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his life. A face framed by silky chestnut hair and dominated by cool grey eyes.
    Chrissie.
    It had been a whim to put her phone number in the German’s newspaper. An instinctive act, stemming froma belief that she still cared for him. She’d been Christine White when they first met, although she’d used a different surname as her cover. Christine Kessler now, the wife of a department head at MI6. Ironically it had been here in Iraq their affair had begun, six years ago. With Iraq’s army massing on the border with Kuwait, Western intelligence had been short of agents in place. Newly transferred to the Intelligence Service from the Royal Navy, he’d been despatched to Baghdad as an extra on a trade mission. A few days later the Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait, and when the West threatened retaliation most foreigners in Iraq, including himself, had been rounded up as hostages.
    He’d been told before his mission that there was another MI6 agent in Baghdad, but not her name. A woman whose cover job was with a British company running a construction contract. He knew that she’d been told about him too. At the hotel where most of the Britons were being held by the Iraqi security services, they’d identified one another through a process of elimination.
    She’d attracted him instantly. Physically at least. From the crown of her red-brown hair to the immaculately pedicured toes peeping from a pair of slingback sandals, she’d oozed style and sensuality. Her character had grated at first – she’d tried to pull rank because she’d worked for the Intelligence Service longer than him. But the antipathy hadn’t lasted. Thrown together by confinement to the hotel, their relationship had become close and equal.
    But not intimate at first, not until the Iraqi announcement that the foreigners were to be used as human shields against American bombers. Then a change had come about in her. The fear spreading through the hostages that they would all be killed had gripped her with an irrational intensity. She’d kept her cool in public, butalone with him in the privacy of his room she’d gone to pieces. She’d shared his bed that night and he’d done what he’d wanted to do since first clapping eyes on her. The next day, when the hostages had been shipped off to be held at strategic targets, Sam had been separated from her. Only at Christmas when they were repatriated to Britain had they met again. Only then had she told him that she was engaged to be married. To Martin Kessler, a senior official at SIS.
    He’d expected that to be the end of the matter – a sexual interlude in a moment of crisis – but the bond forged in Baghdad was not to be broken so easily. A few months after her wedding she’d contacted him again, inviting herself to his apartment one Sunday afternoon. Within minutes of walking through the door she’d told him her marriage had been a terrible mistake. That her husband lacked bedroom skills and seemed disinclined to acquire any.
    She’d made no secret of the purpose of her visit. Her directness had disarmed him. He wasn’t used to women declaring so openly that they wanted sex, particularly women who attracted him as much as Chrissie. Despite qualms about what he was getting into, he’d obliged her, because when she’d unbuttoned her shirt in his living room that Sunday afternoon, the reasons for doing so had seemed infinitely more appealing than those against. Their affair had lasted for over five years on and off, until three months ago, when she’d announced her ‘final and irreversible’ decision to commit herself to her husband. No good reason given. At least, none that had made sense to him.
    The truck hit a pothole suddenly, shooting pain through his bruised back.
    How stupid. How incredibly ill-judged, he realised now, to have sent his message to a woman who’d rejected him. Phoned through to