Taylor hid her relief at having an ally. She’d tried to keep him out of it. Now he was going to have to come along for the ride.

“Are you able to tell me what’s going on?” Kudus said.

“I’m looking into a guy called Jerry Lau. He knows something. That’s my object of interest at this moment.”

Kudus watched her run an open-source search on Jerry Lau. There were no shortage of biogs and appraisals. Lau was the second son of a construction tycoon, Lau Chao-yung, whose China Construction and Engineering Company appeared responsible for half the buildings going up in the Republic. Jerry Lau had been sent to the UK at age nine, educated at Harrow and then Imperial, where he gained a master’s in mechanical engineering. He’d gone into e-finance, specifically electronic trading platforms, investing his father’s money wisely. In April 2009, Lau Junior was ranked as the twenty-third wealthiest man in Hong Kong, worth 900 million dollars. He divided his time between Hong Kong and London. According to various profiles, he discovered his first shipwreck at seventeen years of age. At twenty-three his hobby had been professionalized under the name JL Marine Exploration and he’d raised further millions from people willing to invest in his maritime archaeology.

“This is not what I was expecting,” Kudus said.

“He knows something about Ascension. So did whoever was handling him.”

MI6 picked up strange people of necessity. It liked dilettantes, who were often internationally mobile, well connected, cloaked by their own eccentricity. As Hawkes had described, there was a vetting file from 2016 suggesting he had entered into some form of work with the intelligence service, but no records beyond that. Taylor dialed the number Lau had left. When it went to voicemail, she recorded a message saying she could help and gave her direct line.

He called a minute later.

“You can help?” Lau sounded skeptical, angry.

“I really hope so. Are you still in London?”

“Yes.”

“Can you meet me in an hour?”

He inhaled. “That should be possible.”

Taylor suggested a hotel in the center, somewhere discreet but public just in case anyone wanted to cause them trouble. He said no and suggested the corner of Pembridge Square and Chepstow Place, Bayswater. Taylor brought up a map with the phone cradled against her shoulder.

It was an expensive part of town, residential; it would be quiet but still public—inconvenient for surveillance, inconvenient for assassination. You didn’t let agents dictate arrangements, but then, he wasn’t her agent, and this was the only chance she had.

“Okay,” she said. “Be there in an hour.”

She hung up, grabbed her coat.

“Where are you going?” Kudus asked.

“Out.”

“Not going to C?”

“No.”

He got his coat, joined her in the corridor. Taylor stopped.