Beatrix settled a few car lengths behind him and took the smartphone from her pocket. She had already preprogrammed the number for the tracker, and she texted it. The unit texted back almost at once with its latitude and longitude, its speed and a link to a Google map. She opened the link and, after a moment, saw the tracker’s position illuminated by a blue dot and her own by a red dot.

Everything was working as it should.

She stowed the phone in her pocket and settled in behind him.

She followed for twenty minutes. Duffy turned off the freeway and into an upscale residential neighbourhood. The farther he drove, the better the surrounding neighbourhoods became. The damage had been repaired, the roads resurfaced and the houses on either side of the street were newer and in bigger plots. The gardens were well irrigated, with lush green lawns and healthy palm trees despite the furnace-like sun that scorched down from above. Oil money, she thought. It was obvious.

He slowed and paused at the entrance to a gated compound.

Beatrix slowed, too, as much as she dared, and carried out a spot assessment.

The compound was surrounded by a ten-foot-high stone wall topped with razor wire. There were CCTV cameras spaced at regular intervals around the perimeter. The thick iron gate slid open and closed on a grooved track that was cut into the asphalt. The gate was guarded by two armed men.

She drove another twenty seconds up the road, turned, and then turned back. She studied the guards. They looked like soldiers. Each toted a Heckler & Koch MP-5. As she passed them, she noticed the Manage Risk logo on the sleeves of their black uniforms.

She shifted up to second and accelerated gently away. It would be difficult to get to Duffy at home.

She had another way.

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was nine in the morning the following day. Beatrix and Faulkner were laid up in the Freelander outside the compound where Duffy lived. Beatrix was watching the guards through the windows of the SUV. They were smart and alert, too wise to the risks of guarding high-value targets in a place like Basra to take their eyes off the ball, even for a moment. A direct attack could only lead to bloodshed, and she didn’t want that. Not yet.

Faulkner had his smartphone in hand. He had called Pope overnight with a request for details on Mrs Sascha Duffy. Pope had passed the query on to the spooks at GCHQ, and they had assigned it with urgent tasking. The vast amount of data that they scraped from the internet was poured into endless data farms, but their automated scripts had interrogated those servers at lightning speed until they found what they were looking for.

A number had been texted to Faulkner and was waiting for him when he awoke.

“Ready?”

“Do it.”

Faulkner dialled the number.

The call rang twice and then connected. Faulkner had it on the speakerphone.