Kane stepped carefully into a large bare hall that must have once been the Operations Room. He could see indentations where the huge mainframe computers had been. Now it contained stacks of plastic chairs.

Then Connor screamed. Kane spun, saw the boy jump backwards. There was a scurrying at floor level as a rat dived for cover.

“Holy shit,” Connor said.

Kane looked to see where the rat went. It slid passed a door with a yellow sign reading CAUTION: ELECTRICAL HAZARD. Kane walked through, into a room with pipes and a generator at the back. Then he saw a sealed panel in the center of the floor.

It was an iron access hatch: square, heavy-duty, embossed with diamond-shaped grips. But opened recently. You could see where the handle had scored a line in the dust. You could see shoe prints.

Kane tried to prise up the hatch, but it was locked fast. This one was too solid to shoot. It had a key lock, set into the iron, with the iron fixed to the stone floor. Kane crouched and watched a beetle cross the metalwork. He knocked. A hollow chime filled the room. Connor stood in the doorway, staring at the panel with the look of dread that Kane felt.

“Hello?” Kane called. He listened to the waves outside and the helicopter softly churning. No reply. Another beetle skirted the edge of the metal.

“We need to get some tools,” Kane said, straightening. “Think there are any on base we could use? That you could get access to?”

“Maybe.”

“Are the British police allowed onto the US base?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Kane emptied the rest of the bullets out of the gun, put them in his pocket, and gave it back. “Let’s head there. Your parents will be worried. Who did you borrow the gun off?”

“It’s my mom’s.”

“Does she need a gun?”

“Everyone on base has one.”

“Going to return it to her?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

26

“The girl who went missing last night is called Lauren Carter,” Taylor said as she drove. “Her father’s an aircraft technician, been on the island five years. It’s not clear who she is, how she connects to Petra Wade.”

“And what’s Jerry Lau got to do with it?”

“I think Lau knows something about the island. He was being run as an agent; he passed information that led to a report being filed with the keywords Quadrant and Ascension. Quadrant is Quadrant Space Technologies, who I think are the ones checking on Kane—they have a contract to run a research facility on Ascension. They’re big new players in the space game, with the ear of the government. But there’s something more to them, and I think Lau might know. He might even know why the whole thing’s been wiped from the system.”

“He won’t talk to us.”