She blamed herself for what had happened, but she also blamed Gibson, Hoffman, and the whole CIA. She’d tried to do the right thing from the moment Williams had appeared in Santo Domingo and all she’d got for her trouble was more problems. She’d butted up against two station chiefs, driven a wedge between her and Knox, been shot at, knocked out, and was now apparently dumped and forgotten. She didn’t know what had happened in Dungeness after she’d lost consciousness, but she guessed things hadn’t gone well for the others, and that Williams was probably now somewhere being tortured yet again.

Bennett wondered what her mother would think of where she now found herself. She’d been so proud of Bennett when she was alive, even to the point of hiding just how bad her emphysema had got when Bennett was at The Farm—the result of a life lived in the Kansas dust bowl—and how little the treatment Bennett had fought for her to receive from the white doctors in Lakin had helped towards the end.

After her death, Bennett had worked hard to turn that pride into a fire that propelled her. It was the engine that kept her going, kept her constantly pushing forward and smashing through all the barriers the world put in front of her. But, in her determination to honour her mother, had she let it take her a long way down a wrong path? Could she carry on serving masters who didn’t stand for what she was trying to? Was it too late to change direction?

She felt that old niggle of doubt inside her. The one that told her she should be in Lakin, listening to her brothers’ inane ramblings and childish private jokes, or working at Pinkerton, kidding herself that life would somehow be easier for a half Native American woman as a private detective rather than a government one. But she refused to let the feeling take root and grow. Instead, she stamped it down, pulled herself up onto her feet, and decided it was time to try to start fixing things.

She began by seeing if she was trapped as well as abandoned. She traced the walls with her hands, looking and feeling for any signs of weakness or surveillance. She found nothing, until she came to a slim rusted door embedded into the bricks at the far end of the building. She figured it had to open outwards because there was no handle on this side, or scuff marks where it would swing across the concrete floor. She pushed against the slab of metal with one hand, then two, then her shoulder. It didn’t move.

Then she turned round and realised she wasn’t alone after all.