Bennett and her two brothers had been born in quick succession in the late thirties, as Kansas was being ravaged by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Three years later her father disappeared without a trace. The only things he’d ever given her were her surname and her large, piercing blue eyes. Her mother had given her children their thick hair, golden skin, and three traditional tribal first names. She’d wanted to give each of them something to live up to, and honour their mixed heritage, but she’d just ended up alienating them even further from both the white and Kiowa communities. Bennett’s brothers were named Enapy and Hori, which meant brave and strong. But they were dull, absent-minded children. Abey was an old Sioux word for ‘leaf’. It was supposed to encourage Bennett to be nurturing, and it did, but it also inspired her eventually to blow away from Lakin.

When Bennett was six, her mother developed acute emphysema. All the dust storms had finally caught up with her. She couldn’t work, and she didn’t have enough money for medicine. Bennett’s brothers were too lost in their empty heads to even notice. She was already growing up fast, and after her mother’s diagnosis she had to do it even faster.

The white doctors had no interest in treating ‘a sick squaw and her half-caste kids,’ and the Kiowa elders still considered Bennett’s mother’s union with a white man too much of a betrayal to offer any help. Bennett had forced them both to change their minds.

It was this same strength of will that Bennett had used to get herself through school and then, after years of trying, into the CIA. She was the first Native American to work for the agency since the Navajo code talkers in the war. Her posting to London should have felt like a triumph. And sometimes it did, but a lot of the time it also felt like the latest fight in an unending series of battles to prove her worth.

Bennett had thought Knox might be the key to getting her bosses to take her seriously after shadowing him from Cambridge straight to Holloway prison. Now she was sure.

She’d almost taken the direct approach, sliding up next to him in Bar Italia. But she’d held back, waited to see where he was headed—because anyone who drank two double espressos that late was definitely heading somewhere. It had been a mistake. She’d tried to be inconspicuous, even wearing the trilby a man had left on the seat next to her on the tube a few weeks ago so Knox wouldn’t recognise her. But it had just made her more obvious.