She’d never been to Rome before, but had expected balmy Southern European weather, even at this hour of the night. The train journey from Fiumicino Airport into the centre of the city took thirty minutes. At some point she might need to hire a car, but the hotel address she’d been given was near the station and so she’d decided to take public transport rather than wrestle with the vagaries of traffic in an unfamiliar city. On the way, she ran through the contents of the note she’d memorised before destroying it. Do the necessary, had been the concluding phrase. It was ambiguous, but not much. At Gatwick Airport, while she’d been waiting to board the Lufthansa flight – it had been the 22.13 departure, which left her with over two frustrating hours to kill – Rebecca had bought a small laptop computer. She’d seated herself on a rack of chairs with her back to a wall and had inserted the flash drive which had been in the packet along with the passport and the note.
