Andy McNab - Avenger

But an unexpected return to Foxcroft was now necessary to collect Elena's birth certificate and to get the application form countersigned by Dave.

Under Deveraux's instruction, Elena had called the Passport Advice Line the previous afternoon to discover the correct procedure for obtaining a passport urgently. She was told she was ineligible for the one-day, Premium Service; that was only available to existing passport holders. The best Elena could get was the Fast Track service, which would guarantee a passport sent to her within a week.

Fergus and Deveraux decided that was the route they had to take. If Black Star were to discover that Elena had been able to find a way around rules and regulations, the entire mission would probably be compromised.

It would have to be a week, and Black Star would have to know why.

The day before, Elena had rung to make an appointment at the office in Eccleston Square, and then they had collected an application form and had some passport photos taken in a booth at Woolworths.

Now, at just before 8:20 a.m., Deveraux parked the car in a side street close to Foxcroft. She had chosen the arrival time deliberately. The young residents of Foxcroft would have left for school by 8:20, which meant that there would be no old friends around for Elena to have 'catch-up' chats with. The fewer people she came into contact with, the better.

Deveraux switched off the engine and turned back to Danny. 'Stay here. We won't be long – I've allowed thirty minutes so that we don't arouse the Brookers' suspicions. So don't you go walkabout. Got that?'

Danny nodded. 'Can you leave the keys in the ignition?'

'Why? Are you thinking of going joyriding?'

'I'm not that stupid,' said Danny with a sigh. 'If I've got to sit here, I might as well listen to the radio.'

Deveraux considered for a moment. 'All right. But not too loudly. I don't want you drawing attention to yourself, or to the vehicle.'

She opened the driver's door and looked at Elena. 'Ready?'

'Yeah. It'll be good to see Dave and Jane.'

'Just be careful what you say,' said Deveraux as she stepped out of the car.

'I know!' snapped Elena. 'You've told me a hundred times.' She reached for the door handle and angrily wrenched it open.

'Give my love to Dave and Jane,' called Danny as Elena got out.

Deveraux leaned back into the vehicle and glared at Danny over the back of the driver's seat. 'Don't be stupid.' She moved back and slammed the door just as Elena shut hers.

'Joke!' shouted Danny, watching them walk off down the street. 'Have a nice time.'

He sat back in the seat and waited for a few minutes, watching the pedestrians passing by, half expecting to see someone he knew. Danny had been away from Camberwell for much longer than Elena – over six months. But before that he had lived at Foxcroft for years. If anywhere had ever been home, Foxcroft was as close as it got.

Suddenly he wanted to see the old red-brick Victorian building again. He didn't need to go inside – just to see it from the outside would be enough. He knew that Deveraux and Elena would have gone to the front door; he could take a different route to the rear of the building. That was preferable anyway; from across the street he would be able look up over the back garden wall to glimpse his old bedroom window on the second floor.

He leaned over the driver's seat, pulled the key from the ignition, got out of the car and pushed the door shut. Then he strode off down the street. He had at least twenty minutes to give the old place the once over and be back in time for Elena and Deveraux. Plenty of time.

Fergus wasn't with the physiotherapist. One session had been enough to tell him that he could manage the rehabilitation of his damaged body perfectly well for himself. And besides, he had more important things to do.

He was using crutches, for stability and for speed, as he moved down the corridor towards Marcie Deveraux's room at the hotel. He reached the door and gently turned the master key in the lock. One of the first things Fergus had done when they arrived in Oxford was to get hold of a master key and make a copy.

Deveraux's room was the best in the hotel. There was a king-size bed and velvet curtains, and several pairs of expensive shoes were neatly lined up against one wall. A Louis Vuitton suitcase rested on a stand by the window overlooking the garden. Everything was perfectly in place.

Fergus knew exactly where he wanted to go. He rested his crutches against the bed and went directly to the large, dark-wood wardrobe built into a recess opposite the bed. He opened the double doors; there was no need to worry about tell-tales because hotel staff cleaned the room daily. But the safe fixed to the wall at the back of the wardrobe needed to be handled with the utmost care.

The safe was one of the newer types, wide enough to hold a laptop computer. There was an electronic push-button pad for access. Each time the door was opened or closed a four-digit PIN number had to be used. The PIN could be changed as often as required.

Fergus examined the front of the safe within the gloom of the wardrobe, using one of the two small key torches he had on a key ring.

He had been here before and had learned that, exactly as he had expected, Deveraux always put a tell-tale on the safe. Today was no exception. As Fergus checked the front of the safe with the white light from the torch, he saw that one of Deveraux's thick black hairs was stuck across the tiny gap between the door and the safe itself.

It was a tried and trusted method. Deveraux had pulled the hair from her head and then licked it; the spittle providing the adhesive necessary to stick the hair to the metal of the safe. If the door was opened, one half of the hair would break free or it would fall away completely and Deveraux would know that someone had tampered with the safe.

Fergus checked the exact position of the hair and then carefully pulled it free and placed it on a shelf.

He turned on the second small torch. It shone black light, invisible to the naked eye. Fergus had bought the small ultra-violet counterfeit-note detector from a shop in Oxford. And the UV light not only identified counterfeit banknotes and credit cards, it also detected invisible UV ink.

Deveraux's illuminated ink fingerprints were all over the pads of numbers 2,5,7 and 8. They were the numbers she had regularly used when locking or unlocking the safe.

Fergus knew the combination by heart; he had been coming to the room since day one of the operation. The sequence Deveraux used was 8725, but Fergus was always aware that she might have changed it. If that was the case, he would have simply kept hitting different combinations of the four digits until he got it right, just as he had when originally discovering the PIN. It had taken some time to hit on the right number.

But Deveraux had stuck to her usual sequence. The safe's electric lock whirred, the door sprang open and Fergus lifted out Deveraux's neat black laptop.

He smiled as he plugged his iPod cable into the USB port and turned on the laptop to begin downloading the contents of the hard drive. It was no wonder the MoD and large commercial companies had banned iPods from their offices. This was so easy. No hacking into the secure intranet that the security services used on their laptops was necessary to transfer information. The iPod could just bypass it all. Fergus had learned far more than how to download music when Danny had explained the capabilities of the iPod.

The entire download was completed in less than a minute, and Fergus slipped the computer back into the safe, tapped in the PIN and closed the door. He wiped down the keypad with his shirt cuff to remove his own inky fingerprints and then retrieved Deveraux's hair from the shelf. He licked the hair and then stuck it back in its original position. Job done.