The rules are simple. Break up your shape. Hide your smell. Never show your silhouette. Check the surfaces of your kit. Space the movements of your team. Use the shadows. Danny "Badger" Baxter has a talent for surveillance. He's always followed the rules. Until now, they've kept him alive. But now, Badger has a bigger job than photographing dissident Northern Irish Republicans in muddy Ulster fields, or Islamic extremists on rain swept Yorkshire moors. MI6 has a plan to assassinate the Engineer - a brilliant maker of improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that account for 80 percent of Allied casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. The spooks know he's planning to leave his home in Iran. They just need to find out when and where he's traveling. So Badger finds himself on the wrong side of the Iranian border, burdened with a partner he loathes, lying under a merciless sun in a mosquito-infested marsh, observing the house. If things go wrong, as far as Her Majesty's Government is concerned, his part in the plot is completely deniable.