After she left Hoffman’s office she went down to the canteen that took up most of the embassy’s first subterranean level. She ignored the stacks of white bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly that were left out at all hours to help embassy staff whenever they suffered pangs of hunger and homesickness, and instead chose a large corned beef sandwich.

Her pride, her desire to prove Hoffman wrong, and her fear of who he might send after Williams if she failed meant she needed to get to him first. But, as she found herself a seat far away from the secretaries and low-level diplomatic assistants on their breaks, she struggled to come up with another, bigger reason.

Williams was still a mystery, but no one else in the CIA seemed to care about that. MKULTRA had chewed him up and spat him out, and now he was just a pawn Hoffman wanted to use to score some cheap points over an ally. Bennett had no idea where he could have fled to. He might have rushed straight to Leconfield House, or into the arms of an MI5 team waiting somewhere out of sight while Knox caused a distraction. But she doubted it. She also doubted he was just wandering alleys or curled up in an old, dirty yard somewhere. He was alone and confused in a city that had changed a lot in the time since he’d gone missing, but even if he couldn’t fully trust the memories that were guiding him, there were still some skills and instincts no spy ever forgot.

Knox had told Bennett a little about the mythical figure of Jack Williams. She knew they’d met in France at the end of the war, that Williams had taken Knox under his wing, and that Knox had repaid him by introducing him to Holland and MI5.

‘He was one of us,’ Knox had said.

And what had that got him? He’d sacrificed his life for what he believed in, for the West, only to now come back from the dead all these years later to find his own side trying to finish him off.

She hadn’t told Knox the whole story of his resurrection. She hadn’t admitted anything about what Williams had endured at Haina. Or the journey to get him to London, which included a flight to New York where he’d been questioned one last time to see if there was any last scrap the CIA could squeeze out of him, then tidied up, given a hastily made passport that would get him through London Airport, and bundled onto the back of an overnight Pan American flight, where for eight hours one of his wrists was handcuffed to his seat and the other was attached to Bennett’s.