Lost and Found

Sid persuades a bowling-alley employee to let her and River use the telephone despite closing time. Jane arrives, kills the employee and fires on the fugitives; River is wounded in the hand. Coe helps them escape. A request for the simplest possible service has become another confrontation. They get away together, but escape gives them injuries to manage and the same unanswered question about where they can safely turn next.

Damien Cantor meets Natasha and makes clear his desire for a profitable contract. He subsequently tells Taverner to be ready for a telephone call. At the Park, Oliver Nash has investigated the Kazan death: the victim was a GRU agent linked to the Novichok operation. He challenges Taverner and arranges an oversight meeting. Money, public authority and private violence are being drawn into the same conversation, while Taverner can no longer control every person asking questions.

Lamb, Roddy and Reece arrive at Flyte’s home. They intend to draw Harkness out, but Reece pursues his own terms and arranges a Camden meeting. Lamb faces Harkness in a burger restaurant and learns that Harkness is not responsible for the attacks on his agents. Reece also turns up and is caught by Harkness’s hired men. Lamb creates a disturbance by smoking, gets himself and Reece outside and escapes with Flyte and Roddy. Following Harkness then leads them to Cantor.

Elsewhere, Catherine, Shirley, Louisa and Moira reach a refuge that turns out to be Taverner’s holiday home. River and Sid stop at a service station, where she treats his hand. They argue about Taverner again. Sid remembers that Taverner visited her in hospital; River sees the secrecy surrounding her recovery as a reason for suspicion. The same history produces two different loyalties. Neither can simply order the other to forget what that experience meant.

Taverner receives the promised call from Vassily Rasnakov. He demands Sid in return for ending the attacks on the other agents, together with safe passage for his assassins. That proposed bargain gives Sid’s search for assistance a terrible context. A superior who should offer protection is being invited to decide whose life can be traded away. The offer reduces individual agents to terms in a negotiation, with the threatened people absent from the discussion.

At the service station, Coe confronts Jim in the toilets. Their encounter becomes a knife fight that Coe does not survive. While River is occupied, Sid calls the Park from the car. Taverner has the call traced, and Jane reaches Sid. River finds Coe’s body and arrives outside too late to stop Jim and Jane taking Sid away. The escape party has been broken apart: one colleague is dead, another abducted, and River is left with the consequences of a call he tried to prevent.