“Well, maybe I can help you with it.”

“I’ll do it myself,” Allan said determinedly. “There’s one screen I can’t get past, but after that it’ll be okay.”

Reeve nodded. “What about homework, is it done?”

“Done. Mum checked it this afternoon.”

“And do you still hate Billy?”

Allan wrinkled his face. “I loathe Billy.”

Reeve nodded again. “So who’s your best friend now?”

Allan shrugged.

“Go to sleep now,” his father said, closing the door. He waited in the hall, listening for the crackle of footsteps on paper as Allan left the bed and headed for the computer. But he didn’t hear anything. He stayed a little longer, staring along the passageway. He could hear Joan downstairs, watching television. The dishwasher was busy in the kitchen. This is home, he thought. This is my place. This is where I’m happy. But part of him was still crouching in the rain while a patrol passed nearby…

Downstairs, he made a couple of mugs of instant coffee and headed for the living room. This had been a farmhouse once, just a couple of rooms and an attic reached by a ladder. Reeve imagined that in the winters the farmer brought his animals into the house, keeping them warm and using them as central heating. The place had been uninhabited for eight years when they bought it. Joan had seen potential in the house-and Reeve had seen potential in the seclusion. They were close enough to civilization, but they were on their own.

It had taken time to settle on this location. The Scottish Borders would have provided better communications; clients driving up from London could have done the trip in half a day. But Reeve had finally opted for South Uist. He’d been here on holiday once as a child and had never really forgotten it. When he persuaded Joan to come with him to see it again he pretended it was just a holiday, but really he’d been sizing up the place. There were a few villages nearby; but for the most part there was nothing at all. Reeve liked that. He liked the wilderness and the hills. He liked the isolation.

Most of his clients came from England, and didn’t mind the travel. For them, it was part of the overall experience. They were a mixed lot: hikers looking for something more; gung-ho apocalyptic types, shaping up for the final showdown; trainee bodyguards; all-purpose masochists. Reeve provided intensive training that was partly field craft, partly survivalist. His aim, he told them at the outset, was to get them to use their instincts as well as any skills they might learn along the way. He was teaching them to survive, whether it be in the office or on a wind-chilled mountaintop. He was teaching them to survive.

The final test was the pursuit. It was never a no-win situation for the weekend soldiers. If they planned, prepared, and worked together, they could find him easily within the time allotted. If they read their maps, found themselves a leader, split into pairs, and covered the ground systematically, there was no way he could elude them. The area wasn’t that big, and boasted few enough hiding places. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t find him, just so long as they learned their lesson, learned that they might have found him if only they’d gone about it the right way.

The chocolate-eater was going to be somebody’s bodyguard someday. He probably thought being a bodyguard was all about being big and holding a clean driving license; a sort of chauffeur with clout. He had a lot to learn. Reeve had met a few heavyweight bodyguards, international types, political types. Some of them had been in Special Forces at the same time as him. Chocolate-chops had a long way to go.

He never told clients he’d been in the SAS. He told them he was ex-infantry, and mentioned a few of his campaigns: Northern Ireland, the Falklands… He never went into detail, though he was often pressed. As he said, none of that was important; it was the past. It was just stories-stories he never told.

The living room was warm. Joan was curled up on the sofa, tending to the immediate needs of Bakunin the cat while they both watched TV. She smiled as she took the mug from him. Bakunin gave him a dirty look for daring to interrupt the stroking session. Reeve made a tactical withdrawal and sank into his favorite chair. He looked around the room. Joan had decorated it, doing her usual thorough job. This is what home is all about, he thought. This is fine.

“You slipped up today,” she said, her eyes still on the TV.

“Thanks for making me look good.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know that was my job.”

Did she want an argument? He didn’t need one. He concentrated on the coffee.

“Did you get all their checks?” she asked, still not looking at him.

“They’re in the drawer.”

“In the cashbox?”

“In the drawer,” he repeated. He couldn’t taste the coffee.

“You gave them their receipts?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t say anything after that, and neither did he, but she’d managed to get beneath his skin again. She could do it so easily. He’d been trained for most things, but not for this. Joan would have made a great interrogator.

This is home, he thought.

Then the phone rang.

THE CO-WORLD CHEMICALS BUILDING was situated on the corner of B Street and Fifth Avenue in downtown San Diego. That put it about sixteen miles north of the Mexican border, which was a lot closer than Alfred Dulwater liked. The place was practically a foreign country as far as he was concerned. He knew, too, that the city’s Gaslamp Quarter started only a couple of blocks south of the CWC building, and though the city had cleaned the place up and now advertised it to tourists as “historic,” it was still as full of panhandlers and bums as it was overpriced restaurants and knickknack shops.

Dulwater came from Denver. As a kid, he’d taken a map of the USA and drawn two diagonals through it, one from Seattle to Miami, the other from Boston to San Diego. In so doing, he’d managed to prove to himself that Denver, Colorado, was just about at the heart of the blessed United States. Okay, Topeka had actually been nearest the cross-sights, but Denver was close, too.

He didn’t live in Denver these days, though. The private investigation company he worked for-indeed, was the newest junior partner in-operated out of Washington, DC. The image a lot of people had of PIs was the usual fictional one: grubby men chain-smoking on motel stakeouts. But Alfred Dulwater’s firm, Alliance Investigative, wasn’t like that. Even its name made it sound more like an insurance company than some two-bit outfit. Alliance was big and prosperous and worked for only select clients, most of them big corporations like Co-World Chemicals. Dulwater didn’t mind at all working for CWC, even on something which seemed so trivial, but he did mind that Kosigin kept bringing him to San Diego. Usually, a report would be delivered by trusted messenger service. It was very unusual for a client to demand that a junior partner deliver the report personally; in the present case it was not just one report, but several, requiring several trips to Southern California-crazy economics, since the subject was living and working locally. It meant Dulwater had to fly out here, rendezvous with his team of investigators, read through their report, and then carry the same to San Diego, like he was a damned postman.

Still, Kosigin was paying. As old man Allerdyce at Alliance said, “He who pays is king.” At least for a day.

Mr. Allerdyce was taking a close interest in this investigation. It seemed Kosigin had approached him personally and asked him to take on the case. This was a simple surveillance, with background biography and clippings. They were to look for the usual-dirt buried beneath the fingernails of the subject’s past-but were also to report on his workday activities.