Andy McNab: Zero hour

We'd become quite good mates, as far as the mates thing went for me. He wasn't coming over from his Edwardian apartment in Marylebone and banging on my door for brews the whole time, but he was a regular visitor, and always called first. Maybe that was why I liked him so much. Or maybe it was because he was the only mate I had left. Everyone else seemed to have got themselves royally fucked up or dead.

'Listen, mate, I keep telling you I'm not interested. Why the fuck would I want to go and work again? Take a look at all this.' I waved a hand around the apartment, then wiped it down the side of my face as if it was about to magic the pain away. 'Waste of a morning, mate. I'm shitting money. I don't need any of yours.'

He put down his mug. 'Ah, yes – your grandmother's inheritance…'

'She put it away for a rainy day – bless her.'

Pinpricks of light still swam across my retina, but I could now see well enough to get the full benefit of his ironic expression. Julian knew exactly where the cash had come from.

I took a seat beside one of the three glass coffee-tables scattered around the massive room.

Op Sec triggered MI5's answer to Catch-22: they could only tell you what the job was once you'd signed up for it – but you wouldn't want to do that until you knew what you were letting yourself in for. Not even our friendship could change that.

It was another of the reasons I liked him. He was one of the good guys, straight down the line. Truth, integrity, defence of the realm and all that shit: he radiated it.

I realized I was a bit jealous. I might have the penthouse, the knockout view, the Porsche downstairs, but this lad had things money can't buy.

Jules leant forward, his elbows on his knees. 'They want you back, Nick.'

'After all those years of getting fucked over from both sides of the river, all of a sudden your lot can't do without me?' I laughed, and that made my head start hurting all over again.

Jules shifted uneasily in his chair. 'Are you sure you're OK, Nick?'

I managed to dredge up a smile from somewhere. 'Never better, mate. Never better. Although that fucking "Chinese" we had the other night has given me the odd dodgy moment.' I pointed a finger. 'I blame you.'

He leant back in his chair. 'You should be thanking me. No wheat, no dairy, no toxins – Vietnamese is probably the healthiest food you've eaten in your life.'

'But don't you get bored eating that Ho Chi Minh shit all the time?'

He smiled. 'When I do I'll go somewhere else. You still coming on Saturday?'

'I'll call you.'

Ten minutes later he headed for the lift and I made it to the toilet just in time to bulk up another gutful of coffee-flavoured bile.

Wednesday, 10 March 11.34 hrs The wind gusted down Harley Street, throwing pellets of rain against the window. The nurse had disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, after announcing that Dr Kleinmann was just checking a few things. She'd done her best to look encouraging, but it wasn't working.

A dark blue Bentley coupe pulled up across the road. I'd spent a great morning test-driving a green one a couple of months ago, but decided it was just too wide for my parking space. An overweight driver leapt out with a multi-coloured golfing brolly and held it over a couple of equally large Arab women as he ushered them into the clinic opposite.

The row of gracious old houses where grand families had once played charades by the fire and drunk to the health of Queen Victoria now hosted hundreds of offices and treatment rooms, turning over cash-paying patients seven days a week.

I was waiting in one of the drabber ones: the consultation fees hadn't stretched to a can or two of Dulux in the last couple of decades, and they hadn't been chucked in the direction of the central heating either.

Apitted brass chandelier hung from a sepia moulding above my head, casting enough light over the carpet and furniture to make it painfully obvious that they could have done with a bit of a steam clean. Shabby or chic, it didn't seem to make much difference to the bill. Whatever you were there for, you came out a few hundred quid lighter. A clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes, and the pounds.

Fuck it, I wasn't exactly spoilt for options. The NHS needed all sorts of details that I'd got out of the habit of providing, and BUPA weren't much better. The Firm had never provided health insurance for people in my line of work, and without a bank account I was willing to divulge, I couldn't set up my own. My credit history was non-existent. I'd slipped out of the frame years ago, when I'd left the army; I hadn't paid tax since I'd picked up my discharge payslip. So I had to come to places like this, pay cash, and get on with it. I wasn't complaining. The less anyone knew about Nick Stone, the better.

'Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Stone.' The accent was East Coast, but it would have been equally at home in LA or Jerusalem. Dr Max Kleinmann carried a large brown folder with my name splattered all over it, but he didn't look happy to see me.

His expression was as grim as the weather and made sterner still by his black-framed glasses. Was he suffering under the usual burdens of marriage, mortgages and school fees, or was he just pissed off not to be on Rodeo Drive?

His dark, tightly curled hair was thinning on top, and a patch of stubble sprouted from above his Adam's apple where he'd failed to zap it with his razor. The combo made him look a bit ridiculous, and that cheered me up for some reason. Perhaps it would help me take what he was about to say to me less seriously.

'I just wanted to be sure I was seeing what I was seeing…' He came and sat opposite me, on my side of his desk. 'I wish I had better news for you.'

I turned back towards the window.

'You OK, Mr Stone? You still with me?'

Of course I was. I just didn't know what to say. I came out with the first thing that hit what was left of my mind. 'That's me fucked, is it?'

He didn't even blink. 'This is where the hard work starts. Let me show you…'

I followed him over to a light box on the wall. He hit a switch and it flickered into life. He slid the scan under the retaining clips.

He pointed to the tiny shadow on the right side of my brain. 'This lesion, I'm afraid, is the problem. We know it as a glioblastoma multiforme, a particularly virulent type of astrocytoma. It's a high-grade tumour, which tends to grow quite quickly. It's the most common type of primary malignant brain tumour in adults. I'm surprised the symptoms aren't worse. You have headaches, nausea, drowsiness?'

'Yeah, all that. Listen, Doc, I don't need to know all the technical bollocks. Just – can you zap it?'

'With treatment it can be made bearable.' He breathed in slowly. 'Mr Stone, have you anyone waiting for you downstairs?'

'No, there's no one. No one to call, no one to worry about.'

At last Kleinmann was looking a little happier. He wouldn't have to trot out the usual bullshit, shepherding me and my loved ones through the emotional labyrinth that led from here to fuck knew where. He could just get down to business.

He pushed his glasses further up his nose and leant forward to take a closer look at the tumour, in case it had changed into something nice like a Teletubby in the last few minutes. I found myself doing the same, examining the scan as if I knew what the fuck I was looking at.

'You say it'll keep growing?'

It was hard to believe that something so insignificant was going to finish me off. I'd always imagined it would be something a bit bigger, something more like the diameter of an RPG, a rifle butt or at least a 7.62mm round, but this little fucker was no more than pea-sized. Checking out like this? It felt so… pedestrian…

I tried to smile. 'I always wondered what a death warrant looked like. Does it have a use-by date?'