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.

He allowed his gaze to drift to his destination, at the corner of Waterloo Place: the Athenaeum Club. With its large cream-colored blocks, tall columned portico, and Parthenon-inspired frieze, it was a paragon of the early-nineteenth-century neoclassical style. On the side a hooded security camera projected from a cornerstone. Above the front pillars stood the goddess Athena, painted in gold. The goddess of wisdom—the one thing that was in shortest supply. Janson made a second pass in the opposite direction, walking past a red Royal Mail truck, past the consulate for Papua New Guinea, past an office building. In the distance, a red-orange crane loomed over some unseen building site.

His mind kept returning to what had happened at Trinity College: he must have stumbled on a trip wire there. It was more likely that his old mentor had been under surveillance than that he had been followed, he decided. Even so, both the size of the net and the rapidity of the response were formidable. He could no longer take anything for granted.