Free Dead in the Water by Brian Woolland

his own car. He stops at the canteen for a sandwich, switches on his personal mobile – which he always keeps switched off at work – and calls the garage on the card Daniella gave him last night. James Harvey is very personable – must have been a damn good salesman at some point in his career – and knows immediately who Mark is.
    “ We should be able to take it in on Monday. You can never be sure before you get it on a ramp; but from what you say we should be able to get it done by Wednesday. How does that sound?” That sounds brilliant. Mark will have a key couriered over first thing Monday morning and they’ll pick it up.
    His thoughts drift to Sara; and he checks for messages before switching off the mobile. He’s going through the menu, when he becomes aware of a tall woman with straight, shoulder length blond hair standing on the other side of the table.
    “ Nobody there?” she asks.
    “ They never are when you want them.”
    She introduces herself as Robyn Westacott. She works for SIS; she’d like to talk. He suggests they go to his room, asks if she’d like tea or coffee. She looks at her watch before declining. She’s neat, well groomed; slim and tall. In high heels, taller than Mark. Probably ten years younger than he is. He tells Ba that they shouldn’t be disturbed.
    “ I thought this kind of thing was always done in pairs.”
    “ And that I’d be older and probably male?” Mark lifts his arms and opens his hands, a gesture of self-mocking confession. She has a calm authority and a hint of prim about her. Post-modern ironic prim perhaps? “And what ‘kind of thing’ did you have in mind, Mr Boyd?” She almost smiles. “This is not an interrogation. It’s not really even about you. You are not under investigation. You’ve been vetted.”
    “ Thank you.”
    “ Have you seen the list of demands?” she asks.
    “ The Prime Minister briefed me; but no, not directly.”
    She passes him a piece of paper with a photocopy of an e-mail on it, expecting him to comment. Why hasn’t he seen this before?
    “ No government could possibly agree to this,” he says. “It would turn us into a Third World Economy in a matter of months.”
    “ But it was the election platform, wasn’t it?”
    “ It’s the timetable that’s crucial in this. There’s a global agreement to cut carbon emissions by eighty percent – but not in six weeks”
    “ Is the e-mail genuine?” she asks.
    “ I have no idea.” His tone is sharper than he’d like, but she smiles, as if to reassure him his defensiveness doesn’t bother her.
    “ Are these the kind of demands that an extremist Green group might make?”
    Mark nods. “Yes, I suppose they might – as a kind of bargaining position.”
    “ Meaning that they wouldn’t expect these demands to be met?”
    “ They can’t be met. They can’t possibly be met. They must know that.”
    “ Is that the way you’d have seen it twenty years ago?”
    He tries to suppress the feeling that she’s laying a trap for him. “I underestimated the positive links between a buoyant economy and the kind of technological change which improves the environment. And I was inclined to romanticise a kind of anti-technology, anti-science. But I always argued strongly against violence.” It’s a mechanical answer, an answer he’s given several times to interviewers; and she knows it.
    “ There were people in the movement who did advocate it?”
    “ Of course,” he says. “But you know who they were.”
    “ I’m interested in thought processes,” she says “It may not be fashionable amongst politicians to acknowledge it publicly, but in the security services we still equate intelligence with understanding.” He smiles. She may not be interrogating him; but she’s scrutinising his responses. It’s how he frowns and smiles, twitches and blinks, what he does with his hands, whether he touches his chin; that’s what matters.
    “ You think these demands should be seen as