"No." She doesn't bother to explain that Laundry operatives don't routinely carry bugs because what one party can track, others may pick up. "However, he has a mobile phone."

"They'll have switched it off, or discarded it."

"The former, I hope. If so, I can trace that." The shiny, beetle-black car double-parks outside a nondescript row of terrace houses. "Please wait. I'll only be a minute," she adds as she climbs out.

Ninety seconds later she's back, her go-bag weighing slightly more heavily on her shoulder. "Laptop," she explains.

"Your superiors let you take classified documents home?" Panin raises an eyebrow.

"No. It's his personal one. He paired it with his phone. Which is also a personal device." She belts herself in, then opens the laptop screen. "All right, let's see." She slides a thumb drive into the machine, rubs her thumb over a window in it: "Now this is a secured memory stick, loaded with execute-in-place utilities. Nothing exotic, mind you, strictly functional stuff. Ah, yes. At the end of the road, turn left ..."

The driver doesn't speak, but he has no trouble understanding her directions in English. The car heads south, slowly winding its way through the evening streets. Mo busies herself with the laptop, a route finder program, and a small charm on the end of a necklace, which she dangles above the screen: a ward, taken from around her neck. "It's along here, somewhere," she says as the car cruises yet another twisting residential street, where large houses are set back behind tall hedges. "Whoa, we've gone past it. Okay, pull in here." She pulls out her phone and speed-dials a number.

"Yes?" Angleton is alert.

"I'm in Hazlehurst Road, near Lambeth cemetery, with Nikolai and his driver. Tracking Bob's personal phone. How soon can you meet me here?"

"Hold on." Pause. "We'll be there in fifteen minutes. Rolling now. Can you wait?"

Mo glances sidelong at Panin, who shakes his head slowly. "I don't think so," she says. "Nikolai has urgent business elsewhere." She pulls the door latch, and it swings open with the sluggish momentum of concealed armor plate. She extends one foot to touch the pavement: "I'll be discreet."

"Good-bye, Dr. O'Brien. And good luck."

Most of the houses on this road are detached, sitting in pricey splendor on plots of their own, a few down-market Siamese-twin semis lowering the millionaire row tone. It's London, but upmarket enough that the houses have private drives and garages. Mo walks slowly back along the pavement until she comes level with the hedge outside a semi with a built-in garage, probably dating to the mid-1930s. The ward throbs in her hand as she reluctantly fastens the fine silver chain around her neck and tucks it in. This is the place. She's sure of it.