Max maintained eye contact. For the first time in years, he felt fully alive. There was something magnetic about trying to outwit an opponent, using every ounce of intelligence to create a real-world effect.

But it was immaterial now. She would say nice things and mean them, too, and he wasn’t sure he could face that sort of kindness.

‘Just nothing. One whiff of my arrival to the DGSE or DGSI and you’ll be posted to outer Mongolia with drone attacks as mood music. Do we understand each other?’

‘The sun has gone over the yardarm,’

All of us shapeshifters, eternally mutating.

The secret war, the scientific struggle, depended on that. Spying was a performance and the costume, the voice, the initial entrance were as vital as the lines themselves.

Max almost laughed. It was known in media circles as the ‘Lorraine Kelly defence’. The Scottish TV presenter had successfully avoided paying HMRC back-taxes by claiming that ‘Lorraine Kelly’ was an on-screen persona and therefore not related directly to herself as a private individual.

Samson Syndrome. It was the spy’s equivalent of the mid-life crisis. The most famous case was the MI5 officer Michael Bettaney who was convicted of spying for the KGB in the eighties. The cause? Not buying a train ticket. Because he was caught fare-dodging, Bettaney knew he would fail his next security review; failing the review would lead to his

Max took out the card again and paused over that penultimate line: Dry-clean thoroughly. It was spy speak for counter-surveillance, shrugging off a watcher.