Louis had no idea how old Ross was and had never bothered finding out. He’d just assumed that the FBI man had come out of the womb already looking like a late-middle-aged man with hemorrhoids, at which point his parents had disowned him. But if Ross had already been making Europe appear grimmer by his presence at the start of the 1990s, he was probably at least in his late fifties by now.

‘De Jaager fed us some information about a group of hard-core Stasi who didn’t like the way the wind was blowing,’ Ross continued, ‘not that they were unique in that regard, but these particular cold warriors were of a mind to cause trouble. Ordinarily we might just have kept them under surveillance, or let someone else deal with them – maybe their own people, because this was in the days just after the wall had fallen, and we weren’t in a position to go chasing down every lead amid the chaos. And some of us were optimists. We thought the end of communism meant a new beginning.’

‘Were you an optimist?’ said Louis. ‘Because I have to say, that would surprise me.’

‘I might have contracted optimism once, by association,’ said Ross. ‘But I got over it.’

‘I guessed,’ said Louis.

‘I was just a young agent back then, attached to the Berlin embassy as a new legat. I wasn’t privy to all that went down, because it was an Agency operation and I only learned about most of it later. I became involved in the discussions because we were investigating the death of a young American tourist named Annie Houseman in Bautzen, and the Stasi knew more about it than they were prepared to admit, even through the back channels which we were using to communicate with them.

‘Anyway, the story we were hearing was that one of these rogue Stasi guys might have killed Houseman. He got her drunk in a bar, tried to rape her, she fought back, and it all spun out of control. He ended up crushing her head with his car to hide her injuries, although she was already dead by then. It was put down to a hit-and-run, an unfortunate accident amid the anarchy and celebrations, but De Jaager knew better. He got the story from a functionary looking to relocate to Stockholm via The Hague, who was seeking an honest broker for the documents he had to share. The smarter ones knew that it would be a seller’s market at the start, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long, so it paid to stay ahead of the competition.