Silva was twenty-eight years old. Her father was British through and through, but her mother was born of Portuguese immigrants. Her parents had divorced when she was ten and at some point in her teens she’d adopted her mother’s maiden name. Partly it had been an act of solidarity with her mother, partly a rejection of her father. Her Portuguese side was evident in her light coffee-coloured skin and her dark-brown hair. Her eyes were a mixture of her father’s and mother’s, a grey-green that was the shade of the sea after a fierce storm. She was small, but lithe, strong and agile. In Basic Training, her instructors had been surprised she’d come in the top ten per cent on the loaded march. Her heart, she knew, carried a good portion of her mother’s easy-going southern European attitude, combined with a dash of the fiery temper which had undoubtedly hastened her parents’ separation. What was inside her head came from her father: a calm, stubborn orderliness that she’d done resisting and now used to her advantage. In the army both sides of her character had been invaluable.

Nowadays it was all she could do to remind herself that the military part of her life had ended when the judge advocate had sentenced her to twelve months in prison and dismissal from the service. The charge was negligence and, as her lawyer had been keen to explain, her situation could have been very much worse since initially there’d been talk of manslaughter or even murder.

She blinked as something moved against the brightness of the sky. Someone. There was a kid up there in the car park, held up by his father so he could look down on the street. The boy wasn’t much older than a toddler and he pointed at Silva and waved. For a second she wondered if she knew the kid, but then she realised it was the uniform he was interested in. Silva forced herself to give a half smile and waved back. As the boy laughed with delight, emotion welled up in her stomach. Sadness, regret, self-disgust.

Stephen Holm wasn’t usually asleep at four in the afternoon, but then he didn’t often work a twenty-four-hour shift. When he’d stumbled back to his flat at seven that morning he’d tried to remain awake by fortifying himself with a cup of extra-strong coffee, but despite the caffeine boost he’d found his eyelids heavy. The long hours in the windowless situation room at MI5’s headquarters in Thames House had led to something akin to jet lag, and eventually he’d given up and gone to bed. For a few minutes he’d lain in the dark and tried to calm his mind and then he was out like a light bulb. Hours later he awoke in an instant as his phone blared out. He grabbed the phone and thumbed to answer.