Two hours later, myself, Goren, Davenport, Whitefield & Smith were puzzling over what we'd overheard on Timkowski's surveillance gear, and trying to work out if we'd actually overheard anything useful from the hour-or-so's worth of conversation between Shorokogat and his friends, before their boat moved out of listening range. The equipment had worked just fine. I'd yet to hear Timkowski string together more than about three words, but he clearly really knew his stuff, it sounded as though Shorokogat was in the next room, which made my job immensely easier. Just as well, really. Smith, Whitefield, Goren and Davenport had pounced on the translation as soon as I'd completed it, and immediately started trying to work out how it fitted in with what we'd already learned.

So far, we had learned nothing other than that Shorokogat was enjoying his new boat, his friends were glad he'd invited them and that he'd taken his fifteen-year-old son with him. If we had spent all this time and effort just to eavesdrop on a family outing, a lot of very senior people were going to be very annoyed indeed at the waste of resources. Luckily, that was Whitefield's problem, not mine. My problem was that I still wasn't too happy with part of the translation I'd done. I wasn't at all sure I'd heard the speaker, one of Shorokogat's two crew members, very clearly; he had an odd pronunciation and seemed to be barely able to speak Russian. Desperate to rest my eyes from staring at my notes, and my ears from listening to Timkowski's recordings, I glanced out into the small hallway, which was beginning to fall into shadow as the late afternoon and evening approached. It seemed a bit early for that, but we'd probably been at this longer than I thought.

We were in the biggest room in the small building, which had no windows apart from one small skylight. Whitefield finished summarising what we'd learnt so far from this, which was, effectively, nothing new. Well, this had always been something of a long shot… In the corner, Timkowski's bulky figure hunched over his surveillance equipment, deftly twiddling the controls to see if he could pick anything else up. The air of gloom among the rest of us was almost palpable. He glanced across at Goren, who was leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. I could see Smith rolling his eyes. "Detective Goren, have you got anything to add"?

"There's an old Russian story," Goren replied, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. "There's a checkpoint on the border between Russia and Estonia; this is around 1920 during the War of Independence… Every Thursday, a man who works at the local weapons factory, manufacturing rifles, rides up to the checkpoint and tells the guards that he's going to visit a friend on the other side of the border. Every time, they search him thoroughly, and they never find anything, but they notice over time, he's wearing better clothes, better shoes, eats well, and the Estonian fighters have better guns than they have…. They keep searching him, but they never find anything on him, can't prove he's doing anything other than what he says… A long time afterwards, one of the guards meets the man in a bar, they sit down and have a drink together, and start talking, and the guard finds out the truth... Now, do you know what the man was smuggling?" He smiled, and looked at us expectantly, not at all fazed by the synchronised what the fuck? looks he was getting from Smith and Whitefield.

Inspiration struck. "He was smuggling horses?"

"He was smuggling horses."

Davenport laughed, and added "And they were selling the horses to pay for the guns?" Goren nodded, grinning widely now.

"And this helps us how?" Smith interjected.

"You think Shorokogat's smuggling boats?" Whitefield asked. Goren shook his head, and rubbed a hand over his face. "No. Not boats, not enough profit, he wouldn't get personally involved… he's smuggling something on the boats."

"He can't be," Whitefield replied. "He's under surveillance all the time; he can't be hiding anything on them, not drugs, not foetal remains… nothing."

"If you want to hide something, hide it where everyone looks, because they'll know it can't possibly be there, because they've looked…" Smith mused, looking intrigued.

"What do we see when we look at Shorokogat's boat?" Goren was pacing the room now. I could almost hear him thinking, like being close to a transformer in the rain, when you can hear the energy buzzing around it (was this what life was like for his partner all the time?).

"We see; the boat, the supplies… the crew," Davenport finished the sentence and the two of them froze simultaneously.

Whitefield shook his head. "Can't be. He has the same number of crewmates every time he goes sailing… we know that he often hires new staff when he sails" (he looked at Davenport, who'd supplied this information) "but that's because he's supposed to be an awful employer, they leave swearing never to work for him again."

"Are they the same crewmates every time? Does anyone check that the people on the boat when it returns are the same people that left with it, not just people who look like the crew, wearing the same clothes?"

"Wouldn't there be extra crew if he was picking someone up on the journey?" I asked, and regretted it, as four faces turned towards me with identical You really are new to this, aren't you? expressions. Shorokogat dealt in drugs and trafficked women. He wasn't going to balk at shoving someone he'd just hired over the railings, probably with a knock over the head to ensure they didn't inconveniently manage to swim ashore. People have accidents at sea all the time… What had the crew said whilst we'd been listening?

"Everyone shut up a minute." I held up a hand. "Can I hear the recording again, the part where we heard the crewmember speaking to Shorokogat?" Silently, Timkowski rewound the tape and I listened, shutting my eyes to block out the feeling of eight eyes staring at me. The recording ended, Goren started to ask "Did you…", then trailed off as I held up my hand again, mouthing the words. I tried saying them out loud, repeating what the man had said, and suddenly realised. I was using the wrong accent. If I tried saying them with a Serbo-Croat accent, not Russian or Ukrainian, then I made the exact same pronunciation errors. I opened my eyes. "The crewmember's not Russian or Ukrainian. He's Serbo-Croat."

"Have we got any pictures of the crew?" Davenport asked, urgently.

"Here." Whitefield shoved the file at him; he and Goren pored over them. Davenport flipped through them, then stopped, pointing at one picture with an expression of utter triumph. I'd never seen anyone grin that widely before.

"I thought this face looked familiar." Davenport was practically crowing. "I know who this is. That's Yegeny Shirkirov. Or rather, it's someone who looks just like him. Unlucky for him; I'd guess he's now at the bottom of the Atlantic."

"You're certain?"

"What did Shorokogat say? 'Hope you had a pleasant journey here?'" Davenport looked at me for confirmation; I nodded. I was certain of that.

"Why would he ask a crewmember that? It makes no sense. Shirkirov vanished, as far as anyone could tell, just over five days ago…"

Goren picked up his thought. "I would guess that if we pull the records, we'll find that a cargo flight from Zagreb Airport made an unscheduled refuelling stop further up the East Coast following a transatlantic flight at some point in the last few days. I think he travelled down from there somehow, maybe a fishing boat, something that wouldn't attract too much attention…"

Davenport finished the thought. "Shorokogat shoved the crewmember who looked like him overboard, then picked Shirkirov up just before the boat came into listening range… we were unlucky not to hear that, I guess."

"Did Shorokogat have any Serbo-Croatian crew when he left?" Goren asked, urgently.

"No." Smith shook his head. "I'm certain."

Goren turned to me. "You're certain about the accent."

"One hundred percent. It can't be anything else."

Davenport was grinning so widely I was worried the back of his head would fall off. "Yegeny Shirkirov, known to be involved in smuggling arms to Chechen rebels, in hiding since the Serbo-Croatian authorities and the UN declared him to be wanted for crimes against humanity, responsible for the deaths of more people during the Yugoslavian civil wars than anyone is able to count, including at least one incident where he forced a group of people to dig a trench, then jump in whilst his cronies poured petrol on them and set them alight… he makes Shorokogat look small, and they have no idea we're listening in. He'll be returning on the boat like a little spring lamb."

Whitefield reached for the radio. "Excellent work, everyone…" He switched it on and began to contact the authorities back in New York. The five of us, including Timkowski, who'd looked up from his equipment, exchanged wide grins. I suddenly understood why Goren & Davenport were so devoted to their careers. The sheer rush of catching someone like that, of knowing that the bad guys were going down, that you'd been the one to do it, your intelligence, your knowledge, your skills… I was going to request extra training when I got back…. and at that moment, the sky lit up so brightly that we all threw our hands over our eyes. The lights went out. Timkowski ripped his headphones off, swearing as a burst of static squawked out of them, Whitefield dropped the radio and there was a crash of thunder outside so loud that for a minute I seriously thought we'd been attacked.

Davenport, Goren and I sprinted outside the room to the windows in the entrance, staring out in mutual stunned shock as a wave of falling rain burst over the windows. It had gone pitch black outside, so dark it looked like night had fallen prematurely. Another flash of lightning, another thunderclap, and the sound of rain being driven against the windows with such force I instinctively stepped back from them. I turned to see Whitefield emerging from the surveillance room, clutching the radio and shaking his head. "I can't get a signal – too much interference. I'm going out to the Jeep to see if it's clearer out there. Smith's going to look at the generator." He rammed a hat on his head and sprinted out of the door. I could barely see him after he'd gone a few paces; the wind and rain were so fierce that it was almost impossible to see anything, and the rainwater was already beginning to form a new river outside the door.

We stared out in silence at the churning sea. It was so dark it looked as though night had fallen prematurely, apart from the odd flash of white where the waves were breaking on the shore. Davenport was the first to break the silence. "Well, we're fucked, aren't we?"