These were all grim thoughts, though, because her involvement in something of this magnitude suggested that she had not only known about the plan to kill my father, but was more likely to have been the one to have pulled the trigger. I realized that a part of me had been harbouring the hope that she might have been almost as much of a pawn in the Germany operation as I had been. But this didn’t look like someone who could have been used in that way. This looked like a ruthless professional assassin.

Pritchard had realized the ramifications of the apron within seconds, of course - I’d bloody given him the file in which it stated her cover in ’45 had been as a nurse. That meant it was now more important than ever that I found her. Because if he got to her before I did, he had ample reason to put her in a room and squeeze her for everything she knew. And that meant I was dead.

As soon as we had left the club, Pritchard had headed for the High Commission with Manning to work on getting transportation to Udi, and had told me to check out of my hotel and get down to the Government Press Office in the centre of town to apply for a permit to fly to the front. We were due to meet back at the safe house for a progress report at 15.00 sharp.

It was now half past two. I had checked out of the hotel, but I hadn’t been to the press office and I wasn’t intending to go. Presuming that Anna had not changed her plans, there were now seventy-two hours on the clock, rather than forty-eight, but Pritchard had an awkward problem to solve: if he told London that the Prime Minister’s life was in danger, they’d cancel the trip and he’d lose his chance to find out how the plot related to Slavin’s defection. But any request for airborne transport would have to be cleared by the Federal side, and I already knew from Isabelle that the authority for that could take weeks. At any rate, they wouldn’t let me on board, not after a British newspaper had just accused the Nigerian air force of deliberately targeting Biafran civilians. There were tank convoys, of course, but Udi was a hell of a long way away. Even in peacetime, getting across a country like this could take a while. In the middle of a war, three days would be pushing it.