La Rueda Restaurant London
3-15 p.m.
April 19th
The beautiful glass building was full of light. From his seat in the large restaurant room Sternway could see the tower of London. He looked at his watch and as he did so he saw the rather elegant lady, in her fifties, half size heels, square toed and expensive, Dior original dress and beautifully glossy and pampered hair walk across the room towards him. Sternway found it hard to equate this obviously well heeled and attractive woman with her plump and spineless politician husband.
Sternway rose and pulled out her chair and settled her. He sat down opposite her.
“This is lovely.” She put her small bag on the table.
“Shall we order?” Sternway said and handed her the menu. The waiter arrived.
“I’ll have the Spanish Noodles with mixed seafood and shellfish.” Sternway said in a neat precise tone of voice and the waiter scribbled away.
“I’ll have the Lobster, Clams and Saffron rice.” Mrs Robinson said and added “Shall I choose the wine?”
Sternway smiled. She was surely the driving force behind her husband’s career.
“Please do.”
“I think the pink cava will do don’t you?”
“Yes.” It wouldn’t have been his choice, but he went with the flow.
When the waiter had gone Mrs Robinson opened her small bag and took a piece of paper out. It was an A five sheet, folded.
She slid it across the table to Sternway.
The sheet had three questions. The first was ‘would Stanton be killed when the job was done?’ The second was ‘what did Sternway want in return?’ The third was rather shocking and related to the target.
He took out an expensive, glossy ball point pen, emphatically clicked it once and wrote his answers; one word, a sentence and one word again. She took the sheet and read it.
Across the room a young man and a girl were eating Paella. The man had a medium sized sports bag on the floor beside his chair. Sternway had looked around the room when he arrived. He’d noticed the young couple, obviously engrossed in each other, but hadn’t noticed the bag under the table.
He had been too busy appraising Mrs Robinson as she entered to notice the young man move the bag out from under the table with his foot, reach into it and pull out a pack of tissues, as Mrs Robinson entered. If he’d been watching he’d have seen that the movement looked slightly too long and too complex the simple retrieval of a pocket tissue pack.
When Sternway did look around the room again after he had seated Mrs Robinson and himself and noticed that the girl had put her hand bag on the table, she was doing her make up and looked in the bag a couple of times.
After ten minutes Sternway’s and Mrs Robinson’s food arrived. It was a mini feast. Sternway wasn’t over indulgent with food, often left food on the plate, but ate the very best of what was on the plate, especially if it was good food and he liked La Rueda, for the food, the service and the view of the Tower of London. It was one of four or five of his favourite lunch spots. He avoided patterns as a spy, but he also liked to go places where he knew the staff and layout. His choice of favourite spot was random and he varied his lunch time. DIC had been watching him for some time and knew enough about him to put a team there.
As Sternway and Mrs Robinson ate delicately and made small talk the gun microphone in the bag fed their conversation, via the transmitter in the hand bag, to a car parked across the road. In the car a DIC operative recorded it on his laptop as a digital sound file. It was fairly boring listening material.
The two DIC members in the restaurant and the operative in the car didn’t know who the woman meeting Sternway was.
It was close to four when they finished their eating. The restaurant wasn’t busy, but was waiting for the build up after five o clock. The young man and the girl were lingering over dessert and on the verge of ordering coffees that neither of them wanted.
Sternway called for the bill.
“The answers are clear, but what guarantee do I have that he won’t suffer the fate of his predecessor?” Mrs Robinson spoke suddenly, yet quietly and with confidence.
Sternway was silent. He gave her a look that would have had a time served assassin feeling queasy, but Mrs Robinson was made of sterner stuff.
She had met her husband at Oxford University. He had been slimmer then and both of them were studying politics. They’d both had an interest in politics, but for different reasons. He was man with a view for creating social justice for the working classes and she saw it as a route to an easy life. They had courted, married and she had worked hard to see him make it up the ladder of success. She had introduced him to Terry Bloom, the future prime minister, long before the man was publicly noted. Robinson had served as a back bencher under Bloom, but with her support he had made good contacts. It was Mrs Robinson who had paid attention to the changes in the wind and had pushed her husband towards Gary Braine before any change had taken place there. She was monstrously brilliant at manoeuvring her husband into the right circles, right places and right jobs. Braine hadn’t given Robinson a place in the cabinet. Melinda Robinson saw her chances slipping away and had engineered the situation with the then home secretary, Robert Cole. She had cajoled her husband into contacting Sternway, creating suspicion around Robert Cole about his investigating MI6 foreign operative work. The rest had been easily done, a scandal and the carefully arranged hill walking ’accident’ carried out by Marco Spencer. Mrs Robinson, a favourite of the PM, had arranged her loyal husband’s promotion, in the aftermath, to Home Secretary. She wanted the view from number Ten Downing Street. She needed more control of Sternway.
“Question three…” She paused whilst the waiter took the card and cash tip away. “Question three are you sure that… it can’t be done… “
Sternway kept looking at her, not answering. The waiter returned handed back the card and walked away. Sternway rose, smoothed his clothes and very suddenly grabbed Mrs Robinson’s hand bag.
“Forgive me.” He opened it, took out a small digital recorder and pressed the off switch. He leant in and whispered in her ear.
“You’re a lovely lady Mrs Robinson and people like you do scare me a little, but you tell Tarquin that it will happen in the next hour, as arranged, and if he doesn’t show some backbone he’ll regret it.“
With that he put the recorder on the table and walked away. Mrs Robinson had flushed at the threat, Sternway was a dangerous man. She put the recorder back in her bag and left. The young man and the young woman called for their bill and left.
By the time the young couple of DIC watchers got to the car the digital recording was back at Euston Tower via the internet as was the photograph of Mrs Robinson, who’d then been identified.
The whisper was unclear and had been sent to the technical department to ‘enhance it’. Fulton was on tenterhooks. He knew if he could get a link he’d have Sternway in the bag.