Tim Glister - Red Corona

He’d played the part of the harried deputy perfectly, all the while using Knox’s hatred of Manning to blind him to what was really going on.

‘I went snooping, as you suggested,’ White said. ‘And discovered that Peterson had quietly activated a safe house in Kennington. He’d tried to hide the order, but not very well. There was no way I could come and talk to you last night after the stunt you pulled at RIBA, so I went to see your American friend. She’s been keeping watch overnight.’

‘What happened?’ Knox asked.

‘Five minutes ago she called me from a phone box in Berkeley Square to tell me that a man fitting Peterson’s description arrived at the safe house this morning and left again with Miss Valera. They’re now at the Richmond Hotel on Conduit Street.’

So Knox was right. Peterson had kidnapped Valera under orders from the KGB, and he was going to use the conference as cover for getting her out of the country.

‘He killed Bianchi and Moretti, and now he’s going to hand her over to the Russians,’ Knox replied. ‘I need to stop him.’

‘Yes, you do,’ White replied.

‘And you’ve come to break me out of jail?’

‘Almost,’ White said. ‘Punch me.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You can’t send anyone else to help Bennett, and I can hardly despatch my engineers as cavalry. It has to be you. But you also can’t just walk out of here.’ He squared up to Knox. ‘So punch me, make your daring escape, and I’ll make sure you get a head start.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. There had been plenty of times Knox had wanted to give him a right hook, but this wasn’t one of them.

‘I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t. You’re wasting time.’

‘Fine,’ Knox said. Then he shifted his weight, pulled his arm back, and slammed his fist into the side of White’s face. White took a couple of stumbling steps backwards before stopping and righting himself. He felt a bubble of blood on the edge of his lower lip.

‘That should do it,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ Knox replied, moving towards the door. ‘And thank you.’

‘One more thing,’ White said, leaning one hand on the table and caressing his jawbone with the other. ‘I reviewed the calculations you gave me. They’re crude and unsophisticated, but with a little refinement they’d work. If Peterson has them too then Pipistrelle is blown.’

It took Knox less than ten minutes to get out of Leconfield House and run across Mayfair. The whole way he thought about what else Peterson might be handing over to the Russians along with Valera. He didn’t have the papers Knox had discovered, but Knox had no idea what Peterson might have extracted from the Italians before killing them. Or what he might have taken from MI5. If he’d somehow managed to pass on information about Atlas, it would be an even bigger disaster than London being covered in undetectable listening devices, stealing all the West’s secrets. With a supercomputer, Russian intelligence capabilities would take a massive, and terrifying, leap forward. No one and nowhere would be safe.

Knox slowed to a walk in Conduit Street, ignoring the burning of his scar and the dull ache that still covered his side. He found Bennett sitting in White’s Anglia, staring so intently at the turn-in to the Richmond that he had to bang on the passenger-side window to get her attention.

‘How was your night?’ she asked, unlocking the door to let him in.

‘Uncomfortable,’ Knox replied.

‘Ditto.’

Knox told Bennett that the man she’d seen with Valera was Nicholas Peterson, Manning’s deputy.

‘So Manning is still behind all this?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Knox said. ‘I think he’s a patsy. Peterson is the mole and he used Manning to deflect attention as he burrowed deeper into MI5.’

She filled him in on the details of the morning that White hadn’t had time to pass on, and told him that she hadn’t seen Peterson or Valera leave the hotel, or the black Jaguar come back.

‘Unless they slipped out when I was on the phone to White, they’re still in there.’

‘So we just need to walk in and ask which room the MI5 traitor and kidnapped Russian defector are staying in,’ Knox said

‘We only need to get past the front desk,’ she replied. ‘And I’ve got a plan for that.’ She pointed at a small newspaper kiosk down New Bond Street that had a rack of London maps hanging off its awning. ‘We’re just a couple of tourists coming back from our morning stroll.’

‘That might work for you, but it wouldn’t explain this,’ Knox replied, gesturing at the bruise across his face that was still an intense, deep purple. ‘I’ve also got an idea, though.’

They got out of the car and crossed the junction to the Richmond, pausing just before the turn-in.

‘Give me a minute, then follow me in,’ Knox said.

Then he ran round the corner, through the hotel’s front doors, and straight up to the reception desk.

‘Sorry, excuse me. Hello,’ he said to the young man at the desk between panting breaths. ‘Oh God,’ he continued, his eyes darting across the foyer and back to the receptionist again. ‘He’s going to kill me.’

‘Can I help, sir?’ the receptionist asked, covering his confusion with professional courtesy.

‘My boss, is he already here?’ Knox spun round, facing away from the desk. ‘A man, about ten years older than me, grey suit?’ He turned back to the receptionist. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t get here first. This is it. I’m done.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the receptionist replied, ‘but I can’t give out any information about our guests. Or possible guests.’

‘Just tell me,’ Knox said, a pleading edge in his voice, ‘did he look angry?’

The receptionist looked at Knox’s desperate eyes, and the bruise across his cheek, and very slightly shook his head.

‘Oh, thank God,’ Knox said. ‘Maybe I can still fix this.’ He started to move away from the desk to the bank of lifts. ‘Fifth floor, right?’ he called back to the receptionist.

‘Sixth,’ he replied, instinctively.

‘Of course,’ Knox said, pantomiming smacking the side of his head and wincing at the pain it caused in his cheek.

As the lift doors closed behind Knox, a woman walked through the hotel doors, drawing the receptionist’s gaze away from the lifts. Halfway across the foyer she turned towards the receptionist, raised up a folded A-to-Z of the city, and said, ‘Lovely morning out there,’ in a broad American accent.

‘Yes, madam,’ he replied, immediately forgetting her as he went back to reviewing the morning’s depressingly short list of departures and arrivals.

Bennett reached the bank of lifts in time to see the display above the one Knox had taken stop at the sixth floor. She called the next lift, rode it up to the fourth floor, then took the stairs the rest of the way.

By the time she reached the sixth floor Knox had already made it most of the way down the corridor, moving silently from door to door listening for any movement inside.

There was only one room left, at the very end of the corridor.

Bennett tiptoed over to Knox and they both pressed their ears against the last door. At first they heard nothing, then what sounded like another door somewhere inside the room being opened.

Knox stepped away from the door, and then opened another across from it, revealing a cleaning trolley. He moved it under the spotlight next to Bennett, pressed his back against the wall, and gestured for Bennett to do the same.

‘Be ready as soon as the handle moves,’ Knox whispered. Then he knocked on the door.

Inside the suite, Valera, who had just come back out from her room, instinctively walked towards the sound of knocking.