Timing my escape was a fine balance, though: if I’d given Jack Nazzar much less than twenty-four hours, he wouldn’t have time to get an extraction team on location. Sometimes he’d use local Special Forces for exfiltration. But for this job I knew he’d insist on running the whole show with his own men from the Revolutionary Warfare Wing. Deploying the SAS in Estonia was a political minefield, but I doubted the pro-NATO government in Tallinn would object – always revelling in any opportunity to stick two fingers up at Moscow.

But the entire plan – if sending one message and then driving halfway across Europe to find out if it had been acted on could be called a plan – might be tipped into failure by even the slightest margin of error. A flat tyre, worsening weather … It would take very little to defeat me.

Zero five hundred.

I arrived in Vologda two hours before first light and refuelled. Then I fished Talia’s cracked-screen cell phone out of my jacket pocket and weighed up whether or not to create a backup of the photograph I’d taken of Rachel’s final calculations. I could send it to myself by Signal – but it was too much of a risk. I had to assume that the handset would be loaded with spyware, and, just as Baaz had cautioned in Paris, even if the messaging application was fireproof, it would be straightforward for Talia to capture the photo before the data was encrypted and sent. Besides, as soon as I switched the phone on, Talia would see exactly where I was again.

In Israel she’d been good to her word. But as soon as she knew that Rachel was gone there was no reason for her to keep me alive. On the contrary. I was a witness, the only witness, to the Shabak’s absolute failure to protect someone who’d turned out to be one of Israel’s most valuable human assets. It was an unsettling thought – but whatever happened in the hours that followed would owe as much to the quality of Talia’s relationship with Ezra as it did to the quality of mine with Frank.

As far as the Shabak was concerned, though, the clock was on my side: even if Talia wanted to, she simply didn’t have enough time to take direct action. And given everything, it seemed unlikely she’d enlist the help of the Russians. Although that was a gamble, too; if she was monitoring the phone, then she knew I was heading for Värska from Arkhangel. But if anyone was following me, they couldn’t be sure where I’d approach the border – and cordoning off half of Russia simply wasn’t practical.