Ouch. That stung. She might have a point there, he conceded. He considered mentioning that Hugo Squires’s EQ seemed to be focused entirely on getting Elise into bed and that he was quite prepared to flash enough cash around to achieve his aim. But, no, Luke realized that was probably a low blow, so he’d grunted something non-committal and disappeared into the bedroom. He hated arguing with Elise. He just didn’t know how to fix whatever had gone wrong between them. For a moment, he stood there, staring at the bedside table, lost in thought, questioning if it was even possible to hold down this difficult job and still be with Elise. The two things seemed to be becoming ever less compatible.

In the morning, once again, he’d found it a relief to be getting out of the flat and into work. He noticed that, for the second time in five years, Thames House was cocooned in scaffolding and tarpaulins, like some monstrous chrysalis, as people worked to give its grimy walls a facelift. Unattractive as it was to look at, he bet this suited the men and women who worked there just fine, allowing them to turn discreetly off the Millbank pavement and up the steps into Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, unseen now by the traffic nosing past into Westminster.

He went through the tubular Star Trek-style security doors and into the largely featureless foyer, where TV screens on the walls ran twenty-four-hour-news channels around the clock.

‘Luke?’ He turned. He knew that voice and his spirits sank. It was John Friend, one of the small army of the Service’s in-house legal advisers. Everything had to be signed off by them these days, right from the initial conversations, long before an operation went live. Luke knew these things were needed, after the fiasco of Libya and Britain’s involvement in extraordinary rendition to Gaddafi’s prisons. Yet he couldn’t help seeing Friend as a human ‘fun-detector’, a killjoy out to mess up the missions of people at the sharp end like him.

‘Just passing through, John?’ he said hopefully, as they greeted each other awkwardly.

‘No, no,’ Friend replied cheerfully. ‘I’ve been assigned to this one. The Agent X outbreak. Making sure there’s no legal comeback when it’s all done and dusted. We’ll be working together again. I’ll rather enjoy that. And, look, here comes our escort.’