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reason.’
    ‘Confirmed.’
    ‘Confirm that you will be using non-lethal weapons.’
    ‘He just fucking said that.’ Ashton was unable to control his impatience.
    Gavin smiled to himself. For some reason, the F-word always sounded twice as obscene when delivered in Ashton’s Home Counties accent.
    ‘But we’ll take on the threat as the operational situationrequires,’ Ashton said. ‘So, if the arse-covering session is finally over, we need control – now!’
    Scowling, Woolf looked in vain for his notepad, then reached for a beer mat and scrawled a few words on the back. He signed his name, handed the mat to Ashton, with the reluctance of an atheist putting his last ten-pound-note into a church collection plate, and made the formal declaration: ‘I hand over control pursuant to the provisions of the Military Aid to the Civil Power Act. J. Woolf.’
    Ashton gave a theatrical sigh of relief, then nodded to Gavin, who immediately got on the net. ‘All stations, this is Alpha. I have control. Stand by, stand by . . . Go!’

8
    IN A SIDE street in West Hampstead, an area that had little more than its name in common with the upmarket Village it bordered, a woman was pressing shirts in the back room of a dingy dry-cleaner’s, its windows so fogged with dirt and steam that they were almost opaque.
    While she worked, her ten-year-old daughter sat on the floor at her feet, playing with a car-boot-sale Game Boy. Although she could not have been much older than thirty-five, the woman’s hair was already streaked with grey and her face was lined and worn. She put down her iron as the phone began to ring.
    She picked it up, reached for a notepad, listened in silence for a few moments, then hung up without a word. Was something wrong? Had she made a mistake? She’d been told to expect the call some time on Monday . . . ‘Go and put your coat on,’ she said, in Russian, to her daughter. ‘Hurry!’
    As the child disappeared, the woman pulled a folding wheelchair from behind the door. She manhandled it through the shop and onto the pavement outside. Keeping an anxious eye on it, she took a piece of battered cardboard from under the counter and wrote on it in awkward capital letters: ‘BACK IN 20 MINUTES. SORRY IF PROBLEM.’
    She taped the message to the window, hurried her daughter, still clutching her Game Boy, out of the shop, and locked the door behind them. The little girl ran alongside her, struggling to keep up, and pestered without success to be allowed to ride in the chair.

9
    AS GAVIN GAVE the ‘Go’, Tom broke cover. Ignoring the prone figure of the blonde, he ran towards White, then dropped to one knee and aimed his ARWEN baton gun at the upper windows of the house.
    He pumped two rounds into each of the unshuttered windows. As they smashed through the glass each circular disc ruptured and spun into the rooms, blinding anyone within range.
    Tom reloaded and switched to the lower windows, but this time, though the glass panes disintegrated, the fine CN irritant billowed outside the building. He sprinted through the gas, flattened himself against the wall and whipped out a telescoping steel rod. As he cleared the remaining glass and peeled back the shredded curtains, instead of looking into a room, he found himself facing a concrete wall.
    There was the thud of another detonation outside on Red as more charges blew apart the steel security gates set into the wall. Two black Range Rovers ploughed through the garden, churning up the immaculate lawns and passing on either side of the rose pergola where the Russian blonde still lay, immobilized and unconscious. Aluminium ladders were fixed to the roofs of the cars and Red Three and Four stood on thebumpers and running boards as they roared towards the house, eyes fixed on the windows Tom had already destroyed.
    An X-ray appeared at one, threw up his AK-47 and kicked off a three-round burst. One of the Blue team dropped off the Range Rover and hit the grass, nursing