“Daniel’s great. He’s the first assistant I fully trust. He’s also half my age. Too good for the Service really, with an extraordinary life story. He lost his parents in Eritrea, came over here when he was fifteen. Six wanted him to work undercover, of course: surveillance, penetrating gangs, that kind of thing. But he pressed to be interviewed for HQ, and I liked him. He’s super sharp, no time for office nonsense. Part of me wonders if he’s secretly tasked with keeping an eye on me.”

“He keeps an eye on you to see how you do the job.”

“Sure.” She sighed. “He could choose better role models. I have a horrible feeling that if people start trying to figure out what’s behind Rory’s suicide, they’ll get to Oman. They’ll find out I covered for him.”

“You think they will look?”

“Maybe. Covered for him and then threw him into an isolated environment that would have been tough on anyone.”

“What exactly happened in Oman? Was it a prostitute?”

She closed her eyes and pressed the heel of her smoking hand to her forehead, then looked directly at Kane.

“It wasn’t a prostitute, it was a girl and boy. Teenagers. Street kids. They were in his room and he was watching them. The hotel owner caught them and called the police. He said it wasn’t the first time.”

She continued to watch Kane, alert to flickers of judgment. He was thinking. Of people, and sexuality, and the reservoirs of anguished desire beneath the surface of things.

“Rory was in the police station by the time I found out,” Taylor said.

“What did you do?”

“Signed a piece of paper and gave them quite a lot of money on the understanding it went no further. My own money. He repaid me as soon as he was back in the UK, wanted to pay me more.”

Kane saw the potential gravity of the situation. Intelligence work magnified transgressions, because small things could become very big things if a hostile power decided to exploit them. Your secrets were your weakness, and your weakness was the service’s weakness. That was why they tried to empty you of them before recruitment. That was why small lies in connection with the job could spell dismissal.

“How was he, about it all?”

“Tearful, apologetic. You can imagine. You knew Rory.”

“Not so well, it seems. Did he try to explain it?”

“What was there to explain? He said he wouldn’t have touched them, that wasn’t his thing. Said he never did more—that he couldn’t. Which I took to mean some kind of impotence but was maybe about a moral threshold. Or both. I know this sounds awful, but right then it didn’t strike me as the most appalling thing. He preferred the company of teenagers. He wanted to watch them fucking. That was all.”

“How old were they?”