“What are we going to say to Personnel?” asked Keller.

“As little as possible.”

“There’s no way I can survive a traditional vetting.”

“I should think not.”

“What about my money?”

“How much is there?”

Keller answered truthfully. Seymour raised an eyebrow.

“We’ll have to work out something with the lawyers.”

“I don’t like lawyers.”

“Well, you can’t keep it hidden in secret bank accounts.”

“Why not?”

“Because, for obvious reasons, MI6 officers aren’t allowed to keep them.”

“I won’t be a normal MI6 officer.”

“You still have to play by the rules.”

“I never have before.”

“Yes,” said Seymour. “That’s why you’re here.”

And on it went, long past midnight, until finally the deal was done and Seymour crawled laboriously into the back of his undignified unmarked van. He left behind a notebook computer incapable of making contact with the outside world, and a password-protected thumb drive containing two videos. The first was an edited montage of CCTV images showing the delivery of the blue BMW to Heathrow Airport. The car had appeared on CCTV for the first time near Bristol, several hours before the bombing. The driver headed directly toward London along the M4. He wore a hat and sunglasses, rendering his features invisible to the cameras. He stopped once for fuel, paid in cash, and said nothing to the clerk during the exchange. Nor did he address anyone in the car park at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, where he deposited the BMW at 11:30 a.m., half an hour after British Airways Flight 501 departed Lisbon. After retrieving a suitcase from the backseat, he entered the terminal and boarded the Heathrow Express train to London’s Paddington Station, where a motorcycle was waiting. One hour later the bike slipped out of CCTV coverage on a country lane south of Luton. The motorcycle remained unaccounted for. The car’s point of origin on the day of the bombing was never determined.

The second video was devoted entirely to the woman. It began with her passage through Heathrow Airport and ended with her disappearance in the smoke and chaos that she had unleashed on London’s Brompton Road. To it, Gabriel added several minutes of footage from his own memory. There was a woman sitting alone at a street-side restaurant, and a woman abruptly hailing a taxi on a busy boulevard, and a woman on an airplane staring directly into his face without a trace of recognition. She was good, he thought, a worthy opponent. She had known that dangerous men were following her, and yet she had never once shown fear or even apprehension. It was possible she was someone whom Quinn had met during his travels through the nether regions of global terrorism, but Gabriel doubted it. She was a professional, an elite professional. She was of a higher caliber, a better class.