She began, as she always did, with Bianchi and Moretti’s records. But when she spun the large wheel that opened the archive stacks and pulled them out of their hanging drawers the folders were empty. The last time she’d looked at them, barely forty-eight hours ago, they’d contained several months’ worth of tracking reports and field observations. She checked the log sheet stapled to the front of the first folder. They hadn’t already been moved to deep storage. They’d been checked out at midnight on Friday. Three letters were written next to the timestamp – COS. They stood for Chief of Station.
Bennett went to Irina Valera’s folder next. It had been filed in the stacks on Friday afternoon, then checked out, again in the dead of night, on behalf of the chief of station.
Michael Finney, London station chief for ten years, was one of the most senior figures in the entire CIA. He spent his time briefing senior members of the state department and the top level of government. So why was he suddenly interested in the Italians and Valera?
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.’