This article contains spoilers for season four of Slow Horses.
“Preemptive assassinations, that was his thing. He wanted to create a deniable assassination squad,” admits David Cartwright – an old intelligence chief – in the latest season of the hit Apple TV series Slow Horses. Cartwright is talking about a character called Frank Harkness, a former CIA and US special forces agent gone rogue – the main enemy of Jackson Lamb’s singular intelligence outfit, the Slow Horses.
As the plot unfolds, we learn that Harkness’s project was to groom assassins from birth, separating them from their families and subjecting them to a programme of psychological conditioning and torture. “You start the training young,” Harkness reveals in the tense season finale: “You have a near invincible squad.” The trained assassin in the series, despite possessing almost superhuman strength, is terrified of Harkness and obeys his every command. He is the perfect assassin.
