“What is a pink gin, anyway?”

“Gin with a dash of Angostura bitters,” Hedger replied. “I doubt if you’d like it.”

“I doubt it, too,” Stone replied, sipping his Chardonnay.

“Did you enjoy your evening?” Hedger asked. “I saw you and Mrs. Carter dancing.”

“Yes, thank you, and thank you, too, for the use of the ambassador’s car.”

“Any time,” Hedger replied. “When the ambassador’s not using it, I use it myself, sometimes. Tell me, is it hard to dance with someone’s tongue in your ear?”

“On the contrary,” Stone replied. “It helps.”

Hedger laughed. “I never saw your little bald man, you know; are you sure he wasn’t a figment of your imagination?”

“Isn’t his presence why you had me invited?”

“Well, yes; but I fully expected to see him, if you did.”

“Why did you think he’d be there?”

“Just a hunch. Last night’s dinner, if you didn’t know, was for the foreign diplomatic corps. I reckoned if he was anybody important in an embassy, he’d be there.”

“Good guess,” Stone replied. “And why did you think he’d be somebody important in an embassy?”

“His accents, as you described them, one overlaid on the other. Eton is a very exclusive school, you know, and everybody who spends his youth there comes out with that accent, even the foreigners. Remember Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador to the UN?”

“Yes.”

“Same accent.”

“Now that you mention it.”

Hedger looked at the menu. “I’ll have half a dozen oysters and the Dover sole,” he said to the waiter, “off the bone, and I’d prefer a female, if there’s one available.”

“I’ll have the cold soup and the sole,” Stone said. “Should I order the female, too?”

“If you enjoy roe,” Hedger replied.

Stone nodded to the waiter.

“And bring us a bottle of that lovely Sancerre,” Hedger said. He turned to Stone. “Now, what’s up? Why did you want to see me?”

“Things have taken a rather ominous turn,” Stone said, “and I thought you might have some advice on how I should proceed.”

“Tell me.”

“I followed Lance Cabot yesterday from his house to an antiques market in Chelsea. Do you know his friends Ali and Sheila?”

“Oh, yes; he met them when we were in Cairo. I believe they were complicit in the bombing of my safe house there.”

“Turns out they had a shop in the market. Also turns out that I wasn’t the only one following Lance; so were the two men who abducted me and took me to the interrogation. They were in the same Daimler limousine.”

“Did you make a note of the number plate?”

“No,” Stone replied, a little embarrassed that he had not thought of that.

“Next time you get the chance,” Hedger said. “It would help.”