‘That trick you guys pulled breaking into our system, looping the security footage back over itself, that was fucking brilliant,’ raved McCutcheon.

He sat next to her in the back of a Humvee, both of them being driven across the base to Blackstone’s home residence. Caitlin’s hands were cuffed behind her back and the former air force man kept his gun trained on her midsection, while maintaining as much separation between them as he could. The driver’s head bobbed in time to the bass beat of a song he was listening to through earphones plugged into his Zune.

Little fucking Wayne, again. There was no escaping the guy.

‘A bit too brilliant, though,’ her captor went on. ‘We probably wouldn’t have noticed anything, except I was standing at the security desk with my boys when I saw myself walking down a corridor on the other side of the building. Whoops!’

Caitlin maintained the stillness and silence within which she had cocooned herself, ever since she’d handed over the cell phone and her Kimber pistol.

‘You’re like a Bond villain, you know that?’ said McCutcheon. ‘All of you spooks are the same. All so intent on getting your ninja merit badge, throwing your little smoke bombs, doing your Spiderman thing up on the ceiling, that you forget it would be simpler to just walk in through the front door! You probably could’ve hidden in a broom closet and not been caught.’

She ignored him and concentrated on her breathing. He seemed relaxed, which wasn’t surprising given that she was wearing the handcuffs and he was pointing a gun at her liver. But he shouldn’t have been relaxed. He should have been freaking. Because Caitlin hadn’t stored the data from his laptop on her augmented cell phone. Everything had been uploaded and transmitted back to Vancouver. Either he didn’t know that, or there was nothing on the laptop worth worrying about. She doubted the latter. Not with the lengths to which they’d gone to secure the thing from interference.

Unless, of course, that too had merely been a charade to entrap her.

Echelon’s senior field agent did not have enough information to reach a conclusion, and so she did not bother. What mattered now was waiting for an opportunity to reverse the flow of this encounter.

*

Culver pressed the phone so hard to his ear, it was starting to hurt his head.

‘How many dead?’ he asked.

‘Two here, that we are aware of. Down there, I couldn’t say.’

‘Jesus Christ, Larrison, how long does it take to do a simple body count?’