‘Who do Saracen employ on the intelligence front?’

‘Probably Vectis. Saracen were using them when they ran into trouble in the DCR. Know anything about this? Why are Saracen so hot for Central Asia all of a sudden?’

‘I’ve no idea, but you’ll be the first to hear if I find anything.’

The watcher was still there, still surreptitiously keeping an eye on me. That afforded me a good look at him. He was ruddy-faced under a peaked cap, greying blond, with a slight curl to the hair, blue-eyed, pink-skinned. There wasn’t a team – he didn’t have surveillance skills. I was definitely dealing with former military.

I made another call to a friend at Kilgariff & Co, a private intelligence outfit big on energy.

‘Do you work with Saracen?’

‘No, Vectis have the Saracen contract. Why?’

‘Following leads. Thanks.’

I knew Vectis Global Insight, as much as anyone did. Boutique, headquartered in Mayfair, crammed with former MI6 of all stripes. The company sold a range of underground services to big corporations. Their website advertised ‘strategic advice and analysis for leaders operating in complex environments’. There were a lot of complex environments and the blue-chips paid well. You won’t find ‘espionage’ on their books, but you might well come across ‘security consultancy’, a trail that led via a listed Georgian building to some less respectable corners of the earth. As a rule of thumb, with PI companies, more wood panelling meant fewer moral scruples.

A lot of them appeared in the 1990s. The intelligence budget was down and taxpayers’ money spent on arms and assassinations was a shit-storm waiting to break. British businesses said something had to be done – they needed to compete and had money to spend; why couldn’t they just give the money to MI6 and access the desired muscle? That didn’t look good either. Companies like Vectis appeared, a whole realm of shadow intelligence agencies with complex relationships to the state. MI6 officers knew them as potential future employers, often useful, occasionally making difficult environments even murkier. The ones we called white-hat companies could advertise their services up front: they relied on a combination of retired police and military with enough old-boy connections willing to check the odd database for them, armies of poorly paid interns stitching together passable reports. Black hats went the extra mile. They solved problems in ways the client didn’t want to know about, and their front windows were accordingly opaque. They cost more, and were usually worth it.