Anonymous Sources (28 page)

“This old geezer?” one of them asked.

The two were whisked back to the main waiting room. The guards stepped aside and conferred. There appeared to be some discussion as to whether the commotion in the Cabinet Room required follow-up. Daniel stood tensely off to the side.

Then the old man began to chuckle softly. He held up his hand in the air. He was clutching a wallet.

Malik played along. “In your pocket, Papa? The whole time?”

“But different pocket, wrong pocket,” the old man croaked. He shrugged his shoulders in an apologetic way and let the glazed look creep back over his eyes. His mouth hung slack. He looked ancient, feeble.

The guards appeared to reach a decision. “Enough already,” one of them snapped. “Thanks very much for coming. Out you go. This way, thank you, gentlemen . . .”

Malik caught Daniel's eye and mouthed a thank-you. Then they were walking back down the driveway. There was no security check to
exit the White House. Malik dropped his temporary ID in a bin and collected the phone he'd had to check on the way in. He put it in his pocket next to the new one. They spun through a revolving gate and walked together in silence down the block to Seventeenth Street, just in case anyone was watching. At the corner they turned and faced each other.

“You recorded the video?” the older man asked in perfect English.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He turned and walked swiftly away.

Malik stood still and looked up at the starry night sky. It was still warm outside. The smells of bus fumes and fresh-cut grass hung in the air. A few tourists wandered past.

He allowed himself a small smile. He had done it.

    

    

L
ucien Sly hunched over his desk and studied the contents of the folder. This latest assignment was bizarre, even by the standards of his line of work.

Photographs of Alexandra James were fanned across his work surface. They captured her smiling in her official picture on the
Chronicle
website . . . in profile walking into a terminal at Heathrow Airport . . . sitting two days ago outside a café on Old Compton Street in London. In this last one she was staring in the direction of the camera, a feisty look on her face, as if she knew she was being photographed. It was disconcerting.

When the classified file on Alex James had landed in his in-box yesterday, his first thought was that it must be a joke. Some of the blokes down at Vauxhall Cross taking the Mickey. Perhaps someone had spotted them together at the Eagle pub the other night and decided to have a laugh.

But this had turned out not to be the case. Incredibly, Alex appeared to be a legitimate surveillance target for MI6. Awkward to be asked to monitor someone when you were in fact already sleeping with her.

What was not clear from the file was
why
she had been singled out for surveillance. Yes, she had been asking questions about Nadeem Siddiqui. And, yes, Lucien had stupidly made a few phone calls for her. Trying to impress her, showing off. But it had seemed a lark, calling the fruit company, not something that touched on Lucien's real work. Siddiqui was leaving England, going home. His folder was about to be closed. Honestly, who cared why the Pakistani liked his bananas?

Spying on an American civilian was not something British intelligence would enter into lightly, so Lucien could only assume the CIA was involved or at least being kept informed. But again, why? His request for further information had been rebuffed; the answer that came back from headquarters boiled down to
You don't need to know so could you just shut up please and get on with it
.

He frowned and switched on his espresso maker. It was so bloody typical.

His father had warned him that a career with the Secret Intelligence Service would prove frustrating. It was a bit . . . common. And the history of the service was riddled with scandal and failure. Remember that whole sordid business with the Cambridge Five spies, his father had argued—who wants to get mixed up with that lot? But then, his father was a duke. It wasn't as if he were ever actually going to work for a living. The same was true for Lucien's eldest brother, and arguably, even the middle one. But the third son of a duke . . . well, he could find himself with time on his hands.

And so it had come as a relief when the master of Lucien's undergraduate college had discreetly invited him for tea during his final year. He had glided through university, was about to finish with a first in languages, but he had no clear idea what to do with his life. The master had quizzed him in French, then Italian, then German—then asked how he might feel about picking up Arabic. Love to, Lucien replied. Good. There were some gentlemen he should meet in London, the master had said. Things happened quickly after that.

Two years later, life as a spy for MI6 was proving nothing like Lucien had imagined. He was aware, thank you very much, that James Bond was a work of fiction. But was it too much to ask for a small crumb of adventure, given that all over the world
at this very moment
arms deals were probably being struck, terrorist plots hatched, dictators covertly toppled? And here he was, stuck in rudding Cambridge, where the most radical idea put forward all week was whether to banish the Latin blessing at formal hall.

Lucien longed to travel. It was what MI6 did, for God's sake; the agency's raison d'être was to collect
foreign
intelligence. Affairs on British soil were supposed to fall to their rather less glamorous sister spy service, MI5. And Lucien had traveled a bit, in the beginning. But it became apparent that he suffered an unusual disadvantage: He was too well connected in London society. He could move in circles no other recruit could penetrate. His assignments soon trended toward dinners in Belgravia with Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, German financiers. Lucien moved with ease at their parties because they were the type of parties he would have been invited to anyway. He was simply too valuable at home to be sent abroad.

His cover was not exactly creative. He was supposed to be a graduate student at Cambridge, pursuing his PhD in the department of Middle Eastern Studies. His Arabic was coming along quite well, not that it looked as if he would ever have the chance to use it. And from this post he was free not only to travel regularly to London, but to investigate the many people of interest who passed through the university.

Pakistani nuclear scientists, for example. He had been asked to watch Siddiqui months ago. Standard operating procedure. Pakistan was currently generating terrorists and nuclear weapons at equally alarming rates. Despite their public protestations of confidence, neither London nor Washington were at all convinced that Pakistan's weapons were safe. Thus almost anytime someone with knowledge of the nuclear program traveled to the West, he was monitored. Probably approached too, with an eye to persuading him to sell his country's secrets. Whether this had happened in Nadeem Siddiqui's case, Lucien did not know. That was above his pay grade. He was just supposed to keep an eye on the guy.

This had not been difficult. Siddiqui kept a low profile. He got up to little worth reporting. Lucien had noted his budding friendship with Thom Carlyle. It seemed an unlikely pairing, the golden-boy jock from America and the taciturn Pakistani. The two had met for lunch a couple times. Lucien did not know what they had discussed. He began keeping tabs on Carlyle as well. That had had the fringe benefit of bringing Petronella into his orbit. An enjoyable if not entirely professional detour. Lucien had felt guilty the first few times his job had led to trysts. But he was learning that MI6—an agency that broke the law in other countries as a matter of routine—did not pass judgment when its officers indulged in the occasional moral lapse.

Now, though, Thom Carlyle was dead. And the whole situation with Alex—it was one twist too many. It was one thing to meet someone through your work and end up in bed with her. It was quite another to meet someone through your work, end up in bed with her, and then have her photograph appear on your computer screen as your next surveillance target. He was having trouble sorting through the ethics implications. No, forget the ethics—he was having trouble sorting through the basic mechanics of what was going on. The Crispin Withington encounter, for example, struck Lucien as extremely odd. Who had that man really been? The choice of such a clumsy cover identity seemed amateur for an intelligence agency. But who else could it be?

He reached for his coffee. It had gone cold. Then he looked again at the file. Now that Alex had left the UK, he was supposed to submit a short final report on where she had gone and whom she had spoken to while here. Tricky, given that she'd spent half her time in bed with him. He was also required to provide his professional assessment of the subject's state of mind.

Lucien pulled back his shirt and regarded a purplish bruise flowering across his collarbone. In the middle was a ring of small, pink, horizontal lines. Teeth marks. It had hurt in a searing, wonderful way when she bit him.
Her state of mind?
Assertive, definitely. Determined. Funny. Really, really sexy.

He sighed and stared at his blank screen. He was mad to be carrying on with her. Stark, raving bonkers to have asked her to Bermuda. He could always get out of it, he supposed.

But here he was forced to confront an uncomfortable fact: he very much liked Alexandra James. He quite wanted to go to Bermuda with her. It was ridiculous, obviously, but there it was.

And, really—how much of a problem could it turn out to be?

    

    

THURSDAY, JULY 1

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE
girl, my mother used to wake me by singing.

It is one of my earliest memories. Her entering the dark room, walking to the window to pull back the curtain and let the sun shine in, humming “Amazing Grace.” When she was reasonably confident I was awake, she would drop the humming and burst into full-throated song. She has a deep, warm, honeyed voice and is partial to old hymns, though she's never been much of one for church. Old hymns and Broadway choruses and Scottish lullabies.