‘Really?’ She was as genuinely surprised as she sounded. ‘Who was that?’

‘A bloke called Salim. I know him pretty well but he never said before that he was related to your family. Is he?’ Malik sounded casual, but his eyes were hard now and searching.

‘It’s possible. Even my father sometimes has trouble keeping up with all the relatives we have over here. Especially on my mother’s side.’

‘But you don’t know Salim yourself?’

‘No,’ she said.

He seemed satisfied by this. ‘I thought not, somehow. Anyway, it’s better not to ask the imam yourself. Let me make some enquiries.’

When she nodded her agreement to this, his face lightened momentarily then grew serious again, though this time there was nothing hard about his eyes. ‘Tahira, I am going away soon.’ When her eyes widened he looked pleased. ‘To Pakistan. It is something of a… mission, you could say.’

‘It sounds serious.’

‘It is, and possibly quite dangerous. I must ask you to tell no one I spoke of it.’

‘Of course not, Malik. When will you go?’

‘Quite soon, and it may be some time before I come back.’ He hesitated, and Tahira wondered if he expected to come back at all.

‘I will miss you,’ she volunteered, then realised how absurd this might sound – this was the first time they’d met. She blushed. ‘I mean, it is very nice speaking with you. I have so often heard Amir talk about you that I feel as if we have known each other for a long time.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said approvingly. ‘Perhaps before I go, we could meet again? I have enjoyed this talk.’

‘I would like that very much,’ Tahira replied with a smile. It was after all just what she’d been aiming for.

Chapter 44

Geoffrey Fane had reluctantly conceded that it should be one of Liz’s colleagues, rather than one of his, who would join the crew of the Aristides on its next voyage from Athens to Kenya. But it seemed that he was still trying to run the operation. Liz had been astonished to receive an invitation to what he was describing as a ‘co-ordination meeting’ at Vauxhall Cross. She suspected that he had not been completely frank with her about the extent to which he had already involved the Americans, and that he was now trying to ‘uninvolve’ them and hoping she could help.

Not much chance of that, she thought, once Langley had got a sniff of it. She wondered who else he had invited to the meeting. The room would probably be full of people, all vying for position: Bokus and colleagues from the American Embassy, a team from MI6, probably the Navy, the SAS, the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office… and heaven knows who else. It was all far too premature, and would be sure to result in a muddle.

She decided to go to the meeting alone and let them all talk. Her aim was to avoid anything happening that might mess up the operation in Birmingham which, now she had Tahira in play, she felt might at last be getting somewhere. All this had put her in a thoroughly bad temper, and she was crossly putting her papers away in her security cupboard, ready to go across the river, when Peggy came in with the latest update on the monitoring of emails from the mosque.

‘I can’t stop now,’ Liz said, ‘or I’ll be late for the Fane jamboree.’

‘I think you’d better read it before you go over there,’ said Peggy. So Liz sat down and read:

URGENT

Re: New Springfield Mosque Communications

We have had some success in analysing the internet communications from the New Springfield Mosque. A variety of machines are in use, mainly laptops which appear to be used by different individuals and are probably brought into the premises and used in some sort of library or study room. A4 surveillance linked with emanations has enabled us to identify several individual users.

There is one particular machine that remains in place. It has an Arabic keyboard. We believe, again from A4 observation, that this machine is used only by Imam Abdi Bakri, and is probably situated in his office.

Bakri sends messages to a variety of radical Islamic groups throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, he is a contributor to message boards based in Europe but consulted by Arabic-speaking users. Many of Bakri’s contributions could be considered inflammatory or even illegal under existing UK incitement laws, but none so far has suggested involvement in or planning of actual terrorist missions.

The exception is a series of messages, increasing in number in the last five days, which are clearly designed to be unbreakable by monitoring. These messages go to a parallax repository, which functions as a depot to which outside visitors travel; in that sense it is not unlike a bulletin board in a chat room. The key difference is that access is restricted, and the identity of visitors is technically almost impossible to back-trace as they arrive through a series of relays, each of which can involve half a dozen different ISPs as well as literally dozens of different national boundaries. At present we cannot identify individual visitors to the depot.