London Twist: A Delilah Novella

and dropped it in her purse. “Enjoy your time in Amsterdam, gentlemen,” she said, standing. “I imagine you can find your own way to the red-light district. I’m sure you built in plenty of time for a visit.”
    • • •
    The thumb drive, it turned out, offered not much more than what they’d already told her. Her contact would be waiting for her at ten o’clock at the Coburg Bar of the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair two nights hence. She’d be traveling under her usual freelance photographer cover, and should expect to be in town for some weeks, perhaps longer. They had already rented her a flat in Notting Hill. She barely had time to get back to Paris, pack a bag, and catch a flight to London.
    An unctuous real estate broker let her into the flat, a nice enough one-bedroom walk-up filled with late afternoon June sunlight, and showed her the operation of the appliances and the various other trivialities of everyday life there. The moment he’d left, she swept for bugs with some portable equipment her colleague Boaz had once provided her. Boaz was one of the few married men in the organization who had never made a pass at her. In fact, he treated her more like a sister than a colleague, and she trusted him more than almost anyone else. The place seemed clean, though she’d have to be careful to sweep it again later. The men she worked for were clever enough to delay a listening device’s activation until after a room had been declared secure.
    When she was done unpacking, she showered and changed into a salmon-colored Akris linen sheath dress with an asymmetrical cut. Strappy pumps, a camel-and-cream patent leather handbag, and a matching bolero jacket for the evening chill. She used some makeup to accentuate her eyes, then added a pair of gold Cartier earrings as a finishing touch. This was a business meeting and she didn’t want to appear too enticing, but she did leave her hair down to avoid coming across as overly severe. She looked at herself in the mirror and was satisfied. Understated and professional, but also confident and stylish. Dressed for work, not to kill.
    She spent some time exploring the neighborhood, which she had to admit was charming—rows of restored townhouses, some in the Victorian style, others painted in whimsical pastels of yellow and blue and pink; the antique shops and vintage clothing stores and fruit stalls of Portobello Road; a mix of tourists consulting maps and shoppers lugging bags and locals pushing babies in strollers. There were several routes by which she might come and go from the flat, and she knew her people must have selected the place in part for this reason. For any opposition surveillance to be effective, it would have to focus on her street, and because that was entirely residential, with no coffee shops or parks in which a team might unobtrusively wait, problems would be relatively easy to spot. She identified a few routes she could use to draw out followers, and used them to ensure she was clean while continuing to explore.
    She stopped in an Apple Store in a swank shopping mall and checked out the Connaught on one of the display computers. She had never been there before. That was good: she knew her looks made her memorable, and she didn’t want to have to explain to a chatty employee what had brought her back to London. She wasn’t thrilled to discover the hotel was near the American Embassy, but she supposed prices at the Connaught bar would be a bit more than the average government worker would be prepared to pay, and anyway she wasn’t known to the Americans. She purged the browser when she was done and went back outside.
    She was irritated at the way she’d been brought into this op, and was tempted to demonstrate her disdain and her independence by showing up late for the meeting. But that would have been both excessively immature and operationally stupid. Better to arrive early to reconnoiter before the meeting began. She did a final aggressive route to ensure she wasn’t being followed, then caught a cab not far from Holland Park Station. There were so many video monitors in London that public transportation offered no real operational advantage over a taxi. She had the driver drop her off at Berkeley Square. No sense in telling anyone her actual destination.
    There was still some early summer light in the sky, and the brick and stone facades of Mayfair glowed pink with it, the windows of the area’s antique dealers and real estate brokers