The cottage was officially designated an MI6 safe facility, so it contained no active telephone line. Nor had its current occupant been entrusted with a mobile, lest she say something in an unguarded moment to divulge her whereabouts to her enemies. All attempts to contact her guardians proved unsuccessful. Their phones rang unanswered. Their radios crackled with no response.

One call, however, was answered without delay. It was the call that Graham Seymour placed to Gabriel’s mobile at 3:17 p.m. Gabriel was in the auditorium at Guy’s Hospital, where the prime minister was about to offer a remedy to the ills facing Britain’s sacred government-run health care system. Seymour was watching a live feed of the event on the video screens in the operations room. He spoke with more calm than he would have thought possible, given the circumstances.

“I’m afraid the prime minister wasn’t the target. There’s a helicopter waiting for you and Keller on the pad in Battersea. The Metropolitan Police will give you a ride over.”

The call went dead. Seymour replaced the receiver and stared at the screen as two men rushed from the auditorium.

67

WEST CORNWALL

MADELINE HART NEVER HEARD the gunshots, only the sharp crack of splintering wood. And then she had seen the man rushing through the broken front door of the cottage, an ugly-looking submachine gun in his hands. He had driven his fist into her abdomen—a brutal blow that had left her incapable of uttering a sound or drawing a breath—and as she lay writhing he had bound her hands and mouth with tape and covered her head in a hood of black serge cloth. Even so, she became aware of the presence of a second intruder, smaller than the first, lighter in step. Together they wrenched her to her feet and marched her gasping across her room with a view. Outside, a phone rang unanswered—the phone, she assumed, of one of her security guards. The intruders forced her into the trunk of a car and slammed the hatch with a coffin finality. She heard tires crunching over gravel and, faintly, waves breaking in the cove. Then the sea abandoned her and there was only the rush of rubber over asphalt. And voices. Two voices, one a man, the other a woman. The man was almost certainly from Ireland, but the woman’s muddled accent did not betray her homeland. Madeline was certain of only one thing. She had heard the voice somewhere before.