Tim Glister - Red Corona

‘I’m not?’

‘We are going to work together.’

Peterson looked, and sounded, surprised by this sudden attempt to shift the power dynamic between them. ‘We are?’

‘Yes. We are going to be partners.’

Peterson let out a short laugh. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because I have something more valuable to sell than just a way to manipulate radio signals. You want to give people a way to eavesdrop on each other. I can give them something bigger. Something much bigger.’

‘Why should I trust you?’ he asked.

Valera walked over to the bed, put her cup down on the tray, then casually sat on the edge of the bed, exactly where Peterson had perched a few minutes earlier.

‘You don’t have to trust me,’ she replied. ‘I don’t trust you. You just have to see what we both stand to gain. I have the product, you have the buyers. It makes sense for us to help each other get what we want.’

It took Peterson a moment to process the new possibilities Valera was presenting. He’d discovered too late that the research Bianchi and Moretti had given him was fake. He’d always planned to have them killed rather than let them walk away and sell their imitation Pipistrelle technology themselves. He’d never suspected that they’d double-cross him as well and leave him with a set of useless, meaningless equations. But he was, above everything else, a pragmatist, so he’d still been prepared to sell their bogus work to as many interested parties as possible, then disappear without a trace and with a very healthy balance in his bank account.

But he’d rather not have to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. So when Knox told him he’d discovered the Italians’ secret research he’d sent a couple of men after him for it. Unfortunately, they’d failed rather pathetically and he’d found himself back where Bianchi and Moretti had left him. Then Irina Valera had appeared, dropped into his lap like a deus ex machina , and now she might be giving him the chance to achieve something beyond even his wildest ambitions.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Freedom,’ she replied. ‘Enough money to go wherever I want and be left alone.’

Peterson smiled, at her and to himself. He was happy to give her both, or at least the promise of them.

‘I think I can help you with that.’

‘Good,’ Valera said, getting up from the bed. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Well then,’ Peterson said, picking up the tray and standing next to the open, broken door like a dutiful butler. ‘After you.’

No heads had turned in the ballroom as Knox was escorted down the grand staircase and out through the RIBA building’s front doors to a waiting car that Manning had somehow summoned along with the Watchers.

He was driven straight to Leconfield House and taken directly from the subterranean car park to an interrogation cell on the third floor. Knox didn’t know if it was intentional or just a coincidence that he was put in the same room that Sandra Horne had occupied while she’d been held at MI5 headquarters after the Calder Hall Ring was blown.

The cell also reminded Knox of the room in Holloway he’d visited Horne in. The walls were bare, a table and chairs sat in the middle, and a narrow shelf with a thin mattress on it ran the length of the back wall.

The guards left Knox with a large jug of water and a single glass. They didn’t take his jacket, belt, or shoelaces. They either thought there was no risk of him killing himself or they didn’t care if he did.

For the first hour of his incarceration Knox indulged in the fantasy that the Watchers who had witnessed his tirade against Manning were repeating his accusations through the corridors of Leconfield House and were going to come and ask him to lead a rebellion against the director general at any moment. For the second hour he alternated between sitting at the table and pacing around the room, thinking about what White might have done with Bianchi and Moretti’s passports and research. For the third hour he wondered if he’d been forgotten. Manning hadn’t appeared to gloat, or sent Peterson to do it for him. No one had come to break him out, but no one had come to rough him up either.

At about nine thirty he finally lay down on the mattress. He felt dizzy for a moment and realised he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything. He got up, poured himself a large glass of water, swallowed it in a single gulp, and returned to his bed.

He decided that whatever Manning had planned for him would wait until the morning, or maybe even after the conference was finished, and he’d dealt with Valera and whatever else he had planned over the next two days.

However, the longer Knox stared at the ceiling, the less he was able to shake a feeling that had been quietly taking root in his gut since Portland Place. Manning hadn’t broken character the entire time Knox had been attacking him. His temper barely flared even when Knox accused him of being a traitor and personally responsible for multiple deaths.

As Knox relived the confrontation over and over in his mind, Manning only ever looked disappointed and hurt, like a gentleman whose honour was being unfairly smeared. Even when Knox was being marched off there was no little sneer or wink telling him he was right but had still lost.

It raised a worrying question. Did Manning’s mask not slip because he was the greatest double agent in the history of espionage, or because there was no mask to begin with? Knox realised that he hadn’t just thought Manning was the mole, he’d wanted him to be it. He’d wanted to tie all the loose threads of the man’s career into a rope he could hang him from. But would anyone else do the same in Knox’s place? Manning himself had said Knox had a personal interest in bringing him down. Maybe it was too personal.

Perhaps this was all just the final act in Manning’s long rise to power, and Knox was simply a bit player, done with after strutting and fretting his hour on the stage. It was a sobering thought. But Knox wasn’t ready to completely write himself out of the narrative just yet. He was still the hero of his own story, and if Manning wasn’t his nemesis then someone else had to be.

At the same time Knox was lying on his back in Leconfield House trying to weave a new thread that would connect all the events of the last week and lead him to the person behind it all, Bennett was sitting in the front seat of a car that wasn’t hers desperately trying to stay awake.

After Knox had left 66 Portland Place flanked by Watchers, Manning and Finney had returned to the reception, leaving Bennett alone in the exhibition gallery.

She spent five minutes processing the magnitude of what had just happened, and just how badly wrong things had gone. She decided there was no point returning to Grosvenor Square. In fact, she figured that chances were her security clearance had already been revoked. Instead, she left the RIBA building and walked up Portland Place to Regent’s Park tube station. She briefly thought about returning to Brompton Cemetery, to pay one final visit to Pankhurst’s grave, but decided against it. She’d come to London to prove she was just as smart and capable as any man in the CIA. Now she would be leaving in disgrace, written off as rash, emotional, a liability – a prime example of why women shouldn’t have ideas above their station. She wasn’t sure Pankhurst’s ghost would forgive her.

The boarding house Bennett called home was on Neville Street, ten minutes’ walk from South Kensington tube station. The house, number nine, was three storeys tall, the first covered in white stucco and the second two exposed brick. Unlike the other houses in the street, which were in immaculate condition, the stucco and bricks of number nine were both crumbling. The black and white mosaic steps that led up to the front door were cracked, and the door itself hadn’t been painted in a long time. The owner, Bennett learned shortly after moving in, had bought the house a long time ago, lived somewhere in the country, and rarely came into the city.