His suit jacket was hanging from a hook in the wall, next to a photo of his family, the last one taken before the divorce. Outside in the corridor, Nick Rowe was flirting with a pretty girl from Registry—Rowe, who had been hovering around Grimes all day. He slipped past the pair without a word and went to the elevators. A car appeared the instant he pressed the call button. Surely, he thought, it was no accident.

The car rose so smoothly that Grimes had no sense of movement. When the doors hissed open he saw Ed Marlowe, another man from his department, standing in the vestibule. “Arthur!” he called out, as though Grimes were suddenly hard of hearing. “Buy you a drink later? A couple of small matters to discuss.”

Without waiting for a reply, Marlowe ducked between the closing elevator doors and was gone. Grimes stepped from the vestibule into the dazzling light of the atrium. It was the Valhalla of spydom, the Promised Land. The room where Graham Seymour waited was to the right. To the left was a doorway that led to the terrace. Grimes went to the left and stepped outside. The cold air hit him like a slap. Beneath him flowed the Thames, dark, leaden, and somehow reassuring. Grimes drew a deep breath and calmly collected his thoughts. He had the advantage of knowing their techniques. His cubicle was in order. So was his flat, his bank accounts, his computers, and his phones. They had nothing on him, nothing but a ride on the Tube with Yuri Volkov. He would beat them. He was above reproach, he thought. He was Personnel.

Just then, he heard a sound at his back, a door opening and closing. He rotated slowly and saw Graham Seymour standing on the terrace. His gray hair was moving in the wind and he was smiling—the same smile, thought Grimes, that had greased his way up the ladder of promotion while better men were left to toil in the boiler rooms of intelligence. Seymour was not alone. Standing behind him was a smaller man with unusually green eyes and temples the color of ash. Grimes recognized him. His bowels turned to water.

“Arthur,” said Seymour with the same false geniality he had used on the telephone a moment earlier. “What are you doing? We’re all waiting for you inside.”

“Sorry, Graham. It’s not often I have a reason to come up here.”

Grimes offered a smile in return, though it was nothing like Seymour’s. Gums and teeth, he thought, and more than a trace of guilt. Turning, he faced the river again, and suddenly he was running. A hand reached for him as he hurled himself over the balustrade, and as he plummeted toward the next terrace he imagined he was flying. Then the ground came rushing up to receive him and he landed with a thud that sounded like splitting fruit.