He moved towards the door, but turned back. ‘How are you getting along?’

The question he’s been trying to resist, she thought. ‘I’m making progress.’

‘Typically elliptical,’ he said, with a weary smile. ‘You don’t change, Kate.’

‘Neither do you.’

‘Indeed not. But I’ve seen this clearly from the start. Or at least from before the time of the operation on Igor’s yacht. You’d have to grant me that?’

‘I would, yes.’

He hesitated, as if reluctant to leave it there. ‘Just think about it, that’s all I ask.’

‘I will.’

But as the door closed, so too did her mind on that particular subject. She went up to bed, fatigued beyond measure and desperate for sleep. Her final thoughts that night settled on the necessity for the journey she was about to make. She had, now, to move this once and for all beyond conjecture to truth.

29

DESPITE THE MEDICATION she was on, Kate managed only a few hours of broken sleep in a torturous night of tossing and turning. The decision to bet the house – and very probably her life – on this trip to Moscow had seemed bold when she’d made it, but bad and indeed mad in the dead of night.

By eight, she had been summoned to a meeting in the Cabinet Office Briefing Room. She instructed Julie and Callum to join her there at nine. And just after that, the prime minister swept into the anteroom, with its bank of screens, Shirley Grove hot on his heels. They patched through to Moscow on the encrypted line and were faced with the stony expressions of Andrew and his two female deputies, neither of whom Kate knew.

As Kate had predicted, Andrew put up the fiercest possible resistance. He confirmed that Incisor was a cultivated agent and the officer who had taken control of his grooming, approach and recruitment, Jilly Peters – whom Kate knew from Counter-Terrorism – had just been sent home after they started to suspect she was under close surveillance by their enemies in the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. Incisor was nervous, spooked even, and they now only dealt with him through a cut-out. There was no mechanism to task him: it was a one-way informational drop-off. They were simply reliant on what Incisor chose to give them.

The prime minister intervened. What had Incisor been offered, he asked, in return for his services? Or was he just an idealist?

As Kate had predicted, Andrew began to give ground here. He acknowledged Incisor had been promised safe passage and complete security in the West after a period of two years, if the information he provided continued at the level they had agreed. The prime minister jumped in again: ‘That sounds like a mighty expensive promise, if you don’t mind me saying so. Hard to conceive of how it would be worth it if he refuses to help us on a matter of vital national security.’

Andrew and his colleagues looked as if they had been punched by the blunt nature of this threat. They appeared on the verge of calling out the prime minister on whether this was a matter of national security or merely of his career. But discretion got the better of them.