There’s an unspoken question that seems to ask: really, why wouldn’t you?

‘I was assigned to penetrate a revolutionary cell.’

What Rachkovsky calls without irony his ‘war on terror’ is both lucrative and potentially endless. He doesn’t bother to conceal the pleasure it gives him – or the rewards it brings. The work exactly suits his genius for intrigue and manipulation, his astonishing appetite for long hours in the office. Despite or perhaps because of his own brilliance, Rachkovsky carries an innate distrust for flair and flash. He likes solid, conscientious workers who are prepared to grind away at a problem for weeks. At the same time, he’s a generous boss, and employment with the Third Section brings all kinds of fringe benefits.

International spycraft is a business that runs on cash: paying for safe houses, bribing postal workers and policemen, per diems for agents abroad. No one gives receipts and no one takes cheques. There’s a lot of untraceable money swilling around and the rumour is that much of it ends up in Rachkovsky’s own accounts, invested in the Bourse, and his big mansion in the suburb of Saint-Cloud.

Rachkovsky has most of Parisian publishing in his pocket, so Nicolas is receiving more commissions than ever – and being paid twice. Some of the articles he signs, some he doesn’t. Now and then, Rachkovsky will send a whole piece to him to be published as is. Usually it’s a gossipy insider’s view of exiled revolutionaries that implies one of them is talking to the police. The intention is to sow discord in their ranks.

Nicolas enjoys being a pen for hire. He likes the money and he exults in his power to reorder reality with words. He doesn’t notice the innate peril of the job: the dangerous frivolity of believing that the world of words is entirely separate from the one in which people love and suffer. ‘The line between the improbable and the inevitable is tiny,’ Rachkovsky tells him. ‘Freedom for slaves. Votes for women. Rights for animals. Merely think it and it’s halfway to coming true. Our battlefield is the mind. Our task is to control the plane of the real.’

In some ways, the work seems like a logical progression from his experience with MacGahan, another self-fashioning teller of stories. But when he attends honestly to what he feels, he notices a buried sense of disquiet. At least MacGahan’s story-making was underpinned by her compassion and authenticity, by a sense of responsibility to bearing honest witness. He recalls her tenderness, her capacity to be moved by mute suffering. It’s hard to imagine Rachkovsky shedding tears with a bereaved mother. It’s not clear, in fact, if Rachkovsky actually believes in anything at all. Sometimes the spymaster insists that Russia’s role is to stand firm as the Eternal Rome, a buttress against liberal decadence. At other times, he accepts change is inevitable: ‘Of course change will come,’ he’ll say. ‘But we want it to be at a time of our choosing.’