It took a while to adjust. With the city still in the rear-view, the emptiness stretching to the horizon on either side was less inhuman. You couldn’t tell if it was snow or stone or dust, the landscape was just pale grey and lifeless, strewn with loose rocks like a seabed. A sign warned that it was 200 kilometres to the next town. Tufts of grass and the occasional tamarisk bush stubbled the emptiness, then even these died out. The road divided a lunar landscape and was the only thing in it.

Did she run this way?

After ten miles I turned the radio off. The silence was seductive. I stopped the car and felt my soul expand – stretching – searching for other life. The possibility that the rest of existence was a fantasy flickered and grew. I zipped my jacket up and stepped out of the car, turned around. An eagle hung in the air, as still as the landscape beneath it. I crouched and pinched some of the lifeless rock dust, thought of Mongol hordes pouring across it. Lives adapted to the uninhabitable. No wonder, when they reached the civilised glories of thirteenth-century Baghdad, its mosques and libraries and courts, they burned the place to the ground.

When I got back inside the car there was a message from Tom Marsh.

They’re looking for you. They know we met.

TWENTY

No answer when I tried to contact him. I sent a message to Stevenson. He sent through an ID for Threema, an app that encrypted voice calls. Plenty did, but Threema was the one that didn’t require a phone number or email address. I downloaded the app, entered his ID and he answered in seconds.

‘Where are you?’

‘I took a holiday.’

There was a long pause. I could hear a soft exhalation that constituted various entreaties. Eventually he said: ‘How does it look?’

‘She was working for Vectis Global Insight,’ I said. ‘Under cover as an activist. Client’s an energy company, Saracen. Would you ask around? She may have come here because it’s a good place to hide. She may have had other reasons. I think she started working off her own bat, recruiting sources. She was on to something.’

‘I was about to warn you not to go over there.’

‘Why?’

‘Astana’s coming up high on global risk assessments. The Foreign Office has been debating travel advice. I can’t establish the source or details. I don’t know what, if anything, it has to do with Joanna.’

‘Any word on the trouble in Shefford?’

‘I’m still trying to find out. I’m in touch with Tom Marsh. He’s been questioned again.’

‘Is he okay?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Have you had any trouble?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’ve made contact with Vectis?’