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beyond Beulah, the staff had all gone home. They did the debrief and the pictures were downloaded on to a laptop and . . .
    ‘There was a message for you, Badger.’ The team was run by a an officer from the Box and he’d looked pleased to have the clear-cut portraits of the guy in the rimless glasses. The tails were waiting to track them back into Luton where the van had been hired. ‘A call for you.’
    He was looking for a shower, and a meal to warm his guts, and his bed in the small hotel where they were billeted – and where they were thought to be from a flood-prevention unit. He took the piece of paper from the hand offering it and shoved it into his smock’s inner pocket.
    ‘I’d read it if I were you, Badger, and I’d call them.’
    He hadn’t taken it out again. ‘Actually, boss, I’ve done a bloody long stag – and a pretty good one for results. A wash, food and bed are my priorities. Who called?’
    ‘I’m not your fucking answer-phone, young man. A guy from Six, actually. From the dirty-raincoat crowd south of the river. Maybe he wants to take you off our hands. I’d say that work from Six would suit anyone with as high an opinion of themselves as you, because it would be exacting and likely tax a genius. We’ll miss you. Do me a favour? Just ring him.’
    He called the number, and it was answered. He said who he was and that he was replying to the call. He’d expected to be told why he’d been singled out, but heard a monotonously flat voice tell him where he should be and when. There were no plaudits, just brusque business. He said, into the phone, ‘If it’s a job for croppies, I like to work with my mate as oppo. He’s Ged . . .’ The suggestion was ignored. The voice repeated where he should be the next day, and at what time.
     
    Others around him drank gin, but Joe Foulkes stayed with the tonic. He had been invited to spend a full day with the battalion’s Recce Troop, then stay the night in the officers’ mess. He always enjoyed time spent with any of the Parachute Regiment’s specialist units, found them receptive to the experience he had accumulated in a career of covert surveillance in UK conditions, through the four seasons, in rural and urban locations. They’d enjoyed his anecdotes over the meal . . . it had been a good day.
    The man who called him gave no name but instead offered the Box’s poste restante number, a code good enough to tell him the Secret Intelligence Service had sought him out. After a surprisingly brief exchange of pleasantries – barely civil – he was told he should be at Northolt main gate, the guardroom, no later than 07.30 hours. He had started to explain that the call had reached him at the mess of the Parachute Regiment, 2nd Battalion, which was – didn’t the man know? – in Colchester, a hell of hike from the other side of London that would mean a bloody awful early rising, but his destination was repeated and the time at which he was expected. Then the call was terminated. He had not taken offence, and was more than interested that Six wanted his knowledge first hand.
    He thought of himself, at fifty-one, as a bit of a legend in the field. Joe Foulkes had been a policeman since the age of eighteen, and a surveillance expert for more than twenty-five years; he had a good command of one of the more impenetrable languages on the planet and had, therefore, many seams of information ready for mining and extraction. That day he had been back to his first love. He seldom used it for real, these days, but he kept his veteran gillie suit in the boot of his car and always brought it out when he gave lectures and supervised field exercises. He had worn it when he had lectured Recce Troop, and his audience of young soldiers had been rapt.
    He’d said, out in the rain and scrub beside the shooting ranges, that the basics should always be observed, and he’d used the buzz words that anyone attempting rural surveillance, in Iraq, Afghanistan or