British Intelligence. Well, well, well. I suppose they wanted someone with insight into the workings of the rackets in Belfast. If the peace deal everyone was talking about came off, then they’d want to make sure all those bored paramilitaries in Ulster didn’t move into organized crime and drugs. I could be very useful on that score. Or maybe they wanted someone to spruce up their training programs for undercover ops. I could probably do a job like that. I was army trained and I’d interrogated the shit out of people before. Might be a nice little earner if I played my cards right. The FBI kept me safe but they didn’t exactly keep me flush.

Samantha skimmed through the folder, pretending to notice things for the first time.

“I don’t have all day, you know. I’m very anxious to find out if Stella can learn to love herself again,” I said, holding up my novel.

Samantha smiled and continued to thumb my file.

“You’ve been quite the naughty boy, haven’t you, Michael?” she said, her tone as condescending as if she were a Victorian missionary and I, a recidivist cannibal chieftain caught with a hut full of human heads.

“Depends what you mean by naughty.”

“Killing several unarmed people in cold blood.”

“You want to tell me my life story or you want to get on with it?” I said, irritated.

“Don’t get cross. I’m here to help you,” she said.

“You’re here to bust me out of this joint,” I sneered.

“That’s right,” she said, crossing her legs and accidentally hitching up her skirt a notch.

Really not a bad-looking chiquita if you liked that sort of thing and, if truth be told, I did like that sort of thing. You could tell that underneath the prim, proper, repressed, King and Country exterior… the rest of the sentence is cliché, but I’d bet money it wasn’t far off the mark.

“Michael, first of all, I feel that it’s very important that I’m honest with you. You’re obviously too smart to fall for a line, so I’ll tell you how it is. Although it looks like we have all the cards, in fact I have a poor bargaining position. If time were not a factor, you would need us much more than we would need you. But, alas, time is a factor,” she said in that roundabout diplomat way again.