Buchanan pointed at the apartment building and signalled for Ben to come with him. Passing through a creaky iron gate and a patch of desiccated waste ground, they stalked cautiously around the side of the building until they came to the red door they’d been told about. The safehouse apartment was on the third floor. Pistols drawn they crept up a dingy stairwell and along a corridor that smelled as though something had died there recently.

At Buchanan’s soft knock, the apartment door opened; and there stood the man whose real name may or may not have been Lewis Goffin. Whatever Ben’s mental image of an MI5 spook might have been, this guy certainly wasn’t it. And the Anglo-Saxon surname Goffin was a complete misfit as well. He was a plump olive-skinned guy in his mid or late thirties, with Mediterranean features, oily black hair and a thick black beard prematurely streaked with grey. He might have been of Greek or Cypriot origin but in the right attire he’d easily have passed for a native in Iraq, Iran or just about anywhere else in the Middle East. The perfect spy, physically at least. Goffin was wearing a traditional Afghan pakol cap and the same kind of conservative loose-fitting garb as Ben and Buchanan, and it wasn’t hard to understand how he’d managed to stay safely undercover during these last weeks of the Taliban’s rule over Kabul.

Ben wouldn’t have known him but Buchanan, as commander, had been briefed on his description. Buchanan had also been provided with a cryptic security question to which Goffin responded with the correct password. Sometimes the most old-fashioned tricks of the spy trade were the most effective.

Leaving the two men to talk upstairs, Ben returned back down to street level to give the others the all-clear. The rest of the team got out of the Humvees and they started lugging their heavy kit up to the apartment. The larger items were dismantled along with the rest of their weaponry inside discreet black holdalls, but all the same there was the pervasive feeling that they could be observed from afar as they hurriedly brought the equipment inside the building. Once the kit had all been unloaded, Saleem and his men took off in the Humvees. Those would be hidden in a lockup garage at a different location, for future use. Meanwhile, Saleem had provided a pair of dubiously obtained commercial vans, with false plates and business logos lettered in Arabic script, to use as transport within the city.