It was a MAC 10. A nasty, pocket-sized sub-machine gun, that didn’t really mind who it hit, capable of emptying its thirty-round magazine in under two seconds. Groomed had managed to hit Woolf with most of the thirty, and they’d torn him to pieces.

I bent forward and fired another round into Groomed’s mouth.

It took me an hour to go over the whole building from top to bottom. By the time I’d finished, I knew that it backed on to High Holborn, had once housed a largish insurance firm, and was now as empty as buildings ever get. Which I’d sort of guessed. Gunfire without subsequent police sirens generally means there’s no one home.

I had no choice but to leave the Glock behind. I dragged Richie’s body into the room with Woolf, laid him across the floor, wiped the butt and trigger of the Glock on my shirt and pressed it into Richie’s hand. I picked up the MAC and fired the last three rounds into Richie’s body, before putting it back beside Groomed.

The tableau, as I’d left it, didn’t make much sense. But then real life doesn’t either, and a confusing scene is often easier to believe than a straightforward one. That’s what I hoped, anyway.

I then retired to The Sovereign, a grubby bed and breakfast in King’s Cross, where I spent two days and three nights while my chin dried up and the bruises on my body turned to beautiful colours. Outside my window, the British public traded crack, slept with itself for money, and fought drunken battles it couldn’t remember in the morning.

While I was there, I thought about helicopters, and guns, and Alexander Woolf, and Sarah Woolf, and a whole lot of interesting stuff.

Am I a good man?

Nine

Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!

BROWNING

‘Graduate what?’

The girl was pretty, in a stunningly beautiful kind of way, and I wondered how long she’d stay in her present job. I dare say being a receptionist at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square gets you a reasonable salary and all the nylon stockings you can eat, but it must also be duller than last year’s Budget speech.

‘Graduate Studies,’ I said. ‘Mr Russell Barnes.’

‘Is he expecting you?’

She wouldn’t last six months, I decided. She was bored with me, bored with the building, bored with the world.

‘I certainly hope so,’ I said. ‘My office telephoned earlier today to confirm. They were told that there would be someone to meet me.’

‘Solomon, right?’

‘Right.’ She scanned a couple of lists. ‘One M,’ I said, helpfully.

‘And your office is?’

‘The one that telephoned this morning. I’m sorry, I thought rd mentioned that.’

She was even too bored to repeat the question. She shrugged and started to fill in a visitor’s pass for me.

‘Carl?’

Carl wasn’t just Carl. He was CARL. He was an inch-and-a-half taller than me, and he lifted weights in his spare time, of which he obviously had quite a lot. He was also a United States Marine, and wore a uniform so new I half expected to see someone still finishing off a hem down by his ankles.

‘Mr Solomon,’ said the receptionist. ‘Room 5910. To see Barnes, Russell.’

‘Russell Barnes,’ I corrected her, but neither of them took any notice.

Carl took me through a series of expensive security checks, where some other Carls ran metal-detectors over my body and ruffled my clothes a lot. They were particularly interested in my briefcase, and worried by the fact that all it contained was a copy of theDaily Mirror.

‘I only use the case as a prop,’ I explained cheerfully, which for some reason seemed to satisfy them. Maybe if I’d told them I only used it to take secret documents out of foreign embassies, they would have slapped me on the back and offered to carry it for me.

Carl took me to a lift and stood aside while I entered. Music was being piped in at a maddeningly low volume, and if it hadn’t been an embassy, I would have sworn that it was Johnny Mathis covering ‘Bat Out Of Hell’. Carl followed me in and swiped a plastic card through an electronic reader, then jabbed a number into the keypad beneath with an immaculately-gloved finger.

As the lift flung us upwards, I steadied myself for what was likely to be a tricky kind of an interview. I kept telling myself that I was only doing what they tell you to do when you’re swept out to sea by a strong current. Swim with it, they say, not against it. You’ll hit land eventually. We dismounted at the fifth floor and I followed Carl along a well-waxed corridor to 5910 - Deputy Director European Research, Barnes, Russell P

Carl waited while I knocked, and when the door opened I came within an ace of slipping a couple of pound coins into his gloved hand and asking him to book me a table at L’Epicure. Luckily, he stopped me by saluting violently, then turned on his heel and set off back down the corridor at a hundred and ten paces to the minute.

Russell P Barnes had knocked around the world a bit. I may not be the greatest reader of men, but I know that you don’t get to look like Russell P Barnes by sitting behind a desk for half your life, and swilling cocktails at embassy receptions for the other half. He was nearly fifty, tall and lean, and with a scrum of scars and wrinkles fighting each other to see who could get control of his sunburned face. All I could think was that he was everything that O’Neal was trying so hard to be.

He looked over some half-moon glasses at me as I came in, but carried on reading, running an expensive fountain pen down the margin as he went. Every fibre of his body said dead Viet Cong, well-armed Contras and General Schwarzkopf calls me Rusty.

He flipped over a page and barked at me: ‘Yeah.’

‘Mr Barnes,’ I said, setting my briefcase down by the chair opposite him and holding out my hand.

‘What it says on the door.’ He kept on reading. I kept my hand out.

‘How do you do, sir?’

A pause. I knew the ‘sir’ would get him. He sniffed the air, picked up the scent of brother officer, and slowly raised his head to me. Then he looked down at my hand for a long moment before extending his own. Dry as dust.

He flicked his eyes down at the chair and I sat, and as I did so I caught sight of the photograph on the wall. Sure enough, it was Stormin ’ Norman, dressed in camouflage pyjamas, with a long handwritten inscription under the face. The writing was too small for me to read, but I’d have bet everything I owned on it containing the words ‘kick’ and ‘ass’ somewhere in its text. Next to it, there was a larger photograph of Barnes in some kind of jump-suit, with a flying-helmet tucked under his arm.