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others nodded, one by one.
    ‘One more thing,’ said Donnelly. ‘Joseph Tiplady, you’re a fecking idiot and the maddest, bravest man I’ve ever met, and I owe you my life.’
    When the time came for them to leave the camp for good, Roxy was standing where he knew she would be, in their secret place, on a small bluff in the pine trees, holding hands with her two half-American, golden-haired boys. They couldn’t say goodbye. Only she knew that Chong wasn’t the first man Joe had killed in North Korea. It was a secret between them never to be thought, let alone told. He knew that they would never, ever, let her leave.
    Joe surfaced from his reflection. He decided to give up on the store and go home. Fed up with himself for the waste of time, Joe headed past the queues of people buying flat-pack sofas and pot plants and cheap plastic trays, and the great glass doors parted and he was out in the drizzle once more. The van was exactly where he had left it.
    Only Reilly wasn’t in it.

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
    T he prickly, mock-Gothic porcupine of the temple was smaller than the cheese-grater office blocks that cluttered the sky, but even so, its spirit dominated the centre of Salt Lake City. In the middle of a barren desert, Zeke’s people had written this city in stone, and here he was casting doubt on what had empowered that achievement. Still, here he was.
    The Strengthening Church Members Committee was housed in the church’s main administration building, an anonymous concrete ziggurat. Zeke was ushered into a lift that took him up to the seventeenth floor, where he was shown by a stone-faced man into a waiting room with a fine panoramic view of the Rockies. The room was overheated and stuffy, the atmosphere oppressive. Zeke sat down and stared into space. The combination of his fear of what was to come, the heat, the mountains, took him back to that other time when he almost gave up on life.

    The stink from his skin burning – it must have been forty degrees outside, up the stairs from the basement garage where they were working on him – the acrid, metallic tang of electricity. But worst of all an emetic blend of sickly sweat and a powerful perfume, some kind of lavender. Back then, in 1986, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t going so well and it was not a good time to be an American in Kabul. The KGB had caught him at a safe house. He had been betrayed – but by who? He was not quite sure.
    ‘Tell me, why are you in Kabul? Who did you come to see? Just answer a few questions and it will stop.’ The voice of his interrogator: high-pitched, wheedling. They hadn’t bothered to blindfold him. He couldn’t make the man out clearly because of the spotlight raging in his eyeballs, but he could tell he was fat – very fat – and his lavender aftershave couldn’t hide his stink. The fat man had a Tbilisi accent. So a Georgian – like Beria, like Stalin.
    The pain was becoming too much for him to bear.
    Cover stories, they’d told him at Langley, were like the skin of an onion. You unpeeled each layer, one by one. His first layer was that he was a radical Canadian journalist, intent on exposing American imperialism; the second was that he was a geologist, wanting to stake a claim on a natural gas reservoir under the Hindu Kush. Both were so thin, he could no longer sustain them.
    His third cover was that he was a freelance arms dealer, selling the mujahedin Stingers, surface-to-air missiles that the Soviet choppers couldn’t escape. That begged the question: why take the risk of coming to the heart of the enemy capital if he could discuss everything in the safety of Peshawar in Pakistan? Electricity arced up from his penis through his spine, causing his torso to judder uncontrollably.
    Zeke’s true mission had been to figure out why a full three-quarters of the dollars spent on covert military aid to the rebels wasn’t ending up in Afghanistan at all. Rogue elements of the ISI, the Pakistani