‘She was on a plane to DC by lunch on Monday,’ Bennett said. ‘That I was right about,’ she added, smirking.

‘Shame.’ Knox’s voice took on a sharp tone. ‘I’d have liked to have continued our conversation.’

‘Don’t be too hard on her,’ Bennett said.

‘She shot me in the heart,’ Knox replied.

‘She was the one who told the receptionist at the Richmond to call the emergency services,’ Bennett replied, smiling again. ‘Technically, she saved your life.’

JULY 1962

JULY 1962

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Mission control was buzzing with nervous energy. Dixon watched scientists and engineers rush between huge banks of whirring computers and the blinking control panels and screens they fed a constant stream of information to. Everyone around him was busy with some crucial job, but he knew he was basically just there to pad out the room.

It was almost a year to the day since he’d found himself sitting in a room in central London, straight off a red-eye from Washington, with little idea about why he’d just spent the night crossing the Atlantic.

Murphy had refused to tell him who he was supposed to be meeting despite him asking on the flight, in the taxi into the city, and as they’d climbed the several flights of narrow stairs that led up from the anonymous black-lacquered door just off Dover Street in Mayfair to their mysterious appointment. There had been no one waiting to greet them. Murphy had produced a key to unlock the door on the street, then another one for the room at the top of the building.

It turned out Dixon had travelled three and a half thousand miles to meet a lady called Irina Valera. She’d arrived twenty minutes after they had. When she stepped into the room by herself, Murphy, for the first time, didn’t seem entirely in control of the situation.

Where’s Devereux?’ Murphy asked Valera, using Peterson’s alias.

‘He is no longer part of this arrangement,’ she replied. She didn’t offer any further explanation.

Murphy became even more confused when it became apparent that the woman who’d come to meet them wasn’t there to sell them some new type of clandestine listening technology, but something several orders of magnitude more valuable.

Valera described her breakthrough using the same analogy of her room that stretched around the world, at which point Dixon realised she might be the answer to most, if not all, of his problems. He asked her a string of technical questions and could tell from their short conversation that Valera was on the level—and that she was in a rush to do a deal.

Once he’d given his nod to Murphy, she laid down her terms. Her spread-spectrum code-division technology in exchange for a home in America, a job, and protection.