Sunday, he was very irritable that he’d been called back from Hampshire.
At weekends, Adrian liked to be at his and Penny’s country home—or the Wine Cellar, as office wits referred to it—on the duke of Wellington’s estate in Hampshire. Only a crisis brought him back to London. But during the week he lived here, in Chelsea Green near the Barracks. It was an area of multimillion-pound homes and, like the country house, his apartment was courtesy of Penny’s private fortune. But this wealthy corner of London had been tiresomely invaded in the nineteenth century by a development for the homeless, put there by a do-gooder charity foundation. Adrian wasn’t a person who admired the efforts of other human beings to haul their way out of predicaments he didn’t share. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he instinctively condemned them—the alcoholics, the homeless, a wide range of such groups—for being in that position in the first place.
And now, as the black Mercedes pulled out of the side street, he noted with distaste the idling group of alcoholics who stood smoking cigarettes in the thin sunlight outside the housing project across the road. Normally he saw them on a Monday morning, for their meeting at seven thirty, he supposed. He now assumed they must also meet on Sundays at the same god-awful hour.
“JIC, Ray,” he said. His chauffeur had been sufficiently sympathetic to his mood not to ask where they were going.
A special session of the Joint Intelligence Committee was just what he didn’t need, not this weekend, not any weekend. The Russian Anatoly Semyonovich was dead, but why did they need to have a bloody Joint Intelligence meeting about it? It was first of all a job for Scotland Yard and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—maybe MI5 at a pinch—but not a matter for MI6, to which he had recently been appointed head, with a knighthood to match. Not at this stage anyway.
As he willed himself over the effects of too much excellent claret the night before, he vaguely supposed they wanted to pick his brains about Semyonovich the billionaire; Semyonovich the asset predator; Semyonovich the Kremlin stooge.
They would want his special knowledge of the Russian’s connections both inside and outside Britain, which Adrian had on a few occasions discussed with his opposite number at MI5. He would explain the web of obscure and secret shell companies of which the Russian’s business apparatus largely consisted. But mainly Adrian’s role would be to reveal Semyonovich’s closeness to those who ruled in the Kremlin.
Find the killer, that was Adrian’s prerequisite for delving into the whole bad business.
And then his mind turned to what really preoccupied him.
While his son had been at the game yesterday afternoon, Saturday, in a friend’s merchant banker father’s private box (“Enjoy it,” Adrian had told him, “the bloody bankers won’t be able to afford boxes for much longer”), the Russians had finally made it clear, through their London ambassador, that they wouldn’t be extraditing Grigory Bykov for Finn’s murder, not under any circumstances.
So now Adrian was going to insist that his original plan, to take Bykov down in retaliation for the assassination, must go ahead. The time for negotiating was over. They had nothing to exchange for Bykov. The KGB colonel Anna’s whereabouts were still unknown, even if she was a bargaining chip, which it seemed she wasn’t any longer. An impasse had been reached. Now Adrian wanted Bykov’s head. That was the way of the secret world, and the Russians knew it.
But first he was going to have to deal with the party now being gathered at the JIC. Only afterwards would he be able to collar Teddy Parkinson, its head, to make this special request.
As the black Mercedes cruised down through Victoria and onto Parliament Square, Adrian decided to have a cigarette, in his government-issue car, and damn the rules.
Adrian’s son had
At weekends, Adrian liked to be at his and Penny’s country home—or the Wine Cellar, as office wits referred to it—on the duke of Wellington’s estate in Hampshire. Only a crisis brought him back to London. But during the week he lived here, in Chelsea Green near the Barracks. It was an area of multimillion-pound homes and, like the country house, his apartment was courtesy of Penny’s private fortune. But this wealthy corner of London had been tiresomely invaded in the nineteenth century by a development for the homeless, put there by a do-gooder charity foundation. Adrian wasn’t a person who admired the efforts of other human beings to haul their way out of predicaments he didn’t share. Without giving it a great deal of thought, he instinctively condemned them—the alcoholics, the homeless, a wide range of such groups—for being in that position in the first place.
And now, as the black Mercedes pulled out of the side street, he noted with distaste the idling group of alcoholics who stood smoking cigarettes in the thin sunlight outside the housing project across the road. Normally he saw them on a Monday morning, for their meeting at seven thirty, he supposed. He now assumed they must also meet on Sundays at the same god-awful hour.
“JIC, Ray,” he said. His chauffeur had been sufficiently sympathetic to his mood not to ask where they were going.
A special session of the Joint Intelligence Committee was just what he didn’t need, not this weekend, not any weekend. The Russian Anatoly Semyonovich was dead, but why did they need to have a bloody Joint Intelligence meeting about it? It was first of all a job for Scotland Yard and the National Criminal Intelligence Service—maybe MI5 at a pinch—but not a matter for MI6, to which he had recently been appointed head, with a knighthood to match. Not at this stage anyway.
As he willed himself over the effects of too much excellent claret the night before, he vaguely supposed they wanted to pick his brains about Semyonovich the billionaire; Semyonovich the asset predator; Semyonovich the Kremlin stooge.
They would want his special knowledge of the Russian’s connections both inside and outside Britain, which Adrian had on a few occasions discussed with his opposite number at MI5. He would explain the web of obscure and secret shell companies of which the Russian’s business apparatus largely consisted. But mainly Adrian’s role would be to reveal Semyonovich’s closeness to those who ruled in the Kremlin.
Find the killer, that was Adrian’s prerequisite for delving into the whole bad business.
And then his mind turned to what really preoccupied him.
While his son had been at the game yesterday afternoon, Saturday, in a friend’s merchant banker father’s private box (“Enjoy it,” Adrian had told him, “the bloody bankers won’t be able to afford boxes for much longer”), the Russians had finally made it clear, through their London ambassador, that they wouldn’t be extraditing Grigory Bykov for Finn’s murder, not under any circumstances.
So now Adrian was going to insist that his original plan, to take Bykov down in retaliation for the assassination, must go ahead. The time for negotiating was over. They had nothing to exchange for Bykov. The KGB colonel Anna’s whereabouts were still unknown, even if she was a bargaining chip, which it seemed she wasn’t any longer. An impasse had been reached. Now Adrian wanted Bykov’s head. That was the way of the secret world, and the Russians knew it.
But first he was going to have to deal with the party now being gathered at the JIC. Only afterwards would he be able to collar Teddy Parkinson, its head, to make this special request.
As the black Mercedes cruised down through Victoria and onto Parliament Square, Adrian decided to have a cigarette, in his government-issue car, and damn the rules.
Adrian’s son had
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