“And strapped to a car seat when the bomb exploded.”

“Are you finished, Graham?”

“No.” Seymour allowed a silence to creep into the room. “You’re about to be a father again. A chief, too. And fathers and chiefs don’t go face-to-face with five-hundred-pound bombs.”

Outside, the sun was balanced atop a distant hill. The fire was draining from the moors.

“How much does my service know?” asked Gabriel.

“They know you were close to the bomb when it exploded.”

“How?”

“Your wife recognized you in the CCTV video. As you might expect, she’s rather anxious to have you home. So is Uzi. He threatened to fly to London and bring you back personally.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Shamron convinced him to stay away. He thought it best to let the dust settle.”

“Wise move.”

“Would you have expected anything else?”

“Not from Shamron.”

Ari Shamron was the twice-former director-general of the Office, the chief of chiefs, the eternal one. He had formed the Office in his likeness, written its language, handed down its commandments, imparted its soul. Even now, in old age and failing health, he guarded his creation jealously. It was because of Shamron that Gabriel would soon succeed his friend as chief of the Office. And it was because of Shamron, too, that he had hurled himself like a madman toward a white Ford car with a child strapped into the rear seat.

“Where’s my phone?” he asked.

“In our lab.”

“Are your techs having a good time pulling apart our software?”

“Ours is better.”

“Then I suppose they’ve managed to figure out where Quinn was when he sent that text.”

“GCHQ thinks it came from a mobile in London. The question is,” he continued, “how did he get your private number?”

“I suppose he got it from the same people who hired him to kill me.”

“Any suspects?”

“Only one.”

31

WORMWOOD COTTAGE, DARTMOOR

THERE WERE BARBOUR JACKETS HANGING in the hall closet and Wellington boots lined against the wall of the mudroom. Miss Coventry prevailed upon them to take a torch—night fell suddenly on the moor, she explained, and even experienced hikers sometimes became disoriented in the featureless landscape. The torch was military-issue and had a beam like a searchlight. If they became lost, quipped Gabriel as he dressed, they could use it to signal a passing airliner.