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  The next day Williams was quietly listed as missing in action, and the operation, which had only proved that the guidance and detection system was just a rumour after all, was officially forgotten.

  Without his closest friend, and racked with guilt over his death, Knox started to unravel. While his colleagues may have only seen his usual professional mask harden, Holland could see cracks starting to show in it. He arranged for a short leave of absence after the painful debriefing at which Knox was absolved of any responsibility for Williams’s unfortunate but accidental death. And when the leave ran out and Knox didn’t return to Leconfield House, Holland went looking for him.

  He found him in the Gresham Arms, unshaven, unkempt, and cradling his fifth pint of the day. Holland sat down opposite Knox, lifted the pint glass from his hands, and told him that this wallowing wasn’t doing anything to respect Williams’s memory and that he needed to pull himself together and get on with his job.

  The next day Knox was back at headquarters, and the following week Sarah Holland arranged a small, private memorial for Williams.

  ‘He’ll be with you for the rest of your life,’ she’d told Knox when he’d said he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his best friend. ‘You need to carry more than his death.’

  Knox went back to work, but without Williams it felt like there was an invisible wall around him, an impenetrable distance between him and everyone else that only Holland, sometimes, could cross.

  Since then Knox had stepped away from running all but the most important active operations – like Calder Hall – and dedicated more and more time to sifting through MI5’s past. It had given him a focus, a purpose, but it had also widened the gulf between him and everyone except the few people he was closest to.

  Now, Knox felt almost as adrift as he had after Williams’s death. But this time Holland wasn’t here to help him through it.

  He had no idea what he should do next. The problem was a lack of concrete, tangible evidence to guide him. He hadn’t found anything to suggest Bianchi and Moretti were more than the couple of chancers he’d originally dismissed them as. There was nothing that connected them to the Russians. And nothing to link them back to Manning, either. So, why was Manning so interested in them? Or Knox, for that matter? Why go to the trouble of kicking him out only to bring him back in? Why not leave him out in the cold where he couldn’t cause him any more trouble?

  Was it just as Manning had said himself, to use Knox to prove his innocence, all the while enjoying watching him squirm and chase false leads? With Manning now sitting in Holland’s seat, the only higher powers Knox could turn to for support were political ones, and they wouldn’t dare touch the acting head of MI5 without a cast-iron case against him.

  Knox had nothing, and he needed something. He needed to do something. He decided he needed, in the words of Holland, to pull himself together and get on with his job. So, he climbed out of the Eames lounger, and took himself out of his flat and down the two streets that led from Kemp House to Bar Italia.

  CHAPTER 20

  Even at his most maudlin, the streets of Soho at night had the power to make Knox feel better.

  After his parents’ deaths, Knox had gone to live with his grandmother, who had tried to keep him safe by limiting his world to the few streets of the East End where she’d spent her whole life. It hadn’t worked. As soon as he was old enough to understand there was a vast city out there beyond Bethnal Green waiting to be discovered, Knox became a person of two distinct halves – the well-behaved grandson by day, and the night owl who would pound the capital’s pavements and alleys for hours.

  The city’s lights and spirit dimmed during the war, but Soho had still shone, once you knew where to look. The old men in ragged suits still pushed their carts of meagre wares along the gutters. Open doorways leading to staircases lit with tealights reminded passers-by that London’s oldest and hardest workers were still open for business. And basement bars and clubs still catered for the brave souls who didn’t want to spend their nights cowed in their beds, waiting for German bombs to fall.

  Knox was too young to do much more than watch all this go on. But watch he did, a nocturnal flâneur soaking it all in. He’d choose a street corner or bench and let the city’s nightlife pass him by, or he’d pick someone out from the throng and follow them to whichever theatre, club, or inconspicuous doorway they were heading for. He didn’t know it at the time, but it was all good training for his future career.

  It was Soho that Knox missed when he was fighting in France. So, when it was all over and he returned to London, it was in Soho that he settled. He’d lost count of the places he’d lived before Kemp House. He’d had a room above a restaurant on the corner of Haymarket and Panton Street, lived in what could kindly be described as a garret in Golden Square, and even spent a year in the basement of a grand old townhouse in Bloomsbury Street, next to the British Museum.

  A lot had changed since the war. The glow of the city had returned. The first generation that had grown up untouched by the war was coming of age, testing their boundaries and pushing the world to see how far they could make it move. Collars were getting longer, skirts shorter. But some of the old Soho was still there. The men hauling carts now wore demob suits, newcomers and veterans alike were beckoned into dark doorways, and, at any time of day or night, there was coffee to be had.

  Bar Italia was never quiet, but Knox hit a lull between the pub-goers needing a shot of caffeine to carry them home and the late crowd after a fix to get them through the night.

  He ordered a double espresso at the counter and watched the young waiters with their rolled-up white shirt-sleeves and greased hair cleaning up small cups and plates. The older staff spent their time actually making the coffee, checking their immaculate beards in the counter’s mirrored panels, and harassing the junior staff in rapid Italian. Above them the high wa-wa-was and clavioline notes of Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ played from an invisible radio.

  Knox finished his espresso, pushed his empty cup across the bar, and, realising that there wasn’t anyone waiting to steal his spot from him, ordered another with a brief raising of his finger and the slightest nod – the unspoken language of the regular.

  Knox and Williams had spent endless late Friday nights propping up Bar Italia’s counter and it had taken Knox considerable effort to keep the cafe as a home for only good memories.

  The two men used to play a game over their late-night espressos – guessing which of the cafe’s customers was most likely to be an agent of some foreign power, and inventing ever more sinister backstories for them.

  ‘Eldest daughter of a Cypriot shipping magnate, became a gunrunner for the Turks when Daddy wrote her out of the will,’ Knox would say about a woman in a jet-black trench coat and sunglasses at ten o’clock at night.

  ‘Soviet sleeper who gave it all up for love and is now on the run,’ Williams would say about a pensive man lingering over his third milky coffee.

  Now Knox played the game by himself over his second espresso. This evening he had his pick of a man in a dishevelled suit who looked like he was in a worse state than Knox, two couples talking very quickly over each other, someone Knox could only half-see past the couples sitting in the window, wearing a light jacket with a trilby perched on the back of their head, and another suited man lingering in the door, alternating between sipping his coffee and sucking on a cigarette.

  He settled on the man in the doorway, who kept eyeing people as they walked past the cafe. He decided he was the frontman for a Balkan smuggling operation, waiting to make contact with someone who wanted something only he could supply. Not his best creative work, but it would do.

  Knox finished his espresso and, considerably more alert, gave up his space at the counter and headed back out into Soho. It was one of those hot London nights that brought people out onto the streets. Lovers strolled arm in arm from bar to bar. Groups of teenagers flirted with each other across traffic junctions. Theatregoers lingered outside
tube stations, putting off the end of their evenings as long as possible.

  At the corner of Old Compton Street and Greek Street, Knox realised he’d been wrong to finger the man in Bar Italia. As he crossed the road he noticed a figure twenty yards behind him turn quickly away – a figure in a light jacket and hat. Someone had taken an interest in him.

  Peterson hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he’d be keeping a close eye on Knox. Unfortunately for this Watcher, no matter how well they might know London there was no way they could compete with Knox’s years of night-time wandering. He turned into Moor Street, heading towards Cambridge Circus, then quickly doubled back down Romilly Street, along the side of the Palace Theatre. He crossed over Shaftesbury Avenue and Gerrard Place before approaching Cambridge Circus again, this time from the south. He could see the trilby trying to push through the crowd that was still outside the Palace, discussing the performance they’d just seen of the new musical, The Sound of Music.

  Knox decided to have a little fun at Peterson’s expense. He made his way round the circus slowly enough for the Watcher to spot him again before turning into the warren of streets that made up Seven Dials. Here he could really play with his tail, appearing at random down the narrow, cobbled lanes that, by a quirk of the city’s ancient beginnings, radiated from a single junction like the spokes of a wheel. The Watcher followed him into his trap and chased his shadows and echoing steps in circles for fifteen minutes before giving up in the hub of the Dials, refusing to be tempted down another alley.

  Knox quit while he was ahead. He slipped away and headed south to Long Acre and through Covent Garden, before dropping down onto the Strand. Halfway along, he slipped through the side entrance to the Savoy Hotel, then back out through its gilded foyer to the line of taxis idling in front of its grand entrance. It was an old trick Williams had taught him for getting a cabbie to take you south of the river late at night. They never wanted the fare, but they knew if they refused it the hotel doormen would make sure they didn’t get any more.

  Half an hour later, Knox was back in Deptford.

  CHAPTER 21

  Abey Bennett loved London. But sometimes she also hated it. Like when the mark she’d been trailing realised he was being followed and gave her the slip.

  If her surveillance of Knox had been approved she’d have had a whole team working with her, blanketing Soho so he couldn’t have gone anywhere without her knowing. But, as with so many times in her life, Bennett was working alone.

  It was a skill she’d learned young. Too young.

  Bennett’s mother was a member of the Kiowa tribe, who had once roamed all over Kansas and the surrounding states before their land was taken from them, and her father was a white man with a drinking problem who’d walked out on his family.

  Bennett and her two brothers had been born in quick succession in the late thirties, as Kansas was being ravaged by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Three years later her father disappeared without a trace. The only things he’d ever given her were her surname and her large, piercing blue eyes. Her mother had given her children their thick hair, golden skin, and three traditional tribal first names. She’d wanted to give each of them something to live up to, and honour their mixed heritage, but she’d just ended up alienating them even further from both the white and Kiowa communities. Bennett’s brothers were named Enapy and Hori, which meant brave and strong. But they were dull, absent-minded children. Abey was an old Sioux word for ‘leaf’. It was supposed to encourage Bennett to be nurturing, and it did, but it also inspired her eventually to blow away from Lakin.

  When Bennett was six, her mother developed acute emphysema. All the dust storms had finally caught up with her. She couldn’t work, and she didn’t have enough money for medicine. Bennett’s brothers were too lost in their empty heads to even notice. She was already growing up fast, and after her mother’s diagnosis she had to do it even faster.

  The white doctors had no interest in treating ‘a sick squaw and her half-caste kids,’ and the Kiowa elders still considered Bennett’s mother’s union with a white man too much of a betrayal to offer any help. Bennett had forced them both to change their minds.

  It was this same strength of will that Bennett had used to get herself through school and then, after years of trying, into the CIA. She was the first Native American to work for the agency since the Navajo code talkers in the war. Her posting to London should have felt like a triumph. And sometimes it did, but a lot of the time it also felt like the latest fight in an unending series of battles to prove her worth.

  Bennett had thought Knox might be the key to getting her bosses to take her seriously after shadowing him from Cambridge straight to Holloway prison. Now she was sure.

  She’d almost taken the direct approach, sliding up next to him in Bar Italia. But she’d held back, waited to see where he was headed – because anyone who drank two double espressos that late was definitely heading somewhere. It had been a mistake. She’d tried to be inconspicuous, even wearing the trilby a man had left on the seat next to her on the tube a few weeks ago so Knox wouldn’t recognise her. But it had just made her more obvious.

  She’d let herself get cocky and thought she could play the game as well as one of MI5’s best on his home turf. She’d underestimated Knox and been left looking like an idiot. Bennett hadn’t just lost him in Seven Dials, she’d let him toy with her, and prove just how far out of her depth she was.

  She wished she had someone to turn to, even just to be put through the wringer for her failure and told what she needed to do to make up for it. But there was no one to debrief her, no one she could vent to or run scenarios with. All she could do was wait for her anger to fade, shove the trilby in a nearby bin, and go home.

  CHAPTER 22

  Knox approached the old tenement building off Deptford High Street. He wanted to take a more thorough look at Bianchi and Moretti’s flat and see what Manning’s investigators might have missed. Unfortunately for him, the policeman standing watch outside didn’t want him to.

  Knox tried to step past him, flashing the kind of half-smile that communicated something along the lines of ‘You’ve seen me before and I probably live here,’ but it didn’t work.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the officer asked, moving to block Knox’s way.

  He was a large, stocky man. His heavy brow, lit from behind by the light from the tenement’s entrance, made it almost impossible to see his eyes.

  ‘I’m investigating the murder,’ Knox said.

  That didn’t work either.

  ‘Ain’t nothing like that here.’ The officer shifted his weight, squaring up to Knox. ‘Jog on.’

  Knox decided it would be easier to play the fool than call up the chief of the Met, who he happened to know personally, and get him to put the fear of God into this jobsworth on his behalf. So he turned on his heel, tripped over his feet for added effect, and headed back to the high street. Then he darted round to the building’s back door, waited for the headlights of a passing car to fade, then gave it a hard, sharp shove, catching it mid-swing before it hit the wall.

  There was no guard standing watch outside the flat itself, which, if Knox had really thought about it, made it even stranger that a policeman was guarding the entrance to the building more than forty-eight hours after Bianchi and Moretti’s bodies had been removed. But that tiny piece of the puzzle was too small for him to notice.

  After making sure the curtains were pulled closed, Knox turned on all the lights and started to make his way through the flat, room by room. It looked like it had never been lived in. Everything apart from the most basic furniture had been removed. Knox wondered what had happened to the men’s possessions. They must have had more clothes than the ones they’d been found in, more bits and pieces of everyday life that would have helped him build a picture of who they were, what they were doing, and why they died. He’d hoped for a treasure trove of clues, but he found nothing.

  He left
the small office until last. It was as bare as the rest of the flat. The desk was clear, the boxes gone, the bookcase still empty. He was about to give up, until he realised that one side of the large set of shelves wasn’t quite flush with the wall. It was only off by less than half an inch, a small enough gap for most people to miss, but it caught his attention.

  He squinted behind it, but couldn’t see anything in the narrow, dark void. So he grabbed both sides and started to walk it away from the wall. He heard a low thud as something fell to the floor, finally free from its hiding place. Knox reached behind the case and pulled out what he’d dislodged. It was another bundle of pages covered in equations. But these ones weren’t made up of nonsense symbols. They were letters and numbers, maths he could recognise. And, in the middle of the bundle, were two brand new Swiss passports.

  CHAPTER 23

  The sun was on its way back up into the sky when Valera woke up. For the briefest second her mind allowed her some peace before it reminded her where she was and what had happened. Her stomach cried out again for food, but she had no more to give it. All she could do was get up, stretch out her tired body, and wait for different kinds of pain to smother her hunger.

  She shouldered her pack, picked up Ledjo’s in her arms, and started walking again. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but even though the sun was already getting higher the air was still cool. She might only have been unconscious for a few hours. She stopped at pools and small creeks for water, but with nothing to eat she quickly became light-headed.