I found the number for a bar in the town owned by a woman called Olga Sergeeva, which was a Russian surname. Sergeeva herself answered.

‘This is Dmitry Zubkov from the Moscow Times,’ I said.

‘What do you want?’

‘How are things there? We in Russia are worried. How are people feeling?’

‘People feel there is a lot of bullshit around.’ The woman hung up.

He is beyond cynical, Elliot. That is what we haven’t understood.

I know.

You say you met him.

I thought I had. 2001, Baku, Azerbaijan.

I hadn’t realised until later that Vishinsky was the individual concerned. At the time he’d been just one strange encounter in a series of them. Baku had been an Agentsumpf for sure, a baptism of oil and fire. By the time I got to the place there’d been five years of dark-side operations. MI6 had scrambled to help British business mop up what they could of the former Soviet oil industry. When the wrong man got into power, backed by Russia, MI6 was tasked with sorting out a counter-coup. My predecessors set up ratlines: backdoor arms channels from dumps in Turkey via Armenia. They got a more amenable dictator in place. Three months later, £5 billion worth of energy deals were signed.

The whole project had been set up by men and women with experience of Bosnia, of drugs for arms networks. Intelligence doesn’t have a rule book, which means people fall back on what they know, which isn’t always sophisticated. I arrived to help deal with the fallout. It was one of my first operations for Six, running an agent close to the deposed dictator and trying to anticipate blowback. I was twenty-four, out of my depth, and excited to be there. The experience should have left me feeling disillusioned, but I didn’t want illusions anyway; I felt only delight at getting the chance to see geopolitics up close. I think Vishinsky sensed that: the vulnerability of appetite.