The first half hour took a little less than twice that long, which was par for the course. There was a presentation （hub） on the importance of changing passwords at least once a month, a theme which rolled round with the regularity of a Take That farewell tour, and generated as much interest; and a head-cam recording （Ops） of a takedown of a suspected sleeper cell operating out of a two-bed flat in Brighton. This had proved a false lead—the “cell” was in fact a bridge school made up of off-duty bus drivers—but the process involved in storming the premises and scaring the shit out of everyone was textbook, and the subsequent night out worth a twenty-second rehash before Taverner cleared her throat and silence prevailed.
Then Josie wiped the video, and projected onto the wall images of those attending the reception at the Russian embassy that evening.
This too was run-of-the-mill, but had involved legwork, as there were attendees from Mother R rolling up to sample the canapés, so those from Ops responsible for babysitting the incomers looked suitably important, while the boys and girls from the hub prepared to chip in with background detail, the kind of small-print clarifications often overlooked by those wearing reinforced boots. Diana watched and listened while the guest list was toothcombed for anomalies, none of which arose from among the usual liberally inclined scientists, left-leaning playwrights and anything-for-a-sausage-roll poets; while minor staff changes at the embassy were noted, and local firms catering the evening given a onceover; and while those appointed to monitor real-time coverage of proceedings were namechecked and offered the ritual handclap of relief by those not so appointed, and so on and so very much forth until about forty minutes in, when what had been a by-the-numbers recital went—a breathless Josie later related to non-attenders—from snore-fest to shitstorm in nothing flat, Gregory Ronovitch being the culprit.
Gregory Ronovitch, not previously sighted in this parish, was a visiting academic, Moscow-gowned, come to deliver a lecture entitled “Battleship Potemkin: An iconography re-examined.” The photo accompanying his bare-boned CV—an action shot of Gregory alighting from a car on the embassy’s drive, his welcoming committee limited to one bored security guard—revealed a middle-aged nobody with neat beard and centre parting. He wore sunglasses, true, but so did everyone else, so the detail wasn’t cast-iron proof of mafia connections. Which meant that wasn’t the reason Diana Taverner got to her feet, causing all ambient noise in the room—the taking of notes and wrangling of phones—to cease immediately. When Taverner got to her feet, a meeting was over. Either that or it had just become urgent, without anyone else noticing.
When she spoke, her voice was icy calm. It was said of Diana that she’d been known to frost the glass wall in her office without recourse to the button, a quip popular among those who hadn’t been anywhere near when she was demonstrating its accuracy.
“Why the different angle?”
Nobody understood the question.
“It’s straightforward enough. The other arrivals were shot from whatever direction it was, was it east? Which means this was taken from the west. Why so?”
There was a shuffling of paper, and somebody said, “Ah, this subject, Gregory Ronovitch? He wasn’t caught full-face by the Service hardware. This was harvested from local security coverage.”
“He wasn’t caught full-face by the Service hardware,” Diana repeated. “Almost as if he knew how to avoid that.” Her eyes were fixed on the image on the wall. “Well, then. Someone. Anyone. Care to fill in the blanks on Mr. Ronovitch?”
Someone, anyone, but definitely from Ops, said, “Er, Battleship Potemkin . . . He’s some kind of film critic, right?”
Josie, who’d attended more of these meetings than anyone else present, Diana excepted, sent up a decoy balloon. “He was a late addition, but I’ll have a profile worked up before—”
But it was too little, too late. “No, really, don’t. Let’s just workshop it, shall we? Who’s been babysitting, let’s call him Greg?”
A young man at the back of the room raised an unhappy hand.
“And you’re . . . ?”
The young man said, “Dean. Pete Dean.”
“Well, Pete Dean, run us through Greg’s movements since he hit town.”
“Ah, he first arrived at the embassy yesterday morning—”
“From where?”
“。 . . The airport?”
“You’re asking?”
“From the airport, ma’am. That would be Heathrow.”