Nicholls turned to the third file, which contained a short video shot from the Reaper, timestamped three hours earlier.

The drone’s operator, sitting in his little air-conditioned room in a closed-off part of the base at Morón, had flown as low and long as he dared – Morocco was nominally a friendly country, and the CIA was not in the habit of advertising its spy flights overhead friendly countries – so once again the clarity was not exceptional.

But it was pretty good.

The important bits were concentrated in a thirty-second section of film.

In the rough centre of the frame, some six metres from the shore, was the dinghy.

It looked damaged and deflated, and was half-submerged in the sea.

Two metres from the shore was a body, on its back and spread-eagled in a few inches of water.

Anxiously, Nicholls paused the video, and zoomed in on it.

He exhaled slowly with relief; although indistinct, it was clearly the body of a man, in some sort of brown or black robe, and, from the skin colour, probably of North African descent.

Nicholls zoomed back out and ran the film on.

Paused and zoomed in on the second body – another man, blurred but clearly wearing Western clothing – which lay on the beach, a few metres from the trees. He was framed by a black stain in the rocky sand.

He cropped off both men and saved them in a file.

Then he ran the footage on.

And his heart sank.

Chapter 48.

48.

THE PRIME MINISTER was in her study, reading through papers on energy security, trying to take her mind off her missing daughter – and failing, it might as well have been written in Sanskrit – when the phone rang.

Her secretary, putting Nicholls through.

‘Justin?’

‘Penelope,’ he said. ‘We have some news. The Americans have managed to locate the point where they went ashore in Morocco. It’s a remote national park on the northern…’

‘Is there any sign of Charlotte?’

He hesitated.

‘Justin?’

‘There is what looks like the body of a female there.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘I’m sorry, Penny. The imagery isn’t very clear, and it’s on the edge of a wooded area so most of it is hidden by foliage. It may not be her. Three were taken. As I said yesterday, Charlotte is the one they’d most want to keep alive.’

In her study across London, Penelope Morgan’s eyes suddenly welled up, and she said nothing.

She fought a guilty urge to pray that this dead girl was someone else’s daughter.

‘There are two other bodies there,’ said Nicholls. ‘But I’ve seen them myself and I’m ninety-nine per cent sure that they’re both local males. Whether they disturbed the terrorists as they arrived, or what, we don’t yet know.’

‘Where did they go from there?’ said Penelope Morgan.