Jack Williams had been a unique opportunity. He’d been captured by sheer fluke after his unconscious body had drifted into the path of a small yacht a KGB asset had taken out onto the Solent to get a look at the Surcouf. The operative had almost dismissed Williams as a lump of flotsam bumping against his hull, until he saw a stray fleck of starlight that had pierced a gap in the night’s heavy clouds reflect off his cracked diving mask. He pulled him out of the water and checked him over. There were gashes in his wetsuit and skin where the straps of an air tank should be, but miraculously he was still breathing. Williams had then been transported back to Russia, where he’d been questioned, tortured, and forgotten in a cycle that lasted almost three years—until Rykov found out about him, and persuaded Churkin that there were better things the KGB could do with a highly trained foreign agent who had a personal relationship with the director general of MI5 than leave him rotting in an isolation cell.

For the last four years he’d been relentlessly experimented on in an effort to turn him. Eventually, Line Z had worked out how to do it without him even knowing. They used narcosynthesis, the scientific name for pumping someone so full of drugs that their brain’s protective barriers broke down and their mind became exposed, malleable, and open to suggestion. But instead of using intravenous hypnotics to extract any last crumbs of information from him, they’d slowly hollowed out a tiny cave inside his mind and created a new Jack Williams inside it—a Jack Williams who existed only to serve Line Z. He became deception personified, and a perfect weapon.

Almost perfect.

Using Williams to snatch Holland was an audacious plot. It had taken months of planning and manoeuvring to create a bait so tempting and a narrative so compelling that both the Americans and the British wouldn’t be able to resist getting caught by it. Kosygin’s trip to London was the perfect final twist in the tale Rykov had written—the ultimate red herring that would make all his characters realise they’d never really been in charge of their stories.

If it had worked, Rykov would have been instantly promoted to colonel or higher and given even more power to wreak havoc around the world. But it hadn’t. At the last second his troupe of players had rebelled and written their own endings, and he’d been grabbed from his apartment in the middle of the night and dragged to the Lubyanka, where he was now finally facing the consequences of his and Williams’s failures.