every Monday morning. The meetings’ purpose was to coordinate operations relating to terror networks and to set weekly intelligence targets. The group was run by Liz’s forty-five-year-old head of section, Charles Wetherby, and made up of MI5 investigators and agent-runners and liaison officers from MI6, GCHQ and Metropolitan Police Special Branch, with Home Office and Foreign Office attending as required. It had been created immediately after the World Trade Center atrocity, following the Prime Minister’s insistence that there must be no question of terror-related intelligence being compromised by lack of communication or turf wars of any kind. This was not a point that anyone had been in a mood to argue with. In her ten years with the Service, Liz could not remember such unflinching unanimity of purpose.

To her relief, Liz saw that although the doors to the conference room were open, no one had yet sat down. Thank you, God! She would not have to endure all those patient male glances as she took her place at the long oval hardwood table. Just inside the doors, a bullish duo from Special Branch were regaling one of Liz’s colleagues with the inside track on the Daily Mirror’s cover story-a lurid tale involving a children’s TV presenter, rent boys, and crack-fuelled orgies at a five-star Manchester hotel. The GCHQ representative, meanwhile, had stationed himself close enough to listen, but far enough away to pre-empt any suggestion of obvious prurience, while the man from the Home Office was reading his press cuttings.

Charles Wetherby had assumed an expectant attitude by the window, his pressed suit and polished Oxfords a mute reproach to Liz’s clothes, on which the vaporous bathroom air had failed to work any significant magic. The ghost of a smile, however, touched his uneven features.

“We’re waiting for Six,” he murmured, glancing in the direction of Vauxhall Cross, half a mile upriver. “I suggest you catch your breath and adopt an attitude of saintly patience.”