The restaurant was filling up. The rush would come at one o’clock when the Berlaymont and other EU offices emptied. It was like London in the 1970s and 1980s, when long liquid lunches were commonplace for middle and upper management and it would have been thought bizarre or sad to nibble a sandwich and salad at your desk while working. Charles had booked his table for 12.30, expecting Timber Wolf at 12.45. He had arrived ten minutes early to find a man and a woman in their thirties at the table nearest his and two men and a woman at the table nearest the door. Across the aisle from them sat a solitary older man reading Le Monde, a bottle of white wine opened and sampled before him. The place was blessedly free of background music but as more customers arrived the noise level rose enough to render eavesdropping difficult. Some of the tables had been moved since his last visit but separation was still just about adequate.

He had no idea whether the Z surveillance team was there when he arrived or whether they were among those still arriving and shaking their umbrellas on the doormat. Nor did he know how many of them there were. He didn’t want to know anything about them, he had told Sonia when briefing her to set up the operation. He particularly didn’t want to meet them and then recognise them again in Brussels. Not because he would have betrayed the fact – he was confident of that –but it could have been a distraction, as he knew from experience.

He had decided to call out a Z team over the weekend. They were a part-time resource, named after the Service’s natural-cover Z Organisation of the 1930s, a parallel network unconnected to embassies and officialdom. It was staffed by people with real jobs in their real names, trained to undertake surveillance tasks in foreign jurisdictions where there was no local MI6 station or where its staff were too well-known to mount surveillance on their home territory. Or, as in this case, where the local station was kept in ignorance of the operation, along with the embassy and everyone else in Gareth Horley’s former directorate. It would normally have been Gareth himself who authorised Z deployments and they would have been briefed by his staff, but Charles had bypassed normal structures for fear that Gareth might maintain unofficial contact with one or two of his colleagues who knew nothing of his current situation. In getting Sonia to do it on his behalf, Charles had insisted they be briefed and equipped not in any of the Service’s London buildings but at the Castle, the south-coast training establishment.

‘Hope you weren’t planning a weekend,’ he had said when ringing her at home.

Her sigh was audible. ‘Feigned regret is worse than none, Charles. You’ve never been any good at it so don’t start now.’