“This gentleman rang for you. He said it was rather urgent if you could call him back.
Inside the common room Martin dumped his lecture notes on the Abassid Caliphate and used a pay phone on the wall. The number answered on the second ring, and a bright female voice just repeated the number back. No company name, just the number.
“Is Mr. Stephen Laing there?” asked Martin.
“May I say who is calling?”
“Er—Dr. Martin. Terry Martin. He called me.”
“Ah, yes, Dr. Martin. Would you hold on?”
Martin frowned. She knew about the call, knew his name. For the life of him, he could not recall any Stephen Laing.
A man came on the phone. “Steve Laing here. Look, it’s awfully good of you to call back so promptly. I know it’s incredibly short notice, but we met some time ago at the Institute for Strategic Studies. Just after you gave that brilliant paper on the Iraqi arms-procurement machine. I was wondering what you’re doing for lunch.”
Laing, whoever he was, had adopted that mode of self-expression that is at once diffident and persuasive, hard to turn down.
“Today? Now?”
“Unless you have anything fixed. What had you in mind?”
“Sandwiches in the canteen,” said Martin.
“Couldn’t possibly offer you a decent sole meunière at Scott’s, could I? You know it, of course. Mount Street.”
Martin knew of it, one of the best and most expensive fish restaurants in London. Twenty minutes away by cab. It was half-past twelve. And he loved fish. And Scott’s was way beyond his academic salary.
Did Laing by any chance know these things?
“Are you actually with the ISS?” he asked.
“Explain over lunch, doctor. Say one o’clock. Looking forward to it.” The phone went down.
When Martin entered the restaurant, the headwaiter came forward to greet him personally.
“Dr. Martin? Mr. Laing is at his table. Please follow me.”
It was a quiet table in a corner, very discreet. One could talk unoverheard. Laing, whom by now Martin was sure he had never met, rose to greet him, a bony man in dark suit and sober tie with thinning gray hair. He ushered his guest to a seat and gestured with a raised eyebrow to a bottle of fine chilled Meursault that sat in the ice bucket. Martin nodded.
“You’re not with the Institute, are you, Mr. Laing?”
Laing was not in the least fazed. He watched the crisp cool liquid poured and the waiter move away, leaving them a menu each. He raised his glass to his guest.
“Century House, actually. Does that bother you?”
The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy.
“No, just interested,” said Martin.
“Actually, it’s we who are interested. I’m quite a fan of yours. I try to keep abreast, but I’m not as clued up as you.”
“I find that hard to believe,” said Martin, but he was flattered. When an academic is told he is admired, it is pleasing.
“Quite true,” insisted Laing. “Sole for two? Excellent. I hope I have read all your papers delivered to the Institute, and the United Services people and Chatha
m. Plus, of course, those two articles in Survival .”
Over the previous five years, despite his youth at only thirty-five, Dr. Martin had become more and more in demand as a speaker presenting erudite papers to such establishments as the Institute for Strategic Studies, the United Services Institute, and that other body for the intensive study of foreign affairs, Chatham House. Survival is the magazine of the ISS, and of each issue twenty-five copies go automatically to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street, of which five filter down to Century House.