Chisholm and her husband had been in town all day. Chisholm had been to a meeting of the board of the private security contractors that she had established after leaving Group Fifteen. Manage Risk was a serious concern, with offices around the world, and it counted among its senior employees one of Chisholm’s old colleagues in the Group, Joshua Joyce. Beatrix had been in Somalia last week where she had reacquainted herself with Joyce. He had been assigned as security on a freighter that had been captured by al-Shabaab off the coast. Beatrix had infiltrated the country and the town in which the terrorists had made their stronghold.

Joyce was an ex-employee now.

She had struck his name from her Kill List.

Beatrix had returned home to Morocco to find excellent news waiting for her. Michael Pope, the new Control of Group Fifteen, had reported that they had located Chisholm, too. Beatrix had immediately boarded a flight from Marrakech to Heathrow. She had followed Chisholm for two days and constructed the plan that was now drawing to its conclusion.

Chisholm’s house was a large square building with broad windows on both sides of the porch, five windows on the first floor and two dormers on top. It looked as if it was in the middle of a refurbishment program. The stonework had been repointed, and the lime render on the exterior walls was fresh. There was an alarm box beneath the eaves and a satellite dish positioned discreetly away from public view. There was a broad lawn to the right of the house with what looked like a tennis court behind it and an ornamental garden to the left. The land sloped up steeply behind the property, with the deeper darkness of a copse of tall fir and oak providing a border to that side.

Beatrix waited until the downstairs light was switched off and then moved forward. A stone wall separated the property from the road, and she slipped between it and the BMW, dropped down to her belly and slithered forward. The car was still warm, the engine ticking as the temperature bled away in the coolness of the night. She removed the rucksack and opened it, took out three pounds of Semtex and a disposable mobile phone that she had purchased earlier that day. The phone was wrapped around the detonator with gaffer tape, and that, in turn, was wrapped around the plastique. She took the wire that ran from the phone and connected it to the detonator, peeled away the adhesive backing and pressed the bomb to the underside of the car, right below the fuel tank.

She had a few hours to wait.

She made her way back to her motorbike and hid it in a nearby lane, beneath a railway bridge that boomed and shook as a late night goods train rumbled over it. She clambered over a nearby fence and negotiated a paddock and then a pig field until she had found her way to the large garden at the back of Chisholm’s house. There was a tumbledown shed next to the vegetable patch, and it offered a decent view of the house, the BMW and the road for twenty yards on either side. It was perfect.