“Omnidirectional wheels,” Ben explained. “Smithers was very pleased with them. They’re actually quite similar to what you’d find on a supermarket trolley. Very useful, occasionally.”
Alex looked out of the window. The Ashmolean Museum was just across the road, a very handsome, classical building built in the Greek style, with two wings and a massive portico at the front that could have been the entrance to a temple. It reminded Alex of the British Museum in London, except that it was smaller and somehow more welcoming. A long balustrade separated it from the street with steps leading into a courtyard. Two banners fluttered in the breeze. Each one showed a solid gold figure with the legend: SOUTH AMERICAN GOLD. There were no visitors yet. The museum opened at ten.
“What do we do now?” Alex asked.
“We wait.”
Ben leaned forward and dragged his finger across the satnav screen. It was touch-sensitive. The map of Oxford swiped across to be replaced by a moving film: the unmistakable shape of the assistant curator, walking down a corridor inside. Alex realized that MI6 technicians had been in the museum too. The camera was hidden somewhere above him, watching from behind. A girl came out of a doorway.
“Oh – Mr Vosper! I didn’t know you were in today.”
“Just come to catch up with some research.”
“Right.”
The image changed as Vosper went into his office and sat down at his desk. A second camera had taken over. Alex watched as he opened a laptop, booted it up and, a few minutes later, began to read a document on the screen.
“Let’s have a look,” Ben muttered.
Alex wasn’t at all surprised that MI6 had access to Vosper’s computer. After all, they’d found it easy enough to hack into his own mobile phone – as he’d discovered in Saint-Tropez. Briefly, he wondered about the sort of society he was living in, where everyone – innocent or guilty – could be watched. Ben tapped the screen a couple of times and the first page of a report appeared. It was headed: CELTIC ARTEFACTS: COLLECTION & INTERPRETATION. This was what Vosper was reading…
…and continued to read for the next hour and a half. The picture on the screen was now completely silent. There were just words, thousands of them, about Celtic jewellery and coins.
Meanwhile, the museum was now open and the day’s visitors had begun to arrive. The exhibition had been on for a while so it wasn’t quite as busy as it had been earlier in the summer. Even so, by eleven o’clock, two hundred people had bought tickets, unaware that they had all been photographed and scanned by facial recognition software and that MI6 knew everything about them before they had passed through the main entrance. Nor could they have known that the museum’s usual security staff had all been sent home for the day. They had been replaced by armed field agents. All bags were being thoroughly examined. More agents – in radio contact with one another – had joined the queue, pretending to be visitors and listening in on every word that was said. Mrs Jones had thrown a huge security net around the museum. Every street leading to and from the building was guarded by dozens more men and women. If the order was given, the museum – indeed, the entire area – could be cordoned off and isolated at a moment’s notice.
Alex stared at the screen as another page of type appeared. Vosper had reached a section entitled: IRON AGE BURIAL SITES. He was reading in silence. Nobody had come into his office. The telephone hadn’t rung. He had told his assistant that he had come to catch up with some research and that seemed to be exactly what he was doing. Alex had been in the car for several hours now. He was cramped and frustrated. Worse still, he was increasingly certain that this was a mistake. They’d all overlooked something. What was it?
He let his mind drift back to the Villa Siciliana and played over the conversation – although he had already done it many times before. He saw himself crouching at the door, watching Derek Vosper with the two brothers.
I’ve seen the names on the list.
It’s certainly going to be a dramatic afternoon.
I’m thinking about my other half…
They’re seeing Henry at half past three.
It was definitely Henry – not Hendrix. But Henry who? Alex had persuaded Ben to search the list of museum staff. There were three men called Henry but two of them worked in maintenance and one, a cloakroom attendant, was eighty-five. The name Henry didn’t seem to have any connection with South America or the gold. And there was something else that puzzled him. Who exactly were “they”, the people who were seeing Henry? Why was the time significant?
He’d gone over what he’d heard with both Ben Daniels and Mrs Jones. Alex had a good memory and all the work he had done for MI6 had helped to train him: he didn’t miss details. But this time there was something. Could it be something he’d seen on the boat? He remembered the map that he had found in Dragana Novak’s cabin. It hadn’t shown the Ashmolean Museum. The scale had been too big. In fact, it had shown Oxford and two other towns.
No. Alex tried to remember what John Crawley had said during the debrief. For some reason, he was sure that he’d said something that was a clue. He’d meant to ask Crawley about it at the time but everyone had moved on so quickly that he hadn’t had opportunity. And now he had forgotten! The one piece of information that would make everything else make sense.
“Here we go!” Ben muttered. “He’s moving again.”
Alex was miles away. He glanced at the screen to see that, at last, Derek Vosper had closed the document and got to his feet. He had been picked up by the hidden cameras, leaving his office.
“Where do you think he’s going?” Alex asked.
Ben looked at his watch. “It’s after one o’clock,” he said. “He’s probably going for lunch.”
Two minutes later, Vosper appeared in real life, coming out of the museum. Ben started the engine. “Once more unto the breach…” he muttered.
“What did you say?” Alex asked.
“Once more…”
“…unto the breach. Yes. It means let’s get moving! It’s from a play!”
And suddenly, Alex knew. The play was Henry V by William Shakespeare. He had studied it at school – when he was at school. It was Henry talking just before the Battle of Agincourt.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
The pieces had been in front of him all the time. It was only now, with no particular reason, that they had all come together to make sense. The key was the map. Oxford. Cheltenham.
And Stratford-upon-Avon.
Alex turned to Ben. “Quickly,” he said. “I want to know what’s on at the theatre.”
“Alex, I don’t think we have time…”
“Today. There’s a theatre in Stratford. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre.” Alex remembered going there once. It had been a lifetime ago.
Ben could hear the seriousness in Alex’s voice. Ahead of him, Vosper was coming down the main steps, on his way to his car. He stabbed at the dashboard screen, searching out the information. “Henry V,” he said. “It starts at half past three.”
It was what Alex had been expecting. It made complete sense. “That’s the Henry they’re going to see! Not Hendrix. I was right about what I heard. But it’s not a person. It’s a play! And the map I saw in Dragana’s cabin … it didn’t just show Oxford. It showed Stratford-upon-Avon. That’s where they’re heading.”
“That’s where who are going? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know…”
In front of them, Derek Vosper had reached his car and was just getting in. They watched him start the engine.
“We’ve got to get after him,” Ben said. He reached for the little joystick, to guide them out of the space.
“No.” Alex stopped him. “That’s the mistake we’ve been making. Vosper was there at the villa in France but this has got nothing to do with him. It’s his wife!”
“Jane Vosper?”
“Yes!” Alex knew he was
right. “I actually heard him talking about her. He said he had to think about his other half – and I thought he meant the other half of the money he was owed. But he was talking about his wife!”
“But why? She’s just a coach driver.” Ben remembered what Crawley had said about her. “She works for a school.”
“Yes,” Alex agreed. “But he also said that she’d had a security check done by the police. Everyone in the room just accepted that because it didn’t show anything – she had no criminal record. But that was what I was meaning to ask! Why did they need to check on her in the first place? It must be because she works somewhere important, with lots of security. Maybe that’s the real target. Something’s going to happen between now and half past three and she’s involved!”
Ben hesitated, but only for a moment. He jabbed at the control panel and spoke urgently into a microphone somewhere in the dashboard. “This is Daniels – calling from Vehicle 7K. I need immediate intel on Jane Vosper. Repeat, Jane Vosper. We need to locate her at once!”
A few metres further down the road, Derek Vosper was about to pull out when he heard a squeal of tyres and looked in the mirror just in time to see a silver Vauxhall Astra, which had appeared from nowhere and which was overtaking him at high speed. He jammed his foot on the brake and stopped. It seemed to him that he had only avoided a collision by a matter of inches … and that was something he wouldn’t have wanted today of all days. He sat there for a moment watching the car as it tore into the distance. A traffic light which had been red instantly flicked back to green as it approached. And then it was gone.
STEEL CLAW
One hour earlier, about forty miles east of Oxford, a school bus was preparing to leave. It was no ordinary school bus, but then Linton Hall was definitely no ordinary school.
To begin with, it was by far the most expensive prep school in the country. Its boarding fees began at £12,550 a term … but these could easily rise up to as much as £15,000 once parents had paid for all the extras, which might include piano lessons, judo, horse riding, mountaineering, hot-air ballooning, real tennis, classical ballet and golf. It was, of course, extremely exclusive. There were just three hundred boys and girls aged 8–13 and every one of them had had to pass three days of intensive interviews and exams before they were accepted. Linton Hall’s record spoke for itself. Eighty-five per cent of the students went on to one of the country’s top private secondary schools, with Eton, Westminster and Benenden high on the list. They would all have studied Latin and ancient Greek and would have a grasp of at least three modern languages, including Chinese. They would play a musical instrument. They would be able to recite hundreds of lines of poetry off by heart.
The main body of the school was an Elizabethan manor house, a gorgeous building four storeys high, with chimneys and slanting roofs. It had once been the home of Sir Christopher Linton, a close friend of King Henry VIII and, briefly, Master of the Hunt. That was almost five hundred years ago. Now the house contained several classrooms, a very well stocked library and a dining hall – candlelit at night. It was surrounded by a low balustrade and a series of hedges perfectly cut into the shapes of animals. Real peacocks wandered over the lawns.
There were a dozen other more modern buildings in the grounds. These included a state-of-the-art gymnasium, an arts and leisure complex, a science block and five boarding houses named after British poets. The grounds also boasted a heated swimming pool, squash courts and an Olympic-standard athletic track. Less visible, set on the edge of the main school area and low in the ground, was a circular building made of brick with blacked-out windows. It was known as the Hub, and it was the school’s security centre, manned twenty-four hours a day, the whole year round … even during the holidays.
Linton Hall was not easy to find. It was buried in the Chilterns, at the end of a long track that ran through farmland and over a humpbacked bridge. There was no signpost. The school had no website and entering the name into a satnav system would produce no result at all. The nearest village was called Great Kimble and, despite its name, it was actually very small indeed. None of the villagers ever talked about the school. If anyone asked for directions, they had been warned to call the police.
We want our students to have a happy, normal, carefree time while they are with us.
The words were written on the first page of the school brochure (although the brochure was only sent to a tiny number of people and each copy had to be returned as soon as it had been read). This was the whole point of Linton Hall. The children who went there were the sons and daughters of some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet. In the past, they might have been able to fit into ordinary schools. But modern-day terrorism and the threat of international crime had made that too risky, and at the start of the twenty-first century, a Swiss business group had the bright idea of creating a single location where they might all be brought together and given a first-class education in complete safety.
Two prime ministers – and many senior politicians – had sent their children to Linton Hall. Several members of the royal family had been there and it was rumoured that the future king of England would be starting as soon as he was old enough. But most of the parents could be simply described as “the super-rich”. They were entrepreneurs, the top executives in companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Shell. The Head Girl was the daughter of one of the world’s best-selling authors. The captain of the first eleven was the adopted son of a pop singer who had sold over two hundred million records worldwide. Many of the children had come from abroad, with parents who included Russian oligarchs, Chinese businessmen, Hollywood stars, Saudi Arabian sheikhs. There was barely a parent in the school who had not been mentioned at some time or other in the press.
While Derek Vosper was reading his report on Celtic artefacts and Alex was kicking his heels in a car outside the Ashmolean Museum, fifty-two children from Years Five and Six were assembling outside the Manor House. At school they wore a distinctive uniform – two shades of blue with the word Virtus and a crest with a golden key on the top pocket. Virtus was the Latin for “excellence” and it was the school’s one-word motto. However, it was the school policy that they should wear nothing that might identify them when they went on trips outside the grounds, so they were in their own clothes, smart but casually dressed.
They were being driven to Stratford-upon-Avon for an afternoon performance of Henry V. At some schools, it might be thought that children in Years Five and Six were too young for Shakespeare, but at Linton Hall, the opposite was true. Children read their first play when they were nine and at the end of the previous term, quite a few of them had appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in the open air with the school jazz band providing the music.
The coach that was waiting for them was a fifty-five-seater Mercedes-Benz Tourismo, painted in the school colours but with no other identification. The driver was standing waiting at the front door.
Jane Vosper had once driven buses for National Express but had joined Linton Hall four years ago. Like all the other teachers and support staff, she had been interviewed several times and had undergone a thorough police security check. She was not particularly popular with the children, as she hardly spoke and never smiled. But the school saw her as a safe pair of hands. With her solid shoulders and her muscular arms, she looked completely comfortable behind the steering wheel of a vehicle that measured thirteen metres in length and which weighed twenty-four tonnes. The children referred to her as Mrs T because she never went anywhere without her silver tea flask. She would sip tea while they were at the theatre, the museum, on a field trip … wherever.
Of course, they were not travelling alone. The head of drama at Linton Hall was a slight, nervous-looking man in his early fifties. Jason Green had been a successful actor and writer until he had been wooed by a generous salary and the promise of long holidays, which would allow him to travel and write plays. He had been at Linton Hall for twenty years, during which time he had s
een many of his boys go on to become stars. He was in charge of the expedition.
Also in the coach was a well-built, watchful man with a blank face and a crew cut. His name was Ted Philby, an American recruited from the FBI. He was wearing a suit, a white shirt and dark glasses and there was a wire trailing down from his ear to a microphone next to his mouth. All in all, he could hardly have done more to advertise himself as a hired bodyguard … which is exactly what he was. The school was looked after by a private security firm that consisted of seven full-time operatives: five men and two women. Most of the time, they based themselves at the Hub but whenever there was a school trip, they went too. Very unusually, they were allowed to carry guns. The firm had lobbied the government to make this possible – although it probably helped that one of the students was the son of the minister of defence.
When the coach left, Philby would be on board and it would be sandwiched between two identical Land Rovers with four more armed operatives, travelling in pairs. The cars would be parked outside the theatre throughout the play and the drivers would be in constant communication with the police. If anything happened, they could call for help on a special channel reserved for them. Armed backup would arrive within three minutes.
It wasn’t surprising that everything was done to a tight schedule at Linton Hall and at exactly five past one, the children – who had formed an orderly line – climbed onto the bus and took their places behind each other, rows of two plush seats on either side of a long corridor. The coach had a toilet about halfway down and every seat had a television screen. Normally, the school would transmit classic films or documentaries during long journeys but Stratford-upon-Avon was only an hour away so this time they were blank. Jane Vosper took her place with Philby beside her. As the children settled down and Jason Green began a final headcount, she drew a packet of red and yellow sweets from her handbag.