Having settled on the venue, there was the small matter of the invitees. As Seymour feared, the list of those wishing to attend quickly grew atrociously long—so long, in fact, he felt compelled to remind his brethren it was an intelligence operation they were staging, not a West End premiere. Moreover, since the operation was likely to produce material inappropriate for broad dissemination, it had to be conducted with more than the usual sensitivity. Other agencies would eventually be briefed on the haul, Seymour declared, but under no circumstances could they be present when it was obtained. The guest list would be limited to the three principals—the three members of a secret brotherhood who did the unpleasant chores no one else was willing to do and worried about the consequences later.

Though the precise location of the CIA’s London ops center was a carefully guarded secret, Graham Seymour knew with considerable certainty that it was located some forty feet beneath the southwest corner of Grosvenor Square. He had always been somewhat amused by this, since on any given day several hundred anxious visa applicants were queued overhead, including the occasional jihadi bent on attacking the American homeland. Because the facility did not officially exist, it had no official name. Those in the know, however, referred to it as the annex and nothing else. Its centerpiece was an amphitheater-like control room dominated by several large video screens capable of projecting images securely from almost anywhere on the planet. Directly adjacent was a glass-enclosed soundproof meeting room known affectionately as the fishbowl, along with a dozen gray cubicles reserved for the alphabet soup of American agencies involved in counterterrorism and intelligence collection. Even Graham Seymour, whose primary task remained counterespionage, could scarcely remember them all. The American security establishment, he thought, was much like American automobiles—large and flashy but ultimately inefficient.

It was a few minutes after six p.m. by the time Seymour finally gained admittance to the annex. Adrian Carter was seated in his usual chair on the back deck of the control room with Ari Shamron perched at his right, looking as though he were already in the throes of a full-blown nicotine fit. Seymour settled into his usual spot at Carter’s left and fixed his gaze on the video screens. In the center of the display was a static CCTV image of the exterior of the Financial Journal, workplace of their soon-to-be agent in place, Zoe Reed.