He saw with crystal clarity the intense training his body and brain had been put through, the tests he’d been set to prove himself, the murders he’d been ordered to commit, the blood his hands were soaked in. He remembered the feeling of being lost and then found, when he’d been pulled out the darkness and given the chance to become something new, powerful, and terrifying. But there was nothing further back, nothing beyond the darkness that might remind him of the man he’d once been before his rebirth.

Williams knew his purpose and his destination. Nothing else mattered, and nothing else could matter. His years of mental conditioning had been triggered, he could only do what it drove him to.

And now, in front of him he saw the last stage of the mission he’d been sent on. With all the camouflage of confusion finally stripped away, he remembered who he really was.

He was Project Mykl.

Chapter 57

Chapter 57

‘I hope you’re right,’ Bennett said as she stared at the tracker-receiver White had bolted onto the dashboard of Knox’s Jaguar.

It was a deceptively simple-looking box with a couple of dials Bennett and Knox had been told not to fiddle with, and a round display divided by horizontal and vertical grid lines. It looked like a miniature radar system, but its screen wasn’t lighting up with pings.

‘So do I,’ Knox replied, shifting gear to overtake a lumbering lorry in front of them.

Bennett had expected them to head back to Dungeness—she’d seen the same plane Laing had when they’d both been following Knox and Williams and not noticing the KGB hit squad on all their tails—but they hadn’t. They’d sped south out of the city, passed through Epsom and Leatherhead, and were now just north of Horsham. So far, there had been no signs telling them they were headed in the right direction.

‘Why do you think you know where they’re going?’ Bennett asked.

‘Because Jack told me,’ Knox replied, pulling back into his lane. ‘When we were driving to Kent I thought I was helping him un­tangle everything in his mind, but he was trying to tell me what had been hidden in the mess. He talked about when he’d learned to fly at Shoreham Airport. It was the only thing he brought up that I hadn’t prompted him about. That’s where he’s going.’

‘That’s a big gamble.’

‘I don’t think so.’

The road opened up in front of them and Knox pushed the Jaguar close to ninety miles an hour.

‘The Russians must have been working on him for years,’ he continued. ‘Just waiting for the perfect opportunity to force him to do something like this. But he’s always been fighting them, and I bet he’s still trying to.’