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It was an eerie feeling walking through the city alone, knowing all kinds of eyes were fixed on you, some with your welfare in mind, others – possibly – out to wipe you from the earth’s surface. And having to pretend it wasn’t happening, like you were just taking a stroll. Mordred picked up a copy of The Epoch Times from a metal dispenser and folded it up and put it in his pocket. Falun Gong, you couldn’t but like them. He’d read it later.
He had faith in his colleagues, but knew enough about this sort of escapade to realise the ultimate responsibility for his safety lay squarely with him. If his enemies were any sort of professionals, which they were, they’d have budgeted for guardian angels nearby, and devised a strategy to bypass them. Meanwhile, he needed to focus all his attention on reading as many micro-expressions as possible – anxiety, stress, fear, heightened emotion - and those whose incongruously lowered heads might suggest they were trying to hide something. Passers-by all took on amplified significance, and after about half a mile, he felt like he’d taken some sort of mind-altering drug. It should have felt unpleasant, but instead he floated in a euphoric haze. Like watching himself in his own show.
They’d all agreed back at Thames House that the main danger-points were (1) just as he left the building and (2) just before he arrived at his destination. But of course, he couldn’t take anything for granted. He wore a bullet-proof vest, and carried a telescopic truncheon at Annabel’s insistence, although whatever happened, he probably wouldn’t use it. You probably needed to be accustomed to a weapon before it became your first, instinctive recourse in moments of crisis. Otherwise ... well, you might not get two chances. Things tended to move quickly when someone was trying to murder you.
He could take his time, of course he could. That was allowed. Look natural. He’d been instructed to cross the river and go via the Imperial War Museum. The best alternative - along the Victoria Embankment – left any would-be shooters too much leeway on the other side of the river. Not that they expected shooters. You wouldn’t get American Sniper: you’d get the Kray twins.
They’d allowed twenty minutes, but everyone except him was in mutual touch. Phyllis and Edna, at the finish line, would know if he was going to be late. They wouldn’t worry. He stopped for a good look round him, stretched, pretended to be enjoying the sunshine. Couldn’t see Alec or Ian. But then, they were pros. Or Alec was. And Ian was supposedly behind him.
The ostensible mission – the one beneath which this weird little game of cat and mouse might or might not be going on – was ridiculous really. Going to see the Lord Mayor at Mansion House, like that was where he actually lived. Of course he didn’t. He probably lived in a semi-detached in Bermondsey with Mrs Chester and a King Charles Spaniel. Or more likely still, a private apartment in Belgravia. Or even a country house somewhere fancy like Buckinghamshire. Or a castle in Westeros, complete with five towers and a moat.
As the twenty minutes wound down and he closed in on his destination, paradoxically he began to feel relaxed. Here was where the battle would commence, if there was to be one. And it probably wouldn’t involve him because he didn’t have Bluetooth. All he had to do was knock on the front door of Mansion House – or more likely put his head in at the enquiries desk downstairs if the big blue gates were bolted – then clear off. Stroll a few streets and get a taxi back to where he’d started. End of what was starting to look like a wasted twenty minutes.
He approached his destination alongside the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street and kept sweeping his eyes to either side. All at once, it occurred to him that the gunshot – if that’s what it was – might actually come from within Mansion House.
Unthinkable ... and yet that’s what made it so possible. Phyllis and Edna wouldn’t necessarily see where it had originated. And there were lots of available exits. There might even be – probably were – underground doors to one or both of the two nearby tube stations. The perfect spot.
Suddenly, all his attention was on the Lord Mayor’s official residence. He’d completely lost interest in the rooftops now.
Then he saw something move within the building. His heart jumped and he almost broke stride. The net curtain at the window next to the front door moved. Then drew right back.
Good God, it was Chester. The Mayor himself, looking right at him, like he expected him. His expression showed he wasn’t looking forward to the visit.
It was all over in a split second. The grimy curtain fell, and for all the world Mansion House looked the way it always did: like an abandoned soon-to-be ruin.
Where had he gone? Mordred stepped up his pace. Somehow he knew – second sight, or intuition - the Mayor was on his way outside. Which must mean he was due somewhere. Or maybe he was a lure, to draw a murder victim.
Or maybe neither: maybe the heightened sense of awareness that came with this particular journey had filled Mordred’s brain with endorphins to such an extent that he was imagining things that couldn’t conceivably be. The Lord Mayor as bait to some kind of contract killing? What the - ? Maybe he hadn’t even seen Chester, there at the window. Maybe it hadn’t been him at all. Maybe it hadn’t been anyone.
He stepped up his pace and did a circuit of the building, aware that, if there were assassins lurking, he was behaving exactly as they’d like him to, but also that he couldn’t stop. He was caught in a kind of play, acting the part of the – well, what? Down Walbrook, round the back along St Stephen’s Row, up Mansion House Place and back to the intersection of the Bank of England, Mansion House and the Stock Exchange. No one. Weird, weird part of town. Eight and a half million people in this city. Even looking around now – you could have counted the passers-by in all directions on your fingers.
What did Alec think of his behaviour? Surely, the mission was over. Time for him to show himself if he thought Mordred was behaving oddly, or departing from the script somehow. Which he was. Or Phyllis and Edna? Where were they?
They’d gone.
Suddenly, he was sure of it. He was absolutely alone. Good God.
He didn’t have time to ponder his predicament, because suddenly he saw the Lord Mayor – or the brain-phantom that was impersonating him – walking briskly down Princes Street, right opposite him. He felt himself caught up in a literal nightmare – the sort of surreal, defiance-of-physics-and-logic scenario you’d have when you’d eaten an entire baked camembert and your pillow was too soft.
He set off to follow him. He had to: the nightmare dictated it, but even if it hadn’t, there was a mystery here and it was his professional duty to investigate it. The Lord Mayor had looked at him. Now he was outside, apparently fleeing.
Where to? Bank tube station was just across the road from Mansion House. If Chester was going any distance, that should have been his first port of call. He could have nipped out of the front door while Mordred was at the building’s rear and been underground and away, and Mordred would have been none the wiser. True, Alec would have seen him, or Phyllis and Edna –
But he was forgetting: they’d vanished. That’s what made everything so intensely otherworldly and sinister.
Did Chester know that? That they’d been here, and now they weren’t? It was beginning to make sense. Alec and Phyllis and all the rest of them had been nobbled somehow. The reason Chester hadn’t taken the underground was precisely because he was a lure. He was luring the last agent standing to his death. Mordred looked up at the surrounding buildings. He was a sitting duck here. Too late to call the chase off. They – whoever they were - would know as soon as he turned round that he’d twigged them.
They probably could have killed him by now. They knew he knew. They were stringing it out, playing with him. That upwards look had been a big mistake.
The other best option was to run. Run forward, zigzag a bit, and catch up with the Mayor. Maybe haul him into a taxi or a bus or something. In the last resort, flag a passing car down. Even if he couldn’t do that, the two of them together – they’d make a more difficult target ... probably. And more incriminating for Chester.
Not that that mattered. There’d be a cover-up. If it was Grey, there definitely would.
Suddenly, the nightmare became hyperreal. A car – black, expensive-looking - mounted the pavement. It slapped Chester off his feet and against the wall of the Bank of England, then accelerated towards Mordred.
But it wasn’t aiming for him. The driver’s eyes were fixed hard on the road now. It passed Mordred at speed and went straight through the red light at the junction and off down Lombard Street. CJ15 AXK, Black Mercedes, one occupant. Its tyres didn’t even screech as it took the corner.
Meanwhile, people had emerged from nowhere, running towards the victim. Chester lay prostrate and motionless. Mordred ran and knelt over him as two more men approached at speed.
The Lord Mayor lay awkwardly and a huge contusion was already emerging on his head, but he was alive. Mordred loosened his clothes. A woman had her mobile pressed to her face, begging for an ambulance. People gathered helplessly, murmuring about that poor old guy, with the emphasis on ‘old’. No one knew who he was.
But that was the point, it always had been; and now it had returned to haunt him. He was the Lord Mayor of London. Not a personality, not even any sort of regular in the Evening Standard, but a semi-invisible facilitator for people like Barclays and Goldman Sachs and Pricewaterhousecooper. Useless at a time like this. Just some poor old guy.
Ruby Parker’s office had been built to accommodate five people plus a desk. On the whole, she didn’t welcome visitors. So much so that she’d had a fish tank installed to reduce the available space. She wasn’t a public figure, and wasn’t expected to entertain stakeholders or carry out PR. People came to see her only if they were in her department, and then only if they were directly connected to the business of the day. There were six people in her room right now, and she couldn’t tell whether it felt like five too many or one too few. Because the subject of the meeting was missing. She sat in her chair. Annabel, Edna, Phyllis, Ian and Alec all stood.
“They told you he was spying for the Chinese?” Ruby Parker said.
“Has been for about two years,” Alec said. “Since our Russian excursion. He’s been passing secrets to ‘Dao-ming Chou’, real name Wan Chunmei. Quote: ‘She’d been sent by the Chinese Ministry of State Security to entrap him with sexual inducements’. Then he fell in love with her. That last bit rings true.”
“He never denied it,” Annabel said.
“They then somehow created the impression that she worked for Black,” Phyllis said. “Funnily enough, when they said ‘and she wasn’t’, that’s what made me think.”
Ruby Parker leaned forward. “Explain.”
“Consider how young she was,” Phyllis went on.
“Probably a year or two younger than John,” Alec added.
“To be fair,” Ruby Parker replied. “Neither of you had extended contact with her, and given what she managed to pull off – the prevention of a third world war – there’s every reason to believe she was highly skilled. I know next to nothing about Black, but I’m willing to wager it’s not a gerontocracy. They’ll take the best personnel as and where they find them.”
“The question,” Annabel said, “is, what are we going to do?”
“And it’s complicated,” Ruby Parker said, “by the fact that we don’t actually know where he is.”
Alec’s eyebrows jumped. “Er, what? I thought he had orders to touch Mansion House then make his way back here!”
Ruby Parker shook her head slightly. “Well, he hasn’t. And I don’t know where he is. And there’s no reason to think there’s anything suspicious in that.”
“Maybe he knows his little secret’s out,” Alec said. “I’m just trying to look at all sides of the question.”
“How could he?” Phyllis said. “And why would it make him disappear? This isn’t the Cold War. He wouldn’t make for the airport and a reserved seat on an Air China flight.” She frowned at what she’d said and added: “Not that that was ever a thing.”
“What do we actually know about this ‘Dao-ming Chou’?” Annabel asked. “She did work in Red very briefly, didn’t she?”
“Everything I thought I knew about her turned out to be false,” Ruby Parker replied. “Two things strike me about Grey’s claim. Firstly, MI7’s not the kind of organisation from which you can ‘steal secrets’. The reason we switched from the old MI5, MI6 setup in the first place was that – quote - ‘intelligence must be intelligent’. Parallel distributed rather than serial processing; emergent rather than programmed capabilities. The other thing is that Grey can’t be a hundred per cent certain he’s involved with the MSS, otherwise he wouldn’t still be working at Thames House. They certainly wouldn’t be looking to resuscitate their investigation into him. There must be room for doubt. The question then becomes: what makes them suspect such a thing?”
“And is it true?” Phyllis said. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you mind if I ask a rather brutal question of the group?”
Ruby Parker shook her head once, firmly. “It would be normal for someone in my position to say, ‘that depends what it is’. But we’re all involved in this. Go ahead.”
“Raise your hand if you think John’s guilty,” she said.
No one responded.
“Now if you think he’s not,” she went on.
Alec, Edna and Ian raised their hands.
“Abstentions?”
Ruby Parker and Annabel raised her hands.
“I’ve learned enough in life not to trust my feelings,” Annabel said.
“I’m afraid I can’t afford not to keep an open mind,” Ruby Parker said. “And before you object, I know you’re only asking for a provisional leap of faith, not a firm declaration of allegiance. In any case, a vote’s not terribly helpful if you can’t give reasons. Phyllis, you initiated it. Let’s hear your thinking.”
“Dao-ming Chou was briefly in Red,” she replied. “From what I understand, we didn’t expose her. She just disappeared one day. If she’d wanted to spy on us, she could have done it herself. From inside MI7, she could have turned agents in other organisations – the CIA, say, or the French DGSI - or even mined their secrets herself.”
“Maybe she knew her fabricated background had a short shelf-life,” Alec said.
“So what’s your theory?” Annabel asked.
“He’s got too much stake in his life here,” Alec said. “Good job, one or two friends, big family. I just don’t think he’d give all that up for an infatuation. That’s what it would have to be if she was making him deceive his colleagues.”
Annabel scoffed. “Any spy worth her salt knows from the outset that infatuation won’t get her very far. If she’s in to that sort of thing at all, she’ll quickly supplement it with the security of blackmail. After which, there’s no way back.”
“Edna?” Ruby Parker asked.
“I think Mr Cunningham’s right,” Edna replied. “Even if it ended up in extortion, it would have to have started with infatuation, and Mr Mordred’s very much into human rights, charity, kindness to animals and so on. Fifty years ago, you could get idealists onto the Communist bandwagon by talking about the class struggle and the deferred possibility of a just world, etcetera. But no one believes China’s in the vanguard of anything like that, not nowadays. It strikes me as just too improbable that someone like Mr Mordred would start passing secrets to a regime that still reveres Chairman Mao – whatever the incentive. Added to which, he’s a bit religious. I think.”
Annabel nodded. She didn’t reply.
“Ian?” Ruby Parker said.
“I’m not sure China’s our enemy,” Ian said. “Not in the old sense Russia was. It may want to know things about MI7, but cyber-spying’s the thing nowadays. If Beijing wanted a mole, it would probably have chosen someone with better IT skills. I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr Mordred, but I’d say his knowledge of computers is probably about average.”
Ruby Parker put her fingertips together and looked at the table. “This is what we’re going to do,” she said eventually. “We’re going to have to act quickly. Tonight, if possible. One of you needs to waylay John, take him out somewhere. I want the rest of you to search his flat. Leave no stone unturned – take up the carpet if possible. Annabel, you’re in charge of the search. It won’t be a burglary, because it’s an MI7-approved property, and I have a key. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you: make sure you leave everything exactly as you found it. He’s a trained spy, so keep that in mind at all times.”
“Hairs across the door closures, as in Dr No,” Ian said.
“I wouldn’t put such a thing past him if he thinks Grey are after him,” Annabel said. “Which he does. And given that, isn’t it likely he’ll have hidden or destroyed anything incriminating – assuming it exists?”
“We can only try,” Ruby Parker said. “On the other hand, you might actually find something exonerating.”
“Like what?” Alec said.
“He’s John Mordred,” Ruby Parker replied. “If I’ve learned anything about him, it’s that he has an uncanny knack of surprising you. Now who’s going to do the waylaying?”
Everyone in the room turned to look at Phyllis.
“I think that would be your job,” Alec said.
“Remember Capri,” Annabel said.
Phyllis rolled her eyes. “It’s nothing to do with Capri,” she said. “But yes, I’ll do it. When he gets back from wherever he is, I’ll look all cut up about us being taken off the Holland case. I won’t have to act too hard, that’s for sure. Somebody then needs to suggest to him that it might be kind to take me out somewhere expensive, help me get over it. Because that’s what boyfriends do, John. He might not cotton on otherwise.”
Annabel smirked. “So he’s your boyfriend now?”
“You made this particular bed,” Phyllis replied. “Now I’ve got to lie in it.”
“I can think of worse beds,” Annabel said.
Ruby Parker brought her hand down on the table just loud enough to make a noise. “That’s enough. Sort the details out between yourselves. Keep me updated as regards developments. We’ll talk again tomorrow morning.”
