She smiles at him again, as one smiles at a child whose demands one has no intention of giving in to. ‘That’s not going to happen, Matti. Like I said, we have a lot to talk about, you and me.’

Jacob swallows hard. ‘Don’t call me that,’ he says. ‘That’s not my name any more.’

‘Your name’s not Matti Johansson any more,’ she says. ‘Well, that is indeed true. You’re Jacob Seger now. It’s a much grander name, you might say. Fits the person you want to be.’

‘Please,’ he says. ‘Leave me alone. I haven’t done anything wrong.’

But the woman isn’t listening to him, doesn’t hear him. ‘It wasn’t good enough for you to grow up with a lonely, alcoholic mother in Eskilstuna,’ she begins. ‘That’s understandable. Welfare and evictions. You have big dreams, Matti. Your background must feel like a handicap. You’re made for embassies and elegant dinner parties. Castles, perhaps? Surely you didn’t grow up in such miserable conditions?’

He shakes his head. It can’t be true. Everything he put behind him, everything he worked so hard to escape. Why now? Now when he’s so close?

His mouth is dry, his head is spinning.

‘I need water,’ he whispers.

But the woman’s already passed by him, found a glass and is filling it from the tap. She hands it to him.

‘There you go,’ she says. ‘Now let’s sit down in the living room.’

*

‘I don’t know who you are,’ Jacob says when they finally sit down at the table in front of the closed balcony door. ‘But there’s nothing illegal or suspicious about changing one’s name.’

Jacob has to raise his voice to be heard over the traffic and baseline thumping from the bars.

‘Illegal?’ the woman says. ‘No, definitely not. Suspicious? Well…’ She holds up her hands like scales.

‘How do you know about this?’ he says. ‘Why did you investigate me? Why are you here?’

The woman leans back in her chair and stares calmly at him. ‘When are you planning to meet Yassim Al-Abbas again?’ she says.

‘I…’ he says. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He takes a gulp of water. Al-Abbas. Is that Yassim’s last name?

Slowly the woman leans over the table, her dark, expressionless eyes boring into his own. ‘My name is Myriam Awad,’ she says. ‘Officially, I work with cultural affairs at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria.’

‘And unofficially?’ Jacob whispers, his lungs tightening in his chest, the whole room shrinking around him.

‘Unofficially I work for something called the Office for Special Acquisition,’ she says calmly. ‘It’s part of MUST, the Swedish military’s intelligence service.’

Now the whole room is spinning around him. Is this woman in his apartment some kind of spy?