Amazing. Even in its seventh series, Spooks is still ratcheting up the tension and the pace with every single episode, last night’s being easily the best story of the series so far (as last week’s was at that point). Everyone’s on high alert as an emergency summit has been called in central London to get the Israelis and the Palestinians talking. Meanwhile Malcolm has spotted a high-tech weapon – a VHI immobiliser – being sold on eBay where it has no business being at all, and Harry receives word from Sugarhorse Asset K that the whole network has been compromised and she’s coming to London with intel. Just how much excitement can be packed into a single hour? About this much, probably.

Lucas sets off to purchase the VHI immobiliser from the unsuspecting teenage boy who’s selling it. He’s not the only one interested. While he’s conducting the transaction the original owners turn up, and they’re distinctly uninterested in haggling, crashing through the front door while Lucas convinces Dean and his mother Sarah to leave through the back.

Turns out the gun – which emits a pulse that can totally shut down a vehicle’s electrical system – is involved in an MI6 black op to kill Claude Denizet; the guy who will be leading that Israeli-Palestinian summit. He’s seen as too partisan for the talks to make progress, and when he didn’t respond well to suggestions that he should step down, MI6 decided to take matters into their own hands. Dean found it when he accidentally observed the MI6 agent giving the gun a test run.

I thought at one point that Dean was going to be recruited into Section D in much the same way that Jo was, way back when. The way he decrypted that memory stick he’d be almost a match for Malcolm. Not that anyone can match Malcolm, but he’s young, and a fast learner, as well as fast on his feet. A field agent with tech skills would have been a winning combination, I felt.

Sadly that opportunity was lost as Dean did a runner rather than accept his new identity and a new life in Spain. And he ran right into a bullet. Mind you, if Michael Sands was watching the train station anyway, the result wouldn’t have been in much doubt whether Dean got on the train or not.

MI5, under Harry’s measured guidance, find an alternative way to remove Denizet from the picture without killing him. I think it helped persuade him when he found an assassin sprawled on his lap in the back of a car, fortunately dead already from a couple of well-placed bullets from Ros’s gun. She’s impressive, isn’t she? And was that a brief hint of a softer side I saw later, when Dean’s mother was cradling her dead boy’s ventilated head in her arms? Surely not.

With the Section D comms compromised by the high-level MI5 mole, Harry realises they need to set up a feint when contacting Asset K. He selects a hapless member of the summit delegation who is known to be partial to a back-hander, and arranges to meet him, letting Qualtrough know when and where. Sure enough Qualtrough passes on the details to his contact and Harry’s meeting with the stooge is photographed. Meanwhile, he’s trusted Connie to meet with K. Well, I say meet. This is Spooks of course, so all they do is sit at adjacent tables and flash art at each other, and exchange magazines.

But even though Connie’s house has been searched, and her dead partner’s taped message has exonerated her, and Harry has apologised for doubting her, I still think we’re being sold a double-double-counter bluff. Those looks Connie keeps flashing at Harry could be sympathy at the extreme stress he’s under, but they could also easily be pity at his plight, or disdain that he’s been so easily fooled into trusting her. And as he opens the package of information that Asset K has supplied, and finds his own face staring back at him from a page entitled MI5/FSB mole, it’s clear that if he’s being stitched up, Connie was best placed to switch the files.

Next week: Harry is arrested after being framed as the Russian mole, and the feint is proved to have failed when Ros has to instruct the team to investigate the death of the real Asset K.