Last night he’d been slowly making his way north to send a short and mostly pointless report when, by sheer chance, he spotted a grey Jaguar he recognised in the traffic ahead of him. He’d decided to take the initiative for once and followed it up to Highgate, where he’d watched Richard Knox and another man go into Wytchen House, the home of the director general of MI5.

Half an hour later Knox had left alone and Gaulke had continued on to a motorway lay-by twenty miles outside the city, where he added a short note about what he’d just seen to his report. He stayed at the side of the road with his engine and lights switched off, leaning into the boot, waiting for the standard acknowledgement message that usually only took a few minutes to reach him all the way from the Lubyanka. When he hadn’t received it after ten minutes he started to worry slightly. But after another ten it arrived—except that it wasn’t a simple confirmation of receipt, it was instructions to return to Highgate and wait for support.

His backup arrived at four in the morning. Gaulke had been at least half asleep in his tilted-back seat, parked sixty yards up the street from the cottage, so hadn’t noticed the woman suddenly appear next to his window, tapping on it and gesturing at him to unlock the passenger-­side door. The woman had two rucksacks with her, which she slung into the back of the car. And she was silent. They watched the house together, mutely, for hours until the sun rose.

Gaulke didn’t mind that his career as an illegal agent had been rather pedestrian. He hadn’t been driven to join the KGB by fervent devotion, he’d just wanted to get as far away from Tukchar, his home village on the edge of the Caspian Sea, as possible, and had happened to have a knack for English. He liked life in the West. He preferred the freedoms he’d gained here to the ones he’d lost by leaving the Soviet Union. And he enjoyed his quiet cover life, which consisted of an administrative job at a distiller’s company, a small flat in West Kensington, and an on-off relationship with a Scottish schoolteacher who lived three streets away from him.

But, as he watched another man he didn’t know with a dog leave Wytchen House, followed by Richard Knox and the man he’d left there the night before, and then another car that had pulled up down the street moments after Knox’s Jaguar had arrived half an hour ago, Gaulke wondered what he’d got himself into.

Chapter 33

Chapter 33