The file review took an hour and a half. Caitlin found it professionally interesting, and asked all of the questions expected from her, but she allowed Tusk Musso to make most of the running. She could see that he’d been blind-sided by the intelligence out of Florida, and was having to recalibrate his threat detectors as regards the Federation, but the former Marine lawyer remained sceptical, and he’d not let go of his displeasure with Texas for pushing into areas of the country that were none of its concern. He didn’t climb aboard Blackstone’s bandwagon, but he proved himself willing to change his mind about whether a problem existed in the first place.

Caitlin excused herself after an hour to use the bathroom. While in there, she checked her equipment. Two of the three miniature microphones embedded in her uniform had failed, but the third had picked up the subtly changing tones of the PIN code McCutcheon had entered into the antique keypad controlling the infra-red and pressure pad systems in his room. The scanner embedded deep within the guts of her Siemens phone had intercepted and stored his RFID tag as soon as he’d sent it to the proximity sensor designed to create an exclusion zone around his laptop.

An anxious moment passed while the Echelon agent checked that she had captured the data, but this was not something she could leave until they’d returned to the safety of Temple. Had all three of her microphone pick-ups failed, she would’ve needed to manufacture another reason to return to McCutcheon’s office with him later in the day to have another attempt at collecting his PIN.

No problemo, she told herself, letting go of a breath she hadn’t even realised she was holding.

Back in the office, the two former military officers had sidetracked into a discussion of power projection capabilities. Musso remained underwhelmed. McCutcheon tried to sell him a story about Morales seeking out a number of surviving former Argentine military types with experience of the failed Falklands invasion.

‘Why would he even be doing that, Tusk? Who cares what those old losers think? Unless he’s trying to avoid making the same mistakes they did, right?’

‘I can see that he has sought them out,’ the other man conceded, waving a piece of paper that must have confirmed the fact. ‘But you have to remember that he’s trying to build, or rebuild, a military force, a Frankenstein’s force in many ways. Stitched together from the body parts of half-a-dozen militaries that were dismembered during the collapse. Those Argentine officers are the only men anywhere on the continent with actual command-level combat experience of state-on-state conflict. Why wouldn’t he seek them out?’

‘So what, we just ignore it?’

‘No, I’m not saying that, but it doesn’t mean we rush to conclusions either.’