The driver swung the Jaguar across the traffic in a swashbuckling U-turn, pulled up outside Waterstones, and hurried round to open the passenger door.
Dismounting, Angela noticed a tramp in a grease-shined windcheater lounging by the bookshop's main entrance. As she passed him the stub bled wild-eyed figure raised a can of Special Brew to her in ironic celebration. To add insult to injury he was sitting immediately beneath a poster of herself and her book. The former civil servant averted her gaze in displeasure. The PM hated the sight of derelicts in upscale shopping areas he'd told her so himself and yet one still saw sights like this. Weren't Waterstones responsible for their own stretch of pavement? she wondered irritably. She'd get Annabel to have a word with the manager.
Inside the shop Angela was shown to a staff room where she left her coat, shook hands with the Waterstones floor manager, declined a cup of coffee and greeted Dave Holland, the exRMP officer responsible for her personal security.
'Your fans look docile enough,' said Holland, who had just returned from a recce of the shop floor.
'I'm happy if you are.
'OK, David, let's do it,' said Angela, briefly unsnapping her handbag to check that she had a pen. She had an old MIS-issue Pentel.
The signing desk had been arranged at the centre of the shop floor, facing the Jermyn Street exit. It was flanked on one side by dump bins of A Career Less Ordinary and on the other by an array of photo floodlights. Behind a rope barrier a dozen photographers waited with Nikons primed. The big photo opportunity involved a handshake withJudi Dench, who played 'M' in the James Bond films.
There was a new picture upcoming, and even though 'M' was actually supposed to be the director of the hated Six, Angela was forced to admit to herself that the showbiz association was a flattering one. There was Judi now, approaching from the opposite side of the shop. They'd met once before, at a small dinner at the Ivy.
As the actress approached the desk, and John Barry's Goldfinger theme played over the shop's PA system, Angela's heart quickened. This was fun!
The two women greeted each other and sustained a long handshake for the cameras. Angela ritually presented the actress with a signed copy of A Career Less Ordinary and told her -truthfully, as it happened that she'd always been a big James Bond fan.
At the photographers' request there were more posed shots. Then Judi Dench took her leave of the event with an actressy twinkle and a flutter of her fingers, Angela sat down and the signing session began.
Soon she was into the routine of it. Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile... Angela was enjoying herself, enjoying the attention and the curiosity of the public. There were old-school types in Royal Artillery ties, purple-haired goths, spook-watching journalists, hygiene- deficient conspiracy theorists, radical feminist academics and a host of other London types. One by one, beneath the watchful gaze of Dave Holland, who stood to one side of the desk, they moved forward with their copies of the book.
At the author's side Annabel beamed proprietorially, keeping an eye on the Daily Telegraph profilist who was due to interview Angela after the signing. With the exception of a single freelancer the photographers had departed.
Smile, ask the name, sign, hand the book over. Smile, ask the name A pair of Waterstones assistants kept the pyramids of books around the desk stocked from packing cases.
'Geoffrey!' Angela murmured to a particularly well-connected political commentator.
'How sweet of you. How are Sally and the children?'
The writer replied courteously and moved away. His place was taken by a horsy woman in a Puffa jacket.
'What name?' Angela asked mechanically. In the queue behind the horsy woman she caught sight of the stub bled face of the tramp she had seen outside the shop. To her surprise, despite his wild appearence, he was carrying a copy of the book. The horsy woman's lips moved soundlessly.
'I'm sorry?' said Angela, 'I didn't quite .
The woman repeated a name her husband's, she explained and Angela signed and then abruptly stopped. Where the hell did she know that face from? The features were wind-roughened and the clothes dirty but there had been a time, she was sure, when this man had been somebody.
But then so many people had been somebody once.
The horsy woman retired and the man handed Angela his copy of A Career Less Ordinary. He was smiling, he smelt of beer and the streets, and there was something both intimate and expectant in his smile.
Am I meant to know him?
'What name?' she ventured.
'You don't remember?' he said quietly.
'Angela, I'm disappointed! It's Joe, Joe Meehan.'
Beyond thought, but not yet connected to terror, she started to take the book, to open it to the title-page. And then, gasping, she saw its starched covers close over her hand. She had lost control of her fingers. It was as if they were frost-bitten.
Her whole body was frozen.
It had been she Angela who had ordered Dawn to take a foot soldier and eliminate Temple when he had called in to say that he had captured Meehan on Pen-y-Fan. The chances that the former agent had told the SAS officer the truth about Operation Watchman were just too great.
And then, just hours later, Dawn and her back-up man had been found dead. Of Temple and Meehan there had been no sign. Well, she'd found out Temple's whereabouts soon enough but Meehan Joseph Meehan was dead and buried.
He had to be.
She'd believed it and not believed it. When she left the Sewice she'd been stripped of the close protection team that had surrounded her for so many years. And, now here was the irony there was no one she could go to and say: this man may be alive. And ~f he is alive he will try and kill me.
The weeks had become months and the months had become a year, and still there had been no sign of Meehan, and finally she had begun to relax. Her official security had been stepped down to just one officer and she had begun to tell her seW that the Watchman was indeed dead.
Dave Holland, recognising at some unconscious level that things were wrong, that the moment was horribly out of joint stared at the desk. His eyes narrowed as the bearded man held his principal's gaze. What the fuck was going down?
Angela Fenwick, he belatedly realised, was terrified. Paralysed with terror, like a bird faced by a cobra. She couldn't even move.
At Holland's side the photographer had realised something was up too. The big F3 Nikon was already moving up towards his face. Beside the desk the Daily Telegraph writer stared in puzzlement at the motionless tableau. Then Meehan pulled out a Browning automatic and jammed the point of the barrel beneath Angela Fenwick's chin.
Mayhem. Dave Holland was aware of a distorted screaming, of panicked bodies falling in slow motion to the floor, of the languid chakka-chakkachakka of the Nikon's motor-drive.
He dived for the gun, but impeded by the press of bodies around him fell disastrously short. A shot, meanwhile, rang out simultaneously with the Nikon's final exposure. This image, which British newspaper picture desks would suppress but which would be syndicated worldwide, showed Meehan in profile. He looked almost courteous. Angela Fenwick's expression, by contrast, was one of in comprehending terror as a spectral tiara of skull fragments and other matter leapt from her head.
The moment after the shot rang out although no one would remember this afterwards Joseph Meehan turned to a man in a battered leather jacket who was standing at the back of the crowd. A long look passed between the two men, a look identical to that which had once passed between them in St. Martin's churchyard, Hereford. Then Meehan placed the barrel of the Browning automatic into his mouth, pulled the trigger for a second time and blew his brains into the fiction shelves.
No one noticed the man in the battered leatherjacket slip out through the heavy glass exit doors into Jermyn Street. In his hand was the edition of the Evening Standard in which the signing session had been detailed. Climbing into the passenger seat of a silver Audi TT convertible which was idling at the kerb, he reached out and, after a
