The past few days had been a whirlwind of mental activity. She’d been astonished by how much information Petra Becker had on Tadeusz Radecki, and she could well imagine how frustrated her German contact had become with her team’s apparent inability to close down his operations and put him behind bars. He seemed to operate with complete impunity, largely because he had never made the mistake of most criminals, who eventually came to believe in their own invincibility. It was that hubris that brought most of them to disaster, Carol knew from her own experience. But Radecki had never lost the habit of constant caution. His was a recipe for success; he trusted few people, he understood the difference between turning a good profit and greed, and he apparently never breached the firewalls between his deceptively immaculate public persona and the dirty businesses that kept him in style. The icing on this perfect cake was Krasic, a man who had cultivated a reputation for brutal ruthlessness with apparent glee.

But although Radecki had managed to stay beyond the reach of legal sanction, it hadn’t rendered him immune from the relentless probing of Petra Becker. The dossier she had assembled on him was remarkable. Everything from his taste in music to the shops where he bought his clothes was documented. Assimilating this had been Carol’s first task, and it brought with it a genuine taste of the undercover life. She had to retain as much of this information as she possibly could while simultaneously shunting it to the back of her mind. Caroline Jackson would know almost nothing of Radecki’s life and tastes, and Carol found the necessity of splitting her mind in two profoundly dislocating. That was when she had decided, to hell with protocol, she needed a conduit to Tony.

If she’d had any doubts about the wisdom of her course of action, they vanished in the course of the second evening she spent in the company of Petra Becker. They had used the morning to go over everything Petra knew about Radecki’s criminal network, and the afternoon had been devoted to working with Carol’s cover story, pushing to see where the cracks might appear, trying to identify possible danger zones and letting her explore the personality she would be living inside for the foreseeable future. Finally, Petra had stubbed out the twentieth cigarette of the day and leaned back in her chair. ‘I think it’s time to unwind a little,’ she said. ‘We can’t be seen out together once we get back to Berlin, so we should make the most of our anonymity and have dinner out somewhere nice to celebrate the successful completion of phase one.’

Carol stretched her cramped back with a groan. ‘I’ll drink to that.’