Knox found a bar in the terminal and ordered another whisky to tide him over as he tried to get his head round everything that had happened. He imagined Williams and Holland sitting opposite him, Williams joking about the man who had killed himself by tripping over Knox, and Holland calling him a bloody fool for letting himself get in such a mess in the first place.
The attack on Valera had proved Bennett right. And the dead man was the evidence Knox needed to prove there was a direct line that ran from Bianchi and Moretti to Valera and led straight back to MI5 and Manning. Seeing Valera snatched by a fully armed strike team dispelled any notion that she might have been some sort of elaborate honeytrap, and also showed Knox just how much he’d underestimated Manning. He wondered what else the man might be capable of. The KGB had mastered the art of incapacitating targets without any signs of foul play. For all Knox knew, they’d helped get Holland out of the way to clear a path for Manning.
One question still lingered. Medev. Was Manning so valuable the Russians were ready to sacrifice one of their own to protect him? It was possible, but it gnawed away at Knox’s mind, not quite making sense, alongside what Medev had said about the CIA not having any female agents in Europe. Knox had no reason to believe Medev, but it still made him second-guess the rapid faith he’d developed in Bennett.
Knox hadn’t paid attention to where she’d gone after they’d landed. She might have disappeared into the Dutch night, but Knox had a feeling she was somewhere very close, keeping her own tabs on him. He’d tested her in Stockholm; now he decided he needed to push her, and see if a little more pressure on top of everything they’d been through would make her break and reveal some hidden motive or allegiance. He reminded himself that just because they shared enemies that didn’t necessarily mean they were friends.
They reunited in the gate line. The flight hadn’t filled up and they boarded quickly. This plane was smaller than the ones they’d taken to and from Stockholm. The aisle was off-centre, with single seats running down the left side of the cabin, and sets of two down the right. Their seats were halfway down the plane, near the wing. Bennett took the window, leaving Knox with the aisle. He glimpsed one of the plane’s two propellers starting to turn through a window and immediately fastened his seatbelt.
Bennett was the one who spoke first, but only after take-off, when the stewardess arrived with the drinks trolley.
‘Nothing for either of us, thank you,’ she said to the stewardess, leaning across Knox. Then, patting his arm, she added, ‘You’ve had enough, darling.’
Before Knox had the chance to protest the stewardess moved on, and by the time he turned round to beckon her back after snatching his arm from under Bennett’s surprisingly firm grip she was already several rows away. He wanted another drink, but he didn’t want to be the man who chased a trolley down a plane to get it.
‘Just keeping up the act,’ she said.
But instead of winking back, Knox took the opportunity to put her on the spot.
‘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.’