For a couple of years Huxtable had tolerated Holm’s obsession because he was her spin of the roulette wheel, the couple of quid bunged on the lottery, a tenner on a long-odds outsider at the Grand National. Besides, what else could Holm usefully do? He was regularly sidelined on operations because he was too long in the tooth. He was passed over for younger men and women, graduates who had multiple languages and high-level computer skills. Holm spoke decent French and, in his pursuit of Taher, had picked up a smattering of Arabic. His German was limited to ordering beer and his Russian and Chinese non-existent. He could just about use a computer but when his colleagues began to talk of IP addresses and proxy servers and the dark web his eyes began to glaze over. Was tradecraft dead, he wondered. Didn’t anybody follow a hunch any more?

Holm shook himself and concentrated on his screen. The hour had slipped by and there were no more bullet points. He logged off from the terminal and rose from the chair.

The man the security services knew as Taher sat in the back seat of a minibus bouncing along a rough track some fifty miles to the south-west of Tunis. After two hours of driving the stifling air was getting to him. The vehicle’s air con was broken and the windows were jammed shut against the dust. In the next row of seats were two of his foot soldiers, Mohid Latif and Anwan Saabiq. Saabiq reached up and slid a finger under his shemagh to scratch his neck. The skin was slick with sweat. A laugh came from the driver’s seat up front, hardened eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror.

‘Bloody Europeans,’ the man said, his English heavily accented. ‘If you can’t stand the heat, that’s what you say, no?’