Bennett picked up the strange object, running her fingers along the weld and over the surface until she found the almost perfect edge of the trigger button. Then she held it away from her, aimed it at the wall next to the gantry ladder, and fired. There was no recoil, no propellant ignition, and no explosion of brick and mortar dust. There was just an intense, glowing red light where Bennett was pointing.

She wasn’t holding some new sort of miniature gun dreamed up by Soviet engineers. The double tube was a very small and very power­ful laser.

‘What the hell does this mean?’ she said.

Knox stared at the bright dot, his mind furiously trying to work out why the KGB would have gone to so much effort to get their agents a clear shot at Kosygin only to have them fire a beam of light instead of a bullet.

Then his brain broke his heart.

‘It means,’ he said, ‘we need to get back to Leconfield House.’

Chapter 53

Chapter 53

Anna had originally planned to leave through the opera house’s front doors, making the ushers guess why someone would depart while Nureyev was still in the middle of his performance. But as she quickly exited backstage she decided instead to follow another route she’d memorised from the building’s blueprints.

The Floral Hall next door had been built at the same time as the Royal Opera House, and had been home to Covent Garden’s flower market until a fire had gutted it ten years ago. Its main entrance was on Bow Street, but it also connected to the north-eastern corner of Covent Garden Piazza. Its doors and passageways were shut up, but they were all still there, including one long-forgotten one that joined it to the opera house.

The hall was dark when Anna slipped into it from one of the opera house’s quiet service corridors. She fumbled her way between piles of burnt wood and pools of stagnant rainfall let in through the holes in the roof, navigating using the dim light that crept round the edges of the heavy boards clumsily nailed across the hall’s high, cracked windows.

It took her almost five minutes to find what she was looking for—the narrow, low door that opened onto the piazza. The old wood bent as she pressed against it, and flecks of paint come away on her palms. She felt a single padlocked panel holding the door shut, and she could tell its small screws would put up little resistance.

No one had followed her into the Floral Hall, but she still paused, listening in case the two people she’d briefly fought—or anyone else—were somehow waiting for her outside. But she couldn’t hear anything and, when she shoved the door open, the piazza was empty.