Now, despite the late hour, he was still poring over the initial findings. His people had started with the obvious: the digital trail, mining everything from emails to friends-only postings on VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook. They needed no warrants, no special clearance: Colonel Petrov’s orders were sufficient. Sure enough, there were all the usual revelations he was expecting: the phone sex lines being dialled up from work when someone thought no one was listening, the suspect payments for luxury items on government expense accounts, the guilty proof of visits to an upmarket sauna by someone claiming to be nursing a cold at home. These he could live with: he was after bigger fish, and so far he wasn’t landing one. Not a single clue leading to Svalbard, no hint of the betrayal he was so determined to find. Someone must be covering their tracks extremely well. But he would find them, of that he was in no doubt.

51

Vilnius, Lithuania

Saturday, 12 March, 2128hrs GMT, 0028hrs local

OF ALL THE scenarios they had trained him for, Luke had never expected to end up in a situation like this. Past midnight in a pop-up nightclub on the outskirts of a Baltic capital, and he had to try to hold a serious conversation with a man zipped up inside a leather gimp suit, whose face he couldn’t even see. From beyond the walls came the rhythmic, monotonous thump of techno music, and the man with the pig’s head on his shoulders was still standing by the door, watching him – or, at least, Luke assumed he must be, although it was hard to tell. There were nearly a dozen other people scattered around the room, some on sofas, some standing huddled in a corner clutching drinks. Luke had the feeling that a lot of eyes were fixed on him, the outsider, the intruder into this closed world. How ironic that he should be the one to feel self-conscious.

‘Mr Janulis,’ he began.

‘Mr Carlton.’

The formality of the exchange on the sofa seemed completely absurd to Luke, given the circumstances, but he put that swiftly to one side because right now he was intensely focused on getting what he had come for. Janulis had already delivered last night – for a price – and handing over that flash drive to Jenny meant their mission here in Lithuania was already technically a success. But Luke had now spent enough years in the intelligence world to know that raw intel alone was not enough: you needed to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw. He needed to exploit what they had and the next few minutes could determine the real success or failure of this entire part of the mission.