‘I don’t know,’ Walker said. ‘I’m more concerned by who’s retweeting this image. This one’s a troll. Scroll down.’

I scrolled down to a clip of Putin giving a speech. It concerned his favourite theme: the break-up of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, leaving millions of Russians stranded outside the Russian Federation. A minute in, he dismissed Kazakhstan as a recent invention: ‘The Kazakhs have created a state where there was never one before.’

‘Is that true?’ Chambers asked.

They looked at me. I paused it.

‘Technically,’ I said. ‘I’ve not seen this speech before. Where’s it from?’

‘It’s hard to confirm if it’s genuine,’ Walker said. ‘Our Moscow office isn’t aware of it either. It’s got over eighty thousand retweets in Kazakhstan alone.’

‘How many people are even online here?’ Chambers asked, looking puzzled. A waiter approached.

‘Please,’ Piper said, handing me a menu. ‘Everyone, eat. The croissants are amazing. They fly in the pastry.’

I ordered coffee and a croissant, double-checked the staff folding napkins in the shadows. The lighting was soft, a lot of it coming from a tall glass box filled with bottles of wine, like a trophy cabinet. Chambers speared the remains of his eggs Benedict.

‘You say this is a concerted operation?’ he said. ‘Kremlin-based?’

‘I suspect so.’

This provoked a deep breath. Chambers looked to Piper. ‘You’re keeping Jack in the loop?’

‘Daily.’

Jack, I thought. Jack Burrows at the Foreign Office.

‘We may want to make that hourly.’

Piper said: ‘For now we want to neutralise this as far as possible. It may be that attack is the best form of defence; whack-a-mole isn’t working.’ She looked at me, eyes wide, waiting. ‘Toby?’

‘Kazakhstan’s independent,’ I said. ‘Whatever Putin might say, this is a strong, proud, independent country. We’ve got nationalism on our side.’

‘Nationalism,’ someone said, as if testing the word.

‘If they’re peddling a “Kazakhstan belongs to Russia” line, you want blogs promoting Kazakh independence, authentic Kazakh identity. A secular one, modern, outward-looking. Nationalism not nationalisation.’

‘Nationalism not nationalisation.’ Piper wrote it down.

‘There’s Kazakh warriors you want to bring into play.’

‘Got any names?’

‘There’s one called Raiymbek, eighteenth-century. That could be the pseudonym of someone writing a blog called Kazakh Independence.’

She scribbled furiously.

‘And the independence stuff: like anti-Putin?’

‘Deeper than that. You’ve got plenty of history to draw upon. Kazakh servitude to the czars; legends in which they brought together all the clans to fight against Russia.’ We had a look on her MacBook, found a romantic oil painting by some Englishman showing the hordes gathering with incongruous spears. ‘The Bolshevik invasion saw hundreds of Kazakhs fleeing south. They call it Aktaban Shubryndy, running to the bone.’

‘I like that.’