Taylor drove cautiously, one eye on the mirrors, continuing out of town. Kane wanted to get some purchase on the situation.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Up and down,” she said, tightly.

“Where are you working now?”

“South Atlantic desk. I run it.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Kane thought through world affairs: the newspapers he’d tried not to read, and, when he did succumb to a browse, not to decrypt. Nothing pertaining to the South Atlantic came to mind. It had certainly never been his domain. He wasn’t as up to speed with world news as he used to be, but then his job no longer fed a hunger for omniscience.

The three of them lapsed into silence. Kane watched Oxford slip away. They didn’t drive east to London, as he’d expected, but west, onto the A4 0. He checked Taylor in the mirror and saw anxiety.

The job on which they’d worked together involved tapping a cable running from Seeb in Oman under the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. Taylor had led a team of three—herself, Kane, and an eccentric technical specialist by the name of Rory Bannatyne. Bannatyne was an expert on the discrete diversion of fiber optics. But he needed to get into the facilities that housed them, which demanded insider knowledge. Kane had gone over for two months to run an asset inside the Omani security services who had access to the information they needed: computer systems, building security, and personnel. Kane was essentially a conduit for this intelligence while something complicated happened at high-security junction points.

He received a commendation for the work without knowing much about what had been achieved, and the success earned him a posting to Libya as the country began to implode. He remembered Taylor as ambitious. A year or so after their job together he heard she’d stabbed someone in Algiers. According to who you spoke to it was an agent or a fixer who’d turned on her or got overfriendly; one person had described it as an abduction attempt, another as a sexual assault. Either way, she put a knife in his throat. Kane assumed that was connected to her being in HQ now. It may also have been connected to her marriage falling apart, although from what she’d said in Oman it hadn’t been in a great place to start with. And now apparently she was running the South Atlantic desk. Not one of the prestigious departments, but it wasn’t teaching poetry to undergraduates, either.

They continued improbably into the Cotswolds. Then he realized where they were going.

Kane sometimes walked in this area, but he tried not to venture west of the A34. Too many classified places: the ley lines of military intelligence webbed and thickened in this corner of England. He knew of at least ten sites of various levels of secrecy, but none like the one they now approached.