I put on a black overcoat and fled into the London night. Going to a hospital was a risk I couldn’t take. A doctor we had used in my MI6 days patched me up.

In a cheap bed and breakfast near Tottenham, I made the rest of my calls. They confirmed my worst fears: an all-out purge of the Citium had occurred.

I still had several false identities; I used them to leave the country. I had no clue where Lin would have gone. Hong Kong was my first guess. I was wrong; she wasn’t there. I tried everything to find her. I called her colleagues, but no one knew anything; she had given no warning about her departure. I placed ads with hidden meaning in the newspaper, with no luck. I tried calling Citium members, but everyone was either dead or had gone underground.

So I did the same.

I waited, hoping the Beagle would make its scheduled docking at Nome, Alaska, but it never appeared. I saw three possibilities. My hope was that the vessel had been commandeered and the crew and researchers taken prisoner. Or that someone aboard had learned of the purge and that the Beagle and all souls on board had gone into hiding. I looked for proof of either scenario, but found none. That left the final option, my worst fear: they’d sunk her. The loss of the ship was tough. I had made a lot of friends on board during my time there. The research it carried was impossible to value—and essentially impossible to find.

I didn’t try. I was entirely focused on locating Lin. She was a needle in a worldwide haystack, but I dug into it. I rented a small cottage in the country, a hundred miles from London, kept to myself, and spent every second investigating who had conducted the purge. There was no internet in 1983, no cell phones. People were much harder to find back then, but I made progress. Slowly, pieces began to emerge—Citium cells still operating. The names had changed, but there was a trail. A company called Invisible Sun Securities had absorbed much of Citium Security. I began putting the pieces together. I never stopped looking for Lin or the children.

The years went by, and my hope faded little by little. By 1991, I had designed an operation I hoped would reveal the truth about the purge. Everything was in place. But a week before I was to make my move, a package arrived at my door, delivered by an unmarked parcel van. No signature required. The house was like a fortress. I even had a bomb shelter under it.

With an extension arm, I cut the package open.

What I saw inside broke me.