“I wanted to get out of the whole situation immediately, but I was told that wasn’t the plan.” Lau sighed. “I was given means of communicating with Andrew. He made a promise—my family would be resettled eventually. But he wanted me to continue working with the Chinese. And that was how it kept going for the next year and a half.”

Of course, Taylor thought. An agent’s no use in retirement. There are people in Vauxhall Cross breathing down your neck for product, finance asking you to justify operational costs. If you weren’t prepared to risk lives, you didn’t become an agent handler.

“What was Andrew interested in?”

“Everything. But most of all space. Chinese space tech, their knowledge of Western space tech.”

“And you were able to access that information?”

“Not much. I’m a treasure hunter, not a rocket engineer. I couldn’t tell him what they were looking for. I didn’t know what they had. I said to him: It’s not going to work like this. But he said not to worry. The next two meetings were in Bali and then once in Macau. Andrew started asking about who came on board the ship, all the details of the Chinese I dealt with.”

“What kind of details, exactly?” Taylor said.

“Everything. Their ages, their technical skills, whether I heard any names or ranks, whether they brought devices with them. He asked if they swept it for bugs, if they seemed to trust me. He wanted to bug the boat. He said when I was next in Malaysia some inspectors would come on board, and I should go along with it, just do whatever they said. At Port Klang the following week, it happened. They said they were Customs and asked to see my papers. They checked all over. I assume that some of them rigged devices into the boat. I was never told what or how.

“Next search mission was in December, just before Christmas. I was told by Andrew that a similar thing would happen when I got to New Zealand. It went on like that. Very few meetings. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it with technology.”

“Did you sense that Andrew was getting something from all this?”

“I can only assume it was successful, since you continued risking my life. You subsidized me quite healthily for the privilege. Then, one day, nothing. No communication. I waited for some kind of message, and there was silence. Next thing I know my men have been slaughtered. For all I know the equipment is still installed on that ship. If they found that, my family is dead. I was told six months at first, then two years. I was told that there was a system in place for emergencies. What if I was in a Chinese prison right now? You used me. Something went wrong your end—fine—but I believed the British government was better than that.”