But whatever he’d felt in that moment, it was nothing compared to the stabbing in his chest when he thought of the look in Anna’s eyes as the lift doors had closed.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and rang her number. And then he rang it again, and again, and again. When that failed, he resorted to texting.

Where are you?

Are you okay?

I’m worried about you.

Please call back.

He was behaving like a clingy teenage girl. Also humiliating. But he didn’t care. He had to know she was all right. What he felt didn’t matter.

He growled with frustration at his blank and silent phone, and was almost tempted to hurl it across the room, but he didn’t want to be charged for the fancy TV hidden inside the bathroom mirror, so he stuffed it back in his pocket and strode into his suite.

He kept walking until he reached the corner of the dining area that looked over both the Thames and the City of London. She was out there somewhere amid all those winking lights, possibly ill, possibly… something. He couldn’t get his head around it.

Why, after being so insistent that they meet, had she turned tail the moment she’d set eyes on him? It didn’t make any sense.

He had to go and find her.

Brody turned and headed across the living area to the glitzy hallway, but the closer he got to the door of his hotel suite, the more the tingling in his fingers and feet got worse. Ibrahim had warned him not to put himself in a panic-inducing situation when his symptoms were already threatening to tip him over the edge.

He made it as far as the door, laid his palm against the polished wood, and his heart hiccupped, skipping a beat then doubling up. The air around him began to get fuzzy.

He’d do it, if it were just a case of getting through these symptoms and sensations, if it were just a case of walking through the terror and letting it engulf him. He’d walk a thousand miles in that state to find her, but that was the problem – he didn’t think he’d make it a thousand miles. He didn’t even think he’d make it fifty feet before his traitorous body hijacked him.

He was useless. Weak.

He dropped his hand and his shoulder sagged as he turned and walked back towards the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up almost half the walls of his suite. He rested his forehead against the glass.

A muffled bang came from somewhere upriver, and from behind the buildings to the west, fireworks began to explode. He could just about make out the curve of the top of the London Eye, lighting up with blasts of colour. The river below glowed with the reflection of rockets shooting skywards, marking the passage of one year into the next. The city began to celebrate.

Brody didn’t think he’d ever felt more lonely.