“I would tell you if I did. But you’ve made me very curious.”

“Okay.”

They arranged secure means of contacting each other and a backup plan in case something went badly wrong. Fischer was insistent about this, as if he knew of dangers he wouldn’t share. Taylor said she’d see what she could do and stepped back into the night, trying to decide what she meant by that.

21

She went straight back to HQ. No time to waste. Betraying your country wasn’t something to dawdle over. Ten p.m., office to herself, windows dark. Security had nodded to Taylor as she entered but she didn’t feel too conspicuous. Intelligence work was a global and unpredictable enterprise; various demands meant people came and went at all hours. Everyone had something that might pull them in at midnight.

First on her list of checks was Markus Fischer himself. She ran him through the system to see if he came up as active, hostile, or monitored. Vauxhall’s counterintelligence on rival European agencies was substantial, and they had good penetration of both the French DGCE and German BND. There were no alerts on Fischer. Records had him based in Frankfurt since 2015, no suggestion he was currently in the UK, which made her wonder what paperwork he’d traveled in on, and why.

She studied the Quadrant website again. The company had been set up in 2014 by Stuart Adair, originally a professor of space robotics at the University of Southampton. In the late 2000s, he led a group of researchers experimenting with miniature, maneuverable satellites. In 2012 he attended the European Conference on Space Debris and, seeing the scale of the problem, redirected energy toward devising a system for orbital sustainability. Quadrant was formed two years later as a spin-off company to transfer the results of research into a commercial enterprise.

The website included a cute personal bio. Adair recalled attending Space Camp in the US as a child and meeting the UK’s first astronaut, Helen Sharman, who gave him a handwritten note with the message, “Space is waiting for you.” This note became the inspiration to pursue his dream. From what Taylor could tell, childhood dream segued rapidly into commercial vision: Quadrant seeks to create a freer and more prosperous life for each generation by using the unlimited energy and material resources of space. According to commentators in the press, they’d lobbied hard to ensure governmental support for the rapid commercial development of the solar system. In one off-the-cuff remark to a journalist at a space expo last year, Adair had said: “As a planet, if we don’t colonize space, we doom ourselves to stasis and rationing. As a nation, we miss our chance at dominating this fourth industrial revolution.” Debris was their in.