“Maybe,” Taylor said. Bower glanced at his watch. Kane got the impression that in GCHQ things operated with a technological efficiency that didn’t allow for glitches such as suicide. And there was something unspoken in the room. Taylor hadn’t confided about Rory’s previous mishap, he thought. Now he saw why. This was one reason she’d come to Kane: for discretion.

“If we are going to send someone else out there, I wanted an officer already read into Echelon,” Bower said. “Which I think is reasonable enough. And you had some acquaintance with the man. Perhaps that will help the two of you come to a conclusion regarding what happened. We have a fortnight, then the window for installation becomes trickier since the cover we’ve established won’t work. I’m getting considerable pressure over this, as you can imagine. People want the data flowing yesterday.”

A fiber-optic cable between Africa and Latin America. Kane considered what this would give them: all traffic between two continents set to shape the next century. Thousands of calls in any single second. That meant serious intelligence product. At the heart of the intelligence world was a competition between the agencies: Each morning the prime minister got separate reports from MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, and the quality of these insights determined budgets and careers. GCHQ had a lead it needed to maintain. The human factor was a rare inconvenience.

“Have you ever been to Ascension Island?” Kane asked.

“Me?” Bower looked amused by the question. “No.”

“You?” Kane turned to Taylor.

“No.”

He nodded again, looked at the map.

“How long was Rory over there?”

“Nearly six months,” Taylor said.

“Regular communication?”

“Regular enough. We had an encrypted satellite link. Neither of us wanted to be on it daily, but he was in touch. There was nothing to suggest this was going to happen.”

“I assume someone on the island investigated it.”

“To a basic level. The conclusion was as you’d imagine: straightforward suicide. And of course they may be right. Either way, it’s not clear why this happened. And there are additional questions around his belongings, whether everything got returned, if there might be something he left behind that could tell us the tiniest bit about what happened.”

“Who’s in charge over there?”

“Technically it’s the governor of Saint Helena, which is an entirely separate island around eight hundred miles away. But it’s part of the same territory, as the FCO defines it. The governor’s represented on Ascension by an Administrator. The island has two full-time police officers, assisted by a couple of volunteers. It’s not set up for a thorough investigation of any kind. Obviously, the RAF and the American military base have their own security, but they deal with military matters.”

“Anyone else there know the real reason Rory was on the island?”