As the KGB officer watched the American plane fly over the trawler its rear cargo door opened and a large hooped hook extended from it, snaking out into space.

The Hercules had been sent to retrieve the Corona payload as it fell through the sky. It slowed down as it closed on its prey, letting its hook fall beneath it. It swooped mere metres over the parachute, but failed to snag the thin guidelines. The plane banked, lined up again, and missed again.

When the Hercules came back round for a third pass, the crew of the Shining Emerald started to smell a catch. And the Russian started to hope. He’d already watched the Americans snatch their capsule out of thin air twice. If he reported a third failed mission to the KGB residentura in Mexico City he wasn’t sure what would happen to him—a demotion if he was lucky, a trip somewhere far less hospitable than Mexico or Moscow if he wasn’t.

The captain swung the wheel and pushed the throttle. If the Hercules missed again and the capsule splashed down, the Shining Emerald would only have a few minutes to grab it off the ocean surface before its salt plug dissolved, flooding it and consigning it to the depths.

‘Andale! Andale!’ the crew chanted as one. In the sudden excitement of the race the KGB officer didn’t know if they-were begging their captain or the Americans to go faster.

The Hercules had one last chance. It went into a steep dive, racing the capsule and the trawler to the splashdown point. For a terrifying moment, the Russian wondered if the Americans were going to ram the capsule and maybe even the Shining Emerald, destroying them both rather than letting the KGB capture the precious secrets the spy satellite had dropped from orbit.

But at the last second the plane flattened out, barely ten metres above the water. Then it pulled up, inclining over the capsule so the parachute grazed and snagged on the underside of the fuselage. The payload smacked against the Hercules until the force of the plane thrusting up into the sky shook the parachute loose and at last it was caught by the hook and swept up behind the plane.

A minute later, the Hercules disappeared back over the horizon towards California, leaving the Shining Emerald and the KGB officer sitting alone in the middle of the ocean.

JULY 1961

JULY 1961

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The Gresham Arms was not a salubrious establishment.

A casual observer might assume it had seen better days, but it hadn’t. Tucked away in a quiet backstreet off Whitehall, it had struggled to deliver its various owners any kind of profit for two hundred years. But, from the height of Empire and through two world wars, its doors had opened at the same time every day, offering the same three things to whoever needed them—time, space, and a drink.