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glanced back over his shoulder. His pursuers had reached the market entrance and were scanning the crowd for him. Both had their right hands tucked inside their coats, where each was presumably concealing a gun. Tom turned abruptly and slammed into a man carrying a case of red wine, knocking it out of his hands. The box landed with a crash, the bottles shattering noisily. Tom glanced back toward the entrance and saw that the men, alerted by the noise, were already fighting their way over to him.
    “I’m sorry,” Tom said, pushing past.
    “Hey!” the man shouted after him. “Get back here!”
    But Tom didn’t stop. Dropping to his knees, he crawled under a stall, then ducked under two more until he was a couple of aisles away from the site of the collision. From the cover of a pyramid of olive oil drums, he checked the progress of the two men. They were standing by the box of shattered wine bottles, gesturing frantically. They’d lost him. He cautiously made his way toward the north exit, attaching himself to a group of tourists who were chattering excitedly about the whole deer they’d seen strung up on one of the stalls. As they left the market, he broke away, heading for the main road and the river.
    With a screech of brakes, a large black Range Rover pulled up alongside him. Tom turned on his heel but slipped, the road surface rendered treacherous by the wet cardboard boxes, lettuce leaves, and plastic bags generated by the morning’s trading. Before he could
    scramble
    back
    to
    his
    42 james twining
    feet, the rear passenger door flew open and he caught a
    glimpse of who was sitting in the backseat.
    Archie.
    The front passenger window retracted a few inches, and a pale hand appeared in the crack clutching a government identity badge.
    “Enough
    fun
    and
    games,
    Kirk.
    Get
    in.”

CHAPTER NINE
    January 5—12:56 p.m.
    The driver’s square, close-shaved head emerged from a thick gray woolen turtleneck. He flicked his eyes up to the mirror and then back to the road, a smile playing around the corner of his mouth as the car accelerated away.
    The man in the passenger seat peered back over his shoulder and nodded at them both.
    “I’m William Turnbull.”
    He extended his hand back over his shoulder toward them as he spoke, but they both ignored it, staring at him in stony silence. From what he could see of Turnbull, Tom estimated that he must weigh about two hundred fifty pounds, little of it muscle. He appeared to be quite young, though, about thirty-five, give or take a few years, and was dressed in an urban camouflage of jeans and an open-necked shirt that barely contained the roll of fat around the base of his neck.
    “Sorry about . . . that.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the market. “I guessed that you probably wouldn’t come if I just asked, so I brought some help. I didn’t quite expect you to make us—”
    “Let me guess,” Tom interrupted angrily. “Somebody’s got knocked off and you think we might know something about it? Am I right? How many times have I got to tell you 44 james twining
    people, we don’t know anything and, even if we did, we wouldn’t say.”
    “This has nothing to do with any job,” was Turnbull’s unsmiling response. “And I’m not the police.”
    “Special Branch, Interpol, Flying Squad, PC bloody Plod . . .” Archie shrugged.
    “Whatever you want to call yourselves, the answer’s still the same. And this is harassment. We’re clean and you know it.”
    “I work for the Foreign Office.” Turnbull flashed his identity card at them again.
    “The Foreign Office?” Archie said incredulously. “Well, that’s a new one.”
    “Not really,” said Tom quietly. “He’s a spook.”
    Turnbull smiled. “We prefer ‘intelligence services.’ In my case, Six.”
    Six , Tom knew, was how insiders referred to MI6, the agency that dealt with overseas threats to national security. It wasn’t the sort of organization Tom wanted to get caught up in. Not