Control was seated behind his enormous desk. There was no computer; he was too old-fashioned to use one and still dictated his communiqués for the secretaries in the typing pool that Beatrix guessed was maintained solely for his benefit. His emails were delivered to him in a leather folder for him to scribble his amendments in red ink.

He looked up as Beatrix approached the desk. “Sit down, Number One,” he said, flicking his fingers in the direction of one of the chairs. It was a repulsive gesture, at once dismissive and demeaning, as if he were shaking something distasteful from his manicured nails.

She did as she was told, waiting quietly as he finished amending the document he had been working on. He sighed, swore under his breath, and pushed the piece of paper away.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Beatrix said.

“Yes, I do. I have something for you.”

Control picked up a file and slid it across the desk. The Group had been active for many years and still maintained some of the same protocols that it had adopted in its early years. Some of those continued methods were because of administrative inertia, but others had become more useful as technology had ostensibly left them behind. The Group’s files were a case in point. Mission orders were typed on paper and provided to the receiving agent within a manila folder. It was a curious anachronism, but justified because these files—proof that Her Majesty’s agencies occasionally reached out from Vauxhall Cross and snuffed out lives around the world—would have been politically incendiary if a hacker had been able to break the security on the SIS servers.

Beatrix opened the file and flicked through the meagre papers.

“I can give you the summary,” Control said. “The target’s name is Igor Koralev. He’s a geneticist, Russian by birth. Seventy-four years old, although he’s fit and active for his age. He emigrated to the USA just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has lived just outside Boston ever since. He’s a widower. He’s rich, no wife or any other family that we’ve been able to ascertain. He’s cautious and careful and very smart. He might be old, but this won’t be easy.”

“Genetics?”

“That’s right,” Control said. “But it doesn’t matter what he does. He’s a job. No more, no less.”

“So why are we after him?”