Williams had agreed to his confinement, and to let his friend pick his way through the ruins of his fractured psyche and broken memories for as long as he needed. But Knox knew there wouldn’t be much he could do if Williams changed his mind and left in the dead of night, or if the KGB decided they wanted to stop him cooperating permanently.

Rabley Heath was a sanctuary, but it was also isolated and exposed, and it now felt too large for Knox to protect by himself.

Sometimes he wondered if that was why Holland had suggested this arrangement in the first place. The director general, like the rest of MI5, had started to take the idea of Soviet super-soldiers a lot more seriously, and Knox and Williams made tantalising targets.

Was there an army of Watchers hiding in the rustling bushes that surrounded the estate, keeping a constant eye on them and any un­expected visitors? Knox wasn’t sure if that was wishful thinking or not. But, as he did each morning once he’d spied Williams hard at work restoring another small part of his family pile to some shadow of its former glory, he tried his best to shake such dark thoughts from his head so he could focus on helping his best friend with the ones locked up in his.

Both men took long sips of their coffee, savouring the warm bitter­ness for a calm, quiet moment.

‘Where shall we start today?’ Williams asked as he leaned back in his chair and cradled his cup in his lap.

‘Wherever you want,’ Knox replied.

Historical Note

Historical Note

There’s a tendency to think of the Cold War as a battle of monoliths. Ideologies that rubbed and pushed against each other like tectonic plates along the Iron Curtain, causing the occasional, devastating earthquake.

Of course, it was actually a little more complicated than that, and sometimes those ideologies weren’t so fixed or solid.

This is particularly true of the Soviet Union in the mid-sixties, when the troika of Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny were trying to rule a population who had just experienced a decade of relative social and political openness while also fighting each other for absolute, Stalinistic power.

Things like this made a lot of people both inside and outside Russia very nervous. Paranoid even.

As with my previous novel, Red Corona, I’ve set A Loyal Traitor in a version of the real world, and created a story that captures its fears, along with the divided loyalties and grim determination of cold warriors who, at this point in the sixties, have been fighting side by side and against each other for a long time.

It’s a story that might have happened. And perhaps one very similar to it really did. Though, I must confess that Nureyev’s performance of Card Game, at least, is complete fiction.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements