“Beatrix! My dear girl.”

“Abdullah.”

“How are you?”

“Tolerable.” She had no inclination to engage in small talk with him. “Did you get what I wanted?”

“You are fortunate, Beatrix. It wasn’t easy.”

“Did you get them?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I need you to deliver it.”

He looked at her gravely. “It is not going to be cheap.”

“How much?”

Abdullah named a price.

It was very, very expensive, and Beatrix knew that he would be adding a fifty or sixty per cent markup to the price he was paying God knows who to source the order for him. That was the cost of doing business with this type of merchant and this type of merchandise. Same the world over. Not much she could do about it.

“I’ll transfer half tonight,” she said. “Half on receipt.”

“That is acceptable.”

“When can you deliver?”

“Tomorrow morning. Are you in the same place?”

“Yes.”

“Then they will come to you hidden in crates of fruit. I hope you like orange juice.”

“Can’t beat it,” she said.

Chapter Four

There is a series of buildings on the bank of the Thames, some on the water and some set back from it. They are anonymous and bland, and for all intents and purposes, they accommodate a host of companies and organisations that look like all the other companies in all the other similar buildings in the area. The real purposes of those companies are jealously guarded, cloaked with the draconian protection of the Official Secrets Act and unknown to the thousands of ordinary Londoners who pass them every day. There is the hulking mass of the building constructed to look like a Mesopotamian pyramid. It could hardly be less conspicuous and is referred to by the locals as Babylon-on-Thames. Its brashness was a design choice. The government’s decision in the middle of the last decade to acknowledge that it was the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service gave an official imprimatur to a fact that was well known in any event. The building’s ostentatiousness also has the useful side effect of attracting attention to it and deflecting curiosity away from some of the other buildings in the immediate neighbourhood.

In that sense, it is a lightning rod.

Those buildings, and the clandestine organisations that work within them, would have been much more interesting to those with even a passing interest in national security.

There is one building, for example, that is particularly anonymous. It is separated from the MI6 building by two lanes of busy traffic and is hidden down a narrow side street that can trace its history all the way back to the Great Fire. The neighbouring buildings are old and historically significant, but this one, erected on the site of a Luftwaffe bomb, is a banal sixties infill. There is no reason to give it a second glance. The brass plaque on the wall and the notice above the desk in the utilitarian reception advertise “Global Logistics.” A search of the internet furnishes the information that the company was founded twenty-five years earlier, is engaged in the import and export business, and has a board of directors who are as bland and uninteresting as the architecture of the building in which they work.