‘Look, Penelope,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the blokes. This is what we do. If a plan’s good, they’ll happily go and execute it, or die trying. They all start out knowing their names might end up on the clock tower.’

‘The clock tower?’ said Morgan.

Topham replaced the mug on the pine kitchen table.

‘One day I’ll show you,’ he said.

Penelope Morgan breathed deeply and rubbed her forehead. ‘Likelihood of success? Of getting the hostages out?’ She swallowed hard, and looked away for a moment. ‘Alive?’

Topham looked at her, conscious that he was dealing with a mother, and not just the Prime Minister. But he could see no point in sugaring the pill.

‘No guarantees,’ he said. ‘There’s no-one better in the world at this than my guys, and, believe me, we’d have every tiny detail nailed. Who’s going through which window, which door, who’s blowing what hole in which wall, who’s killing each guard.’ He shrugged. ‘But fate has a habit of getting in the way. Someone connected to the bad guys hears the helis land, or a dog barks, or a guard stumbles into the team by accident, and we’re forced to execute in haste. The plan goes awry, and your daughter is sitting with a suicide vest on, and there’s a man next to her whose sole job is to detonate it if a rescue is attempted…’

He left the rest unspoken, and watched her wrestle with a fear he could only imagine.

‘And how big is that risk, Mark?’ she said, eventually.

‘Unquantifiable,’ he said, softly. ‘I’m not in the business of speculating. I work on intelligence, and facts, and until I have a Recce Team on the ground we don’t have much of either.’ He paused. ‘Even for us, things sometimes go wrong. We’d only have a very small window to get it right.’

Penelope Morgan tried not to think about that small window.

‘Those are the major practical problems?’ she said.

‘They’re a flavour of them,’ said Mark Topham. ‘But, with respect, I think you have a much bigger problem to overcome first.’

‘Which is?’

‘The authority under which we go in,’ said Topham.

‘Of course,’ said Morgan, immediately feeling stupid. She’d been so focused on the details of mounting a rescue operation that she’d forgotten the context.

‘We can’t just operate with impunity in Libya’s back yard, without a Memorandum of Understanding allowing us to conduct the operation,’ said Topham. ‘Without that, if we go in and kill people – and we might well kill a lot of people…’ He paused. ‘It strikes me that that’s a serious international incident. Depending on what developed, it could range from embarrassing to much worse than embarrassing.’

‘Yes,’ said Morgan. ‘I understand.’