He looked suddenly exhausted and weary of the quarrel. Gabriel did not envy his friend’s predicament. A spymaster never won in a situation like this. It was only a question of how badly he lost.
“At the risk of putting my nose somewhere it doesn’t belong,” said Gabriel, “it seems to me you have two choices.”
“Do I?”
“The most logical course of action would be to open an internal investigation into whether Alistair Hughes is flogging your secrets to the Russians. You’ll be obligated to tell the Americans about the inquiry, which will send your relationship into the deep freeze. What’s more, you’ll have to bring your rivals at MI5 into the picture, which is the last thing you want.”
“And the second option?” asked Seymour.
“Let us watch Hughes for you.”
“Surely, you jest.”
“Sometimes. But not now.”
“It’s without precedent.”
“Not entirely,” replied Gabriel. “And it’s not without its advantages.”
“Such as?”
“Hughes knows your surveillance techniques and, perhaps more important, your personnel. If you try to watch him, there’s a good chance he’ll spot you. But if we do it—”
“You’ll have license to rummage into the private affairs of one of my officers.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, Gabriel made it clear that such license was his already, with or without Seymour’s acquiescence. “He won’t be able to hide it from us, Graham, not if he’s under round-the-clock surveillance. If he’s in contact with the Russians, we’ll see it.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll hand the evidence over to you, and you can do with it as you see fit.”
“Or as you see fit.”
Gabriel did not rise to the bait; the contest was nearly over. Seymour lifted his eyes irritably toward the grate in the ceiling. The air was Siberian cold.
“I can’t let you watch my Vienna Head without someone from our side looking over your shoulder,” he said at last. “I want one of my officers on the surveillance team.”
“That’s how we got into this mess in the first place, Graham.” Greeted by silence, Gabriel said, “Given the current circumstances, there’s only one MI6 officer I’d accept.”
“Have you forgotten that he and Alistair know each other?”
“No,” replied Gabriel, “that important fact has not suddenly slipped my mind. But don’t worry, we won’t let them within a mile of each other.”
“Not a word to the Americans,” demanded Seymour.
Gabriel raised his right hand, as though swearing a solemn oath.
“And no access whatsoever to any MI6 files or the inner workings of Vienna station,” Seymour insisted. “Your operation will be limited to physical surveillance only.”
“But his apartment is fair game,” countered Gabriel. “Eyes and ears.”
Seymour made a show of deliberation. “Agreed,” he said finally. “But do try to show a little discretion with your cameras and microphones. A man is entitled to a zone of immunity.”
“Unless he’s spying for the Russians. Then he’s entitled to vysshaya mera.”
“Is that Hebrew?”
“Russian, actually.”
“What does it mean?”
Gabriel punched the eight-digit numerical code into the internal keypad, and the locks opened with a snap.
Seymour frowned. “I’ll have that changed first thing in the morning.”
“Do,” said Gabriel.
Seymour was distracted during dinner, and so it fell to Helen, the perfect service wife, to guide the conversation. She did so with admirable discretion. Gabriel was no stranger to the London press, yet never once did she raise the unpleasant topic of his past exploits on British soil. Only later, as he was preparing to take his leave, did he realize they had spoken of nothing at all.
He had hoped to walk back to his hotel, but a Jaguar limousine waited curbside. Christopher Keller was sitting in the backseat, reading something on his MI6 BlackBerry. “I’d get in if I were you,” he said. “A good friend of the Tsar lives on the other side of the square.”
Gabriel ducked into the car and closed the door. The limousine moved away from the curb with a lurch and a moment later was speeding along the King’s Road through Chelsea.
“How was dinner?” asked Keller warily.
“Almost as bad as Vienna.”
“I hear we’re going back.”
“Not me.”
“Too bad.” Keller stared out the window. “I know how much you love the place.”
The director-general of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service had no private aircraft of his own—only the prime minister had such a perquisite—and so Graham Seymour crossed the Atlantic the next morning aboard a chartered Falcon executive jet. He was met on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport by a CIA reception team and driven at high speed through the sprawl of suburban Northern Virginia, to the British Embassy compound on Massachusetts Avenue. Upon arrival, he was shown upstairs for the obligatory meeting with the ambassador, a man he had known nearly all his life. Their fathers had served together in Beirut in the early 1960s. The ambassador’s father had worked for the Foreign Office, Seymour’s for MI6.
“Dinner tonight?” asked the ambassador as he showed Seymour to the door.
“Back to London, I’m afraid.”
“Pity.”
“Quite.”
Seymour’s next stop was the MI6 station, which lay behind a bank vault of a door, a secret kingdom, separate and apart from the rest of the embassy. It was MI6’s largest station by far, and without question its most important. By standing agreement, its officers made no attempt to collect intelligence on American soil. They served merely as liaisons to the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, where they were regarded as valued customers. MI6 had helped to build America’s espionage capability during World War II, and now, decades later, it was still reaping the rewards. The close familial relationship allowed the United Kingdom, a hollowed-out former imperial power with a small military, to play an outsize role on the world stage, and thus maintain the illusion it was a global power to be reckoned with.
Rebecca Manning, the Washington Head of Station, was waiting for Seymour on the other side of the security barrier. She had been beautiful once—far too beautiful to be an intelligence officer, in the opinion of one long-forgotten service recruiter—but now, in the prime of her professional life, she was merely formidably attractive. A stray lock of dark hair fell over a cobalt-blue eye. She moved it aside with one hand and extended the other toward Seymour. “Welcome to Washington,” she intoned, as though the city and all it represented were hers exclusively. “I trust the flight wasn’t too terrible.”
“It gave me a chance to read your briefing materials.”
“There are one or two more points I’d like to review before we leave for Langley. There’s coffee in the conference room.”
She