‘God, Stephanie, what happened to …?’
‘Don’t ask. Not yet.’
London might have been fifteen centigrade cooler than Marrakech but the climate was far less agreeable with reeking humidity trapped beneath a hazy brown sky. Stephanie reached the corner of Robert Street and Adelphi Terrace, overlooking Victoria Embankment Gardens which, itself, overlooked the Thames. A pair of barges crawled upstream, overtaking the tourist coaches congesting the Embankment.
The brass plaque beside the front door was original: L.L.Herring & Sons, Ltd, Numismatists, Since 1789. The firm still occupied a small part of the building. The other companies fell under the umbrella of Magenta House. An organization without designation, it had no official title and was not registered anywhere. There was no secret code of reference for it. It formed no part of MI5 or SIS, or any of the other security services. Magenta House was the name of the dilapidated office block on the Edgware Road that the organization had first occupied. Subsequently the building had been demolished to make way for a hotel.
Existing beyond existence itself, Magenta House was not constrained by law, by the fluctuating fashions of politics or by scrutiny from the media. It was established as a direct consequence of increased transparency in the intelligence services. Its creators regarded accountability as an alarming intrusion by an ignorant public whose right to know needed to be restricted to information they could digest. They felt that politicians, in thrall to the short term, should be bypassed. They believed there were areas of national security too vital to disseminate, and they knew, with evangelical certainty, that there were some threats that could not be countered by legal means. Stephanie had no idea who these creators were, but they had invested control of the organization in one man: Alexander. If he had a first name, Stephanie had yet to meet anyone who knew it.
She pushed the second button on the intercom, which was marked Adelphi Travel. The lens on the overhead camera turned before she heard the click of the lock. She pushed open the door and entered a parallel world. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001 Magenta House’s area of responsibility had been expanded. So had its budget, which was bled from the military. Some of the changes were macro, some micro; the new smoke detectors, for instance, were a precaution with a difference. They functioned conventionally but were also capable of delivering an anaesthetic gas to counter hostile intrusion.
Soft pools of muted light fell onto the reception area: two sofas, two armchairs, newspapers and magazines in half a dozen languages spread across a coffee table, fresh flowers in a china vase on an antique sideboard. The paintings were nineteenth-century landscapes, oil on canvas, each individually lit. Even the receptionist had been overhauled: gone was the weary middle-aged chain-smoker of years gone by, replaced by a younger model with good cheekbones, a chic grey suit and cold zeal for eyes.
Stephanie said, ‘Which room are we in?’
‘Mr Alexander wants to see you before you go down.’
Alexander’s large, rectangular office overlooked Victoria Embankment Gardens. In the winter he had a view of the river and the south bank. Now all he could look onto was the lush foliage of the trees in the garden.
The room was persistently old-fashioned: parquet floor, Persian carpets, a Chesterfield sofa, wooden shelves groaning beneath the weight of leather-bound books. At the centre of this office stood Alexander, in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a pair of black Church’s shoes, a white shirt with a double-cuff secured by gold cufflinks, a silk tie. Which, appropriately, was magenta. When Mark wore a suit, Stephanie saw an animal trapped in a cage. Alexander, by contrast, wore a suit as naturally as skin. And in this environment he looked at home. But it was an environment that belonged to another era.
‘I wanted to see you alone before we meet the others for the debriefing.’ He was standing by the window, smoking a Rothmans, his back to her. The windows were open, rendering recently installed mortar-proof glass redundant. ‘Were you injured?’
Not the first question she would have expected. It almost sounded like concern. Which made her suspicious. ‘Nothing serious.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘They knew. He knew.’
‘Mostovoi?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he saw you.’
‘I know. When he agreed to see me, he must have thought the deal was valid. Or, at least, potentially valid. In the end, though, the deal was too big. It wasn’t realistic. Not for Petra.’
‘That was the point. He’d been invisible for a year. It needed to be something extraordinary to draw him out. To be honest, I was beginning to wonder whether he was still alive.’
‘Well, now you know. Was and still is.’
‘How close did you get?’
‘Closer than I am to you.’
He turned round. ‘You were in the same room as him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Face to face?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t manage an attempt of any sort?’
Stephanie resented his tone. ‘Actually, I did. After I’d handled his protection.’
‘What happened?’
‘The gun jammed.’
‘You fired at him?’
‘I tried to.’
‘Then what?’
‘There wasn’t time for anything else. I had to exit immediately.’
Alexander shook his head in disbelief, then sat down at his desk. ‘How can you be so sure about Mostovoi?’
‘They had me tagged from the start. The day before yesterday they went through my hotel room while I was out and …’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was witnessed.’
‘By?’
‘Independent cover.’
‘Presumably you didn’t go back there.’
‘I didn’t need to. I’d already established a second identity.’
Alexander frowned. ‘Was that sanctioned?’
‘Under the circumstances I thought it better to act on instinct.’
‘You’re supposed to respond to instruction, not instinct.’ He took a final drag from his cigarette, then ground the butt into an onyx ashtray. ‘Let me guess. The independent cover and second identity were provided by Stern.’
Stern, the information broker, the ghost in the machine. His business was conducted over the internet. Nobody knew his – or her – identity, but Stephanie had used him since her days as an independent and he’d never let her down. Nor she him. In Stern’s virtual world, information was both product and currency. Sometimes, as Petra, Stephanie had bought information with information. Alexander hated the idea of Stern because he was beyond Magenta House’s control and because his electronic existence allowed Stephanie a form of freedom.
‘As fond as you are of Stern, has it ever occurred to you that he might not be reliable?’
‘Compared to?’
He stiffened, then tried to shrug it off – a pointless victory, perhaps, but sweet nonetheless – before changing tack. ‘You didn’t go home last night.’
‘That’s not home. It’s a film set.’