‘Good,’ Holland said. ‘Drive carefully, and if his memories suddenly return and there’s something we do need to act on, get back here as fast as possible.’

Five minutes after White left, Knox and Williams stepped out of Wytchen House, got into Knox’s Jaguar, and drove away. A few moments later, the black Ford Consul that Laing had signed out of Leconfield House an hour before pulled away from the kerb fifty feet down the road and followed them.

Laing’s dislike of Knox had turned to distrust when he’d taken his concerns about Kosygin wanting to go to the ballet to him and he’d dismissed them.

At the very least, he’d thought Knox would order him to reassign enough Watchers to make sure the Royal Opera House was covered for the whole of the next forty-eight hours. And when he hadn’t, Laing had done it anyway.

He’d expected word to reach Knox overnight, and that he’d be dragged over the coals for his prudence this morning. But when he’d arrived at Leconfield House he’d been told by one of the secretaries from the fifth floor that Knox had been called away and wouldn’t be contactable for a few days. And then, on his way back down to the School Hall, he’d heard one of the engineers from the R&D department complaining about a project review delayed because White had been summoned to the cottage.

Laing couldn’t resist putting two and two together and deciding that MI5’s most senior officers were meeting secretly. He was extremely curious as to why. So, he’d quickly checked that everything for the summit was still well in hand, then gone down to the garage and signed out a car.

He’d driven straight to Soho and had reached Berwick Street just in time to see Knox leaving Kemp House. Now, he’d just watched him drive away from the director general’s home with a man he didn’t recognise.

Laing wanted to know who Knox’s mysterious passenger was, and where he was taking him.

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Laing didn’t know it, but he wasn’t the only person watching Wytchen House. Angus Gaulke, whose real name was Pavel Utkin, had also been staking it out all night.

Gaulke was a Directorate S illegal who had been in London for almost three years and who, by fluke of regularly being in the wrong place at the wrong time, had done very little. Normally, his surveillance shifts involved following members of MI5 around the capital and then driving out of the city in his midnight blue Morris Oxford Farina, which had an R-354 Morse code radio set hidden in its boot, to send an encrypted message burst to Moscow detailing whatever had or, more likely, hadn’t happened that day.