Luke had found himself this morning right inside the beating heart of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service and it was all down to what he and Jenny had discovered in Vilnius. It was quite possible, he realized, that there would be some people upstairs – ambitious middle-rankers, people who had joined the Service a good few years before him – who were not going to like him for this. There were men and women in this building, loyal servants of the Crown, Luke knew, who would spend their entire careers working their way up through its ranks, and never even come close to being invited to attend a directors’ 0900. Yet here he was, a field operative, an agent runner, a relative junior with less than five years on the books, still cutting his teeth in some people’s eyes – and now he was sitting at the top table.

‘Obviously,’ Sir Adam was saying, ‘we still need to find corroborating sources on all this, to support what Luke and Jenny have uncovered. Security Service will be working all their contacts over here. Cheltenham will be working the data. But, as I see it, we could be looking at a triple threat. There’s the bio-weapon itself – this pox, this virus, whatever the hell it is these people have cooked up on Svalbard. Containing it is not our problem. Finding out who’s got it, that is. That’s the task now facing all of us in the intelligence community, here in this building, across the river at Thames House and over in Cheltenham.’ Sir Adam ran his hand through his thinning hair and frowned. In fact, Luke wasn’t sure that he’d stopped frowning for the last hour.

‘Second,’ continued the Chief, nodding in the vague direction of Whitehall, ‘before the hour is out I’ll have to go across the river to Number Ten to tell the prime minister in person that – guess what? – we might have got this one wrong, and it looks like it isn’t the Kremlin behind this outbreak after all.’ He took a deep breath, pursed his lips and shook his head.

‘And as if that isn’t bad enough,’ he stopped to give an ironic smile, ‘there are indications, again based on the raw CX from Vilnius, that somewhere inside the intelligence community there could be a leak. In other words, a mole.’ The Chief winced as he enunciated the dreaded word. The taboo term hung in the air like a bad smell. A traitor. An Insider Threat. The Enemy Within. It was every intelligence agency’s worst nightmare. And everyone in the room knew what it meant. It meant triggering an internal investigation, a witch-hunt, by Security Branch, and that was now going to make everyone’s job a whole lot harder.

‘So, Luke.’ The Chief waved a hand towards him. ‘I’d like you to repeat for everyone here what you told me earlier, just so we’re all up to speed.’