Alone at last, in the silence of the cell, Luke took stock of his injuries. His left side hurt like hell: that would be where they’d hit him in his kidney with that knuckle-duster. He ran his fingertips over his ribs and pressed gently. Good. Nothing broken there. His face still ached, where he’d been hit below his left eye, but again, nothing broken, he reckoned. All in all, he had got away lightly, considering the odds. So far. But the harsh truth was that it was now past midnight and he was still stuck in a Lithuanian police cell on a trumped-up charge and facing a judge in the morning. Would they come for him again in the middle of the night? Possibly. He’d have to be ready for them if they did.

Luke pulled his knees up to his chin as he sat in the far corner of the cell, eyes on the door, ears tuned to the sound of any approaching footsteps. He was asleep within a minute.

37

Whitehall, London

Friday, 11 March, 0900hrs GMT

‘SO WE’RE ALL agreed, then. This is Moscow’s work.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact. She said it with finality, her eyes sweeping around the faces at the long table at the morning COBRA meeting. ‘We’ve concluded that is the only logical explanation. It has to be. The documentation recovered from Svalbard proves it. And meanwhile a patient – a UK citizen – has died as a result of their actions. Now the question is: what action should we be taking in response?’

The foreign secretary, newly appointed in the latest cabinet reshuffle, had been in the job for just four weeks after coming from a junior minister’s post in Work and Pensions. This was her first ministerial COBRA.

‘The mistake our previous government made,’ she continued, her eyes shining with conviction, ‘was that after the Russians poisoned Alexander Litvinenko right here in London with radioactive polonium in 2008—’ She broke off. Someone was tentatively putting their hand up.

‘Um, forgive me, Secretary of State,’ said a civil servant, somewhere quite far down the table, ‘but it was 2006. Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006.’

She gave him a piercing look, then carried on. ‘Yes. Quite. So, as I was saying, the government at the time simply didn’t react in a timely way. It took years, didn’t it, for a police investigation and a public inquiry to conclude that, yes, in all probability the Kremlin had carried out a state-sponsored assassination on British soil. And meanwhile the killers were long gone, safely back in Russia and beyond our reach. The net result? Moscow must have reckoned they’d pretty much got away with it.’

There was some brief tut-tutting and nodding around the table before she resumed her piece.