One way or another, I was sure I’d be seeing him in the future. To survive in the tunnels like that takes more than intuition; it takes training. And to vanish into thin air like that takes more than courage; it takes connections. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Perhaps I was looking for patterns that weren’t there. But whoever or whatever Baaz was, a child prodigy from the Punjab simply didn’t cover it. Being photographed on the quayside wasn’t proof he’d boarded his ship. And Frank and I had both fiddled enough passenger manifests to know they weren’t worth the paper they were written on. The drive from Ashdod to Ben Gurion airport takes less than an hour: perhaps it wasn’t the line at the port the Israelis should have been looking at, but the queue of people checking into my flight to Moscow – assuming, of course, that Talia even wanted to find him.

The only real mystery left was why in the end I’d been spared at all. But as Frank had said himself: neither of us was out of a job yet.

I’d started the drive that last night in Russia with the road lit by firelight, turning my back on the forests that would have swallowed Rachel and me. I’d thought I was coming back home, but bricks and water were nothing to come back for. She’d known all along that there was nowhere left for her to go. Not so me. I’d had a choice. And despite everything, I’d chosen to come in from the cold. Frank had sent a ghost to kill a devil. I watched the world, compelled towards my own completion – looking out over the still water, unable to let go.

Rachel had set honour in one eye and death in the other. It had blinded her until she’d died. In the gathering gloom I asked myself what I might possibly be owed from the cost of all that bloodletting. Out of the flames I tried to conjure her face. But all that remained was the memory of those eyes flashing in the inferno; and the reality of me, alone, holding on to nothing but a name. I thought I had known my own mind. But I no longer even knew for sure which one of us had gone insane.

Then from inside my jacket I removed the stricken cell phone, wrapped tight in waterproof bindings, and hurled it into the lake. It had saved my life once. The image in its circuits might one day do so again.

When the ripples reached the shore, I heard footsteps and then a man wearing a black uniform appeared beside me. A security guard, watching for trespassers, face hidden by the peak of his cap. He cleared his throat.

‘You shouldn’t be here, you know,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I know.’