‘It was not your husband’s doing. You should know that.’ Kate stopped, turned back to face Mikhail. ‘He cuts a somewhat pathetic figure in Moscow. For what it is worth, I think you are the love of his life.’

‘Goodbye, Mikhail.’

‘I think you mean “au revoir”. We’ll meet again.’

Kate walked down to the ground-floor lobby and out on to the launch. ‘Take me back to my children, please,’ she instructed the man with the pockmarked face. Her chest had constricted so violently that she felt as if she was about to have a heart attack, the anxiety that had been her constant companion for months now threatening to consume her.

3

KATE WAS MET back at the church by the implacable set of her fifteen-year-old daughter’s jaw. ‘Where the hell were you?’

‘I—’

‘You promised you weren’t going to work while you were here.’

‘How did you—’

‘Dad said you had to take a work call.’

‘Yes . . . yes. I’m really sorry.’ Kate knew better than to choose this moment to get into an argument with her daughter. She could see the hurt in her eyes. There were also scratch marks on her arm, a recent worrying indication of her tendency to self-harm. Gus, meanwhile, stared resolutely at the floor. Whatever had happened in the meeting with their father had evidently shaken them both. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can find an ice cream.’

As the children turned away, Julie whispered, ‘What the hell happened?’

‘Pas devant les enfants.’

‘I do speak French, you know,’ Fiona threw over her shoulder, ‘and in six days’ time, I’ll basically be an adult anyway.’

That sounded like a threat rather than an abstract statement of fact, but Kate let it ride. They did get ice creams on the way back, and sat on a wall by the canal in front of their hotel, eating them in silence.

Once inside, Kate left her children in their room to simmer down, and tackled Julie first. ‘Mikhail and Igor’s thugs,’ she explained. ‘They took me at gunpoint to Mikhail’s fancy palazzo.’

‘What did they want?’

‘To defect.’

Julie looked at her as if she had just gone mad, her vivid green eyes clouded by confusion.

‘They are offering us the video they claim to have been using as kompromat against the prime minister. It shows him having sex with underage girls.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘No. Only if we accept their offer in principle.’

‘What if it’s a fake?’

‘He claims we’ll know it isn’t.’

‘I thought they could fake anything, these days . . . But why would they want to defect?’ Julie couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. She sat down on her bed.

‘Mikhail says his father and Vasily Durov have fallen out with the Kremlin and been ousted in a coup orchestrated by the GRU. He says Durov is under arrest, which likely means bound for Siberia at best, execution at worst. He and his father are desperate to flee to the West before the net closes on them.’