A hundred and fifty klicks further on and an hour behind schedule and the sky began to lighten. Mezga, Trukhino, Khvoynaya … the towns and villages of north-west Russia hid behind the snowflakes blowing constantly around the car. Saturday traffic was light; the local cops more concerned with keeping their feet warm and cars moving than shaking down drivers. No roadblocks. No sirens. No one in pursuit. No one I could see, anyway.

Sixteen hundred.

I pulled into Veliky Novgorod with an hour of daylight left and refuelled for the third time. I bought food, too – a barely edible snack wrapped in plastic – and coffee. I kept my head down, covered with Aleksandr Denisovich’s driving cap, said the bare minimum to the teller and paid in cash. Then I parked up in a quiet side street and swallowed a mouthful of the insipid, brown liquid. At least it was hot.

While I ate, I mapped out the rest of the journey in my mind. If conditions remained the same, the drive to the border would take another five hours. That would put me at the RV at nine o’clock – with two hours to spare before Jack Nazzar and the Wing were expecting me. Where, exactly, they were supposed to expect me, I hadn’t said. But I was hoping that one look at a map of the border would leave Jack in no doubt.

Five years before, I’d trained on Russian Hind helicopter gunships in Poland with A-Squadron SAS. Jack had come along for the ride, never happier than when he was airborne. As part of one of the exercises he’d devised with MI6, we’d studied every possible exfiltration method and route out of Russia imaginable: commercial flights with operators using false IDs; border-hopping light aircraft flown by Romanian pilots; RIBs manned by the SBS collecting personnel on the Baltic coast and then taking them to a submarine rendezvous offshore; vehicle extraction by road in both summer and winter across the land borders with the Ukraine, Finland and Latvia – and various combinations of all of them. But it was escaping via Estonia that had stuck in my mind as the most feasible, achievable plan. I hoped Jack had been similarly impressed.