‘No.’ Huxtable made a point of closing the report and pushing it to one side. ‘I don’t want to pre-empt the investigation into what went wrong. However it’s obvious procedure was set aside for a period of – how shall I put this? – flying by the seat of your pants?’

Holm shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling. It was either that or forget the whole thing.’

‘You were chasing paper planes.’

‘What can I say? Everything had gone quiet. No chatter, nothing from the field. We weren’t able to verify the original source for the intel so I came to you.’ Holm leaned forward. It wasn’t a great shot, but at least he’d managed to get the ball back across the net. ‘You had my recommendation on raising the threat level and all the information.’

‘And then you did a runner?’

‘I didn’t leave the situation room until close to six in the morning. We’d done all we could and in the end, as you know, a joint decision was made that the intel was wrong. We had no idea of the target or the location. All we knew was a threat had been made. It could have been anywhere from Tottenham to Timbuktu. We contacted every agent we had but nobody had any info. GCHQ had nothing but the original intercept. SIS gave us a lead from Belgium but it turned out to be false. The Americans either had nothing or weren’t telling us anything.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know what it means. The Americans share intelligence with us when it suits them. If it doesn’t suit them they play their cards close to their chests.’

‘And the evidence for this?’

Holm shook his head. He had an old friend in the CIA who’d confirmed Holm’s suspicions years ago. ‘Strategy and tactics, old buddy,’ his friend had said. ‘Two separate things. Out in the field our countries play the game in very similar ways, but at the top of the tree the policy wonks are looking at it differently. Sometimes that means not telling our allies everything even if the end result is casualties on the ground.’

‘Well?’ Huxtable waited for a beat. ‘I’ll take your silence as an indication your allegation has no basis in fact. It’s similar to your obsession with Taher. Your excuse for not finding him is he has to be receiving tip-offs from inside the security services, yes? That we have a mole?’

‘Well, there’s—’

‘Absolutely no evidence to back up your claim.’ Huxtable rapped the table like a judge using a gavel to bring silence to a courtroom. ‘Now, let’s move on to the real reason I called you here.’

Holm let himself slump farther down into the chair, as if in doing so he might avoid the hammer blow that was surely coming.