Ever since his return from the Baltics, he had been keen to catch up with her. Seeing her again over the satellite VTC in Latvia, before the war had started, had been a shock and he now wanted to have that long overdue talk. However, ever since his extraction by helicopter from the nuclear bunker outside Pravdinsk, his time had not been his own. There had been a series of debriefs, “lessons learned” sessions, and a friendly chat with the Regimental Medical Officer, who gave him some pointers to help him identify any warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder downstream.

Fortunately, one of the debriefs had been with Allenby at GCHQ. After hearing in detail how GCHQ and, no doubt, the Russians had tracked their progress through the Baltics, Morland had given his account of their time in the forests, with a particular focus on radio and communications. The team at GCHQ had been particularly interested in the cyber-attack he had witnessed when the Russians had first knocked out the Latvian command and control systems as a prelude to their invasion.

Afterward, he and Allenby had somehow contrived to bump into one another and both agreed to meet. But Allenby was also in demand and it had taken until now to coordinate their diaries. Morland had arrived in Oxford early, but Allenby was already seated at a table with a copy of The Sunday Times spread out in front of her. They greeted each other awkwardly; more as colleagues rather than old friends.

“You’re looking a lot more civilized than when I last saw you—you were pretty scrawny when you first came back,” Allenby commented, in an obvious effort to ease the atmosphere.

“It wasn’t exactly Jamie Oliver-style cooking in the forests . . .”

Allenby smiled back, ice temporarily broken.

Breakfast ordered, Allenby pointed to the massive, front-page headline: Russian President Missing in Helicopter Crash in Siberia.

“Seen this?” she asked.

“I heard it on the car radio. I can scarcely believe it. I thought he was indestructible.”

Allenby turned the newspaper so they could both see. It was full of stock shots of the President in action-man mode: riding a horse bare-chested, hunting bears, diving for archaeological artifacts in the Black Sea and fishing for salmon.

“It says he’d flown there to do a thing about climate change to re-establish his political credentials after his disaster in the Baltic states. Another presidential alpha-male stunt, but this time to demonstrate his new green credentials. He always insisted on using his old Mi-8 ‘Hip’ Soviet Russian workhorse helicopter, rather than anything state of the art. And look where that’s ended up . . .”

“Deep in the tundra, I’m glad to say.” Morland drank a mouthful of coffee and looked at the headline. “I can hardly believe the bastard has finally gone. I thought he’d be around forever . . . He certainly planned to be.”