I felt vertigo, standing over a pit of my own making, with difficulty discerning the knot of connections at the bottom. Nikfar, or Reza to friends, was Iranian-born, CIA-trained, Peshawar-made. He’d been in the dark corners of the CIA long enough to have helped build the Taliban and take it down again. He was the hinge between Langley and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the largest intelligence agency in the world. It was called Inter-Services because it drew on all branches of Pakistan’s armed forces, but I always felt the name described a bigger crossroads, the intelligence equivalent of the arms bazaar in Pakistan’s north-western mountains, where every gang came, no laws applied and you could get pretty much anything for a price. Aside from being a reckless visionary, Reza was one of the few intelligence officers who operated at the heart of things.

‘Do you have the name on the Saudi passport?’ I asked.

‘Yousef Shaheen.’

I had arranged a few Saudi passports in my time: they were gold dust, welcome almost everywhere. I didn’t remember a Yousef Shaheen.

‘Know when it was issued?’

‘No. But something’s going on. All the grapevines are whispering: Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the game’s moving. I heard Bakhtiyar Ibraimov, the shooter, was involved in drafting up Central Asians to fight in Libya. He has phone connections with UK recruitment networks.’

I fought against mounting disquiet. ‘Heard’ wasn’t a strong verb in intelligence circles; phone connections extended as far as you wanted them to. I stored Reza’s conjecture for later reflection.

‘IMK a thing?’ I asked.

‘Possibly. Remnants of Al-Nusra and Abu Uzair’s men. It’s very hazy at the moment. If it exists it’s a splinter cell. I’d take the black flag with a pinch of salt, but they did come up in a JIX report yesterday. Where are you?’

‘Kazakhstan.’

‘You had a heads-up on this?’

‘Not as such.’

‘What have you got?’

‘Some leads,’ I lied. ‘But I need your help.’

‘Are you on usual channels?’

‘Personal ones. They’ll do for now.’

He sent the information through: a report from Joint Intelligence X, the secretariat at the heart of Pakistan’s security services. The time and date put its distribution twelve hours ago. It was one page, light on detail, collating information from sources in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

Intelligence had suggested that a group identifying as the Islamic Movement of Kazakhstan was in possession of detonators and 4,000 kilograms of C-4 explosives. The load originated in Afghanistan: it had been packed in crates on an articulated lorry travelling from Hairatan in Afghanistan to Termez in Uzbekistan. Uzbek intelligence had tracked it by satellite, with the intention of identifying the insurgent cell. Somewhere along the line things went wrong. The artic was stopped but it was empty. The load had already been transferred.