At quarter-past, he was striding up to the front entrance of Thames House. A security guard instantly stopped him and Will realised he must look a state in his dirty clothes; but that didn't prevent him saying what he had to say.
'I'm here to see Pankhurst,' he announced flatly. 'My name's Will Jackson. I imagine he's expecting me.'
Within minutes he was being ushered up to the same office as yesterday.
Pankhurst was by himself now, sitting behind his big wooden desk. His suit was immaculate and not a hair was out of place. He did not look at all surprised as Will was shown in and once they were alone he indicated that Will should take a seat.
'I'll stand,' he told the Director General.
'As you wish. I take it you've given some thought to our discussion of yesterday.'
Will looked at him with intense dislike. He had only known this man for twenty-four hours, but already he loathed him. Loathed his self-satisfied demeanour. Loathed the way he had manipulated him. Loathed the fact that they had the same aim now. Different motives, but the same aim. Like it or not, Will Jackson and Lowther Pankhurst were on the same side.
'What is it you want me to do?' he asked.
FIVE
Pankhurst pressed his fingertips together. 'It's complicated, Will,' he said. 'Why don't you sit down, let me order you some coffee.'
Reluctantly, Will took a seat. 'Forget about the coffee,' he said. 'Just talk.'
Pankhurst nodded his head. 'We need to find Ahmed, and we need to find him quickly. But we're stabbing in the dark. Truth is, we haven't got a clue where he is. Don Priestley's a yank through and through, always exaggerating the Americans' capacity to do things; but he wasn't exaggerating about Ahmed. They did a very good job with him. If he doesn't want to be found…'
'You must have people looking.'
'Of course we have, Will. We've got a lot of people looking. But it won't do any good. We don't even know if he's in the country.'
'Then how the hell — ?'
Pankhurst raised his hand in the air to silence Will's outburst. The director stood up, moved round to the other side of the desk and perched on the edge, just in front of Will. 'You don't like me, Will,' he said suddenly. 'That's OK, you're in the majority. My job means that I have to do some pretty unlikeable things. But we have to work together on this and that means you need to start putting some trust in the fact that I know what I'm talking about. Are we agreed?'
Will held his gaze and for a moment the two men simply stared at each other.
'We're agreed,' he conceded finally.
'Good.' Pankhurst returned to his seat and continued as if that little confrontation had never happened. 'As I say, we have a lot of people looking for him, but I don't hold out much hope that he'll be found. But we have another lead and that's what I want you to follow up.'
'What's the lead?'
'His sister. Latifa Ahmed.'
Will blinked. 'You think she'll know where he is?'
'It's possible,' Pankhurst replied. 'At least, she's our best shot. It seems that Ahmed was always very close to her. Don Priestley told you yesterday that she was the only person in Afghanistan who knew the truth when Ahmed staged his own death. What he didn't tell you was that they kept in occasional but regular contact while he was in the US.'
'How?'
'Letters, mostly,' Pankhurst said. 'Ahmed would pretend to be a distant cousin living in Kabul. The letter would be sent to a US contact in the capital, then passed via a long sequence of agents — long enough that it would be nighon impossible to trace the source of the letter — before being delivered to her. It would never be more than a few lines and it could take months to arrive. Even so, from what I could glean from Priestley, the CIA were less than wild about letting him do even that.'
'Why did they?'
'Because it was his condition. He refused to help them at all unless he could have some way of letting Latifa know that he was OK. The CIA had to give in. Then, when he was reinserted into Afghanistan in 1990, he found his own ways to keep in touch with her.'
Pankhurst paused for a moment. 'Tell me, Will,' he continued, 'how much do you know about the Taliban and the way they treated the women of Afghanistan?'
Will shrugged. 'Bits and pieces,' he said.
'Right. Well let me give you some idea of the conditions under which Latifa Ahmed was forced to live when the Taliban came to power in 1996. She was forced to wear the burka, of course; she was banned from proper medical care if she was ill; she was looked upon as a third-class citizen. But in actual fact, Latifa had it a lot better than most women in Afghanistan at the time. Ahmed saw to that. He had infiltrated the highest echelons of al-Qaeda by then and had influence among the Taliban authorities. Of course, no one knew she was his sister, but he let it be known around the neighbourhood where Latifa lived that if she was interfered with in any way, it would not be tolerated.'
'Sounds dangerous,' Will commented. 'Surely he was worried people would ask questions.'
'It was a risk he ran,' Pankhurst agreed. 'But he meant what he said. In 1998 a member of the Taliban police stopped Latifa in the street. It's unclear what he thought her misdemeanour was, but the punishment he gave her was brutal. Nothing out of the ordinary, you understand, but still brutal. In a busy street she was beaten with a metal stick; her arm was broken and she was left weeping in the gutter. Nobody offered to help, of course, because to do that would have been to risk imprisonment or worse.
'The following day, the policeman was found. His throat had been sliced when he was sitting at his table eating a solitary dinner. Nobody saw the killer go in or out of the house, but rumours travelled fast. Nobody lay a finger on Latifa until Ahmed was outed in Afghanistan in the year 2000.
'When word of his true identity reached al-Qaeda's ears, the rumours that he had been protecting Latifa Ahmed simply confirmed their intelligence. Latifa's luck changed then. She was imprisoned by the Taliban, where we can only assume she experienced the brutality for which that regime is so notorious.'
There was a silence as the two of them considered the kind of horror Latifa would have gone through.
'How do you know all of this?' Will asked after a while.
'When Ahmed arrived in England, we debriefed him thoroughly. At first, all he wanted to do was return to Afghanistan to rescue his sister, but we nipped that in the bud.'
'How?'
Pankhurst's face twitched. 'We told him she was dead.'
'Nice.'
'We do what's necessary, Will. Faisal Ahmed was no good to us dead in a ditch in Afghanistan. We calculated that learning of his sister's death would harden his resolve against the Taliban, make him more likely to help us. The British and American governments had always advocated regime change in the region; if he worked with us, he could be doing his bit to avenge his sister.
'He didn't have to grieve long. British and American troops marched into Afghanistan shortly after 9/11. Latifa Ahmed was discovered in a prison on the outskirts of Kabul and we were able to break the news to a grateful Ahmed that his sister was not dead after all. She wasn't in a good way, though. She weighed a little under six stone and her body was covered in sores. She hadn't eaten for weeks, nor had she been allowed out of the tiny cell in which she had been imprisoned, even to use the lavatory. She was practically swimming in her own excrement.