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considered, let alone admitted it, Alix felt certain that neither had a better friend in the world.
    ‘Look,’ she said, wanting to resolve the situation. ‘I’m sure you have very good reasons for saying all this, Jack. And I know that you have access to information that we certainly don’t have. But I’ve told Mark Adams that I will meet him, and I’m going to keep that appointment. I don’t know what will happen after that, but I can absolutely assure you that I have no intention of working with anyone who is, as you say, a nasty piece of work. I have my own reputation to protect. And I certainly don’t want to be opening doors in Washington, just so an evil man can walk through them.’ She reached across, laid her hand on Grantham’s wrist, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Can we agree on that?’
    Grantham sighed. ‘If you insist, yes, we can. But I’m advising you both as the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service and as someone who has known you both a very long time: have as little to do with Mark Adams as humanly possible. Ideally, have nothing to do with him at all.’

6
    IN PARIS ANOTHER eminent, middle-aged man was having a hard time persuading a determined woman to see his point of view. ‘I’m sorry, Madame Novak, but I really cannot have this discussion at the moment.’
    Jean-Jacques Levistre rose from his family dinner table, holding his mobile phone in one hand and making exasperated gestures with the other which, along with the exaggerated look of annoyance on his face, were meant to indicate to his wife, sitting opposite him, just how much he did not want to take this call. ‘Look, I will go into my office so that we can talk confidentially, but I must insist: no more than five minutes, maximum.’
    ‘I fail to understand why you won’t see me,’ said Celina Novak. ‘I have money, lots of it. Are you seriously telling me you don’t want to be paid? I don’t believe it. No one turns their back on cash these days. No one!’
    ‘Of course I want to be paid. I have a family to feed. But I also have professional ethics that I must observe and a conscience that I must live with. What you are asking of me offends both those principles. I’m sorry, but I cannot do it.’
    ‘But you have to! Can’t you see that? I insist! You have to do this for me!’
    ‘No, really I don’t,’ Levistre insisted. He did his best to summon up the soothing, reassuring tones that were one of the major reasons for his success. ‘Honestly, Celina, you should be happy with what we have already achieved. You have been remarkable. Your courage, your fortitude, your ability to endure the un-endurable – they have inspired me. But we must all know our limits. And we have reached ours. I am very sorry, but there is nothing more to be done.’
    Levistre turned off his phone, took a deep, calming breath and then walked back to rejoin his family.
    A couple of kilometres away in her hotel room, Celina Novak looked at herself in the full-length wardrobe mirror, running her eyes up legs that possessed not the faintest scrap of cellulite; a waist as slender as a girl’s half her age; breasts that had been so perfectly enhanced that most men now had to make a conscious effort to look her in her cool, grey-blue eyes; and hair whose natural length and volume had been boosted by extensions applied by the most expensive stylist in Paris. A great deal had already been done. But Levistre was wrong. There was more she could still do. There had to be.
    Two days had passed since the incident with the child in the park. She should have got over it by now. All her life she had lied, cheated, seduced and killed without the slightest backward glance. She possessed a sociopathic indifference to truth, morality, conscience, compassion, empathy or pity. And that included self-pity. As a young child she had learned to fake unhappiness or distress as a means of getting what she wanted from adults. But she did not really feel those