A man in a grey suit got out of the rear door nearest the pavement and Bennett instinctively sank down into the well of her seat as he walked up the steps, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside.
A minute later he re-emerged with Valera by his side in a dark suit. Bennett sank even lower as Valera paused at the top of the steps and scanned the street. She couldn’t read the expression on her face – she didn’t look exactly happy about following the man down into the waiting car, but she didn’t look scared either.
Bennett let the sedan pull away, counted to ten, put the Anglia in gear, and started to follow them.
The Jaguar turned out of Methley Street and headed north. The driver had no idea who either of his passengers were. He’d been hired, along with the car, anonymously by Peterson and paid in cash. Peterson was always careful with the people who did his dirty work for him. He paid well, but never told them more than was absolutely necessary. And he never used the same person twice. The only time he’d broken this rule was when he’d sent the man who’d been guarding the Italians’ flat to Stockholm because he hadn’t had time to find anyone else to complete the strike team. But he’d ended up getting himself killed, so couldn’t betray Peterson even if he’d wanted to.
Valera sat across from Peterson in the back of the sedan. She tried her best to look relaxed, but her body was rigid and her suit itched.
Peterson had an open briefcase perched on his knees. He held a manila folder in one hand while the other kept a vice-like grip on the handle of the case.
‘We’ll be at the Richmond in twenty minutes,’ he said, without looking up from the documents he was studying. ‘We’ll get you settled in my suite for an hour, then we have two meetings this morning. After that, the car will take you back to the hotel, where you’ll have lunch in the suite. I have another engagement I have to attend, but I’ll be back around three in time for our afternoon appointments.’
Valera had already memorised their schedule, and knew what was expected of her. She was to dazzle Peterson’s contacts with her genius, while he worked on extracting the best deal from them. She didn’t know who she would be meeting, and Peterson had made it clear that she wouldn’t find out until she was in the room with them. He may have been doing his best to exude an air of confidence, down to organising the ostentatious car and moving Valera to an expensive hotel, but his paranoia still showed through. Valera tried to sneak a look at the contents of his folder, but all she could see was the handle of a pistol resting under it in the briefcase.
‘Then what?’ she asked.
‘Then,’ he replied, closing the briefcase, ‘it’s back to the Richmond for dinner and an early night, and we do it all again in the morning.’
The Jaguar started to cross Westminster Bridge. Twenty seconds later, the Anglia did the same. Bennett followed Peterson and Valera over the bridge, past Big Ben and Parliament Square, and along the sides of St James’s Park and Buckingham Palace, before turning east along Piccadilly and into Mayfair.
The little convoy travelled up Clarges Street, then Curzon Street, just a few hundred yards away from Leconfield House. It looped around Berkeley Square, then continued on along Conduit Street. After the junction with New Bond Street, the Jaguar slowed to a stop in the middle of the road, indicating right.
Bennett pulled in to the kerb fifty yards behind them on the other side of the junction, and watched as the car turned into the set-back entrance of a six-storey hotel. She got out of the Anglia and ran over the junction just in time to see Peterson and Valera walk inside, then she sprinted back to Berkeley Square, stepped into one of the bright red phone boxes that stood in a row at its northern end, and dialled White’s office number.
CHAPTER 59
The owners of the Richmond had started to worry that they’d made a terrible mistake. They’d bet that the super-wealthy were growing tired of the faded glories of hotels that had last been decorated at the height of the belle époque, and that there was money to be made by being the first to embrace a more modern aesthetic. So they’d spent a sizeable fortune stripping back and renovating the hotel, then filling it with one-of-a-kind pieces by designers like Arne Jacobsen and Eero Saarinen that blended forms and materials in radical, outlandish ways. Unfortunately it hadn’t worked.
The hotel had featured in a couple of travel articles in the UK and America, and had even been used for a photoshoot for Vogue, but so far the rich had not flocked to the Richmond. There had been a steady stream of tourists coming to enjoy the novelty of the place, but there hadn’t been a booking for any of its suites on the upper floors in over a month. The owners had wanted to get ahead of the times, but it seemed they’d gone a little too far a little too fast.
They were particularly concerned that they had no reservations for the OECD conference. Every other luxury hotel in Mayfair was fighting off booking requests, but the Richmond stood almost empty. The owners had no idea that Peterson had orchestrated this exact situation by removing the Richmond from the list of approved hotels MI5 had supplied to the conference’s attendees. So they were extremely relieved when they finally received a booking for one of their most expensive suites for the entire week of the conference from a Mr Devereux.
They had no idea who Mr Devereux was or who he worked for, but they didn’t care – he had money, and that was enough to make him important. Desperate to make a good impression, the front-of-house staff were told to cater to his every whim and accommodate all his peculiarities, such as checking in late on Sunday night, insisting no staff go up to the sixth floor or enter his suite without direct instruction from him, and bringing an unknown woman who he referred to unconvincingly as his niece into the hotel at nine o’clock on a Monday morning.
Peterson had chosen the Richmond out of convenience. It was close to both Leconfield House and Westminster Central Hall, where the majority of the OECD conference’s official events would be held. The Central Hall had been picked to add a bit of weight and theatricality to the conference’s proceedings. It had been the site of the first meeting of the inaugural General Assembly of the United Nations in 1946, and the OECD hoped to borrow some of its historical significance.
The Richmond was also near all the other hotels – the Dorchester, Claridge’s, Brown’s and the like – that had been booked out by visiting dignitaries. And by keeping it off MI5’s list Peterson could be sure he wouldn’t bump into anyone he didn’t plan on meeting, or worry about anyone listening in to his conversations. He’d even taken the precaution of having all Pipistrelle intelligence routed through GCHQ, so if any of his prospective buyers let slip about their meetings with him in their hotel rooms it would be too late by the time it got back to MI5.
And, just to be completely certain of his privacy, a month ago he’d taken a short-term lease on an empty office at the top of a building just off Dover Street, five minutes away. It was neutral, anonymous ground, and, importantly, it was untraceable – the company Peterson had used on the lease didn’t exist.
Peterson and Valera walked across the hotel’s sparse foyer, past the reception desk, which was a single, amorphous piece of dazzling white Lucite that seemed to grow out of the equally white floor, to its small bank of lifts.
They rode up to the sixth floor in silence, then Peterson led Valera to their suite at the end of a corridor that was lacquered black and lit only by small spotlights above each room’s door.