She was in her mid- to late thirties, he guessed, and wore tight jeans and a green T-shirt. Her hair, which had been tucked under the cap, was now free and came halfway down her back. It was a rich brown and gold colour. Her face, as far he could tell in the bright sun, and in the brief moment he caught sight of it, had high cheekbones, smooth-skinned.
It was a face that startled him—a beautiful face. But then she stooped, picked up the toy, and gave it to the boy.
Logan left a few euros on the counter and took his coffee to a pavement seat, where he sat and watched their backs slowly retreating. The boy seemed to be constantly stopping and pointing, asking questions, trying to pick some object of interest up from the pavement, tugging his mother’s hand continually. And she was patient with him. They made slow progress.
A hundred yards ahead of them, Logan noted, if they stayed on the same path, was the electronic sign with the day’s date written on it.
He finished his coffee, picked up the map, and unfolded it, leaving it half open, as if he’d just been studying it. Then he crossed the street, twenty or thirty yards behind them, and walked along the far side, his camera slung over his shoulder and the map carried loosely by his side. He overtook them easily.
The two of them, he saw, as he flicked through a revolving postcard stand, were still making slow progress. She seemed in no hurry, and the relaxed fluidity of her movements, for a moment, mesmerised Logan. She seemed to him to walk like a dancer.
He checked the position of the electronic sign. Then he saw an alley with another café, its white plastic tables and chairs shaded by the buildings. Taking a seat, Logan produced the camera from its case and tested the light and the distance to the sign.
They arrived in stops and starts; the boy seemed to be singing absently and was now waving a twig with some wan leaves attached to it that he must have picked up from one of the trees that shaded the road.
As they drew level with the electronic sign, the woman seemed distracted. She was leaning down at the boy and saying something. The boy responded crossly. She gave him the baseball cap, and he seemed satisfied. Then she stood up, and as she did so, Logan pressed the shutter.
He developed the film later that night in a hotel room in Marseille. He didn’t know if the woman was a KGB colonel, an expat British divorcée, or the Queen of Sheba for that matter. But the photograph, he was relieved to see, gave a clear picture of her face, and those who wanted her would know. He made four copies of the picture, including one for himself. The other three were for his intended customers.
Then he fell asleep, exhausted, and dreamed of a terrified Plismy, surrounded by all the people he hated in the world, like some Benetton or Coca-Cola poster, but with the reverse message—a congregation of all the ethnic groups and religions in existence, closing in on the source of their persecution.
At eleven thirty the following morning, Logan mailed two copies of the picture, the first to the CIA station in Paris, the second to the SIS in London. He put a price on each picture of half a million dollars—in return for which he would reveal the location of its subject.
It was a high price. But if Plismy was right—and Logan sensed he was—then information about the woman was worth a lot of money.
Then he boarded an afternoon flight to Belgrade, to meet his third potential customer. As he took his seat on the plane, he opened up the Sunday edition of Midi Libre and read the headline: “Magnate Russe assassiné à Londres.”
He fell asleep, not waking until they touched down in Belgrade two and a half hours later.
Chapter 4
ADRIAN CAREW STEPPED INTO the chauffeured car outside his London apartment on Chelsea Green. It was a Sunday morning, and he usually only stayed here during the week.
He wished his driver Ray good morning in a way that suggested it wasn’t, and his demeanour dissuaded further conversation. Rarely in London at any time over a weekend, let alone on a Sunday, he was very irritable that he’d been called back from Hampshire.
At weekends, Adrian liked to be at his and Penny’s country home—or the Wine Cellar, as office wits referred to it—on the duke of Wellington’s estate in Hampshire. Only a crisis brought him back to London. But during the week he lived here, in Chelsea Green near the Barracks. It was an area of multimillion-pound homes and, like the country house, his apartment was courtesy of Penny’s private fortune. But this wealthy corner of London had been tiresomely invaded in the nineteenth century by a development for the homeless, put there by a do-gooder charity foundation. Adrian wasn’t a person who admired the efforts of other human beings to haul their way out of predicaments he didn’t share. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he instinctively condemned them—the alcoholics, the homeless, a wide range of such groups—for being in that position in the first place.
And now, as the black Mercedes pulled out of the side street, he noted with distaste the idling group of alcoholics who stood smoking cigarettes in the thin sunlight outside the housing project across the road. Normally he saw them on a Monday morning, for their meeting at seven thirty, he supposed. He now assumed they must also meet on Sundays at the same god-awful hour.
“JIC, Ray,” he said. His chauffeur had been sufficiently sympathetic to his mood not to ask where they were going.
A special session of the Joint Intelligence Committee was just what he didn’t need, not this weekend, not any weekend. The Russian Anatoly Semyonovich was dead, but why did they need to have a bloody Joint Intelligence meeting about it? It was first of all a job for Scotland Yard and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—maybe MI5 at a pinch—but not a matter for MI6, to which he had recently been appointed head, with a knighthood to match. Not at this stage anyway.
As he willed himself over the effects of too much excellent claret the night before, he vaguely supposed they wanted to pick his brains about Semyonovich the billionaire; Semyonovich the asset predator; Semyonovich the Kremlin stooge.
They would want his special knowledge of the Russian’s connections both inside and outside Britain, which Adrian had on a few occasions discussed with his opposite number at MI5. He would explain the web of obscure and secret shell companies of which the Russian’s business apparatus largely consisted. But mainly Adrian’s role would be to reveal Semyonovich’s closeness to those who ruled in the Kremlin.
Find the killer, that was Adrian’s prerequisite for delving into the whole bad business.
And then his mind turned to what really preoccupied him.
While his son had been at the game yesterday afternoon, Saturday, in a friend’s merchant banker father’s private box (“Enjoy it,” Adrian had told him, “the bloody bankers won’t be able to afford boxes for much longer”), the Russians had finally made it clear, through their London ambassador, that they wouldn’t be extraditing Grigory Bykov for Finn’s murder, not under any circumstances.
So now Adrian was going to insist that his original plan, to take Bykov down in retaliation for the assassination, must go ahead. The time for negotiating was over. They had nothing to exchange for Bykov. The KGB colonel Anna’s whereabouts were still unknown, even if she was a bargaining chip, which it seemed she wasn’t any longer. An impasse had been reached. Now Adrian wanted Bykov’s head. That was the way of the secret world, and the Russians knew it.
But first he was going to have to deal with the party now being gathered at the JIC. Only afterwards would he be able to collar Teddy Parkinson, its head, to make this special request.