He took out his Sig and fired a shot. It was wild, high and wide, and shattered the windscreen of one of the big parked coaches. It inspired SNOW to find another burst of pace, cutting between two of the parked busses. Milton lost sight of him. He ran between a truck and the car in front of it, passed between the two busses behind the ones that SNOW had used, and saw him again. A second shot was prevented by a red telephone box and then a tall ash tree.

Milton heard the up-and-down wail of a police siren. It sounded as if it was on the Embankment, behind him, closing the distance.

Milton stopped, dropped to one knee and brought up the Sig. He breathed in and out, trying to steady his aim, and, for a moment, he had a clear shot. He used his left hand to swipe up his visor, breathed again, deep and easy, and started to squeeze the trigger.

SNOW ploughed into the middle of a group of tourists.

Shit.

He dropped his arm; there was no shot. He closed the visor and ran onwards, just as he saw the man again: he had clambered onto the wall that separated the pavement from the river and, with a final defiant look back in his direction, he leapt into space and plunged into the water. Milton zig-zagged through the panicking tourists until he was at the wall and looked down into the greeny-black waters. There was nothing for a moment and then, already thirty feet distant, he saw SNOW bob to the surface. The currents were notoriously strong at this part of the river. The riptides were powerful enough to swallow even the strongest swimmer but SNOW was not fighting and the water swept him away, quickly out of range.

The siren was louder now, and, as he turned to face it, he saw that the patrol car was less than a hundred feet away, working its way around the stalled queue.

Milton paused, caught between running and standing still. He froze. He didn’t know what to do.

“Milton,” came Number One’s voice in his ear.

He turned to his left.

Beatrix was on the pavement, between the river and the row of busses, gunning her Kawasaki hard. Milton pushed the Sig back into its holster and zipped up his jacket. Beatrix braked, the rear wheel bouncing up a few inches, then slamming back down again. Milton got onto the back; Beatrix had a slight figure and he looped his left arm around her waist and fixed his right hand to grip the rear of the pillion seat. Milton cleared six foot and was heavy with muscle but the bike had a 998cc four-cylinder engine and his extra weight was nothing. It jerked forward hungrily as Beatrix revved it and released her grip on the brakes.

Chapter Six

Beatrix looked out of the window of Control’s office. It was the evening, two hours after the operation. It was a habit to debrief as soon as possible after the work had been done and, usually, those were not difficult meetings. Normally, the operations passed off exactly as they were planned. They were not botched like this one had been botched. Control was busying himself with the tray that his assistant, Captain Tanner, had brought in; it held a tea pot, two cups, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar cubes. He poured out two cups. Beatrix could see that he was angry. His face was drawn and pale, the muscles in his cheeks twitching. He had said very little to her but she knew him well enough to know that the recriminations were coming. The crockery chimed as he rattled the spoon against it, stirring in his sugar. He brought the cups across the room, depositing one on her side of his desk and taking the other one around to sip at it as he stood at the window.

“So?” he began.

“Sir?”

“What happened?”

Beatrix had known, of course, that the question was coming. The mission had been an unmitigated failure. The watchword of the Group was discretion, and the shooting had been the first item on all of yesterday’s news broadcasts and the papers were leading with a variation of the same picture: Milton, in black leathers and a helmet with a mirrored visor, his arm extended as he aimed at the fleeing SNOW, his abandoned motorcycle in the background. The headline in the Times was typical: MURDER ON THE STREETS OF LONDON.

“It was just bad luck,” she said.

“Luck? We plan so that luck isn’t a factor, Number One. Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“The driver managed to get the car away from us. That was just bad luck.”

“It was Twelve’s responsibility to neutralise the driver. Are you saying it was his fault?”

She had given thought to what she should say. The honest thing to do would be to throw Milton under the bus. This had been his first examination and he had flunked it. He had frozen at the critical moment. They had the targets cold, helpless, and it had been his corpsing that had given SNOW the opportunity to make a run for it. And even then, she knew Milton was a good enough shot to have taken him down.

She could have said all of that and it would have been true. She could have burned him but it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do.

She had some empathy. She remembered her own introduction to the Group. The operation when she had lost her own cherry had been a fuck-up, too; not quite like this, but then she had been in Iraq and not on the streets of London, far from prying eyes and the possibility of your mistakes being amplified by a media that couldn’t get enough of something so audacious and dramatic. Her own wobble had been between her, the female agent who had been Number Six in those days and her victim, an Iraqi official who was passing information to the insurgency; she had paused at the moment of truth and that meant that the man she had just stabbed in the gut had been able to punch her in the face, freeing himself for long enough to hobble into the busy street outside. Number Six had pursued him outside and fired two shots into his head and then, keeping bystanders away with the threat of the gun, she had hijacked a car and driven them both away. Their Control had been the predecessor to this one and yet he was still just as daunting, and Beatrix had baulked when he had asked her how it had gone. Number Six had covered for her, telling him that it the operation had passed off without incident and that it had all been straightforward. Beatrix would have been cashiered without hesitation if Number Six had told Control the truth. So she understood what had happened to Milton. It did not diminish her opinion of him. It did not make her question her decision to recommend him.

“It wasn’t his fault,” she told him, looking him straight in the eye. “He did his job, just as we planned it.”

“So you say. But he went in pursuit of SNOW?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He never had a clear shot, not one he could take without a significant risk that he would hit a bystander. The rules of engagement were clear. This had to be at no risk.”

“I know what the bloody rules of engagement were, Number One,” he said sharply. “I wrote them.”

“If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I could’ve taken the driver out.”

Control flustered and, for a moment, Beatrix was convinced that he was going to blame her. That would have been alright. She had been a member of the Group for six years and that was already pushing at the top end of an agent’s average life expectancy. It wasn’t an assignment that you kept if you had something to lose. Beatrix had a daughter and a husband and a family life that she enjoyed more than she had ever expected. She had done her time and she had done it well, but all things had to come to an end eventually. She wouldn’t have resisted if he blamed her and busted her out of the Group. There would be something else for her, something safer, something where getting shot at was not something she would come to expect.

But he didn’t blame her. “It’s a bloody mess,” he said instead, sighing with impatience. “A bloody, bloody mess. The police have been told it’s an underworld thing. They’ll buy that, if only because the prospect of their own government sanctioning a hit is too bloody ludicrous to credit. No-one heard either of you speak?”