Not long after settling in a tiny village in Switzerland, and his mother failed to return from a trip to the local market, he’d been told to consider their host family as his own. He’d struggled for years to accept his new name, and to pay heed to the warning to tell no one about his mother or his previous life. In this atmosphere of secrecy and lies, he learned to say nothing about where he’d come from, and to shrink himself down to a wisp of smoke. No past, no future. In his panic over Ismail, Gessen’s younger, frightened self, newly resurgent, urged him to run into the forest and hide.

But he couldn’t do that now. He was no longer little Anton, cowering in the dark, but a grown man whom others trusted with their lives. He rubbed his temples, trying to steel himself for what was to come. But first, he needed to do the one thing he dreaded most. Contact Mr Mahmoud and let him know his son was missing.

* * *

Darkness had fallen, with still no news. The police and Mountain Rescue had searched in an ever-widening radius across the mountain, but with mist and falling snow, visibility was poor all afternoon. Gessen could only hope the boy was on a train speeding towards the UK, alive and well, and not lying dead in the snow. When he’d telephoned Ismail’s father earlier in the day, his heart heavy with dread, the man’s personal assistant informed him he was on a plane to Cairo. She would relay the urgency of Gessen’s message as soon as he touched down.

He forced himself to eat a few bites of his dinner, brought to him on a tray, though it had cooled now, with the fat congealed into grease. He stared into the fire. According to Keller’s report, everyone was where they were supposed to be at the time Ismail went missing. But something niggled. Vidor. Might there have been an altercation? Vidor had attacked one man without provocation, why not another? Staff notes pointed to an ongoing tension between the two. Vidor complained, more than once, that Ismail sometimes knocked on the wall between their bedrooms at night, waking him from a deep sleep. When questioned, Ismail had vigorously denied doing anything so childish.

He straightened up and rang his Security head. ‘Any word yet?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ Keller paused. ‘You’ll be the first to know when we hear something.’