He had come back from their doctor’s surgery at the hospital in Ahvaz and had received the answer that had been telephoned from the headquarters building – in the former Tehran embassy complex of the Great Satan – of the al-Quds Brigade. He had told his wife the news he had been given and they had clung to each other. She had wept on his chest and he on her shoulder, and then he had sat her by a window where a light curtain would shield her from the sun. He had come out to smoke a cigarette and inhale the relief.

The date seller had heard part of what he said to Mansoor, but the Engineer could not know that: ‘A second doctor, abroad, more experienced with the brain… as soon as arrangements can be made because time for her is so short and…’ He could now cling to hope, and the security officer nodded, sucked another date, then spat out the stone.

He had never spoken to Echo Foxtrot – the Eternal Flame. Had he, Len Gibbons would have congratulated her without reservation, and if the information had come at a cost of five hundred American dollars a day then it was cheap. The Yanks would likely have paid five times that for it and thought it a bazaar bargain.

It was the end of their day. She would guard the phones during the night and use the collapsible bed, and he would go to his club: not the Travellers or the Reform or the Garrick, but one that specialised in discounts for couples from the old empire. Sarah had cleared away their supper and the tinfoil would go into a rubbish bag, which he’d take down to the security desk when he left for his accommodation. His last job before shutting down for the evening was to make phone calls. The list in front of him was written in her neat hand. The number of the American who would be waiting in his office on a side-street off Grosvenor Square and, further west, that of the Israeli in the fortified wing of their place in Kensington abutting the park. Both men would be similar to himself: facilitators, not movers and shakers. They were functionaries, the oil in the wheels that made things happen. After that – their photographs were on his desk and later they would go on the wall – two more men would be contacted.