‘Bingo,’ said Khan. ‘We found Vasiliev’s name on one of them, among a lot of other stuff that’s still being worked through, and we ran it through the database downstairs. Turns out he works in the chemical and bio-warfare division of the GRU.’ Khan looked around the room triumphantly and now Luke could see Angela was regarding him with something approaching professional pride. ‘This,’ Khan concluded, ‘has Russian military intelligence stamped all over it! And it’s come just in time for the JIC this afternoon.’

The JIC. The Joint Intelligence Committee, the top-secret Whitehall group that issued all the taskings to Britain’s intelligence agencies, made infamous under Tony Blair’s premiership for its fatally flawed assessment of Iraq’s long-defunct programme to build weapons of mass destruction.

Luke couldn’t quite put his finger on exactly why, but right now, somewhere in the back of his head, a voice was urging extreme caution: this was all sounding a bit too simple. ‘Can we be a hundred per cent certain on that?’ he asked. ‘I mean, the GRU got their knuckles rapped over the Salisbury Novichok poisoning, didn’t they? Then there was the Navalny affair they thought they could get away with and didn’t.’

‘What are you saying exactly, Luke?’ It was Angela who asked this. She had always encouraged him to question, to argue, to take the contrary view at times, so he knew it wasn’t a hostile interruption.

‘What I’m saying,’ he replied, ‘is that it seems a bit implausible they’d try something like this again when they keep getting rumbled. I mean, what if it turns out to be a rogue op?’ Luke looked around the table, searching for support.

It was the man with white stubble who answered him. ‘I should have introduced myself earlier, Luke. I’m Denys Kovalenko from the Russian section. And, yes, that’s a Ukrainian name. My parents both grew up in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the West. So, what do I think?’ He spread his hands wide. ‘I think there is no such thing as a rogue op in twenty-first-century Russia. Nothing, but nothing, gets done without sign-off from the top.’

‘Precisely,’ Khan concurred, ‘but I do like the way you’re thinking, Luke. Intelligence is, as we all know, nearly always an incomplete picture, a case of putting together the pieces and moving them around until they fit. That’s why we have the JIC.’

‘Right. So we do have other pieces?’ Luke tried not to make it sound like a challenge, but that was exactly what it came out as.