It was only once outside the building that Hughes realized he still held the ten-pence piece with the dolphin. It looked even more magical in the airfield’s floodlights. He returned to the gymnasium, wondering how best to return it, and saw the woman standing very still beside the coffin. The lid had been removed again. Her guards remained a few meters away, eyes averted, so there was something oddly intimate to the scene. She held the blank postcard, and Hughes wondered if she was able to discern some message that had escaped him, a message that the man had carried all the way from Ascension Island and that had survived his own will to live.

2

Kane paused with the marker in front of the whiteboard, then wrote Ecstasy. Beneath it, to form a triangle, he wrote Finding and Being. He turned to check the faces of the nine individuals who had chosen to spend the last hour of a sunny Monday afternoon listening to him rather than absorbing the beauty of Oxford outside. The turnout was low again, but then he’d made the lecture as niche as possible: “Sufi Influences on the European Tradition.” The room was in a remote corner of St. John’s College, because he wanted to see who would find it. More people found it each week, and he no longer knew each attendee by name. But still he had noticed the man at the back as soon as he arrived.

He was young, dressed smartly, with the fine features of eastern Africa and a deep, attentive gaze. Kane hadn’t seen him before. Newcomers turned up, of course, in spite of Kane’s bid for obscurity—sometimes lost, sometimes merely misguided. But instinct told Kane this was an employee of the Secret Intelligence Service.

For the last year Kane had been the subject of an inquiry under way deep within the entrails of Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s headquarters. After ten years working undercover on behalf of the British government, it wasn’t about to let him leave without a fight. His exit hadn’t been made any easier by a final escapade in Central Asia that broke a lot of rules. And while Kane knew that he had saved more faces and more bloodshed than his bosses would admit, he carried an aura of danger now. Hence he was currently at risk of being found guilty of appropriation of operational funds, disobeying orders, and the magisterially nondescript “unauthorized absence,” which was one way of describing a battle for his life in Kazakhstan. He was forbidden to leave the country and no doubt monitored while he was here, all pending a decision as to whether to press charges. This hypothetical prosecution was insurance against him speaking out. It meant there was always the prospect of a decade in a high-security prison if residual loyalty wasn’t enough to keep him onside. The god they worshipped was not the law, but silence.