‘You don’t have to trust me,’ she replied. ‘I don’t trust you. You just have to see what we both stand to gain. I have the product, you have the buyers. It makes sense for us to help each other get what we want.’

It took Peterson a moment to process the new possibilities Valera was presenting. He’d discovered too late that the research Bianchi and Moretti had given him was fake. He’d always planned to have them killed rather than let them walk away and sell their imitation Pipistrelle technology themselves. He’d never suspected that they’d double-­cross him as well and leave him with a set of useless, meaningless equations. But he was, above everything else, a pragmatist, so he’d still been prepared to sell their bogus work to as many interested parties as possible, then disappear without a trace and with a very healthy balance in his bank account.

But he’d rather not have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. So when Knox told him he’d discovered the Italians’ secret research he’d sent a couple of men after him for it. Unfortunately, they’d failed rather pathetically and he’d found himself back where Bianchi and Moretti had left him. Then Irina Valera had appeared, dropped into his lap like a deus ex machina, and now she might be giving him the chance to achieve something beyond even his wildest ambitions.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Freedom,’ she replied. ‘Enough money to go wherever I want and be left alone.’

Peterson smiled, at her and to himself. He was happy to give her both, or at least the promise of them.

‘I think I can help you with that.’

‘Good,’ Valera said, getting up from the bed. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Well then,’ Peterson said, picking up the tray and standing next to the open, broken door like a dutiful butler. ‘After you.’

Chapter 55

Chapter 55

No heads had turned in the ballroom as Knox was escorted down the grand staircase and out through the RIBA building’s front doors to a waiting car that Manning had somehow summoned along with the Watchers.

He was driven straight to Leconfield House and taken directly from the subterranean car park to an interrogation cell on the third floor. Knox didn’t know if it was intentional or just a coincidence that he was put in the same room that Sandra Horne had occupied while she’d been held at MI5 headquarters after the Calder Hall Ring was blown.

The cell also reminded Knox of the room in Holloway he’d visited Horne in. The walls were bare, a table and chairs sat in the middle, and a narrow shelf with a thin mattress on it ran the length of the back wall.