‘Do you have anything to say in your defence?’ Medev’s voice was still calm.

‘You can’t blame me for the incompetence of my workers,’ Zukolev spluttered.

‘Yes I can.’

Medev moved up the bed towards Zukolev. Zukolev frantically tried to claw his way out from under the sheets holding him down.

‘The GRU will protect me from these baseless accusations,’ Zukolev said. His voice was now high and desperate.

Medev put a hand on Zukolev’s shoulder, as if trying to soothe him. Zukolev stopped moving, frozen in terror.

‘They won’t,’ Medev replied.

The GRU and KGB might trade occasional jurisdictional blows, but everyone knew who held ultimate power. Medev tightened his grip on Zukolev’s shoulder, then pulled a syringe from his jacket pocket and plunged it into Zukolev’s neck. Zukolev tried to call out, but no sound came from his mouth. He was dead by the time Medev slipped quietly back out of the room.

As Medev made his way back down the corridor to the nurses’ station, his mind finally made a connection it had been groping at since his morning briefing from Rykov.

He asked the nurse on duty if he could borrow her phone, then dialled the long list of numbers that could connect him securely to the Lubyanka. When Rykov answered, he told him that under no circumstances could the Americans be allowed to retrieve the next Corona payload. With twenty-two million square kilometres of Soviet Union for them to spy on it would be terrible luck if the Americans had managed to photograph one small, smouldering naukograd. But it wasn’t a risk Medev wanted to take.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Bennett made her way across the north side of Grosvenor Square towards the US embassy. It was an imposing presence. Its hard-edged, Modernist facade took up the whole western side of the square, and a large sculpture of a bald eagle with outstretched wings looked down from its roof on everyone who approached it.

The embassy had opened just over a year ago, and its interior had been designed to be as much of a statement about America’s Sense of importance as its brash exterior. The six above-ground levels contained vast conference rooms, banks of communications stations, and row after row of offices—each one’s size correlating precisely with the rank of its occupier. The CIA took up the entire fourth floor, as well as a considerable amount of the building’s subterranean levels, which had been given over to the agency’s local archives.

This was where Bennett headed after flashing her security credentials at an uninterested guard and slipping through one of the small staff entrances on the side of the building.