“Robert, if I could?” Brooke Wrenhall said, standing from the table.

“By all means,” Reyland said.

“As you all know, this operation is in no way, shape or form authorized by any local police, so use the highest levels of stealth and aversion at all times,” Wrenhall said.

“But remember,” she said. “There aren’t any words to explain exactly how important this mission is. I’ve been working in intelligence circles for almost forty years, and what we are seeking to recover is the most important piece of actionable intel I’ve ever come across.

“This mission is tide turning, ladies and gentlemen. History making. Or breaking. We all know our jobs. Let’s do them.”

95

Belgravia in London was a neighborhood that seemed to consist solely of large white bank-like buildings.

From the box truck’s front passenger seat, Gannon looked out at the perfect columns and pristine arches, the stone balconies, the high dark windows.

“Ritzy,” Gannon said as he went around a double-parked Rolls-Royce.

The Chilean embassy at 14 Upper Belgrave was on the northeast corner of Wilton. As he passed it, Gannon surveyed its security cameras, its twelve-foot-high thick wrought iron gate. The heavy black metal door behind the gate was as featureless and formidable as a bank safe’s.

No wonder the intel services had gotten so desperate, Gannon thought. No one was getting in there without a wrecking ball or a five-hundred-pound bomb.

He passed the embassy and made a right onto a tree-flanked road then another onto Belgrave Place, and then twenty feet up past a road called Eaton Square he pulled over.

Gannon got out and went to the back of the box truck that now had telephone company markings along its side. He popped the doors and put on a hard hat and orange traffic vest. There was a telephone company manhole just in off the corner, and he took out some traffic cones from the back of the truck and placed them around it. Then he lifted a crowbar off the floor of the truck and bent and popped the manhole.

After he dragged the lid aside, Gannon stood on the street glancing nonchalantly at the passing traffic. Then he went down into the hole with a flashlight and a pair of bolt cutters.

There were four old lead-covered phone cables and five fiber-optic cables leading into the block of buildings he was parked in front of, and it took him less than two minutes to cut every single one of them.

When he was done, he climbed out of the hole and slipped on a large backpack from the rear of the truck and lifted the crowbar. There was a work site there at the first building of the block he’d just blacked out, and he ripped open its plywood door at the hinges.

Inside was a completely gutted hollowed-out building with just a staircase left. There was no alarm clang even after a full minute, and he closed the plywood door and quickly went up.