Hone wasn’t the kind of man you said no to. He would have North’s place staked out by now. His lowlife haunts. The airports and train stations and docks. But there were dumber moves than hiding in plain sight. North used the burner he’d picked up to call an old friend in the travel business. Leave it with me, Plug said. North started slow but the muscle memory came back as he crossed and recrossed the city over the next three hours, checking office and shop windows, changing buses and trams filled with early-morning commuters, jumping on to and off the U-bahn and the S-bahn as the city woke up, walking though cafés and all-night bars and out their back doors into alleys and yards filled with rubbish bins, till he was confident he wasn’t being tailed and he could start.
It was a few minutes past nine when he decided it was safe. The hardware shop was on the corner and had only just opened. It had a dusty electric kettle on a shelf at the back. The stationer’s, a couple of blocks further on, stocked printer paper, and the chemist, two doors along from the stationer’s, sold razor blades and tweezers. He had to go across town, though, for the medical supplies shop. He bought the highest-powered reading device he could find – an illuminated pocket magnifier meant for the partially sighted.
On the Kurfürstendamm he bought a heavy overcoat, a sharp suit, and a shirt and tie, along with an overnight bag and briefcase, all from Burberry. He dressed in a public toilet, hailed a cab and then, amid the last stragglers checking out and paying bills, turned up at the five-star Hotel Adlon Kempinski by the Brandenburg Gate. An elbow on the counter, a bashful smile; he had false papers and a plausible story about his stupidity in missing his flight back to Toronto and the need get some work done till he could hop on another plane. Was there any chance? He was going to be fired if he didn’t file this report – his boss was a complete stickler. The receptionist who booked him in was efficient and most sympathetic. She rang housekeeping and gave the charming Canadian a ridiculously good day rate on a junior suite before slipping him her mobile number. Throughout, he kept his face averted from the MI5 agent who sat in the foyer with a book whose pages never turned.