The writer was a Professor Romas Kleiza. He came up online: Lithuanian-born, expert in Cold War history. A quick browse gave me a sense of Kleiza and his career. Not the world’s most successful scholar – he had one book to his name, World Without the West, regarding a plot by Russia, China and Iran to dominate the next millennium – but popular with right-wing think tanks and anti-Russian lobby groups. I recognised him as the expert who’d been on TV pontificating about Islamist terror in Central Asia.

There was another map he’d created: June 2030. Political structures after NATO.

Poland was misshapen, its eastern regions absorbed into the Russian Federation. Same with Estonia. Ukraine had disintegrated entirely. Turkey was pocked with Russian bases. So were Syria, Libya and Egypt.

A lot of Western countries lay in fragments, broken rocks on the shoreline of a great sea: Central Asia and the Middle East, including the Gulf states, divided between Russia, China and Iran. Symbols indicated their ports, airfields, shipping routes, oil and gas pipelines. As a bloc, they controlled 90 per cent of energy and trade to Europe.

According to his website, the map had been used at a conference, ‘Approaches to the New Russia–China Threat’, put on by the Eurasian Futures Foundation.

The name rang a bell.

A lot of his work, apparently, had been made possible by the generosity of this foundation. EFF, as it styled itself, had been active between 2013 and early 2018, funding conferences, journals and books, and supplying quotes, statistics and opinion pieces to the media. Then it closed down. Even their website was gone.

I had a look to see who had supplied the Eurasian Futures Foundation with their money. The name that came up was Robert Carter.

Robert Carter, it turned out after a few minutes browsing, had put millions into EFF, alongside likeminded business leaders and philanthropists. The establishment of the Foundation was recorded in the press as another front in Carter’s lobbying war. To celebrate the occasion, the Spectator ran a think piece under his name.

We’re told NATO is coming apart, EU defence pacts are in tatters, and the West, defeated in the Middle East, will now bow out gracefully from affairs on our very own doorstep. For new powers are on the rise. Well, some of us will not stand by as the two most autocratic, undemocratic and merciless regimes gang up to make liberal democracy a mere memory. The cynical alliance between Russian and China is the greatest threat we face. Their machinations, combined with America’s absence, is bad news for the free world. It is up to all politicians and diplomats to ensure the twenty-first century won’t turn into the Sino-Russian century.

Then I knew where I’d seen him. He’d been at the event where I’d first met Callum Walker.