Knox reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the bundle of papers.

‘I don’t know if they found a way to reverse-engineer Pipistrelle, or just managed to replicate your genius by sheer chance,’ he said. ‘But these calculations aren’t nonsense.’

White flicked through the papers. His face fell as he scanned the calculations.

‘And these,’ Knox continued, handing over the passports, ‘are professional jobs. Only a few outfits that can create such convincing fakes. And we’re one of them.’

White tested the passports, running his fingers along the covers and pages, checking the subtle security features most people had no idea were there. He had to admit Knox was right—they were near-perfect forgeries.

‘I know you don’t want to think about it,’ Knox said. ‘But what if this means Pipistrelle’s already been blown?’

‘It hasn’t,’ White replied. It was a knee-jerk, protective reaction.

‘But what if it has? What if the Russians already have their own bugs in every embassy and hotel in the city? If they’re as good as Pipistrelle we’d never find them.’

White hated scaremongering, and he had no interest in getting caught up in Knox’s endless conspiracies about traitors and moles. But he couldn’t ignore the passports he was still holding, or the Italians’ equations that looked disturbingly close to his own.

‘If they’re really that good,’ White admitted, ‘we wouldn’t even know they were there.’

‘Until operations are compromised or assets are blown, and MI5 is landed with the blame.’ Knox hoped playing on White’s pride in the Service was the last push he needed.

‘So,’ White said, finally, ‘what do we do?’

‘Whatever we can,’ Knox replied.

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

The CIA archives under the US embassy were as quiet as ever, just a few other clerks on the weekend shift struggling with the amount of filing the run-up to the OECD conference had generated. None of them were surprised to see another of their ranks walking around the record stacks, and none of them paid Bennett enough attention to realise she wasn’t there to file papers away but to hunt for them.

She began, as she always did, with Bianchi and Moretti’s records. But when she spun the large wheel that opened the archive stacks and pulled them out of their hanging drawers the folders were empty. The last time she’d looked at them, barely forty-eight hours ago, they’d contained several months’ worth of tracking reports and field observations. She checked the log sheet stapled to the front of the first folder. They hadn’t already been moved to deep storage. They’d been checked out at midnight on Friday. Three letters were written next to the timestamp—COS. They stood for Chief of Station.