The baby could have been left to live, but those weren’t the assassin’s orders. So the gloved fingers tucked the girl under her brother’s blanket, and held the edge of it over her mouth and nose until she stopped wriggling.

Then the heavy boots walked downstairs, past the body of the father, whose blood had started to stain the hall rug, and back out into the cold night.

By 10 p.m. the assassin was back in the empty bedroom of the groundfloor apartment at Zavodskoy Poyezd, 6, lying on a thin mattress, eyes staring at the ceiling and focusing on nothing. Sleep rarely came easily after a murder. But it wasn’t guilt or pride that kept the assassin awake, it was just simple adrenaline.

They didn’t know what the man in the house had done to deserve the annihilation of his whole family, or that the orders to kill them all had been sent direct from a member of the troika itself. These minor details were irrelevant, and soon enough there’d be a new mission that would require the assassin’s full attention.

March 1966

March 1966

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It took a full minute of polite hammering to rouse Richard Knox from his deep, dead sleep.

He had no clue who wanted him so urgently, or where he was. But, as he slowly let the increasingly loud knocking wake him up, he started to remember.

He recalled the long journey back to London a week ago from the joint intelligence conference with the Americans and Australians about the Venona Project in Sydney. Then the three rushed days in Leconfield House, MI5’s headquarters on Curzon Street in Mayfair. A flight across the Atlantic to Ottawa. His meetings with the Canadian Directorate of Security and Intelligence. And two more flights that took him first to Vancouver and then to Victoria, the tiny capital of British Columbia nestled on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

‘Okay, I’m coming,’ he shouted at the door as he rolled across the expansive bed he’d been lying on, face down and fully clothed.

He looked at his watch—a 1956 Omega with a silver body and tan leather strap—and his disorientation immediately turned to anger.

Knox had arrived at The Empress, the grand chateau-esque hotel that dominated Victoria Harbour next to the British Columbia Parliament building, after 1 a.m. He’d asked the night manager for a wake-up call at 4 p.m. His body was exhausted from all his recent travelling and he needed to give it some time to recover. But he also had an appointment to keep. His watch said it was ten past seven. Could his jet lag really have made him sleep for almost eighteen hours?