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  Before she gave up on the archives, she scoured the stacks for any information they had on General Medev. Eventually she found a reference to him in a mission report from a CIA asset in Moscow. It listed him as head of the KGB’s scientific directorate. If that was true it explained why he’d been the one who had come after Valera. It also made him one hell of a sacrificial lamb.

  Then she went to the other part of the embassy that was home to almost as much information as the archive – the canteen.

  The canteen was on the next floor up – still underground but closer to the surface. It was busy with small groups of people from departments all over the embassy, huddled together up and down its rows of tables.

  Bennett poured herself a cup of coffee from one of the giant pots that lined the canteen’s long wall and were kept full and hot all hours of the day and night. She scanned the tables out of habit, looking for any junior field agents or embassy staff who were too young or too unimportant to worry about being discreet with their breaktime conversations.

  She spotted two secretaries sitting close together on the far side of the room and casually made her way over to them. She sat down four seats away – far enough for them not to pay attention to her but close enough for her to hear every word they said. Both women were wearing the twinset, skirt, and pearls that most secretaries in the embassy defaulted to, and they both looked angry about being stuck at work on a Sunday in summer.

  They were the kind of women who Bennett had been intensely jealous of when she’d first arrived in London, the kind of women who hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. Now she looked down on them, because she knew that just because they were physically closer to the action, that didn’t mean they had any idea about what was really going on.

  ‘It’s ridiculous, I told him,’ the secretary on Bennett’s side of the table said.

  ‘I know,’ the other one replied.

  ‘The city’s full. No room at the inn.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He shouldn’t be surprised. Half the damn state department’s flown in.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All I ask is enough notice to be able to do my job properly. A little decency, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And for some scientist from NASA. What’s he going to do? Launch a rocket off Tower Bridge?’

  Bennett shot to her feet, shaking the table and spilling the dregs of her coffee onto its faded Formica surface. Both of the other women twisted round in surprise, then, realising who had caused the sudden commotion, turned back to each other, pretending they hadn’t seen anything.

  Bennett carried her cup over to one of the sinks. Then, once she was through the canteen’s large double doors, she sprinted up the stairs to the embassy exit. The secretary was right. There was no reason for anyone from NASA to fly all the way to London for a conference on economic development – unless they weren’t coming for the conference at all.

  CHAPTER 47

  Knox had one more stop to make before he met Bennett.

  He walked down the long eastern slope of Parliament Hill, crossed the heath between the wide, open boating lake and the tree-shrouded men’s bathing pond, and headed up into Highgate.

  Highgate was one of London’s old villages. Like Montmartre, sitting above Paris, it had been home to artists, writers, and politicians. It was an enclave of people who had worked out how to successfully combine creativity, power, and influence.

  The Hollands’ home was called Wytchen House, but it was known both in and outside MI5 as ‘the cottage’. It was an ironic name as it was, by any normal standards, a mansion. But it had a demure, even humble air to it, set back from the road behind a small, elegant garden and with most of its bulk hidden behind high stone walls.

  Knox knocked on the heavy oak front door, and a few moments later Sarah opened it. She looked like she hadn’t slept since he’d last seen her in Guy’s, and she did little to hide her irritation at finding Knox on her doorstep. But she still invited him in.

  Knox had been to the Hollands’ house countless times, but he always felt slightly strange when he stepped inside – like a child visiting his rich friend’s parents.

  Without a word Sarah walked into the drawing room, expecting Knox to follow her. She sat in a deep, high-backed chair in front of an empty fireplace. A pot of tea and an open hardback book were on a small table next to the chair.

  Knox stopped in front of a chaise longue, set across from Sarah’s chair on the other side of a large, intricately patterned rug.

  ‘That’s where I found him,’ Sarah said, gesturing at the spot where Knox was standing.

  Knox resisted the urge to leap to one side, and instead sat down on the chaise longue. It was overstuffed and he perched awkwardly on it. Sarah picked up the hardback – a sign that she didn’t expect Knox to stay very long.

  ‘What do you want, Richard?’

  Knox cleared his throat and said, ‘Did James ever tell you about my parents?’

  She sighed. ‘You really do think the world revolves around you, don’t you?’ Her voice was sharp. ‘I don’t care about you or your parents. I care about my husband.’

  ‘How is he?’ Knox asked.

  ‘No change. They say that’s a good thing, as if it could possibly be.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’m due there in an hour.’

  ‘I just need five minutes,’ Knox replied. ‘It’s about James.’

  Knox watched Sarah check the temperature of the teapot with the back of her hand.

  ‘Fine. Five minutes,’ she said, marking her page and closing the book.

  ‘It’s about James,’ he said again, ‘but it starts with my parents. They were normal people. Normal for the East End. My father was a labourer, my mother took in sewing. They got by, until I came along and the economy went to hell. Work dried up. Sometimes there was no money. Sometimes there was no food.’

  Knox knew Wytchen House had been in Sarah’s family for over a hundred years. He wondered whether the hard times of the thirties had even touched her and the other residents of Highgate.

  ‘They survived,’ he continued, ‘hanging on day after day, just like everyone else around them. But eventually things got too hard and people gave up. I don’t mean they left. I mean they died. Starved, or got sick and couldn’t get better. The East End had become a ghetto and people were being left to rot in it. It drove my parents mad.’

  He paused for a moment, shifting his weight on the chaise longue. He knew he could end his story here and protect Sarah from the secret he and her husband had shared for so long. But he also knew he couldn’t.

  ‘There was an old builders’ yard near our house,’ he said. ‘It had been shut up and forgotten about. One day my father broke in, looking for tools or something he could sell. He found a locked box tucked away inside a cabinet. There were two sticks of dynamite inside.’ He lowered his eyes to the rug in front of him. ‘My parents weren’t anarchists. They were desperate and stupid. They just wanted to get people’s attention, make them see how bad things had got. They decided to blow a hole in the wall of a police station. But they didn’t know how powerful the dynamite was. Or how quick the fuses would burn. Two policemen died in the explosion, along with my parents.’

  He looked up, his eyes meeting Sarah’s again. She hadn’t moved. The hardback was still clutched in her lap.

  ‘James knew about this?’ she asked.

  ‘The story was only in the papers for a few days, and they used my father’s name, Campbell. Knox is my grandmother’s name. But James still found it in the pre-war records. He knew the Service would never trust me if anyone else discovered what my parents had done. So he let my secret stay hidden.’

  ‘What does this have to do with last Sunday night?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘It was the anniversary.’

  Knox had learned not to hate his parents. But he still couldn’t forgive them. Every year he marked their deaths and honoured the memories of the police officers they’d
killed.

  ‘And if you’d told the inquiry that,’ Sarah said, ‘they’d have found out everything and James would have been drummed out of the Service before he could defend himself.’

  Knox nodded. The secret wasn’t even Holland’s, but he’d kept it. And the simple act of not exposing Knox would have damned him.

  ‘And you’d become a scapegoat, blamed for the sins of your parents and anything else the Service felt like pinning on you.’

  Knox nodded again. ‘It would have been the end of both our careers. He’s protected me for so long, I have to do the same for him.’

  ‘Then what’s changed now?’

  Knox had come this far; there was no point holding anything else back. He told her about everything that had happened since she’d found Holland’s body on the rug between them a week ago. He told her about Manning’s rapid consolidation of power, about the sidelining of White at a time when he was most needed, and about the attacks on him in London and Stockholm.

  Sarah was as shrewd as her husband at his best. She probed Knox, testing him to prove every connection and leap he’d made. And by the end of her grilling she agreed with Knox’s conclusions: that Manning was most likely a Soviet agent and responsible for Holland’s coma.

  ‘That bastard,’ she said. ‘I want you to stop him. And I want him to pay.’

  CHAPTER 48

  Knox left Wytchen House and headed for Highgate tube station and the Northern Line back into town. But instead of changing onto the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road to meet Bennett, he made his way up to street level. He knew it was a risk to go back to Kemp House so soon after the fire, but he wanted to see just how much damage had been done, and if anything had managed to survive the inferno.

  He took a circuitous route through Soho, dropping down Charing Cross Road and cutting along Old Compton Street before turning into Walker’s Court at the southern end of Berwick Street.

  Walker’s Court was one of the small stretches of Soho that truly seemed to exist outside of time. Its narrow entrance off Brewer Street was framed by a windowed gallery that hung above the passage and connected the two buildings on either side. And it was lined with shops that looked like they belonged in a Dickens novel, and made their money selling the city’s gentlemen provisions for the weekend.

  There were always a couple of men loitering in the passage, building up the courage to go inside one of its emporiums. This afternoon was no different, and as Knox stepped under the gallery bridge he spotted two hanging around at the other end of the passage. Maybe they were nervous shoppers, maybe they were watching the entrance to Kemp House. Knox decided that either way it made sense to encourage them to move on.

  ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ he said, doing his best impression of a plain-clothed police officer. ‘Enjoying yourselves?’

  Both men turned bright red and immediately started to back off. Knox waited until he saw them both disappear round the corner onto Wardour Street, then he crossed over to the entrance of Kemp House, glancing up at the charred streaks that crowned the building.

  He took the lift up to the top floor and checked the corridor and stairwell before heading for his flat. The front door had been smashed in by the firefighters and replaced with a heavy tarpaulin sheet secured around the frame. Knox guessed this had been done by the police, who would have taken over from the fire brigade last night and who might now also be looking for him. Depending on who at the Met had been given the case, word of the fire might even have already made it to Leconfield House.

  Every inch of the tarpaulin edge was fixed down, but it had a covered seal running up one side of it. As Knox pulled it open fresh air rushed into the flat and a burnt stench flowed out.

  He stepped through the heavy sheeting and made his way inside. The air was still heavy with smoke particles and water vapour from the storm and the firefighters’ hoses. There were more sheets across the blown-out windows – the place had been hermetically sealed.

  The bedroom looked like it had survived the fire relatively unscathed. But the same couldn’t be said for the main living area. The walls were black, the marble dining table stained and cracked from the heat, and the Eames lounger had been reduced to a pile of ash and a set of twisted legs.

  Knox walked around the room, leaving damp black footprints in the small patches of floor not already covered in soot as he inspected the full extent of the damage. He recognised the shape of his kitchen, but like everything else it was now a dull, matt black. It felt like he was fumbling around in the dead of night.

  There was no sign of what had caused the fire. The oven was badly burnt, but still intact – it hadn’t exploded, and there were no scorch marks around it. The official line, as it always was in situations like this, would be that the fire had been caused by a gas leak. But the evidence in front of Knox proved that wasn’t true.

  The tarpaulin across the windows started to flutter. Knox assumed it was just wind blowing up the side of the building, and he decided to give the bedroom a more thorough check to see what he could salvage, even if it was just a change of clothes. But before he turned away from the oven something slammed into the back of his head, knocking him out and sending him falling, face-first onto the kitchen floor.

  The fluttering sheets hadn’t been caused by the wind but by someone else silently pulling apart the tarpaulin across the door and bringing more fresh air into the apartment.

  The man had been waiting all night and day for someone to visit Knox’s flat. After the fire brigade and police had left, he’d taken up his position on one of Kemp House’s unoccupied lower floors. He’d spent all night peering through the small window in the door to the building’s central staircase. Then, when the lift was turned back on in the morning, he’d turned his attention to its display panel and waited for it to tell him someone was going up to the top floor. When it finally had, ten minutes ago, he’d made his way up the stairs and into Knox’s flat.

  He pulled a roll of thick duct tape from his pocket, and used it to bind the unconscious Knox’s wrists and ankles before he dragged him into his bedroom and up onto the bed. He ran several long lengths of tape across Knox’s chest and thighs, holding him in place. Then he cut off another strip to cover his mouth. His instructions weren’t to kill Knox, just to make sure he couldn’t leave or call for help. He didn’t know if someone else was going to execute him or if he was just going to be left to die slowly and alone in the flat. And he didn’t care – it wasn’t his job or his problem.

  He looked at the bruise that was starting to blossom across Knox’s cheek and the bloody cut on his brow that was dirty with soot from the kitchen floor. Then he checked that all the pieces of tape were secure and, satisfied with his work, put the roll back in his pocket, stepped out of the flat, sealed the tarpaulin across the door back down, and called the lift.

  CHAPTER 49

  Bennett had discovered Speakers’ Corner one Sunday four months ago.

  Hyde Park was close enough to Grosvenor Square for a lunchtime stroll whenever she needed to get her head above ground. And it was on one such walk halfway through a weekend shift in the archives that she encountered a line of people in the north-east corner of the park raised up on chairs, stepladders and, in a couple of cases, actual soapboxes, waxing lyrical to anyone who would listen. This was Speakers’ Corner, and it was a curious spectacle, both profoundly British and un-British at the same time. It worked as a kind of social pressure valve, letting the usually reserved people of London rant, vent, and rail about anything they wanted – within reason. The police monitored the speakers – particularly those who drew large crowds – but usually only intervened if their speeches crossed the line into profanity.

  This Sunday a constant stream of orators offered benedictions, damnations, and prophecies to the passing crowds enjoying their afternoon in the park. Bennett had timed her arrival well. A couple of the speakers had just finished their speeches and their audiences were starting to move on. She had her pick of
the benches and chose one that gave her clear lines of sight along the paths that converged on this part of the park.

  A few moments later a man sat down on a bench two along from her. Like Bennett, he looked like someone who had been called into the office and was stealing a few hours of his Sunday back to enjoy the sun. He wore a light linen shirt and slacks, and carried a tightly stuffed document wallet. He was, Bennett had to admit, quite a good tail.

  Bennett had realised she was half an hour early for her rendezvous with Knox as she’d raced out of the American embassy. So she’d taken her own meandering route to Hyde Park while she went over the implications of what she’d discovered about Finney and the sudden arrival in the city of a NASA scientist.

  She’d first noticed the man following her when she’d paused in front of one of Selfridges’ windows, then again when she made a loop of Portman Square, just north of the department store. He blended well with the general street traffic, but not well enough for Bennett to miss him passing her in the Marble Arch underpass or appearing two benches down from her in Speakers’ Corner.

  The CIA hadn’t given her the skills to spot a tail. She’d acquired those herself in the Garden City library, reading novels like The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Secret Agent over and over, soaking up everything they could teach her about spycraft. She’d put what she’d learned to use quickly, finally finding out where her brothers vanished to every day instead of working or looking after their mother. She’d followed them to a dried-up creek where they spent hours shooting at stunted bushes and sun-dazed lizards with an old revolver one of them had found somewhere. Then she’d made them teach her how to shoot it in exchange for keeping their secret.

  The man made a good show of watching the world go by and listening to people talk about the end of civilisation and the healing power of Christ. But there was no escaping the fact that he and Bennett were the only people who had stayed on their benches and not moved on for several changes of speakers.