“I take the point and will pass it on to my friends. Take care.”

He caught her arm. “These friends of yours. They would have to be very special people who knew how to handle this kind of thing.”

She smiled. “Oh, they are. Call me, Alex, when you’ve had time to think.”

She went to the elevators, a door opened at once, she stepped in, and it closed.

FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning in London, but in the Holland Park safe house, Giles Roper sat as usual in his wheelchair, his screens active as he probed cyberspace, his bomb-scarred face restless. He’d slept in the chair for a couple of hours; now Doyle, the night sergeant, had provided him with a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea. He ate the sandwich and was pouring a shot of scotch when Monica’s voice came over the speaker.

“Are you there, Roper?”

“Where else would I be?”

“You’re the only fixed point in a troubled universe. That’s one thing I’ve learned since getting involved with you people. Is Sean spending the night?”

“Returned to a bed in staff quarters ages ago. How was your evening? Did Kurbsky impress?”

“Just listen and see what you think.”

It didn’t take long in the telling, and when she was finished, Roper said, “If he’s serious, I can’t see why we couldn’t arrange something. I’ll speak to Sean and General Ferguson first thing in the morning. You, we should be seeing sometime in the early evening.”

“Exactly.”

She switched off. He sat there thinking about it for a while. Alexander Kurbsky doing a runner to England. My God, Vladimir Putin will be furious. He put Kurbsky up on the screen. Too good-looking for his own good, he decided morosely, then brought up his record and started going through it carefully.