50 Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square
She noticed him for the first time in Moxon Street. She was standing in the queue at the Ginger Pig, maker of the finest sausage
rolls in all of London, and he was seated at a sidewalk table across the street at Aubaine, accompanied by a plain woman of
perhaps thirty. He too was unremarkable looking, with a face so dull and drab it defied description. His clothing was without
style. His shoes were worn.
The queue at the Pig was long and slow that day, which allowed her to examine the dull man and his plain companion at considerable
length. By all appearances they were a couple of some sort—their hands were entangled on the tabletop—but there was something
forced about their manner, especially the way the woman threw back her head with laughter when the man uttered some witticism
to their waiter, who by contrast was not amused.
By the time she left the Ginger Pig, the man and woman at Aubaine had yet to order anything more than water.
She devoured the sausage roll while walking to the Baker Street Tube station, then boarded an anticlockwise Circle Line train.
A lithe, slender man with caramel-colored skin stepped into the carriage a few seconds later, and they each clung to a yellow pole during the twenty-minute ride around central London to Temple.
They left the carriage together but upstairs on the Victoria Embankment they went their separate ways, he in the direction of Waterloo Bridge, she toward King’s College.
There she attended a lecture on contemporary Russia delivered by a professor widely assumed by the student body to be a former officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
He was under the impression that his gifted Canadian student named Chloé Lamont had come by her proficient Russian in a classroom, which was not the case.
She had learned it on Kovenskiy Lane in Saint Petersburg, where she had lived as a child.
Back then she was Zoya Danilova, but Zoya was no more; she had been erased, extinguished, by the GRU.
Zoya was now Chloé Lamont from Toronto, a graduate of McGill University presently pursuing a PhD at King’s College London. The last bit, at least, was true.
Indeed, in addition to her clandestine activities on behalf of Unit 29155, Chloé was hard at work on her doctoral dissertation, so when the lecture concluded she headed over to the Maughan Library in Chancery Lane for a few hours of research.
Leaving the library, she received a text from a classmate, a daft American called Wade who had spent the better part of the last semester attempting to coax Chloé into his bed.
Though she had done nothing to stoke his lust, she had skillfully played the role of friend and confidant, for daft Wade seemed destined for a career in government, quite possibly the US intelligence community.
And so she accepted his invitation to meet for a drink at Tequila Mockingbird in Covent Garden and listened with genuine interest as he spoke of his future plans.
She was distracted, though, by the two men drinking at the bar.
The one nearest to her was the man she had spotted in Moxon Street, she was certain of it.
He was wearing different clothing but had neglected to change his shoes.
They were the shoes, she reckoned, of a man who spent a great deal of time on his feet.
That was the instant she knew MI5 was onto her.
She spotted the plain woman from Aubaine the following day while walking along Oxford Street—and the slender, caramel-skinned
man the day after that during an afternoon run in Regent’s Park. The man with the face that defied description followed Chloé
to the door of her building in Gloucester Place late that evening. That was the instant she knew she was in serious trouble.
Upstairs in her tiny flat, she told her handlers in Moscow as much in an en clair email sent to the digital equivalent of
a dead letter box. Her handlers, in clear but coded language, pledged to bring her in from the cold—but only after she had
carried out her assignment. In the chaos that would follow the event, she was to proceed to a remote safe house near Inverness
in Scotland and await extraction. The property was owned by a GRU front company called Landmark Ventures and was well provisioned
with food and other supplies. She could hide out there for a month or more, and no one would be the wiser.
On her final night in London, Chloé watched with alarm a speech delivered by the Danish prime minister about an incident that
had taken place earlier that day in Copenhagen. She knew the victim—they had met recently in Leicester Square—and she could
not fathom the reason why the GRU had killed him in so ruthless a manner. She considered approaching one of the MI5 watchers
and requesting their protection but quickly ruled it out; there was no hiding from the long arm of the GRU. If she threw in
her lot with the British, she would undoubtedly meet with the same fate as her colleague Captain Yuri Ivanov.
And so she rose early the following morning and put her things in order before showering and dressing in the most unremarkable outfit she could muster—dark jeans, a dark pullover, a pair of trainers.
In her King’s College rucksack she stuffed a woolen jumper and cashmere beanie.
She left her flat in Gloucester Place for the last time at nine fifteen and, tailed by two MI5 watchers, walked to the Ginger Pig for a final sausage roll, which she consumed on the way to the Baker Street Tube station.
Once again she caught an anticlockwise Circle Line train, but this time she got off at St. James’s Park.
She crossed the park from south to north, then followed Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square.
It was a turbulent sea of demonstrators of every stripe, including a noisy contingent of several hundred displaced Ukrainians
waving the blue-and-yellow flags of their shattered homeland. Chloé plunged into the crowd and wandered the immense square
for several minutes, from the steps of the National Gallery to Nelson’s Column and, finally, to the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
When at last she left the square she was wearing the woolen jumper and cashmere beanie and had shed her King’s College rucksack.
She had also dropped her MI5 watchers. This time she crossed St. James’s Park from north to south, then followed Birdcage
Walk westward toward Belgravia. She was no longer Chloé Lamont from Toronto, she was Zoya Danilova from Kovenskiy Lane. And
she was about to set the world ablaze.
Gatherings of world leaders in London were by nature a security nightmare.
The Metropolitan Police shouldered most of the burden, but it was MI5 that provided the critical intelligence.
On the morning of the Downing Street summit, MI5’s analysts and field personnel were monitoring a constellation of potential threats emanating from the far right, the far left, the environmental movement, ISIS, Iranian sleeper cells, and even a band of unreconstructed Irish militants.
The last thing Director-General Amanda Wallace needed that morning was a seemingly unrelated problem.
But that was exactly what Miles Kent, MI5’s deputy director for operations, brought her at 10:20 a.m., as Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster and four other heads of government and state entered 10 Downing Street for a summit
that might well determine the future of the civilized world.
“What do you mean, they lost her?” asked Amanda.
“Perhaps ‘lost’ is too strong a word,” replied Kent.
“Choose another.”
He hesitated, then said, “Misplaced.”
Amanda gave him a withering look. “One misplaces one’s reading glasses, Miles. One loses a Russian illegal who’s working on her bloody PhD at King’s College.”
He made no reply.
“How did it happen?”
Miles Kent explained.
“Sounds deliberate to me.”
“The A4 team had the same impression.”
“Did they?”
The remark required no response, and Miles Kent did not provide one. He had spent more than a decade jousting with Amanda
Wallace and knew the rewards of holding his tongue. Presently she was admiring the view of the river from her top-floor office,
something she often did in moments of stress or indecision.
“The question is,” she asked, “did Ms. Lamont know we were watching her, or was it merely a by-the-book countersurveillance
move on her part?”
“She’s never done anything like it before.”
“We’ve only been watching her for a few days.”
“True,” said Kent. “But it looks to me as though she might be making a run for it.”
“Why now?”
“Copenhagen,” suggested Kent.
“She knows she’s blown?”
“Possibly. Or perhaps Moscow ordered her home.”
Amanda cast a glance at her television monitors. All the major news networks were covering the same story. “But why today
of all days?” she asked.
“Maybe our friends at GRU headquarters thought we would be distracted.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Were we?”
“She chose her spot well. But not to worry, we’ll find her. The CCTV cameras never blink.”
“In the meantime,” said Amanda, “I need to inform my counterpart from across the river that we’ve misplaced his girl.”
“I believe he’s at Downing Street.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Ukraine is his account.”
“Cheeky bastard, isn’t he?” Amanda reached for her phone but, thinking better of it, headed for the door instead. “I won’t
be gone long, Miles. And when I get back, I want you to tell me that you’ve found that woman.”