She found Emmeline Pankhurst in a biographical encyclopaedia of famous women in history. The book was short, ordered chronologically, and Pankhurst was the final entry. Bennett felt an immediate connection to this dead foreign woman, the cause she’d led, and her belief that acceptance was something to be claimed, not just asked for. This sentiment became Bennett’s driving force, and it had pushed her all the way from Lakin to the CIA.

London was her first international posting, and she’d gone looking for Pankhurst’s grave as soon as she’d arrived in the city. She visited it whenever she felt her own resolve wavering, whenever she felt beaten down by the constant struggle to be taken seriously by her colleagues or, like now, when she just needed to think about her next move.

Bennett’s superiors were paying close attention to the fallout from Holland’s mysterious coma and Manning’s ascension to the top of MI5 days before the OECD conference. But they didn’t think either of these strange events had anything to do with the lingering rumours about Russian infiltration. Bennett did.

Her suspicions had led her to Dr Kaspar, and she’d been extremely careful timing her visit to Cambridge so she’d be able to take a look at his office undisturbed. She hadn’t expected to be interrupted halfway through her search of the old man’s den by one of MI5’s most senior officers, and she wanted to know why he’d been there. The obvious answer was that he was a mole hastily shutting down his network. Obvious and stupid. If Knox was a Soviet agent he’d have disappeared out of the country as soon as people had begun to ask questions about what had happened to Holland. The fact that he hadn’t, Bennett thought, meant something else was going on. She wondered if Knox was still hunting the mole himself. And if he was, then she might be able to use him.

After a few more minutes standing quietly in front of Pankhurst’s grave, staring at the details of the headstone that stood almost a full foot taller than her and that she knew so well, she left the cemetery.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Valera stood on a low rise looking out over the tundra. By her reckoning she was about thirty kilometres from the Finnish border.

She had dug Ledjo’s body out of the rubble and sat cradling it for over an hour in the ruins of Povenets B. Long enough for all the dust, soot, and whatever else the explosion had thrown up into the air to start falling back down to earth, blanketing the naukograd in a black, acrid snow.