O’Hagan shook his head. ‘Nobody you were aware of, John, but actually somebody did. The British SIS had a man watching, and he would certainly have seen you. Whether he noticed you is a different question.’
‘I saw nobody,’ Petrucci repeated, ‘and I was checking constantly.’
‘He was probably sitting in a café or a car, or maybe even in a building across the street, but I don’t think it matters. The authorities won’t be looking for a CIA officer working with their own police force, and certainly not one who was lying in his hotel room suffering from food poisoning.’
‘So you reckon we’re fireproof?’
‘Unless something remarkable happens, yes,’ O’Hagan replied. ‘Hussein is going to be busy sorting out the crime scene, and he won’t have much time to deal with us for a couple of days. Tomorrow’s Saturday, and I doubt if anything will happen over the weekend, but I’ll call him and suggest we start checking the hotels on Sunday. One of us is going to have to become an expert on those explosive detectors by then, so I’ll brief Dick. Now, the CIA guy here suggested we should just pack our bags and head off back to Langley, because Holden’s dead.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have whacked him so quickly,’ Dawson said. ‘If we’d done an interview with him today, we could have taken him out next week.’
O’Hagan shook his head. ‘No. Holden was an amateur and a loose cannon. He’d already met John and me, and I couldn’t risk him reacting when he saw us again. Hussein’s quite a sharp cookie, and if he suspected Holden knew us, the shit would really hit the fan. Getting rid of him was the safest option.’
He pursed his lips and glanced around them. ‘Right, the other matter is fairly minor. When we went over to Al-Ramool, Ed and I met a senior British SIS officer called Michael Watkinson. He’s based locally and Hussein seemed to know him well. I don’t think he’s likely to be a problem, but the man with him possibly might be.
‘His name’s Paul Richter and he works for some kind of deniable outfit attached to the SIS, but he wouldn’t be specific, and wouldn’t show any ID either. None of that’s real important, but what worries me is that he’d opened the door of Holden’s apartment and been inside. In fact, he was still inside when we arrived with Hussein, which shows he’s not afraid to break the rules. I don’t know why he’s out here, but he has the definite look of a trouble-shooter about him. If he gets too close to us, we may have to arrange for him to have an accident.’
‘Don’t either of you two have a home to go to?’ Watkinson asked, opening the door of Chris Halls’s office and peering inside. It was late evening, and Richter hadn’t emerged in over three hours, except to go to the loo and collect mugs of coffee.
Richter glanced up. ‘I do have a hotel room and a bed with my name on it, but Chris here thinks she’s getting close to cracking this, so I plan on staying around for a while.’
‘No problem. But to avoid ruining her concentration, can you come to my office? There are a couple of things we need to discuss.’
When they got there, Watkinson sat down behind his desk. ‘I’ve been talking to George Blakeney about Holden. He’s very embarrassed because it happened on his watch.’
‘He shouldn’t be. He was supposed to be watching the building and following Holden if he left the premises. He wasn’t there as a bodyguard and, as far as I’m aware, there was no known threat to Holden.’
‘Agreed. I asked him to give me a description of everyone he remembers entering or leaving the building, and he’s come up with a few, but nothing detailed enough to start a search. Almost all the visitors he can recall were Arabs — or at least they were dressed like Arabs — and he has no recollection of anyone looking out of place.’
‘I’d be surprised if he had. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing. They went there prepared to wipe the hard drive beyond recovery, which requires specialist software that the murderer must have taken with him.’
‘I thought you could just delete everything on a disk using a DOS command?’
‘You can but it’s pointless, because anyone with any serious knowledge of computers can recover it quite easily. Deleting a file simply stops it being accessible, but the data is still physically on the disk. Wiping the drive only makes sense if it’s permanent, and that needs special software. It’s even possible to recover data after a format, if you’ve got the right tools.’
‘How’s she doing?’
‘Pretty well. She’s discovered that there is a hidden partition on the hard disk and she’s trying to identify the program used to create it. It’ll take her some time.’
‘OK. The obvious question is who did this. Any ideas?’
‘Actually,’ Richter replied thoughtfully, ‘I think the “why” is more important than the “who”. Holden could have been assassinated by somebody on contract or even by a member of the terrorist organization he’s been working for.’
‘You’re sure of that? You’re certain he was part of whatever was going on out here, that he wasn’t a genuine psychic?’
‘Holden was no more psychic than my cat.’
‘Have you got a cat?’ Watkinson asked doubtfully.
‘No, but that’s not the point. Holden being involved with the terrorists is the only scenario that makes sense. There were exactly two possibilities here. First, Holden could have been genuine, and been seeing these visions, or whatever you like to call them, and was assassinated by the terrorists so that he couldn’t warn anybody else. If that was the case we have three questions to answer. How was he getting his information — premonition, telepathy or some other equally unlikely method? Second, how did the terrorists get to know about him? As far as I’m aware, no details about Holden have been released outside the intelligence community. Finally, why did his killer wipe his hard drive?’
‘Go on,’ Watkinson said.
‘Now, if on the other hand he was in league with them, all those questions have simple answers. He knew about the bomb attacks because the people who planted them told him exactly where and when they were going to explode. The terrorists knew about him because they’d recruited him as a conduit to the authorities. And they wiped his hard disk because they knew it stored information that would prove his contact with them.’
‘You make a good case,’ Watkinson said, ‘but that still doesn’t answer everything. Were the two attacks Holden described organized by the same people? And why on earth were they using him to leak details in the first place?’
‘I’ve no idea, but they must have had a reason. And I do think both attacks were coordinated by the same group.’
‘If you’re right,’ Watkinson said, ‘that also suggests something of real concern.’
‘I know. Whatever the aim of this campaign is, the final act is probably imminent. And that worries me too.’
Saadi stopped the car about two hundred yards from the racecourse, switched off the engine and extinguished the lights. For a few minutes the three men sat there, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness. Under their white gellabbiyas, each was dressed in black clothing: trousers, polo-neck jumpers and trainers.
‘It’s time,’ Saadi said, finally.
Massood walked to the back of the car and opened the boot. Inside it were four large grey rucksacks. On top of them were two rolled-up rope ladders, each secured by cord. He handed the ladders to Bashar, then pulled out the rucksacks. All three men pulled off their gellabbiyas and placed them in the boot.