It was five years since the two of them had met, when Bennett was desperately trying to prove she could be more than just a file clerk in the US embassy on Grosvenor Square and Knox had been suspended from MI5 while hunting a Soviet mole who had buried their way deep into the Service. They’d made a formidable team, pushing each other when they both felt on the verge of giving up, finding the traitor Knox had started to fear might only have existed in his head, and proving that Bennett was a better spy than any CIA field agent in London.

They’d kept in touch from time to time via the odd letter and inter-agency gossip. Knox missed Bennett and her unrelenting determination, and always hoped their professional lives would cross paths again. But this wasn’t the reunion he’d expected.

Five years, and she still had the exact same jet-black, close-cropped hair, and the bright blue of her eyes hadn’t dimmed at all.

‘How?’ he stammered. ‘How is this possible?’

‘He turned up in Santo Domingo,’ Bennett said. ‘Somehow he knew who I was. When we worked out who he was I asked if I could bring him home.’

Knox looked past Bennett to Williams. He still seemed uncannily serene, like what was happening didn’t defy all rational or fantastical reason.

‘Is it really him?’ he asked.

‘As far as we can work out,’ Bennett replied. ‘But he’s not in good shape.’

Knox’s head snapped back to her, his face instantly switching from astonishment to concern.

‘He hasn’t made a lot of sense,’ Bennett continued. ‘He doesn’t know where he’s been or how he ended up in the Dominican Republic.’

‘The Russians?’

‘Maybe. Probably.’

‘I need to get him to White.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘What? Why?’

Bennett inched closer to Knox.

‘He told us he was the Wolf,’ she said, her voice low even though there was no one near them to hear.

Knox’s eyebrows rose. He knew the myth of the Wolf, and he mostly thought the idea of a Soviet master assassin running riot across the globe was precisely that—a myth.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Bennett agreed. ‘But it’s not something you can take back once you’ve said it. Hoffman wants a real hoopla. Make handing him over very official and very political.’

Hugh Hoffman was the new CIA chief of station in London. Michael Finney, who had been COS for decades, had finally stepped down three months ago. It was widely known that Hoffman wanted to ‘shake up the place’, and apparently thought that producing a missing British agent who had claimed to be a Soviet operative would do exactly that.

‘And then,’ Bennett continued, ‘all hell will break loose.’