‘If we go back to the States and this thing checks out, we’ll give you a green card and all the work you can handle,’ Murphy said. ‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll go our separate ways on good terms.’

He was playing it cool, but now that he understood the full scope of what Valera was offering, Dixon could tell Murphy would have said anything to get her on a plane.

When they did get back to America, they realised just how valuable Valera was, and the impact of the events surrounding her escape from the Soviet Union. An entire naukograd had been put out of commission, and the KGB scientific directorate had lost its chief. The CIA had been handed a major advantage and it didn’t intend to squander it.

Dixon and Valera had made a good team, working together to bring her lab work to life in the real world, and slowly getting to know each other.

They’d spent months developing and refining Valera’s discovery into a fully fledged Earth-to-orbit communications system, secretly testing it in Corona satellite after satellite. They’d even included a version of it in John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule when he finally became the first American to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7 six months ago.

Dixon had led the celebrations when the communications system took over control of Friendship 7 as Glenn briefly lost contact with ground control over his standard radio during his descent back to Earth. The official story was that Glenn had triumphantly piloted the Mercury capsule all the way to its splashdown site by himself, but as far as Dixon was concerned, his electronic co-pilot had been the real hero.

Suddenly Kennedy’s twin dreams of putting a man on the moon and advancing America’s intelligence-gathering capabilities so fast and so far that no one else would be able to catch them both seemed achievable. Dixon could relax at last after two years of constant stress. But his downtime didn’t last long. The president and the CIA were still waiting for him to come up with a way to hunt the Vietcong from space. And Valera, as Murphy had promised, was offered all the research projects she could handle.

Dixon had always been astonished by Valera’s seemingly limitless capacity for work. She was always the first in the lab in the morning and the last to leave at night. When he’d finally persuaded her to take a little break of her own and celebrate everything she’d achieved he understood why.