‘I didn’t leave the situation room until close to six in the morning. We’d done all we could and in the end, as you know, a joint decision was made that the intel was wrong. We had no idea of the target or the location. All we knew was a threat had been made. It could have been anywhere from Tottenham to Timbuktu. We contacted every agent we had but nobody had any info. GCHQ had nothing but the original intercept. SIS gave us a lead from Belgium but it turned out to be false. The Americans either had nothing or weren’t telling us anything.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know what it means. The Americans share intelligence with us when it suits them. If it doesn’t suit them they play their cards close to their chests.’
‘And the evidence for this?’
Holm shook his head. He had an old friend in the CIA who’d confirmed Holm’s suspicions years ago. ‘Strategy and tactics, old buddy,’ his friend had said. ‘Two separate things. Out in the field our countries play the game in very similar ways, but at the top of the tree the policy wonks are looking at it differently. Sometimes that means not telling our allies everything even if the end result is casualties on the ground.’
‘Well?’ Huxtable waited for a beat. ‘I’ll take your silence as an indication your allegation has no basis in fact. It’s similar to your obsession with Taher. Your excuse for not finding him is he has to be receiving tip-offs from inside the security services, yes? That we have a mole?’
‘Well, there’s—’
‘Absolutely no evidence to back up your claim.’ Huxtable rapped the table like a judge using a gavel to bring silence to a courtroom. ‘Now, let’s move on to the real reason I called you here.’
Holm let himself slump farther down into the chair, as if in doing so he might avoid the hammer blow that was surely coming.
‘As you know, JTAC has always recruited the brightest and best. We’re lucky to be able to draw personnel from many different branches. You came across to Five from Special Branch originally, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Holm nodded. The way Huxtable phrased it made his transfer to MI5 sound like a cold war defection, but Holm had been an obvious recruit and he’d felt he was coming to the end of his days in the police. When the call had come he’d jumped at the chance.
‘You had a lot to offer back then.’
Holm flinched. Huxtable was getting to the business end of the meeting.
‘Although you’ve had personal issues recently, I see.’ She indicated a printout on the desk in front of her. She looked up and gave a flat smile. ‘Still, it happens to nearly all of us from time to time.’
The inference being that nothing personal would ever happen to Huxtable.
‘My wife.’ Holm shrugged. There was no point in hiding anything. Huxtable was all-knowing and all-seeing. ‘She left me a couple of years ago. Demands of the job, I suppose.’
‘There was nothing else we should have been informed about, was there? No indiscretion on your part?’
‘No.’ If only there had been, he thought. ‘We broke up amicably.’
A straight-out lie. But then he was good at lying. To himself as much as anyone. The split had come out of the blue and the irony of that wasn’t lost on him. He’d spent his life playing detective and uncovering secrets and there was his wife carrying on with the next-door neighbour right under his nose. They’d been at it for months and if he hadn’t returned home from an overseas trip unexpectedly one day and caught them screwing on the living-room floor, they’d probably have continued to pull the wool over his eyes.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Huxtable said. ‘About a new role for you.’
‘I’m happy where I am.’
‘Sure, but your talents are wasted behind a desk. I’m looking for somebody to get out there and be proactive, to chase down leads.’
‘Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do?’
‘They don’t have time to develop anything these days. I’m talking about the bigger picture.’
Holm noted Huxtable’s use of the bigger picture. Noted, too, the euphemisms aplenty in her statement: wasted behind a desk – useless at analysis. Doing things the police don’t have time to develop meant investigating areas they didn’t feel were worthwhile. While get out there suggested, quite simply, that Huxtable wanted him gone from under her feet.
‘And this bigger picture? Where exactly am I to find it?’
‘You’re aware we get thousands of pieces of information a week, most of which are never followed up? Time and time again we have people who blip on our radar but are passed over because of lack of resources. Right-wingers, left-wingers, radicals of all types intent on getting their fifteen minutes of fame. There are snippets of intelligence which, as much as we try, we can’t jigsaw together. Even with AI and a bunch of algorithms we’re missing these at the moment. You might just get lucky.’
‘You’re kicking me out of JTAC.’
‘We’re supposed to be the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, Stephen. The problem is your recent analysis has been wide of the mark.’ That flat smile again. ‘And I’m not kicking you out. I prefer to think of it as moving you sideways, OK?’
‘Sideways?’
‘Yes. You’ll remain under the JTAC umbrella, but you’ll have an office of your own, a budget and a free hand to pursue whatever leads you want within reason.’ Huxtable smiled, but the look wasn’t a good one. ‘Take some time off to think about it, OK?’
Huxtable reached for Holm’s report. She glanced at the cover before sliding the document into her out-tray. He’d been dealt with. Rubber-stamped. Filed. Her gaze moved to Holm, a quizzical expression on her face as if she was surprised to see him still there.
He struggled out of the armchair and got to his feet.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said.
The funeral for Silva’s mother took place fifteen days after the attack. Francisca da
