As she walked away from Doralis’s, feeling the night-time breeze come in off the sea—the bitter salt mingling with the heady, pungent scents of orchids and nicotianas—Bennett decided she was going to find out the answers to those questions.

Gibson might not want to tell her, but he wasn’t her only option. She wondered if Warren might know, or be able to find out. She also wondered if he was still awake. His overnight stay had been a mistake, but the sex had also been pretty good.

However, at the corner in front of the CIA apartment block her burgeoning lust abruptly evaporated at the sight of a man standing in the middle of the road.

Seeing someone else on Santo Domingo’s quiet streets this late at night wasn’t that strange. But this man was. He was white, so white it looked like his skin hadn’t seen the sun in months, and his hair was long, greasy and knotted. His clothes were dark, heavy wool, completely out of place in the Caribbean. And he was staring at Bennett.

The small, still sober bit of Bennett’s mind wanted her to turn round and walk away. But the larger rum-soaked part wanted to go home.

‘Can I do something for you?’ she asked, matching the stranger’s stare.

‘You are Abey Bennett,’ the man replied.

His voice was hoarse, and quiet, but his accent was unmistakable—he was British.

Bennett tried to cover her surprise at hearing her name. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘I need your help,’ he said. He hugged his arms to his chest, as if he was shivering against a cold only he could feel.

‘And I need to know who you are.’

The man paused for a moment, then he said three words that made Bennett freeze—‘I’m the Wolf.’

The Wolf was a legend. A Soviet super-agent who could strike anywhere and any time without leaving a trace. No one in any Western intelligence agency knew who the Wolf was, or if they even really existed. For some, that made them the most terrifying enemy in the whole Cold War, more dangerous than Castro or Mao, or whoever would win the latest battle for supremacy that had taken over the Kremlin. They were the personification of the never-ending threat of communism, spreading undetected around the world like the worst, most vicious cancer. For others, the Wolf was just a fantasy. They were nothing more than a convenient excuse to explain operations gone wrong, and a bogeyman used to inflame paranoia.