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Jericho smiled at him.

He and Yoyo had switched places. One of the basic rules of surveillance was not to let the target see the same face the whole time. Now she was upstairs, waiting for
his
signal. The door to the conference room clicked shut. Unhurriedly, Jericho was on his way across to Norrington’s office when the conference-room door opened again, and Shaw emerged.

‘Owen,’ she called.

He stopped. He was ten, perhaps twelve steps from Norrington’s office. He could be going anywhere.

‘I think perhaps you should join the discussion. We’ve sifted some more data from Vogelaar’s dossier, material which has to do with your friend Xin, and the Zheng Group.’ She glanced about. ‘By the way, where are your colleagues?’

Jericho went over to join her.

‘Yoyo’s on Vic Thorn’s trail.’

Her habitual scowl softened to a smile. ‘Could be that you’ll be quicker about it than MI6 with your enquiries. And Tu Tian?’

‘We’ve given him the day off. He has a business to run.’

‘Splendid. God forbid that the Chinese economy should falter. The American crash was quite enough. Are you coming?’

‘Right away. Give me a minute.’

Shaw went back inside without quite closing the door. Jericho strolled casually back to Norrington’s office. Somebody at one of the workstations looked up at him, then back at the screen. Without stopping, Jericho stepped into the little room, logged Norrington out and then walked purposefully across to the other side, and
to the conference rooms. Just before he joined the others, he sent Yoyo the agreed signal.

* * *

Straight away, she typed Norrington’s name. The system asked for authorisations. She entered the eight-character password, squirted Norrington’s thumbprint and waited.

The screen filled with icons.

‘There you go,’ Yoyo whispered, and told Diane to download Norrington’s personal data.

‘As you wish, Yoyo.’

Yoyo? How nice. Owen must have stored her voiceprint. She watched eagerly as Diane’s hard drive gulped down one data packet after another, holding her breath for the
Download complete
message.

* * *

Jericho was just as impatient, waiting for the signal that would tell him that the transfer had worked and that the false Norrington was now logged out. Once that happened, there was one more thing for him to do: leave the conference, go across to the office and log the deputy head of security back in, so that Norrington would not notice the theft later.

At that moment, Norrington stood up.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, smiled at the assembled talking heads, and left.

Jericho stared at his empty chair. Yoyo, he thought, what’s going on? Why’s it taking so long?

Should he leave too, and catch up with Norrington? Stop him from going into his office? What would that look like? Norrington was already on edge at the idea that the central computer had simply shut him out, and if Jericho took any action, he would certainly suspect trickery. Ill at ease, he resisted the urge. He sat there hoping for the all-important signal, and tried to look interested.

* * *

Ever since he could remember, Norrington had suffered gut-ache and stomach cramps whenever he was scared. He made for the toilet, sank down, grunting, and then left with a lighter step. He was at the door of the conference room, holding the handle in his hand, when all of a sudden he had the feeling that someone was staring at the back of his head. Not someone, something, some grinning, goggle-eyed bogeyman. He stopped dead, and whipped round towards his office.

Nobody there.

For a second he hesitated, but the whatever-it-was was still staring at him. Slowly he crossed the space, walked into his office and around his desk. Everything seemed to be in order. He tapped the touchscreen and tried to open one of his files.

Access denied.

Norrington stumbled backwards, looked around in a panic. What was happening here? A system error? Not on your life! He felt a trickle of ice creep up his spine as he remembered how Jericho had niggled at the matter of Vic Thorn, and what a stupid mistake he’d made in replying. Why hadn’t he just admitted that they’d been friends, good friends at that? What the hell would that prove, that he’d known Thorn, even if the guy turned out to be a terrorist a thousand times over?

He opened a login window and typed in his name.

The system told him that he was already logged in.

* * *

Download complete.

‘At last,’ Yoyo said, logged Norrington out and sent the message to Jericho’s phone.

* * *

Norrington stared at his screen.

Somebody was helping themselves to his data.

His fingers trembling, he tried again. This time the system accepted his codes and let him in, but he knew all the same that they had been through his files. They had got hold of his access data and they’d been spying on him.

They were onto him.

Norrington steepled his index fingers, and put them to his lips. He was fairly sure that he knew who ‘they’ were, but what could he do to stop them? Demand that Jericho’s computer be searched? Then the detective would cast his loyalty in doubt. Norrington would have to agree to a search of his own data if he didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and that would be the beginning of the end. Once they started to piece together his deleted emails—

One moment though. Jericho was sitting in the conference room. It might have been Jericho who had logged him out, but he could hardly have anything to do with what had just happened. One of the others, either Tu Tian or Chen Yuyun, was sitting in front of Jericho’s computer right now – what kind of stupid name had he given it? Diane? It was probably the girl. Hadn’t she been roaming through the control room just a while back, looking as though she had nothing better to do?

Yoyo. He had to get rid of her.

‘Andrew?’

He jumped. Edda Hoff. Pale and expressionless under her lacquered black pageboy cut. Expressionless? Really? Or wasn’t there rather a gleam in her eye, the sly look of someone watching a trap to see who will walk into it?

‘Jennifer rather urgently needs you to come back for the rest of the meeting.’
She drew her eyebrows together, infinitesimally. ‘Is everything all right? Are you not feeling well?’

‘The tummy.’ Norrington got to his feet. ‘I’m fine.’

* * *

The way he came back to the conference table set alarm bells ringing for Jericho. The man’s face was a jaundiced yellow colour, and his forehead was creased and lined with worry. There was no mistaking that Norrington knew exactly what was going on, but instead of pointing the finger at him and demanding an explanation, he sat down to suffer in silence. If any further proof of his perfidy were needed, Norrington had just supplied it.

‘Possibly I should recap on the—’ he began, when all of a sudden more faces appeared on the video wall, and the Xin working group broke in to have their say.

‘Miss Shaw, Andrew, Tom—’ One of the new arrivals held up a thin file. ‘You’ll want to hear this.’

‘What have you got?’ Shaw asked.

‘It’s about Julian Orley’s good friend Carl Hanna. He’s a Canadian investor, and he’s worth fifteen billion, isn’t that right?’

‘That was his story,’ Norrington said, nodding.

‘And you checked him out.’

‘You know that I did.’

‘Well, everybody makes mistakes. We asked around a little. In the end the CIA dug up his family tree.’

Expectant silence.

‘Hey.’ The man smiled at each of them in turn. ‘Anybody want to get to know the guy a little better? After all, this is somebody you people decided you could trust to go on a trip with Julian Orley.’

‘This is quite a build-up.’ Shaw gave them a razor-thin smile. ‘Is there going to be another advertisement break, or will you get to the point?’

The agent put the file down in front of him.

‘From now on, you can call him Neil Gabriel. He’s American, born in 1981 in Baltimore, Maryland. High school and US Navy, then after that he was with the police as an undercover detective. The CIA noticed him, recruited him and sent him off to New Delhi for an operation. He did such good work there that they let him stay several years. He became something of an expert on the region, but also a bit of a lone wolf. So he was telling the truth about India, although that’s about the only truth he did tell. In 2016 he left the good guys and signed up with African Protection Services.’

‘Hanna was with APS?’ Jericho blurted out.

The man leafed through his pages. ‘Vogelaar mentions pretty nearly everybody in his dossier who was connected with the Mayé coup in 2017. There’s a Neil Gabriel in that list, although he was only with the outfit for a little while and then went independent. It looks as though he did jobs for the Zhong Chan Er Bu as well, at least Vogelaar says that Xin liked his work. So now that we’ve talked to our American friends, we know who Neil Gabriel is. Clearly APS must have split at the time. One part stuck with Vogelaar, while the others became Kenny Xin’s creatures.’

Jericho listened, fascinated, and kept an eye on Norrington at the same time. The security number two was visibly distressed by the barrage of facts.

‘Right now we’re busy trying to unravel Hanna’s fake CV, pardon me, I mean Gabriel’s. We hope to find out who set him up with shares in Lightyears and Quan-time. People with serious money. This won’t be anywhere near as easy as it was to crack who he really is.’

‘You know one of them already,’ Jericho said. ‘Xin.’

The agent turned towards him. ‘We don’t hold out much hope of getting a glimpse of him. He seems to just melt away into thin air whenever you think you have him in your sights.’

‘Was it easy to crack Hanna’s identity?’ Shaw asked.

‘Well, easy would be overstating the case. We have good contacts with our friends across the pond, and we couldn’t have done it without them. But the bottom line is’ – he paused, and looked at Norrington – ‘a quiet chat with the Central Intelligence Agency would have done the trick back at the start.’

Norrington leaned forward.

‘Do you really think we didn’t talk to them?’

‘I have absolutely no wish to question your competence,’ the agent said, cheerily. ‘I leave that to others.’

Jericho’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen, excused himself and went outside, shutting the door behind him.

‘Norrington knows,’ he said quietly.

‘Crap.’ Yoyo was silent for a moment. ‘I thought—’

‘Didn’t work out as we expected. Were you able to download everything, at least?’

‘I’ve been hard at work already! The search program can’t find anything about Thorn in Norrington’s data, but there’s some stuff about Hanna. He was a long way from being the only one who could have taken Palstein’s place. There was a regular queue of candidates: Orley’s business partners, it looks like, or people he wanted to do business with. Multi-billionaires, the lot of them, but Norrington always managed to find something to cavil at. Heart condition, high blood pressure, this one’s been in therapy, that one might be flirting with the competition, the other’s got
close links with the Chinese government and he doesn’t like the look of it, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t help but think that he was being paid money to find reasons to rule them all out of going along.’

‘Maybe he
was
paid.’

‘And after all that, Hanna’s just smiles and sunshine. The perfect travelling companion for Julian Orley.’

‘And nobody double-checked?’

‘Norrington’s not just a line manager, Owen. He’s deputy head of security. If somebody like him recommends Hanna, then Hanna flies. Orley must have trusted him – after all he pays him a lot of money for his expertise.’

‘All right, I’ll talk to Shaw. Enough hide-and-seek.’

She hesitated. ‘Are you sure that you can trust her?’

‘Sure enough to take the risk. If the whole thing turns out to be flim-flam, she’ll throw us out on our ear, but we’ll chance it.’

‘Good. I’ll spend some more time going through Norrington’s sock drawers.’

The door to the conference room opened. Norrington hurried over to his office. Shaw, Merrick and the others got ready to go their separate ways.

‘Jennifer.’ Jericho moved to intercept her. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’

She looked at him, her face expressionless.

In the end DeLucas had given up caring and had marched Lynn up to the top floor by main force, then along to Igloo 2, where she threw her a spacesuit, backpack and helmet, and threatened to beat her up if she didn’t pull herself together. She’d run out of patience, whether or not this was Julian Orley’s beloved daughter. The woman was clearly two sandwiches short of a picnic. Sometimes she seemed to be perfectly lucid, then at the next moment DeLucas wouldn’t have been surprised to see her crawling around on all fours, or stepping gaily into the airlock without putting her helmet on. She turfed the Ögis out of bed, who were mercifully cooperative and quick to understand the situation, but by the time she had got the whole crowd of them into one of the robot buses and over to the landing field, Palmer and his crew had already arrived and begun to search the caves. They turned the laboratories upside down as though carrying out a drugs raid, tore the mattresses from the bunks in all the bedrooms, looked into all the lockers and behind the wall panels, in the aquaria and the vegetable
patches. Finally DeLucas, already in her spacesuit, her helmet under her arm, went into the Great Hall to join them. She hadn’t the first idea what a mini-nuke looked like. All she knew was that it was small, and could be anywhere.

Where would
she
hide something like that? In the jungle of the greenhouses? In among the trout and the salmon?

In the ceiling?

She looked up at the Great Hall’s basalt dome. She felt a feverish desire to get out of there, to go with the guests. What they were doing here was crazy! The fact that Hanna had showed up in the control room didn’t remotely mean that the bomb had to be here in the underground. It could be anywhere in the whole vast complex.