‘It’s your call, boss,’ Suzy said, to which Kate very nearly replied, Of course it’s my bloody call. But with the same uncanny sense of timing, the phone rang again. ‘Go down the stairs, cross Friedrichstrasse and head east.’

‘Is this leading anywhere? I’m close to calling it off.’

‘You were followed.’

The call was ended. Kate gritted her teeth. She did as she’d been told, emerging again into the spitting rain on the cobbled street the far side of Friedrichstrasse. She followed its passage east, past a series of down-at-heel cafés and restaurants.

She stopped to drop money into a busker’s hat. ‘Talk to me, Danny,’ she said. ‘He says I’ve been followed.’

‘We don’t know what he’s on about, Kate. We think you’re still clean.’

Kate walked on. She reached the end of the road, where the S-Bahn bridge crossed the canal. She lit another cigarette and turned around. There was nowhere she could sensibly proceed to without further instructions, so she paced and smoked with choking unease. ‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered. ‘This isn’t right.’

The phone rang. ‘Get out of there,’ Mikhail said. ‘We’ve been compromised. Get out of there now.’

Kate threw away her cigarette. Two men emerged from the shadow of the S-Bahn bridge. One blocked the road she had come down, the second a potential escape route to her left. She instinctively turned right, only to be confronted by a car that screeched into view and swung around in the middle of the street. Kate was cornered, with her back to the canal, both men armed with thick steel bars. ‘I’ve got trouble,’ she whispered. ‘Big bloody trouble.’

Kate glanced behind her. To swim or try to run?

She faced the men again. One was short, stocky and bald, with tattoos that climbed from his neck up either side of his shaved skull. The other was surprisingly slight, with a thin moustache and the kind of wispy half-beard you’d normally see on a teenager. He was the more dangerous.

The short guy got out of line, came on too quickly and swung with too much force. Kate stepped aside, tripped him and smashed his skull on to the top railing of the fence by the canal. He collapsed with a low grunt.

Two more men had got out of the car and were advancing towards her. One had a knife, but her immediate concern was the guy who looked like an overgrown adolescent. He advanced with stealth. They circled each other for a moment.

He feinted one way, then brought the bar down in a vicious arc towards her skull. She swerved, but only just in time – she felt the tremor in the air as it passed her cheek.

He tried again too swiftly and this time she caught his arm, blocked his leg and used his momentum to send him tipping over the rail and straight into the canal.

But the other two men had split up, blocking any realistic chance of escape. Besides, one was now armed with a pistol. Kate edged along the fence as they closed in. The man she’d sent into the canal was yelling at his colleagues in Russian.