It would have to be.

A fastpath rotation opened before Roger, and Jed’s voice sounded: ‘Step right in, buddy.’

Roger had called Jed from Erdös Endway, an offshoot of Borges Boulevard, saying only that he had good news. Not that anything was guaranteed: this was the first step into the training programme – one with a failure rate of ninety-something per cent, apparently – and never mind an actual operational career like Dad.

Reality swirled.

‘Daistral’s warmed up.’ Jed held out a goblet. ‘For you, mate.’

Roger was in an apartment lounge decorated with holo streamers blaring Congratulations! while a lean-faced woman – Clara James, now part of Jed’s life – raised her own goblet and said: ‘You flew her, Roger. Well done.’ She came forward to give him a one armed hug, drink in her other hand.

‘Yeah, well done.’ Jed clapped Roger’s shoulder.

A three-person party. But who else did he know?

‘Thank you both. But that’s not all that happened today.’

Jed grinned. ‘Guess your balls dropped, old mate. Seems like—’

‘Ahem. Jed.’ Clara poked him in the shoulder with a fore knuckle fist. ‘Behave.’

‘Ow. But his voice is deeper already.’

Clara winked. ‘I noticed.’

Roger looked at them, his friends, knowing that Jed must have been security-vetted – he and Clara had moved in together, after all – but with restricted clearance, presumably. Only Clara was an intelligence officer.

He looked at her. ‘I’m going to be one of you.’

With a muscular grin, Jed said: ‘What, a woman?’

Something there?

Roger detected a private joke between Jed and Clara, but no more than that, no hint of what it entailed. As for Clara, her obsidian eyes were focused on him, Roger, her colleague-to-be if he ever graduated.

‘Are you willing to pay the price?’

‘Maybe I already did.’

Jed let out a melodramatic breath.

‘It’s like spook central,’ he said. ‘What have I got myself into?’

‘Tangleknot, then.’ Clara still looked serious.

Roger nodded. ‘Starting tomorrow.’

‘Didn’t we try that earlier, darling?’ asked Jed.

‘Oh, for—’

Then they looked at each other and laughed, clinked goblets, and drank a toast. Things were beginning to happen: a career under Roger’s control, instead of a maelstrom of events sweeping him up without reason or predictability.

Maybe I can live a normal life.

Except, of course, that was not what he had signed up for; nothing like it.

TWO

EARTH, 1954 AD

It was a year since her last visit to Rupert’s office, and this time Gavriela was in a rage, in tears as she stood there, fighting not to slam the Times onto the polished desk.

‘He deserved so much.’

Rupert’s pale face tightened. ‘I know.’

‘Were you ashamed to be seen protecting a pervert, was that it, Rupert? Couldn’t you have moved to protect him?’

‘I’ll forgive you that because you were his friend. Because we are friends.’

Rupert was the consummate chessmaster, moving spies across the board with whatever degree of ruthlessness was required to win. But he loved men in the same illegal way that Turing had – and in particular loved Brian, father of Gavriela’s child – which meant the corridors of Whitehall would grow chilly indeed if they were ever indiscreet. Homosexuality meant openness to blackmail, a lever to crack open a man and produce a traitor; and these days the stakes could rise as far as global war and humanity’s extinction: you could never tell where a chain of events – or a chain reaction – might end.

‘I’m not just talking about stopping the Director of Public Prosecution in the first place,’ she said. ‘After the trial, your bloody watchers should have been looking after him. Or are you telling me it was suicide, as the papers say?’

Perhaps someone here in MI6 had ordered the killing. Cyanide in an apple, so typically Russian, so perfectly characteristic of the KGB’s modus operandi, was precisely the kind of thing some Whitehall mandarin might have indirectly suggested, a hint of: ‘Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’

She stopped her thoughts and sat down on the visitor’s chair.

‘AMT was in a strained state of mind.’ Rupert tapped the rosewood desktop, noticed a fingerprint, breathed on the mark, and used a monogrammed handkerchief to wipe the surface clean. ‘We did have watchers on him, and they followed him to Blackpool Pier, where he had his fortune told by one Gipsy Rose Lee. When he came out he was white-faced and shaking.’

This was ridiculous.

‘He wasn’t superstitious.’

‘I’m quoting the report,’ said Rupert. ‘Plus, he had raised the subject of killing himself.’

‘With whom?’ Normally she would have said who with? to annoy him; under stress, she reverted to Teutonic exactness.

‘Someone close to Turing. But the point is, when my officers questioned the fortune-teller, she remembered nothing of him. Nothing at all.’

Purely in memory, she heard an echo of nine notes: da, da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da.

‘Tell me there have been no sightings of Dmitri Shtemenko.’

He was her first suspect, when it came to altering minds.

Rupert said: ‘Someone who might have been Shtemenko was seen at the Institute of Physics. Looking for a Dr Gavriela Wolf.’

‘No.’

She was registered as a member of the institute, but as Gabrielle Woods, the name that everyone knew her by: the identity created by Rupert during wartime, with a fully backstopped biography. Only someone who had known her earlier than 1941 would refer to the Wolf identity – someone like Dmitri Shtemenko, who saved her and himself from Nazi thugs, back in 1927 when the world was young.

‘So, Shtemenko... It’s interesting you ask about him, Gavi. Some kind of premonition?’

‘I’m Gabrielle, thanks all the same, and no premonition. Do you have any actual intelligence on the man?’

Six years ago, during de-Nazification procedures in Berlin, Dmitri had surfaced using the pre-war German cover identity provided by his Bolshevik masters, and he had slipped away from American and British military police who tried to arrest him. At the time, Rupert had concluded that Dmitri Shtemenko slid across to the East via Checkpoint Bravo, presumably reverting to his real name, to be shot in a courtyard or kissed on both cheeks as the GRU’s prodigal son returning. GRU or KGB, they had never determined which.

‘We backtracked,’ said Rupert, ‘to find out he was probably a V man for the last years of the war’ – he meant a Soviet mole inside Wehrmacht intelligence – ‘but what he did before that, no one knows.’

‘There’s no way to justify a manhunt,’ said Gavriela.

It was the fear that spoke: a creature of the darkness was on her trail, and if anything happened to her, then what about Carl? Twelve years old, a grammar school boy who had excelled in his Eleven Plus, and whose questions about his father received no satisfactory answers.

‘I think there is justification.’ Rupert gave her the chess grandmaster stare. ‘Clearly the real reason has to stay out of the reports – unspoken among friends, as it were – but if our man is back in the field, he’ll be a senior intelligence officer by now.’

‘Therefore a good catch for Five or Special Branch.’

That was a provocation, because there was no way that Rupert would delegate this outside the family, and never mind that domestic counter-intelligence was explicitly beyond the remit of SIS, alias MI6.

‘Europe is just entering a phase of peace,’ said Rupert. ‘That frees up personnel, cold war or no.’

Fully eight years after V-E Day, that might seem an odd statement to the fabled everyman on the Clapham omnibus; but from her desk in GCHQ, Gavriela kept track of the same events that Rupert did. The past four years had seen – finally! – a decline of the violent anarchy that had ruled most of Europe following the official end of the war.