‘No?’

A pair of sofas faced each other around a glass coffee table. Misha sat down on one of them. It groaned a little under his weight.

Nicholas shook his head. ‘It might be months.’ He went to the galley kitchen and poured us both glasses of water.

I felt Misha’s eyes on me as I drank carefully. ‘We don’t have months,’ he said. He asked Nicholas to sit down.

Nicholas sat down beside me on the sofa. Misha looked at each of us in turn, appraising us. ‘We need our proof,’ he said.

Proof. Dokazatel’stvo. That was me.

‘We’re very short of time,’ he went on. ‘They know what we’re up to now. And if Vera’s talking …’

Nicholas shot me a glance. ‘Vera’s alive?’

‘Of course. They have to take care of her. They need what’s up here.’ He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘But us …’ He widened his eyes to emphasise the size of the threat we were under. His irises stood out alarmingly, like the bullseye on an archer’s target. ‘We’re just small change.’

Nicholas finished his glass and put it on the table. ‘How long do we have?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t ask them. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out that I’m part of this too. But not weeks. Definitely not weeks. Three days, five maybe.’

‘I need at least a week,’ said Nicholas.

‘Why? What’s to stop us doing this now? We need to …’ Misha chopped the side of his hand against his palm. The sound it made evoked abrupt severance.

Nicholas hesitated. ‘If we go too soon, no one will believe us. They’ll think we’re mad. And once we break cover, we’re all running for our lives. We need to give ourselves a fighting chance. We need his testimony.’

This answer didn’t please Misha, but I could see him considering it. He stared at the floor for a while as though he was recalculating a difficult sum. Finally, he nodded. ‘Okay. A week.’ He got to his feet.

The focal point of the tiny room was a cast-iron fireplace with giant pine cones in the grate. Misha reached up inside the chimney breast and pulled out a plastic bag. It emerged with a patter of broken plaster and dust which he recoiled from with a surprising fastidiousness. He wiped the bag with his handkerchief and took out a dossier of documents and photographs – a paper trail to the Common Task. Nicholas added the Swiss passports on which we’d travelled from Almaty to the dossier and Misha showed him how to secrete it back inside the chimney breast.

‘Okay,’ Misha said, in English. And in Russian: ‘Good luck.’ He nodded at me. I heard the unfamiliar clunk of the front door as he left.

Nicholas saw the query in my face.

‘Yes, he can take care of himself. He was a maroon beret. Vera said he was one of the last Spetsnaz soldiers to leave Kabul in ’89.’

*

A degree of irrational optimism is necessary for us even to attempt difficult tasks. There are things like war and marriage that we’d just never undertake if we didn’t somehow blind ourselves to the real odds against us. But Vera must have always known that our chances of success were remote.

They needed irrefutable evidence: proof that the Common Task was a going concern, proof that the Malevin Procedure was workable, proof of the criminal conspiracy surrounding it, proof that Hunter Gould and Sinan Malevin were among its organisers and beneficiaries.

I was their Exhibit A.

Vera and Nicholas needed to reveal what was going on in Baikonur before the lieutenants of the Common Task learned that Vera was attempting to betray them. They were under pressure to move quickly. This had forced them to collect me well before my rehabilitation was complete. It had been a psychological blow to Nicky. And yet, events at Almaty showed that they had waited too long. Somewhere along the chain, they had been exposed.

For the next thirty-six hours, Nicholas worked to make up lost ground. He pumped me for information about what I’d undergone. He went through Vera’s list of contacts, adding names, excising others. He agonised about when to go to the police, about whether to contact people individually or to hold a press conference. He settled on the latter, and booked a room under an assumed name at Conway Hall, the headquarters of the South Place Ethical Society. And he worried about the impact of all this on Vera.

Misha had said Vera’s grasp of the Procedure made her indispensable. But was that true?

Malevin’s methods always generate a code for the proxy complex, but its reliability and accuracy depend on the subjective judgements of the coder. Malevin identified 167 key markers which can be recombined in a virtually infinite array. So the coding process requires a subjective sense of nuance. It demands both tough-mindedness and compassion from the coder. It is hard to imagine anyone more rich in both than Vera. In the most delicate and profound way, her extraordinary work exposes the false dichotomy between art and science. She is the reason I am here.

And yet, if Hunter was spooked enough, surely he’d dispose of Vera just as ruthlessly as he’d disposed of Jack? We could only hope that Misha was right about her value to the Common Task.

*

I was desperate to be as much help as possible. Frustratingly, I could feel my rehabilitation progressing, but it wasn’t smooth or linear. There were moments of great euphoria. Together Nicholas and I were able to identify the exact location where I had been held and where I underwent the Procedure. I can say with some certainty that it was in a horseshoe-shaped building near the western bank of the Syr Darya river. The co-ordinates given by Google Earth for the structure are 45 degrees 37’ 27.47’ N and 63 degrees 19’ 24.46’ E. Nicholas was overjoyed to bolster his case with this kind of verifiable detail. He gave me an awkward hug, which we both found strangely repellent.

But at other times, I broke down into dismaying bouts of stammering. There were blinding headaches and a degree of physical discomfort along the length of my spinal cord that no painkiller could assuage.

I think my very eagerness to improve was counterproductive. I think I hurried the pace of my convalescence and my carcass rebelled.

*

On the second afternoon, Nicholas left me alone in the flat and didn’t return until late. He came back guiltily, expressing a forced surprise that I was still awake, but without meeting my eye. He didn’t say what he’d been doing, but I knew. He’d gone to see Lucius and Sarah. I was desperate for news of them, as he must have known. But he said nothing. I held my tongue. I heard him brushing his teeth, and then the sound of snoring from the bedroom.

Nicholas had made me up the sofa-bed in the living room. I lay down, but I was unable to sleep. The amount of sleep I required dropped markedly after the Procedure. It may be a side-effect of the Procedure itself; an indication of my premature ageing; or the altered requirements of my new carcass.

It seemed pointless to lie there brooding, fretting about my children and my slow rehabilitation. So I got up and went outside.

The streets were empty. It was about 3 a.m. I kept walking. Towards dawn, I had the whine of milkfloats for company. There was also a prizefighter who passed me in Battersea Park, jogging and shadowboxing with a surprising lightness of step. He planted his feet almost in silence, but I could hear his breathing and the tinny chorus of the headphones he wore under his hooded sweatshirt.

It was in that first pre-dawn walk that I truly began the long and continuing process of reconciliation with this carcass. The steady rhythm of my footsteps, the calm of the waking city and the slight elevation of my heartbeat not only gave me a pronounced sense of well-being but appeared to speed up my convalescence.

That morning I walked beyond Tower Bridge and as far as Billingsgate, which I reached around six o’clock, towards the end of their trading day. There was something invigorating about the smell of fish and the bright lights glittering over scales and crushed ice. I wandered around staring like a yokel until a porter ran into my leg with a trolley. Instead of abusing me, as I thought he might, he apologised and gave me a pair of smoked mackerel which I carried back home in a plastic bag.