‘You must have formed a view of who he might be, based on the type of material you were getting?’

Natasha started to tap her nails on the table again, staring over Kate’s shoulder into the middle distance. ‘I know he was recruited in New York sometime in the nineties.’

‘How?’

‘Because the only way I could piece together any clues as to his identity was from what Igor told me and the email traffic that referred to my own small part in Operation Alexander.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Igor once let slip he had spent a lot of time in New York in the mid-nineties. I asked what he had been doing there and he just smiled. And then a couple of emails I had in one particular trail referred to some early intelligence Dante had provided on events in Bosnia. A later email referenced the depth of material he had provided on the Americans’ attitude to a particular UN resolution.’

‘Not much to go on,’ Kate said.

‘If you had read the email trail, I think you’d have reached the same conclusion.’

‘Do you—’

‘I have notes.’

They stared at her.

‘Not printed. That would be suicide. But stored in a notebook.’

‘Could we—’

‘I can give you an hour. I will meet you here at the same time tomorrow. Then I am done. And I want to know you will hold good on the offer of asylum if I ever need it.’

‘Agreed.’ Kate nodded. ‘Agreed, of course.’

10

‘HAVE YOU NOTICED,’ Julie said, as soon as they were safely back in the car, ‘that at every step of this business we strike what appears to be intelligence gold? I know we’ve worked at it, but it just falls into our lap every time and it is dazzling. Except that the real truth is like a mirage that fades further and further into the distance.’

‘You drive,’ Kate instructed Callum.

He handed her his phone. ‘I’ll need you to put it in the satnav.’ Kate did as she was instructed. She gave him back his phone. ‘Sounds like you had an interesting meeting,’ he said.

Kate didn’t answer. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ Julie prompted from the back. ‘We come out here for Operation Sigma and it all kicks off. The prime minister has prostate cancer and is about to resign and one of the leading candidates to replace him is a Russian agent. Boom! Off we go. Then Igor Borodin is going to defect with a juicy sex video of our new PM and boom again!’

‘I don’t think I’d describe a video of him having sex with a group of underage girls in Kosovo as juicy,’ Kate said.

‘You know what I mean. And just when everything is completely settled and done, along comes another bar of gold. It’s all been a hoax, orchestrated by Agent Dante, a very senior traitor at the heart of SIS. Boom again.’

‘Agent Dante?’ Callum asked.

Neither replied. ‘Don’t you think, Kate?’ Julie prompted.