Then I shook my head and turned towards the garage. Not until JD is safe home. I was the leader, now, God help me. I suddenly had a whole new appreciation of what JD did. I was going to have to make decisions, send people into danger. What if, this time, someone died? How many lives should I risk, for a shot at getting JD back?

I couldn’t sleep, so I started going through the information the Sisters of Invidia had found on Otto Becker. It wasn’t good news.

The rest of the intelligence community were terrified of this man. Most spies are carefully-spoken diplomats from top colleges who sit in meetings and tap at computers all day. Becker was something utterly different, a German Special Forces veteran who still swam a mile every morning and was a black belt in four martial arts. But it wasn’t just his physical toughness that scared everyone.

Becker was fifty-five. He’d grown up in a different world: East Berlin, when it was a police state controlled by the Soviets. His dad had been high up in the Stasi, the secret police, and little Otto had grown up thinking it was normal for the authorities to have absolute power, normal for civilians to be threatened or tortured or just disappear because there was a suspicion they were disloyal to the party. There’d been all sorts of allegations against him since he joined the BND: beating suspects, water torture, even threatening their wives and girlfriends with rape. But nothing had ever been substantiated: my guess was, no one was brave enough to come forward as a witness. And because he got results, he’d risen fast, to the top levels of the BND. Now he had his own hand-picked military team and he reported directly to the German Chancellor. We couldn’t have picked a worse enemy.

I fell into bed, exhausted and alone. When I finally slept, I had nightmares: ones where I screwed up again and watched the whole team die in front of me.

* * *

The next morning, I was the first to arrive. Hazy from lack of sleep, I stared at the keys for The Factory, trying to remember which one fit which door. JD had given me a set but I’d never had to use them: I’d never been the first one in, before. I made tea in the kitchen and my eyes kept falling on JD’s mug, sitting unused on the drying rack.

Kian walked in, his phone to his ear. “It’s the CIA,” he told me. “Roberta, I’m putting you on speaker.”