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handed the luggage to a porter with a whispered order and slipped him a sheaf of folded notes. Jamie stared at the great shimmering blue bowl that dominated the entire area twenty feet above.
    ‘I suppose there’s no argument about what I’m having for dinner?’
    The limo driver glanced upwards. ‘The AquaDom. Biggest fish bowl in the world, they say. Reception is over there, sir.’ He pointed to a curving row of desks. He reached into his inside pocket and withdrew an embossed pasteboard card. ‘Call this number any time, day or night, and either I or one of my colleagues will come and pick you up. There’s an emergency number if you should have an accident or get in trouble with the authorities.’
    ‘If I end up in a cell,’ Jamie grinned, ‘I’ll be too embarrassed to call anybody.’
    Max’s lips didn’t even twitch. ‘It’s there for your convenience, sir.’ He nodded. ‘Enjoy your stay in Berlin.’
    When Max returned to the Mercedes, Doug Stewart emerged from the hotel entrance and slipped in beside the driver. He’d watched from the bar as Saintclair had completed the formalities and been directed to the lifts, as certain as he could be that no one was tailing the art dealer.
    ‘Remember, I want to know where he goes, who he meets and what he eats for breakfast,’ he told the German. In Stewart’s view it was a long way to come just to make sure Jamie Saintclair had his mind fully on the mission, but he’d been with Keith Devlin long enough to understand that he liked to cover all the bases. Then again, if any other party realized the true significance of the Bougainville head, this was where they would pick up Saintclair and the best place to spot them. ‘If you see anything suspicious let me know and we’ll put a full team on him.’ Max nodded and pulled out into the traffic.
    As the Mercedes drove off a young Oriental man stepped from a shop doorway on the other side of the street. His eyes followed the car until it was out of sight and his lips barely moved as he spoke into a hands-free mobile phone.
    At the same moment Jamie stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of a fifth-floor suite big enough to host a Premiership football match. He took a contented sip of weiss beer and stared out over the glittering waters of the Spree to Museum Island and the distinctive green domes of Berlin Cathedral. Behind it he could just make out the outlines of the museums complex, where tomorrow he would begin his strangest quest yet.
    There were worse places to be, he reckoned. If Keith Devlin’s shrunken head was out there, he would find it. If not, the philanthropical tycoon could whistle for his next copper mine and Jamie would go back to Fiona where he belonged.

V
    Bougainville Island, 1943
    Signals Lieutenant Tomoyuki Hamasuna of the Imperial Japanese Army carefully plucked the hooked thorn from his faded green uniform shirt and pushed through the almost impenetrable wall of bushes and vegetation. To his left and right he could hear the other members of his twelve-man patrol cursing softly as they struggled to keep station in the thick jungle. Sweat soaked his peaked cloth cap and streamed down his face, the coarse material of the shirt stuck to his flesh and the pack over his shoulder chafed everywhere it touched. He would never have admitted it to anyone for fear of ridicule, but Hamasuna found the jungle an oppressive assault on the senses. The relentless buzz of clouds of black flies and countless stinging insects filled his ears, the air around him stank of decay and damp and the foliage was like a green curtain that wrapped itself around him to the point of suffocation. He tightened his grip on his pistol. The atmosphere wasn’t the only intimidating thing about the jungle. It wouldn’t be the first time a small patrol like this had been attacked by the filthy blacks who inhabited these islands at the instigation of their white masters.
    Hamasuna had been searching for three torturous hours