He continued on, unconsciously slowing down as he processed the abrupt and dramatic change to the landscape around him. He passed a small, quiet car park, where he saw a couple of wet dogs being coaxed into car boots and the two helmeted riders from the motorbike dismounting their metal steed. For a moment, he thought Knox had somehow vanished, sucked down into quicksand or swallowed up by one of the marshes, but then he saw the Jaguar over to his right, still heading away from him down a barely visible path.

Laing’s wheels crunched as they drove over chunks of rock that had been smoothed by tides for centuries then blown onto the narrow strip of tarmac that ran across what was technically Britain’s only desert. There was no wind now, not that there were any trees with leaves and branches to sway in the breeze—the expanse of shingle was only broken by the occasional stunted bush or brave flower, fisherman’s huts that looked abandoned and stood far away from the sea and, in the distance, the squat, hulking profile of a nuclear power station.

Dungeness was an eerie, remote place. It was that remoteness that had led to this stretch of the Kent coastline being chosen for the power station. Strangely, the addition of its series of grey, featureless boxes had made the place seem even more desolate. The power station looked completely alien, and it was impossible to believe that anyone at all worked there, let alone hundreds of scientists and engineers, or that the track Laing was driving down and the narrow-gauge single train line that ran alongside it didn’t just continue beyond the odd aberration and on into oblivion.

As Laing passed yet another wind-beaten hut with window shutters closed up and old strips and blocks of metal strewn across the shingle in front of it, he noticed that Knox’s Jaguar wasn’t as far away as it should be. In fact, it was stopped in the middle of the track ahead of him. Laing swore at himself. He’d been so focused on imagining the schemes that might be afoot and then mesmerised by the strangeness of Dungeness that he hadn’t realised that he hadn’t just been following Knox, but that Knox had also been leading him to exactly where he wanted him—possibly even all the way from London.

He slowed to a halt twenty feet behind the Jaguar, turned off his engine, and waited for Knox to make his next move.

‘What do we do now?’ Williams asked as Knox watched the Consul come to a stop in the Jaguar’s rear-view mirror.

The glint of the sun on the second car’s windscreen meant that Knox and Williams still didn’t know who had followed them all the way out to Dungeness.

‘You stay put,’ Knox said. ‘And I’ll see what this is all about.’