable a swift exit if there was some kind of health and safety drama.

I gripped Luca before he opened it. ‘What happens outside?’

He turned. ‘An alleyway. Then the street.’

‘Lit or unlit?’

‘Unlit.’

‘And how often have you used this place before?’

He shrugged. ‘Three or four times, perhaps. But not regularly.’

So, we weren’t as deep in what Luca called the shadows as he believed.

‘OK, I’ll go now, and turn left. If there’s anyone out there, I’d rather they followed me than fucked you over and took the laptop. You call a cab, and tell the driver to run you around for half an hour before taking you to wherever you need to go.’

I peeled off a note and handed it to the boy. ‘Tell him it would be best for him to wait another twenty before leaving.’

The kid seemed well pleased.

I gave him a grin. ‘Yup, you should be smiling. A euro per minute beats the shit out of the minimum wage where I come from.’

4

I didn’t aim to go straight back to the car. Not because I was in the mood for sightseeing: I just needed to check whether Luca had been followed from his office. He was clearly well able to take care of himself, but maybe his anti-surveillance skills weren’t as highly developed as mine.

As soon as I emerged from the mouth of the alley, two guys with shiny heads turned away from me and got very busy ordering pizza at the takeaway on the opposite side of the street. Too busy. I’d seen their faces clearly enough to be sure that neither was Elvis. Now I was about to find out whether they were run-of-the-mill Neapolitan muggers or something a bit more switched on.

By the time I’d moved half a K to the west, and travelled twice the distance in the process, I knew they weren’t just out for a good time. No one orders pizza, then doesn’t wait to collect it. Or turns three corners to walk back on themselves. Unless they’re stupid Brit tourists holding their map upside down.

But was Luca their real target, or were they after me?

I was moving west, a few hundred north of the Romeo. The sea about a K to my left, the rest of the town sloping up to some kind of castle on the hill in front of me. I lengthened my stride so that I could increase my speed without breaking into a run. The gap between us stayed the same.

I slid my UZI out of my pocket, held it in my right hand and twisted out the nib. I thought about turning towards the docks and taking them down there, or going the Gucci route and holing up in the Romeo, but they’d already thought of that. One of my pursuers was waffling urgently into a mobile phone, and when I glanced left at the next junction, so was a guy on a moped, moving purposefully up the cross street towards me.

I tightened my grip on the UZI and kept aiming for the high ground.

Thirty ahead and to my half-right was a steep flight of stone steps, which looked like they curved up to a church. As I reached them, the clouds obliterated the moon. That suited me fine. I climbed them two at a time, mostly staying in the shadow of the high wall to my right. They seemed to go on for ever.

The moped’s engine shrieked in protest as its rider throttled up and sped further along the street I’d just left. I heard footsteps below me. I gulped in a couple of lungfuls of warm, damp Neapolitan air and quickened my pace. It felt like a storm was coming.

I reached the stretch of level paving that led to the church door and thought about taking them on there, but only for a nanosecond. I legged it past, aiming for the next set of steps. I could still hear movement below, and the odd curse. I hoped the fuckers were leaking. I was. I felt sweat prickle at the base of my spine and the back of my neck.