“Will do. So they say. Been working on a system called ClearSky for the last three years, but it’s just gone big-time. Eco space. Green space. You’ve cried about the oceans, now let us remove the debris from low earth orbit. It’s an eye-catching initiative, enough to get them a hell of a lot of funding up front. A strange amount of funding. Something’s very wrong there.”

“Go on.”

“Are we going to be open with each other, Kat?”

“I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Until recently, Quadrant were at risk of bankruptcy. They’d always struggled to attract investment. There’d been seed funding but that had gone. Then there was a very rapid turnaround. In February last year, the company received an injection of one hundred twenty million dollars from two venture capital funds about which I can get very little information other than that one’s registered in Delaware and one in the Cayman Islands. That was a few days before your government announced a further twenty-five million would go to the company via the UK Space Agency as part of an attempt to boost the space industry in this country.”

“Something must have attracted them.”

“Right.”

“Maybe Quadrant have got groundbreaking technology.”

“I hope so. The following week Payne flew to Brussels, attended a meeting of top European policy makers, and announced that all UK cooperation in the European space program was off.”

Fischer watched Taylor’s reaction. She tried to remember if she’d seen this in the news. There had been a lot of negotiations, a lot of cancellations, too.

“The European space program’s world class,” Fischer said. “Navigation systems, high-precision positioning, space surveillance and tracking. The UK were central to it, of course. You had access to research grants, manufacturing contracts, prestige. But no, suddenly the word goes out: You guys would explore alternative options. No more data sharing, you’d do your own thing. My bosses came to me and said: What’s going on? How are they going to afford that? This is insane.”

Fischer’s incredulity seemed genuine, but Taylor took a mental step back. Lesson one: Ask yourself what’s their game? Why are they talking to you at all? Germany was an ally, but one with its own ambitions. So she added a pinch of salt and kept her mind open.

“I started looking into it,” Fischer said. “And I got to Quadrant. They’ve been channeling a lot of resources to Geoffrey Payne and he’s not been shy in returning the favors. Those resources came out of nowhere, as far as I can tell. But whoever’s behind it has clearly been pushing for total autonomy. Why? There are bigger players in the UK space industry but none as strange, none operating in such secrecy. When do you start talking?”

“In a minute. Tell me what else you know about the money trail.”