The new Head Office was in Westminster’s Smith Square, a three-minute walk from their terraced house in Cowley Street. The building had previously served as Conservative Party headquarters, then as the European Union’s London office, a minor but pleasing irony given what Charles was going there to discuss. It was too small to house more than a portion of MI6’s Head Office staff and MI5’s assessment of its physical security vulnerabilities had resulted in an unsightly periphery of heavy steel barriers. But it was not Croydon, where the much-reduced Service had been sent following the events that had led to Charles’s unexpected recall and the downfall of his predecessor. That the rest of Head Office was distributed throughout various central London buildings was undeniably a disadvantage but returning to Westminster was essential. Despite all the advantages of modern communications, nothing compensated for physical proximity to the centres of power and regular access to those who occupied them.

Gareth’s office, like Charles’s, looked into the leafy upper branches of the plane trees in the square. Gareth was already at his desk, newer and grander than Charles’s own. Charles had kept one of the very few Century House grade-four desks that had survived from the Cold War decades, a symbolism that did not, he knew, escape notice. Nor, in some cases, silent censure; but that didn’t bother him.

‘So, Timber Wolf delivered?’ he said, sitting opposite Gareth.

Gareth turned aside from his screen and keyboard. ‘Big time.’

‘Headlines?’

‘Plenty of negotiation mood music, bickering behind the seemingly united front, Poland and Hungary threatening to cut up rough, Nordics becoming more cautious. The big thing is the financial bottom line, which is higher than we thought.’

‘Sub-sources?’

‘The negotiating team, all of them. They all talk to him. Not all at once, nor do all of them tell him everything, but they all gossip or complain and he puts it all together.’

Timber Wolf was Gareth’s source in the EU Commission, reporting on Brexit negotiations from the other side. A Dutch former diplomat whom Gareth had befriended while running the MI6 Geneva station, Timber Wolf had resigned from the Dutch foreign service to join the Commission as part of the policy development team. Although a permanent EU civil servant, he had remained an Anglophile and he and Gareth had kept up their friendship on a purely personal basis. Over the years there had been a family skiing holiday and occasional visits and dinners. Their friendship had been unaffected by the EU referendum, following which Timber Wolf began to be indiscreet about EU thinking. His indiscretions soon blossomed from office gossip into intelligence and had elevated their personal relationship into a professional one.