“Just doing my job, Mr. President.”

Blake went and opened the door, and Cazalet called, “And, Blake…”

“Mr. President?”

“Take them down. Whoever they are, take them down.”

“You can count on it, Mr. President,” and Blake went out.

LONDON

3

The Gulfstream came in to Farley Field right on time and Blake thanked the crew, alighted and walked across the tarmac, pausing to look around him. A lot of water under the bridge at this place, and not just the struggles with the Rashid empire.

A voice called, “Hey, Blake. Over here.”

Blake turned and saw a Daimler by the control tower, parked close to the entrance of the operations room. The man standing beside it was no more than five feet five, with hair so fair it was almost white. He wore an old black leather bomber jacket and jeans, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. The man was Sean Dillon, once a feared enforcer for the IRA and now Ferguson ’s right hand.

Blake shook hands. “How are you, my fine Irish friend?”

“All the better for seeing you. The right royal treatment you’re getting, Ferguson sending the Daimler.”

They climbed in the back and the chauffeur drove away. Blake said, “So how are things?”

“Pretty warm since Ferguson heard from the President. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Blake, but that was a close call.”

“You know how it is, Sean, you’ve been there. I remember how you saved President Clinton and Prime Minister Major on that Thames riverboat years back, and took a knife in the back for your trouble.”

“From Norah Bell, the original bitch and worse than any man, and it took a decent woman like Hannah Bernstein to shoot her dead.”

“How is Hannah?”

“Wonderful, as usual. If she didn’t work for Ferguson, I think she’d have been Chief Superintendent by now or even Commander at Scotland Yard.”

“But she loves you all too much to move on?”

“Blake, she’s still trying to reform the lot of us. You know her grandfather is a rabbi. It’s that moral perception of hers. She’s been shot to bits, had her life shortened in any number of ways, and still hangs in there trying to keep Ferguson and me in check.”

“And fails in that respect.” It was a statement, not a question.

Dillon said, “Blake, the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket. Terrorism, Al Qa’eda, all that stuff since nine-eleven, has changed everything. It can’t be combated by the old-fashioned rules of war. It isn’t like that.”

“I agree.” Blake shrugged. “A few years ago, I’d never have said that, in spite of what I had to do during my time in Vietnam. I believed in the decencies, the rule of law, justice, all that stuff. But the people we have to deal with these days – there are no rules as far as they’re concerned, so there are no rules as far as I’m concerned. I’ll take them down any way I can.”

“Good man yourself, I couldn’t agree more.” Dillon lit another cigarette. “I speak Arabic, you know that, and I’ve spent my share of time in the Middle East. Even worked for the PLO in the old days when I was a naughty boy, and I think I know the Arab mind a bit. Most Muslims in the States or the UK are decent people, interested only in making a living and raising their families, but there’s a few of them who have a different political agenda, and it’s dealing with them that’s the problem.”

“Take Morgan. English father, Muslim mother, raised a Christian,” Blake said. “I know what happened to his parents, his mother returning to the Islamic faith and Morgan finding that same faith himself. But what turned him into the assassin who tried to take out the President?”

“Well, that’s what you’re here to find out,” Dillon told him. “And Ferguson, Hannah and Roper are waiting at Cavendish Place to discuss it with you.”

The Embassy of the Russian Federation is situated in Kensington Palace Gardens and it was typical November weather, rain falling, when Greta Novikova emerged through the main gates and paused at the edge of the pavement, waiting for the traffic to pass.

She was a small girl, unmistakably Slavic, with black hair to her shoulders, dark intense eyes, and high cheekbones, and she wore an ankle-length coat in soft black leather over a black Armani suit. She would have made heads turn anywhere. She was a commercial attaché at the embassy and had the degree to prove it, but in fact, at thirty-five years old she was a major in the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence.

She crossed the road during a break in the traffic and entered the pub opposite. Early lunchtime it wasn’t very busy, but the man she was seeking was at the far end of the bar in the window seat reading the London Times.

He was a couple of inches short of six feet, and wore a fawn raincoat over a dark wool suit. His hair was close-cropped, and a scar ran from the bottom of his left eye to the corner of his mouth. The eyes were cold and watchful, and the face powerful. The face of a soldier, which in a way he had been. A man of forty-five who had joined the KGB at twenty and had made major when he had moved on to other things. Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq in the old days – he’d seen it all. His name was Yuri Ashimov.

He stood up and kissed her on both cheeks and spoke to her in Russian. “Greta, more lovely than usual. A drink?”

“I’ll have a vodka with you.”

He went to the bar, ordered two, brought them back, sat down, took out a pack of Russian cigarettes and lit one.

“So, as nothing incredibly shocking has happened in New York, you must have a story for me.”

“Not a thing,” she said.

“Come on, Greta, GRU handles all things Arabic and Muslim. There has to be something.”

“That’s the point. There isn’t. The President didn’t keep his damned appointment with Senator Black. After the function at the Pierre, he went straight to Washington.”

“And Morgan?”

“Certainly went to Gould amp; Co. as usual. One of our New York associates confirmed this. The only unusual activity was some sort of paramedic ambulance going down into the underground parking lot. It left half an hour later.”

“Did our associate follow?”

“He deemed it unwise.”

“I should bloody well think so. It stinks.”

“Do you think they got him?”

“Sounds likely. But if they have, they won’t let on, and it won’t affect us anyway. There were no direct contacts.”

Greta nodded. “I think they’d want him alive to see what he had to say. On the other hand, our American friends are a lot lighter on the trigger these days and he did have the cyanide tooth.”

“Alive or dead, they won’t advertise the fact. What about the mother?”

“I called yesterday, as you suggested. Brought flowers and a basket of fruit, supposedly from friends at the mosque.”

“How was she?”

“Faded – slightly confused as usual. She told me everyone at the mosque was so kind, Dr. Selim was fantastic. And she mentioned that someone from the Council Welfare Department had visited her. A woman, apparently.”

Ashimov frowned. “Why would the Welfare Department visit her?”

“Because she’s handicapped?”

“Rubbish. Her son’s well enough off. Why would Welfare visit?” He shook his head. “I don’t like it. Did she say if they would visit again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Be there, Greta. Just in case. If somebody turns up, I want a photo. I get an instinct for things.”

“Which is why you’re still here, my love.”

“True. But something here isn’t right. Let’s try and find out what it is.”

At Cavendish Place, Dillon and Blake were admitted by Kim, the General’s Ghurka manservant, and found Ferguson, Hannah Bernstein and Roper in the drawing room. Ferguson was in his sixties, a large, untidy man in a crumpled suit and a Guards tie. Hannah Bernstein was in her early thirties, with close-cropped red hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. Her Armani trouser suit was certainly more expensive than most people could afford on police pay. Major Roper sat in a state-of-the-art electric wheelchair, wearing a reefer coat, hair down to his shoulders, his face a taut mask of the kind of scar tissue that comes from burns, the explosion that had ended his career.