Andy McNab - Zero hour

'You sure?'

Of course she was. She'd done things that were a lot more dangerous.

'When?'

'As soon as possible. Now?'

'Lena can drive me.'

'OK. He's overweight, with big frizzy hair. In one of the photos he's kissing a girl. She's blonde, dyed blonde.'

Lena closed down her mobile. 'No problem. I'll drop you off.' She'd been listening to every word. She pulled another cigarette from her pack and stabbed it at us. 'You want to stay here?'

'If that's OK.'

'Of course.'

They started towards the door, arm in arm. Lena's mobile kicked off again. She dug in her bag. 'But please don't leave. The office must never be unattended.'

Anna and I sat back and enjoyed a moment's silence.

Eventually I stood up and went over to the stack of files on the desk.

We spent nearly an hour flicking through them. There wasn't anything to check on a PC because there wasn't a PC.

I was feeling rough.

Anna read my mind. 'Up the stairs, you can't miss it.'

I followed her instructions and dry-swallowed a couple of Smarties. Fuck the water: I didn't trust anything out of a tap in this neck of the woods.

Anna was kneeling by the fax machine when I got back, sifting through sheets of paper. 'Maybe the police don't want them to be online. It would make Lena's job too easy.'

I picked up a box file labelled 2005 and discarded it. Our target wouldn't have left school by then.

'I bet it's Lena who doesn't want to be online. Cell phones are giving the police enough information already.'

Anna brought another pile of documents to the desk for me to rifle through. 'You OK, Nicholas?'

'Fine. I was knackered from the flight and we haven't exactly been dossing around since then, have we?' I paused. 'All this smoke's not helping.'

Anna scrutinized the desk top. 'I've been thinking, Nicholas. Maybe we could go away together… Spring is so beautiful in Moscow.'

'What about CNN?'

'CNN can wait. Maybe I could show you the White Nights in St Petersburg.' Her face lit up. 'It's such high latitude the sun doesn't sink below the horizon. You can walk along the river in daylight, even at two in the morning.'

'Sounds like an insomniac's paradise.'

We sat in silence for a while. I didn't know what more to say. Did I look that bad? Was it that obvious?

'Nicholas… Why are you really doing this job? You don't need to. It's not a game, you know.'

'Part of me has always tried to pretend it is a game. But not this time. I don't want to go all dewy-eyed on you, but I'm worried about this girl. I don't want to let her down. I've been there before, and I didn't like it.'

Her iPhone rang. 'Hello, Irina.' She grabbed a pen and paper with her spare hand. I watched her write just two words.

Viku Slobozia.

They spoke a little longer, and then she closed down.

'That's him. He's a post-grad. Irina's already called Lena. Neither of them has heard of him. Lena's picking her up.'

I'd been hoping his name would ring bells. They'd know who he was and where he lived, and we'd go down to his flat and come out with Lilian. What now? I picked up a file with a photocopied picture on the cover, and a light bulb flicked on in my head. 'You know what, Anna? Lilian might not be on Facebook any more, but this boy might be.'

'Found him!' She held up the iPhone. 'He's quite the Mr Lover Man. At least, he seems to think so.'

She expanded the first picture with her thumb and forefinger. Viku Slobozia was giving it some in a bar, in full eighties porn-film gear. He clearly thought he was Daniel Craig. He'd not held back on the hair gel, but the frizz remained defiant. The dickhead even had Aviators on indoors.

She scrolled down. 'Here we are.'

It was the photo I'd seen at the uni, the one where he'd mistaken Lilian's face for a pie. She scrolled some more. Lilian was only one in a cast of dozens. Mr Lover Man had many 'chicks'. There was a different girl in every picture. He either had a giant appetite, or they didn't stick around long. I couldn't blame them. Maybe Tresillian was right about all this social-networking shit. It made you look a dickhead, and for ever.

She pointed at a caption. 'It says: "Viku loves the ladies." '

I bet he did. But I still couldn't believe the ladies loved him. I went back through his gallery of conquests. Lilian included, they all looked younger than him. Maybe that was his secret. He was a post-grad who only hit on first and second years.

The next three pictures had me worried.

I expanded one of Slobo sitting in an old-style silver Merc convertible, one of the little two-seater jobs with a steel roof that folded back and tucked into the boot. A machine like that should have been way beyond his student grant.

What he cradled in his hands concerned me more. He posed side-on to the camera, gangster-style, the barrel of a chrome-plated Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol aimed at the ground about ten feet away. There was no mag in it, but that didn't matter. The thing was still so heavy he couldn't hold it straight. Fully loaded, it would hold nine.50 rounds to fuck people up with. The weapon fitted his profile, of course. As a bad-boy brand it was up there with Mercs and magnums of Cristal champagne.

'Why don't you email him, Anna? Get a date. Looks like he'd give a warm welcome to a new girl in town. Just stay away from his mouth.'

Her brow furrowed as she scrolled to the end of Slobo's picture library. 'Don't you think there might be an age issue?'

'We'll worry about that when the time comes. He's not going to know until he meets you, is he? By then it'll be too late.'

She hesitated a few seconds while she gave it some thought. Then the thumbs got moving again. 'This guy's so vain he's got to be checking his page ten times a day.' She smiled. 'I bet he replies inside an hour.'

'What makes you say that?'

'I don't think Mr Lover Man will turn down what I'm saying is on offer.'

We could hear Lena gobbing into her phone from half a street away. That thing never left her ear.

She swept in like a tornado, grabbed the first available piece of paper and started scribbling. Irina was just behind her. She looked down at the coffee-table and saw no mugs. 'You haven't had coffee?'

'Didn't even think about it. We were checking files. We thought we'd have a look in case our guy was tucked away in there somewhere.'

She looked almost offended, like we'd spurned her hospitality. 'I'll make some.'

Lena accepted one of Anna's cigarettes and they both lit up. She finally finished the call as Irina came back with the brews and placed her mobile carefully on her desk. 'The mother broke down with joy. I'm trying to arrange a call between them. The mother has no phone. They're poor. They have nothing. But, hey…' Her hands went up in the air to signal a change of subject. 'So what do we know about this Viku Slobozia?'

She listened intently as Anna tried to explain how we'd found him on Facebook. Her eyes narrowed. She wasn't having any of it. 'This doesn't ring true. There's more to it. Why didn't you tell us you were going to the university? Irina could have gone in for you straight away. We're here to help.'

There was no way I was going to let Anna bring up Lilian's name. I jumped in. 'It was my fault. I'm trying to protect people in London. I didn't want anybody here to know what we were doing. And then I met you two. I didn't want to affect what you're doing, or add to your workload. But I realize now that I could have messed things up.'

Irina took a sip of her brew. 'What next?'

'I'm waiting for a reply.' Anna looked up from her iPhone screen and grinned. 'I'm an innocent seventeen-year-old today, new to the city. He's in for a shock, isn't he?'