and generally hanging out. I went inside one of the shops across the street that sold high-end ladies’ wear and did some shopping near the front window, where I was behind a display and could watch the street. Sure enough, right on the dot I saw an elderly British woman in a nice dress get out of a taxi, cross the sidewalk and go inside.
As I was sorting through dresses and checking pedestrians on the street, the clerk came over and asked if she could help. I was tempted to ask her if she had anything in my size, but didn’t. “My wife is a four,” I said, “and we’ve been invited to a party.”
Ten minutes later, without making a purchase, I was back out on the sidewalk. I strolled to the corner and waited.
Seventeen minutes after she entered the store, the elderly lady emerged carrying a shopping bag over one arm. She turned my way and headed for the subway. I waited until she passed, then strolled that way myself.
There were only two other passengers on the platform, both schoolgirls wearing short skirts, long cotton stockings and jackets and carrying backpacks. Both were smoking. Ditching school, I suspected.
When the train pulled in, they tossed their butts and climbed aboard. So did the old lady. Apparently undecided, I loitered until the last moment, as the door was starting to close, then stepped aboard. The train was about half full.
People got on and off at every stop. I recognized none of them. Four stops from Harrod’s, the girls left the train. The old lady and I got off at the next stop. She disappeared in the direction of the parking garage.
I waited at the entrance to the subway, watching the crowd.
Finally I set off for the parking garage.
The old lady was sitting in my car with her bag on the floor between her feet. Kerry Pocock had the wig off, revealing that mane of curly brown hair.
“You look lovely this morning,” I said after I was behind the wheel and buckled in.
“You are so sweet,” she said in her old lady voice. Then she dropped it and said normally, “Here it is.” She handed me a plastic film container. “He hid it in the chicken.” As I pocketed the container, she said, “The bird looks good — better than that last one he gave me. It must have been an old rooster.”
“Young roosters are the best,” I remarked. She snorted.
I took her home, so she could get out of her makeup and go to work. Our agent was a guy named Eide Masmoudi, an American Muslim who was worshipping at the biggest mosque in London, one run by a controversial cleric named Sheikh Mahmoud al-Taji. When he wasn’t hanging out down at the mosque, Eide worked as a clerk in Harrod’s food section. The store employed over a dozen English Muslims, some of whom were members of his mosque, so Eide had to be careful. Kerry was his courier. Jake Grafton was personally running him, and I was the help that made sure she wasn’t followed. If someone started to check on her, Eide and his pal Radwan Ali, another American Muslim, were under suspicion and would have to be jerked out of the mosque PDQ.
The CIA’s London office is in a big old house in Kensington. The sign out front tells the world that we are in the import-export business, but that’s just another tiny lie on a huge big pile. When I arrived, Jake Grafton was in his office in the classified spaces in the basement reading a newspaper. He swiveled and latched on to the film container like a dog who had been given a bone. He opened it and took out the paper that had been folded and rolled tightly and stuffed in there.
“She was clean,” I said. “No one took the slightest interest in her.” He merely grunted. After he had unrolled and unfolded the sheet of paper, which was densely covered with tiny script, he took his time reading it. Then he read it again. Finally he slipped it inside a folder and put it in his desk.
At last he fastened his eyes on me, on the other side of the desk. “Tell me about last night. All of it.”
I tossed the recorder on the table and ran through it. There wasn’t much to tell, since I didn’t think he wanted to hear a rehash of Kerry’s and my repartee.
While I was talking, Grafton punched a button and a tech guy came in. Grafton handed him the recorder.
When I ran dry, he pulled out his lower drawer and propped his feet up on it. “I got a call this morning from MI-5, Kerry Pocock’s boss.
Seems Alexander Surkov was taken to the hospital last night by his wife. Food poisoning, they think. They’ll know more this evening.”
“Food poisoning?” I remembered that gooey yellow stuff. “Montezuma’s revenge, at those prices? That’s gotta be a new record. Wait until you see my expense account.”
It wasn’t food poisoning, as it turned out. Late that afternoon Pocock’s boss called again. Alexander Surkov was suffering from radiation poisoning.
The story came out that evening. Surkov had eaten nothing after he returned home from the restaurant the previous evening, and that night he began vomiting. His wife took him to the hospital when the usual over-the- counter remedies had no effect. He was showing all the classic signs of radiation poisoning.
Jake Grafton got this from a guy he knew in New Scotland Yard, who called him.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing his coat. “Let’s go to Mayfair.”
It was eight in the evening when we arrived. The restaurant was lit up, all right, but all the customers were police. I tagged along as Grafton introduced himself to an inspector Connery. We shook hands all around, and the inspector took us inside.
A team of soldiers was working with a Geiger counter, going over every inch of the place. “It was cleaned last night, of course, but not to the point of decontamination. Mr. Grafton said you were here, at this table, Mr. Carmellini?”
I nodded.
“And Surkov was at the table over there, with the yellow tape around it?”
“That’s correct.”
“That table is radioactive.”
Inadvertently my eyes went to the table in the corner where Marisa Petrou and her escort had eaten. I saw yellow tape there, too. “That table?”
“It’s warm, too. Not as hot at Surkov’s table, but warm.” I looked down at the table where Kerry and I had gobbled our goo. Nothing.
“Any other hot spots?”
One in the kitchen, all over the dishwashing area, very slight but detectable. Perhaps it was contaminated when the dishes were washed.”
“Perhaps,” Grafton echoed, looking around. He turned back to the inspector. “You are interviewing the staff, I assume.”
“Of course. Those that can be found.”
Grafton waited, and finally the inspector said, “We are having difficulty finding one of the waiters. He lived in a rooming house, and didn’t go there after work last night. Visiting a friend, perhaps.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to ask. On the way back to Kensington, I was going over every moment of the evening I could remember, when Grafton asked, “What do you think?”
“Marisa paused at their table, talked and shook hands. Could she have salted something on the appetizer or the drinks? Of course. Everyone looked at her — she was well turned out, nice dress, a few jewels, delightful face and figure — so her hands could have been busy. Same for her escort. Marisa’s table was the one in the corner that was also contaminated.
“On the other hand, maybe the missing waiter poisoned Surkov and salted Marisa’s table. More likely, one of Surkov’s companions slipped something into his grub. After all, they had all evening. Or he could have been poisoned by his wife. Or someone could have dosed him that afternoon, before he got to the restaurant.”
“That about sums it up, I think,” Grafton said sourly.
The next morning the newspapers had it. A big splash on the front page of every London paper. Alexander Surkov had been poisoned with polonium 210, a radioactive isotope. The story didn’t stay local, either. Within another day it was all over every newspaper and television in Europe and America. Still, an exotic poisoning would have been merely a brief sensation without something more … and Surkov gave that something to the press. He held a hospital bed interview and accused the president of Russia of ordering his murder.
The Russians hotly denied the accusation, of course. Regardless, two days later, four days after he was poisoned, Alexander Surkov was dead. When the photographers took his photo in his hospital bed, his hair had already started to come out. His ghastly countenance was the photo of the year.
If that weren’t enough, British and German investigators had found a radioactive trail from Moscow to
