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 (11m 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 T
ower. 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 horn-rimmed 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 blasé 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.
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, h
e 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 bonkers,” 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.
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