place once it had been secured. The Chief returned to Vauxhall Cross, leaving Dolph and Herrick to watch as a stream of visitors looked over the shots from Bosnia. Journalists, diplomats, army officers and even the odd aid worker had been contacted the previous evening and asked as a matter of urgency to Thames House. They were all on time for the unusual invitation to coffee and croissants, but as each of them pored over the photographs laid out on a table and consulted a map where the photographs had been shot, it became clear that the remaining men would not be so easily identified. ‘Well,’ said Dolph as the last one left, ‘we’ve still got the Guignal gal. Maybe Lapping should fly out to Skiathos with a disk. He might even lose his virginity.’
‘It would be quicker to get her to an internet cafe and send them by email,’ she said.
‘You’re not worried about security?’ he asked.
‘Damn security, and anyway we do need to speak to her about Jamil Rahe. She may remember him. Why don’t you do that?’
Dolph’s eyes flared. ‘All of a sudden I’m your runner, Isis. Why the fuck don’t you do it?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ll both talk to her, okay? It will be better.’
Dolph still looked put out. ‘You’re tired. You need to rest.’
‘Yes,’ she said, managing a grin. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve had a rough few weeks and sooner or later it’s going to tell.’
‘Lecture over?’
‘I mean it,’ he said, looking down at the photographs.
She was tired, damned tired. She thought of Harland in her kitchen that morning, sitting as though drugged, over a cup of coffee. They said little, but she had tried to let him know that she didn’t regret sleeping with him. He was affectionate but also slightly remote, as though mentally drawing back to grasp the scale of something. Fine, she had thought, she’d wait, and if this turned out to be a one-night stand, all well and good. It had been very pleasant.
‘Don’t worry,’ she had said, brushing her knuckles across the top of his hand as the cab pulled up at Brown’s Hotel. ‘There’re no strings. I’m not like that.’
‘I’m not worried, just astonished that it happened. More than that, I’m moved and extraordinarily grateful that you would favour my old bones.’
‘Grateful is not a word that should ever be used in the context of sex.’
They smiled at each other and it was left at that, but as he reached for the handle of the cab door she noticed the haunted, puzzled look in his eyes. She clutched at his arm and immediately regretted it because it made her seem needy, when in fact she was just concerned for him.
‘Are you okay?
He had replied with slight irritation, ‘Yes, of course I’m okay.’ Then he pulled free and got out of the cab.
It had been a very unsatisfactory parting and she wished she could put it right.
Dolph and Herrick had returned to Vauxhall Cross by 11.00 a.m. but it was not until 1.10 p.m. that they were told that Jamil Rahe had left his house with a sports bag over his shoulder and walked to the end of his road to catch a bus. A feed from Thames House was hooked up and they were able to hear Jamil’s progress. The bus took him to the centre of Bristol, where he moved unhurriedly from store to store buying odd items – a pair of socks, a packet of soap and a school exercise book. At length he came to an electronics shop where he browsed through the display and then, as though on impulse, bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone. The phone stayed in the box and the watchers were fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to use it straight away because it would require a period of charging. Rahe then whiled away time in a park, briefly visited a library and considered the programme of movies at a multiplex cinema. The consensus was that he had activated a pre-planned routine to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Several times he went through ‘dry cleaning’ channels – an escalator in a shopping mall, an underpass and an alley, each of which allowed him to observe at leisure the people in his wake. The police response was briefly to implement a procedure known as cascade surveillance, which involved filling his path with watchers, like water falling over a boulder. But Rahe moved so slowly through the city centre that it soon became necessary to revert to traditional methods and just hang a little further back.
Herrick realised time was getting on. Even though the raid on the Pan Arab Library had now been put back to 6.00 p.m. she would need to leave Vauxhall Cross by 5.15 and it was now 3.30. She went and found Dolph and they tried for a fifth time to raise Helene Guignal. She answered on the first ring, and in response to Herrick’s question, told them that she had her laptop with her and could pick up her email. The Bosnia photographs were sent to her.
Ten minutes later she called them. Dolph put her on speaker.
‘These pictures are etonnant – how do you say? Amazing. The whole group is here.’
‘Which group? Do you remember their names?’
‘The one standing in profile is Hasan, my boyfriend. And you have seen Yaqub and Sammi, yes?’
‘That’s Youssef Rahe, ’ Herrick said to Dolph.
‘Who else do you see?’ he asked impatiently.
‘Larry.’
‘Larry? Which is Larry?’
‘The man in the foreground. He is the American – a convert to Islam. J’oublie son nomme islamique, mais Les Freres – the Brothers – they called him Larry.’
‘This group referred to themselves as the Brothers?’ asked Dolph.
‘Yes.’
‘Right, the tall man by the tree. This man we now believe to be Algerian, like Yaqub. He is passing himself off as Yaqub’s brother?’
‘Please, I don’t understand.’
‘He is pretending to be Yaqub’s brother?’
‘ Non! He is not his brother! But he is Algerien, yes.’
‘His name?’
She hesitated. ‘Rafik… no, Rasim. That is it – Rasim.’
Dolph was scribbling a note to Herrick.
‘Any other name for him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know anyone else?’
‘These are the only names. Some of the others I recognise but I did not know them well. I do not know their names.’
Dolph passed Herrick a note which said, ‘THEY WERE ALL IN THE HAJ
SWITCH.’
She wound up the conversation, saying that she or someone else would call that evening and that Guignal should keep her phone on. She also said Nato headquarters would be made aware of her help in this matter, a way of underlining what she had already told Guignal about not showing the pictures to anyone or speaking about them.
‘We’ll have to get someone to Guignal,’ she said. ‘We need to know everything she can remember about the Brothers.’
‘There are so many fucking names in this thing,’ said Dolph. ‘As soon as we’ve nailed one group, up pops another with a fresh load of backgrounds and connections.’
‘But we’re peeling the onion.’
‘Yeah, and I’m fucking sure that every one of them went to the Haj. Nathan Lyne wanted to keep on it, but Collins and the rest of them said we should focus on the suspects we knew about in Europe. They were going to come back to it. A bad mistake.’
