Kane moved for Anne’s jeep. No one shot him, so he got in beside her.

“Who are you?” she said, turning the ignition.

“I work for the British government.”

“People are saying my husband might have started the fire.”

“He might have done. Let’s get Carina safe first, then we can try to understand this.”

She pulled out fast, headed in the direction of Georgetown.

“You don’t know where Connor is?”

“No.”

“You think Thomas is going to his boat? That’s impossible. The sea’s too rough.”

“We can explain that to him. He’s armed, Anne. We’re going to have to think how we do this.”

Then, very carefully, she said: “Does this have something to do with the Russian ship?”

“Russian ship?”

“There’s a ship coming—Russian signals intelligence, approximately twenty kilometers west of Ascension now.”

“I reckon it might.”

She looked straight ahead, taking the car to fifty, staring at the lava flows as if they might contain the explanation for her collapsing life.

32

The BND security team tailed Taylor as far as they could. For her protection, they said. After she crossed into Westminster, she didn’t see them again. She had a sense of walking a tightrope between two burning buildings.

She drove past Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square, into government territory. It was a sunny day and Whitehall was crowded. Taylor ditched the car on Victoria Embankment with the doors open and the keys in the ignition, then circled back to the vast stone block of the Ministry of Defence headquarters: a pale, tomblike seven-acre sprawl of military bureaucracy. The main entrance was on Horse Guards Avenue, but she went to the one at the side. She’d hoped it might give her some privacy, but there was a group of tourists listening to a guide in Spanish. Taylor approached the MOD Police on the door, explained who she was, and why she needed urgent access. She watched as some communication went on inside their cabin. Then she was arrested at gunpoint.

There was a gasp from the tourists. The guide fell silent. The police checked Taylor for weapons and walked her inside with a grip on her arm.

The interior of the building was no less sepulchral, its oxblood marble suggesting cold butchery. Staff stopped as she was marched to the back of the ground floor, where she saw Skinner and Sir Roland Mackenzie advancing toward her.

“Kathryn.”

“I need to speak to you about what’s happening on Ascension,” she said.

“You need to explain why both British and US special forces on the island are looking for a Dr. Edward Pearce,” Mackenzie said. “A man who escaped police custody last night and comes up on our records as your responsibility.”