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ran back to her mother in floods of tears, her pleasure at reclaiming her monkey entirely forgotten.
    Novak could hear quite clearly as the mother asked, ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
    The girl sniffed a couple of times, pouted her lips as she thought, wiped her hand across her nose and then said, ‘That lady is strange, Mummy. I think she’s a wicked witch.’
    ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Of course she isn’t.’
    ‘She is! She is! Look!’
    Novak found that she could not turn away. Something made her keep looking at the mother and daughter as the girl pointed towards her and the woman gently scoffed at her until she herself caught Novak’s eye and fell completely silent for a second. An instant later, the mother snapped back into life and almost pulled her daughter off her feet as she dragged her away down the path, calling out over frantic squeals of protest, ‘Come on! Come on! We must get back home or we’ll be late for your dinner.’
    Celina Novak had never been given to crying – not unless she was doing it deliberately as a means of manipulating someone else. But now she found that there were tears forming in her eyes, and she had to dab her face with the sleeve of her jacket to keep them at bay. For she knew exactly what had made that little girl look at her the way she had. She understood precisely why the girl had run to her mother. And as she thought about that, her pain and humiliation gave way to a rage that drove her to run even harder and push herself even closer to the limit. And as she did so she thought of the people who had made her the kind of person whose face scares small children: that vicious bitch Alexandra Petrova and her bastard lover-boy Samuel Carver.

5
    CARVER AND ALIX flew into London on Tuesday morning. They queued for three hours to present their passports to untrained temporary personnel in dirty polyester uniforms, brought in to cover the regular Border Agency staff, who were protesting at the under-manning of their posts by simply not manning them at all. Or perhaps they had joined the widespread strikes against the scrapping of all earnings-related pensions for state employees, a move forced on the government by the IMF as a condition of their latest loan. Or maybe they were just bunking off. It was hard to tell these days.
    There were no luxury stores to be seen any more in Terminal 5. The number of air passengers was down by more than fifty per cent, and most of those that remained had a hard enough time affording their tickets, let alone a six-hundred-pound purse from Smythson or a spontaneous four-figure jewellery purchase at Tiffany & Co. Carver walked along unswept corridors, past ‘Out of Order’ signs and shabby staff who were going about their work with a kind of surly, resentful indifference to their customers’ wellbeing. Passport control had become a lottery. Some days passengers were held up for hours , others they were waved through without more than a casual glance at their passports. This was one of the slow days, the queues at the immigration desks compounded by the long lines outside the few functioning, but filthy, toilets.
    Carver was a man who was always more interested in solutions than problems. But now he could sense himself becoming infected by the negativity he could feel all around him. He’d come to London with Alix because it had seemed like a good opportunity to visit the land where he was born and for which he had gone to war. He still planned to stick it out for the few days it would take Alix to conduct her business. But once that was done, he’d be leaving on the first flight he could find.
    ‘I wouldn’t even wait that long, if I were you,’ said his old sparring-partner Jack Grantham, when they met up for an early supper on Tuesday evening. ‘I’d be off like a shot, if I had the chance.’
    ‘You’re the head of MI6,’ Alix pointed out. ‘If you made a run for it, everyone would think you were defecting.’
    ‘But defecting