Taking no more chances, he had headed straight for Vilnius airport, arriving a full four hours before his flight and having the few personal effects he’d left at the Shakespeare Hotel couriered over to him in the terminal. Its clean, modern interior and smiling Baltic charm had done little to reassure him. Someone in this country had just tried to kill him and he’d thought seriously about getting an earlier connecting flight via Warsaw. Instead, he had found a quiet corner of the departure lounge and held a long, encrypted conversation on the phone to Angela. At this time on a Sunday, despite the fears over the Svalbard outbreak, there were only weekend on-call staff working in Whitehall. But across the river in Vauxhall Cross a lot of staff had been drafted in to work through the weekend on the Moscow angle. Angela was one of them. If anything, she was even more rattled than he was by what had just happened to him. But when he told her what he had gleaned from Earl Grey she had listened intently. Everything he told her would now be relayed immediately to the cross-agency taskforce working around the clock. ‘Stick with the direct flight to London,’ she told him. ‘The Chief will want to be briefed by you in person first thing tomorrow.’

The cab from London City Airport dropped him right outside the block where he and Elise lived. He should have been happy to be home. Yet he found his finger hovering over the door buzzer at street level and something, he wasn’t sure what, was stopping him pressing it. In the almost four days he had been away on the Vilnius mission Luke had received just one curt WhatsApp message from her. Already, these days, he could feel himself growing inexorably more distant from her, as if a rip tide were pulling him away from the shore. He had wanted to ask her how her training was going for the London Marathon, how things were at the art gallery where she worked, whether she was still concerned about her old dad coping in that Buckinghamshire cottage on his own. All the normal, mundane things that had absolutely nothing to do with a lethal, genetically engineered, contagious disease threatening to break out into the general population. And yet he had asked her none of these things. He had simply swung himself into work mode and focused all his energies on the mission. Switching his personal phone back on after the flight from Vilnius, he had thought about sending her a text from the airport to say he was on his way home. But in the end he hadn’t. Luke had never found it easy to express himself in text form, and since joining MI6 what little ability he’d had in that department seemed to have evaporated altogether.