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  ‘Yes,’ said Slater, deliberately withholding the ‘sir’ that years of non-commissioned service otherwise brought automatically to his lips.

  ‘Good,’ said Duckworth with a quick smile. ‘Very good. I’m sure you’ll . . . fit in.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ Slater said.

  Duckworth nodded. ‘Just before I ask Josephine to run through the paperwork with you, Neil, I’d like to read you a few lines of poetry. You may make of them what you will.’

  Slater, who was studying a framed painting of an Arab boy with a snake draped around his neck, tried to look intelligent.

  Duckworth removed a book from a drawer in his desk.

  ‘When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,

  He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside,

  But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail . . .’

  Hesitating, Duckworth glanced at Slater.

  ‘For the female of the species’, Slater obliged him, ‘is more deadly than the male.’

  ‘You know it!’ said Duckworth.

  ‘My father used to read me Kipling when I was a child,’ said Slater. ‘He was a Royal Engineers RSM. Mandalay and Gunga Din were the nearest I ever got to nursery rhymes.’

  ‘And your mother?’ Duckworth asked delicately.

  ‘She was knocked down and killed by a police car in Hong Kong when I was six.’

  ‘Brought up by the army, then.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘There are worse parents, as any bodyguard will tell you.’

  Abandoning any pretence of interest in Slater’s beginnings, Duckworth shifted his attention to the screen of his computer. ‘Are you free to work on Wednesday? I’ve got a rather interesting one for you.’

  As he stepped out of the marble atrium into the street, Slater heard his name called. A smiling dark-haired figure, tough-looking beneath the fashionably cut suit, was waving and hurrying towards him.

  ‘Andreas!’

  ‘Neil! How are you, man?’

  ‘I’m OK. Wow! It’s good to see you. Are you here to . . .’ he nodded up at the building he had just left.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve just been on a job in Europe for them. You?’

  Slater nodded, and looked the other man up and down. Andreas van Rijn was recognisably the same person that he had served with in the SAS. The same square features and amused brown eyes, the same swagger, the same air of being up for anything. But something had changed. Some subtle smoothing-out process had taken place.

  Until his departure five years earlier, Andreas van Rijn had been one of the Regiment’s more colourful characters. Good-humoured in the vilest of conditions and a supremely efficient soldier, he had always seemed to Slater to represent the best that the SAS stood for. The two men had been good friends, serving together in Northern Ireland, the Gulf, Libya and Sri Lanka. They had shared more hangovers than either of them cared to remember and probably, it occurred to Slater, the odd girlfriend too.

  Andreas had left the Regiment after an Overthrust exercise.

  Overthrust was an inter-service co-operation programme between the special forces and MI5. Slater, Andreas van Rijn, Dave Constantine and a handful of other NCOs had been sent to London, dressed in plain clothes, and placed alongside the Box agents (in military circles MI5 was known as ‘Box’ after their old PO Box 500 address, just as MI6 were invariably ‘the Firm’). On balance, Slater reckoned, the soldiers had shown up the spooks. Northern Ireland had sharpened them, and they were more aware of the consequences of not doing the job properly. Dave Constantine always claimed that he’d been on a surveillance detail in North London with a Box agent when his companion had glanced at his watch, said, ‘Right, five-thirty, that’s me off home,’ climbed out of the car, and disappeared. While Slater only half-believed the story, he had not particularly enjoyed the Millbank atmosphere. For his money there were too many smart-arsed, number-crunching twenty-three-year-olds about the place.

  Andreas, on the other hand, had appeared impressed by the set-up, and the general assumption in Hereford had been that he had been cross-recruited.

  ‘Listen,’ he told Slater now, still smiling, ‘are you free for lunch? Because if so give me half an hour . . .’

  They arranged to meet in Harvey Nichols, at the fifth-floor restaurant. En route, Slater visited a shoe shop. He had a good suit, bought at Austin Reed out of his SAS clothing allowance, but if he was going to be pounding pavements he needed new shoes. He settled for Church’s black Oxfords. The price made him wince but if there was one thing that Slater had learnt in his years of soldiering, it was that you had to look after your feet. In Harvey Nichols he added a couple of plain white shirts and a black, knitted silk tie to his shopping basket. You couldn’t go wrong with black and white, he reasoned. It was discreet, as bodyguarding demanded, but it also had that sixties retro look he’d seen advertised in the magazines in the Minerva offices. Next time he came face to face with the delectable receptionist, he decided, he’d look the part.

  At the table, Andreas immediately ordered them a glass of Champagne each. Slater eyed his narrow-stemmed tulip-glass dubiously. The swanky restaurant and the Champagne obviously represented some sort of attempt to impress: in the old days they’d have made straight for a pub.

  ‘So Neil!’ Andreas began. ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Well, I’m out of the Regiment,’ Slater began. ‘I left just before Kosovo. Since then I’ve been working at a school, coaching the rugby team.’

  ‘And how was that?’ asked Andreas. ‘A bit low-gear for a man of your talents, I’d have said.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t really work out in the end,’ said Slater. How much did Andreas know? he wondered. If he was working for Minerva, presumably he wasn’t still working for Box. If, indeed, he ever had worked for Box.

  For a time they talked of mutual friends and old times. Slater reminded Andreas of an incident that had nearly seen them both RTUed, when an intelligence team known as the Forces Research Unit had discovered that a Provo sniper unit was assembling at a location near the border and had tried to scramble the SAS. To their fury and frustration the FRU were told that the Lisburn duty officer could get no response from the unit. Little wonder – the entire team, including Slater and Andreas, had been at a Def Leppard concert in the Belfast city centre. If any of them had heard their pagers over the ear-numbing wall of sound it would have been little short of a miracle.

  ‘This is good,’ said Slater, indicating the shining tranche of swordfish on his plate.

  ‘It’s metropolitan food,’ smiled Andreas. ‘You’ve been on ration-packs and school cabbage for too long. How did you find Minerva?’

  ‘The money seems pretty good. And the work sounds pretty painless. How do you find it?’

  ‘Well the fact is, Neil, I don’t actually work for Minerva. I was looking for you.’

  ‘Me? How did you know I was going to be there?’ The moment he had spoken Slater realised how naive his words sounded.

  ‘Everything connects, Neil. You know that. How about another glass of Champagne?’

  ‘I’d have preferred a beer, but yeah, OK.’

  Andreas smiled, beckoned him closer and brought him up to date. After the Overthrust exercise he had – as Slater had guessed – crossed over. He’d been ready for a change of scene. Had had enough, frankly, of freezing his bollocks off in all weathers.

  And he’d enjoyed what he’d found, he told Slater. Plenty of brain-work, plenty of weirdness, and a lot of autonomy. ‘I plan my own operations,’ he explained. ‘Get the word from upstairs and set things up in my own way.’

  To Slater the whole set-up sounded unappealingly corporate. ‘I’m glad it suits you,’ he said. ‘Personally, I’m looking forward to the freelance life.’

  ‘You’ve never done BGing, before, have you?’ asked Andreas, indicating Slater’s empty glass to the waiter.

  ‘Not outside of the Regiment,’ admitted
Slater.

  ‘It sounds good,’ said Andreas. ‘You turn up at some fabulous apartment, pick up the lady of the house, have lunch, perhaps do a little shopping . . . But the truth is, Neil, that a switched-on guy like you will go nuts in five minutes. You realise that you’re a nanny, that you’re an arse-wiper, that you’re a trolley-pusher – basically that you’re a servant. And a servant for the kind of people you wouldn’t give the time of day to. Corrupt businessmen. Spoilt rich kids. Vulgar, uneducated women who haven’t done a day’s honest work in their lives.’

  ‘All the more reason to take their money,’ said Slater reasonably. ‘At least I know that at the end of the day I’m my own man. I can say no to anything I don’t fancy.’

  ‘You won’t last long if you do say no,’ Andreas retorted. ‘Close protection’s a service industry. It’s all about saying yes. Did Duckworth read you the poem?’

  Slater admitted that he had.

  ‘He does that with all the guys. Then when they complain that some arms-dealer’s wife has given them a bad time he can quote it back at them. In fact, like a lot of queers, Duckworth adores rich women. He genuinely thinks that—’

  ‘Did you say queers?’ asked Slater.

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you figure that out? Your antennae are going to have to sharpen up, my friend.’

  ‘I guess they are.’

  Andreas, his eyes shining, leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Neil, junk Minerva and come and work with us. It’d be like old times, but without the beasting and the bollockings and the trenchfoot. We were a great team then, we can be a great team again.’

  ‘Doing what, exactly?’ asked Slater. Faced with Andreas’s enthusiasm, he could feel his resolve wavering. And the other man was right — they had been a great team.

  ‘Doing what we both do best,’ said Andreas, gesturing to the waiter to take their plates away. ‘Look, I’ll put my cards on the table. You remember the stuff the special projects teams used to do?’

  As if he could forget.

  ‘That’s what I do. I’m part of a sort of inter-service special projects team. There are only a handful of us – half a dozen all told – but what we do is important. It saves lives. I can’t give you details at this stage, but I have been authorised to make an approach to you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re very good. Because you’re . . . experienced. Because although you probably don’t want to go back to the Regiment you’re missing something. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. Something to do with the excitement of planning an operation and seeing it through, of living a certain sort of life, of being somebody again.’

  ‘Look, Andreas, I arrived in London a week ago. All I want is enough work and enough money in the bank to keep me going. I’d like to hang out with normal people and do normal things like shopping and playing sport and going to the cinema. I’m thinking of doing an Open University degree. I don’t need all this covert operations stuff.’

  ‘But Neil, you don’t know any “normal” people, as you call them, to go shopping with. You don’t know anyone to go to the rugby with, or to take to the cinema. Look what happened last time you tried living in the normal world – there were corpses strewn over three counties. The covert world is the normal world for you.’

  So, he knew about the school.

  ‘We need you, Neil, and right now I think that you need us.’

  Join us, in other words, if you want Lark to get you out of the shit.

  Looking back, Slater remembered that there had always been this manipulative side to Andreas van Rijn. He had always enjoyed power games – always liked trying to freak people out, to control them.

  The trouble was, although Slater was loth to admit it, much of what Andreas said was true. He didn’t really know anyone outside the covert world. And there was a side to it all – a sharp needle of excitement – that he missed . . .

  ‘I need to get on with my life, Andreas. That’s all. I wish you well, but I’m not going anywhere near your department. I’m out of the system now.’

  Andreas smiled. ‘And you think the system’s out of you?’

  He left the question hanging.

  Two days later Slater was standing on the steps of the Hyde Park Hotel, waiting for the man he was to be guarding for the day. In the morning, he had been told, the principal would be shopping for clothes in the SW1 area, and in the afternoon he would be watching a home game at Spurs’ White Hart Lane football ground. At 7pm the principal would be attending a drinks party followed by dinner at a private house from where a car would be collecting him and driving him home.

  At 10am precisely a dark green Rover swept to the kerbside and the principal climbed out. Slater recognised Salman Rushdie immediately from the many newspaper portraits that had been published over the years. Today, the novelist was swathed in a long belted overcoat and wearing a Parisian beret.

  ‘Mr Rushdie, I’m Neil Slater.’

  Was it Lord Rushdie? Had he read somewhere that the writer had been made a life peer? Had he made a fool of himself with his first word?

  But Rushdie still seemed to be smiling his oblique smile. ‘I think we might start with some coffee,’ he said. ‘Just to fortify ourselves.’

  Slater looked around. No obvious assassin had presented himself. There were no cloaked anarchists carrying bombs, no wild-eyed sword-wielding dervishes. He led Rushdie up the hotel steps, into the large, ornate foyer, and thence to the dining room. Again, the place looked safe enough.

  ‘Why don’t you sit here?’ said Rushdie, pointing Slater to a window seat facing the door.

  Slater sat down. From the security viewpoint the position was a sensible one.

  ‘It occurred to me recently,’ the novelist continued, ‘that if people were to stop reading my books, I could go into the bodyguarding business myself. I’ve probably as much experience as anyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s been necessary,’ said Slater.

  Rushdie nodded. ‘Me too. Me too. Now, how do you take your coffee?’

  Slater had never guarded a celebrity before. With the Regiment he’d been assigned occasional protection duties, but never of a recognisable figure. As he and Rushdie made their way through Harrods ten minutes later he realised just how complex his task was to be. A lot of people recognised the novelist, and many of them stared. Some manoeuvred themselves into positions from where they could take a second look. Whether any of this attention was hostile was almost impossible to determine. Rushdie had insisted on proceeding on foot – he liked window-shopping, he told Slater, and he liked to see the faces of strangers close up – and the best that Slater could do was to interpose himself between Rushdie and anyone who might conceivably be an Islamic militant.

  For more than a decade the novelist had been the object of a fatwa issued by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. This edict urged that Rushdie be killed because of supposed blasphemy in one of his novels. A year ago, however, a less puritan Iranian government had announced it intended no harm to Rushdie, and for a time it had seemed as if he might resume normal life. And then a report had appeared in the Iranian newspaper Kayhan that over 500 Iranians had pledged to sell their kidneys to raise money for the writer’s murder. According to intelligence sources the plan was devised by Islamic militia members in the Iranian holy city of Mashad.

  Slater, for whom anonymity was the very breath of life, sympathised with Rushdie. He had seen photographs smuggled out of Iran of mass public hangings from the arms of cranes, and from Algeria of the mobile guillotines driven from village to village by Islamic fundamentalist death-squads. And in Iraq, of course . . .

  ‘Do you mind’, said Rushdie, ‘if we just look in here?’

  It was the book department. Shoppers were browsing among the shelves and standing in line at the till, but no one made any sign of having registered Rushdie’s entrance. In fact, Slater was certain, they had all noticed him. They just weren’t so uncool as to stare.

  On
a small, circular table close to the aisle was a display of a new John le Carré novel. On the far side of the table, facing the interior of the room rather than the aisle, was a similar display of Rushdie’s new book. A visitor passing through the department would certainly see the Le Carré display, but probably not the Rushdie. Deftly, the author revolved the table through 180 degrees.

  ‘What’s the book about?’ asked Slater, amused.

  ‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ Rushdie answered. ‘Would you like a copy?’

  ‘Very much,’ said Slater.

  ‘Help yourself, then. Steal one.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘I dare you,’ said Rushdie, with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘I’m not in the daring business any more,’ said Slater. ‘Let alone the getting-arrested business. Apart from anything else we’re on closed circuit TV. And that guy over there in the blazer is a store detective.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  Slater shrugged. ‘The way he stands. The way he isn’t actually looking at the books.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Do you think he knows what you’re doing here?’

  ‘Yeah, definitely he does.’

  An assistant approached them.

  ‘Have you got Geri Halliwell’s autobiography?’ Rushdie asked.

  Ten minutes later they were in the Armani shop on the Brompton Road.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Rushdie, holding up a shirt in heavy olive-green wool.

  ‘I’m not a good person to ask about clothes,’ replied Slater, his eyes scanning the store. ‘But it looks OK to me.’

  Rushdie held up the same shirt in grey. ‘And this one?’

  ‘That looks OK too.’

  ‘Which would you buy for yourself?’

  ‘The grey. I’ve spent half my life in dark green.’

  As Rushdie signed the credit-card slip, Slater held out a copy of his novel. ‘While you’ve got your pen out,’ he said, ‘would you mind signing this?’

  Rushdie stared at him in amazement. ‘Now how the hell . . .’