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happened to Rahe.

    She founded Philip Sarre in the library, leafing through some material on Uzbekistan, which he informed her was now his speciality. ‘If you go to Langley, you find whole rooms of Uzbek specialists; here it’s me in my coffee break.’

    Sarre always maintained that he had been brainwashed by MI6 and was actually meant to be in Cambridge watching particle acceleration experiments. His friend Andy Dolph was equally improbable. The son of an independent bookie, he had come to MI6 via the City of London and a banking job in the Gulf States where he had allowed himself to be recruited to relieve the boredom. Sarre reported that Dolph was across the river in a pub waiting for him and an Africa specialist named Joe Lapping. Sarre said he’d extract both men and bring them to Heathrow.

     
    An hour later Herrick and the three men were crowded into the security room at Terminal Three having arranged for two of the technical people to stay as long as they were needed. Their first break came after 1.00 a.m. Dolph had been going over the film from the gates of two flights that landed consecutively from Bangkok at 9.15 and 9.40 a.m. when he saw the man who had taken Rahe’s place walk off the second flight. Wearing a dark red jacket, a bright tie with hibiscus motif, grey trousers and black shoes, he was among the last passengers to leave the plane. This told them that he had probably been seated at the back of the Thai International Airways 747. The airline’s records showed that one of the rearmost seats had been occupied by an Indonesian national named Nabil Hamzi, who they later found was travelling on to Copenhagen at 11.40 a.m. from Terminal Three.

    Herrick gasped. ‘Rahe didn’t check in until past midday,’ she said.

    ‘So?’ said Sarre.

    ‘Don’t be a fucking idiot,’ said Dolph. ‘It means that Rahe couldn’t have made the Copenhagen flight. And that means there wasn’t a straight swap between Rahe and Hamzi.’

    ‘There had to be a third man, at least,’ said Sarre.

    ‘By George, he’s got it,’ said Dolph, pinching Sarre’s cheek.

    ‘And the third man must have arrived in the airport before eleven to give him time to change clothes, tickets and passports with Hamzi and get himself to the Copenhagen departure gate.’

    They crowded round a screen to watch film of flight SK 502 to Copenhagen boarding and with little surprise saw a man in a red jacket, hibiscus tie and grey trousers waiting to present his boarding card and passport. It was neither Rahe nor Hamzi but another individual who was the same height and build and who was also in his mid-to-late thirties. After a couple of hours they found this man on footage from one of the long corridors leading to the departure gates. Then, working back through recordings made by a series of cameras, they traced him to a flight from Vancouver. This worried Herrick - it had implications for the other North American airlines. Still, there was no way of pairing the face with a seat number and therefore a name, because they couldn’t work out at what stage he’d left the aircraft. However, Dolph realised that there was probably a pattern.

    ‘Look,’ he said. ‘These guys aren’t going to be travelling with baggage in the hold. And they are all likely to be booked on connecting flights out of Heathrow on the afternoon of the fourteenth. So all we have to do is go through the manifest of the Vancouver flight and match the two criteria.’

    This produced the name Manis Subhi, who was travelling on a Philippine passport and had left London for Beirut four hours after landing.

    Herrick wondered out loud whether she should let Spelling know the provisional results.

    ‘No, let’s tie this thing up, darling,’ said Dolph. ‘Present them with a fucking bunch of roses in the morning. Let’s follow the trail until it ends.’

    Sarre reminded them that they hadn’t yet discovered the eventual destination of Rahe.

    ‘Maybe it’s not