‘Slipping in and out of the wakes of cargo ships, suddenly registering in front of ferries and forcing them to change course before vanishing again. Basically being a nuisance. But the navy can only catch shadows of it. They think it’s got some kind of new technology that’s stopping them finding it, so they’ve come to me to solve their problem for them.’

‘Well, you are a magician,’ Knox said.

‘I fear this might be outside the realms of even my skills.’

Knox looked at the nooks and crannies of the British and French coasts laid out between them. ‘Sounds like you need something to lure it out into the open.’

‘Maybe,’ White said. ‘But I can’t shake the feeling that that’s exactly what it’s doing to us.’

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Simon Laing wasn’t happy. He didn’t like having his solitude disturbed, and he didn’t like that the man who had been sent to Canada to clean up his mess was now going to be hovering over him as he sat out his purgatory.

‘It’s a mark,’ he’d been told after he’d returned from Ottawa and gone through a week of debriefing that had felt like a month. ‘But one that will fade in time.’

All Laing wanted was to be left alone to get on with his job, but Knox’s sudden attention felt like the stain on his service record was already having fresh ink poured on it. Managing MI5’s security for Kosygin’s secret conference with Wilson was Laing’s responsibility and he knew he could handle it. He didn’t need his hand holding, but he hadn’t been given a choice.

After Laing had made his excuses and left Knox in the rose garden, he’d gone straight back to Leconfield House and requested the same files he’d handed over to the records clerk twenty minutes earlier, which detailed all the recent Pipistrelle intelligence about known Soviet agents in London that he had the security clearance to read.

Then, once he’d committed to memory the latest reports he hadn’t managed to read before Knox had interrupted him, he gave them all back to the clerk again, told him which files to send up to the fifth floor, and made his way home to the small set of rooms he rented in a terraced street just north of Kentish Town tube station.

Laing didn’t know any of the other residents of the three-storey house he’d found and taken between his debriefing sessions on an optimistically short let. And he didn’t want to, because getting to know them would mean giving in to a fate he’d tried so hard to avoid and still hoped wasn’t completely sealed.