It was Elena, therefore, who would have to make the direct approach. The session would adjourn in ten minutes. What happened next would determine everything.

  Members of the British cabinet typically have offices on Whitehall and other nearby streets; the foreign secretary is the titular head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and his official quarters are on King Charles Street. But Bryson knew that because of his hours negotiating with members of parliament, Rupert Vere also maintained quarters beneath the sloping roof of the Palace of Westminster. The suite was a mere five-minute walk from the Commons chambers, and provided a discreet meeting area for matters that required sensitivity and immediacy.

  Would Vere do what the note had suggested, or would he surprise them with another response altogether? Bryson believed that Vere’s primary reaction would be curiosity, that he would indeed return directly to his office under the eaves. But in case Vere panicked, or decided for some reason to go elsewhere, Bryson had to tail him. Having identified the foreign secretary, he was able to follow him out of the Commons Chambers by picking him out of the crowd of Parliament members. He shadowed Vere as he made his way up the stone committee staircase, past busts of prime ministers past, to his Parliamentary office, until he could follow him no longer without attracting attention.

  Rupert Vere’s personal secretary was Belinda Headlam, a thickset woman in her early sixties who wore her gray hair in a tight bun. “This lady says you’re expecting her,” she murmured to the foreign secretary as he entered the antechamber. “She says she’s left you a note?”

  “Yes, well,” Vere replied, and then he saw Elena sitting on the tufted leather sofa outside his office. She had taken care to project the right image: her navy suit revealed décolletage, though not inappropriately so; her glossy brown hair was pulled back; her lips were painted in eggplant gloss. She looked stunning, yet at the same time professional.

  Vere raised his eyebrows and smiled rapaciously. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. “But you’ve certainly got my attention. Your note, that is.” He beckoned her to follow him into his small, dim, but exquisitely appointed office built in the eaves beneath the Parliament building’s vast slate roof. He sat behind his desk and indicated that she should sit in a leather chair a few feet away.

  For a moment, he shuffled his correspondence. Elena was conscious of Vere sizing her up—less, it almost seemed to her, as an adversary than as a potential conquest.

  “You must be a puzzler, too,” he said at last. “The answer is ‘Prometheus,’ is that right? A rather crude clue, though. Me between pro and the, plus us.” He paused, his eyes boring into hers. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Miss …?”

  “Goldoni,” she replied. She had not lost her accent, so it would have to be a foreign name. She watched him closely but could not read him. Rather than pretending he didn’t understand what she was hinting at, he had immediately acknowledged the word Prometheus—yet his bland reaction revealed no alarm, no fear, not even any defensiveness. If he was acting, he was skilled, though that would not have surprised her: he had not gotten as far as he had without some talent at dissembling.

  “I assume your office is sterile?” Elena said. He gave her a look of puzzled incomprehension, but she persisted. “You know who sent me. You’ll have to excuse the irregularity of this means of making contact, but then that’s the reason for my visit. The matter is urgent. The existing channels of communication may have been compromised.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said haughtily.

  “You must not use the existing codes,” Elena said, watching his face closely. “This is of utmost importance, particularly with so little time remaining before the Prometheus plan goes into force. I will be in touch with you soon to indicate when the channels have been normalized.”

  Vere’s tolerant smile faded. He cleared his throat and got to his feet. “You’re starkers,” he said. “Now, if you’ll please excuse me —”

  “No!” Elena interrupted in an urgent whisper. “All cryptosystems have been compromised. Their integrity cannot be relied upon! We are changing all the codes. You must await further instructions.”

  All of Vere’s professional charm had vanished; his face grew hard. “Get out of here at once!” he demanded in a loud, clipped voice. Was that panic in his voice? Was he using indignation to cover his fear? “I’ll be reporting you to the constabulary, and you’ll be making a grave mistake if you ever try to enter these halls again.”

  Vere reached over to press his intercom button, but before he could do so, the door to his chambers swung open. A slim, tweedy man entered, shutting the door behind him. Elena recognized the face from her recent researches: it was Rupert Vere’s longtime deputy, Simon Dawson, the seniormost member of Vere’s staff, who was charged with formulating policy.

  “Rupes,” Simon Dawson said in an almost languorous drawl. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Is this woman being tiresome?” Dawson’s pale brown hair, apple cheeks, and lanky figure gave him the unsettling look of a middle-aged schoolboy.

  Vere was visibly relieved. “As a matter of fact, Simon, yes,” Vere said. “She’s nattering at me all kinds of hogwash—about something called Prometheus, about crypto-something-or-other, ‘Prometheus plans being in force’—utter madness! The lady must be reported to MI-5 at once—she’s a public danger.”

  Elena took a few steps away from Vere’s desk, her gaze shifting from one man to the other. Something was very wrong. Dawson had closed the heavy oak door behind him, she noticed. That made no sense.

  Unless …

  Dawson withdrew a flat, silenced Browning from his Harris tweed jacket.

  “Crikey, Simon, what are you doing with a pistol?” Vere asked. “That really shouldn’t be necessary. I’m sure this woman has the sense to leave at once, don’t you?” She studied the shifting expressions of Vere’s face, a rapid sequence of puzzlement, dismay, and fear.

  The civil servant’s long, tapered fingers rested by the trigger with practiced ease. Elena’s heart was pounding, her eyes darting wildly around the room hoping to find an opportunity for disruption or escape.

  Dawson looked into her eyes, and she returned the stare, boldly, brazenly, almost daring him to fire. Suddenly Dawson squeezed the trigger. Frozen with terror, she watched as the pistol bucked slightly in his hand. There was a spitting sound of a silenced bullet, and then a splotch of crimson spread across Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere’s heavily starched white shirt, and he collapsed onto the oriental carpet.

  Dawson turned to Elena with a faint, glacial smile. “Now, that was unfortunate, wasn’t it? Having to cut short such a distinguished career. But then you really left me no choice. You told him far too much. He’s a clever man, and he’d easily put things together, and that wouldn’t do at all. That’s something you can understand, can’t you?” He moved closer to her, then closer still, until she could feel the clammy moisture of his breath. “Rupes may have been an indolent fellow, but he wasn’t dim. What did you think you were up to, chatting to him about Prometheus? This really isn’t on. But let’s talk about you, shall we?”

  My God! Simon Dawson! It was another name she’d come across in the old Pangbourne news clips, the name of a younger classmate she’d assumed had later become Vere’s protégé.

  Wrong.

  Dawson was the control.

  The same logic that had ruled out Miles Parmore should have ruled out Rupert Vere: he was too visible. The real puppetmaster was the faceless deputy, working through his oblivious superior.

  “So you kept him in the dark all along,” Elena said, half to herself.

  “Rupes? There was no need for him to know. He’s always trusted my advice implicitly. But nobody had his charm. One needed the charming stooge. Needed, past tense. He’s not exactly necessary any longer, is he?”

  She took a step back. “You mean because Britain’s now a signatory to the treaty.”

  “Exactly. As of ten minutes ago. But who are you? I fancy we haven’t been introduced properly.” The Browning still rested comfortably in Dawson’s right hand. He pulled a flat metallic case from his breast pocket, evidently some sort of wireless personal digital assistant. “Let’s see what the Network has to say,” Dawson murmured. He held the device up in the air and pointed it toward her. An image of her face immediately appeared on the square LCD screen. Then the screen began to flicker as hundreds of faces flashed by almost in a blur, until a match was found.

  “Elena Petrescu,” he said. He read from an electronic file. “Born in 1969, Bucharest, Romania. Only daughter of Andrei and Simona Petrescu, Andrei having been Romania’s leading specialist in cryptography. Ah, most intriguing. Exfiltrated from Bucharest just before the 1989 coup d’etat by … Nicholas Bryson.” He looked up. “You’re married to Nicholas Bryson. Now it comes together. Directorate employees, both of you. Separated for five years … in the year before you left, you bought, let’s see, three ovulation kits—obviously trying to get pregnant. Hmm … didn’t happen, I take it. Regular weekly sessions with a psychotherapist—I wonder, were you dealing with the difficulty of being a political defector in a strange country, or working at an agency as secret as the Directorate, or was it the crumbling marriage?”

  There was something about the disjunction between what he was saying and his casual tone that made Elena shudder. She noticed that although he was still holding his Browning, he was paying it little attention.

  “Your plans have leaked, you should know that,” Elena said.

  “It really doesn’t concern me,” Dawson replied airily.

  “I doubt that. You were concerned enough about Rupert Vere knowing and informing MI-5 that you killed him.”

  “The CIA and MI-6 and MI-5 and all the other three-letter spy agencies have all been neutralized. The Directorate took us longer—perhaps by virtue of your paranoid structure—though the very secrecy that insulated you from penetration also made it that much easier for us to paralyze you, funnily enough. It’s strange how long it’s taken you people to realize that time has passed you by, that there’s simply no need for you any longer! The NSA is overwhelmed with the sheer volume of traffic—the E-mails and cell-phone calls it struggles to vacuum up, all the Internet traffic. Good God, it’s a Cold War relic—it thinks the Soviet Union never went away! And to think that there was once a time when the NSA was the crown jewel of American intelligence, the biggest, the best! Well, encryption has pretty much ended that reign. And the CIA—the folks who accidentally had us bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, who had no idea India had nuclear weapons! The ineptitude! The less said of them, the better. Intelligence agencies are a thing of the past. No wonder you all try so hard to block the rise of Prometheus—you’re like dinosaurs impotently raging against the inevitability of evolution! But by this weekend, your demise will be evident to the entire world. On the shores of the lake, a new global order will be assured, and the welfare of the human race will be secure as it’s never been before.” He turned his attention to the Browning once again, pointing it at her. “Sometimes the few must be sacrificed at the altar of the many. I can already see the headlines in the Telegraph—FOREIGN SECRETARY VERE SLAIN BY SUICIDAL STALKER. And in the Sun, something like SLAYS CAB MIN, THEN SELF. They’ll probably intimate some sordid sexual angle. And the gun and the powder spray will positively identify you as the killer.”

  As Dawson spoke, he was unscrewing the silencer from the Browning; then, as tightly coiled as a mountain cat, he took two long, rapid steps toward Elena. With a grip of iron, he placed the gun in her hand, crushing her fingers around it, then bent her arm so that the barrel pressed hard against her temple. Elena started thrashing violently, convulsively: if nothing else, she would spoil the tableau he had planned. She screamed at the top of her lungs. She felt as if another force altogether had taken possession of her body, the concentrated will to survive transmuting into a primal muscular response. She writhed and flailed, and when she heard another voice it seemed to come from a great distance.

  Nick Bryson’s voice.

  “Dawson, what on earth are you doing? She’s one of ours!” Bryson shouted. The door to the closet opened, and Bryson stepped out, disguised as a Whitehall civil servant with hairpiece, mustache, and glasses; only upon close examination did he bare any resemblance to Nicholas Bryson. The shoulders of his suit were flecked with wood splinters and dust, evidence that he had made his way into the office through a crawl space. “She was dispatched personally by Jacques Arnaud!” Bryson warned.

  “What—who the hell are you?” gasped Dawson, spinning around to look at the intruder with mingled astonishment and uncertainty; in so doing, he momentarily loosened his grip on Elena, who suddenly lunged to one side. In one violent motion she was able to wrench the pistol, which Dawson had been forcing into her hand, away from him. Elena hurled it toward Bryson, who dove into the air and retrieved it.

  Bryson gripped it in both hands, aiming it at Vere’s deputy. “Don’t move,” he said sharply. “Or there’ll be two bodies on the floor.”

  Dawson froze, staring malevolently at Bryson, then shifting his eyes toward Elena.

  “Now, we have a few questions for you,” Bryson said, advancing toward Dawson, the gun still pointed. “And you’d be wise to answer them as completely and truthfully as you can.”

  Dawson shook his head in disgust, backing up slowly. “You’re sadly mistaken to think that you can threaten me. Prometheus has been in the planning for over a decade. It’s larger than any one person, any one nation for that matter.”

  “Freeze!” Bryson shouted.

  “You can kill me,” said Dawson, still backing up, edging closer and closer to Elena, “but it’s not going to change a thing, or even slow anything down. The gun in your hands was used to kill my dear friend there; if you’re so foolish as to kill me too, you’ll have two homicides on your head. And it’s only fair to warn you that this office is equipped with electronic eavesdropping devices; the moment your friend here entered the foreign secretary’s office and I saw what she was really up to, I placed a call to the Alpha squad, Grosvenor Square detachment. I’m sure you know about the Alpha squad.”

  Bryson only stared.

  “They’ll be here any moment now. They’re probably entering the building already, you goddamned son of a bitch!” And as he raised his voice, he leaped toward Elena, grabbing her by the throat, his thumbs squeezing the cartilage in a death grip. Elena’s screams quickly became gagging, strangulated sounds.

  There was a thunderous explosion as the bullet was fired from the unsilenced Browning in Bryson’s hands. At the top of his forehead, near the hairline, a tiny oval wept blood. Dawson, his face oddly immobile, slumped face forward onto the floor.

  “Quick!” Bryson said. “Grab his pocket computer, his wallet, whatever else is in his pockets.”

  Her face wrinkled with distaste, she searched the dead man’s pockets, taking keys, wallet, Palm Pilot, and assorted scraps of paper. Then she followed him through the open closet door and saw where Bryson had removed the plywood backing.

  Belinda Headlam’s experience in Foreign Secretary Rupert Vere’s employ had taught her the supreme importance of discretion. She knew that he conducted negotiations of exquisite sensitivity in his alcove suite, and she had her suspicions that it might also be his lair for the occasional assignation, as well. Last year, the young woman from the agricultural ministry had seemed ever so slightly flushed and dishabille when she’d had to interrupt their conversation with the urgent summons from the prime minister. Foreign Secretary Vere had been just a little short with her for a few days afterward, as if he had been embarrassed by the interruption and displeased at her. But all that passed and she tried to put the episode out of her head. Men had their weaknesses, she knew; they all did.

  Yet the foreign secretary was a most eminent man, one of the most capable members of the government, as the leader page of the Express often repeated, and she was honored that he had handpicked her as his personal assistant. But surely something was wrong. She wrung her hands, agonized about what to do, and finally decided she couldn’t dither any longer. The foreign secretary’s office was well soundproofed—he had insisted on that—but that noise, muffled though it was, sounded terribly like a gunshot. Could that be? And if it were a gunshot and she’d done nothing—why, then what? What if the foreign secretary were wounded and in dire need of help? Then there was the fact that Simon Dawson, his deputy, had joined them, and it wasn’t like him to stay for so long. There was, furthermore, something peculiar about the tarted-up woman who’d passed him a note. Mrs. Headlam had an inkling of what Foreign Secretary Vere’s appraising look might mean, but the woman didn’t seem as if she were there on such … business.

  Something was dodgy.

  Belinda Headlam stood up and rapped sharply on the secretary’s door. She waited five seconds and rapped again. Then, saying, “I’m so terribly sorry,” she pushed open the door. And then she screamed.

  The sight was so shattering it took her almost half a minute before she had enough sense to notify security.

  Sergeant Robby Sullivan of the Palace of Westminster Division of the Metropolitan Police kept himself lean and taut with an hour of hard jogging each morning, and he looked askance at his colleagues who, as the years wore on, allowed themselves to—well, get a little podgy. You might have thought they didn’t take the beat seriously. Robby had been assigned to Westminster Division for seven years, charged with policing the halls of Parliament, ousting intruders, and generally keeping the peace. Though the time had passed with relatively few incidents, years of IRA threats had given him much practice at responding to alarms.

  Still, nothing had prepared him for the scene in the foreign secretary’s suite. He and Police Constable Eric Belson, his young redheaded deputy, radioed New Scotland Yard for immediate backup, but in the interim they sealed off Vere’s chambers and used the existing detail to station an officer by every major stairwell. From Mrs. Headlam’s account, there was likely a killer on the loose in the building—a woman, at that. Though how she’d managed to get out of the office without going past Mrs. Headlam was a puzzlement. She would not be permitted to escape from the building, he was determined—not on his watch. He’d gone through regular drills, knew all the requisite moves and maneuvers. Of course, this time it was the real thing. The adrenaline reminded him of that.