“Good evening,” said a young woman behind the front desk. “Your name, please?”
“Holly Barker.” She produced her Agency ID.
“Your flight is the Gulfstream 450 parked on the ramp. You may board whenever you like, and your luggage will be loaded into the cabin.”
“Thank you,” Holly said. She left her two bags and took her briefcase and purse with her.
A stewardess greeted her at the door of the airplane. “We’ve made up three seats as bunks, Ms. Barker,” the woman said. “You may choose any other seat, and when you’re ready to sleep, a bunk. May I get you anything to drink?”
“Thank you, I’ll have some fizzy water, please.” Holly found a seat at the rear of the airplane and checked her e-mail. There was one from Kate Lee, announcing her appointment to a list of Agency executives. She forwarded that to her father, Ham, in Florida. “Thought you’d like to see this,” she wrote. “Kiss Daisy for me.” Her workload had been so heavy that she had left her Doberman pinscher with her father and his wife, where there was room for her to run. She missed Daisy but knew she was in good hands.
Stewart Graves and Greg Barton arrived together, chatting like old friends. She got a perfunctory greeting from both, then they sat down and buckled in. The stewardess closed the cabin door, and the engines started. At the stroke of eleven the airplane began to taxi, and five minutes later they were roaring down the runway.
When they had been climbing for fifteen minutes the pilot’s voice was heard. “Good evening; we’re now at flight level 450, and we have a ninety-knot tailwind. We should arrive at Biggin Hill Airport, in Kent, at five-thirty A.M., Dulles time, ten-thirty London time.”
The stewardess appeared again. “Would you like dinner?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” Holly said.
“Breakfast will be served an hour before we land. What would you like? We have cereals, pastries, or scrambled eggs with bacon.”
“I’ll have the eggs,” Holly said. She settled in to read the Agency’s handbooks for her two phones and discovered that both could send and receive encrypted messages. Forward of where she sat Graves and Barton were in earnest conversation. Holly chose the aftermost bunk, set her watch forward five hours, and was soon sound asleep.
—
The stewardess woke her at nine o’clock, and she went to the toilet and freshened up. When she returned she raised the shade of her window and got an eyeful of bright sunshine. There was an undercast far below. She switched on the screen at her seat and found the moving map. They would make their landfall south of Land’s End soon, and their arrival time had not changed. The breakfast was much better than she had expected.
—
They touched down at Biggin Hill three minutes early, and her luggage was taken into an FBO, where a customs and immigration official awaited them. She was unimpressed by Holly’s brand-new diplomatic passport and gave it its first stamp.
“There’s a van waiting for us,” Stewart Graves said. He had eight or nine pieces of luggage; this was a move across the Atlantic for him.
Greg Barton shook her hand. “Good luck in the new post,” she said to him.
“Thanks. You, too.” Those were the only words he had spoken to her since they had boarded the airplane. Holly thought he might have given her a few pointers on her new job, since she was replacing him, but apparently he was not anxious for her to succeed. Stewart Graves was similarly tight-lipped. After a hideously long drive through the south London suburbs, the van stopped at the Connaught, and the doorman unloaded her bags.
“Good luck,” she said to Graves, and he nodded. “You, too.” Then he was gone.
Holly checked in and was walked upstairs by a young woman. She was delighted to find that a suite had been booked for her, a first since she had joined the Agency. She showered, then dried her hair and had a light lunch. She was dozing on her sitting room sofa
when her iPhone rang.
“Yes?”
“This is Hamish. Seven P.M. at a pub called the Grenadier, in Wilton Row. Any cabdriver will know it.” He hung up.
“Okay,” she said into the dead line. She watched a cricket match for an hour, trying to figure it out, then gave up and watched an old movie.
17
The cab dropped Holly at the doorstep of the Grenadier, which was located in a pretty mews behind Wilton Crescent, in upper-upper-class Belgravia.
She walked up the front stairs and into a cozy barroom. A fire crackled in a hearth to her left, and the room was crowded with expensively dressed young people. Holly ordered a scotch over ice and found a spot to sit near the fire. She had begun sizing up the young men in the room, when somebody stepped in front of her. She looked up to see a trim figure in clothes that were clearly bespoke. He had a bald head with a fringe of dark hair and he had, of all unexpected things in London, a suntan.
“Holly Barker?” he asked.
Holly stood up and found that the top of his head came to about the tip of her nose. “Hamish?”