‘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 been 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.