Empire State Part 5

'Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran.'

'With all these men?'

'No, we came together in Turkey. Then we went by truck to Bulgaria, but were cheated many times. Our money was stolen by men who promised to take us to Greece by boat. There was no boat.'

'You say you are Karim Khan - not Jasur...' he checked the notes and the ident.i.ty card he had in front of him. 'Not Jasur al-Jahez. Or Jasur Faisal or Jasur Bahaji. The man with many names. You are not him.'

'No, I am Karim Khan.'

'How can I believe this?'

'Because it is the truth. Look at the picture of him. He is younger than I am and he is different. Look at him. Jasur has curly hair. I have straight hair.' He touched his damp head.

Nemim shrugged, then moved on to examine the photograph in Khan's pa.s.sport. 'Why you are not black like Pakistani man? You are like an Arab man, I think. You are Palestinian terrorist, no? You are Mister Jasur?' He held one or two of the pa.s.sport's pages to the bulb above them, which had attracted a swirl of small black flies. His brow furrowed. Then he brought it down on the table and began to sc.r.a.pe at the page that included Khan's details and photograph.

'This pa.s.sport is changed - here.' He held it out to reveal the spot where the expiry date had been altered. 'And here the paper. Where is the paper? Why no paper here?'

The page had been razored out by the man in Quetta who'd suggested that an entry stamp for Afghanistan at the tail end of 1996 was enough to put him in jail. The same man had changed the date, quite expertly, Khan had thought, but he had to admit that the pa.s.sport was barely tested. He had crossed from Pakistan to Iran along the Siahan range without being stopped by a border patrol, and the man on the Turkish border with Iran had not looked beyond the twenty dollar note folded in the front.

Nemim flipped through the pa.s.sport again and came to a page containing a British visa.

'So you go to London City in nineteen ninety-one?'

'Yes, that was my second visa. I was studying to be a doctor. I was at school in London before then.'

The policeman looked at him sceptically. Khan had the odd thought that perhaps he had dreamed his past; everything before Bosnia and Afghanistan had been a kind of fantasy to protect him from things he had done and seen. Nemim was talking but he didn't hear properly and asked the policeman to repeat himself.

'This British visa is dated. This makes your pa.s.sport thirteen years old,' he said. 'No pa.s.sport can be that old. This pa.s.sport is dead.'

He closed it and swept the notebook and Jasur's doc.u.ments up from the table. 'We understand you. We know who you are. You are international terrorist,' he said. He got up abruptly and marched from the room.

Two hours later Khan was shaken awake. He saw the bread, cheese and water that had been set in front of him while he slept. He s.n.a.t.c.hed at it but managed to eat only a little before being taken from the room. Outside the police station quite a crowd was waiting, in the middle of which was a TV crew. Khan stood in the glare of the lights, feeling shrunken and exposed. Nemim was enjoying the moment, although he did not seem to know whether to present his captive as the heroic survivor of Macedonian brutality or a dangerous terrorist, and allowed for both options in his manner.

The media opportunity ended, but instead of being taken back into the police station, Khan was placed in a van and borne off into the night.

CHAPTER NINE.

At 7.00 a.m. Isis Herrick arrived with her bag at the gentrified mews house - French shutters, geraniums, carriage lamps - not far from the American Emba.s.sy in Grosvenor Square. The door was opened by an American carrying a machine pistol. He explained - a little apologetically - that the house was part of the emba.s.sy and she was now on US soil. Then he showed her to a room where two men stood listening to Walter Vigo, installed in a revolving leather chair with a cup of coffee and the Wall Street Journal draped like a napkin over his lap. Vigo was in his element - the nexus of the 'special relationship'.

'Ah,' he exclaimed, tipping the paper to the floor. 'Here's the brains responsible for RAPTOR.' He introduced her to the two men. 'This is Jim Collins and Nathan Lyne from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. Both these gentlemen were with the Directorate of Operations and have experience in the field so they know the problems and pitfalls of an operation as complicated and wide-ranging as this. Jim is one of the people in charge of things out at Northolt and Nathan is running your desk.' He stopped for the Americans to murmur h.e.l.lo and give Isis firm handshakes.

'Northolt?' she said.

'Yes, we've moved the operation out there. I think you'll be very impressed with what you're going to see. We expect you to spend a week or two there before a transfer to the field but, as you'll appreciate, things are and will remain very fluid. I hope, by the way, you won't mind the accommodation, but it seems simpler and more secure if we're not all being ferried to and from the Bunker in minibuses.'

'The Bunker,' she said, surprised. 'Are we confined to barracks? '

'No,' interjected Collins, a stout man with a pinkish complexion and a brush of fine blond hair. 'But we're trying to keep this as tight as possible, at least for the time being. There are not too many great restaurants in the area, but you're welcome to leave for R&R when you need. It's more a question of not having large numbers of American spook-types filling up the trattoria in Mayfair. Besides, the facility under Northolt has a great deal of s.p.a.ce and there's plenty of room for solitude. There's even a restaurant and a gym.'

Collins nodded to Nathan Lyne, who rose and moved to sit on the sofa beside her. Tall, with a slow, understated manner, Nathan Lyne haemorrhaged high caste Yankee confidence, which she later learned was the result of Harvard law school and a short period with a Washington law firm.

'You're the only person we've brought on the team who doesn't need the introduction so I'll cut to the chase,' he said. 'We now have eleven suspects under surveillance. All of them pa.s.sed through Heathrow on May fourteen and as far as we know at the present time, they are all lilywhites. No record of any misdemeanour and only tenuous Islamist affiliations. Certainly no training in Afghanistan. We're making some progress on who they are and we have names for some of them.'

'We've split the suspects into three groupings - Parana, Northern and Southern. The Parana group has a h.o.m.ogeneity of its own and it's the one we've had most success with. Your work at the airport allowed us to trace three of the eleven suspects to the Shi'ite community in the tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The river that flows through the area is named the Parana. There's a strong Lebanese contingent in the area that has links to the Hizbollah organisation and its many business interests in Lebanon. The three men appeared to have been sheltered rather than trained in the towns and ranches, sitting out the worldwide hunt for terrorists and establishing unblemished credentials for themselves. A successful operation to penetrate the community by us put names to the stills from the Heathrow security film. These guys had the smell of North Africa about them, though no one was certain about their exact nationalities. Anyway, eventually the trail led to a man named Lasenne Hadaya, a former officer in the Algerian security forces who was reported to have undergone a religious conversion after seeing a sign written in a desert rock.

'Hadaya led to a man named Furquan, with whom he had had contact in Rome. Finally we nailed the ident.i.ty of the third man, a Moroccan engineer and part-time college professor named Ramzi Zaman. By the way, we had help with all this from the North African intell' services but they have no idea exactly what we're doing. Anyway, these three guys vanished in the late nineties, having lived quietly in Italy's large North African community and worked in various menial jobs that were way below each man's capabilities.'

Without asking Herrick, Collins placed a cup of coffee in her hand. She nodded gratefully.

'So, these men wind up in Western Europe. Hadaya is in Paris, Furquan in Stuttgart and the Moroccan, Zaman, is in Toulouse. Each was received by a bunch of North African helpers, who prepared for their arrival by arranging work, accommodation, cars and all kinds of local permits and pa.s.ses.'

Lyne continued for another half hour talking without pause. The Northern group consisted of five men, two in Copenhagen, one in Stockholm and two who had come to rest in Britain after flitting around Europe on May 14 and 15. They were working on the suspects in Scandinavia and were now sure that they included an Indonesian national called Badi'al Hamzi who had once been a science teacher in Jakarta. The Syrian in Denmark and the Egyptian in Sweden were unknown quant.i.ties. The two suspects in Britain were a Pakistani and a Turk. Lyne said neither of these gentlemen could break wind without MI5 and Special Branch watchers knowing about it.

'In fact they had an astonishing piece of good fortune yesterday. The Turkish fellow, Mafouz Esmet, was taken ill on the street, outside a tube station in East London. One of the female officers with the Security Services called for help and then went with the guy to hospital. He was suffering from appendicitis and had an operation last evening. She's going to visit with him tomorrow, and you know what, this could be a very important break for us.'

'Okay, so now we come to my specialty - the Southern group. These three men landed in Rome, Sarajevo and Budapest. For a time we lost one of the guys in Budapest but then we got another lucky break. An agent with the FBI's outfit in Budapest, which is mostly devoted to the Russian Maf ia's activities, was travelling on a bus and just happened to see the very man whose picture he was carrying in his breast pocket. He trailed him to a poor part of town where the guy is living with a couple of Yemenis. This rang bells and again we had all three members of the Southern group checked out against descriptions of men who served in Afghanistan. But Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence couldn't find a match for any of them. Besides, these men don't really look the part. They're out of condition and spend a lot of time eating, drinking and smoking. They're not clean-living Muslims, that's for sure.' Lyne put his hands together and turned to look at her with radiant American purpose. 'So, basically, your job will be to chase up everything you can on these three guys. You speak Arabic, I hear. There's going to be a lot of reading to be done. You'll live and breathe these men for as long as you're with us.'

'Questions, Isis?' said Vigo, in a tone that implied he didn't expect any.

'Yes, do we have any idea about their plans? I know it's early. But are there any suspicious shipments being made? Have they been observed looking at potential targets? Do we have any communications intercepts?'

'As yet we don't have the vaguest notion what they plan,' said Collins. 'They haven't been talking to each other and there's no movement of anything like your WAYFARER. Chemicals and stuff - nothing like that. There's a general feeling among the surveillance teams that the suspects are in a period of stasis, a kind of hibernation.'

'Aestivation,' said Herrick.

'Come again?' said Lyne.

'The summer equivalent of hibernation,' said Vigo, not disguising his irritation.

'Perhaps I should say something about how RAPTOR is set up,' said Collins. 'We've split the operation between surveillance and investigation. The surveillance teams on the ground - there are about thirty officers in each team - report to a desk dedicated to each suspect, which is manned twenty-four seven. Once the subject is moving, his route is plotted on an electronic map so everyone knows where he is. The field officer in charge of each surveillance consults the desk on questions of strategy and security. When there's a problem with implications for the entire operation the issue is settled by RAPTOR control, which consists of myself, Walter here and a representative of the National Security Agency. Beyond that there is a level of a.n.a.lysis and risk a.s.sessment reporting to our respective governments.' Collins smiled weakly, as if he had made a poor joke.

'There should be a lot of interaction between the two sides so anyone working on the investigation desks, like you, will have real time access to surveillance, all the communication traffic between the watchers, photographs and film, when they are available. Equally, we want to feed the material you're finding out to the surveillance teams as soon as you get it.'

'Can I ask a little about the surveillance? How many of our people are involved?'

'You know a few of them,' said Vigo. 'Andy Dolph, Philip Sarre and Joe Lapping are all involved on the ground, as you would expect. You will know many others too, but as we've made clear, this is a very closed and secret order. We've had to chose personnel who do not have past a.s.sociations with the cities we're covering, except in the case of Sarajevo where we felt it would be better to have people who've got Balkan experience. That's why Dolph is there.'

Herrick could feel herself bridling and hoped it wasn't showing. Dolph deserved a place in any surveillance operation: he was sharp and versatile. Sarre was at best mediocre and Lapping downright feeble. She remembered what Dolph said about Lapping after they'd been on a job together. 'He needs help crossing the road, that Lapping. You've got a better chance of going undercover with Liberace.'

Vigo saw what she was thinking. 'There's no room for personal compet.i.tion on this team,' he said firmly. 'It's all for one and one for all right from the top. Believe me, those people in the field will need to be rotated and your turn will come. But we thought you would appreciate a period experiencing the whole operation beforehand. After all, it's your baby, Isis. None of us would be here were it not for you.'

She made appreciative noises.

On the way to the car that would take them to the outskirts of West London, she saw Collins murmur to Lyne, 'Brittle, but cute.'

'And a fair lip-reader too,' she said, before climbing into the Chevrolet. 'Though not in Arabic.'

The Bunker was part of the Nato command centre at Hillingdon and sat directly under an airfield where there were one or two military and private aircraft. At first glance she thought of a trading floor built for decades of nuclear winter. Two constellations of circular desks spread out across the vast s.p.a.ce, almost like molecular diagrams. RAPTOR's full complement was never seen because of the shift system but at present she reckoned there were about 130 officers from three US agencies, the FBI, CIA and NSA, and the British counterparts, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Lyne explained that the surveillance operations were handled to the right of central aisle. To the left were the investigation and intelligence desks, three modules per terrorist group. They walked towards a vast notice board which featured the faces of the eleven suspects. Every known detail had been summarised and added next to the name. Lyne said the board was more rea.s.suring than helpful. He was equally dry about the tracking operation in which the suspects' positions were marked at any time of the day or night on one of the electronic city maps. A touch of a key would give an officer a record of an individual's movements over the entire course of the operation and, if desired, the program would helpfully point out his favourite routes, where he met contacts, even the bars where he took coffee in the morning. All of this had been subject to furious but so far fruitless scrutiny, he said.

RAPTOR was still experiencing teething problems. Technicians were crawling about the floor, adjusting screens or hooking cables across the ceiling. NSA programmers struggled with two large mainframes that lived in their own special environment way off in the distance. There was a good deal of noise above, and someone from a surveillance desk would occasionally call out that one of suspects was on the move. 'Number Two going walkabout, number Six in transit.'

Raised from this activity was a control box with gla.s.s sides where Vigo, Collins and the man from the NSA, a Colonel John Franklin Plume, worked. Vigo had already taken his seat and removed his jacket to reveal a pair of vermilion braces. In front of him was a large screen, split to accept several different feeds at once from secret surveillance cameras. Above the aisle was a much larger screen that could be seen by everyone. The screen was being tested and flashes of blue TV lightning probed the recesses of the cavernous s.p.a.ce above them.

They went over to the investigation and intelligence desks. Lyne introduced her to his group, then to the 'Wallflowers', a team of twenty eager young American research a.s.sistants whose work stations were ranged along the concrete wall of the Bunker. 'These are the slaves of the investigation desks,' he said, giving a managerial shoulder rub to one of them. 'Our Stakhanovites.'

She looked down at the desk. Each Wallflower was on the internet. Their work stations were choked with boxes of files and copies of every conceivable reference book. Herrick read some of the t.i.tles - Gulf Maritime Conventions, Ancestry and the Tribes of Saudi Arabia, The Dictionary of Muslim Names.

'That's about it,' said Lyne. 'Coffee, food, exercise machines, ma.s.sage, laundry, sleeping arrangements: you can find them for yourself.'

She nodded, impressed.

'This is America mobilising,' he said.

'Right,' she said, and sat down at Southern Group Three.

It soon became clear to Herrick that every second of the day, RAPTOR was producing a vast amount of information which in turn sp.a.w.ned endless new investigative possibilities. Field officers were being sent to check out the most casual contacts made by the suspects while a lot of work was being done on the helpers who had eased the men into their hiding places. A separate data bank was dedicated to this information as it constantly threw up possible links and cross-references in the backgrounds of people and organisations across Europe. Already, interesting connections had been made - men who had attended the same university or were from the same Middle Eastern tribal grouping; clerics who had visited mosques in Stuttgart and Toulouse; businesses belonging to the fixers which had arrangements with cities where suspects were present; the use of the same banks or hawala agents to transfer money.

The range of activity was bewildering. The hackers based in Crypto City at Fort Meade were penetrating the defences of every relevant public agency, including in a few instances the computer records of European intelligence services. Vast amounts of data were sucked up and flung unedited in the direction of London, where the systems people had breakdowns trying to absorb the flow of information and make sensible arrangements for its a.n.a.lysis. Added to this was the work of the Special Collection Service, a joint unit run by the CIA and NSA, based in Beltsville, Maryland. Known simply as 'Collection' it had sent a substantial proportion of its staff to Europe to eavesdrop on the suspects and their helpers. A similar outfit run by MI6 and GCHQ was also on the ground, erecting eavesdropping antennae disguised as TV aerials and dishes, and attaching devices to the suspects' phone lines. But circ.u.mspection was called for because a few of the helpers and two of the suspects were seen carrying out anti-surveillance routines while on the street. This meant they would also be alert to the possibility of electronic eavesdropping and might have access to the equipment to detect it. Electronic surveillance added another swollen tributary to the flow of intelligence that the Bunker attempted to process each day.

The British and American service chiefs let it be known they were already exceptionally pleased with the detail being gathered and sifted - they were already far in advance of their previous understanding of terrorist methods and planning, and most importantly there had been no breach in security.

'In due course,' said Spelling in a rallying speech at the end of Isis' second daily briefing in the Bunker, 'these networks of sleeper cells and enablers will be lit up like an air traffic control board. We will know the routes, the timing, the intention of these people before they know themselves. This is a very great step in the war against terrorism.' Beside him were Barbara Markham, Director of MI5, and Walter Vigo.

The Americans had all fallen in love with Vigo. They said he knew what it was like to be at the sharp end. Herrick observed that he often wandered over to the investigation desks and chatted to Lyne. On Friday evening he had made a crucial suggestion. The Rome suspect had disappeared for two days after losing the surveillance at the city's northern rail terminal.

'Have a look at the Muslim student groups in Perugia,' said Vigo. 'There's a foreign university there and our chum may be in contact with the radical groups around the Italian university.'

This advice turned out to be spot on, and two Arabic-speaking Americans were sent to the Umbrian town to sign up for Italian language courses. After this, Vigo made a point of coming over to them at least once a day. He would pull up a chair and sit with his hands folded across his Anderson and Sheppard suit to attend to detailed questions about the beliefs of the Wahabis or the transfer of gold through the Gulf States. His manner was that of a concerned PhD supervisor. The vibration of sophisticated menace Isis felt in the late night meeting with Spelling a week before had been replaced by an almost amiable focus.

Her misgivings about Vigo and the operation receded at equal pace mostly because of the pressure of work. Lyne was demanding and insisted that every avenue was investigated thoroughly. He nagged them constantly to remember the two central questions: what were the eleven planning and when were they going to move?

Lyne knew which b.u.t.tons to push. When he wanted a favour out of the emba.s.sy in Riyadh he dashed off a cable and routed it through the State Department, marking it for the attention of several diplomats, even though he knew they couldn't read it because of the special encryption used by RAPTOR. What mattered was that America's spies knew their performance was being watched by the highest levels of government in Washington. On scrambled phone lines to CIA stations all over the Middle East, Lyne harried officers to make that last call. Late one night Herrick heard him organising funds to bribe an official in the Qatar immigration service. It was four in the morning in Qatar but he ordered the station chief round to the man's house and told him to email copies of the pa.s.sport applications to the Bunker by morning Middle Eastern time.

Herrick pushed the British emba.s.sy officials in a similar fashion, though most of the MI6 officers working undercover in British emba.s.sies already sensed the urgency of the situation, even if they did not know precisely what was going on.

It was Herrick's conversation with Guy Laytham, the MI6 man in Oman, that produced a crucial breakthrough. Laytham remembered a reception early in the spring when a director of one of the country's bigger banks had pointedly asked him about the funding of rebuilding programmes in Sarajevo. The question struck Laytham as odd because he hadn't served in the Balkans and was unfamiliar with the levels of corruption. The banker said he was worried about a client's money that was being sent to a Muslim charity he had not heard of, through the Central Bank of Bosnia CK. Could Laytham make inquiries about the bank and the charity? Thinking about the conversation later, Laytham realised that his contact was not asking him to check out the bank and charity; he was telling him that one or both were involved in something that would interest him.

Herrick hung up and arranged to speak to Dolph in Sarajevo. Dolph, no slouch when it came to Middle Eastern banking practices, said he welcomed the distraction since the RAPTOR team was tripping over itself in Bosnia. The local suspect was only a little more active than a pregnant sloth, he said.

Fifteen minutes later he came back to her.

'How about sending a second donation from the same bank in Oman using the name of the original remitter, but with instructions that the money be picked up in cash at the bank in Sarajevo? I'll see to it that we have someone inside the bank to tell us when the transfer comes through. Then we'll simply watch who collects it.'

There was some prevarication at the British Emba.s.sy in Masqat, but eventually $5,000 of British taxpayers' money was released and sent on its way by the bank in Oman. Twenty-four hours later, Dolph was on the line saying they had surveillance pictures of someone picking up the money. Dolph suggested that the look of surprise on the man's face meant one thing: he had been the one to send the first donation from Masqat and was therefore the primary financier.

Photographs of the helper were sent back to Laytham. A bank official remembered the man from a year before when he had changed a very large sum of Saudi riyals into the local currency and US dollars. Records showed that the man's name was Sa'id al-Azm. He had produced a Saudi pa.s.sport and an Omani driving licence when setting up two business accounts. The driving licence meant he had been resident in Oman for some time. A search was ordered of the country's driver and vehicle licensing authority records. On the application form he gave his occupation as construction engineer and property developer. Further search of Oman's corporation registry yielded the fact that al-Azm was from a well-known professional family in Jeddah with business connections all over the Gulf.

Late that night, as Lyne and Herrick ate a meal in the Bunker canteen with the rest of Lyne's crew, Herrick suggested that al-Azm must have known suspect Four before they both ended up in Sarajevo.

'You got a point. The Parana suspects knew each other in Rome.'

'Right, maybe they attended the same Islamic college or worked together.'

'Everything says Four's got to be a Saudi, like al-Azm. We got pictures of both so why don't we start with those and get the Wallflowers to trawl through the picture agencies?'

It took just a day for the hunch to pay off. Sa'id al-Azm's professional life didn't merit a published photograph, but in a brief newspaper description of his work as project manager for a sewage works in Oman, it was mentioned that he had played for the Saudi national under-eighteen soccer side. Pictures of the side were sent to the Bunker, but Four was nowhere to be seen. Lyne wasn't about to give up.

'Maybe he made the local side with al-Azm.' A search of the newspaper libraries around the Gulf eventually produced pictures of the Jeddah touring team from 1984 and 1985. Al-Azm was seated in the front row holding the football. Standing in the back row was the man currently under observation in Sarajevo. His name was Abd al Aziz al Hafy. 'The servant of the Almighty,' said Lyne, translating the first part of the name. Then to anyone in earshot he announced, 'We've ID'd another wood p.u.s.s.y. He's in the cross hairs, brothers and sisters.'

A small celebration was held - champagne in throwaway cups and cheesecake bought from a patisserie near the US Emba.s.sy. Spelling and various American officials emailed their congratulations to Lyne. Vigo came over to them, made a courtly bow and said they were about to get a line into al-Azm's phone.

'With their usual lack of regard for our convenience,' said Vigo, 'it's quite possible that the suspects are pa.s.sing messages by word of mouth - Chinese whispers from person to person. But somewhere along the line, someone has got to make a telephone call.'

We know that, thought Herrick rather testily. The satisfaction she got from the identification of Four had not done much to reduce her unease about RAPTOR, which seemed to her to be displaying the cla.s.sic growth of bureaucracy. When later someone wandered over to ask Nathan Lyne whether they should mount an operation to get DNA samples from the suspects, she shot a look of cold fury at the man. 'Why the f.u.c.k would anyone want to know their DNA profiles? The only thing that matters is what these men are planning, not whether they drink cafe macchiato in the morning or have a predisposition to male pattern baldness.'

'I agree with Isis,' said Lyne, looking a little startled at her outburst. 'I think that's a really dumb idea.'

When the man had left, Lyne steered her away to a coffee machine. 'Something eating you, Isis? Maybe you need to go get some daylight. I know I feel like a G.o.ddam earthworm down here.'

'Yes, but that's not what's bothering me. This thing is too remote. We're no nearer to knowing what they're planning. We have no concept of their leadership, although that was what my people said they wanted when they told me about all this.'

'Hey, the whole point is to watch these guys at work. We're learning all the time. It's a long process and it may go on a year or more. That's what a good intelligence operation takes - sweat, frustration and hard labour. Who said it was going to be fun?'

'All that's true. But doesn't it strike you that in this microscopic observation we're missing some of the big things?'

'Like what?'

'Like what happened to Youssef Rahe, the MI6 agent who was found murdered in Lebanon. Like what happened to the twelfth man who got on the same flight as Rahe and is presumed to be responsible for his death. We don't know that, yet no one has bothered to find out where he went or who he was. We just a.s.sume he was the hit man and that he's disappeared into the sands of the Middle East. Why are we ignoring him?'

'You got a point about Rahe,' said Lyne. 'But the rest of what you say challenges the policy, the whole purpose of RAPTOR. You signed up for it.' 'Well, someone needs to challenge it. Remember, these men are masters at flying under the radar. What we have here is a fantastically complicated radar system designed to detect everything but the obvious.'

Lyne shook his head sympathetically but didn't agree. 'What do you want, Isis? Arrest the suspects and lose the chance to learn who's pulling their strings and how they receive money and instructions? What we're doing here is gathering life-saving intelligence that's going to be important for maybe the next five years. It's a real opportunity you created. As Walter says, it's your baby, Isis, for chrissake.'

She nodded. 'Yes, but we're missing something. I know it, but I can't tell you what it is.' She didn't like saying this. She knew that graft, logic and occasional inspiration solved problems in their world, not some kind of daft women's intuition.

'I like having you work with me,' said Lyne. 'You're solid talent right through. The real thing. But if you're going to buck against this, you may feel you're more comfortable quitting and going back to Vauxhall Cross.' Then he slapped his forehead. 'Hey, you know what, I have an idea for getting you out of here for a while but not losing you entirely.'

'What is it?'

'I'll tell you when I've talked to Jim Collins and Lord Vigo. Meantime, get your a.s.s back to work.'

She returned to the desk, picked up the phone and dialled a number in Beirut. After a little while a familiar English voice answered. Sally Cawdor was placing her ineffably sunny nature at Herrick's disposal.