al-Qaeda hadn’t carried out the 9/11 attacks you wouldn’t have been there in the first place. If the CIA hadn’t funded the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the eighties then perhaps Bin Laden wouldn’t have risen to prominence. And so on. How far back do you want to go?’

‘I pulled the trigger.’ Silva repeated the bare facts she’d mulled over so many times. Felt the tears coming yet again. ‘In the end it was down to me.’

‘Sweetheart.’ Her mother raised a hand and stroked Silva’s hair. It was as if Silva was a child once more. ‘It hurts me to see you like this. At some point you have to move on.’

‘I know.’ Silva had told herself as much dozens of times, but the words refused to alter the reality of the situation. Still, her mother was correct, and invariably the advice she gave was the right course of action. ‘I’ll try to put it aside while I’m here.’

‘There’s no need to do that, we’ll give it a good talking over, right?’ Francisca smiled. ‘But perhaps leave it at the airport with the unclaimed baggage when you return to the UK, yes?’

Silva nodded and changed the subject. ‘What will we do?’

‘See the museum, go to the beach, visit the souks, eat, drink, and – this most important of all – laugh!’

They’d done all of that and, for the week she’d been there, Silva had almost forgotten about Afghanistan. When they parted in the departure hall at the airport, she’d kissed her mother and waved as she passed through to airside. She’d turned back to see her mother fumbling with a piece of paper, unfolding it, and waving it above her head. It was the sign she’d held up when Silva had arrived: BecBec.

‘Au revoir, BecBec,’ her mother shouted. And then, in Portuguese, ‘Até breve.’

See you soon…

The document Holm had cobbled together on the day of the attack hadn’t been received well, and Huxtable gave him two weeks to write a full report.

‘Something I can show to Thomas Gillan,’ she said. ‘Something he can show to the prime minister. Pretty pictures and pie graphs. Lots of confusing figures. Plenty of footnotes and appendices. You know the kind of thing.’

When he strolled across Vauxhall Bridge and met Palmer for lunch in a pub round the corner from the SIS building, Palmer reached out a hand and patted Holm on the shoulder.

‘Can’t win them all, mate,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be fair on the rest of us. We all like someone to blame. Makes us feel better.’

Brighter by the weekend. Finding a positive even when the chips were down. Palmer’s generous and optimistic nature was the opposite of Holm’s ‘glass half empty’ outlook on life.

‘The Belgian lead you gave me was bogus,’ Holm said as Palmer bought a couple of beers. ‘Without it I wouldn’t have advised Huxtable that an attack on UK soil was imminent.’

‘The bogus Belgian, yes.’ Palmer sipped his pint and made a face. ‘Eighty per cent was as far as I was prepared to go, remember? It was your call.’

‘Yes, but I expect an eighty per cent certainty to mean…’ Holm paused and glanced down at the froth on his beer. Palmer was right. The other side of eighty per cent was twenty. It was his call. ‘Didn’t you lot have an inkling about Tunisia? I mean, you’re head of the North Africa station, there must have been something?’

‘Gossip, but nothing substantial, nothing we could act on. Nothing as good as eighty per cent.’

‘No word on Mohid Latif?’

‘We don’t know where he is but according to the Border Force there’s no record he travelled to Tunisia.’

‘He’s in the bloody picture at the cafe, Harry. Of course he travelled to Tunisia.’

‘I know, but there’s nothing from Tunisian immigration or our contacts on the ground. The only sliver of intelligence is that the Tunisian authorities have identified another one of the attackers as Adnan Kadri, a well-known people trafficker. The bad news is that he’s dead.’

‘The Tunisians killed him?’

‘No. It appears he was taken out by rival traffickers.’ Palmer raised his hands in apology. ‘Sorry I can’t be more helpful.’

Holm didn’t really know what he’d been hoping for. Perhaps some reference to Latif which meant Six could take part of the blame. If not that then a miracle. At least the lunch had been good and Palmer had paid.

Holm slogged over the report for the next ten days and then attached the document to an email, pressed send, uttered a short prayer and waited for a response. It came the following afternoon as he was getting ready to leave for home. He trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor and slunk into Huxtable’s office, head down. When she told him to take a seat he sank into a high-backed chair in a vain attempt to disappear.

‘Right.’ Huxtable tapped a long-nailed finger on the desk, her voice soft but ominous. Silk laced with acid. ‘I thought we needed a talk about your performance. A review.’

‘Ma’am?’ Holm could see a copy of his report open on the desk. ‘I thought this meeting was to discuss my document on the Tunis attack?’

‘No.’ Huxtable made a point of closing the report and pushing it to one side. ‘I don’t want to pre-empt the investigation into what went wrong. However it’s obvious procedure was set aside for a period of – how shall I put this? – flying by the seat of your pants?’

Holm shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling. It was either that or forget the whole thing.’

‘You were chasing paper planes.’

‘What can I say? Everything had gone quiet. No chatter, nothing from the field. We weren’t able to verify the original source for the intel so I came to you.’ Holm leaned forward. It wasn’t a great shot, but at least he’d managed to get the ball back across the net. ‘You had my recommendation on raising the threat level and all the information.’

‘And then

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