The Beagle put ashore at ports all over the world. I got to use my knack for foreign languages, but I didn’t get to enjoy the scenery much. I was always on guard, planning for what might go wrong, and making contacts in case they did.

In Rio de Janeiro in 1967, I was glad I had made contingency plans, and that I had the contacts to execute them. I was at the hotel on a Wednesday night when one of the researchers, a female biologist in her early thirties named Sylvia, threw open the lobby’s glass door and ran in. Blood covered her face and matted her brown hair. One of her eyes was swollen shut. She barreled past the bar and the people checking in, yelling my name. I was sitting in the lobby reading a book. I rose, caught her by the arm, guided her to a phone booth, and closed the folding door. I finally got her calmed down enough to speak.

“They took them!”

“Who?”

“Yuri and Lin.”

“Who took them?”

She was sobbing now. “I don’t know. They wore masks.” She shook her head as if she didn’t want to remember. “They said they’d kill them if I didn’t come back to the bus stop with twenty thousand dollars in two hours.”

I took her up to my room after that, questioned her more, then called for two of my intelligence operatives. I sent one of them to the Beagle to get forty thousand dollars just in case. We kept a lot of money on hand for scientific provisions as well as kidnap and ransom operations. I sent my other operative to make inquiries with a few of my old MI6 contacts, to find a man I knew only by reputation, but who I was confident would ensure my operation’s success.

When I was left alone with the trembling woman, I poured her a tall glass of brandy and sat her on the bed. She winced when the liquid hit her cut lip, but with a shaking hand, she finished it quickly.

“Listen to me, Sylvia.”

She looked up at me with her good eye, which still leaked tears.

“Everything is going to be okay. I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to make the person who did this very sorry.”

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in the back of a Portuguese restaurant, waiting for my host. He entered, sat without introducing himself, and stared at me with blank eyes. He was a corpulent man, with long, greasy black hair plastered to his scalp. Two men stood by the door to the private dining room, hands stuffed in their pockets, fingers no doubt curled around the triggers of snub-nosed revolvers pointed in my direction.

I knew the man by his alias—O Mestre—but I didn’t use the name to address him. I simply said, “We have a common enemy.”