The huge, blocky Hotel Ukrayina had a view of the Maidan. Last time here, many years ago, we were celebrating the Orange Revolution. The hotel served as headquarters of the opposition, which was convenient for spooks and journalists. Ten years later I had seen photos of the same rooms being used as a makeshift hospital and morgue, the square around it divided between protesters and the paramilitary units cracking their skulls.

Quieter tonight, and repainted. The scars of those events were 700 kilometres south in Donetsk and Crimea. I drank in the hotel bar, among the red and gold Soviet-era décor, and rehearsed Toby Bell, his enthusiasm for what he would describe as enabling policy environments, his knowledge of the EU’s development cooperation strategy. His sense of opportunity. A man who had never been quite as successful as he wanted to be, perhaps. Who sought approval and had few memories that kept him awake at night.

Two or three days, I told myself. That was all I was going to spend in Kazakhstan. No need for MI6 to know I’d even left the country. Long enough to determine whether there was anything I could do, short enough to remain under the radar. I’d follow the leads I had and ensure discretion while doing it; that was what I was trained to do. If Joanna was there and needed help getting out of the country for whatever reason then a fresh presence could be invaluable. I was wary about crashing into someone else’s field of operations, though, if that was what it was. Without even knowing which direction the threat might come from. There’s always the opportunity to make things worse.

Around 8 p.m. the bar became a strip club. I tried out Toby. I flirted with escorts, flashed some cash, got in a conversation with an Israeli who owned an IT company, telling him that Kazakhstan was the future. I left at 10 p.m. and spent a couple of hours poring over Kazakh news clippings, identifying useful social media accounts and local journalists. Then I stopped and read some of Frederick Burnaby’s nineteenth-century account of travelling in the region, spying for the British state when Tsarist troops were encroaching on the Empire. And I felt the tingle again: entering a country as a spy, your own mystery momentarily equal to the world’s.

Few of my fellow passengers looked up to observe the miracle of Astana when it appeared. The Ishim river had frozen – a winding white road through the city – and as we got lower you could see snowmobiles and sledges scarring the ice. Expensive new apartment blocks hugged the left bank, all glass and curves, older Soviet neighbourhoods to the right: sullen, square-shouldered, like individuals who gambled on the wrong future.