The café was located on the corner of Wardour Street and a narrow alleyway. It was the kind of place where people came and went without being seen, where the staff weren’t staff but baristas, and where the customers’ names were written in scratchy block capitals on paper cups while they waited for their coffee.
The man who’d just been served was holding a cup signed ELVIS, but that wasn’t his name at all. He paused under the awning outside the big window, his back to the glass as the rain formed a transparent screen in front of him. He sucked up the sweet chai latte through the hole in the lid, watched the traffic and all the people passing by on the other side of the rain curtain. Here and there, Christmassy gift bags were already starting to give up in the rain, and people pushed their umbrellas ahead of themselves like reluctant sails in the wet wind.
If he tried hard enough, he could pretend he was one of them. A man who’d just bought a cup of tea, that’s all he was, a well-dressed Londoner in his sixties who was just waiting for the rain to pass, before returning to his Christmas shopping and to jostling in sweaty shops and panic-buying things that no one wanted.
But the man who wasn’t Elvis had much bigger things to worry about than Christmas presents. He batted away the thoughts, forcing himself to enjoy the warmth from the paper cup and think about nothing. Not about Stockholm. Not about the news from Warsaw. And most definitely not about Floodgate.
There he was, a perfectly ordinary man under a perfectly ordinary awning, right until reality caught up with him.
When the black diplomatic limo finally drove past, he waited until it had turned down the next street before raising his umbrella and walking away at a suitable pace. When he followed into the narrow side street and opened the back door, the guy with the tie was already sitting there.
‘Major,’ he said.
The man who wasn’t Elvis nodded back and sat down opposite, and seconds later the car had disappeared into the heavy evening traffic.
With that, the meeting was under way. A meeting of a working group that didn’t exist.