Knox scrambled up to his feet. He heard the sound of footsteps approaching behind him. It was giant number one. Somehow they’d known where he was going and how he’d react if he realised he was being shadowed. He tried to back away as the two giants circled him, but there was nowhere for him to go. In the end, he held up his hands and managed to say ‘Gentlemen—’ before they lunged at him.
Giant number one struck first, followed by his shorter friend. They alternated their assault, keeping Knox off balance as they hit and grabbed at him. The attack was brutal but calculated. They wanted to do damage, but Knox could tell between blows that they were holding back. Instead of just one of them holding him down while the other laid into him, they kept switching roles and going after different parts of his body. Knox realised they wanted something more than just to hurt him. They were searching him. Not for his watch or wallet, but for the papers and passports he was carrying in the inside pocket of his jacket.
Knox twisted and squirmed, taking every hit while not letting them hold him still. Eventually the giants ran out of patience and the smaller one grabbed both of his arms and kicked his legs out from under him, pinning him down on the tiles as the larger giant started working his way through his pockets. He reached inside Knox’s jacket. His fingers brushed the papers, but before he could pull them out a voice shouted out behind them.
One of the station guards had finally noticed what was happening. He was ancient, small, and bent over under the weight of his uniform. The old man couldn’t have done much to help Knox, but just interrupting the beating he was taking was enough to spook the giants. The taller one let go of the papers as the smaller one let go of Knox. Then, after both giving him one last kick in the side, they ran past the guard and disappeared.
Knox used the tiled wall to help push himself back up onto his feet as the guard approached him.
‘Not fair that, two on one,’ the guard said.
‘A case of mistaken identity,’ Knox replied. ‘They thought I was a friend of theirs.’
He thanked the old man for his help, but declined his offer of calling the police. Instead, he straightened his jacket, patted himself down, and made his way up the staircase he’d been kicked down a minute before.
At the top he looked out across the square, just in case the giants were waiting for round two. They weren’t. He checked the papers and passports were still in his jacket pocket, held a hand to his side where it felt like the final kick had cracked a couple of his ribs, took a breath, and ran.
He sprinted across Trafalgar and Leicester Squares, then through Piccadilly Circus, weaving his way through the people bustling under the giant glowing adverts for Wrigley, BP, and Coca-Cola, and avoiding the policemen in their jet-black uniforms and bleached white gloves trying to control the traffic and early-evening crowds. His side throbbed as he ran, and the scar across his head that itched whenever he pushed himself too hard felt like it was on fire.
He struggled to keep his breath even and shallow enough not to add more pain to his side. He finally slowed down as he cut through the grim, narrow Ham Yard to Archer Street, and was walking at a normal pace by the time he turned north into Rupert Street. Instead of continuing on the short distance to Kemp House, he turned right into Tisbury Court and stopped outside a small, anonymous door halfway down the alley. He didn’t want to risk going home yet, just in case the men from Trafalgar Square knew where he lived and had got there ahead of him. He needed somewhere to hide and recover, somewhere people wouldn’t think to look because they had no idea it existed.
He knocked on the door three times and after a long, pregnant moment, it opened.
The basement bar was dark, lit only by a few scattered candles. There was no way of telling how far back the room stretched, how many tables there were, or who was sitting at them. The only clues were the murmur of intimate conversations that mingled with the quiet, mournful jazz that played from somewhere, and the occasional candlelit glint of a cocktail glass or flare of a burning cigarette.
The bar was private, members-only in all but dues. It served a clientele who didn’t want to be seen, who craved respite from the city above and wanted to be alone, or sometimes together, away from prying eyes.
It would normally take a few minutes to adjust to the dimness, but Knox had been to this particular clandestine refuge from the world enough times to know his way through it with his eyes closed. He walked in a diagonal across the room, avoiding the tables and legs of the other patrons, to a long counter lined with stools and a row of low lamps.
A man sat at one end of the counter. His body was lost in the dark but his tanned face and perfectly quiffed hair were haloed by the lamp hanging just above them. Knox chose a spot at the other end, suddenly conscious of how much of a mess he must look after his sprint across Soho. He slouched on his stool, craning his body to avoid the pool of light on the counter in front of him, and nodded to the bartender, a woman in a three-piece suit whose pompadour hair matched the man’s.
‘You look like you’ve had a time of it,’ she said. ‘What’ll it be? Vodka? Whisky?’
‘Both,’ Knox answered.
‘Sure thing.’ She poured two generous measures of the spirits over ice and passed the two glasses across the bar to Knox.
He swallowed the vodka in one go, then started to swirl the whisky, encouraging the ice to melt a little and take the edge off the deep-brown liquid. Eventually the vodka did its job. His side stopped aching, his scar stopped feeling like it was burning into his skull, and he started to calm down.
CHAPTER 33
The crew of the Hercules stationed at Cooke Air Force Base understood why the timings of their recovery flights had to be kept secret until the last minute. But they didn’t enjoy the endless days spent on standby, waiting for the go signal. It also irked them that no matter when they flew, day or night, the Shining Emerald was always waiting for them in the target zone over the Pacific. It seemed like the KGB knew their mission parameters before they did.
Evening was always the worst time to fly. Heading west out over the coast, it took every pair of eyes on board to spot the parachutes attached to the Corona payload capsules against the fierce rays of the setting sun. At least this evening the Shining Emerald would have just as much of a problem as the Hercules. A thick blanket of low cloud stretched over the ocean, cutting visibility to just a few thousand feet from sea level.
Fortunately, luck was also on the Hercules’ side, and just as the plane entered the target zone, several shouts went up. The parachute had been spotted twenty degrees off their current path, roughly five miles away. The pilot altered course and altitude to give them plenty of time to reach it before it was lost in the clouds.
When the Hercules was about a mile from the capsule, a strange shadow started to appear on the surface of the clouds in front of the plane. It looked like it was projected a few feet ahead of the cockpit, but it couldn’t have been because the Hercules was still flying into the sun. The pilot made a small course change, and the shadow matched it. He came back onto his original trajectory, and so did the shadow.
Then the shadow pulled away. It rose out of the clouds and solidified. First a long, silver tube. Then two vast, swept-back wings. A Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 long-range strategic bomber.