The bistro was tucked at the end of the alleyway so that you could almost miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Inside, it was furnished in the sort of deep reds and wood veneers that reminded Gabriela of the Italian cafés that were all over Camden when she was growing up. The kind of place her mother would offer to meet her on their weekends together as a teenager, as if the warmth of the pizza would make up for the coolness she couldn’t help but exude towards her only child.

‘What will you drink?’ Emsworth asked, once they were settled at a table.

‘Oh, I’ll just have a Coke.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, without looking up from the wine menu. ‘You can’t leave me to drink alone. White or red?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she replied as the waitress came to take their order, greeting him in a way that confirmed he was a regular.

‘I was interested in what you mentioned in the briefing about, what was it, terrorism and branding? Very intriguing.’

She sat straighter in her chair. ‘Oh, OK. Well, I was just saying that from the data that’s beginning to be collected in other countries, it seems that terrorist groups are manipulating emerging social media platforms to create an identity which helps to propagate their own narrative, rather than that foisted on them by traditional media.’ She sounded like an automaton, churning out lines verbatim from what she had read, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘The fear is that with the recent emergence of platforms like Myspace and Facebook, these groups will be able to access potential recruits in ways that we can’t see and therefore can’t monitor …’

As the waitress settled the bottle on the table, she felt Emsworth’s eyes on hers in a way that she found both thrilling and unnerving.

Pausing to take a sip of cold wine, he said, ‘Gosh, you really are more than a pretty face. Do carry on.’

As per another of the organisation’s peculiar, and frustrating, habits, just as she was catching her stride in Counter-Terrorism, she was pulled into Digital Diplomacy, an ‘emerging department’ pivoting around the sort of PR work that made a mockery of the whole place. Madeleine, meanwhile, was hoisted kicking and screaming, almost literally, into Communications.

‘I swear to God, they’re trying to kill us off.’ She gesticulated with her cigarette as they stood outside the Red Lion one evening after work, clots of traffic leaking out fumes on the street in front of them.

It was that autumn when Gabriela was offered her first foreign posting, in Russia, Emsworth delivering the news personally as she made her way back into the office from lunch.