The new centre displayed fragments of pottery they’d dug up, alongside bad watercolours of a traditional nomad community. At the end was a display regarding wildlife protection, signed off by an organisation I’d never heard of called Clean Caspian. The ribbon had already been cut and hung limply on either side of the entrance. Four silver minibuses waited to transport the delegation back to the Marriott once a group of schoolchildren had finished burying a time capsule for an unspecified future generation to pore over. The capsule was a Tupperware box, and the hole into which it was being deposited had been created in the icy courtyard with the help of a blowtorch and pickaxe. The ceremony was being filmed.

I introduced myself to a man directing proceedings, with cropped ginger hair and a waistcoat, his name badge identifying him as Neil Graff from Piper Anderson Communications. He said Lucy was at the Marriott dealing with a last-minute emergency but I could hitch a ride back to the hotel with them.

At the Marriott I was directed to a restaurant, dim and low-lit and almost empty, with tables set for the next day. Empty apart from one person.

Lucy Piper stood alone at the windows, phone to her ear. She wore a white suit, hair up, eyes cool. The screen of a MacBook glowed on the table behind her. She was having a bad day.

‘No … I don’t know … It’s worse than we thought.’

In the low-lit comfort it took me a second to connect her to the figure I’d seen stepping among the former Taliban like some mascara-laden angel of history. There was a lot of paperwork on the table, pinned down with a vape the size of a Colt .44.

She hung up, put on a professional smile.

‘Hey there.’

‘Lucy Piper? I work for Vectis. Toby Bell.’

Her smile turned cooler. She extended a hand. ‘Callum mentioned your name. Another former Commando?’

‘Something like that.’

No suggestion she recognised me. I scanned the visible documents. They had the day’s analytics: Google results for ‘Saracen’, ‘Saracen in Kazakhstan’, ‘Kazakhstan oil’, ‘Kazakhstan corruption’. Critical social media accounts had been mapped geographically. She had a photocopy of a petition launched by Testimony – The lavish trade mission is a green light to political oppression – along with a strategy to quieten it, which looked like it might involve an organisation called the Kazakhstan Business Alliance whose contact number was a London landline.

Her company was well connected in Westminster, of course, with a muscular lobbying operation involving former politicians and diplomats, and direct lines to the EU and the UN. But it was their dark arts that kept the clients coming: managing Wikipedia entries, controlling their own astroturfed NGOs, manipulating Google results so that the first thing you saw when you searched ‘Saracen Kazakhstan’ wasn’t a woman being dragged from a court room.