responsible for sending those signals, but that consideration had been overridden by the need to eliminate Khan and maybe Loz too. At the back of her mind she wondered if the CIA station in Djibouti, which would have controlled the Predator, was in possession of entirely accurate information.
She lay dozing in the sun, running through it all and trying to focus on what was left in the ruins of the attack. Khan was gone. Loz was probably dead. However, she was still certain that a third person existed, a man whom both Khan and Loz had met in Bosnia and then subsequently in Afghanistan.
She picked up her cell phone and called Dolph again, who answered on the first ring.
‘Welcome back, Isis,’ he said, on hearing her voice. ‘By Christ, we were all relieved when we heard you were okay.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Look, I need to ask you something. A couple of weeks back you mentioned some photographs from Bosnia. You had an idea that there was a photographer on the front line where Loz and Khan were serving. Am I imagining it or did you actually say that? I was half-expecting you to send me some material by email.’
‘That’s right, but I never got hold of him.’
‘Can you trace him and see if he is willing to empty his archives for us? Photographers keep everything, and he might just have what I’m looking for.’
‘Sure.’
‘And there was a French journalist who covered the siege of Sarajevo – I think you said she now works for Nato. Can you get hold of her too? It’s important.’
‘I thought you were retired from this inquiry.’
‘Not that I’ve heard.’
‘Yeh, I can’t imagine that Vigo and Spelling missed out on the full story of what happened. I mean, it doesn’t look good for the people who went on the pyramids package tour.’
‘Thanks for the encouragement. I was acting on the Chief ’s orders throughout. You know that.’
‘The former Chief ’s orders. He’s been airbrushed from the official history. He left on Friday, although he’s not actually due to leave until Wednesday of this week.’
‘Christ!’
‘But I’ll stand by you all the way.’
‘Somehow that doesn’t reassure me in the way it’s meant to.’
‘Seriously, Isis, you have my support, if it counts for anything. Look, I’d better go before you give me something else to do. We’ll speak tomorrow when I know about the photographer and the French hackette.’
‘Thanks Dolph, you’re a good friend.’
The moment she hung up her phone rang again, and she answered to Harland, who asked, ‘Can you do dinner tomorrow? I’ll be at Brown’s Hotel, Albermarle Street. We’ll speak then.’
She managed to say yes before he hung up.
Monday morning came early with a summons from Vauxhall Cross. Spelling wanted to see her in the Chief ’s office no later than eight-thirty.
She took a cab into London. It was again a beautiful day, and as they drove through Kensington Gardens she suddenly felt a calm resignation about what was going to happen. If she was to be expelled from the Service under a cloud, so what? A summer in Scotland beckoned and then she’d find a job in the autumn and begin to lead a normal life, without having to allow for the possibility that every call she made was being listened to. There was nothing Vigo or Spelling or any of the other whey-faced bureaucrats could do to her, and she felt good about that.
As the taxi crept through the rush-hour traffic down Vauxhall Bridge Road towards SIS headquarters, her phone rang again.
‘Hello, it’s Leonard Jay.’
‘Hello,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Dr Jay from Oxford!’
‘Oh yes. Do you have any results for me?’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m ringing about,’ he said huffily. ‘I was concerned to get them to you as soon as possible since you did sign up for the priority service and we have already received payment. I would have sent them by post, but you specifically instructed us to convey the results of the analysis to you personally by phone.’
‘Absolutely right. What are the results?’
‘Well, it was difficult with the first sample because while there was a preponderance of material from one individual – ninety per cent of the scales of skin and the hairs came from that person – there were traces of other people too. So we made the assumption that it was this person who interested you and obtained a clear picture of his genetic profile.’ He drew breath. ‘Now the second sample, which reached us about ten days ago, was from one person. There was no contamination to contend with and we had-’
‘And?’ she said impatiently.
‘To answer the question in your letter, these two samples are from different people.’
‘Are you certain about that?’
‘As certain as I can be about anything. We do a lot of forensic work, Ms Herrick, and we applied the same rigorous standards to your samples as we do to evidence for a criminal case. These are two different people. I am absolutely sure of it. I had a slight worry that sample B, that is the second one you sent me, might be matched against some of the minority material in the first sample. But we found B did not match any of the traces in A. There is no doubt about this.’
Herrick pressed a finger in her ear as the cab roared forward to make the lights on Vauxhall Bridge, and asked if the results could be couriered to London.
Dr Jay said that would be no problem.
‘Is there anything else you can tell from either sample?’ she asked.
‘As a matter of fact there is. Both are male and both come from Mediterranean stock.’
‘You can say that for certain?’
‘Yes, recent advances mean we can show that on the Y chromosome of both men there is a common mutation present that originally appeared in the peoples of the Middle East. Indeed this marker has been very useful in the study of ancient migration patterns. There is still a distinction to be found in the character of the Y chromosome between the men of northern and southern Europe.’
‘So you can assert that neither sample comes from, say Anglo-Saxon or Indian men.’
‘Well, not categorically, but you might conclude that the two were from roughly similar genetic stock.’
‘You might be able to say they were Arabs, for instance?’
‘Yes, you could certainly argue that.’
The cab pulled up a little distance from the main entrance of SIS and Herrick asked the cab driver to wait while she finished her conversation.
‘But to be sure,’ she said, ‘you would have to do the test again with new samples, is that right?’
‘Oh, I don’t think there’s much point. As long as you are not proposing to take this to a court of law, I think we’re on pretty safe ground.’
She gave him an address in central London used by SIS as a letter-box and then hung up.
The Chief ’s office had clearly suffered an unceremonious exorcism. Propped against the wall outside were Sir Robin Teckman’s library of books about the Soviet Union and the Middle East, his family photographs and his collection of landscapes by Cavendish Morton. On the other side of the entrance was some rugby memorabilia that she recognised from Spelling’s office, and a new widescreen TV.
After a few minutes in the corridor, Spelling’s assistant told her to go in. Vigo and Spelling were sitting on one side of the maple veneer conference table that had also migrated from Spelling’s office over the weekend. Vigo indicated that she should take a chair opposite them. Spelling did not look her way, but it was already plain to her that the battlefield general was glorying in his new power and the bold decisiveness that was expected of him.
‘We haven’t long,’ he said, removing his glasses. ‘I must be at Downing Street for a meeting of COBRA within the hour. Walter, where are the others?’
Herrick reflected that Teckman would never have announced he was going to Downing Street. She found
