Culver’s special project took up all the available space in his rather cramped office. The desk wasn’t a mess by any means. Jed Culver’s mind was too organised to countenance sloppiness of thought or deed, but it was a mind possessed of an unnatural ability to take in and process vast amounts of information. It was why he had been such a successful attorney once upon a time. Having learned something, he retained that knowledge. But more importantly, he understood it within the context of everything else he had learned. That was the mistake people made, thought Jed: they confused information with meaning. It was all very well to have a so-called photographic memory – he didn’t, he simply had a very well organised and partitioned memory – but unless you could synthesise all of the random bits of information, the data points, the seemingly disconnected instances and episodes and reams of evidence and counter-evidence into a coherent narrative that was firmly grounded in reality, and not what you wanted reality to be, then you were fucked.

A sub-zero gale rattled his office window in its frame, as if applauding this grim, Darwinian opinion. Jed grunted in irritation. He’d jammed a folded wedge of paper in there a couple of hours earlier, Kipper style, to stop the damned thing annoying him. He wondered if they’d had these same problems, of working in an old, antiquated building, back in the original White House.

He dropped down on one knee to search for the missing wedge. For all of his justly famed powers of concentration, rattling windows drove him nuts, and left him unable to think. He found the makeshift wadding behind the floor-length curtain and jammed it back in between the sash and the frame, restoring blessed quiet to his office.

His desk looked as though children had made a game of constructing a city out of manila folders crammed thick with paper. Small towers of the buff-coloured folders rose up from the leather desktop in a strict grid formation, giving the impression in the soft lamplight of a city skyline, built for play. But games, he didn’t need. Culver was tired.