Payback by Graham Lancaster

‘You’re the most beautiful woman in the restaurant. The most beautiful in the whole of London from where I’m sitting. You’re witty, sophisticated, well read. A brilliant hostess. A great mother to two beautiful girls. You’re just terrific.’
    Leaning forward, she kissed him, lightly cupping his chin in her hand. Closing her eyes, she lingered over the moment before breaking off, embarrassed that others may be watching. Smiling shyly, she whispered, ‘I needed that.’
    ‘ You also need an early night and gallons of Evian, ma’am,’ he replied, taking a chair and a whip to his own self-control, and gesturing for the bill.
    Smiling back, Maddie pulled herself together, relieved now, and a little surprised that neither of them had made an embarrassing drunken pass. ‘You’re right. As ever. Thanks for just listening. I guess I’m kind of vulnerable right now. You’re not taking advantage of that...’ Her eyes held his, curiously, silently asking why.
    He looked away, his mind racing to find an answer that would neither depress nor encourage her. ‘Someone—Maugham I think—said that morality was the last refuge of the coward.’
    She clucked and corrected him, slightly shaking her head and pulling a face. ‘Patriotism. Patriotism is the last refuge...And it was Johnson.’
    Minutes later, in the cab back to his Chelsea Wharf apartment, Tom reflected on the evening: on Maddie and her worries, but mostly on the private picture she had painted of her husband, the restless, brooding commercial genius who had dominated both their lives for so long. A man each had loved in their way—and feared, in equal measure. A man who, like most tyrants, had somehow attracted wholly undeserved, irrational loyalty from those closest to him.
    But for how much longer? The ranks of the praetorian guard, he mused, were beginning to murmur.
    *
    There was no moon, so Manuel Ferez had little difficulty in keeping out of sight of the two men. It was also a windy night, and the breakers of the Atlantic crashing just a few hundred yards away, helped further to conceal his surveillance.
    It was his fifth night, watching, waiting, hoping for some kind of night-time delivery to the laboratory at Oeiras, just down the coast from Lisbon. The son of an English wine shipper and a Portuguese mother, he had been educated in England, and recruited by MI6 at Cambridge. After five months at the Lisbon Station, operating out of the embassy as an assistant to the commercial attaché, this was only his second modest field assignment. Like most things in the Service, however, it too was proving boring and routine, and he was pleased when at last the two Temple Lab security guards had emerged. He noted the time: 03.08. Looking through his infra-red night-sights, they just seemed to be wheeling some bagged-up waste out the back. But at least it would give him something to report in his log.
    Silently he shadowed the men, keeping well back. There was no need to get close. They were not going far with the tall factory trolley, its wheels squeaking and crunching across the rubble towards the land site a hundred metres away from the lab which Barton was developing for a new light industrial factory.
    Ferez doubled the chew rate on his gum as he remained hidden behind a digger. ‘03.09. Target takes out black bag rubbish and returns,’ he dictated to himself, cynically. ‘Notify Vauxhall Cross without delay! Man the COBRA centre. Alert the PM!’
    They manhandled the trash, throwing it into a foundation trench, then one jumped down, seemingly taking some trouble to cover it over with soil and rubble being tipped in by his partner. Each was smoking throughout, and as they returned, he noticed the one who had been in the pit had a cold, his handkerchief at his nose. ‘Perceptive, or what? So this is why they recruit double firsts,’ Ferez continued, still jokily bantering to himself.
    Suddenly the powerful flashlight carried by one of the men lit the