Down the corridor, a sharp right turn, then down a flight of steps. Another corridor, darker this time and dingier. Where the hell was Jenny Li? She’d better be working on his release or this was starting to look very grim. Hell, she wouldn’t even know where they’d taken him. Luke detected the damp, rotting smell of mildew and the pungent, ammoniac tang of stale urine. They turned left and stopped. In front of them was a row of steel bars, floor to ceiling: a holding cell, impossibly brightly lit by a neon striplight on the ceiling. It already had several occupants – as the guards got out their keys, Luke counted five men, all dirty and dishevelled. Two sat slumped and dozing in a corner. But the other three sprang up at his arrival, exchanging expectant glances.

The guards gave Luke a final shove, then locked the door behind him with an elaborate clanking of keys and left. Great. So he was now sharing a cell with a bunch of petty criminals, people so far down the pecking order they didn’t even have the Mafia connections to get themselves out. And meanwhile no one had read him his rights – no one had even read him the charges. No phone call, no lawyer. Bloody hell. Lithuania was supposed to be a simple, straightforward mission to map the links between the Svalbard outbreak and a suspect chemical company in Eastern Europe. But something had gone very, very wrong. He’d been set up and he had absolutely nothing to show for it.

In the silence that followed the guards’ departure, Luke’s new cellmates looked at him and he looked at them, sizing each other up. One said something in Lithuanian and Luke froze. While he didn’t understand a word of their language there had been one in that sentence he did recognize: ‘Svalbard’.