Outside, an elderly woman with bunioned feet and cracked leather shoes shuffled past. Ossi or Wessi? She looked old enough to have lived through not only the communist era but Hitler’s as well.

How might the conversation be going between Laure and her boss back in the British Embassy building in the Unter den Linden?

There would be the report on him, and others like him. These would be analysed. From what he heard, several British MPs had been approached by the StB not so long ago. The British being wary, the approach had yielded nothing of any note, apart from a remarkably detailed intelligence report, put together by the British, on the Czech industrial sector. This had been smuggled back to Prague and people at Petr’s level got to read it. Unsurprisingly, it featured him.

‘Potio Pharma. CEO Petr Kobes…’ Here someone had noted in the margin, ‘A survivor as a surprising number of those old commies have proved to be’.

Potio Pharma. Established post the so-called Prague Spring in 1968. Pharmaceutical in origin. Since the Velvet Revolution in December 1989, has been diversifying into bio-technology. Headquarters in Prague. Emerged viable after the communist regime although there were several problems with levels of pollution that threatened the purity of their products. They have always displayed a hard export drive and maintained a team of salesmen who were probably engaged in industrial espionage as well.

Since the regime change, they have bought up smaller companies and, currently, are one of the top five Czech pharma companies. They have taken to the capitalist mode with vim and vigour but try to disguise it…

Evidently, the writer of the report had a sense of humour.

Objectives:

•   Regulation of the distribution of pharmaceuticals with limited margins

•   Regulation on distribution

•   Return on R&D investment

•   Proliferation of licensing and co-marketing agreements’

The marginalia displayed less restraint. ‘i.e. Keep socialist in flavour and rake in profits by other means. Cake and eating thereof.’

It was odd reading about his company from another point of view. Odd, but educational and he appreciated the Oxbridge turn of phrase.

The report continued. No link has been established between Potio Pharma and the Russian poison factory (established by Joseph Stalin) or the manufacture of chemical weapons, including nerve agents and other substances listed in the recent Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), although this cannot be definitively proved.

Past history suggests Kobes was engaged in industrial espionage for StB searching for information on research and techniques which the then current regime lacked and was desperate to obtain. It is possible that he was involved in the exfiltration of a dissident who was living in Marseilles in 1984. It is thought that Kobes was the instigator and money man. This has not been proved.

Bloody fuckers, he thought, on reading the above. But what surprised him was the level of personal detail. Inside detail. Someone had fed it in.