As his body collapsed, Mary screamed. The other three men hacked at her with their machetes, slicing into the arms she raised in a futile attempt to protect herself, and butchering her body. Within seconds she was lying dead beside her husband and her blood was bathing them both.

Kabaya looked at the corpses with indifference. He glanced at the final three oath-takers. They were huddled together, their arms wrapped around one another’s bodies.

‘Take the oath,’ Kabaya said.

In desperate voices that cried out to be believed, they did what they were told.

London

LONDON

‘Before we go any further, I’d like to propose a toast,’ said Saffron Courtney Meerbach, raising her glass of champagne. ‘To Gubbins . . . who brought us all together, and without whom none of us would be here today.’

‘To Gubbins!’ chorused the other five men and women seated around the table in the small French bistro.

They had met there at her invitation as a nod to days gone by. The restaurant was an old haunt for them all. It was off Baker Street in central London, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive, the wartime intelligence agency in which all but one of them had served. Brigadier Colin Gubbins was their commanding officer.

‘By God, he was scary though, wasn’t he?’ Leo Marks, a small man with a puckish smile added. ‘I still have nightmares about the first time he fixed those eyes of his on me. Classicists among us will recall the basilisk, the mythical Greek snake that could kill with a single glance. Well, dear old Gubbins made the basilisk seem like the Sugar Plum Fairy.’

Of all the people at the table, only one had joined in the toast out of politeness, rather than enthusiasm. He was tall, with the chiselled features, tousled dark-blond hair and perfect tan of a Hollywood star. But there was a slight hollowness to his cheeks and, occasionally, a haunted look to his cool, grey eyes that spoke of a man who had seen and experienced horrors beyond any normal human imagination. He was not the only one around the table of whom that was true.

‘Tell me, my darling,’ Gerhard Meerbach said in a light German accent, as he reached across the table and took his wife’s hand. ‘I understand how Gubbins links you all together. But how do I owe my presence here to him?’ Gerhard gave a wry shrug of the shoulders. ‘I was on the other side.’

‘Because, dearest,’ Saffron replied, ‘it was Gubbins who packed me off to the North German plain in late April ’45, to try and find our missing agents, including Peter . . .’

Peter Churchill gave a modest nod of his bespectacled head as Saffron continued, ‘Had I not been there, I should never have followed the trail of the high-value prisoners that the SS were hoping to trade for favours with the Allies all the way to . . .’