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known.’
    That was something of an understatement. Hardly a week went by without that man’s picture appearing somewhere, particularly in the Middle Eastern newspapers.
    Karim had come to Mazen’s attention by a somewhat circuitous route. Mazen himself was a member of the Special Intelligence Service – equivalent to Bahrain’s secret police force
– and ran a string of informants in and around Manama. Two of them had heard whispers about a reclusive sheikh arriving in Bahrain for medical treatment. This interested Mazen because, like
all policemen, secret or otherwise, he was always keen to discover what was happening on his ‘patch’, and particularly the identity of any significant new arrival.
    His open-source check showed that a certain ‘Sheikh Rashid’ and his advisers had recently flown to Bahrain in an executive jet. Having dealt with this air-charter company before,
Mazen knew that its management would never divulge the real identity of any of its clients without a court order, and possibly not even then. Predictably, his carefully phrased and recorded
telephone conversation with the Al-Sulmaniya Hospital administrator had proved fruitless.
    But then one of his informants had overheard a Filipino talking in a restaurant in the Al-Adliya district about the man he’d seen, and had approached him. As a result, the following day
Karim had been waiting nervously outside the Al-Hilal bookshop on Tujjaar when Mazen drove up.
    ‘Remind me – how was he dressed?’ He’d asked this question before, but he would cover the same ground as often as he thought useful, until he was certain that he’d
extracted everything the witness could recall.
    ‘I already told you,’ Karim sighed, looking at the stocky Arab in the driving seat and wondering how many more times he would have to repeat himself. ‘A gellabbiya and kaffiyeh .’
    ‘Do you know where he is in the hospital now?’
    Karim smiled with a kind of weary triumph. ‘Yes. One of the nurses told me. He’s on the third floor, where they send people with kidney trouble.’
    The significance of the treatment the mysterious ‘sheikh’ might be receiving was not lost on Mazen, though he was still unconvinced. He would have to confirm the patient’s
identity, and maybe talk to one of the Western embassies – preferably the British. Despite the significant American influence in Bahrain – the US Navy has a major base at Al-Jufayr
– Mazen was not over-fond of the Yanks. The British, he thought, might handle things rather more discreetly.
    ‘And if it is him?’ Karim asked. ‘There’s a big reward?’
    Mazen looked at the shabbily dressed Filipino and smiled. ‘If you are right, my friend,’ he replied, ‘then you’d better think about getting out of Bahrain and
finding yourself a new name and somewhere else to live, because people you really don’t want to meet will certainly come looking for you. But at least,’ he added,
‘you’ll have enough money to do so in comfort.’
    Hammersmith, London
    Paul Richter walked into Richard Simpson’s office and sat down, uninvited, in front of the desk. His boss – short, slim, pinkish, balding, generally
bad-tempered and fastidious in all things – was reading a red file.
    Richter himself wasn’t in the best of tempers. Although the experience of lying in a damp hole for four days, clutching a sub-machine-gun loaded with blanks and watching a ramshackle Welsh
farm cottage that appeared to have been sensibly deserted by its owner, was hardly the stuff of dreams, he had been seriously looking forward to ENDEX. Though a lifelong teetotaller, Richter had
always enjoyed the camaraderie of a wardroom or officers’ mess, and Hereford was something special.
    But instead of enjoying a long soak in a hot bath, a decent meal and then a pleasant evening in the mess, he’d been forced to dump all his gear, grab a quick shower, and drive straight
back to London.
    The only redeeming feature of the