But compliance was not the same as acceptance.

Whatever impression he had given, Knowles had had no intention of giving up without a fight. He’d had no intention of betraying the country he had served his whole life.

It would require a different approach to the one he was used to – a chess match instead of a special forces assault – but the endgame remained the same: the destruction of Kelvin Cunningham, his organisation and their influence on the office of the president of the United States.

And so the fight had begun.

The first shot fired had been Elizabeth Kirk, and the allegation she had brought to him from Tom Quilty. A close confidant and supporter, Kirk had not believed it. She had made that clear. But Knowles did not want that. He did not want Kirk to accept the easy explanation. And so he ended her tenure with the CIA and had her appointed to the directorship of the new United Nations’ International Security Bureau.

It was a ‘promotion’ which, Knowles knew, would both frustrate Kirk and feed any suspicions she might have had. Cunningham had been against it, at first. He saw Kirk as no threat; she clearly did not buy the Tootkai report, so sending her away was needless. But Knowles had insisted, and he had persuaded Cunningham that the directorship of the ISB would keep her focus elsewhere.

That much was true. Kirk knew only one way to do her job, and that was with absolute focus.

But Knowles knew that it would also eat away at her. She would see it as banishment, and she would always wonder why. And that, in turn, would keep the Tootkai allegations at the back of her mind. Ready to be deployed if the opportunity arose.

An opportunity which had taken the dangerous form of Joe Dempsey.

Knowles had first encountered Dempsey in Trafalgar Square in London, during the assassination of British politician Neil Matthewson. That had been a little over two years ago.

Knowles had followed Dempsey’s investigation into that shooting, during which the Brit had proved himself effective, ruthless and – above all else – utterly incorruptible. Hell, the man had killed his closest friend and brought down both his own agency and the man tipped to be Britain’s next prime minister.

All because it was what his duty demanded.

Knowles had identified then that Dempsey was the weapon Kirk would need to unravel the fiction of Tootkai. And so he had manipulated the fallout from the Matthewson shooting, to bring Dempsey to New York as primary agent of the ISB.

To place him under Kirk’s direct command.

It had been Knowles’ masterstroke. Kirk and Dempsey were the ideal team to investigate his presidency. All that was needed was the right prompt to get them started. And then Knowles was sure that they would discover what really happened.

But then his plan had stalled. He needed Cunningham to make a mistake. To draw attention to Knowles. Enough to make someone start looking for answers. But for the next two years there was nothing. The man was faultless.