PROLOGUE
The headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, occupies an imposing edifice of concrete and green glass on the south bank of the River Thames, in London. It was erected in the early 1990s, alongside Vauxhall Bridge, under circumstances of such secrecy that when the architect was commissioned to design the building, he did not know who he was designing it for.
The Thames is a tidal river, its powerful currents ebbing and surging twice each day with salt water from the North Sea. Occasionally a bottlenose whale will veer off course, separated from its pod, and wander downriver, dangerously far from the ocean. When the tide recedes, the Thames shrinks, its level plummeting by as much as twenty feet, exposing a muddy shoreline. Urban beachcombers—“mudlarks,” as they’re known—have unearthed artifacts of previous civilizations from the silt along the riverbanks: Bronze Age daggers and Iron Age coins.
It was the Thames that first drew the Romans, two thousand years ago, to establish a walled entrepôt, which they gave the name Londinium. By the heyday of the British Empire, London had colonized a quarter of the globe. In 1860, half of all exports from Asia, Africa, and Latin America were sent there; the Thames was the busiest port in the world. Hundreds of ships arrived each week, and towering cranes unloaded tobacco, ivory, spices, wool, rice, tea, and other treasures. The river was teeming, thrumming with commerce, jostling with all manner of vessels and tradesmen and stevedores and mariners from strange lands, hinting at the existence of other civilizations over the horizon.
But the riverbank could be a frightening place as well. In the Victorian era, the waterfront was rife with crime. People had an alarming tendency to die in the Thames, whether voluntarily, in a moment of despair, or because somebody pushed them. If you misstepped on a slick cobble after a night out drinking, the black water could suck you under in an instant. In the work of Charles Dickens, the river was often depicted as a malignant force, grimy and malodorous, “lapping at piles and posts and iron rings, hiding strange things in its mud, running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies.” This was the paradox of the Thames: it was the pulsing artery of London’s industrial boom, with vast factories and warehouses swarming with laborers and belching smoke along its banks. But at the same time, Dickens saw in the river “an image of death,” a ribbon of danger coiling through “the midst of the great city’s life.”
The design of the MI6 building was meant to evoke Britain’s industrial era, echoing the monolithic power stations, like Battersea and Bankside, which stood nearby. But by 1994, when Queen Elizabeth II presided over the opening of the new spy headquarters, the power stations had long since been decommissioned and now seemed like artifacts themselves, relics of London’s vanished past as a factory town. The city had shuttered most of its factories; between 1960 and 1990, jobs in the manufacturing sector declined by 80 percent.
Shipping, too, had disappeared. In 1955, an American trucking executive from North Carolina invented the modern stackable shipping container. The standardization of these twenty- and forty-foot steel boxes during the 1960s sparked a revolution in global commerce, enabling a more integrated transportation infrastructure in which containers could be transferred fluidly from truck to ship to train. Suddenly big waterfront warehouses for the storage of goods were obsolete, and a new class of gigantic container ships could accommodate ever-larger loads. These vessels were so big that they could no longer navigate the narrow docks lining the Thames. So between 1960 and 1980, nearly all of London’s docks shut down and a whole commercial sector that had sustained the region virtually disappeared. For hundreds of years, London had been a port city. Then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t.
At least the air was clear. The word “smog” had been invented in London, to describe the smoke from coal fires and factories, mingled with English fog, that often enshrouded the city. But new regulations on such fires, combined with the closure of so many factories, meant that suddenly London had clean air. By the time MI6 headquarters opened, the old Dickensian industrial city had been supplanted by a glistening new metropolis. London might not be a center of shipping or manufacturing anymore, but it was reinventing itself as a financial capital. The waterfront was experiencing an astonishing revitalization: in 1988, a group of young British art students had converted a derelict warehouse in the Surrey Docks into a temporary gallery for an exhibition called
Freeze. Cool restaurants soon followed, and eventually new housing and high-tech trading floors. Having shed any trace of its old grit or menace, London’s waterfront had become a sanitized playground for tourists and young professionals. In 2000, Bankside Power Station reopened as the Tate Modern museum. Battersea Power Station would eventually find new life as a shopping mall.
To many, this new London was hugely exciting: the city had been reimagined as a preferred destination for money and people who had it. Suddenly there were good restaurants for what felt like the first time in history, and world-class shopping and deluxe hotels with chauffeured Bentleys idling out front. Once again, cranes dominated London’s skyline, but now they were not unloading cotton or nutmeg but throwing up glass-and-steel skyscrapers and glossy residential complexes with staggering prices. In fact, a lot of Londoners found themselves priced out of this new version of their city, forced to relocate and commute from distant suburbs. Much of the real estate speculation was driven by foreign buyers, who regarded property in London as an investment rather than a place to live. So the buildings were full of amenities—but curiously devoid of residents, because the international owners were mostly out of town. Clocks in lobbies displayed the times in Moscow, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi. “You have people with five, ten apartments all around the world,” a staffer at one new luxury tower remarked. “They come and go.”
London was an attractive second home for “potentates, monarchs, chiefs, sultans, and diplomats,” Trevor Abrahmsohn, a veteran real estate agent with a billionaire clientele, observed. But many of these foreign-owned properties remained unoccupied for much of the year. A former deputy mayor of London, Nicky Gavron, complained that overseas investors “want to buy a luxury flat in a skyscraper to treat as a safety deposit box.” In fact, there is a statistical correlation between the value of a property and the likelihood that it will be occupied: the higher the price, the greater the chance it is empty. As a consequence, parts of London that had once thronged with local people now often seemed eerily depopulated. The effect was unsettling; in fashionable neighborhoods after sundown, the windows of the multimillion-dollar dwellings were all dark. The press gave a nickname to these vacant palaces: ghost mansions.
In 2016, one of these luxury buildings was constructed on the north bank of the Thames, directly across from MI6, on a site that had once housed a nineteenth-century prison. It was a residential complex called Riverwalk and consisted of a pair of sleek towers, one tall and one short, connected by a low-slung lobby and fronted by a cascade of curved balconies. Riverwalk had been conceived by a buccaneering property impresario, Sir Gerald Ronson, who was convicted in 1990 on charges of conspiracy, false accounting, and theft in connection with a stock fraud case; did a stint in prison; and then, in 2012, was made a Commander of the British Empire for his philanthropic work. “Imagine the parties you could throw here,” Ronson told an interviewer when construction was complete. From the £25 million penthouse, you could see as far away as Wembley Stadium. The building’s wealthy residents were rumored to include Tom Jones, the Welsh crooner who was famous for songs like “It’s Not Unusual” and “Help Yourself.” But it was hard to say for sure, because people who purchased units at Riverwalk tended to register them through offshore trusts and shell companies, to preserve their anonymity. And anyway, much of the time the place seemed empty.
In the early hours of November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera on MI6 headquarters registered movement on the fifth floor of the taller tower at Riverwalk, just across the water. The night was cold. The Thames was running high, and the reflected illumination of the lamps lining Vauxhall Bridge danced on the surface of the water. Riverwalk was almost entirely dark, but one apartment blazed with light: unit 504.
At 2:23 a.m., the MI6 camera captured a dark figure walking out of the apartment and onto the narrow balcony overlooking the Thames. It was a slender silhouette against the brightly lit windows: a young man. He made his way to one corner of the balcony and seemed to peer over the ledge, before crossing to the other corner and briefly pausing there. Then, returning to the center of the balcony, he jumped.
Copyright © 2026 by Patrick Radden Keefe. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
