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Years of practice had taught him to start with a question or a request that the target could not fulfill, then move on to the real matter at hand. The theory was that the expert, stumped by the first request, would be more amenable for his own self-respect to agreeing to the second.

Dr. Martin’s surprise revelation happened to answer a query that had already been raised during a high-level conference at Century the previous day. At the time it had been generally regarded as a no-hope wish. But if young Dr. Martin were right ... a brother who spoke Arabic even better than he ...

and who was already in the Special Air Service Regiment and therefore accustomed to the covert life ...

interesting, very interesting.

On arrival at Century, Laing marched straight in on his immediate superior, the Controller Mid-East.

After an hour together they both went upstairs to see one of the two Deputy Chiefs.

The Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS—also popularly if inaccurately known as MI-6—remains even in the days of supposed “open” government a shadowy organization that guards its secrecy. Only in recent years has a British government formally admitted that it exists at all. And it was as late as 1991 that the same government publicly named its boss, a move regarded by most insiders as a foolish and short-sighted one that served no purpose other than to force that unfortunate gentleman to the unwelcome novelty of needing bodyguards, paid for at public expense. Such are the futilities of political correctness.

The staff of the SIS are listed in no manual but appear if at all as civil servants on the lists of a variety of ministries, mainly the Foreign Office, under whose auspices the Service comes. The budget appears in no accounts, being squirreled away in the budgets of a dozen different ministries.

Even its shabby headquarters was for years supposed to be a state secret, until it became plain that any London cab driver, asked to take a passenger to Century House, would reply, “Oh, you mean the Spook House, guv?” At this point it was admitted that if London’s cabbies knew where it was, the KGB

might have worked it out.

Although much less

famous than the CIA, infinitely smaller and more meanly funded, “the Firm” has earned a solid reputation among friend and foe for the quality of its “product” (secretly gathered intelligence). Among the world’s major intelligence agencies, only the Israeli Mossad is smaller and even more shadowy.

The man heading the SIS is known quite officially as the Chief and never , despite endless misnomers in the press, as the Director-General. It is the sister organization MI-5, or the Security Service, responsible for counterintelligence within the United Kingdom’s borders, that has a Director-General.

In-house, the Chief is known as “C,” which ought to stand for Chief but does not. The first-ever Chief was Admiral Sir Mansfield Cummings, and the C comes from that long-dead gentleman’s last name.

Under the Chief come two Deputy Chiefs and under them five Assistant Chiefs. These men rule the five main departments: Operations (or Ops, who gather the covert information); Intelligence (who analyze it into a hopefully meaningful picture); Technical (responsible for false papers, minicameras, secret writing, ultracompact communications, and all the other bits of metal needed to do something illegal and get away with it in an unfriendly world); Administration (covering salaries, pensions, staff lists, budget accountancy, Legal Office, Central Registry, and the like); and Counterintelligence (which tries to keep the Service clean of hostile penetration by vetting and checking).

Under Ops come the Controllers, who handle the globe’s various divisions—Western Hemisphere, Sov Bloc, Africa, Europe, Mid-East, and Australasia—with a side office for Liaison, which has the ticklish task of trying to cooperate with “friendly” agencies.

To be frank, it is not quite that tidy (nothing British is ever quite that tidy), but they seem to muddle through.

That August 1990, the focus of attention was Mid-East, and particularly the Iraq Desk, upon whom the entire political and bureaucratic world of Westminster and Whitehall seemed to have descended like a noisy and unwelcome fan club.

The Deputy Chief listened carefully to what the Controller Mid-East and the Director Ops for that region had to say and nodded several times. It was, he thought, or might be, an interesting option.

It was not that no information was coming out of Kuwait. In the first forty-eight hours, before the Iraqis closed down the international telephone lines, every British company with an office in Kuwait had been on the phone, the telex, or the fax machines to their local man. The Kuwaiti embassy had been bending the ear of the Foreign Office with the first horror stories and demanding instant liberation.

The problem was, virtually none of the information was of the sort the Chief could present to Cabinet as utterly reliable. In the aftermath of the invasion, Kuwait was one giant “bugger’s muddle,” as the Foreign Secretary had so mordantly phrased it six hours earlier.

Even the British embassy staff were now firmly locked in their compound on the edge of the Gulf, almost in the shadow of the needle-pointed Kuwait Towers, trying to contact by telephone those British citizens on a grossly inadequate list to see if they were all right. The received wisdom from these frightened businessmen and engineers was that they could occasionally hear gunfire. “Tell me something I don’t know” was the reaction at Century to such gems of intelligence.

Now a man in on the ground, and a trained deep-penetration, covert-ops man who could pass for an Arab—that could be very interesting. Apart from some rock-hard real information as to what the hell was going on in there, a chance existed to show the politicians that something was actually being done and to cause William Webster over at the CIA to choke on his after-dinner mints.

The Deputy Chief had had no illusions about Margaret Thatcher’s almost kittenish esteem (mutual) for the SAS since that afternoon in May 1980 when they had blown away those terrorists at the Iranian embassy in London, and she had spent the evening with the team at the Albany Street barracks drinking whiskey and listening to their tales of derring-do.

“I think,” he said at last, “I’d better have a chat with the DSF.”

Officially, the Special Air Service Regiment has nothing to do with the SIS. The chains of command are quite different. The active-service 22nd SAS (as opposed to the part-time 23rd SAS) is based at a barracks called Stirling Lines, outside the county town of Hereford in the west of England. Its commanding officer reports to the Director of Special Forces, or DSF, whose office is in a sprawl of buildings in West London. The actual office is at the top of a once-elegant pillared building covered in a seemingly perpetual skin of scaffolding, part of a rabbit warren of small rooms whose lack of splendor belies the importance of the operations planned there.

The DSF comes under the Director of Military Operations (a general) who reports to the Chief of General Staff (an even higher general), and the General Staff comes under the Ministry of Defence.

But the Special in the title of the SAS is there for a reason. Ever since it was founded in the Western Desert of Libya in 1941 by Colonel David Stirling, the SAS has operated covertly. Its tasks have always included deep penetration with a view to lying hidden and observing enemy movements; deep penetration with a view to sabotage, assassination, and general mayhem; terrorist elimination; hostage recovery; close protection, a euphemism for bodyguarding the high and mighty; and foreign training missions.

Like members of any elite unit, the officers and men of the SAS tend to live quietly within their own society, unable to discuss their work with outsiders, refusing to be photographed, and rarely emerging from the shadows.

Because the lifestyles of the members of the two secret societies had much in common, the SIS and the SAS knew each other at least by sight and had frequently cooperated in the past, either on joint operations or with the intelligence people, “borrowing” a specialist soldier from the regiment for a particular task. It was something of this kind that the Deputy Chief of the SIS (who had cleared his visit with the Chief, Sir Colin) had in mind when he took a glass of single malt whiskey from Brigadier J. P.