56 Bloomsbury Tavern
Bloomsbury Tavern
The official committee of inquiry would later determine that the Protection Command of London’s Metropolitan Police received
only thirty-three seconds’ warning that a swarm of drones was approaching Downing Street, though where the warning originated
and how the information was obtained in the first place would never be determined to anyone’s satisfaction. It was chief of
staff Geoffrey Sloane who informed Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster of the impending attack, and Lancaster who in turn told
the four other leaders standing next to him outside Number 10’s black door. Several Protection Command officers quickly escorted
the visiting dignitaries into the Downing Street tunnel, but Lancaster refused to go. In one of the attack’s most enduring
images, he was seen calmly herding the press corps into the safety of the neighboring Foreign Office. Several journalists
refused to heed his warning, including Samantha Cooke of The Telegraph, who used her smartphone to capture an iconic photo of the drones skimming across the treetops of St. James’s Park.
As the drones passed low over Horse Guards Road on their final approach to Number 10, a man in a dark business suit was seen firing on the aircraft with a SIG MCX tactical rifle.
The committee of inquiry would later identify him as a plainclothes Protection Command officer, though some observers, including Samantha Cooke, would suggest he worked elsewhere.
Regardless of his affiliation, the business-suited man with the tactical rifle managed to damage the rotors of one of the armed drones.
It tumbled to earth in Mountbatten Green and detonated on impact.
Because the area was closed to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, there were no casualties.
A second drone, also armed with an explosive payload, passed over the security gate at the western end of Downing Street and
made straight for the door of Number 10. Samantha Cooke quickly sought cover in the Foreign Office, where, along with the
prime minister and his chief of staff, they awaited impact and detonation. But much to everyone’s surprise and relief, the
drone sailed harmlessly over the gate at the opposite end of Downing Street, over the deserted pavements of Whitehall, over
the car park between the Ministry of Defense and New Scotland Yard, over the Victoria Embankment and Westminster Pier, and
into the steel-gray waters of the River Thames. Its detonation sent a towering geyser of water skyward. While precariously
close to the London Eye observation wheel, the explosion resulted in no damage or injuries.
The same could not be said, however, for the third detonation. It took place not in a park or waterway but on the roof of
27 Wilton Crescent in Belgravia. The blast left the house and the two neighboring dwellings in ruins and injured twelve Metropolitan
Police officers. Three other people sustained minor injuries as well, though for reasons never made clear their names were
withheld from the public.
Seven remaining drones, all unarmed and presumably decoys, met with watery ends—one in Hyde Park’s Round Pond, two in the
Serpentine, a fourth in St. James’s Park Lake, and three in the Thames. By midafternoon London’s phones and Internet were
once again working, and at 5:00 p.m. the prime minister returned to the podium outside the iconic black door of 10 Downing Street, this time to declare the incident over.
He then headed straight to the CObrA room in the Citadel, where he would remain, huddled with his senior ministers and defense and intelligence chiefs, until nearly midnight.
By then the jihadist terror group ISIS had issued a claim of responsibility—as had a hitherto unknown environmental group
and a long-forgotten Irish faction—but the television experts were certain Russia was to blame. The British government, however,
refused to assign responsibility until the investigation was complete. That didn’t prevent Kremlin spokesman Yevgeny Nazarov
from issuing a preemptive denial, which one analyst likened to an unintended admission of guilt. A bellicose Russian television
commentator known to reflect Kremlin thinking warned Britain not to retaliate. “Otherwise,” he said with a smile, “the next
munition aimed at Downing Street will be nuclear-tipped, and it won’t miss.”
But why had so many of the drones, eight in all, veered wildly off course and crashed? Once again the British government said
it would withhold judgment until all the facts were known, but so-called well-informed sources told anyone who would listen
that the aircraft had been knocked off course by signal jammers deployed around Downing Street. In truth, signal jamming had
played no role whatsoever in the failure of the drones to strike their intended targets; it was a team of computer hackers
from the Dutch intelligence service who had spared Britain a calamity. Sitting at terminals in their darkened lair in Zoetermeer,
they had remotely seized control of the Russian drones and guided them harmlessly into the nearest body of water—all while
their counterparts at GRU headquarters in Moscow, including the commanding general of Unit 29155, stared at their screens
in disbelief.
Official London misled the press and the British public about other key aspects of the incident, including the events surrounding the third and final detonation in Wilton Crescent.
Why did the third drone fail to take flight?
Official London would have more to say at a later date.
What about the reports of gunfire inside the house?
Official London was looking into the matter.
Were the three injured civilians somehow connected to the case? Official London declined comment.
Nor did official London have anything to say—at that early juncture, at least—about the female Russian intelligence operative
who had entered the house in Wilton Crescent after expertly dropping a team of MI5 watchers in Trafalgar Square. She left
the house through a rear garage door ten minutes before the start of the attack, accompanied by a man who was wearing a hat
and sunglasses to conceal his appearance. It was the assumption of MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service that the man was
likewise an illegal Russian operative. Five days after the incident, both individuals remained unaccounted for, much to the
dismay of official London.
Eventually the brick wall of official silence began to crumble, as such walls invariably did. It was The Guardian, quoting a slew of intelligence and security sources, that first pointed the finger of blame at Moscow and, more specifically,
at GRU Unit 29155. The article appeared shortly before Jonathan Lancaster made his first post-attack appearance in the House
of Commons. Conservative and Labour MPs alike gave him a hero’s welcome, which prompted one commentator to say that Lancaster,
with his act of courage after learning of the pending attack, had single-handedly restored his party’s fortunes for the next
election.
Away from the glare of the Commons, Lancaster and his Cabinet were considering an array of retaliatory measures against Russia, ranging from additional economic and diplomatic sanctions to a massive air strike on Russia’s frontline forces in Ukraine.
The prime minister’s rage notwithstanding, his primary goal was to avoid a war with a vastly superior nuclear power—a war that Britain, in its current state, could ill afford.
It was Graham Seymour, director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service, who suggested an alternative.
It was time, he said, to take the gloves off—in the British tradition, with stealth and low cunning and, yes, a touch of wickedness.
SIS would confront Russia’s so-called hybrid war on the West with a hybrid war of its own, led by the same officer who, after draining two glasses of the PM’s Macallan whisky, had calmly snatched a SIG MCX rifle from the Downing Street weapons room and shot down one of the two approaching Russian drones.
None of which the prime minister mentioned when, six days later, he appeared before the press to announce the results of Britain’s
initial investigation into the drone incident. He confirmed that GRU Unit 29155 had carried out the attack and announced a
raft of new sanctions, including the expulsion of thirty-two diplomats from the Russian Embassy in London and the seizure
of all Russian money held by British banks. Additionally British authorities issued arrest warrants for a GRU officer known
as Chloé Lamont and her as yet unidentified male accomplice.
There were some on the traditional anti-Russian right who found Lancaster’s response woefully inadequate, even cowardly, and
others, especially in the press, who were sure they were getting only part of the story. Phoebe Chadwick, coordinator of the
Africa program at Global Relief UK, fell into the second category. Like most relief workers and advocates for human rights,
she maintained a healthy mistrust of the organs of state security. Still, she was relieved that Jonathan Lancaster had not
gone off half-cocked. The last thing the world needed now, she thought, was yet another war.
The prime minister made his case to the Commons the following day, but by late afternoon all of Britain was consumed by lurid new revelations about the king’s oversexed brother and his appalling friendship with an American pedophile and sex trafficker.
Even Phoebe, a certifiably serious person who had largely averted her gaze from the unfolding scandal, found the story too shocking to ignore.
Around half past five she checked her text messages and noticed that she had received an anonymous invitation for drinks at the Bloomsbury Tavern at six.
The sender of the message would be seated in the corner table beneath the television. Phoebe was to come alone.
She was not in the habit of meeting strangers for drinks, but it was only the Bloomsbury Tavern, after all, and she had a
sneaking suspicion the anonymous email had been sent by the famous art restorer and retired spy she had met there several
weeks previously. She entered the pub at the stroke of six o’clock and made her way as instructed to the corner table. And
there sat not the man she had been expecting but a woman in jeans and trainers and a stretched-out cotton pullover. Her face
was hidden behind a pair of movie-starlet sunglasses. Her hair was short and dark.
Phoebe glanced around the interior of the pub.
“Looking for someone?” asked the woman in a sultry drawl.
“A friend of mine,” said Phoebe. “Not a friend, actually. More like an acquaintance.”
“Really? Who?”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
“Shortish chap? Eyes like jade?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Did you happen to see him?”
“He just left, I’m afraid.” There was something remotely familiar about the woman’s voice. She nodded toward the chair opposite
and said, “But why don’t you have a drink with me instead?”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“I insist.”
Phoebe sat down, extended her hand across the tabletop, and introduced herself. The woman frowned and said, “Yes, I know.
We were at Cambridge together.”
“Were we?”
“We had a terrible row one evening. You threatened to throw me off the Magdalen Bridge.”
Phoebe stared at the woman for a long moment, then said, “Take off those glasses.”
She lowered them a fraction of an inch, revealing a pair of liquid blue eyes, then returned them to their original position.
“You really mustn’t cry, my darling Pheebs,” she said in that posh drawl of hers. “After all, it’s only me.”