He looked uncertain, put a call in to someone announcing our change of plan. Everyone had their orders. But his was the last deference I’d get for a while and I wanted to use it.

London looked solid, fortressed in a thick, impregnable peace. A dream that had congealed. How long was I going to be here? I directed him to a Caffe Nero across the road from Balthorne Safe Deposits and he pulled up.

‘How do you take your coffee?’ I asked.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘Go on. Flat white?’

‘No sugar.’

I crossed the road to Balthorne. A row of classical columns obscured the front window. Reception was wood-panelled. They minimised human interaction. Four cameras and a smartly suited elderly guard watched you approach the entry gate and place your palm on a glass panel that read your veins. If your veins lined up, you got to enter a six-digit PIN code and walk in.

It became more functional inside: another desk, a brightly lit corridor and finally stairs down to the vault. By this stage the key seemed quaint.

In my box there were a few photographs, some handwritten poems, souvenirs of past operations, and a manila envelope containing a sim card. I unlocked my briefcase and removed a couple of grand in various currencies, depositing it along with a fragment of pottery that might have come from the Temple of Artemis in what was now north-eastern Libya. I kept the diamond. Then I took the sim and placed it in my new phone.

I crossed the road to the coffee shop. As far as I was concerned, the operation had been pulled six months early, I had half an hour for a coffee. And I needed strength for what was to come, whether or not it included re-entering my own life. I took the driver his flat white, with a pain au chocolat, which I felt should buy me ten minutes. Then I returned to the café and sat down.

London throbs. You’re alert to threats that aren’t there any more, and the senses overload. Three young women came in, talking Cantonese. A man in the far corner of the café muttered Kurdish into a Bluetooth headset. I heard the words ‘mother’ and ‘hospital’. The coffee-shop window was bare, no defensive blocks between it and the road. But there would be no attacks. I tried to re-enter the complacency. A copy of The Times had been folded on a rack beside the tills so that you saw a strip of flames in a front-page photo, but they were somewhere far away.