– For several years, figures close to Putin have been agitating for a more aggressive foreign policy to the south as well as to the east.

– Kazakhstan is an attractive prospect to Russians nostalgic for the territorial reach of the Soviet Union.

– Invasion itself would not present a problem for Russia’s military. Kazakhstan’s limited forces of some 70,000 could not offer significant resistance. Seizing their ‘rightful’ portion of Kazakhstan would bring Russia substantial resources and enormous geopolitical advantages. It would also gain control of China’s border to the west, thereby getting a monopoly of control over China’s energy imports and any manufactured exports that pass west through Kazakhstan.

Beneath the terse prose, it was Joanna’s voice, I felt sure. I took my phone out, accessed my encrypted files and found the image of Joanna taken from the mall CCTV.

‘This woman,’ I said.

‘That’s Natasha,’ Aliya said, staring at the image, puzzled.

‘This is definitely Natasha?’

‘Yes.’

She sounded certain, and calmer now; it was my turn to deal with bewilderment.

‘What was Natasha’s role, exactly?’

‘She runs the company. She was in charge.’

I sensed a lot of pieces falling into place, without being able to see what shape they formed just yet.

‘What did you think it was all for?’

‘I thought it was to generate clicks, drive traffic. Why else?’

I checked the latest file, dated Monday. Aliya was being prompted to tweet about people protesting. Encouraging them. Announcing the gathering in Independence Square.

‘Why this gathering? What do you know?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. I need to get out of here.’

She topped up her glass, drank again. Then she asked if I had cigarettes. I went to buy some from the front. When I returned she had vanished.

So had the case with the money.

No sign of her in the car park. I checked the road. She was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to suggest she’d been abducted. My laptop remained on the bed. She must have hitched a lift. Good luck to her, I thought. I hoped she was going to use that money to get herself and her family as far away from here as possible.

The dropbox was still open on the laptop. The zip file within it contained twenty or so links, suggestions, articles and academic papers. Now I could hear Joanna’s voice in the instructions. The latest set of instructions included a map showing areas of Kazakhstan that Russia might annex in an invasion, identical to the one I’d seen in Saracen’s offices.

I ran a reverse image search online and it came up attached to a paper by a professor at Southampton’s School of International Relations. ‘Russia’s Southern Front’.