‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Reading through CVs of people showing off about their management skills would bore me to bloody death.’ Jake leaned back in his plastic chair and took a large gulp of coffee. He had dark circles under his eyes and was wearing the same shirt as yesterday. What Jake got up to on nights when he didn’t get home could vary from acrobatics with one of the many willing doe-eyed, long-limbed twenty-somethings that flocked to his dark, brooding looks, to dabbling in activities that could be violent, illegal, immoral or even all three. One time we’d been called in in the middle of the night for an urgent mission, I’d had to pick him up bloodied, bruised and missing a shirt from some disused railway tracks. Jake needed to push it, he needed to be on the edge. Even being a Rat wasn’t always enough. He’d go looking for the trouble he needed to get himself into and out of to feel alive. Today he looked exhausted, but there were no tell-tale specks of blood on shirt cuffs, no wincing as he leaned forward for another hit of caffeine. Maybe last night was just a particularly energetic young ingénue trying hard to convince him she was enough to give up the others.

‘Don’t be fooled by the bland recruitment talk. “Tenebris” is Latin for “dark” and this is without a doubt a dark force we’re dealing with,’ said Hattie. He nodded at Geraint. ‘Take us through it, G.’

Geraint tapped a couple of buttons and a screenshot of a website homepage was projected onto the whiteboard. ‘The Tenebris Network is a major new threat to the security of not only all our assets and informants but all Security Service agents both here in the UK and abroad. It’s an app that’s a cross between Tinder and LinkedIn. On one side there are the profiles of Employees – for example, civil servants, agents, analysts, intelligence officers – while on the other are the Employers – foreign intelligence services, crime syndicates, drug kingpins and all manner of bad people. Tenebris confidentially connects Employers to Employees with a simple right swipe.’

A PowerPoint presentation flicked through example pages of the Tenebris website and finished on their Terms of Business. We were all quiet as we took everything in.