“The Secret Intelligence Service? They’ll lock me away in that awful little cottage with Parish and Miss Coventry and throw away the key. And for my penance I’ll spend the rest of my days wandering Dartmoor like Jane Eyre.”
Downstairs, the conversation had grown suddenly heated. Edward was shouting at the top of his lungs, hurling insults, issuingthreats, all in the manner of one clad in a cape and clutching a drawn sword. Then things quieted down again, and a businesslike conversation ensued. It sounded as though Graham Seymour was doing most of the talking.
“What’s happening now?” she asked Ingrid.
“Final terms, I imagine.”
“Edward is going to work for the Secret Intelligence Service?”
“Something like that.”
“Are they going to tell him that I’m alive?”
“At some point, perhaps. But not today.”
“I’d rather just...” Her voice trailed off.
“Disappear?”
“Yes.”
Ingrid smiled sadly. “I know how you feel.”
Part Three
Irreconcilable Differences
42
London–Cornwall
They quibbled over the code name—eventually the undertaking would be christened Sapphire—but on one point they were in complete agreement. For reasons of operational security, Liam Higgins, Edward Knight’s faithful if officious personal assistant, had to go. It was Knight himself who did the deed, using as his justification the state of his finances, which had been depleted by the half-billion-dollar ransom he had paid to the phantom kidnappers of his wife. He nevertheless offered Higgins a generous severance package before showing him the door. The Sapphire team, which monitored the proceedings via concealed cameras and microphones, declared the operation’s modest opening act a rousing success.
A replacement for Higgins arrived at Hans Place early that evening in the form of Nigel Whitcombe, aide-de-camp of none other than SIS chief Graham Seymour. Whitcombe, after settling into his rooms, immediately laid down a few ground rules. His role, he told his ersatz employer, was one of physical surveillance, not perpetual servitude. There would be no preparation of meals, no running of errands, no answering of bells—unless, of course, there was an operational necessity. Knight, incensed, fired off a written complaint to Christopher Keller, Sapphire’s nominal leader, and Christopher,after giving the document no consideration whatsoever, dropped it into his burn bag.
For the most part, though, Knight accepted the yoke of SIS discipline without complaint, even when Nigel Whitcombe demanded the password for his mobile phone and computer—and when Whitcombe declared that, henceforth, he would be reading all incoming and outgoing emails and text messages, and monitoring all calls and videoconferences. For good measure, the digital snoops at GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence service, did the same. Like Whitcombe, they saw nothing to suggest that SIS’s reluctant recruit had violated the terms of his agreement with His Majesty’s Government.
They were spelled out in a draconian document drafted in secret by an SIS lawyer and signed by Knight in a somber evening ceremony at Hans Place. It was Christopher Keller who supplied the handsome gold pen and the soothing words of encouragement. He then gave his new recruit the first of several private lessons in basic tradecraft, though later he would concede that Edward Knight required little training in the art of deception. He was a spy by nature, and a rather gifted one at that. Had he attended Oxford or Cambridge instead of the University of Leeds, he undoubtedly would have received a quiet tap on the shoulder from an SIS talent spotter.
His debut as a newly minted SIS asset would take place only seventy-two hours after his formal enlistment and was occasioned by the receipt of a much-anticipated encrypted text message from the Russian oligarch Dmitri Savin, the subject of which concerned the failure of the Knight Group Ltd. to make its monthly investment in Landmark Ventures of Nassau, the Bahamas. At Christopher’s direction, Knight waited another forty-eight hours before informing his Russian business partner that no additional investments in Landmark would be forthcoming, though in point of fact it was NigelWhitcombe who composed the text and tapped thesendicon. A laser-guided missile of a response arrived from Moscow a few minutes later, and Knight, after yet another lengthy delay, suggested they speak by telephone at Dmitri’s convenience. The Russian oligarch said he was looking forward to it.
So too was the Sapphire team, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Serious Fraud Office, the National Crime Agency, and HM’s Revenue and Customs, all of which were poring over the Knight Group’s ledgers and bank records. A select interagency delegation was permitted to listen in on the call, which was initiated by Dmitri Savin at 6:20p.m.London time, 9:20p.m.in Moscow. Dmitri, who sounded as though he’d had a drink or two that evening, skipped the pleasantries and got straight to the point. But much to the Russian oligarch’s dismay, Edward Knight stood his ground. His wife’s kidnapping, he declared, reading from Christopher’s carefully worded script, had laid waste to his personal finances. The well was dry.
“You’ll regret this, Edward,” came the reply from distant Moscow.
“Sorry, Dmitri. But I’m afraid it’s over.”
At which point the conversation descended into a replay of the one some six months earlier that had precipitated the unraveling of Edward Knight’s marriage. Dmitri Savin made it clear that only he could end the relationship, that Knight had until the close of business on Friday to wire the money to Landmark Ventures, that failure to do so would prove fatal, in so many words. He didn’t bother to issue a threat against the British tycoon’s wife. As far as Dmitri Savin knew, Alice Winter was already dead and buried.
The delegation from British law enforcement was under the same mistaken impression, and after monitoring the tense phone call, they feared that Edward Knight might soon meet with the same fate. Therefore they would have been shocked to learn that their cunningcounterparts from the Secret Intelligence Service wanted nothing more—not Knight’s assassination, of course, but a serious attempt on his life, carried out by an operative of GRU Unit 29155. Such an outcome, after all, had been the point of the entire charade.
But how to arrange the circumstances whereby the Russians might try to make good on Dmitri Savin’s threat? This aspect of Sapphire they left in the hands of their silent partner, the one who had brought them Edward Knight and his wife in the first place—the one with the matchless operational touch. He drew up a proposal and forwarded it to Graham Seymour and Christopher Keller at Vauxhall Cross. It would have to be something splashy, he told them, perhaps a touch over the top. The art world bash of the season.
Gabriel chose Olivia Watson, of all people, to set his gambit in motion. As instructed, she let it slip to Nicky Lovegrove over lunch at Franco’s, and Nicky, perhaps hoping for a piece of the action, promptly told Simon Mendenhall of Christie’s. Simon being Simon, he kept it under wraps for twenty-four hours while making repeated attempts to contact the collector in question—the real estate mogul Edward Knight, he of the long-missing spouse. Receiving no response, Simon mentioned it seemingly in passing to Julian Isherwood, from whom Knight had purchased several paintings in the past. Julian, as was often the case of late, professed complete and total ignorance. Sarah Bancroft, his beautiful American-born partner, was only marginally more forthcoming.
“Don’t quote me on this,” she murmured over her martini at Wiltons that evening, “but I hear Edward’s going in a different direction.”
“And which direction is that?” probed Simon.
