Temple Place, London
ANGELA SCOTT HAD not enjoyed her forty-five-minute encounter with HR. What she had assumed to be a simple piece of good housekeeping – notifying them that the Service had someone missing on a live operation – had turned into some kind of macabre corporate witch-hunt. And she now had a strong suspicion that she had become the target. Angela realized she had underestimated just how devious Felix Schauer was capable of being. Like most of her colleagues in the Service who had met him, she had always found his Germanic directness to be quite appealing. Schauer got things done and he told it how it was. She had just never figured him for an expert at Machiavellian office politics. Well, how wrong she was. He had outmanoeuvred her. MI6’s Director Critical had made sure he got to HR ahead of her and neatly dumped the problem of Hannah Slade’s disappearance on her shoulders. If the family stirred up trouble then it was Angela’s name in the frame for this one. She kicked herself for not seeing it coming.
It was not as if she didn’t have enough to worry about with Luke and Jenny out in the field on the other side of the world, working round the clock to retrieve Hannah and the data Blue Sky was supposed to have passed to her. As she boarded the Tube to attend a lecture that evening just off the Strand she wondered if they had made a mistake in not sending a larger team. It was the perpetual trade-off between secrecy and support. Send too few people and they could end up being under-resourced. Send too many and you increase the chances somebody is recognized by the opposition. And, by God, how things had changed since she joined the Service. The whole world of espionage had morphed beyond recognition in that time. It was incredible to think that back then, in the late twentieth century, you could still squirrel a case officer unnoticed into a hostile country, have them stroll straight past Immigration, as bold as brass, using a fake identity, a made-up ‘legend’ as their cover. Well, those days were pretty much gone now, thanks to biometrics and hidden facial recognition. There were even gait-recognition cameras that could match an individual with their data entry on record within seconds, simply by mapping the speed and direction of their body movements. And of all the countries on Earth, the People’s Republic of China was the absolute past master when it came to the art of intrusive human surveillance.
Which was why she was giving up the early part of her evening to attend an invitation-only seminar at a respected London think-tank, hoping to educate herself a bit more on the threats now facing Luke and Jenny in the field. The lecture was entitled ‘Chinese Surveillance in the Twenty-first Century’ and it was to be delivered by an eminent professor of East Asian Studies at King’s College London.
Angela got there a few minutes early, emerging from the Tube to walk up the steps of the institute’s rather grand nineteenth-century townhouse. She took the lift to the top floor, found a quiet corner in the anteroom next to the lecture theatre, fetched herself a cup of tea and sat down, pretending to scroll through her emails. Intrinsically reserved by nature, Angela tended to avoid such events if she could. While the glib words ‘Oh, I work for the Foreign Office’ tripped off her tongue with well-practised ease she still dreaded the follow-up questions. ‘Oh, really? Which department? Then you must know so-and-so. You don’t? That’s odd.’ After many years of subterfuge Angela had grown proficient at swerving the conversation into less treacherous territory but she could still feel her cheeks flush with embarrassment. No, Angela Scott was happiest working away behind the sandstone-coloured walls of Vauxhall Cross these days, making her contribution to Britain’s national security unseen and unquestioned by the public.
With the lecture about to begin, she took a seat towards the back, placing her empty teacup and saucer on the chair next to her, a favourite habit she had to deter anyone from sitting next to her. She put her phone on silent. There were a few dozen people in the audience, a mixture of journalists, diplomats and academics. Plus the odd diplomat who was probably not quite what it said on their business card. She spotted someone three rows in front of her whom she had once met on a visit to Langley, Virginia; the CIA still had an undeclared presence in London.
The lecturer turned out to be more engaging than he looked. Bookish, bearded, bespectacled and wearing a jacket that had clearly seen better days, he was absolutely on top of his subject and Angela found herself listening to every word from her spot at the back. Which was why she failed to notice the pale-faced university student sitting two seats away who seemed unusually preoccupied with something on the inside of his jacket.