He spotted an ancient Land Rover, allowed his gaze to slide past, then snapped it back with a rising sense of dismay. The driver, a boyish chap who at second glance might have been as much as thirty, was leaning patiently against the battered fender, holding a ratty umbrella and a hand-scrawled sign that said, innocuously enough, Stirling. Whether it was meant to identify him by name or point out their destination hardly mattered. The driver caught sight of him next moment and hurried over to take his duffel.

"You'd be Captain Stirling, then?"

"I would," he allowed.

"Marc Blundell, project liaison and dog's body. If anything wants fetching, I'm the one to do it." Blundell eyed the wrist cast and the crutch-cane with a dubious glance. "Training accident?"

"No." It came out stiffer than his knee. "Clonard."

Blundell's eyes widened. "Bugger, you say? The election riots? Bad luck, mate."

Stirling didn't bother to respond. No civilian could possibly understand, anyway.

A flush crept up Blundell's neck. "Right. Well. Let's be off, shall we? Beastly weather, it usually is." Blundell hunted through pockets for keys, unlocked the doors, and tossed Stirling's duffel into the backseat. "Put yourself in the passenger's seat, Captain. Would you be needing to go the messages before we leave town?"

Stirling paused in the midst of wrestling one-handed with the door latch, surprised into a faint smile. Scots dialect, its English idiom influenced to an improbable degree by past ties to France, sounded at once alien and the most heartwarming thing he'd heard in four years. "Thanks, but no, I did my shopping in London before the train went."

Blundell gave him another quick, narrow-eyed once-over, followed abruptly by a cheery grin. "You're a Scots lad, then? No lowland Englishman would've understood that."

Stirling finally wrenched open the passenger door with a scream of rusted hinges, legacy of Scotland's eternal damp. The interior of the Land Rover smelled of mildew and stale pipe smoke; the pipe lay upended in the ash tray. He eased himself into the seat. "I was born in Stirling, as a matter of fact. Took a university degree from Edinburgh before signing on with the SAS."