Dedication

To Emma, Matt and Phoenix.

Part I

1

Beatrix Rose waited in the antechamber outside the office. She hated to wait. Punctuality was important, and it had been drilled into her during her time in the military. Control had asked to see her at midday, and she had been here on time. It was twenty past now, and she knew that either he didn’t care what she thought of being made to wait or he was making a point. It was, she suspected, the latter. Control was not the sort of man to do anything without consideration, and she guessed that he was reminding her who was in command of Group Fifteen. She was Number One, the senior agent, but it was Control who sent her, and the fourteen others with whom she worked, out on assignment. There had been one conversation that she recalled, near the start of her career in the Group, when he had suggested that he was a craftsman and that the fifteen of them were his tools. She had taken an instant dislike to him then, and nothing that had happened in the intervening period had changed her mind.

Captain Tanner guarded access to the door. He was Control’s private secretary and managed the inconveniences of his position with a warm smile and ready wit that belied the fact that, by rights, he should have been resentful. His leg had been blown off by an IED on the road outside Kabul. A promising career had been forestalled and replaced with a life as a superannuated functionary, making excuses for his boss when he pulled rude stunts like this.

There was a light above the door that shone red when Control was not to be disturbed. Beatrix remembered a doctor she had seen when she had been a child; there had been a similar system then, but that was thirty years ago.

“Ah,” Tanner said, looking up at the light. It had changed to green. “He’ll see you now, Number One. Sorry for the wait. Please—go through.”

The office was large and pleasant. Beatrix was not in the habit of frequenting the members’ clubs that could be found off Pall Mall, but she imagined that those rooms would have more in common with this office than the offices of similarly senior intelligence officers in the SIS building at Vauxhall Cross. There was a wide window that offered a view out onto the Thames, and the prints on the walls had been expensively framed. There was a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece, and sitting atop it were pictures of Control’s wife and three children and another of him as a much younger man wearing full military uniform.