‘That is why,’ I continued. ‘Part of why. The note. It’s special. It’s from a cache of notes the bad guys have; and it’s the only one we have. I have. A lot of people have died because of it. You and me both, too, nearly.’

‘So we’re the good guys, then?’ Baaz was grinning. He was refreshingly straightforward.

‘Yes, Baaz,’ I reassured him. ‘We’re the good guys. Scout’s honour. But it’s more than that. This note is valuable in some way that I don’t really understand.’ He turned the bill over.

‘What does it say?’ he asked.

‘Arkhangel. It means “Archangel” in English. Like St Michael, you know?’

‘I know as much about archangels,’ he said, ‘as you do about Guru Gobind Singh.’

‘Fair play,’ I admitted. ‘But Arkhangel is also the name of a village in Russia.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t. It’s not just any village. It’s the village where my mother was born.’

He scrutinized the bill up close.

‘Oh my God,’ he exclaimed, ‘I don’t believe it!’

His shining eyes darted between Benjamin Franklin’s gaze and mine. It was as if a Eureka moment had lit him up from the inside. My heart leapt. The thought half formed that maybe he’d seen, understood, something I’d missed, that he understood what the note meant.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

‘This whole thing,’ he said, fizzing with excitement, ‘is so totally James Bond.’

My shoulders slumped. ‘All right then, Q. Tell me this. All this kit you have for trading …’

‘And studying,’ he said quickly.

‘And studying. Can you use it to make calls, too? Encrypted calls.’

‘Of course.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘The actual call can’t be hacked. Not at all. Even if someone captured the data stream, it would be useless to them. Unless the person you want to call has malware on their system that records the audio of the call separately from the call itself, it’s completely safe.’

‘And how likely is that?’

‘It entirely depends,’ he said, ‘on who you want to call.’

It was a chance I was willing to take.

‘OK then,’ I said. ‘Set it up while I go to the bathroom.’ I stood up and retrieved the banknote, feeling the tear in my thigh again. ‘When you need a lifeline, there’s only one thing to do.’

‘What’s that?’ he asked, clearing away the breakfast things.

‘Phone a friend.’

19

‘Hal-lo?’

‘Ezra?’ The line sounded dead. Not even a hiss. It was the fifth time I’d tried his number. I adjusted the headset. ‘Ezra, it’s Max.’ There was a long pause. ‘Max McLean,’ I added, uncertain how solid the connection was.