They had settled on the polo neck, which was exactly what the man on the door was wearing. Blond, massive, tattooed and earringed, the club’s bouncer didn’t give them a second glance: he looked right past Luke and waved them inside. Purple lighting, the sweet smoke of shisha pipes and young, happy-looking people. Those were Luke’s first impressions as they stepped through the door. This wasn’t flashy downtown Moscow, it was Vilnius, relaxed, low-budget, informal. The club had a dark, smoky vibe, with an illuminated blue neon waterfall effect on the wall. A pair of ash-blonde girls sat up at the bar, twirling on their stools and sucking at shisha pipes, their manicured fingers gripping the corrugated stems of the waterpipes as they inhaled the scented smoke. One smiled up at Luke as he and Jenny went past, then tilted her head back and blew smoke rings up at the ceiling. A huge screen above the bar was playing Billie Eilish’s ‘Bad Guy’ music video from 2019 as her song thumped out from giant speakers mounted on the walls.

‘I’m going to check out the rest of this place,’ said Luke. ‘See if I can find him.’ He waved towards a padded leather sofa in the corner. ‘D’you want to grab that spot before anyone else does?’ He moved past the bar, behind which a girl in a black leather minidress was expertly spinning a bottle of vodka in the air as she mixed the drinks. Luke wasn’t watching her: he was noting the exits and scoping the clientele. He needed to be sure they had an escape plan if this all went pear-shaped and it turned out to be a set-up. It wasn’t the authorities here he was worried about, it was the underworld Mafia that had sprung up in the Baltics ever since independence in the 1990s. He had read up about it in the pre-mission briefing. Former Soviet Spetznaz Special Forces operatives, who had reinvented themselves as they spread their tentacles into organized crime. They had a reputation for violence that made the Italian Mafia sound mild.

Luke moved on, turning a corner into the washrooms, where two girls were waiting patiently for their turn, both head down, scrolling intently through their phones, ignoring each other. No sign of Janulis yet. Luke turned on his heels to go back the way he had come and found his path blocked by a giant of a man in a tight black T-shirt, bald, bearded, muscled. Instantly on alert, Luke mentally measured him up. They were the same height, but, if it came to it, Luke wasn’t sure he could take him down. The man smiled and politely moved aside to let him pass. False alarm.

Luke rejoined Jenny on the sofa. ‘There’s no bloody sign of him,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard above the music.