‘Then there was the guy who scootered past. As he drew level, he looked up and right at us, as if he knew we were likely to be there.

‘And, finally, I don’t understand why he changed his mind about the method of handing over material. Initially, he said he could only memorize it and pass it on to me verbally, but he then switched to a download.’

‘I thought that was because he knew he’d set off an alarm either way and at least this method would be quicker.’ If Grove was nervous, she was doing a much better job of hiding it.

‘But it also leaves me with hard evidence if I’m caught,’ Kate said. ‘Enough for a long stretch in a Russian prison.’

‘You think that’s why he changed his mind?’

‘In the dead of night, it seems more than a possibility.’

After that, Grove tried to reassure her, but there was little point. It was an intelligence officer’s gift to doubt their own judgement and everyone else’s motives and it was a process that, once begun, rarely went into reverse.

Kate returned to bed, but not to sleep, and only the onset of dawn and the approach of the climax of this affair settled her nerves. She drank black coffee for breakfast and tried to dry-clean her passage as best she could on the walk to Gorky Park. It was a bleak morning, the sun struggling to break through thick banks of dark cloud, gusting hard with spitting rain so that those who had ventured out at this hour often had to tilt their heads into the wind.

It was not ideal weather for this kind of assignment. Who stops someone to ask for a light in a howling gale?

Kate tried to push the niggling doubts from her mind. She’d made her call and rolled the dice. Now they would land where Fate decreed.

She passed Julie halfway through her first circuit of the park, but her protégée gave no sign that she’d seen her and Kate marched on purposefully. They locked eyes on a second circuit. All clear, Julie appeared to signal. This is it.

Kate hoped the nervousness evident in Julie’s gait was not mirrored in her own. She breathed out, tried hard to relax. Morning exercise in the park: no more. She pushed on harder.

But on her third and final circuit, she could see no sign of Incisor. She slowed, as if her exercise routine was coming to an end and she was warming down.

He should be here, on this stretch by the river.

Walk on, her instincts told her.

Something has gone wrong. Abort.

But she lingered, stopping to watch a tugboat lumber up the Moskva. The wind strengthened, the rain thickened. Kate looked down the path.

Where was he?

She could hear Julie’s voice in her head. Get out of there, Kate. She knew her protégée must have failed to clock him entering the park on her circuit and would have instantly abandoned the mission, as all procedure and logic suggested she must.