I set up a wireless camera, smaller than my fingertip, positioned so it faced the door: motion-sensitive, high-definition, straight to my phone. I locked the Makarov in the safe.

The hotel’s bar was a cavernous, Hollywood-themed place with a lot of young staff and few customers. It served food through the night: Happy Hour was 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. For a city with no evident desire to party the night away, Kazakhstan had a lot of places that never closed. I drank a beer and thought of the lines by Thomas Mann: In an empty, unarticulated space our mind loses its sense of time as well. He was describing a sea crossing but it fitted Astana. Our mind loses its sense of time and we enter the twilight of the immeasurable. Dämmerung des unermesslichen.

I planned my next move.

Joanna had acquired information and possibly contacts through Testimony. That had evidently got her in trouble. It coincided with the appearance of Vishinsky. A psychological war had begun. Did it involve fake videos of myself? She saw what Vishinsky had planned, tried to warn me. Here I was.

Stumped.

Cherenkov wanted Perfect Vision. I tried to imagine a piece of forecasting software effective enough to inspire the envy of hostile governments. A crystal ball. Or it was something else entirely, some means of defeating Russia’s psyops. A truth machine. Perhaps the attention on me was a bluff and they already had penetration at Shefford that meant the project had been compromised, the whole thing falling apart in time for them to make a play for Central Asia.

I needed cyber capabilities, and was keen for Stefan to arrive. I had a strong lead in terms of the Chevy Equinox, but no easy means of pursuing that beyond what the police had already attempted. If Russia was preparing for action, there would be big changes inside Kazakhstan’s state apparatus. Shomko could map structure and sympathies. I could inform Six by some back channel. But why hadn’t Joanna done that? Stevenson’s words haunted me: changes in priorities … Russia’s got the wind in their sails … Syria’s a test bed.

The men who had attacked the Russian woman had been named on social media. I typed their names into Google to see if they really existed. It was hard to say without a photo. Meanwhile, two other Kazakh men had been hospitalised in what sounded like revenge attacks in Schuchinsk, a house set alight.

I called the hospital mentioned in reports and eventually got through to a doctor who sounded young, stressed and tired.

‘Can I speak to the men who were admitted?’

‘No.’

‘But they are there?’

‘We can’t give you any information.’

‘I’m family.’

‘Makes no difference.’

‘Can I just check – were there any men admitted at all?’

He confirmed that two men had been brought in but wouldn’t give any more details.