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  ‘Who sent you?’ he asked, point blank.

  ‘What?’ she replied.

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘No one sent me,’ she said, her voice turning as hard as his.

  ‘Really? You just turned up at the right moment saying all the right things to get me to come on this jaunt with you?’

  ‘And you just couldn’t resist the little lady stroking your ego?’ she shot back. ‘I didn’t force you to come. I needed help, so I asked for it. It’s not my fault everything went south.’

  ‘Things went south as soon as I started to trust you. Are you even CIA?’

  ‘You’re going to believe a KGB agent trying to destabilise a situation? If you’re that easy to manipulate I should’ve just told you I found out Stalin was alive and well and living on a fishing boat on the Stockholm docks.’

  She sounded genuinely hurt, but Knox knew she was evading him. ‘Do you work for the CIA?’ he asked again.

  ‘Give me some credit.’

  Bennett turned away from him, staring out at the North Sea, now thousands of feet beneath them. Suddenly she looked very young to Knox, like a child who had been sent on a long journey alone.

  They sat in silence for ten minutes. When Knox spoke again, his voice was softer.

  ‘I need to know,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, refusing to take her eyes off the dark, churning waves. ‘I work for the CIA.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘File clerk.’

  ‘Christ.’ Knox barely mouthed the word, but she still heard it.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she spat, finally turning back from the window to face him. ‘Is this embarrassing for you? Have I taken you away from all that important work you were doing drunk off your ass on suspension? Let me get you a drink or three to make up for it.’

  Knox tried to defend himself, but she cut him off before he could get a word out.

  ‘Nothing I told you was a lie. Nothing. I work for the CIA. I see everything that comes through London, including all the intelligence my bosses choose to ignore. We’d been watching Bianchi and Moretti. We knew about their deaths before the ink was dry on the autopsy report. But no one cared, it was none of our business. I didn’t buy that, but when I went to my boss he laughed at me. Told me not to worry my pretty head and go back to doing the filing.’

  ‘So you ignored his orders?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Of course it is. You’re a man. You can break all the rules and just get a slap on the wrist. You live in a world where you’re right even when you’re wrong.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Knox replied. ‘I’ve fought for everything I’ve ever got.’

  ‘And you got it too, didn’t you? Because you really, really wanted it. Do you want to know about the world I live in? A world where my father decided he didn’t like the family he’d been stuck with and left us with nothing. Where I put myself through school, aced every test, got a job working for the goddamn CIA, beat out a hundred other people for an international posting, and still get told every single day that what I think is wrong and what I do isn’t important.’

  ‘I haven’t exactly had it easy,’ Knox said, breaking the short but deep silence that had fallen between them. ‘Both my parents died when I was a child.’

  ‘And I’m sorry for you,’ she said. ‘But don’t try to make this a competition. Because I’ve got plenty more I can tell you about how tough life can be, and you’re the one who lives in a penthouse.’

  Knox’s confidence in his ability to read people had taken a battering over the last couple of days, but he couldn’t deny the intensity of Bennett’s emotions. If she was just a bit player in a larger game, drafted in to run interference on him, he was sure she’d have taken her leave by now. There was no reason for her to still be sitting next to him unless she really did believe in the conspiracy she’d sold him and thought he was the only person who could help her prove it was real.

  ‘We knew about the suspicions you and Holland had about Manning,’ she said quietly, her eyes looking down at her lap. ‘It was obvious you were being hung out to dry. I thought you could help me, that we could help each other. My mistake.’

  ‘Well, you were right about one thing,’ Knox replied after a moment. ‘This is definitely bigger than a couple of Italians. The dead man who attacked us. I did know him.’

  Bennett looked up at Knox. The scarlet had left her cheeks and there was even the hint of a smirk on her lips again. Knox explained that he’d seen the attacker before, standing guard outside Bianchi and Moretti’s flat.

  ‘So someone in MI5 is behind all this,’ she said, when Knox had finished. ‘And now they have Valera.’

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Do you think she’s already on her way back to Russia?’

  ‘I doubt it. They’ll take her somewhere quiet first. Maybe see what they can get out of her themselves before they hand her over.’

  ‘Then we still have a chance to find her.’

  ‘If they’ve taken her back to the UK.’

  ‘Which, with any luck, they will have.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would be so lucky,’ Knox said. ‘With everyone in London focused on the OECD conference it’d be the perfect place to hide Valera. Or put her to work.’

  A stewardess interrupted their conversation, telling them the plane was about to begin its descent.

  ‘By the way,’ Knox said after the stewardess had moved on and he’d checked that his seatbelt was still tight across his lap, ‘how long has the CIA known about Pipistrelle?’

  ‘What?’ Bennett replied.

  ‘White’s bugs.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bennett smiled. ‘That was just a guess. Lucky for you my bosses wouldn’t believe me if I told them about it.’

  As the plane came in to land at London Airport they agreed on a plan for the next day. Bennett would see if there was anything else she could find at the American embassy, and Knox would talk to the one other person in MI5 he might be able to trust.

  CHAPTER 42

  It was midnight by the time Knox reached Soho. The hot, heavy air that had sat over London for days had finally broken into a storm and he had to move between shop doorways and awnings, dodging the last of the downpour as he made his way from Oxford Circus to Kemp House.

  Soho was quiet, its usual nocturnal wanderers driven indoors by the rain. Knox walked down Argyll Street, turning left onto Great Marlborough Street opposite Liberty, the department store’s black and white Tudor panelling shining in the wet. He thought about his conversation with Bennett on the flight from Amsterdam. He understood better now why she was so scared of her dark vision of the world after everything she’d already gone through. He was starting to become as scared himself. Someone in London was so desperate to get their hands on the next generation of surveillance technology that they’d killed for it. Now, barely twenty-four hours before the opening of the OECD conference, they had kidnapped Irina Valera as well, leaving a trail of more death behind them. And Knox was convinced that this someone was his boss.

  At the top of Poland Street two fire engines passed him. He wondered where they were headed at this time of night and in this weather. Then, as he turned into Berwick Street, he realised they weren’t on their way to deal with a fire, they were leaving one they’d just put out.

  Small groups of people were gathered on the street, some in raincoats and holding umbrellas, others looking like they’d come straight from their beds, wrapped in whatever they could find on their way out of their homes. They were all looking up at Kemp House, where black scorch marks circled the top of the building and wisps of smoke were still reaching out from the blown-out windows of Knox’s flat.

  Knox stood paralysed, staring at the destruction. He reached for his chest and felt the bundle of papers that were still in the inside pocket of his jacket. He knew this wasn’t an accident. He didn’t know if the fire had be
en meant to burn him and the papers along with his flat, or if it was some kind of swift retribution for the death of the man in Stockholm. But either way someone was sending him a very direct message.

  He wanted to push past the gawpers and see just how much damage had been done, but he knew that if he did, or even if he just stayed on Berwick Street much longer, anyone waiting to make sure he got the message would spot him. And he didn’t have enough energy to cope with whatever else they might want to throw at him.

  He turned away from Kemp House and slipped into D’Arblay Street. He hugged doorways as he moved quickly across Wardour Street and through the narrow cut-through of St Anne’s Court, before doubling back north up Dean Street and into Soho Square.

  He paused at the edge of the old public garden, watching the corner he’d just turned around. After a moment a figure appeared, lingering on the kerb. It was a man, wearing a heavy mackintosh. His face was obscured by the umbrella he was still holding up even though the last of the rain had stopped falling. He may have just been a drunk businessman trying to decide which way to take home, but after he’d spent almost a full minute looking up and down Dean Street and towards Soho Square, Knox decided he was trying to do something else.

  Knox was tired of being watched, followed, and attacked. But he was also physically exhausted. He decided that right now his best course of action was to retreat. He waited for the man to turn away from the square, then he burst into a run, leaving his hiding place in the shadow of a large old plane tree and making a break for Tottenham Court Road.

  The tube station was shut, the last train gone. But there were two double-decker night buses idling on the north side of the station’s New Oxford Street entrance. The first bus started its engine as Knox reached it, and pulled away just as he jumped on its backboard.

  His respite lasted twenty seconds until the second bus also started to move down New Oxford Street, apparently taking an identical route. There was a chance the man looking for Knox had missed his quick, echoing footsteps around Soho Square and had been too slow off the mark to catch the bus behind him. But after what Knox had gone through over the last twenty-four hours he wasn’t inclined to hope.

  Knox’s bus quickly filled up with people who had stayed too late at work or given up the idea of walking home after an evening in a pub. The windows on the lower level began to steam up thanks to all the warm, breathing bodies and Knox was forced to abandon his rear-facing seat next to a man who had definitely spent the evening hunched over a bar rather than a desk. He stood on the backboard, keeping his eyes fixed on the second bus, which was still following, always just one stop behind.

  He let his double-decker take him down High Holborn and deeper into the city’s history, past Chancery Lane towards St Paul’s, then along London Wall, which traced the path of the ancient Londinium’s battlements.

  Knox could have stayed standing on the backboard as the bus took him further and further away from the West End, but constantly watching the second night bus follow him was making him impatient. He suddenly wanted to flush out and face the man from Soho Square, so as the bus slowed through a deserted junction he took a chance, jumped off the backboard, and started to run.

  Cripplegate was a black hole all hours of the day, but especially at night. Once one of the most heavily populated parts of the City of London, it had been almost completely flattened by the Luftwaffe, and immediately after the war its residents numbered in the tens. It took Knox just a few seconds to disappear into the darkness that seemed to stretch away into eternity from the streetlights of London Wall, and only a couple more before the ground under him became uneven and he felt himself kicking rubble as he ran. He was sure he was making enough noise to be easily tracked, but he slowed down to make sure of it – and to stop himself slamming too hard into some unseen chunk of building or something else where it shouldn’t be.

  After a hundred yards Knox’s instincts told him to stop, and he held his hands out into nothing. He caught his breath as his eyes adjusted to another level of darkness and he discovered he was teetering right on the edge of a chasm-like bomb crater.

  He crouched down and inched his way round the rim of the crater, feeling with his hands and feet until he found a slab of wall that would hide him but also give him a clear view of his pursuer hopefully tumbling full-tilt into the abyss. He waited, and waited. He was tense. The fear and anger of Stockholm and the decimation of his home burned inside of him, and he wanted to take it all out on someone. But the longer he waited, squatting in the dark, the more he started to wonder if he’d actually been followed at all.

  Knox shifted his weight, leaning against the wall. The old bricks crumbled under him and sent him skidding down into the hole in the earth. He grabbed at the wet dirt but couldn’t stop from crashing into the waterlogged, pitted floor of the crater. He pulled himself up, wiping his hands on his trousers and feeling filthy liquid pooling in his shoes and soaking his feet. For a brief, hysterical moment he stood in the centre of the void, daring his imaginary tail, or anyone else, to show themselves and take a shot at him, but there was only silence and darkness. After a few seconds he came to his senses and hauled himself back up out of the crater.

  He thought about walking back to Soho, but decided to head in the opposite direction instead, to the one part of London he knew even better.

  The night gave him one final stroke of luck when he was back on London Wall – a taxi to flag down. The driver had just dropped someone off at Liverpool Street station and was heading back into town to pick up some more late-night custom. He had no desire to go east again, but Knox persuaded him by offering double his fare.

  Twenty minutes later the cab dropped Knox off on Roman Road, which, as its name suggested, was the old straight-arrow Roman route out of the city. He walked north towards Victoria Park. The park, as its name also suggested, was a gift from Queen Victoria to the people of the East End, a space where they could escape the drudgery of life for a few hours. It was a kind gesture, but it assumed that the people it had been created for could afford to take time off from working all hours every day to make ends meet to promenade through the park and smell its roses.

  Twenty years after the Blitz, Bethnal Green also still wore its scars. Knox passed rows of old terraced houses, condemned but showing signs of occupation, collapsed buildings waiting to be cleared, and several low-rise blocks that had emerged from the wreckage of the war over the last decade. It was quiet now, but Knox remembered nights filled with people doubled over fires in the middle of streets and children with filthy faces tempting rats into traps so they could turn them into pets or a meal.

  The war had been equal parts blessing and curse for Bethnal Green. The poverty of the years before the war had been grinding. It had killed countless people here. It had killed Knox’s parents. After the war there was no way life could go back to how it had been. The East End had become too much of a symbol of London’s tenacity and resilience to be left to fester and ruin. So, slowly but surely a new Bethnal Green was growing through its cracks and wounds.

  The buildings might be changing, but the streets were still the same. He walked up Globe Road, then cut right onto Cyprus Street, one of the few old streets of terraced cottages that looked like it hadn’t been touched by the twentieth century at all. It was a long straight street, uninterrupted on one side and with a small turning off it halfway along the other – the perfect place for Knox to reassure himself one last time that no one was shadowing him.

  Knox was still running on adrenaline but after ten minutes watching the silent, empty street it finally started to wear off. He needed to find somewhere to spend the rest of the night, but before he did he walked the short distance to Sewardstone Road, where his grandmother’s house had stood until it was knocked down five years ago.

  Sewardstone Road had been a dirty, narrow street of tenement houses pressed up against the stagnant, filthy water of Regent’s Canal. He could still smell the canal now, but the tightly packed ol
d houses were gone, replaced by modern blocks of flats. Knox stopped for a moment outside the flat that now stood where he’d once lived in a tiny, two-room house with his grandmother. He remembered all the early mornings when he’d creep back in after a night’s wandering the city, and the few times his grandmother had caught him before he’d reached his bed and spent hours screaming at him, out of anger, love, and fear of losing him like she’d lost his mother. Then he thought about how he’d now also lost the only two places he’d ever really called home.

  He headed south back towards Roman Road. Next to Bethnal Green tube station he found the grandly and wholly inaccurately named City View Hotel. It was an old Victorian dosshouse that had been turned into the kind of place that rented rooms by the hour as well as by the night.

  Knox woke up the night clerk, who was not happy about being disturbed, paid for a room until morning, and had the stairs pointed out to him. His room was at the very top of the building, and he might have been able to see the city through his high attic window, if the walls of a raised train track hadn’t blocked the view.

  He locked the door and wedged the back of the chair that served as a bedside table under the handle. Then he pulled off his jacket and trousers, balled the jacket up with the papers and passports under the bed, splashed his face, trousers and socks in the small sink, and lay down on the thin mattress. Even the sound of a freight train passing within ten feet of him, rattling the window and shaking the bed, didn’t stop him from falling asleep almost instantly.

  CHAPTER 43

  Valera stood in the middle of Mikhailovsky Garden. In front of her the Moyka flowed lazily across the northern side of the park, feeding into the Neva, the great river that split Leningrad in half. To her right, the faded copper roof of Saint Michael’s Castle was just visible above the trees that edged the park. To her left, the domes of the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood rose high above her. It was late summer, and the air was pungent with the smell of city life and anticipation.