There was no unexplained diversion, no attack, just slow-moving afternoon city traffic. And the longer nothing happened the more the tension coiled inside Knox and Bennett as they waited to spring into action.

They crawled along the south side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, both of them constantly looking for cars or motorbikes jumping traffic lights, speeding out of turnings or swerving across the road. But none of that happened, and the Soviet motorcade safely turned into Embassy Row once more.

Shortly after Knox’s Jaguar looped round Kensington Gardens Square and started heading back east towards Mayfair, the driver of Kosygin’s Volga walked across the wide, tree-lined road from the Soviet embassy to the building site opposite it where the new Czechoslovakian embassy was being constructed.

The man was now dressed as a labourer—a light, worn sweater over his collarless shirt, a flat cap on his head, and a rucksack slung over his shoulders. The bag contained an empty lunchbox, a half-drunk flask of tea, and an old waxed jacket smeared with grime and oil. The Russians kept a variety of disguises like this one in the embassy garage, which they used from time to time to confuse the MI5 Watchers who had a habit of following their low-level staff. But Kosygin’s driver was doubly camouflaged because, while officially he was merely one of the Soviet embassy’s pool of chauffeurs, he also worked for Directorate S.

The man looked tired as he walked towards Notting Hill Gate tube station, shoulders sunk from a long imaginary shift pouring concrete. But he was in a rush.

He took the Central line to North Acton, then dashed over the Western Avenue, the wide arterial road that stretched out of the city, and into the semi-detached house on Cloister Road where he rented a room from an old woman who’d been widowed a long time ago and now offered cheap lodging for émigré workers with very few questions asked.

He went up to the first floor without announcing himself—he never did—locked his door behind him, and pulled the suitcase that contained an R-354 radio out from under his bed.

Sending a message burst from the house was dangerous, and a breach of standard protocols. But he’d been given explicit instructions barely eight hours earlier that if anything suspicious happened while he was transporting Kosygin round the city he had to get a message to the Lubyanka as fast as possible. And he’d decided that Richard Knox appearing at Congress House, the Foreign Office, and in his rear-view mirror as he drove between the two of them counted.

Chapter 47

Chapter 47

As the illegal chauffeur-builder’s message travelled east to Moscow, another was being sent west from the ZEVS broadcast station outside Murmansk to the depths of the North Atlantic. And Rykov was standing once more at the tall window next to his desk in his office, looking across the Moskva to the Kremlin.