The Pegasus Secret (19 page)

Even the Victorian opulence of one of the Savoy’s River Suites, exquisitely furnished and oval shaped, could not compensate for the gloom that met every morning’s glance from the window. Lang and his wife spent an afternoon at the Tower, watched the changing of the guard, and endured overcooked beef at Simpson’s, all the tourist activities he thought she would enjoy.

The weather was a blanket that smothered any enthusiasm she could muster.

The couple had dinner with Lang’s friends from MI6 at their clubs, evenings of drinks and war stories; they spent an afternoon of extravagance at Harrods. Neither lifted Dawn’s mood, as dark as the view from the window.

Lang had been frustrated. London had been one of his favorite cities in the world. He and Dawn had their first and only fight. They went home early, on Boxing Day, notwithstanding Ben Jonson’s observation that he who tires of London has tired of life. According to Dawn, Dr. Jonson obviously enjoyed beastly weather and worse food.

The day they left, the weather was as bad as the day they arrived.

Lang remembered that trip with particular pain, for it had been only a week later that Dawn experienced menstrual cramps that curled her into a fetal position. Another week and she was under the doctors’ death sentence.

Lang had never returned to London until now.

Changes in the city were obvious. Every vista included building cranes. New office space, new dwellings for the City’s new e-millionaires. Lang had recently read that London was outstripping the rest of Great Britain combined in construction, prosperity and expansion.

He watched the West End from the moisture-streaked
windows of the cab until Buckingham Palace flashed by. On the other side of the car, the Victoria Monument was alive with rain slickers and umbrellas, tourists seeking a vantage point for the changing of the guard. A quick left onto St. James Street and the area of the same name. They were only blocks from Piccadilly Circus, the entrance to Soho, the shopping, restaurant and theater district. Just past the crenellated twin Tudor towers of St. James’s Palace, the cab turned into a small mew, made a right and stopped in front of an unimpressive brick building, identified only by a brass plaque announcing it to be the Stafford Hotel.

Small, cheap accommodations hadn’t helped Lang evade Them in Rome. He was certain he had been followed from the
pensione
to Orvieto. This time he was choosing an upbeat hotel, a place Herr Schneller might stay with his wife, what the guidebooks called “moderate to expensive,” well located. The deciding factor had been its location in a cul-de-sac, a short street that hosted one private club, two small hotels and a few businesses. No shops, no restaurants. Anyone loitering there would be obvious.

A doorman who could have stolen his uniform from the set of
A Christmas Carol
took their baggage from the cabby. While Gurt dispensed tips and checked in, Lang inspected the lobby. It was as he remembered. Past the reception area, the parlor of a Victorian manor house was set for tea. Behind it was someone’s idea of an American sports bar–
cum
–men’s club. Helmets from each NFL team were placed around the top of the bar, which faced stuffed chairs far more comfortable than anything to be found in a North American counterpart. Neckties, each displaying school or regimental colors, hung from the ceiling like striped stalactites. Photos of European athletes adorned the walls along with a single print of a B-17 landing on a snow-lined runway, presumably a British aerodrome of
World War II. French doors opened onto a small courtyard. Since Lang’s last visit, apartments above a garage had been built on the other side.

He wasn’t happy that the only exits from the hotel were through the front door or those units. There’s safety in numbers and nowhere is that more true than when it comes to ways to get out.

By the time he had completed his tour, Gurt was waiting at the elevator. Their room was small, neat, clean and well furnished. Once Gurt had hung a couple of dresses in the closet, she lit a Marlboro and headed for the bathroom.

“I’m going to change before I go to Grosvenor Square,” she announced over her shoulder.

The U.S. Embassy and, therefore, the Agency Chief of Station were in Grosvenor Square. Even on their own time, Agency employees had to check in upon arrival in a country other than that in which stationed. Conventional wisdom was that the requirement discouraged operatives from launching projects of their own just as Gurt was doing by accompanying Lang.

“Take a cab or you’ll get drenched,” he advised the closed bathroom door. “The nearest tube station is almost as far away as the embassy.”

The door cracked open and Gurt’s disembodied head appeared along with a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You know this or are you reading from a guidebook?”

“Where the nearest subway station is? I know. I used to spend a fair amount of time here.”

She nodded, seeming to evaluate the information. “Thanks for the point.”

“Tip.”

“Whatever. It does me happy you care.”

The door closed, leaving him to reflect that in English, people were happy. Or were made happy. Only in German were they done happy. The difference said something
about the nationality. Someday he might take the time to figure out what.

London, St. James

Half an hour later, Lang stepped out of Fortnum and Mason, opened his new umbrella and thanked the top-hatted doorman who was holding the door open for him. His acquisition would not only shelter him from the persistent drizzle but it would also blend into the umbrella-toting crowd lining the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic.

To Lang’s right, the neon of Piccadilly Circus bled into the wet pavement, making the black asphalt dance with color. A doubledecker bus blocked then revealed the stature of Eros, the Greek god of love, who had presided over the circle for over a century.

Horns hooted as busses, trucks and cars came to a stop. Not quite used to having to check his right, rather than his left, Lang stepped in front of a bright red Mini Cooper. The driver’s hair was cut Beatles fashion, a cigarette bobbing in his mouth as he shouted into a cell phone. Lang picked his way around the rear of a Rover and two Japanese motorcycles before he got to the opposite sidewalk.

Half a block to his left was Old Bond Street. He saw the sign before number 12: Mike Jenson, Dealer in Curios, Antiquities, Etcetera. He pushed open the door and went in.

London, the West End

Miles away in the West End, a man scanned black-and-white television screens on which pictures of city streets
flickered, stopped and rolled on to various urban scenes. Occasionally a picture was commanded to freeze, a white halo surrounding a face until the controller told the machine to proceed.

Most Londoners did not know that, on average, their likenesses were transmitted forty times a day as they commuted to and from work, ran errands between buildings or simply window-shopped. The cameras were a legacy of IRA terrorism. Thousands had been posted around the city in discreet locations, cameras little different from those used as security devices in department stores. The sheer number of images had been overwhelming, far too many to be scanned by London police.

The age of technology had come to the rescue with face-recognition software. A picture of a face could be programmed into a computer and assigned numerical values: a number for the space between the eyes, another for the length of the nose and so on. Once a face was “recognized” in the cameras’ pictures, an alarm went off and the countenance in question was highlighted, its location appearing on the screen.

Since major components of facial construction—occipital arches, mandible, rhinal bones—can be altered only by surgery or trauma, the computer could, in most instances, see through changes such as hair loss, weight loss or gain, or the most relentless force of all, age.

With the reluctance of governments everywhere to relinquish power once acquired, the London police had elected to let those few who knew of the devices forget them once the Irish Question had been temporarily resolved by tenuous agreement. On the few occasions when the subject arose, officials quickly pointed out that cameras in less-than-prosperous neighborhoods were responsible for an impressive number of arrests. Removal of surveillance equipment from “safe” areas but not from others
was likely to offend the historic British sense of fair play, and, more likely, cause a political firestorm in the city council. The occasional citizen who publicly bemoaned the loss of privacy was condemned by authorities as an anarchist opposed to municipal security.

Identical technology was used by the Tampa, Florida, police as an “experiment” to identify no less than nineteen Super Bowl fans with criminal records at the 2001 game.

The London police would have been the last to admit that anything transmitted was subject to interception or, in this case, hacking.

It was just such an interception that the man in front of the screens was watching.

Lang Reilly turned just as he entered the shop, presenting both full-face and profile shots to a lens mounted unobtrusively on a rooftop. The man monitoring the screens stopped the motion in the picture and squinted at the highlighted or “haloed” area before punching numbers into a cell phone.

“You were right,” he said. “He’s tracked it back to Jenson. What do you want done?”

He listened for a moment and disconnected without another word. He hurriedly entered another number.

“Jenson’s,” he said without identifying himself. “Make sure everything is sanitized, Jenson included. No, we’ve changed that. We want Reilly alive, see what else he knows.”

London, Old Bond Street

A bell tinkled as Lang entered the shop, a room about twenty feet by twenty. Oils and watercolors shouldered each other for space on the simple plaster walls. Regiments
of dark-wooded furniture paraded in orderly ranks and files, dividing the room into squares as neat as any formed by the British infantry. There was a smell of lemon oil.

He heard footsteps on the wooden plank floor and a curtain at the back was brushed aside. A short man in a dark suit came out, his hands clasping each other as though he were washing them. A long, pale face was topped by lifeless dark hair shot with silver. His smile revealed teeth crooked enough to make an orthodontist salivate.

“Mornin’, sir,” he said in an accent Lang would have attributed to Jeeves the butler. “I help you or you jus’ browsin’?”

“Mr. Jenson?” Lang asked.

There was a furtive flicker of the eyes, the look of someone in need of an escape route. Lang would have bet Mr. Jenson had unhappy creditors.

“An’ who might you be?” he wanted to know, his tone more defensive than curious.

Lang smiled, trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible. “A man looking for information.”

The caution in Jensen’s voice was not dispelled. “An’ what sort of information would that be?”

Lang admired a highboy, running a hand across mahogany drawers inlaid with satinwood. He pulled out the Polaroid, using the marble top of a commode to smooth out the creases. “I was wondering if you could tell me where you got this?”

Jenson made no effort to conceal his relief Lang wasn’t there as a bill collector. “Some bloody estate or winding-up sale, I’d imagine. Not some place where you can’t likely get another if it’s genre religious work you fancy.”

“I’m a lawyer,” Lang explained, his hand still on the cool marble on which the small photo lay. “I have a client to
whom the origins of the painting shown there could be very important.”

As Jenson inspected the snapshot, his eyes narrowed, giving his long face the appearance of a fox scenting a hen house. “Don’t usually keep records of art sold lyin’ about. Space considerations, and all that, y’know. Have to look it up, check my books. That’ll take a spot of time, if you take my meaning.”

Lang did. “I, my client, that is, would expect to pay you for your time, of course.”

Jenson treated Lang to that picket-fence-in-bad-repair grin again. “I’ll have it for you”—he produced a pocket watch—“after lunch. You come ‘round a coupla hours from now.”

London, St. James
An hour and a half later

Lang had lunch wrapped in newspaper at a fish and chips take-away. It wasn’t the best meal available, but it was the quickest. Which meant he had time to kill. Wiping the grease from his chin with a thin paper napkin, he entered the nearby Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, where he spent half an hour staring with total lack of comprehension at the current visiting exhibition of abstract art.

Best Lang could tell, there were two schools displayed here. First were the splattists, distinguishable by paint applied by flinging it in the general direction of the canvas or whatever surface was involved. The paint splattered as it hit, forming shapes and patterns dictated by centrifugal force and gravity rather than design. The other was the smearists, artists who preferred to glob paint at random
and then smear it into whorls, lines or anything else as long as it was not in a recognizable form. Then there were the truly avant-garde, who defied definition by simply coloring the canvas a single, uniform color.