his book about the Templars and the crusades, which was how many men went to war and fought for God or in search of him.
‘Interpreting . . . That’s where it always falls apart,’ Gabriel said. ‘Like those cards psychiatrists hold up with nothing but black blobs on them and they ask you what you see. One person sees a butterfly, another sees Abraham Lincoln. Eventually someone has to make a choice, and then all the other choices have to hang off that one. You start wrong, then everything else is usually wrong.’
Gabriel closed his eyes.
‘You make much money as a viewer?’ Stratton asked, trying not to sound flippant, although he was being a little. Gabriel didn’t answer. Stratton glanced in the mirror. He was either asleep or didn’t want to talk any more.
A sign indicated the M11 was a few miles ahead. Stratton checked his watch. They could be in the area in an hour and a half.
An all-too-familiar feeling suddenly enveloped him, a deep sense of pointlessness, as if he should be doing something more useful with his life. What that was he had no idea but the frequency of the feeling seemed to increase the older he got. He often wondered if he would get more out of life doing something like diving instruction on some Caribbean island, living in a palm-covered lean-to on the beach and wearing flip-flops, shorts and brightly coloured shirts. But then, who was he kidding? A week of that and he would start turning crazy. He suspected the answer to his idea of a meaningful life was close by but he had always been skirting around it, not brave enough to make the leap. For the moment Sumners dictated his life for him until he could find one of his own. And fate, of course.
Chapter 5
Zhilev stood in the darkness of a forest surrounded by a dense, brittle army of black slender pines, their heads shuffling in the breeze. He was completely still, listening to the sounds of the night. It was some thirteen years since he had last stood in this wood, on the same spot, also in darkness, but that time he was not alone. He had been with three other members of Spetsnaz, all Combat Swimmers, all from the unit on Mayskiy Island. They had been dropped off the night before by a Russian ‘fishing boat’ in the Norwegian Channel, ten miles off the coast of East Anglia, where they then motored the rest of the way to the coast in a small rubber inflatable. The relatively quiet beaches west of Cromer had been chosen as the point to come ashore where it was also easier to carry the boat up the gently sloping sand and into the hinterland at high tide, deflate it and bury it with the engine and fuel bags in a sand dune. They then made their way across country and just before dawn arrived at a small wood a mile in from the coast where they laid up for the rest of the day. One of them remained on watch at all times in case of farmers or children while the others slept, ate, or serviced their gear, then the following evening they crossed several fields to an agent contact point in a quiet country lane. The agent was a Sandringham game warden who had done this many times in the past ten years. He drove them across country in his Land Rover to the other side of Thetford Forest and from there they walked through the wood to the point where Zhilev now stood.
He remembered how the pines were younger and thinner then but still dense enough to give cover from view from the light, night-time traffic that cruised the A1065, 75 metres away, where it cut through this part of the forest. During his military service he had imagined returning to this place, but never as a civilian.
Zhilev had been standing still for almost an hour, the recommended minimum amount of time to watch and listen before proceeding to the next phase. Throughout his career, Zhilev had been a perfectionist and stickler for protocol. His reconnaissance and target survey reports were always detailed and supported by sketches, photographs, charts or maps, with samples of local soil and flora where possible, and Zhilev kept a copy of everything except the samples. It was an offence to do so but wise and worth the risk if your chosen career in the military happened to