a large platinum ring on his fourth finger. He had been smoking a cigar, but as he stepped from the car, he dropped it and ground it out with a brilliantly polished shoe. Without looking left or right, he crossed the pavement and entered the building. An old-fashioned bell on a spring jangled as the door opened and closed.
He found himself in a wood-paneled reception room where an elderly, gray-haired man, also wearing a suit, sat with his hands folded behind a narrow desk. He looked at the new arrival with a mixture of sympathy and politeness.
“Good morning,” he said. “How can we be of service?”
“I have come about a death,” the visitor replied.
“Someone close to you?”
“My brother. But I hadn’t seen him for some years.”
“You have my condolences.”
The same words had been spoken seven times that
morning. If even one syllable had been changed, the bald man would have turned around and left. But he knew now that the building was secure. He hadn’t been followed. The meeting that had been arranged just twenty-four hours earlier could go ahead.
The older man leaned forward and pressed a button concealed underneath the desk. At once, a section of the wooden paneling clicked open to reveal a staircase, leading up to the second floor.
Reed and Kelly was a real business. There once had been a Jonathan Reed and a Sebastian Kelly, and for more than fifty years they had arranged funerals and cremations until, at last, the time had come to arrange their own.
After that, the undertaker’s had been purchased by a perfectly legitimate company and registered in Zurich, and it had continued to provide a first-class service for anyone who lived—or rather,
The name stood for “sabotage, corruption, intelligence, and assassination,” which were its four main activities.
The organization had been formed some thirty years before in Paris, its members being spies from different intelligence networks around the world who had decided to go into business for themselves. There had been twelve of
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them at first. Then one had died of illness and two had been killed in the field. The other nine had congratulated themselves on surviving so long with so few casualties.
But quite recently, things had taken a turn for the worse. The oldest member of the organization had made the foolish and inexplicable decision to retire, which had, of course, led to his being murdered immediately. Soon afterward, his successor, a woman called Julia Rothman, had also been killed. That had been at the end of an operation—Invisible Sword—that had gone catastrophi-cally wrong. In many ways this was the lowest point in Scorpia’s history, and there were many who thought that the organization would never recover. After all, the agent who had beaten them, destroyed the operation, and caused the death of Mrs. Rothman had been fourteen years old.
However, Scorpia had not given in. They had taken swift revenge on the boy and gone straight back to work.
Invisible Sword was just one of many projects needing their attention, for they were in constant demand from governments, terrorist groups, big business . . . in fact, anyone who could pay. And now they were active once again. They had come to this address in London to discuss a relatively small assignment but one that would net them ten million dollars, to be paid in uncut diamonds . . .
easier to carry and harder to trace than banknotes.
The stairs led to a short corridor on the first floor with a single door at the end. One television camera had watched the bald man on his way up. A second followed
him as he stepped onto a strange metal platform in front of the door and looked into a glass panel set in the wall.
Behind the glass, there was a biometric scanner that took an instant image of the unique pattern of blood vessels on the retina behind his eye and matched them against a computer at the reception desk below. If an enemy agent had tried to gain access to the room, he would have triggered a ten-thousand-volt electric charge through the metal floor plate, incinerating him instantly. But this was no enemy. The man’s name was Zeljan Kurst, and he had been with Scorpia almost from the beginning. The door slid open, and he went in.
He found himself in a long, narrow room with three windows covered by blinds and plain, white walls with no decoration of any kind. There was a glass table surrounded by leather chairs and no sign of any pens, paper, or printed documents. Nothing was ever written down at these meetings. Nor was anything recorded. Six men were waiting for him as he took his place at the head of the table. Following the disaster of Invisible Sword, now just the seven of them were left.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Kurst began. He spoke with a strange, mid-European accent. The last word had sounded like “chintlemen.” All the men at the table were equal partners, but he was currently the acting head. A new chief executive was chosen as fresh projects arrived.
Nobody replied. These people were not friends. They had nothing to say to each other outside the work at hand.
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“We have been given a most interesting and challenging assignment,” Kurst went on. “I need hardly remind you that our reputation was quite seriously damaged earlier this year. In addition to providing us with a much-needed financial injection following the heavy losses we sustained on ‘Invisible Sword,’ this new project will put us back on
