“One heard rumors,” said Seymour delicately.

“I didn’t hear them, and I’m the director general of MI5. I suppose it’s true what they say. The spouse is always the last to know.”

“Is there no chance of reconciliation?”

“None.”

“A divorce will be messy.”

“And costly,” added Amanda. “Especially for Charles.”

“There’ll be pressure for you to step aside.”

“Which is why,” said Amanda, “I’m going to require your support.” She was silent for a moment. “I know I’m largely to blame for our little cold war, Graham, but it’s gone on long enough. If the Berlin Wall can come down, surely you and I can be something like friends.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

This time, Amanda’s smile almost appeared genuine. “And now to the real reason I asked you to come.” She pointed a remote toward the flat-panel television and a face appeared on the screen—a male of Egyptian descent, lightly bearded, approximately thirty years of age. It belonged to Omar Salah, the leader of the so-called Harlow cell who had been killed by a special firearms officer inside St. Martin’s Theatre before he could detonate his explosive vest. Seymour was well acquainted with Salah’s file. He was one of several thousand European Muslims who had traveled to Syria and Iraq after ISIS declared its caliphate in June 2014. For more than a year after Omar Salah’s return to Britain, he had been the target of full-time MI5 surveillance, both physical and electronic. But six months prior to the attack, MI5 concluded that Salah was no longer an imminent threat. A4, the watchers, were stretched to the breaking point, and Salah appeared to have lost his taste for radical Islam and jihadism. The termination order bore Amanda’s signature. What she and the rest of British intelligence didn’t realize was that Salah was communicating with ISIS central command using encrypted methods that even the mighty American National Security Agency couldn’t crack.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Seymour quietly.

“Perhaps not,” answered Amanda. “But someone will have to take the fall, and it’s probably going to be me. Unless, of course, I can turn the unfortunate case of Omar Salah to my advantage.” She paused, then added, “Or should I say our advantage.”

“And how might we do that?”

“Omar Salah did more than lead a team of Islamic murderers into St. Martin’s Theatre. He was the one who smuggled the guns into Britain.”

“Where did he get them?”

“From an ISIS operative based in France.”

“Says who?”

“Says Omar.”

“Please, Amanda,” said Seymour wearily, “it’s late.”

She glanced at the face on the screen. “He was good, our Omar, but he made one small mistake. He used his sister’s laptop to conduct ISIS business. We seized it the day after the attack, and we’ve been scrubbing the hard drive ever since. This afternoon we found the digital remains of an encrypted message from ISIS central command, instructing Omar to travel to Calais to meet with a man who called himself the Scorpion.”

“Catchy,” said Seymour darkly. “Was there any mention of guns in the message?”

“The language was coded, but obvious. It’s also consistent with a bulletin we received from the DGSI late last year. It seems the French have had the Scorpion on their radar for some time. Unfortunately, they don’t know much about him, including his real name. The working theory is that he’s part of a drug gang, probably Moroccan.”

It made sense, thought Seymour. The nexus between ISIS and European criminal networks was undeniable.

“Have you told the French about any of this?” he asked.

“I won’t leave the security of the British people in the hands of the DGSI. Besides, I’d like to find the Scorpion before the French. But I can’t,” she added quickly. “My mandate stops at the water’s edge.”

Seymour was silent.

“Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, Graham. But if I were you, I’d send an officer to France first thing in the morning. Someone who speaks the language. Someone who knows his way around criminal networks. Someone who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.” She smiled. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone like that, would you, Graham?”

5

Hampshire, England

He had come to the port city in the south of England like many others before him, in the back of a government van with blacked-out windows. It had sped past the marinas and the old redbrick Victorian warehouses before finally turning onto a small track that carried it across the first fairway of a golf course, which on the morning of his arrival had been abandoned to the gulls. Just beyond the fairway was an empty moat, and beyond the moat was an ancient fort with walls of gray stone. Originally built by Henry VIII in 1545, it was now MI6’s primary school for spies.

The van paused briefly at the gatehouse before entering the central courtyard, where the cars of the DS, the Directing Staff, stood in three neat rows. The driver of the van, who was called Reg, switched off the engine and with little more than a dip of his head signaled to the man in the backseat that he could see himself out. The Fort was not a hotel, he might have added, but didn’t. The new recruit was a special case, or so the DS had been informed by Vauxhall Cross. Like all new recruits, he would be told at every opportunity that he was being admitted into an exclusive club. The members of this club lived by a different set of rules than their countrymen. They knew things, did things, that others did not. That said, the man in the backseat didn’t strike Reg as the sort of fellow who would be moved by such flattery. In fact, he looked as though he had been living by a different set of rules for a very long time.