Yes, I saw plenty of parallels with the current geopolitical situation, but I also enjoyed reading it. The characters came to life, the plot was pacy, the villains were scary and the heroes believable. And oh the nostalgia! Central locking for cars was obviously a fairly new thing (not remote central locking, mind), since I mentioned it more than once. Then there were the Filofaxes, floppy disks and cassette tapes. People smoked on aeroplanes, Tower Records had arrived at Piccadilly Circus, and Germany was still divided into East and West.

I’d forgotten that the listening base where Martin Hepton works was sited at Binbrook, Lincolnshire – a location I’d chosen because my sister Maureen (married to an RAF technician) had lived there for several years and I’d stayed with her as a teenager over the course of one or two long, hot school-holiday summers, back in the days when I was convinced I was going to be either a rock star or a poet. This is partly why I have the notion that ‘Coffin Burial’ must have been a poem. But during the course of writing the book, I started disliking that title. My British spy satellite was called Zephyr, and a zephyr is a light breeze or ‘the west wind’. Bearing in mind that (influenced by Alan Moore’s comic Watchmen) I was calling my spy novel Watchman, maybe I had the idea that my novels could all start with the letter ‘w’. The third Rebus novel, after all, would be titled Wolfman (before an astute editor in the US asked me to alter it to Tooth and Nail so as not to deter non-horror book buyers). The George Bernard Shaw quote at the start of the book was probably another piece of serendipity – the ‘false wind from over the water’ might refer to either the US or Russia. It certainly hints that those you think of as your friends may actually have hidden intentions and ulterior motives.

I’ve given the original printed text a polish, hopefully ridding it of those flawed sentences and scenes. A few words have been added here and there, while others have been removed or altered, but it is essentially the same book that it always was, just thirty years older and a little wiser …

Ian Rankin, 2019

Part I

Editorial in London Herald, 15 July 1990

1

He watched the planet earth on his monitor. It was quite a sight. Around him, others were doing the same thing, though not perhaps with an equal sense of astonishment. Some had grown blasé over the years: when you’d seen one earth, you’d seen them all. But not Martin Hepton. He still felt awe, reverence, emotion, whatever. If he had called it a spiritual feeling, the others might have laughed, so he kept his thoughts to himself. And watched.