Bowman barely heard him. He was buzzing with adrenaline. The tiredness he’d felt earlier that evening was a distant memory now. An hour ago, he had been sitting in his crappy hotel room, watching TV. Now he was being drafted in for an urgent mission with the Cell. Something big was about to go down, Bowman sensed. And he was going to be right in the thick of the action.

That’s exactly where I want to be.

Mallet said, ‘Drop your stuff off at the bunks. Then meet me in the Shed. I want to show you something.’

He started towards the Shed. Bowman beat a path across the room, dumped his holdall on one of the empty beds. Then he hurried over to the soundproofed room and stepped inside.

There was a boardroom table in the middle of the Shed, with eight chairs arranged around it and a conference speakerphone in the centre. Wires snaked through the square cut-out, leading to unseen plug sockets and modems beneath the table. The walls were covered in eggcrate-patterned foam tiles. Soundproofing. Bowman had seen it before, in MI6 safe houses elsewhere in the city.

Mallet was standing in front of a large display board against the back wall. The board was covered in postcard-sized photographs, linked to one another with lengths of red string. Bowman saw a picture of a palatial mansion overlooking a bay, an exterior shot of a gleaming apartment block. A photo of Ken Seguma, along with some other faces he vaguely recognised. Members of the president’s family.

In the middle of the board was a snap of David Lang.

Bowman drew up alongside Mallet and took a closer look at the photo. It appeared to have been taken at some sort of party. A private gathering. Lang sat at a table, between a couple of burly guys in dark suits, a bottle of wine in front of them. The two stocky guys were smiling as they posed for the camera. But not David Lang.

He looked almost identical to his twin brother. He was slimmer than Freddie, lean-hipped and slender, and his hair was sprinkled with grey. But he had the same arched eyebrows as Freddie. The same thin lips and cruel, cold eyes. He was smartly dressed in a linen jacket; the top two buttons on his shirt were popped, revealing a tuft of chest hair and a gold chain as thick as a hanging rope. On his left wrist he wore a chunky watch with a spider on the dial. Bowman had seen that model before. The Russian president owned the same one. He remembered reading about it somewhere. A limited-edition model, costing almost half a million quid.

He turned to Mallet and jabbed a finger at the pinboard. ‘Is that who we’re arresting? David Lang?’