‘I hardly need to,’ Culver replied. ‘Unlike so many of my other charges, you don’t cause me problems. You solve them.’

‘We try.’ The director shrugged. ‘If you’ll follow me, we’re in here today. No staffers, of course.’

Jed felt, rather than saw, the way his two aides bristled at the dismissal. Even hailing from a much-reduced White House, the young men and women who fetched and carried for him were little different from their forebears. Their own importance loomed very large in their consideration.

‘Of course,’ said Culver, defusing any issue with a wave of his hand. ‘Mike, I’ll need the President’s revised schedule for his APEC trip by this afternoon, if you think you can shake that out of the trees over at State. Sally, you go too. It might need both of you yelling at them to wake someone up over there.’

The aides nodded and hurried away to tend to the very important business of making phone calls and establishing just how much more important they were than the people they were talking to.

‘That’ll keep ’em happy for hours,’ he said.

Larrison murmured something to his own aide, a young Welsh woman, to judge by her lilting tone. She made a few notes in a folder before gliding away to attend to whatever villainy her boss had just set in train. When the two men were alone, the Echelon spy chief used a magnetic key to open the solid-looking double doors to the conference room.

Jed set his features to disguise the acid burn in his stomach and stepped through to take his meeting with a killer. That wasn’t the reason for his anxiety. Rather, he knew that by being here he was disobeying a direct order from the President of the United States. He’d done as Kip had asked, by bringing the FBI in on the link between Ozal’s shipping company and Blackstone, but he hadn’t pressed the issue with them, hadn’t made it a priority. The Bureau didn’t have the resources to assign strike teams of special agents on the whims of a political operator like himself, and he trusted them to take their time, working slowly and methodically away at the documents he had provided.

In the meantime, the Chief of Staff would do what he’d always done. He would take control of events, even at risk to himself. He knew there was only one person he trusted to strike hard and fast at Blackstone’s newly exposed weak point. And she was the only person in the room when he and Director Larrison entered.