Jonas Merrick—mockingly nicknamed 'Eternal Flame' by his colleagues at MI6 because he was desk bound and considered a long redundant encyclopaedia of names and faces - was on the edge of retirement.
Having escaped his own insincere retirement party and taken refuge on a bench within the grounds of Thames House, he finds himself sitting next to Winston Gunn, a young man drawn into the Jihadi activist net while serving 18 months imprisonment. A young man packed tightly with explosives ready for detonation....