‘Yes. You’ll be there first but I should make it in time.’ Hyde Park was the code name for the alternative Head Office outside Reading, a fully equipped emergency headquarters maintained in case a bomb or other event rendered the normal Westminster headquarters unusable. It was fully manned for that weekend.

‘I’ll draft a summary for you, headlines and bullet points only. We need to discuss Whitehall circulation. Number Ten, of course, but who else? Need to know and all that but in spades this time. If it got out it could scupper the Brexit negotiations. The big story is the red line, the one we were talking about on Thursday, the one you said was—’

‘Save it till I get there.’

Chapter Two

The iron gates opened and one of the barriers was raised for Charles’s ancient Bristol without his having to slow down more than enough to wave at the guards. They should have stopped and searched the car, of course, but they took pride in recognising the Bristol from a distance and he connived in their rule-breaking. Guarding anything was boring, relieved only by small pleasures. In his operational days he had broken rules and taken chances, albeit calculated, but as chief the opportunities were so limited as to make the occasional flouting, no matter how trivial, refreshing. It made him feel younger, which in turn made him feel it really was time to go.

The building codenamed Hyde Park had begun life as the nineteenth-century Palladian centrepiece of a country estate but successive incarnations as a school, a wartime military hospital, a mental asylum, a secret communications outpost during another war, a country club and a short-lived conversion to a semi-rural business centre had all but obliterated its architectural virtues. It was now converted into modern office suites with a communications centre in the cellars and an invisible array of oddly shaped aerials hidden in the attic. The gracious pillared entrance was cluttered by bulletproof glass and revolving doors. Locals assumed it was part of the nearby BBC monitoring service establishment at Caversham.