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transactions. And I hadn’t enjoyed those embarrassing moments at the supermarket checkout when my payment wasn’t authorized.
    I’d picked up a turbo-charged debit card during my Zürich stopover that meant I could turn my back on all that shit. It was a sleek black thing without any embossed numbers, which delivered money from my Swiss account at any ATM worldwide. Because the link between me and my bank vault was routed through a randomly selected, ever-changing configuration of about twenty-six separate servers, the very sharply suited gnome who’d handed it to me in its little velvet pouch claimed that my privacy was guaranteed.
    Next up was a visit to Go Mobile. The NSA had been tracking cell phones for nearly a decade, which meant GCHQ and any number of bad guys had too – you could even trace an iPhone with your iPad, these days – but I’d decided to ignore Trev’s instruction twice over. My iPhone was zipped into an inner pocket, but I wasn’t sure which network would have the best signal on the hill. I bought a Samsung G3 and three pay-as-you-go SIM cards, each with a different network, as back-up in case everything went to rat shit.
    I’d been caught in the open without comms more than once when the weather closed in, and it was never a good day out. And the GPS systems on these gizmos were now reliable enough to save me having to unfold an Ordnance Survey map every ten minutes and bring out a compass.
    A shaft of sunlight burst through the swirling grey cloud as I slung the sack into the wagon and aimed us in the direction of the main to Brynmawr. There was an internet café fairly close to the centre that had come in useful to me from time to time. It also served the best Americano outside Colombia. Words like Wi-Fi, Twitter and Instagram didn’t yet feature in Father Mart’s vocabulary, and I needed to check stuff out.
    The patch of blue sky had headed east by the time I got there. I made my way past a line of plastic fliers, emblazoned with giant daffodils, which flapped their ‘Welcome’ message in the strengthening breeze.
    I was met by a beaming Welshman and the smell of frying bacon as soon as I opened the door, so added a pig roll to my coffee order. A large one. I’d only recently had breakfast, but I had time to kill, and you never knew when you might need some extra calories. I was also pretty sure that for an hour or two I was going to be a whole lot warmer in there than I would be for the rest of the day.
    The Welshman handed me my change and waved me across to a row of keyboards and computer screens. And, yes, he was happy for me to crack the Samsung straight on the charger and bin the packaging.
    I shrugged off my Gore-Tex jacket, bunged it over a chair and loosened my fleece.
    The first site I tuned into was ARRSE, the unofficial Army Rumour Service. It gave squaddies the chance to do what they did best: honk about everything and everyone.
    The SAS references, not surprisingly, had more to do with the number of ferrets we had to bite the heads off to pass Selection than what actually went on behind closed doors. Halfway down the postings on the News Forum someone claiming to be SBS (user name: Coldfeet) asked if anyone had heard about a fuck-up behind the wire at Credenhill. He’d been met by a storm of abuse from the party faithful, mostly accusing him of Small Bollock Syndrome. A Crap Hat wondered if one of the Boys in Black had got tangled up in his abseil rope; another thought he might have dropped his ice cream. There was no reference to the CQB Rooms.
    Elsewhere, a girl called Rosie with a Good Sense Of Humour was looking for Fun Times with A Hero In Uniform, and the Old and the Bold queued up to applaud Guy Chastain’s posthumous VC. The colonel’s boy had sacrificed himself to save the lives of his men on an op in Afghanistan, and the old man had sparked up a fundraising campaign for a statue. I didn’t know quite what to make of that. On the one hand, I’d have loved a