"Nobody saw me."

"Think hard. Could anybody have seen you to associate you with the car even?"

" The road was empty."

" You were seen by nobody?"

"Only by the target, and whoever was with him… "

"Whoever…?"

"They're both dead."

" Do you know who it was who was with the target?"

"I did not ask his name before I shot him, no."

He stood very still. He knew that the target was a writer, an exile. He had been told what the writer wrote about the regime and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He had been told also, in whispered confidence, that two attempts against the target had failed. He was the Colonel's card…

Below him he could hear the passing wail of sirens, a familiar sound after dark had fallen over the city. The squads from the Department of Public Security always did their work at night, taking into custody those they claimed were a threat to the regime.

And the sirens escorted their prisoners from the Department to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and those who had not survived interrogation from the Abu Ghraib gaol to the Medical City Mortuary on the other side of the Al Sarafiyah Bridge.

" Y o u shot an American, Colt…"

"I killed the target."

"A C.I.A. American…"

The boy laughed out loud. He laughed in the face of the Colonel, and at the watcher standing against the door.

" So what,..?" he said.

"He was an intelligence officer."

"It was a good street, got me? It was great. It was dead, there was no one No nannies, maids, deliveries, really good. The target, he was already fidgety, I couldn't follow him all day, not a target who was that sharp. The street was right. If the American hadn't gone then he had my face, and he had the car. He had to go… and he should have chosen his friends more carefully."

At last the Colonel smiled, and there was the gravel growl of his chuckle. "And you did nothing stupid in Athens…?"