Yusuf conversed with someone again in Turkish and conveyed that MIT were taking it seriously now and calling the chief of police, but Kate knew this was a lost cause. The Russians were two minutes from zero, then one – and then they were racing past the terminal and three men carried some kind of heavy-looking suitcase into the rear of the plane.

By the time Kate reached the airport, MIT had intervened and Zehra arrived to ensure the barriers were open, but all they saw as they roared on to the tarmac was the plane with the clues to Agent Dante’s identity on board taking off into the rich red haze of a vintage Turkish sunset.

12

KATE REACHED HER desk in the makeshift office in Cambridge Street late in the afternoon of the next day and she was pleased to see that, waiting for her, in hard copy, were the files Shirley Grove had promised her.

She put to one side those relating to her former boss, Sir Alan Brabazon, the last chief of SIS, and focused instead on the ones that dealt with the Service’s current head, Ian Granger. The top file was marked ‘Personnel’, and the one beneath ‘Vetting’. Kate switched on her desk lamp, pulled up her chair and started on the former.

Ian Granger had been educated at Aylesbury Grammar School and Trinity College, Oxford, where he had studied modern and medieval languages. He had joined the Service as a new entrant in 1990 – on the recommendation of his Oxford tutor – and completed the induction period nine months later. After a brief stint in Counter-Intelligence as a junior officer, his first overseas posting had been in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early 1992, where he had worked undeclared and undercover as a third secretary in the Chancery section of the British Embassy there. After another brief period working for the controller, North America, in London, he was transferred to New York in 1995, where he had been promoted but was still working undercover as press secretary for the British delegation at the United Nations. He had clearly been heavily involved with the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia, which had perhaps led to the communication with the SVR in Moscow that Natasha Demidova had referred to in their meeting in Istanbul.

So far, Ian’s career had been predictable but unspectacular. An intelligence officer’s great fear was to be detected and exposed while working undercover, which was particularly debilitating and embarrassing when working in a friendly country such as the United States. It tended to limit future career options. Ian had therefore done well to avoid detection and his personnel files were full of positive annual assessments and reports from his superiors. But equally there was nothing to make him stand out. It was steady, satisfactory – but not the stuff of a future C.

However, that all seemed to change after his posting in New York. It was a fact of Service life that you could make your name in the most out-of-the-way places. So while an outsider might assume you’d need to do well in Moscow to cut your teeth as a Russia hotshot, it was equally possible to do so in somewhere far removed from the Russian capital.