“We all are. Fiber optic’s the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve got more data coming in than the NSA itself. He can’t see why Ascension shouldn’t be exactly the same.”

“Nor can I.”

“You think Rory just lost it? We should proceed as if nothing happened?”

“He’d spent six months operating alone on a lump of rock. I suspect he was unstable to start with.”

“He was brilliant.”

“He wasn’t without issues, was he?”

She didn’t answer.

“No one else in Six working on this?” Kane said.

“No.”

“You’re really overseeing the whole thing alone?”

“That was the agreement. Until the interception facility is in place, at least.”

She seemed sensitive about talking in the car, so Kane didn’t push it any further. He thought about their previous collaboration, about a very beautiful, domed, and expensive Oman, pre–Arab Spring. Kathryn had been managing the operation, which she could have done remotely if less effectively, but she insisted on being there. Rory Bannatyne was technically brilliant. His skill with fiber optics seemed connected in some obscure way to the intensity of his green eyes, his love of music, his quiet charm. The image of him hanged felt cruelly bizarre. As ever, it was hard not to implicate the world of secrets that they served. There was a touch of Prometheus to it all: playing with godlike powers that had been loaned to you; feeling the heat of a guilt that wasn’t entirely your own but to which you were exposed. Rory Bannatyne had enabled schemes beyond the natural order of things, a mutation that could give a person troubled dreams.

Kane had responded to his dark talent in the only way he knew how: He probed. He wanted to know what exactly was going on under the Strait of Hormuz. Eventually, over a bottle of Laphroaig, Rory opened up. Kane could see him leaning in, with his shock of wavy ginger hair and his strong, freckled arms.

Fiber optics had arrived just as GCHQ was hitting a problem, Rory said. The British had excelled over the years at intercepting microwave satellite communications, but the dawn of universally available encryption had started making that a lot more complicated. Underground fiber-optic cables changed the game. On one hand, they were buried deep, but at the same time they were physical, which meant you could infiltrate the system at vulnerable points. When GCHQ wanted to tap a new international cable, engineers like Rory were installed in the relevant communication companies to plan where the splitter would be connected. The splitter diverted the light carried on the cables into a secret “black room” under control of GCHQ.