…The man with the scar stepped out of the restaurant and paused in the doorway. The pool of light from the restaurant behind him shadowed his eyes as he scanned the rain-drenched cobbles, hazily reflecting the yellow halos of the street lights. Bueno. In his long Gucci leather coat with rabbit-skin lapels, he didn’t look out of place on the pedestrian walkways off Manchester’s Deansgate. But he was a long way away from the sun-drenched pampas, the hectic night-life in the alleys of his native Buenos Aires. He consulted the luminous dial of his Breitling. It was time. From an inner pocket he produced a white handkerchief, and, with a casual flourish of his left hand, raised it to wipe his brow. The click of a lighter from a doorway 200 yards away replied as the chimes from the not-too-distant Victorian Town Hall sounded the hour.

Bueno.

This was the man Fergie called his second-best. And the Iron Glaswegian Fergie gave no first spots. Trained in the Western camps in the age-old crafts of disruption and disinformation by the very best of the Counter-Intelligence Services in Aberdeen and Old Trafford, Fergie was a war-scarred veteran of battles in foreign lands, asking no quarter and certainly giving none. But now his imperious gaze was settled on a rising menace from the Eastlands, an Italian firm settling uneasily under the Arab influence. His plan was coming to fruition, a plan whose preparation denies measurement by any ordinary scale. And now he was sending his second-best across the East-West divide.

Past Checkpoint Charlie.

Past salvation, where even his greatest victory, his triumph of deception would still end in personal tragedy.

The man with the scar had come to accept his martyrdom. For the cause. For this was what it was all about.