seated, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a field marshall who had been a hero of the Peninsular War and, later, of the Crimean War. "The war is popular beyond belief," Queen Victoria had said of the Crimean conflict, which would become a byword for pointless suffering. To be a hero of the Crimean - what was that? It was a conflict whose eruption represented diplomatic incompetence and whose prosecution represented military incompetence.
He allowed his gaze to drift to his destination, at the corner of Waterloo Place: the Athenaeum Club. With its large cream-colored blocks, tall columned portico, and Parthenon-inspired frieze, it was a paragon of the early-nineteenth-century neoclassical style. On the side a hooded security camera projected from a cornerstone. Above the front pillars stood the goddess Athena, painted in gold. The goddess of wisdom - the one thing that was in shortest supply. Janson made a second pass in the opposite direction, walking past a red Royal Mail truck, past the consulate for Papua New Guinea, past an office building. In the distance, a red-orange crane loomed over some unseen building site.
His mind kept returning to what had happened at Trinity College: he must have stumbled on a trip wire there. It was more likely that his old mentor had been under surveillance than that he had been followed, he decided. Even so, both the size of the net and the rapidity of the response were formidable. He could no longer take anything for granted.
Sight lines were everywhere. He had to be attuned to the kinds of anomalies that would ordinarily pass without notice. Trucks that were parked that should not have been parked; cars that drove too slowly, or too fast. The gaze from a passerby that lingered an instant too long - or was averted an instant too soon. Construction equipment where there was no construction. Nothing could pass without notice now.
Was he safe? Conclusive evidence was impossible. It was impossible even to say that the mail truck was simply what it appeared to be. But his instincts told him that he could enter the club unobserved. It was not a meeting place he himself would have selected. For his immediate purposes, though, it would be helpful to meet Grigori Berman on his own terms. Besides, the venue was, on reflection, a highly advantageous one. Public parks offered freedom of movement - it was what made them popular rendezvous points - but that freedom could also be exploited by observers. At an old-fashioned gentleman's club, it would be difficult to station an unfamiliar face. Janson would be there as the guest of a member. He doubted whether members of a surveillance team could gain similar access.
Inside the club, he identified himself and the member he was awaiting to a uniformed guard who sat at a booth by the front door. Then he proceeded to the polished marble floors of the foyer, which was four-posted with large, gilded Corinthian pillars. To his right was the smoking room, filled with small round tables and low-hanging chandeliers; to his left, the large dining room. Ahead, past a sea of red and gold carpeting, a broad marble staircase led up to the library, where coffee was taken and periodicals from all over the world lay stacked on a long table. He seated himself on a tufted leather bench by one of the pillars, beneath the portraits of Matthew Arnold and Sir Humphry Davy.
The Athenaeum Club. A gathering spot for members of the political and cultural elite.
And the unlikely rendezvous for a most unlikely man.
Gregori Berman was someone who, if he had developed a nodding acquaintance with morality, preferred to keep the relationship at arm's length. Trained as an accountant in the former Soviet Union, he had made his fortune working for the Russian mafiya, specializing in the complex architecture of money laundering. Over the years, he had set up a thicket of IBCs - international business corporations - through which the ill-gotten gains of his mafiya partners could be cycled, and thus hidden from the authorities. Several years earlier, Janson had deliberately let him slip through a dragnet that Consular Operations had run. Dozens of international criminals had been apprehended, but Janson - to the annoyance of some of his colleagues - let their financial whiz kid go free.
In fact, the decision represented reason, not whim. Berman's knowledge that the Cons Op officer had decided to let him escape meant that he'd be in Janson's debt: the Russian could be converted from