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the day at someone else’s expense. So many civilians crammed into one space made it an operational nightmare.
    A few years ago someone had ridden a motorcycle packed with explosives straight through a sloppy evening checkpoint and blown himself up by the main entrance, taking seventy-eight other people with him. By the looks of the rickety buildings, they had simply dragged the bodies away, hosed the blood off the streets and carried on. You could still see craters in the walls where chunks of shrapnel had torn holes. But the thing that made this a suicide bomber’s paradise also made it a preferred meeting place for his ultra-cautious contact: there was no better place to hide than in a crowd.
    Hyde was cautious too. He had arrived early and claimed the best seat in the café for surveillance. It offered a one-eighty degree view of the street, with a solid wall behind making it impossible to approach without being seen. He’d bet himself that he could spot his man before he got to him. It was a game he liked to play every time he was sent on this particular detail. The contact was known for his ability to appear and disappear with ease. It was why he’d never been caught, despite the best efforts of several agencies on both sides of the political street. But Hyde had something of a reputation too. Back when he was in 8th Recon he had been the sharpest scout in his platoon. He’d prided himself on never letting anyone creep up on him, though his buddies had constantly tried; they’d even had a name for the game – Hyde and Go Seek. Now he was in civilian life, he had to work harder to keep those skills honed. He’d seen what working for the private companies could do to you; men who had been out of the army just two, three years, their muscle turned to flab, still trading on reputations they’d long since lost. That wasn’t going to happen to him. Get sloppy in a place like this and pretty soon you’d get dead. So he pushed himself, treating every assignment as if it was a hot mission, just in case it turned out to be.
    He started another sweep of the market, left to right, comfortable in his tactics. He had just reached the furthest point where the wall blocked his view when the scrape of a chair made him whip his head round.
    ‘You have the money?’ the Ghost said, settling into the chair on his blind side, his strangled voice barely audible above the noise of the street.
    Goddamn – he did it again
.
    Hyde folded the newspaper and placed it on the table, trying not to appear rattled. ‘What, no chit-chat? No “Hi, how’s it goin’? How are the wife and kids?”’
    The Ghost stared at him, his pale grey eyes cold despite the trapped heat of the day. ‘You don’t have a wife.’
    ‘And how would you know that?’
    ‘Nobody in your line of work has a wife – at least not for very long.’
    Hyde felt anger catch light inside him. His fists clenched. He’d got the divorce papers from Wanda in the mail six weeks ago, after she’d hacked his Facebook page and found some messages she was not supposed to see. But this guy couldn’t know that. He was just trying to push his buttons with a lucky guess. And it had worked. Right now he wanted to drive his fist straight through the middle of those freaky grey eyes.
    The Ghost smiled, as if he was reading Hyde’s thoughts and feeding off his anger. Hyde looked away and reached for his coffee, draining it to the thick gritty dregs before he’d even realized what he was doing. He’d met some hard characters in his time, but this guy was something else. He was taller than the average Iraqi and wiry with it. He also carried about him a sense of danger and physical threat, like a grenade with its pin pulled. The local crew said he was a desert spirit and refused to have anything to do with him. That’s why Hyde always got these gigs. He didn’t believe in spirits, he just did what he was told; old army habits died hard.
    ‘It’s in the bag under the table,’