He looked down at the package in his hand and gently opened it. The black USB stick fell into his palm. All those names, aliases, passwords that they needed, contained in just this tiny gadget. It would need to be quarantined and screened before anyone could access its contents. Luke had received enough briefings on offensive Russian cyber ops to know it would almost certainly be loaded with the latest most sophisticated malware. But, still, he had got what he had come to Moscow for and he should be feeling a sense of achievement that at last, after all this time in Svalbard, Vilnius and here in Moscow, he was finally making real headway. But if he couldn’t track down Jenny very soon, this whole mission would be called into doubt. He contemplated getting into a taxi and going in person to the Ivanovsky Institute to push for answers, but decided against it.

When the phone rang beside the bed twenty minutes later, the voice on the other end was brisk and stern. ‘Come down to Reception,’ the man said. He didn’t sound like somebody who worked for the hotel.

Three of them were waiting for him at the far end of the reception desk, all stockily built men in dark suits; one wore an earpiece. They introduced themselves as working for Colonel Petrov and the oldest flashed his ID badge.

‘Come, please,’ they told him. ‘We go to GRU headquarters.’

Despite this being his first, and most probably last, visit to Russia, this was exactly how Luke had imagined it would be in his dealings with Russia’s shadowy security apparatus. His uncle had spent long hours telling him tales of Soviet life in the seventies and early eighties, when he’d been posted undercover to the British Embassy during the dark days of Leonid Brezhnev. It occurred to Luke now that when it came to state security nothing much had changed since those times.

Sitting once more in the back of the car, being driven across Moscow at night and past the floodlit red walls of the Kremlin, Luke pressed again for an answer. ‘I would like to speak to my colleague, Miss Li,’ he said, leaning forward to address the man in the front passenger seat. ‘Her phone is switched off and she is with your people at the Ivanovsky Institute.’

He waited while a hurried conversation in Russian flowed back and forth between his three GRU escorts. Finally, the man in front replied: ‘I have some news. Miss Li has met with an accident. We are sorry.’

‘What?’ The news hit Luke like a blow to the head. They had stopped at a busy intersection and the lights of the vehicles were flashing past like a kaleidoscope, the roads glistening with a light dusting of snow. There was silence in the car, just the drone of the traffic outside the windows in the freezing night.