A younger Knox would have been disgusted by Furlock, branded him a coward and told him to go back to America and accept his duty, like he’d done in 1944. But, as Northcott had said, that had been a just war. Everyone Knox fought side by side with understood why they were there: to protect freedom and defend the world against tyranny. But it was hard to say the same thing about America’s decade-long conflict in Vietnam.

For ten bloody years, thousands of young lives and millions of dollars had been spent failing to drive communism out of South East Asia. If anything it had spread, establishing footholds in Laos and Cambodia as well. The longer the war dragged on, the less people were sure why America was there in the first place. Some people even morbidly joked that it was only because their troop carriers had gone the wrong way when they’d left Korea in 1953. Public opinion was starting to turn.

So was Knox’s, and not just about Vietnam.

When Holland had asked him to become a soldier in the new Cold War, Knox had jumped at the chance to continue serving his country. But that was twenty years ago, and now he couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d ended up caught in a perpetual stalemate, a war of paranoid attrition and meaningless skirmishes.

Northcott might not have been smuggling Soviet agents into America, but someone, somewhere would be, or pretending to to keep the CIA and FBI on edge and chasing phantoms. America would be doing exactly the same, turning disgruntled Soviet military attachés or low-level members of KGB residenturas wherever they could. And both would be gleefully sneaking people over the Berlin Wall while complaining it had been the other side’s belligerence that had somehow willed almost a hundred miles of concrete, barbed wire, and no-man’s-land into existence between Germany’s Federal and Democratic Republics.

Britain would be doing its part too, keeping extremely close tabs on the secret forces at work in the hearts of her allies and enemies.

Knox was still a soldier, still doing his duty. But his conviction no longer felt entirely total or unquestioning. As his plane started its descent outside Toronto, his mind went again to Burton raging behind the wheel of a car at Claire Bloom about the dirty work he’d been unknowingly forced to do. He thought too about Northcott’s refusal to tell him where Furlock and all the men before him went after they landed in Victoria, and his own to press for the information. Maybe they were all holed up somewhere in Vancouver, waiting for fake Canadian passports. Maybe they headed east as soon as they could, and tried their luck on the ranches and farms of the vast prairies that stretched across the country. Wherever they disappeared to, Knox didn’t want to be the one responsible for hunting them down.