Free A Sentimental Traitor by Michael Dobbs

enough they’d eventually hit a target. But no
one doubted it was an Arab plot, because the Telegraph had said so, and that paper at least seemed to know what it was talking about. On the day of the recall it published further details.
The terrorist who led the cell was Abdul Mohammed, his family name was Ghazi; it meant warrior or champion. He had been a conscript during the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, captured by the Israelis
and turned fanatical by his appalling treatment, so it was said. Later he had been responsible for any number of indiscriminate atrocities, which ended only when Mubarak’s men had dragged him
onto their torture tables. The Telegraph reported he had lost an eye and, allegedly, a testicle during this time. The tabloid psychoanalysts had a field day with that. His survival was said
to be a miracle, his release the result of the revolution of the Arab Spring, and he was now an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood who had come to rule in that blighted country.
    The story was all supposition and speculation, there was no firm information to go on, the wonks at MI6 couldn’t corroborate it, but neither would they disown it, since no ambitious spy
can afford to admit he or she simply doesn’t know. Ignorance doesn’t read well on the annual assessment. Anyway, McDeath was known to have excellent sources and was considerably more
reliable than the mistyped university thesis the British government had downloaded from the Internet and used as a pretext for war in Iraq. So the British government decided to act.
    On the morning that Parliament was recalled, the British Foreign Secretary summoned the Egyptian ambassador to King Charles Street, which runs parallel to Downing Street. As his car slowed to
pull into the rear entrance to the building off Horse Guards Road, it was met by a posse of journalists and photographers who shouted questions through the closed car window and snatched
photographs, a couple even kicking a side panel under cover of the scrum to see if they could get a snarl or look of alarm. The ambassador, however, remained impassive.
    The Ambassadors Door, the discreet entrance into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office used by visiting diplomats, is tucked away at the back of Downing Street where it faces the park. As the
Egyptian’s car stopped he was met not by the Minister for the Middle East as protocol normally required but by an official, who conducted him to a small lift. The ambassador had a degree in
comparative economics from the LSE where in his twenties he had gained a reputation as an irrepressible womanizer, yet the joys of life seemed to have been drained from his face, and despite his
proficiency at English he had still brought with him an embassy official to act as an interpreter. They all knew this wasn’t going to be fun and he wanted a witness. The lift to the
ministerial floor was intensely claustrophobic.
    Only once he stepped out of the lift did the Minister appear and offer a formal handshake. Their heels clicked along the mosaic tile of the hallway as they took the brief walk to the office of
the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State, which was vast, constructed by Victorians to impress the natives. Gilded frames, heavy oils, cascading red drapes and marble fireplaces,
everything else clad in ornately carved dark wood that had been ripped from the forests of Africa. Somewhere near at hand the ambassador could hear the insistent ticking of a clock, even though
this was a place that time seemed to have passed by.
    ‘Darius!’
    The Foreign Secretary, Andrew Judd, stood in the middle of his office, beaming welcome, but not moving, forcing the ambassador to come to him, even though the Arab was old enough to be his
father. ‘How are you? And how’s that son of yours? Following proudly in his father’s footsteps at the LSE, so I’m told.’ And so that the Egyptian remembered they were
keeping a watch on his son, too.
    ‘As-salamu alaykum,’ the Egyptian