The name didn’t immediately mean anything to Ben. But then he remembered his conversation with Linus Twigg, and what Madison’s assistant had told her about Rigby Cahill’s long search for a lost city of Alexander the Great. Ben had been too worried about her to focus much on those kinds of details, but now they suddenly mattered far more.

‘Zakara? In the Bamiyan Valley?’ he asked, and the old man nodded again. Ben asked, ‘Where exactly? Do you have anything like a GPS location, or map coordinates?’

Karim looked completely blank at the mention of GPS, but then a thought seemed to dawn on him. ‘Maps, yes. The Institute has many, many maps.’

‘Show me,’ Ben said.

Chapter 15

By the time Ben got back to the safehouse he’d been away nearly all of the two hours he’d given himself. Folded away safely inside his kameez was the collection of ancient map prints that Karim had given him. It had taken the pair a long time to sift through all the wreckage of the offices to find the dusty old file in which they’d been catalogued away years ago, recently buried under heaps of debris. Once he had them safely in his possession, he thanked the old man for his help, promised him once again that he wouldn’t breathe a word of their meeting to anyone, then hurried back to the van and raced back to base, ducking and dodging Taliban patrols all the way.

In truth, Ben almost hadn’t returned to the safehouse at all. Now he had a much clearer idea of where Madison had gone and some sense of how to get there, it was all he could do to resist the urge to bail out of Operation Hydra and cut and run straight after her. It was the only real reason he’d come to this hellhole, after all; he had transport and weapons; there was little to stop him going AWOL, taking his chances, and to hell with Carstairs. The colonel had been happy enough to send eight men unsupported into a possible suicide mission with an unspecified objective. Ben owed him nothing. Let them roast him over the coals afterwards.