‘If I trigger an alarm, it would appear in Tech Support. The duty officer would alert his supervisor, who would speak to the senior officer in Travel. He in turn would pass on his suspicions to one of the senior executives in 61a, who would alert Borodin himself.’

‘They’d put you under surveillance straight away?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘An internal team or the FSB?’ The FSB was Russia’s internal security agency, the equivalent of the UK’s MI5.

‘Internal.’

Kate watched him as he weighed the choice: another two years of terror or a swift and dramatic roll of the dice? She could tell he was toying with an idea. ‘Is there a way through?’ she asked, keen to tease it out of him. ‘We can act as swiftly as is required.’

He turned the packet faster and faster until it seemed to irritate him, too, whereupon he took to tapping it against the side of his mug of coffee. ‘Today I start a week of night shifts. They are long and boring. Senior members of 61a rarely arrange travel outside office hours. Sometimes I take a walk around to chat to other officers. There is a community ready to share our gripes about the graveyard shift and what it says about the progress of our careers.’

He shrugged. ‘The shift ends at six, but by the last few hours, we’re all counting down. It is not uncommon for the officers to sneak away a few minutes early and even more usual for those coming in to be late.’

‘Go on,’ Kate said.

‘If I were to seek this information between five forty-five and six fifteen in the morning, it’s just about conceivable that the alarm might fall between the cracks, or at the very least that the confusion and lethargy between shift changes might delay action for half an hour or more.’

‘Doesn’t a security alert trigger immediate action?’

‘In theory. But some things have not changed much since Soviet times. It is a bureaucratic organization and ambitious men – particularly those who want to spend less time on the night shift – are wary of bothering their superiors. They would want to investigate first. It would take time for the message to be passed up the chain of command and, in the intervening period, no one would dare cut corners.’

‘So, as long as we began the extraction process immediately, we could be one step ahead of them?’

‘It’s possible,’ he said.

Kate didn’t wait for him to have second thoughts. She needed to take the idea and run with it, to turn a proposal into fact. ‘I’ll tell Andrew this morning that your extraction will need to begin at six tomorrow morning, as soon as you’ve passed the information to me.’

‘I will bring it with me.’

She shook her head. ‘It can’t work like that. You’re asking us to spend a great deal of money and shoulder enormous risk—’

‘Risk for you?’

‘For all of us. I need to be sure I have the material before we can go through with it.’