He was dropped back at the hotel as the sun went down, and after a meal de Payns walked to the elevators, noticing that the follower’s chair in the lobby was no longer occupied. Within only two days they were bored with him and had been unable to find anything of interest in his room or his travels. Operationally, he felt good.

Having showered, he realised he wasn’t tired. In fact, he was wound up. He felt like a glass of beer and fished the American Karaoke flyer out of his jeans. Looking over the map of Islamabad in his room, he realised the place was two blocks away. It wasn’t even 9 p.m., so he dressed again and stepped out.

The karaoke bar was in the basement level of a small hotel off the main boulevard. He showed the flyer to a doorman and was allowed inside. It looked like a Paris student bar, with rock music playing and a long bar overlooking twenty-five round tables. He looked around, adjusting to the gloom, and saw people of European background, in Western clothing, drinking beer and wine—an activity usually confined to foreign hotels in Pakistan. If de Payns took a wild guess, it looked as though the Islamabad police didn’t care about foreigners drinking alcohol, so long as locals weren’t doing it. Especially not local women.

De Payns sat on a stool at the far end of the bar, from where he could see the door. Old habit. They served Budweiser and Heineken, and he went for a cold Heineken as a song by Richard Marx started. He sipped and consciously brought down his emotional brain. It wasn’t healthy to be on the verge of ruining a person’s life and to start worrying about it. He’d had to deal with those misgivings when he flew over Kosovo, and he had to get on top of it now. The mission was to access the MERC through Timberwolf. He had to stay focused on Raven as the channel for a successful operation, not as an individual with a life in jeopardy. He went over lists in his head—the following actions, the tourniquet and the exfil. He sipped at the beer and thought of all the cas non conformes, the ‘what-ifs’. What if they arrest me when I go into the flat? What if they arrest Anoush and ask me to talk while they torture her? What if I make it through the dinner but they’re waiting for me in my hotel room when I return? What if one of my support team has already been arrested? And the biggest cas non conforme: What if I rushed this? What if we needed three weeks more for recon and planning?

This, thought de Payns, could be my last beer … So he finished the Heineken, raised his finger at the barman and got another.