grown a designer beard, tinted my sideboards grey and changed my mode of dress, even developed a limp. Or rather, I had deliberately held onto the limp I'd been left with, legacy of Jean Daniel. In all I looked quite a lot older. And I was staying out of bars, places where people might have been warned to look out for me. But one lonely night - I don't know, maybe I was hoping against hope that Natasha would be there - I went back to the bar where I'd first met her.'I suppose I was lucky I'd developed my disguise, for Jean Daniel was there. He was on his own, didn't notice me. But when he left I was waiting in my car, followed him to the villa. And having found the place, I sat back out of sight and watched it, watched its clientele ... hard men, all of them! Then, for some few weeks, I followed them, too. Well and good - now I knew the places to avoid if ever Natasha came back to Marseille; I mean, I knew which routes not to take getting her out of there. And I knew to get her out fast.'For despite all my earlier intentions, finally I was getting some sense. These people played rough, played for keeps. So maybe I'd be wise to forget the revenge thing, simply take Natasha and run for home. If she ever came back. 'And eventually she did.'It was less than three years ago, in early November. I got a message from a friend, who gave me a Moscow telephone number. And when I called ... I knew it could only be Natasha. She was scared. Castellano had done a job on her, ruined her reputation with the Moscow Mob. For a long time they'd left her alone, let her go to the dogs. She'd been unable to find work, and finally she'd become desperate. Then she'd begged a Mob boss to let her run drugs again. And now she was coming to Marseille. But Castellano knew she was coming and she was more afraid of him than ever.'I asked her if she remembered our previous plans. She did, and was ready to do whatever I'd worked out for us. But her own idea was a lot more daring: to dump her drug consignment cheaply on a rival French gang, and then to run with the money! Even cheaply it would still be worth a quarter million sterling!'At first I backed away from it. But the more I thought it over the more I liked it. Wouldn't it be as good, even better, than the somewhat more physical revenge that I'd once planned? And it would hit them all, not just Jean Daniel, who obviously had been my principal target.
'Natasha had already contacted her buyer; she was supposed to come by yacht but instead would fly into Marseille. That way she'd have time to dispose of her load and get out of France - with me, of course - before Castellano and his people even knew she was missing. My part of it would be simple: drive like hell for Lyon, Dijon, and Paris, finally the Tunnel. I'd studied the routes, couldn't find any fault with the plan. We'd be on board a train and passing beneath the English Channel before the Marseille Mob even thought to backtrack Natasha's movements. So we reckoned, anyway.'Maybe it would have been easier to fly. But that way would have meant leaving my car behind. I had a beauty, an almost new Peugeot. Also, if we'd flown the Mob would find it a lot easier to track us. Idiot that I must have been, I still hadn't fully appreciated just what kind of people I was fooling with ...'Jake paused to look at Trask. 'You compared the modern Mob to terrorist organizations. Well, I thought I had learned something about terrorism in the SAS. Maybe I had, but plainly not enough. And anyway, that was just classroom stuff. Whatever, I thought of the Mob a lot differently from you: as just a bunch of hoods, I suppose. But you were right and I was wrong.'They were probably watching her all the way down the line. They'd probably always watched her ... maybe they have watchers for all their couriers and dupes. Take Jean Daniel, for example. That spindly bastard was just another watchdog. Not so hard to