The man appeared increasingly anxious as he failed to spot his quarry, and so Gil removed her wide brimmed hat and shook loose her long fair hair to give him a better view. She smiled to herself as he spotted her immediately and compared her to the photo in his hand.

Job done, Gil walked off in the direction of her tour group and boarded the bus which would drop her and a rowdy crowd of Geordies and Mackems at the Hotel Nacional.

***

Jared Stevens dropped the newspaper into the trash and followed the tourists out onto the concourse, where he watched as their luggage was loaded onto a bus which had a crudely printed sheet of A4 paper blu-tacked to the windscreen. The writing on the paper read “Nacional”.

Jared waited until the target had entered the bus and the door had closed with a loud hiss of air before he extracted his mobile phone. Carefully scrolling down the Cubacell Nokia 8 phone’s screen, he selected ‘Moriarty’ and pressed the speed dial. The phone was answered almost immediately at the other end.

“Holmes, has the bird landed?” Moriarty asked.

“Yes indeed. She is winging her way to you as we speak,” Stevens responded, replying to his codename.

“Excellent,” Moriarty replied. “I’ll be waiting.”

***

Thom Passerell, alias Moriarty, was the senior half of the two man team that MI5 had assigned to watch Gillian Davis. Neither operative was supposed to be active in Cuba. Usually, they operated entirely separately from the MI5 man in the Embassy, Laurence Hinds, who was allegedly the commercial attaché, a title which fooled no-one, especially the Cubans.

The middle aged Jared Stevens and Thom Passerell constituted a covert unit who were essentially the eyes and ears of Whitehall in the Revolutionary Republic. Both held down real jobs in Havana, and both were part timers. Nonetheless, they were well trained and had been considered to be highly skilled operatives at one time. But, completely against regulations, and the QA policy drafted at Thames House in 2002 that demanded refresher training every two years, neither man had been back to the UK for skills training for over five years. As a result they had become lazy, and their skills were perhaps less well honed than they might have been.

Stevens would take up the surveillance later in the day, but for now he had to return to his office at Cubapetrolio, sometimes known as Cupet, where he needed to finalise a proposal for a new semi submersible oil platform for presentation to the Cupet board the next morning.

***

The elderly bus disgorged the tourists at the Nacional and the concierge staff swarmed over the luggage, hoping that the owners of the individual suitcases would present them with a generous tip when they delivered them to their rooms. Gil waited her turn in line and duly checked in, after touching up her make up using a small compact. She had spotted Thom Passarell as soon as she had walked into the hotel lobby. She obviously did not know his name, but she knew his type.

As Gillian stepped up to check in, Passarell moved over to the counter a few feet away and perused some leaflets offering boat trips and bus tours of the locale.

“Ah, Senora Davis, it is so good to welcome you to Habana,” the small grinning receptionist gushed as he looked at Gillian’s passport. “You are in room 431 which is on the fourth floor. I am sure you will like the room.” Then, after preening his thin, immaculately neat moustache, he pointed to the bank of elevators.

“The lifts are to your left. Is there anything else I can you with?”

Gillian spoke loudly enough for Thom Passerell to hear.

“Yes. I’m booked in for a pampering session this afternoon, I believe?”

The man tapped a few keys on his computer, while his eyes quickly scanned the information on the screen. He smiled at her, and spoke.

“Yes Senora, that is at 4pm for two hours. I also note that you are booked on the city tour tomorrow. That tour is due to leave at eight in the morning. Do you wish an alarm call?”

“Yes please. Tell me, what time does the tour return in the evening?”

The receptionist picked up an itinerary and read off the details.

“After visiting National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, you have a boat tour followed by lunch. The afternoon is spent touring the region by bus, culminating in a delicious dinner at the famous Club Paradiso, where you will be watching and dancing salsa until 11pm, when the bus leaves for your hotel.” He paused whilst he thought. “You should be back at the hotel around midnight tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Gillian replied gracefully. “I have a full week of events planned. I want to make the most of my week in Havana.” The receptionist bowed and Gillian walked across the lobby to be reacquainted with her luggage, which was in the safe hands of a smartly uniformed young man whose name badge read ‘Jesus’.

***

Across the Atlantic a phone rang in Thames House. Maureen Lassiter answered it without giving her name.

“This is Moriarty. Our little bird has settled. This afternoon I will visit her room and by this evening we will have audio in the bedroom and bathroom. There will also be limited motion sensor video from the alarm clock. I’ll send you the IP address of the server so that you can watch and listen in real time on the website.”

“Good. When do you plan to extract her?” Maureen asked.

“We will have a subcontracted team waiting in her room when she returns tomorrow night. They will lift her and she will be on the company transport back to London by the early hours of the morning.”

“That is acceptable. Call me when she has boarded.” At that Maureen replaced the receiver, then lifted it again to dial Barry Mitchinson.

***

Mrs. Docherty went to a good deal of trouble naming her baby boy. After much considered thought she and her husband eventually alighted on a name that was stylish and cool without sounding odd. She called him Vaughan. When her baby boy started school, the much considered name was abandoned and he was thereafter called ‘Doc’. Now approaching twenty nine years of age, he was a geeky computer genius who eschewed people and the outside world for the world of multi core chipsets, motherboards, flat screen monitors and superfast graphic sets. Doc could build, or disassemble, anything electronic.

Without formal qualifications, he rebuilt computers that people had discarded and sold them second hand. He had a ready market, because his reconditioned gaming machines were faster than any production model. Unfortunately, like many isolated young men running virtual worlds from his bedroom, he descended into the murky world of computer hacking. After successful efforts to shut down some of the USA’s top law enforcement websites, he tried to close down the SOCA website. Unfortunately for Doc and his friends, the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency had an ex hacker geek of their own, ‘The Repeller’.  Sitting in an almost empty office on a Sunday night and playing war games, ‘The Repeller’ saw an unexpected spike in data requests which were multiplying geometrically by the minute, and quickly realised that his baby was under attack. ‘The Repeller’ quickly took the website offline and repelled the attack by sending back a barrage of data from an array of computers that Doc and his friends simply could not match. The quickly escalating data requests were now swamping their originator’s machines and closing them down, whilst stripping their hard drives. Before Doc managed to shut down his system, ‘The Repeller’ had a full copy of his system registry, along with a list of his IP addresses and his contacts list.

Less than an hour later, whilst Doc was trying to revive his useless computers, the front door came in and his mum screamed as men streamed in to her neatly maintained bungalow. Doc was in trouble.

Since then Doc had been on the side of the angels, or at least of the authorities, and it was here that he found the resources that allowed him to show his capability. Ten years later he had seven ‘apps’ on the top hundred Apple iPhone Apps list, and it was widely believed that Apple had incorporated one of his rejected ‘apps’ into the architecture of the new iPhone 4.