Marah Chase and the Conqueror's Tomb by Jay Stringer

Author:Jay Stringer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-SEVEN

There was an art to being followed. In Mason’s experience, most people got it wrong. They made stupid choices and got caught. As with every other part of the spy game, it was really pretty simple. The difference between those who lasted and those who didn’t was how quickly people embraced the simplicity.

When being followed, a rookie mistake was to try to lose the tail straightaway. Deep down, there was an assumption that if you can’t see them, they can’t see you. That was almost never true. The best working principle was to think that they could always see you. It paid to level the odds and keep an eye on them.

She had taken Cullis’s call on Vauxhall Bridge Road, on the corner of Rampayne Street. Pimlico tube station was at the other end of the road. Pimlico was known as Spook Station in the trade, hosting the entrance to a tunnel that ran parallel to the Victoria line and accessed both the basement of Legoland to the south and a few government buildings to the north. Anyone walking past Pimlico on foot could see a tunnel leading to a large car park beneath the station building. Most would assume it was for the nearby office block rather than for MI6.

Mason knew this street could be crawling with spies within seconds. The first thing she did was back away from the corner. She wheeled the bike along to a row of parked cars. Most of them were nondescript: Vauxhalls, Fords, Toyotas. She stopped at the most expensive one in the row, a shiny blue BMW convertible with the roof up. Mason used an electronic multitool from the equipment department to disable the alarm and unlock the doors. She put the bike across the back seat and settled in up front.

Within seconds, she watched both MI5 and MI6 staff converge on where she’d spoken to Cullis. A police car pulled up, and two officers got out, listening to orders from the spooks. Mason felt a brief swell of pride. She counted eight staff from the two agencies, some who would have been pulled back onto active duty just for this. And the cops would be relaying orders out across two police forces.

All this trouble for her.

The pride helped edge out the fear. The dark side of this, of course, was that she didn’t know who could be trusted. The Visitologists had people in both the government and Legoland. It was safe to guess they’d worked their way into Thames House, maybe even the police. At this point, Mason was working on the assumption that the entire security establishment was compromised. That meant it was her versus the city of London.

Mason was fewer than a hundred yards from them, and nobody had noticed. Even as they looked at the road, trying to figure out which way she’d gone, they filtered out the expensive car right in front of them. People would look at a flashy car, like a Ferrari or an Aston Martin, but in London, BMWs were the cars of bankers and middle managers.

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