Scorpia Rising

any more mental energy trying to decipher it. Half a dozen different departments within Special Operations would have been working on the note from the moment it had been found, and he had called a meeting for nine o’clock in the morning, expecting to hear results. As if on cue, there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Jones entered, followed by a younger woman, casually dressed, with fair hair and freckles. This was Samantha Redwing. She was only twenty-seven, but she had risen quickly through the ranks of MI6 to become chief science officer. Redwing had a photographic memory and the analytical skills of a world-class chess player. Surprisingly, she was also very normal, with a boyfriend who worked in advertising, an apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and a proper social life. Blunt thought she might well be unique.
    The two women sat down. They were each carrying their copy of the Scorpia file. Blunt nodded at them. “Good morning. What progress do we have on this business with Levi Kroll?”
    “We’ve made some headway.” Mrs. Jones opened her file. She was dressed, as always, in dark colors, which with her jet-black hair and dark eyes made her look not just businesslike but almost as if she were on her way to a funeral. The next head of MI6? Blunt noticed a sheaf of pages stapled behind the original report. She had, of course, come prepared. “First of all, Kroll had been in the water for around ten hours when he was found, suggesting that he was shot around eleven o’clock at night. We’ve examined the tidal reports for the Thames, and if he was going to end up being washed ashore at Southwark, then he would have had to have entered the water farther east, probably somewhere around Woolwich.”
    That was close to City Airport. A question formed in Blunt’s mind, but he didn’t interrupt as his deputy considered.
    “We’ve been focusing our efforts on the electronic key card and the information we were able to retrieve from his iPhone,” Mrs. Jones went on. “It’s a shame that all his telephone numbers were lost—and the phone itself won’t tell us very much. It’s the latest model, the iPhone 4, purchased in New York the day it came out.
    “But we think we may have decoded the actual words. They don’t mean very much on their own, but you have to put them together with the other things that Kroll was carrying. The key to it all is the Times Educational Supplement that he bought at Heathrow. I have this week’s edition here.” She produced a copy and laid it on the desk. “What would a man like Kroll want with a paper like this? Was he interested in something that might involve a school? If we assume that Ju means June, not July, then the dates—the thirty-first of May to the fourth of June—just happen to coincide with the next half-term in many schools in the UK and around Europe. We know that Kroll had just come from Cairo. And Shafik—the name on the phone—could well be Egyptian.”
    “So Scorpia might be interested in a school somewhere in Egypt.”
    “That’s exactly the conclusion we arrived at and that’s how we’ve been directing our research.”
    Mrs. Jones unwrapped a peppermint and slipped it into her mouth. Blunt waited for her to continue.
    “There are twenty-eight men and women with the surname Shafik working in different schools around Egypt,” she said. “Eleven of them are in Cairo. To start with, we assumed that the figure—forty-three—referred to their age. That narrowed the field to three and only one in Cairo, a Mrs. Alifa Shafik, the headmistress at a primary school. But we checked her out and there’s nothing that could possibly make her of interest to an organization like Scorpia. The school is in a poor area of the city. We decided that trail went nowhere.”
    Blunt nodded his agreement. He was quietly impressed. Mrs. Jones had moved quickly and there was no doubting the logic of what she had said. “Shafik is a fairly common name,” he muttered. “The link with the educational supplement is interesting and it may well be that a school is involved. But it could be in Alexandria or Port Said or even Luxor. Do we have anything more specific?”
    “As a matter of fact we do.” Mrs. Jones flicked through the pages of the newspaper. “We read the Times Educational Supplement from cover to cover, looking for stories that related to Egypt, trying to make a connection. There were none—but in the back there was an advertisement for a new head of