“Then I suggest you find someone who does and put him very close to Eamon Quinn.”

“I believe I have just the man. Two men, actually.”

Seymour’s car was waiting outside Downing Street’s famous black door. It ferried him back to Vauxhall Cross, where he found Gabriel and Keller in the windowless room on the top floor. It looked as though they hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d left.

“How was he?” asked Gabriel.

“Resolute to the point of stubbornness.”

“What time does his motorcade leave Downing Street?”

“Two forty-five.”

Gabriel looked at the clock. It was five minutes to two.

“I know we said two o’clock, Graham, but—”

“We wait until two.”

The three men sat motionless and silent while the final five minutes slipped away. At the stroke of two, Seymour rang Amanda Wallace across the river at Thames House and asked about the status of the computer search.

“They’re close,” said Amanda.

“How close?”

“Within the hour.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Call me the minute you have something.”

Seymour hung up and looked at Gabriel. “It might be better if you weren’t here for this.”

“It might be,” said Gabriel, “but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Seymour picked up the phone again and dialed.

“Arthur,” he said genially. “It’s Graham. So glad I caught you.”

Seven floors beneath Graham Seymour’s feet, a man in a gray cubicle slowly hung up his phone. Like all the cubicles in Vauxhall Cross, it had no nameplate, only a series of numbers broken by a slash. It was odd that Graham Seymour had spoken his name because most people at Vauxhall Cross referred to him by his job title, which was Personnel. Go and fetch Personnel. Run and hide, here comes Personnel. His name was a slur, an insult. He was loathed and resented. Mostly, he was feared. He was the exposer of other men’s secrets, the chronicler of their shortcomings and lies. He knew about their affairs, their problems with money, their weakness for alcohol. He had the power to ruin careers or, if so inclined, to save them. He was judge, jury, and executioner—a god in a gray box. And yet he, too, had harbored a secret. Somehow, the Russians had found it. They had given him a young girl, a Lolita, and in return they had taken his last shred of dignity.

It’s Graham. So glad I caught you . . .

Interesting choice of words, thought Grimes. Perhaps it had been a Freudian slip, but he suspected otherwise. The timing of Seymour’s summons—one day after Grimes had made a wireless dead drop on the Underground—was ominous. It had been a reckless encounter, a crash meeting. And in the process, it seemed he had exposed himself.

So glad I caught you . . .