Honour Among Thieves

insiders as 'Skills' - a company that specialised in solving problems that could not be taken care of by thumbing through the Yellow Pages. With his father's contacts, and Cavalli's driving ambition, the unlisted company soon made a reputation for handling problems that their unnamed clients had previously considered insoluble. Among Cavalli's latest assignments had been the recovery of taped conversations between Sinatra and Nancy Reagan that were due to be published in Rolling Stone and the theft of a Vermeer from Ireland for an eccentric South American collector. These coups were discreetly referred to in the company of potential clients. The clients themselves were vetted as carefully as if they were applying to be members of the New York Yacht Club because, as Tony's father had often pointed out, it would only take one mistake to ensure that he would spend the rest of his life in less pleasing surroundings than 23 East 75th Street, or their villa in Lyford Cay. Over the past decade, Tony had built up a small network of representatives across the globe who supplied him with clients requiring a little help with a more 'imaginative' proposition. It was his Lebanese contact who had been responsible for introducing the man from Baghdad, whose proposal unquestionably fell into this category. When Tony's father was first briefed on the outline of Operation 'Desert Calm' he recommended that his son demand a fee of one hundred million dollars to compensate for the fact that the whole of Washington would be at liberty to observe him going about his business. 'One mistake,' the old man warned him, licking his lips, 'and you'll make more front pages than the second coming of Elvis.' Once he had left the lecture theatre, Scott Bradley hurried across Grove Street Cemetery, hoping that he might reach his apartment in St Ronan Street before being accosted by a pursuing student. He loved them all - well, almost all -and he was sure that in time he would allow the more serious among them to stroll back to his rooms in the evenings for a drink and to talk long into the night. But not until they were well into their second year. Scott managed to reach the staircase before a single would-be lawyer had caught up with him. But then, few of them knew that he had once covered four hundred metres in 48.1 seconds when he'd anchored the Georgetown varsity relay team. Confident he had escaped, Scott leapt up the staircase, not stopping until he reached his apartment on the third floor. He pushed open the unlocked door. It was always unlocked. There was nothing in his apartment worth stealing - even the television didn't work. The one file that would have revealed that the law was not the only field in which he was an expert had been carefully secreted on his bookshelf between Tax and Torts. He failed to notice the books that were piled up everywhere or the fact that he could have written his name in the dust on the sideboard. Scott closed the door behind him and glanced, as he always did, at the picture of his mother on the sideboard. He dumped the pile of notes he was carrying by her side and retrieved the mail poking out from under the door. Scott walked across the room and sank into an old leather chair, wondering how many of those bright, attentive faces would still be attending his lectures in two years' time. Forty per cent would be good - thirty per cent more likely. Those would be the ones for whom fourteen hours' work a day became the norm, and not just for the last month before exams. And of them, how many would live up to the standards of the late Dean Thomas W. Swan? Five per cent, if he was lucky. The Professor of Constitutional Law turned his attention to the bundle of mail he held in his lap. One from American Express - a bill with the inevitable hundred free offers which would cost him even more money if he took any of them up; an invitation from Brown to give the Charles Evans Hughes Lecture on the Constitution; a letter from Carol reminding him she hadn't seen him for some time; a circular from a firm of stockbrokers who didn't promise to double his money but...; and finally a plain buff envelope postmarked Virginia, with a typeface he recognised immediately. He tore open the buff envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper which gave him his latest instructions. Al Obaydi strolled onto the floor of the General Assembly and slipped into a chair directly behind his Head of Mission. The Ambassador had his earphones on