Outside, I lit a cigarette and thought about the arrangement we had made. Arrangement is perhaps the wrong word: I hadn’t had any say in the matter. The photographs of Anna and me covered every conceivable angle. I wondered who had taken them - Father? Pritchard? Well, it hardly mattered now.

I wandered down the street, looking for a cab but not seeing any. It was getting late, and I was on the wrong side of the river. A free agent, I thought bitterly, as I buttoned my coat.

Far from it.

Author’s Note

Author’s Note

The background to this novel is real. The Nigerian civil war took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and was a superpower conflict by proxy. It was waged for over two and a half years, until Biafra finally fell in January 1970. The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was vilified as a result of his government’s support for the Federal side, and did visit Nigeria in March 1969. I am grateful to the National Archives of the United Kingdom for providing me with copies of several Cabinet Office records related to his visit, including the programme (reference CAB 164/409 105669), an excerpt of which is quoted on pages 186-7.

There is no record of an assassination attempt against Harold Wilson in Nigeria, but there were extensive and bizarre conspiracies against him, and by members of the British establishment and intelligence community. I am indebted to the work of Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, whose Smear! Wilson and the Secret State is an impeccably sourced primer on that subject. Cecil King did meet with Louis Mountbatten and others in May 1968 to discuss a coup against the Wilson government.

Stephen Dorril is also the author of an excellent history of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, which led me to many other works, and I am particularly grateful to him for his advice on Nigeria at an early stage. The atmosphere and details of life within SIS during the late Sixties were drawn from many sources, but chief among them was Tom Bower’s biography of Dick White, The Perfect English Spy. Regarding Soviet intelligence, my starting point was My Silent War, the autobiography of Kim Philby, which was first published in 1968. It gave me few easy answers regarding the motivations of double agents, and even fewer details of tradecraft - although he does describe taking almost an entire day to meet his handler at one point! It is a frustrating but compelling book - I returned to it often. Robert Cecil’s biography of Donald Maclean was similarly stimulating, as were several other books on the known double agents of this era. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s works on the history of the KGB were also crucial stepping-stones for my research into Soviet espionage.