The way ­people ignored each other on the underground spooked him; they were like ghosts, lost in their own heads, dodging around each other silently looking away.

Just as everyone had done in the restaurant.

And then along came Frank King, the new military attaché, a uniform packed full of charisma and a bright light in a city in darkness. They’d fast become friends. Eric didn’t really know what a military attaché did for certain, but it seemed to involve a lot of drinking and a lot of laughing.

Oh, and English girls. It involved an awful lot of English girls.

Frank King had changed Eric Cook’s life in many ways.

Especially seeing as a few months after meeting him Eric was sitting in an alleyway, shot and bleeding, after kidnapping a mother and daughter.

Shot and bleeding, and on his own.

He still wasn’t certain what a military attaché did, but whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

He opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. Fat, heavy, pink clouds, which looked ready to let go of the snow they were barely clinging to, pressed down on him, and he shivered with the cold.

His back hurt, but the damp of the ground finally made him struggle onto all fours, in a preamble to getting up.

He paused, lifted his head, and saw them.

Two men stood at the end of the alley watching him.

Nobody moved.

Somewhere a dog barked as Cook’s hands began to hurt from being half buried in the snow.

“I’m an American,” he finally said, although he didn’t know why.

One of the men took out an automatic pistol and walked toward him, feet crunching in the snow.

“Please, no. I’m an American.” Eric raised one hand out of the snow.

“I don’t care,” replied the man as he lifted the pistol level with Eric’s temple.

Eric Cook shut his eyes and lowered his head.

He wasn’t going to cry.

Everything went black.

FROM THE CORNER at the end of the street, King watched them carry Cook out of the alleyway and put him in the back of the van. He hadn’t heard a shot, but he’d only just arrived, after trekking a quarter of a mile across Whitechapel toward Bethnal Green. By the time he had flagged down the car, struggled with the driver, and eventually dragged him out, he’d been gone for over twenty minutes.

It was turning into one hell of a night.

King squinted; Cook could be dead, but there was no way of telling from this distance.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then chewed his thumbnail.

One of the men at the far end of the street climbed into the back of the van, where they had just put Cook; the other two closed the doors and got into the cab.

Why would you climb into the back with a corpse? If he’s dead, there’s no point.

He saw a puff of white smoke at the rear of the van, so he in turn started the car. He watched the van move off, then slowly followed it out of the street with his headlamps off.

They didn’t travel far. King guessed they were heading back in the direction he and Cook had run from. They crabbed across Whitechapel through smoggy streets that seemed to suck the air out of your lungs.

His suspicions were confirmed when he saw the saw the sign for Stuffield Street pass by on his left-­hand side.

They were passing the street where King and Cook had held Anja.

He craned his neck to look for signs of police activity after the shooting, but the street was silent. The only indication that anything untoward had taken place was the Opel, lopsidedly sitting on two flat tires, smoke drifting through the smashed windows, waiting for the local kids to pick it clean in the morning like buzzards would a carcass.

The van hadn’t slowed at Stuffield Street; it continued another fifty yards before turning left, and then sharp right onto Providence Street.

King breathed a sigh of relief that he was traveling slowly enough to glide to a halt at the head of the street before he was seen. He watched the van pull over to the curb, halfway down the short street of terraced houses.

Before the occupants of the van had a chance to get out and go to the back doors, King was out of his own vehicle and crouching by the street corner. He watched as one of the men, carrying a Thompson submachine gun, climbed up into the box on the rear of the van and disappeared into the shadows.

A moment passed before Cook emerged, supported on either side by the men. King watched as Cook managed to climb down, slowly and gingerly, half lowered, half dropping the two feet to the floor, into the arms of the van driver.

They hadn’t killed him; he was still alive, waiting to be saved.

Cook seemed to swoon slightly and the driver struggled to hold him up. The two men from the back of the van dropped down, then all three dragged Cook into the open door of the house next to the van.

Cook seemed to stiffen as he crossed the threshold; he turned his head and for a moment King thought he was looking right at him.

King pulled back from the corner and stood flat against the wall. He waited and then snuck another look along the street.

Except for the tracks in the snow at the back of the van, there was no sign anyone had been there. Every house was in darkness.

The one Cook had been taken into was tiny, one window downstairs, one window up, and barely big enough for a cat to fit into, let alone be swung around.

King wiped his nose with the back of his hand and looked back the way they had come. He realized that after all his circuitous traveling on foot and then driving, he was less than five minutes’ walk from where they had held Anja.

He leaned back against the wall and cursed.

If the resistance had a safe house here, they would have noticed his Opel parked nearby.

“Fuck,” he breathed. A simple mistake had ruined everything. He kicked his heel against the wall behind him and looked again at the house where Cook was.

The front door opened and the driver appeared. He’d barely stepped through before it closed again behind him. The driver went to his vehicle and King listened as it coughed into life, belching oily blue smoke as it did.

The van revved once or twice, then slowly pulled away from the curb and headed off into the darkness. King watched as brake lights shone dirty red at the end of the street, then the van disappeared as it turned left.

The exhaust smoke drifted toward him, irritating his nose with the sweet smell of burned oil. King looked at his own vehicle, ten feet away, and thought about his options.

Run or stay?

Fight or flight?

He looked back around the corner at the darkened house.

Dulles would want him to drop Eric, put distance between them and him. If the poor kid turned up dead in an alley in a week’s time there was nothing that could connect them. Frank King had been careful of that; he’d taken a few weeks to spread rumors about Eric being a party boy, always on the arm of some young English broad. If the kid turned up dead in an alley, ­people would most likely think he’d just crossed to the wrong side of the tracks chasing a bit of skirt.

London was a dirty town with a dirty police force; violent crime was rife in certain quarters. King could be back in Washington before ­people started to ask questions, assuming they bothered to.

“Fuck,” he said again before sighing and crossing to the car.

Frank King wasn’t that kind of guy.

He should never have used the kid. He should have known he wasn’t up to it.