followed at a studiously sedate pace.
Cecil and Leppard waited for a few moments while the others filed out and then without speaking, steered her to the elevator bank. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I can find my own way out.’ Nonetheless they went with her to the front desk and waited until she had retrieved her cell phone. As the security guard handed it to her it began to ring. She answered to Robin Teckman.
‘They’ve just bloody well fired me,’ she said. ‘I’m being escorted from the building by that little twerp Cecil and Leppard.’
The Chief laughed. ‘Really? Well, it happens to us all at some time or other. Now, pop yourself in a cab and come round to the Cabinet Offices. You’ll find the entrance door a little way up from Downing Street. Present yourself there in forty-five minutes. There’s a meeting I want you to be in on. Your name’s on the door. Don’t be early and don’t be late.’
Herrick put the phone in her bag and with a broad grin said, ‘Cecil, I wonder if you would be so kind as to get me a cab… for Whitehall.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Herrick presented the ID tag that Cecil and Leppard had failed to take from her and passed through the security gate of the Cabinet Office. She was met by a brisk young civil servant who introduced himself as Entwistle and asked whether it was her first time in COBRA. Only then did she understand she was to attend the same meeting as Spelling and Vigo.
‘The Prime Minister is running a little late,’ said Entwistle, ‘so Sir Robin suggested we put you on ice for fifteen minutes or so in a room next door. Is that all right?’
‘What’s this about?’ she asked.
‘I think you’re in a better position to say than I am,’ he replied, pushing at a door and gesturing towards a stairway. He dropped her off in a small, windowless basement cell where there were old magazines and brochures issued by departments of state. He returned with some coffee brimming in a utility china cup. Herrick settled down to idle her way through the property ads in Country Life and briefly entertained a life in some distant shire with a couple of dogs and an undemanding man who cooked.
Forty minutes later Entwistle breezed in. ‘Rightyho, you’re on. When we go in, I will point out the seat you should take. The Prime Minister is opening the meeting with a brief preamble. If you’re not sure what to do or say, just follow Sir Robin’s lead. Okay?’
She shrugged hopelessly, unable to hazard what events had brought her from being fired an hour before to a meeting presided over by the Prime Minister. They moved along a carpeted corridor and came across a huddle of men and women, all in their early thirties, who Entwistle said were the staff of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat who would be swinging into action once the COBRA meeting was over. He reached a pair of doors, looked round and said, ‘Okay?’ again. She nodded.
He opened one of the two doors and she found herself propelled into a large white room with a low ceiling and somewhat harsh lighting. There were no pictures or other adornments. Seated at the centre of a long table was the Prime Minister with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, displaying a weekend tan. On his right was the Foreign Secretary, hunched over a pile of papers; on his left was the Home Secretary, who was the only one of the three to notice her entrance. Enwistle pointed to a seat two away from Sir Robin Teckman, four places from Richard Spelling and Walter Vigo, neither of whom acknowledged her. The remaining chairs were taken by the Director of the Security Services, Barbara Markham, members of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Ian Frayne, Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, who had originally been head of Security and Public Affairs at Vauxhall Cross when Herrick was a trainee. He flashed her a welcoming nod.
‘So I stress,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘I have not convened the Civil Emergencies Committee lightly. Overnight I have been given information which cast Operation RAPTOR in a very different light, and makes me doubt the value of the way it was set out in the wake of the assassination of Vice-Admiral Norquist. Clearly these faults must be rectified before I speak to the President this afternoon. I hesitate to call it a misjudgement until the internal inquiry has reported, but I do emphasise at the outset this morning that I am concerned that RAPTOR is being run without full recognition of the risks and dangers that we face at every hour of the day. We may have to consider that it is flawed in its very concept.’
There was a slight murmur around the room, a shuffling of papers, the almost perceptible adjustment of each person’s position.
‘Now, this committee’s brief is not to take over the business of our Secret Intelligence Service, but I do intend to get to the bottom of what is happening and make my dispositions accordingly. I wonder if I could begin with you, Richard, as the Chief of SIS designate?’
Everyone noticed the stress on the last word. ‘Well, Prime Minister.’ Spelling’s eyes swept confidently around the room, rallying support which, in the downward glances and blank expressions, was evidently less forthcoming than he had expected. ‘I first of all want to draw the attention of the committee to the immensely detailed understanding we now have of the men who passed through Heathrow on May fourteen. There has never been an operation like this. This is the cutting edge of surveillance and both the United States and UK governments have benefited hugely from our ability to watch these men and monitor every move they make, at the same time as studying their backgrounds, psychological profiles, associates, support systems and financial backing. It is a triumph of modern intelligence gathering and it has greatly increased our knowledge of Islamist groups. Besides this, the risks of this in vitro experiment are minimal, because each man is covered by a squad of no less than six highly trained and armed personnel. The suspects are already virtually handcuffed.’
‘That’s very reassuring, Richard,’ said the Prime Minister, with a slightly pained expression, ‘but I’ve heard all this before. It seems to me and my two Cabinet colleagues that Sir Robin’s new information does call RAPTOR into question, particularly the value of what one paper I have received from the Joint Intelligence Committee notes as its “unyielding and exclusive focus”.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but Prime Minister, these were the terms that our American partners insisted upon.’
The Prime Minister’s gaze traversed the table and alighted on Teckman. ‘Sir Robin, perhaps you would like to go over the material you brought to me on Friday evening?’
Teckman began to speak quietly, so that the people at the furthest extremes of the room had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. Herrick smiled to herself. This was always his method of drawing people towards his argument.
‘While I don’t want in any way to undervalue the efforts made by the men and women of RAPTOR, over the last forty-eight hours we have made certain discoveries about the nature of the terrorist threat to the West, the possibility of which has largely been neglected.’ He stopped and glanced in Herrick’s direction. ‘Few of you will be aware that a key figure in this has been my colleague, Isis Herrick. She was first responsible for establishing what happened at Heathrow on May fourteen and subsequently worked with RAPTOR. Now she has brought crucial intelligence from Egypt. Even she is unaware of what she conveyed to us by satellite phone late last week.’
The faces around the table, including the Prime Minister’s, began to examine her with interest. She acknowledged his compliment with a nod, inwardly wondering what on earth was in the recording that she had overlooked, then remembered that she had only managed to listen to a small portion of it. After that she had been fighting off Loz in the bath-house.
‘The part I am going to play you was of exceptionally poor quality and has been rescued by extensive work by GCHQ technicians.’ He placed a briefcase on the table and unzipped it. Inside was a large tape player. ‘Here we go,’ he said, pressing the play button with the uncertainty of someone unused to electrical equipment.
There was a rustling noise, which Herrick recognised as coming from the dead leaves on a vine outside the window in Khan’s room, followed by silence. You could hear a pin drop in the bomb-proof underground chamber, as the eyes of each person came to rest on the spools of the tape recorder.
Then came a voice – a whisper floating on the breeze that had now audibly taken hold of a cloth hung in front of the window, though only Herrick could possibly have seen this in her mind.
‘She is a devil that girl – no?’
‘That is Dr Sammi Loz,’ said the Chief. ‘The important part is coming up now.’ He turned up the volume
