Lavon circled around the block and made his way back to Lea Bridge Road. On the opposite side of the road was an empty bus shelter with an adequate view of the target house. As he lowered himself wearily onto the bench, he could hear Uzi Navot relaying the address to Graham Seymour at MI5 Headquarters. Lavon waited until Navot was finished, then murmured into his throat mic: “I can’t stay here for long, Uzi.”

“You won’t have to. The cavalry is on the way.”

“Just tell them to come quietly,” Lavon said. “But hurry. I’m about to freeze to death.”

It took MI5 and the Anti-Terrorist Branch of Scotland Yard just ten minutes to produce a list of the four men now using 23 Northumberland Road as a legal address and just twenty minutes to acquire the records of every telephone call placed from the residence for the previous two years. Calls placed to numbers that appeared on government watch lists, or to phones located in areas known for the extremism of their Islam, were automatically flagged for additional scrutiny. The records of calls placed from those numbers during the past two years were pulled as well. As a result, within an hour of Lavon’s first contact, MI5 and Scotland Yard had constructed a matrix of several thousand numbers and more than five hundred corresponding names.

Shortly after three A.M., a copy of the matrix was placed before the special MI5 task force that had been working around the clock since Elizabeth Halton’s disappearance. Five minutes later Graham Seymour personally delivered a second copy of the document to the fourth-floor conference room, which was occupied at that moment by three rather young women. One was an attractive American in her early thirties with shoulder-length blond hair and skin the color of alabaster. The other two were both Israelis, a curt Rubenesque woman with the bearing of a soldier and a small dark-haired girl who walked with a slight limp. Though all three had entered the United Kingdom on false passports, Seymour had agreed to let them into Thames House on the condition they did so under their real names. The Rubenesque Israeli was Major Rimona Stern of AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence service. The quiet girl was an analyst for the Israeli foreign intelligence service named Dina Sarid. The American’s credentials identified her as Irene Moore, a CIA desk officer attached to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley..