Series 5 Episode 4 (Spooks)

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Series 5, Episode 4
An episode of Spooks.
Writer	David Farr
Director	Kenny Glenaan
Script Editor	Jayne Spooner
Producer	Andrew Woodhead
Executive producer(s)	Simon Crawford Collins Jane Featherstone
Series	Five
Episode	Four
Length	approximately 57 mins
Preceded by	Series 5, Episode 3
Followed by	Series 5, Episode 5
IMDb profile

The 'Addressing Africa' Summit delegates left to right Manu Buffong, James Allan, Gabriel Sekoa

First aired in the UK at 10.30pm on 25 September 2006 on BBC Three. Aired in the UK at 9pm 2 October 2006 on BBC One.

[edit] Plot

As delegates from G8 and African countries arrive at the Havensworth Hotel in Berkshire for the Havensworth summit, the team are undercover within the conference to help bring it to a successful conclusion, with permission from UK Foreign Secretary James Allen. Ros is posing as Debra Soams, the summit organiser, with Zaf as an agency waiter, Adam as Joseph Baxter, a 'civil servant', and Harry and Ruth 'as themselves' as MI5 reps. Malcolm and Jo are back at Thames House, carrying out surveillance via Diaspora (a mobile-phone-tracking computer program) and bugs.

The West Monrassan president Gabriel Sekkoa is the main architect alongside the President of Guadec Manu Buffong. Sekkoa and is given a photo opportunity at the start of the conference, researched by the MI5 team, of an African child who unnecessarily died of cholera. The chief opponents of a deal are Traynor Styles, the American Secretary of State(whose CIA minders make attempts at surveillance on him difficult, and who is attempting to protect protectionist US agricultural policies), and Emil Becker, the French finance minister. Becker is forced to cave in by being tricked by the team into walking in on an ecstatic crowd of supporters (brought in from a local primary school by the team), thus making him appear to be giving a press release in support of the deal. He cannot then back down from this.

Harry tells Adam that Ros's father will not have his sentence commuted for his attempted coup (episode 2). He, however, tells Adam to keep this secret from her, so that she will concentrate on the present operation.

Meanwhile, Styles leaves the conference room pleading ill health, but then secretly bribes the Japanese delegate Finance Minister Yao to pull out of the talks, thus making them collapse, since the British cannot be got to do so, and the Americans (in Styles words) need the British sweet for future operations.

The team eventually hack their way into Styles' email and computer via a DVD of the Kansas City Flamers ice-hockey team which Ros gives him under her alias. This contains a "Spyder" bug which downloads all Styles' files whilst he is online, but he goes offline before all the files are downloaded. They do, however, find that Styles's bribe to the Japanese was an illegal and secret sale of military arms from the Global Cordon list to the Japanese, for use by Taiwan. This piece of intelligence is then used as a bargaining chip to force the Americans to back down and sign up to the conference, which they then do.

However, the team then receive intelligence of an imminent assassination attempt by the Monrassan opposition against Sekoa should the agreement be signed. Harry tries to get James Allan to stall the agreement, and Adam tells Sekoa of the intelligence, but neither will listen. The team attempt to prevent the assassination occurring by keeping the agency waiting staff secured away from the concluding press conference, which Harry had tried to prevent Allan from having. However, a waitress named Michelle Lopez reaches the hall where the press conference is occurring, but Adam prevents her attempt.

Meanwhile the team has got the rest of Styles' files, and find that the Global Cordon weapons are also being sold to Sekoa, whom America is nurturing as a buffer against the 'Islamic threat'. Lopez's real name is discovered, and also the team find out that her father, a journalist who was threatening to expose Sekoa's embezzlement of public funds, was killed by Sekoa. She tells him that the population of the north of Monrassa - the opposition's heartland - is being gathered into a single shanty town to be massacred in a genocide, but that (by giving him the publicity opportunity of the Havensworth agreement) the west has made him unimpeachable even if he carries this out.

By instant-messaging Styles under the guise of Styles' masters in Washington, Adam and Malcolm find that weapons suitable for genocide, such as air-spread biological agents, are to be prioritised in the Sekoa/Global Cordon deal, and when further evidence (verifying 'Lopez' 's story that her parents' plane was shot down) is given to Adam by the delegate President Manu Buffong of Gwadek, the team decide to release 'Lopez' and allow her to assassinate Sekoa as planned, which she does. She is then 'captured' and disarmed by Adam, but is then herself killed upon Allan's orders, giving Adam a flashback of his wife's death (where she was also killed despite being unarmed).

In a stand off between Allan and Harry back at Thames House, Allan threatens to expose the team, but they are saved from disgrace and disbandment by Allan when he is blackmailed with an incriminating tape of his calling Africa "a land of genocidal maniacs living in the Dark Ages" and his assertion that the conference will make no real difference and is only for show, to get a high-profile deal that will "get a few ageing rock stars off our backs" (a reference to Bob Geldof and Live 8) and aid Allan's bid to become prime minister (an indirect reference to leadership struggles in the Labour party during 2006, although it is nowhere stated whether or not Blair is prime minister within the fictional Spooks version of the present). We hear on the news that Styles, thanks to his public 'success' in bringing the agreement about, is being tipped for US Ambassador to the UN, and that a popular uprising has occurred in the north of Monrassa. Ros then angrily confronts Harry over covering up her father's fate, and Adam makes a tearful phone call to his son Wes.