In the morning they spoke of the nightmare they had both witnessed, sifting details, trying to make some sense of the penetration.

  “When you called the airstrip to reserve the jet,” asked Bryson, “you probably didn’t use a sterile line, did you?”

  She shook her head slowly, her face taut with anxiety. “The airstrip wasn’t equipped with a scrambler on its end, so there was no point. But calls originating in the Directorate facility were generally considered safe, since our internal communications center was beyond the reach of outside interference. If we phoned London or Paris or Munich, say, we usually used the sterile channels—but only to protect the other end.”

  “But calls made across such a distance—a hundred miles or more, for instance—generally are routed from landlines to microwave towers, and it’s the microwave transmission that’s penetrable by satellite surveillance, right?”

  “That’s right—landlines can be tapped into, but not by satellite. It has to be by conventional means—phone taps placed on the wires and such. And that requires knowing exactly where the calls originated.”

  “Prometheus obviously knew the details of the Dordogne center,” Bryson said quietly. “For all Waller’s precautions, the comings and goings, into and out of the airfield, must have been observed, noted. And the airstrip was an easy target for a conventional phone tap.”

  “Waller—thank God, he was gone! But we have to reach him.”

  “Jesus. I’m sure he knows. But Chris Edgecomb —”

  She covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh, dear God, Chris! And Layla!”

  “And dozens of others. Most of them I didn’t know any longer, but you must have had quite a few friends among them.”

  She nodded silently, removed her hand from her eyes, which were flooded with tears.

  After a moment’s silence, Bryson resumed. “They must have patched into the power grid and planted explosives—plastique—throughout and beneath the facility. Without inside resources—without human beings who’d been turned—they could never have done it. The Directorate was on the verge of unraveling the Prometheus Group’s plans, and so it had to be neutralized. They sent me—and others, I’m sure—and when those efforts didn’t pan out, they went for the direct approach.” He closed his eyes. “Whatever secrets, plans they’re protecting, we have to assume they’re of monumental importance to the men behind Prometheus.”

  A direct, frontal approach to the treaty’s most vocal proponent, Lord Miles Parmore, was therefore doomed to fail: it would only alert their enemies without yielding information; such men were well guarded, well prepared for deception, misdirection. Moreover, Bryson’s instinct told him that Lord Parmore was not their man. He was a figurehead, a very public figure, closely watched, incapable of maneuvering behind the scenes. He could not be a Prometheus control. The true control would have to be someone affiliated with Parmore, connected to him in a tangential way. But connected how?

  The Prometheus conspirators were too clever, too thorough, to allow connections to remain visible. Records would be altered, erased. Even close scrutiny would not reveal the hidden controls, the puppetmasters. The only giveaway would be what was not there, records missing, obviously deleted. Yet the search for such gaps would be the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.

  Finally, it was Bryson’s idea that they dig more deeply, dig into the past. It had been his experience that the truth could often be discerned there, in old files and books—records rarely accessed, too dispersed, too difficult to alter convincingly.

  It was a theory, but only a theory, and it took them that morning to the British Library at St. Pancras, which lay sprawled across a landscaped square off Euston Road, its orange, hand-molded Leicester brick shimmering in the bright morning sun. Bryson and Elena made their way through the plaza, past the large bronze of Newton by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and into the spacious entrance hall. Bryson scanned the faces of the people he passed, attuned to the slightest sign of recognition. He had to assume that the Promethean networks had been alerted to him, perhaps even to their presence in London, though so far there was no sign of it. Inside the library, a broad flight of travertine steps took them to the main reading room—an expanse of oak desks with individual desk lamps—and they walked through the discreet paneled doors that led to the carrels. The double carrel they had reserved was private but not cramped, its round-backed oak chairs and green leather-topped desks creating a slightly clubby feeling.

  Within an hour, they had gathered most of the necessary volumes, starting with selections from the official proceedings of Parliament— heavy, large volumes with rugged, black library bindings. Many had been unopened for years, and gave off a musty smell of decay when the pages were turned. Nick and Elena went through them with intense and single-minded focus. Had there been earlier debates about civil threats and civil liberties—other decisions with implications for civilian surveillance? On a pad, they each jotted down errant facts—unexplained references, names, sites. These were areas where the marks of the sculptor’s chisel might be in evidence.

  It was Elena who first spoke the name aloud. Rupert Vere. A low-key, soft-spoken, and highly expert maneuverer, the embodiment of political moderation but also—the chronicles made this clear over the years—a master of procedural cunning. Was it possible? Was the intuition worth checking out?

  Rupert Vere, Member of Parliament from Chelsea, was Britain’s foreign secretary.

  Bryson followed the intricate tracery of the Chelsea MP’s career through the smaller regional papers, which were more attuned to incidental details, less preoccupied with the official significance of events. It was painstaking, even stupefying work, the matter of collating a hundred tiny articles in dozens of local gazettes and circulars, the paper often yellowed and brittle. At times, Bryson was seized with exasperation—it seemed like madness to think that they’d find clues to the most concealed of conspiracies right out there in the open, in the public record.

  But he persevered. They both did. Elena made the analogy to her signals-intercept work: within the cascade of noise, the abundance of useless information, might be a signal somewhere—if only they could make it out. Rupert Vere had graduated with a first from Brasenose College, Oxford; he had a reputation for laziness, which was quite likely a cunning subterfuge. He also had a distinct gift for cultivating friendships, a Guardian columnist noted: “ … and so his influence goes beyond the formal ambit of his authority.” A picture was coming gradually into focus: for years, Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere had been working behind the scenes to prepare the way for passage of the treaty, calling in political debts, inveigling friends and allies. And yet his own pronouncements were temperate, his ties to the firebrands nowhere in evidence.

  Finally, it was a seemingly trivial piece of data that caught Bryson’s attention. In the yellowing pages of the Evening Standard, there was an account of the 1965 rowing races in Pangbourne, on the Thames, where nationally ranked teams from secondary schools around the country competed. In small agate type, the paper reported on the teams. Vere, it appeared, rowed for Marlborough, where he was a sixth-former. The language was stilted, the account seemingly innocuous.

  At the Pangbourne Junior Sculls, a number of the quads and doubles distinguished themselves. In particular, the J18 quad from Sir William Borlase School recorded the fastest time of the day (10m 28s), but were pressed quite close by the crews in the strong J16 class where St George’s College Crew (10m 35s), with the GBv France double scullers Matthews and Loake aboard, were chased hard by Westminster. In both the J14 classes the Hereford Cathedral School doubles proved outstanding (12m 11s, and 13m 22s). There were also some high-class performers among the J16 singles. At the front Rupert Vere (11 m 50s) had 13 seconds on his Marlborough team mate Miles Parmore, while David Houghton (13m 5s) finished almost half a minute clear of his pursuers. Showing real promise, Parrish of St George’s (12m 6s) and Kellman of Dragon School (12m 10s) headed the MJ16 class, finishing fourth and fifth overall. The younger age groups race over a 1500m distance at Pangbourne. The WJ13 winner, Dawson of Marlborough (8m 51s), had finished a creditable second-equal in the morning’s WJ14 race and now finished fifth overall, behind MJ13 winner Goodey.

  He reread the item and soon found a couple of similar ones. Vere had rowed for Marlborough, in the same eight as Miles Parmore.

  Yes. The British Foreign Secretary and MP from Chelsea, an early champion of the treaty, had been a teammate and longtime friend of Lord Miles Parmore.

  Had they found their man?

  The New Palace of Westminster—better known as the Houses of Parliament—was, in its very blend of antiquity and modernity, a quintessentially British institution. As far back as the Viking King Canute, a royal palace existed on these grounds. But it was Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror in the eleventh century who enlarged the ancient dream of royal munificence and splendor. The historical continuities were as real as the Magna Carta; the discontinuities were greater still. And when the structure was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth century, it represented the height of the Gothic Revival style, an enduring legacy to the ingenuity of its architects—a vision of an artificial, invented antiquity, which would be reinvented once more when a World War II blitzkrieg destroyed the Commons Chamber. Carefully restored, albeit in a more subdued interpretation of late Gothic, it was a replica of a replica.

  Even as it opened onto one of London’s busiest centers of traffic, Parliament Square, the Houses of Parliament themselves remained aloof and protected by their eight-acre arcadian redoubt. The “new palace” itself was a whirlpool of human traffic. It had almost twelve hundred rooms, and fully two miles of passages. The areas of the buildings that members routinely used, that tourists routinely saw, were impressive indeed, but there was much more, the plans for which were, for reasons of security, not readily accessible. But they, too, could be found in the historical archives. Bryson had given himself two hours to learn and master their details. A series of shifting orthogonal forms arranged themselves in his mind into a layout that had a visceral immediacy to him. He knew precisely how the Peers’ Library related to the Prince’s Chamber; he knew the distance between the Speaker’s Residence and the Sergeant-at-Arms residence, knew how long it would take to go from the Commons Lobby to the first of the Minister’s rooms. In an era without central heating, it was essential to have some special chambers that were protected from the exterior wall by unused, insulating spaces. Moreover, any vast public work would, it was understood, be in constant need of repair and refurbishment, and there had to be passageways for workmen to go about their tasks without disturbing the grandeur of the public spaces. Like government itself, its functioning required complex spaces and relays that were invisible to the citizenry.

  Elena, meanwhile, scoured every recorded detail of Rupert Vere’s life. Another tiny detail had caught her attention: when Vere was sixteen, he’d won a Sunday Times crossword puzzle competition. He was a gamesman, which seemed somehow apt: yet the game he was playing was anything but trivial.

  At five o’clock in the morning, a backpacker in a leather flight jacket and black plastic glasses walked around the perimeter of the Houses of Parliament, like a sleepless tourist trying to walk off a hangover. Or at least Bryson hoped he would be taken for one. He stopped before the black statue of Cromwell, near St. Stephen’s Entrance, and read the carefully lettered sign: PACKAGES LARGER THAN A4, OTHER THAN FLOWERS, MUST BE DELIVERED VIA THE BLACK ROD’S GARDEN ENTRANCE. He walked past the Peer’s Entrance, noting its precise location vis-à-vis the others; then made his way through the small stand of horse-chestnut trees and noted the location of each security camera, invariably posted high in white enameled hoods. The Metropolitan Police of London, Bryson had learned, maintains a network of traffic cameras, three hundred of them fixed on posts and high buildings across the city. Each has a number, and if an authorized person types in the number, he or she can call up a clear, color image of London. It is possible to rotate the camera and zoom it in. It is possible to follow police chases, moving from camera to camera, and to follow a motorist or pedestrian without being detected. It would not be wise to spend much time on surveillance here, he decided; this would have to be brief.

  He took in the four-tiered structure of the main gallery, mapping the physical structure itself with the mental representations he had formed, turning the abstract metrics into concrete perceptions. It was essential to transmute data into intuition, which could be accessed instantly and unreflectively, without calculation and consideration. That was one of Waller’s early lessons to him, and among the most valuable. In the field, the only maps that matter are in your head.

  St. Stephen’s Tower, the clock tower at the north end of the Parliament building, was three hundred and twenty feet tall. The Victoria Tower, on the opposite end of the complex, was wider but nearly as high. Between the towers, the roofing was garlanded with scaffolding; the process of exterior repair work was almost unceasing. External stairs surmounted the roof twenty feet from the Victoria Tower. And then he ambled toward the Thames and scanned the far side of the complex, which abutted directly onto the Thames. By the galleries, there was a fifteen-foot terrace, but at the towers to either end, the drop was sheer, a plumb line. Across the river, he saw a few anchored boats. Some were designated for sightseeing trips, others for maintenance purposes. One was stenciled FUEL AND LUBRICATION SERVICE. He took note of it.

  The plan was set, the schedule determined. Bryson made his way back to their hotel and changed, and then he and Elena went over the plan twice more. Yet his concerns were not allayed. The plan had too many moving parts; he knew the probability of a mishap grew geometrically as the sequence of constituent events lengthened. But there was no choice now.

  Smartly attired in a double-breasted, pin-striped suit and round hornrimmed glasses, Bryson—or rather, as his pass attested, Nigel Hilbreth— ascended the stairs from the lower waiting hall to the upper waiting hall of the Chamber of Commons and took his seat in the gallery. His face was composed into a mask of bland disinterest, his sandy hair neatly parted, mustache tidy. He was every inch a midlevel civil servant, including even the fragrance—Penhaligon’s Blenheim, purchased on Wellington Street. A simple expedient perhaps, but in some ways equally as effective as the dye, glasses, and adhesive-backed facial hair. It was originally Waller, too, who first alerted him to the rarely discussed olfactory aspects of camouflage. When Bryson had an assignment in East Asia, he would abstain from meat and dairy products for several weeks: Asians, with their diets of fish and soy, found Westerners to have a characteristically “meaty” smell, their skin proteins affected by their beef-rich diet. He made similar dietary accommodations preceding assignments in the various Arabic regions. An adjustment in fragrance was a trivial change, but Bryson knew that it was often through such subliminal clues that we detect the strangers among us.

  “Nigel Hilbreth” sat quietly observing the tense parliamentary deliberations, a small black briefcase by his feet. Below, on the long, green leather-upholstered benches, the MPs sat with an unusual measure of attentiveness, their documents lit by the small capsule lamps that dangled just above their heads, suspended on long wires from a vaulted ceiling. It was an ungainly solution to a problem that admitted no elegant one. The ministers of the current government sat on the front bench to the right side; the opposition faced them to the left. The gallery benches, paneled with precisely incised dark-brown woodwork, rose steeply above them, in balcony formation.

  Bryson had arrived in the middle of the emergency session, but he knew precisely what was being bruited about: it was the issue that was at the forefront of every organ of governmental deliberation in the world right now, or had been only recently: the Treaty on Surveillance and Security. In this instance, however, the precipitating incident was the horrendous damage wrought by a recidivist splinter faction of Sinn Fein, which had detonated a shrapnel bomb in the middle of Harrods during one of its busiest hours, wounding hundreds. Was that, too, secretly funded and instigated by the Prometheus Group?

  For the first time, he was able to see Rupert Vere in the flesh. Foreign Secretary Vere was a deceptively wizened-looking man, seemingly older than his fifty-six years, but one could tell that his small, darting eyes missed little. Bryson glanced at his watch—another subtle prop, an old tank watch from McCallister & Son.

  Half an hour earlier, Bryson had, adopting the blase manner of a Whitehall civil servant, asked a messenger to deliver a note, presumably official and semi-urgent Whitehall business, to the foreign secretary. Any minute now it would be brought to Vere by one of his assistants. Bryson wanted to study his reaction when he opened the note and read its contents. The note—a simple, almost childish contrivance that Elena, a lover of puzzles, had devised—was framed like an English crossword-puzzle clue:

  Put yourself between support and a definite article, then add a couple. Puzzled? See you at your alcove suite during the intersession.

  It had been Elena’s inspiration to put, in the form of a clue, the one watchword that he could not ignore.

  As a member of the Opposition held forth on the threats to civil liberties posed by the prospective treaty, Rupert Vere was handed an envelope. He opened it, scanned the note, and then looked up into the gallery directly at Bryson. He had an intent yet nearly unreadable expression. It was all Bryson could do not to flinch; long seconds passed before he realized the foreign secretary was merely gazing up into the middle distance, that his eyes weren’t focusing on anyone at all. Bryson struggled to maintain his placid, bored expression, but it was not easy. If he attracted notice, he was done for: that had to be the operating assumption. The sentries controlled by the Prometheus Group undoubtedly knew exactly what he looked like. But there was a good chance that they hadn’t been notified about Elena, or that if they knew about her, they would assume she had been killed in the destruction of the Directorate’s Dordogne headquarters.