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Katya nodded and went out.

As soon as Rik and Clare arrived, Harry dialled Ballatyne’s number. It rang without answer. He tried again in case he’d misdialled. Still no response.

‘Problem?’ Rik was standing by the kitchen door, watching him. Clare had gone into the bathroom.

‘Could be, but I don’t know what. Ballatyne isn’t picking up.’

Rik delved into his bag and opened his iPad, waiting for a connection. Seconds later, he was tapping away one-handed on the screen’s virtual keyboard.

‘What are you doing?’ Harry queried.

‘Just checking something. Won’t be a minute.’

Harry left him to it and took a walk round the apartment. He wondered how many people had used this place before. It was minimally furnished, with two single beds, chairs, table, small sofa and cupboards. No carpet but a simple tiled floor. It reminded him of British army accommodation around the world: basic, unfussy, plain and cheerless. There was probably a specialist department somewhere in Whitehall, with an order book full of details about such furniture very similar to this.

He turned off the room lights before approaching the windows, and checked the view of the parkland and street outside as carefully as he could. There was too much shadow and darkness to be certain of anything, however. He considered that ironic seeing as how he had been relying on that very thing to survey the apartment building before coming in.

Rik appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, waving his iPad. ‘Six have had a system shut-down. They issued an inter-agency security statement two hours ago saying all non-essential comms channels have been suspended for security checks. It includes a short-term interruption to most call networks.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Sounds like they’ve been hacked. But it could be they’re tracking down the insider. It would explain why Ballatyne’s been out of touch.’

‘How did you get this?’ He knew Rik wouldn’t have had time to get into any of the security agency systems, and nor would Six have gone public with the situation. The one thing you don’t do is alert your enemies to the fact that you’ve suffered a system meltdown.

Rik smiled. ‘Friend of a friend. Don’t worry, I didn’t hack into Six.’

Harry said he was going downstairs to check the outside more closely, and left the apartment, scanning the corridor carefully before stepping out. He passed the doors to other apartments, where for many, life was going on as usual; an argument in one, music from another, a child crying, a football match commentary.

He left the building and walked along one of the paths, passing two Muslim women with a baby buggy and shopping bags, their heads covered in hijabs. Once they had gone, he stepped off the path and melted into the trees. Then he stood and breathed in the atmosphere, using his senses to tune in to the night.

Cars passed along the street nearby, and there was a steady roar from the A23 dual carriageway which they had joined to bring them down from the city centre. But there was nothing that suggested there was anybody here who shouldn’t be — except maybe himself and the others.

He wondered what Katya was doing.

FIFTY-ONE

Katya was standing outside a small Turkish-run general store, studying the street. She was clutching a plastic bag of groceries in one hand, while the other was inside her jacket, resting on the butt of her gun.

The weapon, a slim-line PSM 6.35mm pistol, issued on arrival by the embassy’s security armourer, was designed to sit snugly beneath the jackets of personnel of both genders. It felt uncomfortably small compared with her usual service weapon, a heavier Viking MP-446 9mm. She had used the PSM before, but never in a hot action, and never out on the street. Right now, it left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. If anyone decided to launch an attack on her out here, she would have felt better prepared with a heavier weapon carrying more punch.

She walked away from the store towards a darker area at the end of the building, and took out her mobile. What she was about to do was crazy, and she knew Tate, the Englishman, would advise her against it. But she had no choice. If she could find out who was ranged against them, and what they knew, it gave her a better chance of getting out of this city with her life, or locked up in a cell awaiting a trial back in Moscow. In aligning herself with Clare and her colleagues, she had already gone too far to turn back now.

The truth was, she didn’t want to go back. Whatever her life had been was over. From here on in, the future would be whatever she could make of it, with Clare, hopefully.

But to do that, she had to live. They all did.

She sent a text message to Bronyev consisting of a single dot. Her number would not show up on his mobile, but he would know it was her. They had once discussed a colleague using it to get a friend to call her back when needing backup or an escape from a clingy or boring companion — a dating SOS. If anyone with Bronyev should see the dot, it would look like an incomplete or blank call from an unknown number.

She waited for him to call back, sinking into the shadows of a doorway and watching the street. There was no way they could trace the call, but she didn’t know how clean of telltale signals Clare and her two friends were. If either one of them used their mobile and the local FSB unit somehow got a trace on it, they would be here within twenty minutes.

Her phone buzzed. A dot and a question mark.

It was Bronyev. He was asking where she was. She smiled. More than that, he hadn’t given her away. If he had, he’d have called her, tried to keep her talking and find out where she was. And every moment she spent on the line would reduce their chances of remaining free. The downside was that in using this brief communication, he was also telling her that his freedom was severely restricted.

At least he was still in one piece and not confined to a locked room in the embassy basement.

She wondered what to do. Ironically, neither of them could communicate freely now. She because whoever was with Bronyev would be waiting for just that event; Bronyev because he would be being watched.

She had to get back to the apartment building. Tate and the others would be getting anxious about how long she had been gone now. She was about to put the mobile back in her pocket when it buzzed again. She checked the screen.

‘888’

She frowned, then went cold. Bronyev had once told her that his mother had studied numerology, and had talked about it often with her son, explaining the importance of numbers in spiritual matters. All numbers meant something, he had explained to Katya, and had gone through a list from 0 to 9 and their repeat sequences. She’d forgotten most of the list because it meant nothing to her. But 888 had stuck because it had once been her mother’s apartment number in the concrete housing block where she had lived and died several years ago. Too lacking in imagination to name the blocks after anyone interesting, such as heroes of the former Soviet Union, the then Cold War authorities had settled instead on the dull conformity of numbers.

Apartment 88 in Block 8. 888.

In spirituality, the three numbers 888 meant a phase in one’s life was about to end — a warning so that one could be prepared. She recalled telling Bronyev at the time that he was being over-imaginative. Numbers were to be added and subtracted, not feared. Anyway, she hadn’t wanted to think about her mother dying alone in that place while she had forged a career in the FSO.

Bronyev hadn’t argued, but had smiled indulgently, something which had made her think he was more spiritual than their superiors might approve of. For a man whose job was to potentially kill in order to protect the lives of others, it could be seen as a sign of weakness.