Less than an hour after leaving the base camp, we said goodbye to the RSM outside Abergavenny Railway Station. He gave both of us a big hug and said,
“Watch your backs ladies. You never know who is really a bad guy in disguise.”

Jemma had a hard time keeping a straight face but we both gave Jock a kiss on his cheeks and then made a hasty exit.

I looked back at him in the rear-view mirror and saw Jock give us a wave. It made me go all gooey inside for a few seconds.

After leaving Jock, we headed towards Cheltenham and then London. Just before we reached the halfway point of the A419 between Cheltenham and Swindon, I turned off the main road and into a now closed Service Area.

At the back of the building, my car was waiting. We’d left it her on our way to the start of our little jaunt in Wales. It was well away from prying eyes which was exactly why we’d chosen this location for our transport switch. Jemma’s car was still in Wales but we’d get someone from the department to retrieve it in a day or so. We had more important matters to resolve first.

Neither of us said anything as we got out of the transit van we’d been driving.
Our minds were totally focussed on the task ahead. I stopped for a moment and looked at Jemma. Then I afforded myself a small smile. We were back in the groove. The last six days had done its job. I only wished that we’d been able to ease back into operations but the sniper who had tried to kill us had made that impossible.

I opened the boot of my car and both of us stripped naked. Neither of us had said a word since we crossed into England. Inside my car there was a full change of clothing for both of us, some food and importantly a number of weapons. We were not taking any chances. Having already discovered one tracking device, we were determined to avoid inadvertently bringing another one with us on the next stage of our mission.

This total clean break thing was a behaviour that we’d used for years and it had almost become second nature for us. It was not something that we broadcast and if we hadn’t needed to deal with a traitor, I’d have simply dropped Jemma off and we would have driven home in convoy. However, with the information that we’d discovered in Wales, we needed the fresh car as well as fresh change of clothing. We’d arrange for the other car to be picked up within the next few days.

---

With a price on our heads and at least one person out to claim it sooner rather than later, we were determined to resolve this once and for all. We had discussed our options on the drive from Abergavenny. By the time we turned onto the A419 we were clear on our plan.

The information we’d received earlier had made us even more determined to sort this out without delay. We’d found out who was involved from the two we’d captured at our mission base. Once we’d gotten over the surprise, it all began to make sense. Well, as much sense as anything had that day.

Along with the change of clothes in the back of my car, we’d left a number of phones. The Americans call them burner phones. Using this sort of device was SOP for us. The Quartermasters Stores of our department bought them by the dozen. ‘Burner Phones’ was a pretty apt title. Use once and that’s it. They were so disposable that we didn’t even have to account for them.

Once we’d changed our clothes and checked our weaponry for at least the third time, Jemma drove us south and into Swindon. She found a part of the old town that was busy with people and without too many CCTV cameras. We didn’t say much. That was not unusual for us at this stage of an operation. Our minds were fully focussed on the operation ahead.

Jemma stopped and let me out of the car. Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to. We’d done this sort of thing many, many times before. She’d return to pick me up in fifteen minutes. If I wasn’t there then she’d head for a department safe house after destroying the car. That meant doing just the same as many criminals did these days, by torching the car. There was even a 5ltr can of petrol in the boot for this very purpose. Taped to the can was a box of matches. We left nothing to chance.

I ducked into the doorway of a now closed and boarded up shop and switched on one of the ‘Burner Phones’. When it was connected to one of the mobile networks, I made a single call.

When the call was answered, I punched a series of numbers into the keypad. The call was transferred to an operator.
They simply said,
“I am ready to take your message.”

No names. No ‘hello how are you’. This was business and not to be trifled with.

“For Sam, Eyes Only. Someone tried to kill Jemma and me last night with a 50 cal. We are on top of it but there are two traitors at the safe house in Sennybridge. They need dealing with. They gave up all we needed to know and will be acting on the information within the hour. They need to be kept on ice for at least seventy-two hours. They told us who was controlling them. That person is in the department. Yes Sam, there is a mole and they are at a senior level. We are going after the mole as they threaten the operation of the whole department and beyond. Repeat SAM Eyes Only.”

I didn’t wait for a response as I knew the person on the other end would know from the code that I’d punched into the phone who I was and that this was a priority message call. We had many other numbers that would identify who we were and the type of call this was.

My location when making the call would be attached to the message. That would help Sam identify who we were going after without actually identifying the person.
As soon as I ended the call, I switched off the phone. Then I removed the Sim Card and battery. The battery put went in my pocket. That could be re-used but the phone went into a nearby waste bin. I tossed the sim card into the back of a builder’s tipper truck as it drove by. The burner phone had been burned.

I looked at my watch. I had ten minutes before Jemma would return.

To use up some time, I headed for a ‘convenience store’ where I bought a couple of daily papers and some water. These would not only be useful but it would make me appear to passers-by that I was not doing anything out of the ordinary.

Right on cue, Jemma appeared in the car. She stopped and I got in. I gave her a simple thumbs up as she drove off heading east and then south towards the Wiltshire town of Marlborough on the A346.

We passed through Marlborough and carried on south on the A346.
Our destination was a house in the hamlet of Stibb Green, This, is about half a mile south of Savernake Forrest. This was where our target lived. It was not that far in both time and distance from Swindon but far enough to not be in the Town.

We came out of the forest, over two old railway bridges, the Kennet and Avon Canal and the Taunton to Reading railway line. Then Jemma turned left and left again onto Savernake Road.

Jemma slowed the car down as we went past the home of the mole. I scanned the property for signs of life but the house was well hidden from the road.

“Nothing visible. Too many trees,” I reported to Jemma.

“Ok, I’ll turn around. There is a junction ahead.”

Less than a minute later, we were back at the property. This time we stopped the car.

Jemma parked the car so that it totally blocked the driveway to the house. If our suspicions were correct then we didn’t have long to wait for something to happen unless we were already too late and our target had already fled the scene. The way we were parked, would appear other road users would think that we’d just pulled off the road for some reason. Looking at it from the other direction, the driveway was totally blocked. No car was leaving this house by this route and according to Google Earth there was no other road exit from the property.

Jemma grabbed her weapons and deployed off to the right of the driveway. There was some cover there. I stood in the undergrowth on the other side of the drive where I’d be on the right side of the car to talk to the driver when and if they appeared.

---

Sure enough, less than twenty minutes later, an almost new Porsche 911 GT2 came rapidly along the drive. As soon as it saw our car it quickly came to a halt with a little slide on the gravel drive. As it did so, I stepped out of the undergrowth an pointed my Sig-Sauer at the driver.

“Easy does it, Mr Farthing. No sudden moves. This SIG has a hair trigger.”

The driver looked at me and the colour trained from his face.

“Kill the engine there’s a good chap. I really don’t want to empty a whole clip into such a nice car.”
“Oh, and keep your left hand up on the dash. After almost six long days in the Welsh Mountains, I’m a little sleep deprived but there again, you know that don’t you?”

The tone of my voice told him that I was serious. He switched off the engine.

I eased the driver’s door open.

“Out you get and no sudden moves. My partner has you right in her sights.”

As if to illustrate that, she switched on the targeting laser. A red spot appeared on his chest.
He saw it and shuddered. His shoulders visibly sank. He knew that the game was up.

“Nice and easy and you won’t get hurt,” I said as I motioned for him to get out of the car.

Slowly, he emerged his face was still ash grey.

“How…?”

“How did we find you?”

“Simple really. Those two numbskulls you hired didn’t zero their phones after getting their orders from you. One look at their call history and we knew who had been behind the kill attempt on us. Once we’d confronted them with that information, they blabbed. You really should not have used your work phone to call them. A simple mistake but there again, you aren’t a trained agent, now are you? Still, you did pretty well for a failed pen-pusher.”

Jemma had joined us by now.

“Get moving,” she said as she used her sniper’s rifle to point back up the drive.

With an air of resignation, he began walking back up the drive with my Sig giving him the odd prompt in the back.

Once we were inside the house we could see signs of the speed of his flight everywhere. For someone who appeared to be the neatest of neat freaks in the office, this was well out of the ordinary but these were no ordinary times.

I fetched a chair and put it in the middle of the hallway. I noticed that it was pretty old. Eighteenth Century if my guess was right. It had been made by craftsmen and was as solid as the day it was finished. I chuckled to myself at how useless ephemera popped into my mind at the most off times.

“Sit,” I commanded as I switched back to the here and now.

He sat.

Jemma produced two pairs of handcuffs from her backpack. We used one of these to secure his ankles to the chair. Then I used the other pair to secure his hands behind him and to the back of the chair. A few plastic cable ties reinforced the bindings. We wanted to make an impression on our prisoner.

He wasn’t going anywhere in a rush.

“Tea?” asked Jemma with a smile.

“Later. I think we should clear the drive first.”

“Good point,” came her reply.

Without waiting for a command or even a discussion, she disappeared out of the house still carrying her rifle.

“Right Mr Terrence Farthing, you have a few questions to answer before…”

“Before what? You won’t kill me. It is not is your psyche. I haven’t been your boss for all these years not to know how you two work.”

I smiled.
“You don’t know half of how we work. You read our reports and think you are an expert. Those reports don’t contain the detail of how we work. You have no idea what I’d do if Jemma’s life was in danger and the same for her if my life was threatened. If you had any operational brain at all you would have targeted us on day one not just before the end of the operation.”

He just glared at me so I carried on.

“I don’t need to kill you. All I need to do is to give the evidence we have to Sam and the Minister and you will be on the next flight to South Georgia. You might have been an assistant director but you were never really our boss. You are nothing more than a PHB [1] and you know it. You have licked arse in various departments across all of Whitehall until you got to your current position. However, your arse licking days are well and truly over.”

He shuddered when I mentioned that rock in the South Atlantic.

“Your other boss won’t like knowing that you have not completed your mission. That’s why you were running wasn’t it?”

“What can I do? I have money?”

“Oh, we will be taking every penny you have. Rest assured on that.”

“But… You are nothing more than criminals.”
“Well, you trained us, or rather the department did. That’s how we work or didn’t you know that?”

He just glared at me.
“How much did he pay you?” I asked.

He didn’t reply but his eyes briefly flicked towards the dining room. He’d just told me where his safe was. I wondered if he’d had time to fully empty it before he fled?

I waited for Jemma to return before doing anything else. I knew that she wouldn’t be long.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, she returned carrying a large bag and a smile on her face.

“Both cars are in his garage. Did you know he has a Ferrari 308GT in there as well as an almost brand spanking new Bentley? A four-car garage as well! He must be getting a good wedge from Esteban.”

“Tut-tut and all of this on a Civil Servant’s salary?” I remarked.

“Was there anything of importance in his car?” I asked with a grin on my face as I knew the answer already.

Jemma smiled.

“A large bag full of Euros. It is safely locked away in our car. Then there was this little toy.”

She opened the bag to reveal a broken down 50 calibre sniper’s Rifle in a carry case and a pair of Night-Vision glasses.

“Tut-tut,” she remarked in a very school mistress voice.

“He was in such a rush that he hasn’t even bothered to clean it.”

“You have been a busy boy haven’t you. Too bad that you really don’t know how to use this thing in the dark. That takes a lot of training and even more practice. You should know by now that elemental mistakes invariably cost the lives of the people in the field. You lit up the target as if we were at Wembley Stadium. You didn’t think that we might be using Night Vison Goggles, did you? Then you fired an Infrared Laser at us? Doh! You really should have used an out of band laser but there again, you are a desk jockey, aren’t you?”

She looked at the rifle again.

“I think we’ll keep this handy,” said Jemma as she started to assemble it. You never know when there is a rat or two that needs exterminating…”
Then she smiled and removed a bullet from the chamber.

Jemma caressed it gently. She had a thing for guns and weaponry.

“You really were out to kill us weren’t you. Hollow Point is such an effective round at half a mile range. But… only rank amateurs leave a live round in the chamber of a disassembled rifle.”

He shuddered.

I smiled.

“Good. His safe is in there,” I said pointing at the dining room.

“My, my, you have been a busy girl and all without drawing blood. I am impressed,” remarked Jemma with a huge grin on her face.

“It was easy. He has not been trained in the same way that we have.”

Jemma laughed.
“The RSM would make mincemeat of him.”

“Indeed, he would and while doing so he’d thoroughly enjoy himself.”

“I’ll go rustle up some tea and something to eat while you keep watch on our prisoner,” I said.
“Then I’ll watch him while you crack open his safe.”

“Gladly,” replied Jemma as she pulled her Glock from its holster and carried on working on cleaning the rifle.

We had our own little specialities. Jemma could open a combination safe as quickly as anyone named ‘fingers’ in the criminal fraternity. That and guns made her a dangerous person. I loved blowing things up plus computers and electronics and the like.

An hour later, we had emptied his safe and examined its contents. It proved to be a veritable treasure trove of information and money. We photographed every page of every document before carefully putting them into plastic bags. Our host was very kind and had a large supply of plastic bin liners in his kitchen. These were ideal for this purpose.

“What are we going to do with scumbag? Shall I kill him now?” teased Jemma as she lovingly caressed her Glock. This was all designed to unsettle our prisoner.

“I think I have a better way out for him. CO poisoning in the back of his Bentley perhaps?” I replied.

“Oooohhhhh I like that,” said Jemma grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

Our prisoner was visibly shaking.

“You can help yourself by telling us everything. How did Esteban get you hooked and who else is involved? I mean everything. We will video your confession just to be safe.”

“I’m not saying a thing. I’m dead already and so are you two. Don’t you realise how big the price is on your heads now?”

“Oh, please do tell?” Asked Jemma in a Childs voice.

“Two Million Euros. One Million for each of you.”

That shocked both of us. We knew that we had to go deep, really deep.

I took Jemma outside for a brief conflab. She was as usual reading my thoughts. It didn’t take us long to decide what we should do next.

Once back inside, I said to our prisoner.

“We are going to expose your betrayal of us and god knows who else. You have clearly been on the take for a long time. In the meantime, we will leave you here all nice and safe. When we get to London, we will turn everything over to the chief and disappear.”

Then Jemma added,
“Enjoy your time in the cold and watch out for those hungry Polar Bears.”

We left Farthing securely tied up and locked in the Hall Closet. We put a chair under the door handle just in case he managed to get free. While Jemma got the car out of the garage I cut the phone line into the property and removed a large section of cable. She also disabled his cars for good measure. We hadn’t lasted this long in the business by not being thorough.

As Jemma drove us down the drive, I tossed the telephone cable into the undergrowth.

I felt good despite being sleep deprived, I felt back in the groove.

The smile on Jemma’s face told me that she was also feeling good. I knew that by the way she’d caressed the rifle that had so very nearly killed her.

---

As we headed east on the M4, Jemma said,
“I didn’t think that Esteban was able to put up that much money. Didn’t a huge amount of dosh get confiscated with that big bust last month?”

“He must have a lot more fingers in a lot more pies than we first imagined.”

Then something hit me and right between the eyes. How could I have missed it earlier.

“We need to stop at Reading Services. There is something that you need to see and it can’t wait until we get back to London.”

[to be continued]

[1] PHB = Pointy Headed Boss. Made famous by the Dilbert Comic Strip. A useless SOB who should be nowhere near management.