the chest area on which was a circle of dark blue. The paint was still wet when the body was discovered shortly past midnight...
Per nostro circolo.
Vasili closed his eyes. He had pronounced Kassel's sentence of death with the name Voroshin. It had been carried out.
PART III
"Scofield?" The gray-faced man was astonished, the name uttered in shock.
Bray broke into a run through the crowds in the London underground, toward the Charing Cross exit. It had happened; it was bound to happen sooner or later. No brim of a hat could conceal a face if trained eyes saw that face, and no unusual clothing dissuaded a professional once the face had been marked.
He had just been marked, the man making the identification-and without question now racing to a phone-was a veteran agent for the Central Intelligence Agency stationed at the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square. Scofield knew him slightly; one or two lunches at The Guinea; two or three conferences, inevitably held prior to Consular Operations invading areas the Company considered possessively sacrosanct. Nothing close, only cold; the man was a fighter for CIA prerogatives and Beowulf Agate had transgressed too frequently.
Godamn it! Within minutes the U.S. network in London would be put on alert, within hours every available man, woman, and paid informer would spread throughout the city looking for him. It was conceivable that even the British would be called in, but it was not likely. Those in Washington who wanted Brandon Alan Scofield wanted him dead, not questioned, and this was not the English style. No, the British would be avoided.
Bray counted on it. There was a man he had helped several years ago, under circumstances that had little to do with their allied professions, that had made it possible for the Englishman to remain in British Intelligence. Not only remain but advance to a position of considerable responsibility.
Roger Symonds had dropped P-,000 of MI-Six funds at the tables of Les Ambassadeurs. Bray had replaced the sum from one of his accounts. The money had never been repaid-not by default, only because Scofield had not crossed Symonds' path. In their work, one did not leave a forwarding address.
A form of repayment would be asked for now. That it would be offered, Scofield did not question, but whether it could be delivered was something else again. Yet it would be neither if Roger Symonds learned that he was on Washington's terminal list. Debts aside, the Englishman took his work seriously; there'd be no Fuchs or Philbys on his conscience. Much less a former killer from Consular Operations conceivably turned paid assassin.
Bray wanted Symonds to arrange a private, isolated meeting between himself and England's Foreign Secretary, David Waverly. The meeting, however, had to be negotiated without Scofield's name being used-the British agent would balk at that, refuse entirely if he learned of Washington's hunt for him. Scofield knew he had to come up with a credible motive; he had not thought of one yet He ran out of Charing Cross station and walked into the flow of pedestrians heading south on the Strand. At Trafalgar Square, he crossed the wide intersection, joining the early evening crowds. He looked at his watch. It was 6:15, 7:15 in Paris. In thirty minutes he was to start calling Toni at her flat in the rue de Bac; there was a telephone center a few blocks away on Haymarket. He would make his way there slowly, stopping to buy a new hat and jacket. The CIA man would give a precise description of his clothing; changing it was imperative.
He was wearing the same windbreaker he had worn in Corsica, the same visored fishing cap. He left them in a curtained dressing room at a branch of Durms, buying a dark tweed Mackinaw jacket and an Irish walking hat, the soft brim falling around his head, a circle of narrow fabric throwing shadows downward across his face. He walked south again, more rapidly now, and cut through the winding back streets into Haymarket.
He paid one of the operators at the telephone center counter, was assigned a booth, went inside, and closed the glass door, wishing it were solid. It was ten minutes to seven. Antonia would be waiting by the phone. They always allowed a variable of a half-hour for channel tele- phone traffic; if he did not reach her by 8:15, Paris time, she could expect his next call between 11:45 and 1:15. The one condition Toni had insisted upon was for them to talk