He pressed a button on his armrest. A door hissed open, and a young analyst, Moneypenny—no first name, just Moneypenny—stepped in, clutching a tablet.

He stood up, buttoned his jacket.

The projector whirred in the private screening room beneath the Thames. Sir Alistair Finch, the quietly terrifying Controller of MI6, sat alone, bathed in the flickering blue light. On screen, a man in a perfect Savile Row suit was defusing a nuclear device with a paperclip and a tube of lip balm.

“So the movies are useful after all,” she said.

“The Nightingale franchise has one more film in development,” he said. “Jack Ryder wants to make it ‘gritty and realistic.’ I’ve just had a quiet word with the producer. Nightingale will die in the opening scene. Killed not by a supervillain, but by a cyber attack traced to a teenager in Ohio. The rest of the film will be a three-hour procedural about filing Form 17B in triplicate.”

“Exactly,” Finch said, walking to the door. “And the best camouflage we’ve ever had.”

Moneypenny frowned. “I don’t follow.”