It was a man’s voice on the phone, deep and resonant, not old, but not young, with an accent whose audible Scottish-born origins had been smoothed around the edges by decades of international business travel. He sounded outwardly calm and cool, but Ben sensed an undertone of agitation, like ocean currents swirling beneath Arctic sheet ice. The voice said, ‘Am I to presume that I’m speaking with Mr Ben Hope? Or perhaps I should address you as Major?’

Ben replied, ‘And am I to presume that I’m talking to Mr Charles Stuart?’

‘We meet at last. I wish I could say it was a pleasure.’

‘That’s the nice thing about business negotiations,’ Ben said. ‘You don’t have to like the people you’re dealing with.’

‘I take it, then, that I’m correctly informed and you wish to do business with me?’

‘When one person is in possession of something that the other would do anything to obtain, a sober commercial transaction is the more mature way to resolve things for everyone’s benefit. As opposed to, say, going to war. I don’t think that either of us wants to do this the hard way.’

‘As I think you know, I’m fully prepared for that option.’

‘Nobody’s ever fully prepared for a war,’ Ben said. ‘I’m offering you a far preferable alternative. One that you get to walk away from unhurt.’

‘Then you do have something that I want?’ Stuart was doing his best to sound composed, but as they circled the main issue it was becoming harder for him to contain his anticipation.

‘I’d say you want it more than anything else in the world,’ Ben said. ‘Considering the risks you’re obviously prepared to take to get hold of it.’

‘You have my attention. So what exactly are you putting on the table here?’

‘Rather than take my word for it,’ Ben said, ‘why don’t you let me show you? Give me an email address and you can see for yourself, right now.’

Stuart reeled off the address. Ben took out his own phone and sent him the image of the gold coin that Mirella had forwarded to him three days ago. Ben waited for the email to land. When it did, he could almost palpably sense Stuart getting all pepped up and jumpy on the end of the line. Ben said, ‘If that looks like something you might be interested in, then I can tell you it’s only a tiny sample of what I’ve got. There are thousands more.’

Now Stuart was fairly hopping. ‘How many thousands?’