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winced.
    â€˜Yes, yes,’ he wheezed through clenched teeth. ‘My knees aren’t so great anymore, but I’ll be all right.’
    He lowered himself into the car with a pained groan. He fastened his seatbelt and adjusted the rear-view mirror, which came unstuck in his hand. He pulled some thick black tape out of the glove box and retaped it to the front window. ‘Buckle up, everyone.’
    Stefan revved his car and crunched through the gears before bumping over the kerb and into the airport fence, which easily buckled under the wheels of his car. He crossed three lanes of traffic and swerved around a goods truck, leaving a tangle of cars in his wake, skidding into roadside bushes and spinning into tyre-screeching donuts.
    â€˜So.’ Max tugged at her seatbelt to make sure it could handle Stefan’s driving. After racing through London with Steinberger in the Force’s Aston Martin, no safety precaution was enough. ‘Have you been a spy for long?’
    â€˜Most of my life. When I was young I wanted to be an actor, but do you know how hard it is to even get an audition?’
    He spun the wheel hard into oncoming traffic to avoid a car that had double parked. ‘Oh yeah, everybody wants to be Johnny Depp or George Clooney or Orlando Bloom.’
    He jerked the wheel back again and his car screeched into the left lane.
    â€˜First, you have to be good-looking, and don’t get me wrong, I was a very good-looking man in my younger days. The women threw themselves all over me. Ah,’ he breathed dreamily, ‘I was quite the handsome devil, I can tell you.’A wail of squealing tyres drilled into their ears as Stefan accelerated through a red light. ‘Then you spend years doing commercials for breakfast cereal or a new toothbrush, while knocking on doors of producers and directors who are too busy to see you, and when they do see you, all they really want is to use you up and make themselves lots of money.’
    Stefan started driving even faster.
    â€˜Spying must be a good alternative career?’ Linden asked calmly from the back seat, as if his life wasn’t in extreme danger of being flattened under a truck.
    Stefan brightened momentarily. ‘It is, don’t get me wrong.’ He turned to look at Linden. ‘But acting was my first love, and you can never quite forget a first love.’
    â€˜I know what you mean,’ Linden nodded.
    â€˜Stefan!’
    Stefan turned back just in time to slam on the brakes. ‘ Grazzi , Max. That was close.’
    Max’s heart jammed in her throat like a cricket ball as she watched a mother push a pram across the street, only centimetres from the car’s bonnet.
    Stefan took off again with a spluttering jerk. ‘You’ll learn that people in Malta are not very gooddrivers or pedestrians – they never watch where they are going. But you are lucky.’ He stabbed his chest proudly. ‘I’m one of the safe few.’
    It was a whole thirty seconds before Max could start breathing again.
    Stefan drove into the narrow streets of Malta’s capital, Valletta. ‘This city has a fascinating history. It was built in the sixteenth century after The Great Siege, a battle that threatened to wipe Malta off the world’s face forever.’
    He screeched into a roundabout, cutting off a busload of school kids and a group of elderly German tourists.
    â€˜We Maltese people might be short, but we are strong. With only seven hundred knights and nine thousand civilians, we faced an invading force of thirty thousand armed men.’
    Stefan’s car jumped a kerb to squeeze past a delivery van before crashing back onto the cobbled road.
    â€˜After four months of fighting, the Maltese people drove away the invaders, and the magnificent city of Valletta was built in memorial of that great heroism.’
    He turned sharply to avoid a street filled with market stalls, only to bump his way to the