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had white tablecloths, real silverware, bustling uniformed waiters and soft light. Since we were in the British Isles, I ordered a single-malt Scotch whiskey. She ordered a bottle of French wine.
    “A whole bottle?”
    “You can help me with it, if you like.”
    The waiter presented us with menus in bound leather, and we opened them. I heard her sharp intake of breath—she had seen the prices. I scrutinized them. They looked in line, I thought, for a high-toned beanery in New York or Washington, if the prices had been in dollars. They weren’t. They were in pounds, so if you doubled the numbers you got roughly the price in U.S. dollars, which is the currency Uncle Sugar pays my salary with.
    My name is Tommy Carmellini—I think I introduced myself before—and I work for the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, or, as it’s referred to in some profane quarters, Christians In Action. Not that we are all Christians, because we aren’t, nor is there a lot of action. Most of what we do involves ruining perfectly good paper with ink squiggles and symbols. Entire forests have their existence violently terminated so we can have paper to ruin. But on this wet, chilly winter’s night I wasn’t destroying paper; I was out on old London town with a beautiful woman.
    “Bit expensive cutting a dash in here,” she remarked, not looking up from the menu.
    “Good thing this dinner is being paid for by loyal American taxpayers,” I muttered.
    “Those colonials have their uses.”
    Kerry was pondering her dinner choices when the man we were here to observe, one Alexander Surkov, a Russian expatriate, came in with two other men. They sat at a table near the window, Surkov with his back to me, which was fine. He didn’t know me, had never actually seen me, and I didn’t want him getting a good gander at my face since I was going to be following him for some weeks. I didn’t want to make eye contact, so I, too, concentrated upon the menu.
    “What’s good?” I asked Kerry.
    “When I got this assignment yesterday,” she said, “my officemates said the beef is excellent. All these French dishes… one never knows what one is getting. I’m a toad-in-the-hole or fish-and-chips girl myself.”
    Yesterday after I learned that Surkov had made this reservation, I asked MI-5 if they had a female staffer who might like an expense-account meal in a good cause. The ladies of the CIA London office somewhere near my age all pleaded prior commitments or jealous spouses. Kerry was my volunteer.
    Mayfair was the heart and soul of the Russian community in the U.K. Here the refugees could spend money like drunken sailors, soak up vodka, talk Russian as loudly as they wished and hang out with other people just like them, all the while pining for the good old days when Mother Russia was a worker’s paradise and they were in the driver’s seat.
    Surkov had been a KGB man, then, when Communism imploded and the bureaucrats reshuffled, a foreign intelligence service officer. Six years ago he left the agency and got into the private security business in Moscow, which meant he guarded old Communists who were emerging from the closet as new capitalists by buying up government assets on the cheap and selling them dearly, getting filthy rich in the process, then, a couple of years ago, he decamped from Russia and moved his wife and daughter to London, where he set up a consulting business, supposedly helping Western companies that wanted to do business in Russia learn what permits they needed, who to talk to, who to bribe, which taxes to pay and which to ignore, that kind of thing. These days he was Oleg Tchernychenko’s right-hand man.
    Grafton had me keeping an eye on Alexander Surkov. “I want to know where he goes and who he talks to,” the admiral had said. “We’re monitoring his cell phone and telephone calls, so don’t worry about that. Your job is to keep track of him.”
    “This guy is Tchernychenko’s chief lieutenant,” I said.