The sidewalks of London’s Jermyn Street were filled with people who had too little time, and with people who had too much. An assistant bank manager of NatWest was scurrying with as much speed as was consistent with dignity, late for a lunch date with the junior vice president of Fiduciary Trust International’s Fixed Income Department. He knew he shouldn’t have taken that last phone call; if he wasn’t punctual, he could kiss that job good-bye … . A beefy sales rep for Whitehall-Robins was keeping an assignation with a woman he had chatted up at Odette’s Wine Bar the night before, braced for disappointment. Daylight usually added ten years to those slags who looked so sultry and appetizing in the smoky gloom of the downstairs banquettes—but a chap had to find out one way or another, right? Maybe a stop-off at the newsagent was in order: being on time might make him seem a tad eager … . The neglected wife of a workaholic American businessman was clutching three shopping bags filled with expensive but dowdy clothes she knew she’d probably never wear back in the States: charging it all to his Platinum American Express somehow let her vent her resentment for his having dragged her along. Another seven hours to kill before she and her husband saw Mousetrap for the third time … . The chief assessor of Inland Revenue’s Westminster branch was jostling his way through the crowd with an eye on his watch: you never had as much authority with those berks at Lloyds when you showed up late; everybody said so.

Striding down Jermyn Street in a fast lope, Paul Janson was lost among the window-shoppers, bureaucrats, and businessmen who crowded the sidewalks. He was attired in a navy suit, a spread-collar shirt, and a polkadotted tie, and his look was harried but not nervous. It was the look of someone who belonged; his face and his body alike telegraphed as much.

The jutting signs—the ovals and rectangles overhead—registered only vaguely. The older names of the older establishment—Floris, Hilditch & Key, Irwin—were interspersed with newer arrivals, like Ermenegildo Zegna. The traffic was half congealed, sludgy, with tall red buses and low boxy cabs and commercial vehicles that amounted to wheeled signage. INTEGRON: YOUR GLOBAL SOLUTIONS PROVIDER. VODAFONE: WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S LARGEST MOBILE COMMUNITY. He turned left on St. James’s Street, past Brooks’s and White’s, and then left again onto Pall Mall. He did not stop at his destination, however, but instead walked past it, his darting eyes alert to any signs of irregularity. Familiar sights: the Army and Navy Club, known affectionately as the Rag, the Reform Club, the Royal Automobile Club. In Waterloo Square, the same old bronzes stood. There was an equestrian statue of Edward VII, with a cluster of motorcycles parked at its pedestal, an inadvertent comment on changing modes of personal transport. There was a statue of John Lord Lawrence, a viceroy of India from Victorian times, standing proudly, as one who knew he was very well known indeed to the few who knew him. And, grandly seated, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a field marshall who had been a hero of the Peninsular War and, later, of the Crimean War. “The war is popular beyond belief,” Queen Victoria had said of the Crimean conflict, which would become a byword for pointless suffering. To be a hero of the Crimean—what was that? It was a conflict whose eruption represented diplomatic incompetence and whose prosecution represented military incompetence.