The Secret

Steven pondered his next move with heightened feelings of apprehension. He’d been sure he’d identified the bad guys and was making progress, but Khan’s coming to London after leaving Paris and the possibility — which still remained — of his having murdered Tom North was throwing him. He understood only too well that the less you knew or understood about your enemy the more vulnerable you became. It was an uncomfortable feeling. One thing was for sure, Khan’s presence in London was enough to make him call a code red. He went back through to see Macmillan, who acceded to the request without question after hearing what Steven had learned from Le Grice.

The code red status entitled him not only to be armed but to have on call a range of other operational back-up services ranging from credit cards to forensic laboratory expertise. A number of consultants in a wide range of specialties under Home Office retainers could be called upon to give opinions. There would be a dedicated duty officer at the end of a phone twenty-four hours a day ready to deal with his every request without question and, not least, he would have Home Office authority to call on police assistance whenever and wherever he felt the need. Under normal conditions a request could be made for police assistance; under code red UK police forces were obliged to comply. As always, Steven hoped that he would not have to use or call on any of these things but it was a comfort to know they were there.

He paid a visit to the armourer and left with a Glock 23 pistol nestling in a shoulder holster under his left arm and a supply of.40 ammunition in his briefcase. He did so with a heavy heart. Walking the streets of London knowing he was armed always seemed like a betrayal of everything he believed in. He took great pride in living in a country where the police didn’t carry guns; it suggested a degree of civilisation that set the UK apart.

There was also the question of how Tally would see it. His assertions about the largely routine nature of his investigations now seemed more like lies than the reassurances they were meant to be. He decided not to go back to the Home Office, returning instead to Marlborough Court where he got out the relevant files again and started looking for inspiration.

He took a sheet of A4 paper from the paper tray of his printer in the corner of the room and laid it on the table next to the files. ‘Tabula rasa,’ he murmured. ‘A clean sheet... a new beginning.’ He wrote the word Afghanistan at the top and dropped a vertical line to where he added Prague.

He put Simone and Aline at the head of the list: they had set the ball rolling. Simone felt something had gone badly wrong with the vaccination effort against polio in north west Pakistan and wanted to make her fears public. She’d been denied the chance in Prague by, among others, her own bosses, who knew about the presence of fake aid teams but had conspired to keep quiet because of the CIA’s apology and a promise to put much more in the way of aid into the region.

All this, however, was political: it wasn’t a reason for anyone to murder Simone and Aline, so there was something else, something to do with people falling sick in a remote Afghan village and blood samples that ended up in Porton Down.

A number of big players in the world of science and medicine had met in the Czech Republic to discuss their failure to wipe out polio in Pakistan’s north-west frontier region. He wrote the names of these players next to Prague. Their involvement in the proceedings ended here. They had all agreed to keep quiet about the CIA’s action in the belief that they were preventing a backlash against aid teams in general. It was understandable. These people had to live in the real world and act with pragmatism. To them, Simone would have been seen as a nuisance but nothing more. To others, she must have constituted a real threat.

Steven drew a short line down from Prague and pencilled in Bill Andrews and Ranjit Khan, adding in brackets after their names CIA and Pakistani intelligence respectively. They had a different reason for wanting to keep Simone quiet. She either knew something... or possessed something that they wanted? This was a new thought and one inspired by what had happened to Tom North. Had he been killed because Andrews and Khan had failed to get what they were looking for from Simone or Aline?