Less than an hour after leaving Deptford, he was walking the short distance from Oxford Circus to Berwick Street and Kemp House, the eighteen-storey high-rise block that towered over the centre of Soho.
The building had only been complete for a few months and Knox had been its first resident. When he’d seen the announcement by Westminster Council about the block in the Evening Standard over a year ago he knew he had to live there, and he’d used some contacts to pull a few strings and cut a deal with the council to buy a flat on the top floor off the architect’s plans.
His flat was made up of a single large living area wrapped by windows, which served as his kitchen, dining, and living room. The space looked austere but considered. There was nothing extraneous, and everything served a purpose. On one side of the room was a free-standing granite kitchen counter. On the other was a large marble dining table and chairs. Along the wall halfway between them a well-stocked drinks trolley sat next to a black leather and rosewood Eames lounger. Behind the open plan was an equally minimalist bedroom and en suite.
Of all the absences from the flat, one was particularly noticeable: a television. In less than a decade they’d become a feature of almost every British home, but Knox had never seen the appeal. He understood the excitement a little window on the world might offer people locked away in semi-detached houses up and down the country, but he saw more than his fair share of life on a daily basis.
Knox always said he liked living in Kemp House because it made him feel connected to the heart of the city. Holland had countered that he’d chosen it so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. Knox admitted it was a little bit of both.
Ten minutes after arriving home and making himself a stiff gin and tonic to take the edge off the afternoon, there was a knock at his front door.
Knox didn’t receive many visitors, which was another part of the attraction of living at the top of a high-rise. He valued his privacy, and still hadn’t introduced himself to the building’s few other residents. And should any of them want to learn more about him, all they’d find in any public rec-ords would be his name and job title at Avalon Logistics, one of the more prosaic cover company names used by members of MI5.
He checked his watch – a 1956 Omega with a silver body, clear face, and tan leather strap he’d treated himself to when Holland had been made director general and promoted him three years ago – and took a guess about who was calling on him at four in the afternoon.
He opened his door and proved himself right. A Watcher was standing in the hallway, holding a small crate.
‘Is this everything?’ Knox asked, fairly sure it wasn’t.
‘It’s what I was told to bring. So it’s what I brought.’ The Watcher thrust the crate into Knox’s hands and turned back to the lift without saying anything else. Knox let him go.
Back inside his flat, Knox emptied the crate onto the dining table and spread out the contents. He picked up the slim MI5 file on Bianchi and Moretti. It was scant. Copies of their passports, a few details about their daily routines, a police report for a night Moretti had spent in a cell for being drunk and disorderly a few months ago, and not much else.
Then, the rest of the crate: business cards for both men, an address book, and several bundles of paper, which Knox assumed must have been the ones scattered across the desk in their makeshift office.
Knox’s instincts told him he’d been given the edited lowlights. Nothing jumped out to him that justified Manning’s interest in their deaths, or even MI5’s surveillance of them, as light as it might have been. Manning was already tying his hands behind his back. It was frustrating. But it was all Knox had to work with, so it was where he had to start.
The business cards were elegant, but didn’t give away anything other than the Italians’ names and their address, which Knox already knew. There was no company or mysterious foreign phone number to call. The address book contained the details of several high-profile organisations, but they all matched the list Manning had reeled off in their makeshift study. There were no curious omissions or additions.
Of the four bundles of papers, three of them were written entirely in Italian, which Knox had never learned. The fourth appeared to be a series of mathematical equations, advanced enough to use symbols rather than letters or numbers – another language Knox couldn’t read. It wouldn’t have taken much to get the Italian pages translated. Knox only needed to walk a few hundred yards to Bar Italia, the twenty-four-hour Italian cafe on Frith Street, buy an espresso, and call in one of the many favours the cafe’s waiters owed him. He knew he could rely on their tact – he’d owed them his fair share of favours over the years for secrets they’d kept and indiscretions they hadn’t held against him – but he decided it probably wasn’t worth the security risk in case the papers did end up containing something important. He’d have to send them on through official channels and wait for someone to be assigned to translating them.
The equations, however, he might be able to get help with sooner.
CHAPTER 5
Ledjo stood pressed against the front door, his nose rubbing the unvarnished wood and his mouth moving as he silently counted to himself. When he reached five he spun round and Valera, who had been creeping up on him from the kitchen, froze like a statue. He stared at her. Ledjo had inherited his mother’s eyes, but also his father’s, so they looked more like raindrops than almonds, with a slight upward curve at the edges that made him look permanently on the verge of breaking into a smile. He giggled and waited for her to make the slightest movement. She didn’t budge.
He faced the door again, counting faster this time. When he turned back, Valera was already halfway across the living room. He started to spin round and round, giggling more with every turn until Valera reached him, scooped him up, and pulled him into a tight, bony hug.
‘Be a good boy today at school,’ she said into his neck.
‘Yes, Mama.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, Mama.’
She put him down and straightened his simple uniform of a white shirt and grey shorts.
‘Goodbye, my little Pikku,’ she said once she was done.
Then she took his hand in hers, opened the door, and stepped outside.
Ten minutes later she had delivered Ledjo to school and was heading back to her lab. As she passed the power plant, its own siren began to wail and men ran to deal with today’s little crisis. Valera silenced the ever-present worry at the back of her mind that one morning the emergency at the plant would be really serious. Instead, she focused on the hope that she would get through the day without being summoned to see Zukolev. Unfortunately, when she reached her lab two of his goons were already there waiting for her.
Every ruble that came into Povenets B passed through Zukolev’s office, and it showed – on both the man and room. Zukolev had grown fat on his excess. His GRU dress uniform, which he wore at all times, strained against his stomach, and his face was flushed red from too much rich meat and vodka.
His office was modelled on Stalin’s own in the Kremlin, to which Zukolev had made a pilgrimage as a young GRU officer. The walls were covered in dark maroon wallpaper and hung with ugly paintings on revolutionary themes. A large wooden desk sat in the middle of the room. Marble busts of Lenin and Stalin stared at each other from either end.
Zukolev, of course, proclaimed his loyalty to Nikita Khrushchev, the current leader of the Soviet Union, but his heart belonged to Stalin. He had come of age at the height of Stalin’s personality cult, and now that he had a little nation of his own to govern, he took his cues from the true father of the Soviet Union. However, where Stalin had been one of the shrewdest minds ever to rise to power in the long history of Russia and inspired devotion across the nation, Zukolev was heavily deluded about his own competence and how much the people of Povenets B loved him.