‘Exactly. Perhaps it was Binot who alerted us.’

‘Rav wouldn’t go anywhere near a man like Binot. And, besides, he would have called us straight away if he had sensed he was being watched.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Mikhail looked exasperated. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘Was Stuart Viper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. It was my father who recruited him.’

There was something about Mikhail’s expression that unsettled Kate, not so much that he might be telling a lie – which he would likely pull off with consummate ease – so much as the sense that she, in turn, had unnerved him. But why? ‘How did Moscow Centre know what Rav was up to? Because Stuart could not have told them.’

‘Who says we killed Rav?’

‘You did.’

‘If we did, it was done without my father’s knowledge.’

Kate thought about that. She had kept her gaze fixed on Mikhail’s face. ‘What do you mean if? You must know.’

‘You are starting at shadows, Kate. It was not our work. That is what I am saying.’

‘What if there is someone else?’ she asked.

‘Where?’

‘In SIS, working for Moscow Centre.’

‘You mean someone whom my father, the head of our foreign intelligence service until two years ago, was unaware of?’

‘Perhaps he or she does not work for the SVR.’ Kate moved to the window and looked out at the grey clouds illuminated by the dying rays of the sun. ‘What about someone recruited and run by the GRU?’ She turned back to him. ‘A man or woman in a position to tell his or her masters in Moscow that Rav was circling close to Binot, a lawyer with intimate connections to the Russian president.’

She waited. ‘A man – or a woman – in a position to warn his masters that we had come to Berlin with the aim of persuading you to defect.’

‘You think anyone in the GRU gives a fuck what happens to us?’

‘I imagine, if they succeed in removing you, your father and his successor from power in the SVR, they would be rather interested in inheriting the British prime minister as an agent of influence.’

‘Stuart was Viper,’ Mikhail said, with finality. ‘The rest is just conjecture. I shouldn’t let it keep you awake at night.’

But as he left, she knew with utmost certainty that this particular piece of conjecture would be keeping them both awake for many nights to come.

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