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would take off from Trabzon in the morning and what time they would land in Baku. A message should be sent to the contact who would meet them and who would square Immigration, landing rights and Customs, take care of the formalities. It would go encrypted and the kid swore on his mother’s life that neither the Americans nor the Europeans could break the codes or make sense of the jumbled mess of letters, digits and mathematical symbols. Trabzon to Baku to Constanta, then home for two full days, then to the west of Africa and on to the Mediterranean. Tomorrow he’d want confirmation of the stop on the Mediterranean coast. Now he had figures to work at.
    He didn’t see the kid’s face. He hadn’t looked for it.
     
    At the end, when the team was disbanded and scattered, Winnie Monks had thought them ground down by their failure to identify Damian Fenby’s killer. They had biographies of more than forty organised-crime leaders in Russia, Georgia and Chechnya, but couldn’t put any of them in Budapest on the relevant date. The last explosion of hope had been nine weeks earlier when a shivering, terrified little runt – an Irish teenager from Pomeroy – was captured with a loaded Russian-made automatic handgun from a batch previously unknown. The team traced the weapon back to its import in a cargo container, its shipment from Lisbon, its transfer there by lorry from Trieste. In that Adriatic city the trail had died. Weeks of bloody work and nothing achieved, but they had all stayed strong, little Dottie, Kenny, Xavier and Caro Watson.
    Winnie had said, ‘It’ll happen, believe it. When it happens, come running. When you’re running, remember what they did to our boy, picture his face. He was one of us, our family and our team. I’ll call you. It will happen.’
     
    ‘A mistake. We’re always looking and praying for the mistake . . .’
    The Latvian policeman walked towards the outer gate where the Czech’s car and chauffeur waited. It was the end of the day and the man from the Foreign Ministry in Prague had asked perhaps his only pertinent question: what did the investigators need to bring down the major figures in the organised-crime groups?
    ‘We need to hear of a mistake. They work diligently to avoid such but they do make mistakes, and we have to be ready to exploit them.’

2
    He was almost run over – might have been flattened on the road.
    The lorry swerved late enough to avoid Natan, but its draught blew him aside. He stumbled, lost control of his legs and fell. He had been far away, his mind in turmoil. Ahead, the flag hung from its tilted pole above the entrance to a concrete office block. Its colours, red, white and blue, were bright against the grey and the tinted windows set in the walls. It marked his target. He had started across the road, looking neither right nor left, and had dreamed again of how he would introduce himself, but there had been the ear-shattering blast of the lorry’s horn, the scream of the tyres, and as he had hit the road, a knee and an elbow taking the impact. He had seen the face of the driver, mouth twisted in anger, and heard the abuse.
    He pushed himself to his feet. Natan – his paymaster called him the Gecko – had no Azerbaijani but understood the venom shouted at him. His crime? He had delayed the bastard a second or two as he drove between destinations and caused him to lose precious time.
    He cursed in his native language, Georgian, then in his adopted language, Russian, and his learned language, English – he’d come too close to a mangled death. He was on his feet and swayed. His moment between life and a fast death was past. He knew where he was, and why. He stood at his full height, more than six feet, and had a view of the flag above the doorway into a modern block. He started again into the traffic to cross the road. If there were more blasts on horns and yelled insults he didn’t hear them. That November morning Natan was twenty-two years old.
    He