‘You have to ask?’ He leant forward, placing his elbows on the table. ‘Besides, Grove didn’t authorize this surveillance.’

‘How would you know?’

‘I’ve worked with her a long time. She’s pretty straight.’

‘In this kind of investigation, no one is straight. Rule Number One.’

‘She is. And so am I. Which means that only Ian could have authorized us to be tailed. I don’t think it reflects well on him.’

‘And yet everyone we encounter who knows him intimately is of one view. He does not have the courage to be an agent of an enemy power.’

‘I thought it was weakness we were looking for, not courage.’

‘Perhaps a peculiar combination of both,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I have some things to take care of tomorrow morning before our flight, so you’ll have a chance to catch up on your old haunts.’

Callum looked at her oddly for a moment, then drained his glass. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But before we get to that, you promised me a night on the tiles. And I haven’t got really hammered in Prague for a very long time.’

21

AND SO IT was that Kate found herself more or less forced into the most unlikely event of her recent life: a bar crawl of central Prague, with the impossibly handsome young assistant she had acquired in this latest twist of the intelligence dial.

They began in earnest in a place called Katyna, a restaurant-cum-bar housed in a former bank in the Old Town, just the other side of the Charles Bridge. They sat in the back at a chrome table beneath a cavernous ceiling, served by a slim waiter with a thin pencil moustache who brusquely ticked off each new delivery on a sheet in front of Callum. Kate started with a pilsner, which was about as far as her taste in beer had ever gone, but Callum grew didactic and impatient and started ordering for her, so that she progressed on to black beer, which bore no resemblance whatsoever to stout, and výčepni, or draught, which was weaker, and finally to extra malty kvasnicová.

They talked easily, so that the night spun past in a blur. Callum loomed over her, leaning forward on the table, so that his face was close to her own, and drawing her in every time she pulled back, like a moth to a flame. He was very funny, incredibly handsome – had she noted that already? – and about as charming as any man she had ever met. He didn’t look, sound, or feel like the relatively young man he actually was, so that the chunky age gap seemed to melt into the soft Prague night.

He asked her what she had been like at university. Bookish, she’d said, but he didn’t believe her and she gradually offered up snippets of her past: her terrible fashion sense, questionable taste in music and a penchant for really intense, late-night conversations by a fire with a bottle of whisky beside her. ‘Wild,’ he said.