As I crouched down to take a closer look at Chief’s body, there was a noise somewhere behind me and my hand flew to the Luger. But it was just the bleating of the telephone from the sideboard.

I let out my breath and placed the gun back in my jacket. I had taken it from beside Father’s body twenty-four years ago, and kept it as my personal weapon all this time. Now I had learned that he had apparently not used it to take his own life, or Anna’s: he himself had been murdered, as part of a squalid little conspiracy to lure me into serving Mother Russia. The British officer who had been seen visiting Anna’s quarters hadn’t been him, but Chief. And the soldiers carrying Anna off in a jeep would have been NKVD - they had probably driven round to the farmhouse minutes later. Had Anna been the one to pull the trigger, or had she still been in her coma? It didn’t matter: she’d been part of it.

Now I had murdered Chief. I had had no choice. He had spotted something crucial in the Russian transcript of Slavin’s interview: that the double had been involved in secret secret work - some kind of deep operation. He’d known that Father had been involved in just such an operation, because Father had told him, but he hadn’t known who else had been involved: me. However, Pritchard, the only other surviving participant of Sacrosanct, did know that. If Chief had lived another half hour, he would have told Pritchard about the translation error and the rest, and Pritchard would have realized at once that I was Radnya.

I had had to kill him, but it had only bought me a little time, because I had no idea what else Slavin might know about me. Defections usually involved delicate negotiations, and Slavin would know not to use all his bargaining chips too early. He was due to be interviewed again at the High Commission in Lagos on Tuesday morning, where the deal would no doubt be done to exfiltrate him to London. They could also try to get hold of Anna - she wasn’t offering to defect, but they knew she had recruited the agent. I had to reach both of them before anyone else did, otherwise . . . Otherwise what? I would either be jailed or hanged. But what was the alternative? The masters I had served for over half my life had killed Father: how could I continue to serve them now? I knew I couldn’t.