After a frantic clean up and exit and a few hours sleep, they found themselves once again in their meeting room with the PM.
"MI6 were fucking useless, weren't they?" said John. "CIA my arse!"
"Be fair, John," said White, "it was us that leaped to the CIA assumption in the first place."
"Those three we found in the woods were definitely CIA," said Adam, "Why would anyone be impersonating the CIA?"
"Street cred?" offered John sarcastically.
"Come on, this isn't a playground," said White sharply.
"I've been thinking," said Jennifer. "Suppose a small group of CIA agents were tasked with infiltrating our establishments, for whatever reason, and recruited whoever they could find in the mercenary yellow pages. They get them all false US passports, arrive here and go to the old IRA network for their equipment."
"None of that makes sense," said Hannah.
"All the driver said was that the president didn't know what they were doing," said White, "but I can't believe an official CIA operation would use mainly mercenaries, and middle eastern ones at that."
"So what are the other options?" asked Adam. "Somebody hired the CIA? They're former agents trying to ruin the CIA? None of that makes sense."
The Prime Minister shook his head. "No it doesn't, but I have to decide what to do about it. Do we just pretend it never happened and deport the survivors? Charge them with terrorism offences? Do I talk to the US President or the head of the CIA? And what to do about the middle east and Irish connection?"
"We could do nothing and wait and see," said John. "If they were a totally independent operation and we keep the survivors in custody then nothing else will happen. If someone was funding them and they don't hear anything from them they'll know that the mission failed. I doubt they'd try again."
"Of course," said Hannah, "there's still the matter of Arthur and who put that nano mic in his head. Now that we have Irish and middle-eastern people involved, that opens up the possibility that there are people living in Britain who are helping them in some way. We have everyone who launched the attack but maybe there are people on the fringes who supplied them with weapons. Maybe Arthur is even still being listened to."
"I've been thinking about that," said White. "I'm now confident we can remove the bug without harming him or the implant - the question is do we want to? If there are home grown sympathisers still out there we need to find them."
"So we set another trap?" said Adam.
"What about Arthur though?" said Hannah. "We have to tell him eventually, we're not going to leave that thing in him forever."
"I think this is all becoming overly complicated," said Jennifer. "Keeping everything from 4 I mean. It's making our job much harder. I vote we bring him on board. The longer we leave it the more he'll resent us."
"I have also been considering that factor," said White.
"This is fairly crude device, isn't it?" said John. "So the sound quality will be fairly poor. Couldn't we remove it and put in a container that he can carry around with him. Then when we don't want anything to be overheard just leave the container in another room?"
"That's a brilliant idea," said White, "that would solve a lot of problems. I'll see if that's possible now, excuse me."
He walked over the the other side of the room to make the call.
"So," said the PM, "how much further do you think this group extends?"
"It can't be that much bigger than the people we've already captured because it hasn't shown up on any radars," said Adam.
"No," agreed Jennifer, "if there was a large group assembling that sort of arsenal and manpower within these shores we'd know about it. All the planning must have been done in the States. Maybe they recruited the other guys as a red herring, to put us off the scent if they were caught."
"And it was rather a slap-dash, if well equipped, operation," added Hannah. "To leave only the four drivers outside is verging on amateurish."
"Or arrogance," said John.
"It strikes me," said Adam, "that they were either in a great hurry to accomplish whatever goal they had in mind, or they were given orders by someone who intended them to fail."
"Or maybe it was a suicide mission?" offered Hannah.
The Prime Minister ran an exhausted hand through his hair.
"So where does that leave us now?"
"We use Arthur to set another trap and see if anyone responds, and we double our efforts to find out where all those arms came from," said Jennifer. "In a way, if they arrived from the States undetected, that's even more worrying than them being amassed in our own backyard."
White concluded his call and returned to the group.
"The tech team see no problem in implementing John's idea. I'll set that in motion tomorrow, once I've worked out how to tell Arthur that we've been keeping this from him.”