The distant blast of a car horn woke Valera. She had no idea where she was, just that she was no longer in the dark room, tied to a chair and surrounded by faceless, shouting figures. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but for the first time in a week she didn’t feel completely exhausted. If it wasn’t for the thick purple bruises on her wrists she might even have thought the dark room had just been a bad dream.

She was lying on top of a narrow, soft bed. Her clothes were dry and her shoes were still on her feet. She felt clean, really clean. There was no grit under her nails, no foul stench lingering in her hair.

She swung her legs off the bed—they were heavy, but they moved—and took in her new surroundings. The room was empty apart from the bed. The walls were bare, the floorboards exposed but varnished. There was a large sash window on one side of the room, and a door on the other. Valera slipped off the bed and stepped lightly round the room. She tested the door. It was locked. She peered through the window, looking for something that would reveal where she was, but all she could tell was that she was on the first floor of a house in the middle of a narrow street and, judging from the short shadows she could see on the few cars below her, it was the middle of the day.

She’d expected someone to come after her, but not the head of the KGB scientific directorate. And she definitely hadn’t expected to watch a bullet pierce his skull and shower her in blood and brains.

She couldn’t imagine the KGB killing one of their own so openly and brazenly, which meant someone else must now be holding her captive. The Swedes were the only people who knew anything close to the true extent of her breakthrough and what it was worth—not even the GRU or KGB knew how far her work had really progressed—but they already had her. She may not have served up all of her secrets on a plate, but she was cooperating with them.

She remembered the American woman and British man who, just like Medev, had appeared out of thin air in Skansen. Who were they? And who were they working for? For all she knew, they were another distraction, working with the people who kidnapped her, and right now she might just be enjoying a temporary reprieve before being thrown back into the dark room.