Her fellow initiates had started to change their minds about her when she’d reported enough of them for smoking, excessive drinking, and other unacceptable and un-Soviet activities. They ostracised her, played tricks on her, even threatened her. But she remained resolute, and her would-be tormentors eventually ended up bending first, finally seeing her as the immutable moral force of nature that she was. By the end of their time at School 101 her classmates found it easier to either act properly and piously whenever she was around or come up with excuses to never go anywhere near her.

She hadn’t expected to be assigned to Directorate S when she’d graduated, or to stay there for the last six years, overseeing operations and managing illegal operatives without ever leaving the Lubyanka. But she was happy she had been. KGB headquarters was her monastery, and she was its most faithful abbess.

She didn’t even mind that her office was so small that she could reach out and touch both sides of it with her arms if she stood up at her desk, or that it had clearly been carved out of some dead space between two other rooms, because it had been created just for her.

Working in the Lubyanka also gave her ample opportunity to uncover more potential traitors. And now her attention was firmly on Rykov, a man whose rapid rise and disregard for the solemn responsibilities given to him were both going unchecked.

Yegerova didn’t share the view that his assumption of General Medev’s responsibilities at the scientific directorate after his death demonstrated loyalty and dedication to duty. She thought it was insubordinate. She also didn’t believe that Line Z was working for the greater glory of the Soviet cause. She thought Rykov had a different agenda for his department, one that would only benefit him and his rampant ambition. And she’d decided that what was happening in London might be the perfect way to expose it.

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Knox was more careful when he left Leconfield House again. This time he retrieved his Jaguar from the car park and drove the short distance north up Park Lane, past the Dorchester Hotel, and into a side street behind Marble Arch tube station. Then he left his car behind, dropped into the network of underpasses that ran beneath the triumphal arch that had ended up incongruously perched on top of a roundabout, and completed a convoluted figure of eight through the dark, permanently damp passages before descending further underground and taking the Central line east to Tottenham Court Road, the Northern line south to Leicester Square, and then the Piccadilly line back west to Knightsbridge.