Sam Bourne - Pantheon

Emboldened, he strode over to the cleric, the camera still covering at least half his face. ‘OK, a group picture, gentlemen,’ he said. He gestured for Lowell to gather closely with his colleagues, guessing that one of them was young Tudor. And then, as naturally as he could make it, he said from behind the camera, ‘And let’s have Dr McAndrew in this one, shall we?’

‘Oh, darn, you’ve just missed him,’ said the younger man, gesturing at an exit James had not spotted, at the other end of the room. ‘He had to dash out for a breakfast meeting, must have been half a minute ago, tops.’

James clicked and turned away, winded as surely as if he had been punched hard in the gut. After travelling all night, to miss him by just seconds…

He swivelled back towards the door, catching Harrison’s eye. James glared at him with such intensity that the American understood immediately, broke off whatever conversation he was having and followed.

They took the stairs outside two steps at a time.

‘He must have gone while we went downstairs or we’d have seen him,’ Harrison panted.

‘Not necessarily. He could have found another exit out of the hotel. Especially if he thinks he’s being followed.’

‘And does he?’ Harrison said, as they burst back into the lobby.

James thought of the corpse lying by the railway tracks, the confirming phone call the gunman was doubtless meant to have made to McAndrew but hadn’t, the Dean’s knowledge that James was therefore still alive. ‘Probably.’

Dashing across the marble floor, they emerged into the Washington morning. The warm, damp air hit James’s face in an instant, smothering blast. He looked left and right then right again, focussing on the other side of the street.

He couldn’t see the man’s face. Nor was it the hair he recognized, though once he was in pursuit he caught sight of the familiar salt-and-pepper. It was, instead, the purpose that caught his eye. Unlike everyone else strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, Preston McAndrew was walking with unrelenting intent.

So that he could move faster, James thrust the camera back towards Harrison, who took it and shoved it in his bag.

James crossed the street with barely a glance at the traffic.

The eyes are your most lethal weapon. Never let your gaze waver, not even for a second. If you stay watching him without a blink, then you will never lose him — and he will be yours.

Jorge’s voice was his own now as James let his pace quicken and then slow, quicken and slow, synchronized with his prey. When McAndrew moved to cross Constitution Avenue, James did the same, reflexively making a three-quarter turn of his body, so that — had the Dean thought to look over his shoulder — he would have seen nothing to catch his eye.

The buildings had given way now to green lawns on both sides. Up ahead, poking into the sky, was the pale golden obelisk of the Washington Monument. McAndrew was marching towards it.

Suddenly James felt dangerously exposed. Buildings are a kind of shield for tailing a man; the pursuer always has the possibility of darting into an entrance or down a side alley. Jorge had warned him a dozen times. Once you are on open ground, you are in danger. Your subject will think, why is that man here, except to follow me? And he will be right…

James slowed to a stop and Harrison was at his side within moments. The American was breathing hard. ‘What do we do now?’ he gasped.

‘We watch.’ James’s gaze followed McAndrew up the slope towards the needle. ‘And we walk slowly. That way.’ He indicated a curved path towards the monument, leaving McAndrew to take the straight route.

The Dean was slowing down, just as James had hoped. He had guessed the rendezvous was here and it seemed he was right. He checked his watch. Twenty-five minutes past eight. Meet at the Washington Monument at eight thirty. He could almost hear McAndrew saying it.

He watched him take a seat on a bench among the forty-eight flags of the forty-eight states, and felt the fury bubbling and boiling inside him. This man who had so nearly had him killed, this man who had kept him from his wife and child, this man who through lies and deceit was determined to pass a collective death sentence on the people of Britain.

It would be so easy to have his revenge, James thought. The sprint across this patch of grass would take what, twenty seconds? McAndrew would run but he would not be as fast as James; few men were, despite his wound. He could tackle him at his knees, bring him tumbling to the ground and then it would require the smallest exertion of the fingers to choke the life out of him, to press his fingers to his throat and squeeze. And squeeze…

It would be justified too. Not just as self-defence, but as vengeance — vengeance in advance for the crime of plotting the agony of England, and vengeance for the torments he had already inflicted on James. All he had to do was run a few yards and he could have this man in his hands.

And yet he knew he had to resist that urge. It would not be enough simply to lash out and kill McAndrew. The Dean was here in Washington because he clearly had a plan, an operation involving others, and it was that plan that had to be stopped. Watching the Dean die now would be satisfying, but it would almost certainly leave the threat to England intact.

James turned to Harrison. ‘In a minute or two, someone is going to join him. I need you to tell me who he is.’

‘I’ll have to get closer.’

‘You can get as close as you like. He has no idea who you are.’

Ed Harrison walked ahead, gingerly and, to James’s mind, obviously. He had the studiedly casual gait of the amateur; so ostentatiously nonchalant it was immediately suspicious. It didn’t help that he was identifiable as a reporter from a distance of two hundred yards.

But Harrison was no fool. He had the wit to hang back, so that he was not in McAndrew’s immediate field of vision. Besides, James, his focus still on the Dean, could see that the subject was too preoccupied with his appointment to notice much else. McAndrew checked his watch three times in as many minutes.

At last, another man came into view. He approached the Dean’s bench, slowed, looked down and then appeared to hesitate. McAndrew said something and the man sat down. They then shook hands in a way that struck James as odd, looking straight ahead rather than at each other. But they were certainly talking.

James stared at them, wanting to miss nothing. He certainly did not recognize the second man and, he concluded from McAndrew’s posture and that initial hesitation, neither did the Dean. They were strangers who had nevertheless arranged a meeting.

So fixed was his gaze that only now did James notice that Ed Harrison had rejoined him. He heard him before he saw him, the same fast exhalation. Except this time it was not exertion that made the American breathless, but excitement. ‘You won’t believe who that is,’ he said. He looked back towards the two men conversing on the bench, surrounded by blue sky and fluttering flags. ‘Your Dean is locked in discussion with Hans Stoiber, the most senior diplomat at the Washington Embassy of the Third Reich.’

James couldn’t help himself. He turned to Harrison, his eyes wide and his mouth open, utterly aghast, before remembering his task and turning back. That man in front of him, just a matter of yards away from him, was a Nazi. Elegantly tailored, well-shod, a man you would pass without objection on one of these Washington streets — and yet a servant of a cruel regime bent on crushing and mastering all of Europe, if not the world. It was one thing to glimpse their planes in the skies, to witness the havoc their bombers could wreak, as James had first hand in Spain, or to see their leaders, Hitler, Goebbels and the others, in black-and-white on a newsreel. But to behold the enemy in the flesh and in colour, so near…