Williams didn’t deserve what he’d been put through. But as she ate the last of her sandwich, she reminded herself that he’d still been a spy and, as Bennett kept discovering herself over and over, no spy could ever be entirely blameless. As Gibson had so ineloquently put it, nobility wasn’t part of the job description. Intelligence officers lived and worked in uncertainty and opportunity, in the moral in-between. On top of that, he’d still appeared out of thin air on the other side of the planet, known private information about her, and claimed to be a Soviet super-agent. He couldn’t be an angel, and Bennett doubted he was a devil, but she still wanted to know exactly where in between the two of those he fell.

She decided she needed to learn more about her prey if she was going to hunt him down, so she went to the one place in London where she might find something to help—the floor directly beneath her.

The archives had been Bennett’s domain when she’d been stationed in London. After being forced to accept her posting, her superiors had dumped her in the embassy’s basement and tried to forget she existed.

She didn’t enjoy the sensation that washed over her as she pushed open the swing doors and stepped inside. It felt like after so much hard work for so long the universe had brought her back where she belonged.

She wasn’t sure if she should be surprised or not that in five years the place hadn’t changed. The lights were still kept low, the clerks’ desks were still piled high with the unending supply of requests or filing generated by the people who got to work above ground, and it was still very, very quiet.

Bennett knew there would be at least a couple of clerks somewhere out in the stacks but they didn’t seem to be anywhere close to her. She figured that was probably for the best—she didn’t want anyone asking her any questions about why she was there or what she was looking for.

Her anonymity lasted five minutes, until a clerk carrying a large pile of folders crashed into her back as she leaned over an open file drawer.

‘Can I help you?’ the clerk, a young black woman wearing thick glasses, asked as she balanced the pile of folders she’d managed to stop spilling out of her arms onto the edge of the file drawer.

Then a mix of recognition and excitement flashed across her face as she looked at Bennett properly and realised who she’d just bumped into.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘you’re Abey Bennett.’

It was the second time in a week a complete stranger had known who Bennett was, and she didn’t like it.

‘I didn’t realise I was famous,’ she said.