Edward Goring

In the novel They Came to Baghdad, Victoria Jones first meets Edward at a park in London. He tells her he an ex-fighter pilot who had won the DFC during the war but found hiolding down a job in peace time much more difficult, having to deal with files and figures. He tells Victoria he would be leaving soon for a job in Baghdad as the the secretary/assistant of one Dr Rathbone. Victoria Jones, on a whim, falls in love with him and decides to make her way to Baghdad to find him.

Finding "Edward" in Baghdad did not prove easy as Victoria did not even know Edward's surname. Fortunately, Dr Rathbone proved more well-known, being director of the Olive Branch. She finally tracked Edward down and learnt that his full name is Edward Goring. For a time she enjoyed his company, with excursions out of Baghdad, although she did not enjoy the fact that he seemed to be close to another woman, Catherine Serakis from the Olive Branch.

Only much later does Victoria discover that Edward is the leader of a secret and extremely well organised group intent on bringing about a New World Order through violence. At the behest of British Intelligence, Victoria plays up to Edward and infiltrates the organisation and Edward deploys her for one of his critical operations to kill one of his group's enemies Anna Scheele. Victoria reflected on how Edward was so willing to trust her on such a critical operation without fear that she might betray him and concluded that it must be his vanity, "a strangely blinding quality". However as she later found out, he might not have been blind. He had cynically enticed her to Baghdad and set up coincidences for her in London to make it easy, because she resembled Anna Scheele. During the operation itself, Edward took no chances--Victoria was escorted at all times by armed operatives and she was not allowed to communicate with anyone else. Eventually she found herself kept prisoner and was on the verge of being executed before she was rescued. The book does not describe what happened to Edward in the end but in that most of the network was rolled up, it would be fair to assume that Edward was captured as well.