The Cilla Rose Affair by Winona Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

pavement for a few moments longer, then climbed aboard also, staying on the lower level.
    The bus deposited Evan at Charing Cross. Walking across the road, he caught another one to Waterloo. The two men followed, confirming that it most definitely was not his imagination. He was being targeted.
    At Waterloo Station, Evan bought himself a croissant and a cup of tea from the kiosk beside the entrance to the Underground, and found himself a seat in a waiting area beneath the departures board. He listened to the piped-in marching band ushering the hordes to and from their trains, and he gave 50p to a young woman in a white lab coat who was shaking a charity tin for Kings College Children’s Hospital. He took advantage of the opportunity to study the young man in the sweatshirt, who’d bought himself a Telegraph from the newsagents and who was now leaning against the outer wall of the shop, reading about the end of the coup in Moscow, the return of Gorbachev, the death of the Communist Party.
    There were two kinds of watchers: the overt, who were fond of targeting foreign nationals with diplomatic immunity, who trailed you about openly, unabashedly, keeping you on your toes and effectively preventing you from engaging in any sort of clandestine activities; and the covert, whose success was measured by the amount of information they were able to amass without being noticed.
    There were two kinds of targets, as well, Evan thought, drinking his tea. Those who twigged, and those who didn’t. And if you caught on, you again had two choices: to react, or not. If you took deliberately evasive action, you gave away the game. They’d be more careful next time, less easily spotted. Often the best course of action was to do nothing at all.
    Evan finished his croissant and tea and went down into the tube. He bought a ticket back to Charing Cross and travelled the short distance under the river, coming up at Trafalgar Square and following the long, curving passageway around beneath the pavement and the pigeons, to Cockspur Street. The tunnel smelled like a toilet, water of questionable heritage having seeped into the gutters, belying the bold, brave blue plastic improvements thrown up around the escalators and the newsagents.
    He surfaced—followers intact—and crossed over the busy road to Canada House. He held up his identification for the duty officer in the vestibule, and was admitted.
    It wasn’t much, he thought, like the flashing-button set he used to inhabit in the make-believe 1960’s, with its banks of reel-to-reel Ampexes made over by the props people to look like computer consoles. Rather, the basement meeting room at Canada House reminded him more of a war bunker—low ceiling and diffused lighting, vintage furniture, heavy green curtains drawn across windowless walls—concealing, he supposed, items of a vital statistical nature: charts, ordnance survey maps.
    Once the centre of all diplomatic and intelligence functions, Canada House was in dire need of refurbishment. The bulk of the country’s diplomatic and intelligence functions had already been transferred to more modern accommodations a mile away, at Macdonald House, close by the Americans in Grosvenor Square. There were, however, still some selected activities which were better left behind at the crumbling old High Commission building in Trafalgar Square…and the department run by Nicholas Armstrong was one of them.
    Evan shut the door behind him. This was one of the shielded rooms, and there was a subtle increase in the quiet hiss of the air conditioning.
    Nicholas was not happy.
    “Would you mind telling me what the blazes you think you’re doing, Evan?”
    He had that morning’s Express open to yet one more story about Simon Darrow.
    “You handed me the mandate, Nicholas.” Evan sat down at one end of the table.
    “Yes—to substantiate our concerns about Victor Barnfather, not to rid the British airwaves of their top-rated presenter. What the hell