Culver regarded her with the same caution he’d give a coiled rattler. Monroe was both an anachronism and a harbinger of the changed world. Fashioned as a weapon long before the Disappearance, she had proven she could adapt to altered realities more swiftly and with less apparent disinclination than most of the people he worked with. In their own way, everybody seemed to be trying to hold on to how things had once been, even as that history cracked apart and broke up like a giant ice shelf.

He exhaled slowly. It was her world, not his. There would soon be more like her, rather than fewer. Jed pressed at his stomach and tried to control the boiling underneath his right-hand bottom rib. Quite honestly, he preferred Lupérico dead. The fewer loose threads to unravel, the better.

‘So you’ve read the brief, Agent. You know what we need.’

‘I read the summary. I only got it when I arrived. Ten minutes before you.’ There was no hint of accusation in her tone. Merely a statement of fact.

‘Well, read it all, before you agree to anything,’ he said. ‘Because in spite of what will undoubtedly be sterling efforts on your behalf from Mr Larrison here, you’ll have zero ass cover if this goes wrong. And it could go wrong about ten ways from Sunday.’

‘In my experience, Mr Culver, life can and does go wrong more often than not.’

He leaned forward. Not getting into her personal space, but approaching as near as he dared. ‘You’re a realist, Ms Monroe. That’s good. Because here’s the reality: this country is dying. The Wave ripped our heart out and we’re just staggering forward, carried along by our own momentum. We could be at war with Roberto’s little pirate kingdom within six months, and we could lose if it doesn’t go nuclear. If we’re not at war with him, we might just turn on ourselves. Mad Jack’s got his Heart of Darkness routine polished to an obsidian fucking sheen down there in Texas, and it’s getting to a point where even my boss, the sainted and peace-loving James Kipper, might just have to stand to his guns in response. You were in Manhattan, Ms Monroe. You know what that fight took out of us. We cannot win against Morales. And we probably can’t win against Blackstone either. Not that anyone ever really wins a civil war in any case.’

As the White House Chief of Staff spoke, his earlier anxiety at meeting this woman fell away, replaced by the fears that really underlay his nervous agitation. They were the fears of negation, of total collapse, and the return of a dark age that would envelop the whole world.