Luke felt a gnawing pang of worry. Not on his account, but on Jenny’s. Splitting up their team had definitely not been in the plan and it was far from ideal. By deliberate design, he suspected, they had been given no opportunity to check in with London via the QKD transmitters – they certainly weren’t going to risk a burst transmission from a locked toilet cubicle right inside GRU headquarters. Instead, they had just had to take a command decision on their own and go with it. But now he was having second thoughts. Jenny was his senior and he knew she could more than take care of herself, but if anything happened to her out here … well, he couldn’t help feeling personally responsible.

Thirty minutes after leaving GRU headquarters they passed another towering example of 1950s Stalinist wedding-cake architecture. A hypertext link on Luke’s map showed it to be Moscow State University, ‘the tallest educational establishment in the world’. Was he being taken to meet an academic? Maybe a professor of bio-medicine? But, no, the convoy drove on, leaving the university behind, and the sleet that had begun falling when they set off was now turning to snow. They had entered a strange suburban wasteland of endless red garages and lockups, devoid of normal habitation. Every single person they passed was male, mostly hanging around in groups, hunched against the cold, seemingly waiting for something or someone. Others were working on dilapidated cars and glanced up with worried faces as the convoy passed by. Everyone in Moscow knew that three black Mercedes jeeps meant only one thing: military intelligence.

Sitting up front, the interpreter asked the colonel a question in Russian and he nodded his assent. He then turned to Luke. ‘This place,’ he said, ‘is called Garage Valley. Also we call it Shanghai.’

‘Garage’ he got – they were surrounded by them – but Shanghai?

‘Why Shanghai?’ Luke asked. The interpreter looked questioningly at his boss, who shook his head. The interpreter shrugged and turned back to face the front.

They had slowed to a crawl now, moving slowly along an unpaved road between two lines of lockups, their wheels slithering through shallow troughs of wet slush. A man in a baseball cap, bomber jacket, boots and cargo trousers appeared, looming close to the windscreen, cradling an automatic carbine. Even from his seat in the back Luke had a good enough view of him to recognize the weapon in his hands: an AKS-74U, a short, stubby version of the Kalashnikov, perfect for close-quarter encounters and part of the chosen armoury of the GRU’s Spetznaz Special Forces.

They stopped.