Andy McNab - Agressor

I nodded at the tape next to the TV. 'What's the plan with that? Tell you what' – I picked up the tape and shoved it inside my jacket – 'I'll take it. You've got enough shit to carry.'

I did up my jacket. 'You positive you want to go through with this?'

The smile vanished. He was going to give me a bollocking. I put my hands up. 'I know, I know. This will be the last time, promise. I just want to make sure your senile fucking brain has taken all the risks on board.'

He toyed with the pick set. 'It's got to be done.' He tried to extract one of the picks from its retainer but seemed to find it difficult. He dumped it quickly on the bed before he thought I'd had a chance to notice.

I turned to go, but got called back. 'Oi, shit for brains – let's see if anything's rubbed off during my years of painstaking tuition. One: Whitewall couldn't find out Baz's date of birth – can you? And two: we need five or six towels and a couple of extinguisher inners for tonight…'

I nodded and turned back towards the door.

'And make sure you nick them from the penthouse floor. If there's a fire, the posh fuckers can burn…'

I came out of the hotel and turned right along the main drag, checking the town map I'd got from the front desk. Everyone else on the street was either a local draped in black or a Westerner in regulation Gore-Tex jacket, polo shirt and Rohan trousers. It had certainly been dress of the day in the Marriott. The reception was full of them emerging for breakfast; the cafe was a sea of Outward Bound.

I followed the main drag, paralleling the river somewhere to my right. It was 11.26 and a lot busier now as I passed the spruced-up opera house, theatres, museums and parliament. They were beautiful buildings, hailing from an era before Joe Stalin turned up with a few million truckloads of ready-mix. I couldn't understand it: from what I'd read there were still a few statues to him left standing, and plenty of old Soviets who rated him their greatest ever leader – pretty scary considering he'd massacred a million or so of his devoted comrades.

Above me, just before the cloud cut off the sky, was a telecoms mast the size of the Eiffel Tower, beaming out pictures of US flags and smiling Russian housewives 24/7.

There were quite a few locals out and about at this time of the day, and I definitely wasn't the grey man. I didn't have the sort of skin that tanned in five seconds like theirs did, my hair wasn't black and my eyes were blue. I was blending in like Santa in the Congo. People were looking at me as if they all had come to the conclusion that I must be a spy, or there to do any number of bad things to them.

A police blue and white Passat cruised past. The two guys inside had AKs on the back seat. They both looked me up and down before the driver gobbed off to his mate about the weirdo. Fuck 'em, I'd be out of here soon enough. Besides, they were probably just jealous of my jumper.

All the same, I was beginning to feel more worried about this job – or, more truthfully, about Charlie. Which probably meant I was a little worried about me, for being stupid enough to go along with him. I couldn't quite work out how he could rattle off the kit list, yet forget about the DLB…

Then I thought, fuck it, so what? I'd see this through. Charlie needed me. He was all that mattered. He might have disco hands and have difficulty remembering what the fuck he was up to, but at least he was still here. Every other friend I'd ever had, whether we'd still been at the embryonic stage or reached the point where we were wearing each other's clothes, was dead.

I was doing this for Charlie; he was doing it for Hazel. I couldn't let him down. He was in the hotel at the moment, probably flapping a bit about whether or not I'd noticed that there were times when he couldn't even pick his own nose. Maybe he was flapping big time, not knowing if he was going to be able to keep his shit together long enough to see the job through. The thing he most needed right now was to know that he could depend on me, and that made me feel good.

Maybe I'd also be doing my bit to save a young squaddie or two on the pipeline. I'd seen what happened to a family when their much-loved son was zapped, and I realized I didn't like it one bit.

I had a shrewd suspicion that I was really trying to concentrate hard enough on Steven and Hazel to allow me to avoid thinking about Kelly and me, but I just didn't have the bollocks to admit it to myself. So I thought of Silky instead and that felt much better. I knew I'd rather be on a beach with her than fucking about in a Georgian politician's backyard.

I crossed the road and passed an English bookshop/cafe/internet joint. A high-pitched American female voice screeched through the open door: 'Oh-my-God… that-is-sooo-cool.' I made a note to give the place a miss.

I felt myself smiling. The fact was: I missed Silky. Months of sitting on a psychiatrist's couch hadn't cleared my head anywhere near as effectively as bumming around for a few months with a freewheeling, freethinking box-head.

Maybe I'd just get back to her and crisscross the continent in that van for years to come. Maybe this job would be my swansong as well.

I passed the city's newest landmark. No doubt about it, the new McDonald's was the glossiest, brightest building on the main drag. Its brown marble walls were extra shiny this morning after their coating of rain. New converts lined up with their kids for a Georgian McBrunch.

There weren't too many Ladas parked up outside. Being the new thing in town, it was the domain of dark-windowed Mercs, and even a Porsche 4x4. You didn't get cars like that by working for a living in this part of the world. Their drivers-cum-bodyguards were gathered under a nearby tree, dragging on Marlboros and pausing occasionally to flick ash off their obligatory black leather sleeves.

An old man in an even older black suit jacket pointed at parking spaces with a small wooden truncheon, as more shiny cars full of rich kids came to stuff their faces with American imperialistic calories. I was even thinking about getting supersized myself.

It wouldn't be long now before I turned off the main; it was easy to tell because McD's was featured big-time on the map. Just as well, because I couldn't read the street names in Russian and Paperclip.

My plan was simple. If possible, I would do a full 360 of the target house, until I'd seen as much of it as I possibly could. My priorities were defences and escape routes. That was if I didn't get picked up by one of the VW blue-and-whites. They buzzed around the city like flies, or just sat there, lurking in lines of parked cars while their passengers watched and smoked.

I turned left on the second junction and walked uphill into a swathe of narrow roads and cramped houses that hadn't had their wash and brush-up. Suddenly I was in the real Tbilisi, the part that was poor and decaying, and I realized that I felt at home in it, away from the land of fresh paint and shiny new tarmac.

Small bakers sold bread and cakes from a hole in the wall. Cars swerved round potholes and pedestrians who'd stepped into the road to avoid craters in the pavement. Abandoned vehicles and bulging bin bags littered the kerbs. Maybe it was garbage day. Or maybe it was just a hangover from the communist era: the belief that anything inside your four walls was your responsibility while anything outside was the state's had come hand in hand with the hammer and sickle.

It was easy enough finding the house numbers; they were stuck to the wall on two-foot-square plastic panels that also carried the street name in Paperclip and Russian. It felt like another depressingly uniform throwback to the old days, but I guessed at least it meant the postman wasn't going to make a mistake with the Christmas cards – unless you lived in one of the fancier places. They seemed not to have to advertise themselves.