‘Precisely. What she didn’t realise as she took those photographs was that she was witnessing the Hopes signing her own death warrant. They were recruiting Latif and the other man to kill her. The attack on the head of the women’s charity was just a front, a blind. She was the bystander, not your mother. You mother died because she was about to expose the Hopes and their dodgy dealings. Had the story come out, Karen Hope would have been toast.’

‘How do you know all this? It can’t be common knowledge.’

‘Of course not. Your mother knew she was working on the scoop of a lifetime, a story that had the potential to bring down the most powerful person in the world. This was Watergate for the twenty-first century. Bigger, even. She knew that was dangerous so she took precautions. All her files were backed up to the agency’s server, but she also kept a personal set in a virtual time vault.’

‘A what?’

‘They were stored in the cloud, and if your mother didn’t log into the vault once every week, the files would be emailed to a trusted address.’

‘My dad.’

‘Yes. He hadn’t a clue what he was dealing with when he received the files so he called me.’

Silva slumped in her chair. The vast sitting room somehow appeared to be getting smaller, the ceiling lowering, pushing her down, weighing on her. Even as the room shrank, Fairchild appeared to be fading into the distance while at the same time his voice was getting louder.

‘Do you understand now, Rebecca? Why you, as the best in your particular field, need to be involved in this? What you need to do?’

The room had returned to normal but Silva had the sense she was floating above everything, looking down at herself in the armchair.

‘No,’ she saw herself say. ‘I don’t.’

‘You need to travel to Italy. Once you’re there, you’ll make your way to the Amalfi Coast and the town of Positano. Every year Brandon and his sister spend a week there in the summer. It’s a family tradition and could well be the last chance Karen gets for a relaxing holiday before she’s elected president.’

‘And when she turns up?’

‘It’s quite simple.’ Fairchild tapped the photograph again, this time with more force. ‘When Karen Hope turns up… you’re going to kill her.’

Chapter Ten

London had been Taher’s base for a number of years. The city was filled with people from a hundred different countries and they practised a dozen different religions. It offered instant anonymity. He owned a small flat high up in a grotty tower block far to the west of the centre where nobody bothered him, nobody asked what he was up to and nobody cared.