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Soon after Mordred spotted Maria making a purchase in Pizza on the Dock, a team of six MI7 agents moved into the Guoman Tower Hotel on the south side of the marina and kept continuous watch on the freshly re-named Saint Martha’s Pride. After three hours, they saw Fenella poke her head above the cabin for a few moments. Later, they saw Maria and Rory running errands in turn. They had to wait until midnight to catch sight of the hostage-takers. A man of about forty emerged on deck to smoke a cigarette. Then another man took his place and stayed there until morning, watching intently. Both were quickly identified as Horvath employees. They were probably dedicated, but not enough to kill hostages. A visit from a Scotland Yard swift response unit should put paid to them.
And yet it was important not to act prematurely. Mordred had an appointment with the Lord Mayor in fourteen hours’ time, and the aim was to present him with something he couldn’t wriggle out of. For that, he needed Phyllis.
At first sight, it looked like there was an alternative solution: just liberate Fenella and persuade her to lead them to Peter. But Mordred didn’t think she’d do that. She might not even know where he was. If all MI7 did was rescue her from St Katharine Dock and she was unable or unwilling to cooperate with them, obviously that still left Cavendish with something to hope for. Wherever the old scientist was, the City might still succeed in getting to him first, and there was no telling what new stratagems Cavendish might turn his hand to in pursuit of that end. No, Phyllis was integral. And someone to imitate his voice. God, how humiliating that everyone in the building did impressions of him. Because that’s what it boiled down to. Men and women, old and young. He’d probably have to hold auditions. Did that make it better or worse?
Fifteen hours away from his job interview with Cavendish, and Ruby Parker sent him and ten others down to the pods beneath the building to get some sleep. Mansion House, 3pm sharp. He was already beginning to have nightmares and he hadn’t even fallen asleep yet. He expected to lie awake worrying, but in fact he’d underestimated how tired he was. He fell asleep with Ruby Parker’s words ringing in his ears. This is a team effort, John. Others can look for Phyllis just as well as you. The star part is tomorrow at three. For that, you need to be alert. When he was awoken at eight by a gentle dinging, he showered, dressed and went straight to basement one where the most integral hub of Red Department was.
The first person he ran into was Annabel. “Well done, John,” she said. “We’ve found her. This morning’s cleaners, Pickthanks Office Hygiene, 5am. Top floor, Domine Dirige Tower.”
For a moment, the news was so good he felt he must be dreaming. He looked at his watch. 9.05. Nearly six hours to go. Doubly brilliant, unless -
“How is she?” he asked.
“Fine, I think. Go and see Ruby Parker. I don’t want to be seen speaking to you for too long because it might get back to Tariq.”
“I spoke to him yesterday,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear ...” He didn’t know how to end the sentence.
“How was he?” she asked.
“Very, very upset.”
Whether this was or wasn’t what she was expecting, he didn’t know. She looked emotional for a moment, then walked away.
Leave them well alone, that’s my advice. They’ve got to learn to resolve their own problems. He continued along the corridor and knocked on Ruby Parker’s door.
“Good news,” she said, when he put his head round the door.
“I just heard it from Annabel.”
“And from what we can discover, she’s being treated very well indeed. We’re keeping watch on her from Whitaker Place, the adjacent building.”
“Excellent.”
“On another matter, you’ll also be pleased to know I’ve been running auditions. Your sound-alike.”
“Yes, I suppose on reflection it doesn’t make sense for me to do it myself. Most people don’t have a very good grasp of what they sound like.”
“And, of course, natural human vanity gets in the way. We all want to think we sound better than we do.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense then. Who’s the winner?”
“It was a toss-up between Annabel and Brian. In the end, I gave it to Brian, because Annabel has other priorities.”
He laughed. “Annabel and Brian? What about Walter, or Chris, or Marcus?”
“They may be about your age and build, but imitation’s a tricky business. The upshot is, Brian’s upstairs and waiting. I’ve a vague idea what you’re planning, but I expect to see you back here before midday to finalise the details.”
Brian was known to value courage as the crown of the virtues, and he exhibited it by coming into work every day in the same clothes. To his credit, there was nothing malodorous about him - presumably he bathed and visited the dry-cleaners on a regular basis – but thirty years in a tweed jacket and khaki trousers was a long time. What made it doubly odd was that he also valued glamour.
They met in a seminar room with a digital recorder between them. “Good to see you,” Brian said in a voice clearly not his own. One Mordred vaguely recognised.
“Is that my voice you’ve got there?” he asked.
“Is that my voice you’ve got there?” Brian repeated.
“Because it doesn’t sound anything like me.”
“Because it doesn’t sound anything like me. Sorry, John,” he said, reverting to his own voice, “before you get annoyed, I’ve been practising by going the last eighteen hours in character. Obviously, I drew the line at dressing like you and adopting your mannerisms – I’m not Dustin Hoffman: I don’t think either of us is – but I brought a colleague of yours along to verify the authenticity of my rendition.”
“Hi, John,” Edna said, from the corner of the room. He hadn’t noticed her before.
“Hi,” Mordred said. “What ‘mannerisms’?”
“I was told by Ruby Parker that time is of the essence,” Brian said. “Shall we get started?”
Mordred turned to Edna. “Is this what I actually sound like?”
“It’s a nice voice,” Edna replied. “What do you think you sound like?”
“In my own head, I sound like ... I don’t know. A normal person.”
“It’s what I’d describe as posh with a pinch of Geordie,” Brian said. “A bit like Bob Ferris in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?”
Mordred grinned. Oh, well. He was what he was. Not Roger Moore, though.
“I take it you’ve got a script,” Brian said.
“Two copies,” Mordred replied. “Read it through first, then we’ll go live. This should only take five minutes at the outside.”
“I’ll operate the recorder,” Edna said.
“Am I allowed to make changes?” Brian said.
“No,” Mordred replied.
“Because I don’t think you would say this.”
“Nevertheless, that’s what I did say. It’s the transcript of an actual conversation.”
“Who’s this other character then? ‘L.M.’?”
“Lord Mayor. As in the Lord Mayor of London.”
“Gotcha. And you’re going to play him, right? Bob Wellington.”
“Correct. Except it’s not Bob Wellington. It’s Ashley Cavendish.”
“Who?”
“Ashley Cavendish. The Lord Mayor of the City of London. One square mile. Bob Wellington’s only the Mayor of Greater London. Six hundred and seven square miles. Just take my word for it.”
“Are you sure you can do him, this ‘Ashley Cavendish’?”
“I’m a languages expert. A lot of being able to learn different tongues lies in one’s ability to imitate native speakers exactly. I’ve been honing my skills since I was ten.”
“Can you do an imitation of me?”
“Can you do an imitation of me?” Mordred repeated.
“That didn’t sound anything like me!”
“Defer to Edna.”
“Sorry, Brian,” Edna said. “That’s exactly what you sound like. It was even better than yours of John.” She apparently saw how crestfallen he looked, and added: “If that’s possible.”
“Look,” Brian said bitterly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but why can’t you just do both parts? You must think you can do the Mayor – sorry, Lord Mayor - otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And obviously, you can do you.”
“It’s more difficult than it sounds to convincingly alternate two voices when your audience is judging with their ears alone,” Mordred said. “I’d have to be a much better actor than I am.”
“Know your limits,” Edna said. “The first rule of effective spycraft.”
Brian sighed. “Que sera, sera. Let’s get down to it then.”
Edna pressed record, and nodded.
“So you want to know where your colleague ‘Phyllis’ is,” Mordred said, in the Lord Mayor’s voice.
Brian spluttered a loud guffaw. Edna pressed stop.
“What’s so funny?” Mordred asked.
“He surely can’t sound like that!” Brian exclaimed. “No one sounds like that!”
“I assure you he does,” Mordred said.
“He sounds like bloody Jabba the Hutt! Play it back! Go on, play it back!”
Mordred didn’t need to have it played back, but Edna obliged anyway. Brian was right. He hadn’t seen it before. How could he have missed it?
Five minutes later:
Mordred: “So you want to know where your colleague ‘Phyllis’ is.”
Brian: “Yes, please.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I knew where this woman was.”
“Go on.”
“And I also knew where Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra was.”
Brian tried to say his next line. He quaked, scrunched his eyes, made his fingers rigid. Mordred laughed. Edna followed suit. She fell off her chair. Brian howled and slapped his thighs. He slapped the floor. He dribbled slightly onto the carpet.
One hour later:
Mordred: “So you want to know where your colleague ‘Phyllis’ is.”
Brian: “Yes, please.”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I knew where this woman was.”
“Go on.”
“And I also knew where Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra was.”
Brian tried not to crack up. Mordred juddered, tears in eyes. Edna laughed. She fanned her face.
Everyone recovered.
Mordred: “So you want to know where your colleague ‘Phyllis’ is.”
Brian: “Yes, please.”
Two hours later, Mordred knocked on Ruby Parker’s door.
“Talk me through your plan,” she told him.
“We keep a close eye on Fenella and Phyllis until about 2.40pm,” he told her. “Then we send in an armed team to rescue them. We know the two sets of Horvath guys holed up in Saint Martha’s Pride, and we know they’ll come quietly once they realise the game’s up. We know the same about Phyllis’s captors. We need shock and awe, obviously, but we can do that.”
“2.40 may be cutting it a bit fine,” she replied. “Are you sure that leaves enough time for you to reach Mansion House?”
“Barring a serious traffic jam, yes, but even then, we’re authorised to use the bus lanes. Plus Kevin knows the short cuts. Or at least, so he told someone else.”
“And we bring Fenella here, right?”
“Plus her two companions. It seems the safest option in the short term. After I’ve seen the Lord Mayor, we can take her where we like. In terms of telling us where Peter is, she probably won’t cooperate.”
“We’ll come to that in a moment. What are you going to say to Ashley Cavendish?”
“I’m going to show him Phyllis in the flesh, and tell him we’ve got Fenella, so he no longer holds any cards. Then I’m going to tell him I was recording him with my phone at our last meeting, and present him with this.”
He took his phone out and pressed it. A tinny MP3 played.
“So you want to know where your colleague ‘Phyllis’ is.”
“Yes, please,”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I knew where this woman was.”
“Go on.”
“And I also knew where Fenella Decristoforo-Salvaterra was.”
“Keep going.”
“You don’t sound very taken aback. Good acting. You probably need a skill like that in your job.”
“So you’ve got Phyllis Robinson and you’ve got Fenella Decristoforo- Salvaterra. What are you going to do with them?”
“I’m not saying I’ve ‘got’ them.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying for the sake of argument, for God’s sake. I thought I’d made that clear at the beginning. Don’t try and trap me. It won’t work.”
“If, for the sake of argument, you were holding Phyllis and Fenella, then what, for the sake of argument, would you do with them?”
“For the sake of argument, I – we: we in the City of London – would hold on to Phyllis, while you rendezvous with Fenella Decristoforo- Salvaterra and persuade her to lead you to her father. Once you’ve done that, we would release Phyllis. For the - ”
“But you’d kill Peter.”
“In the last resort, maybe. But his internet-cloaking discovery probably has important commercial applications. We’d want to access that first. Better than it falling into the hands of terrorists, you must agree. To that end, we’d need to hold on to his daughter.”
“I see, yes.”
“I accept that, for the sake of argument, all this would be asking a lot of you, but you’d be the head of Horvath and obviously two hundred and fifty thousand pounds is a lot of money. You’d have to be prepared to go beyond the call of duty all the time.”
“Yes, I appreciate that.”
“The people at Horvath warned me about your conscience, by the way –“
He pressed stop.
Ruby Parker stroked her chin. She took a deep breath. “And that’s you and Brian, is it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s convincing, I’ll give you that. You’ve both got the voices off. What are you going to do with it, once you’ve played it to him? How does it help?”
“There’s nothing clinching enough to put him in the clink here, especially with the kind of judges we’ve got in this country. But circumstantially, it’s enough to cause him serious embarrassment. All his ‘for the sake of argument’ qualifications are going to count for nothing next to the fact that he’s talking about two women who’ve just been rescued from a captivity in which Horvath – the organisation now in his employ, and of which he explicitly offers me the headship - played the gaoler role. The Director of Public Prosecutions may or may not think it’s worth sending to trial. The press will have a field day. And we do know that apart from the dressing up and processing through the city once a year, the one thing the Lord Mayor hates with a vengeance is light on his domain.”
“And yet for all its superficial power, the recording is a fake. If he calls your bluff - ”
“Would you, in his position?”
She thought for a moment. “No, probably not.”
“We’re not doing anything immoral. Illegal, maybe.”
“I have no problem with that, John. It’s the poker aspect I find worrying.”
“Cavendish is basically a wannabe Mafioso. It pays to call such people out. They’re not good for democracy. This guy isn’t, and he never will be. The sooner Bob Wellington soaks him up without remainder, the better.”
“How many copies of the recording are there?”
“This one, and the one on the digital recorder upstairs.”
“I’ll arrange for that machine to be destroyed. I’ll talk to Brian about confidentiality, although of course, he’s already bound by the usual agreements. After this is over, whether it works or not, I want you to give me your phone and buy another. Charge it to expenses, obviously.”
“Here’s a consoling thought. Say Cavendish thinks to himself, ‘that’s not a real recording, he’s bluffing’, even so he’s wise enough to know it’ll disappear before his lawyers have subpoenaed it. The mere rumour of its one-time existence would be enough to inflame a million conspiracy theories, none of which do him any good whatsoever. In that unlikely event, I’d expect MI7 to cut me loose as a ‘rogue agent’, acting without the approval of the centre. I’d take the consequences, in other words.”
She laughed humourlessly. “I’m supposed to find that ‘consoling’?”
“There are things that can go wrong – one of Horvath’s men might get trigger-happy, or there might be more security surrounding Phyllis than we anticipated – but, as plans go, this one’s relatively impervious.”
“That’s what’s troubling me. It’s just a little too perfect. And don’t forget, even if it works, it merely takes Cavendish out of the picture. It doesn’t necessarily get us one inch closer to Peter Decristoforo.”
“Sooner or later, he and Fenella will have to meet. We’ll be waiting. I know that makes me sound a bit of a heel, but Cavendish was right about one thing. We don’t want his invention – whatever it is – falling into the hands of terrorists.”
“Good luck, John. I’m assigning Annabel to help you and the others rescue Phyllis. She’s a black belt and she knows how and when to use a gun.”
“I don’t imagine it’ll come to that, but thanks for the thought.”
“And obviously, report straight back here after you’ve finished at Mansion House.”
“Of course.”
She must be pretty nervous. She didn’t normally state the blatantly obvious.
