“But look at the next paragraph,” Kudus said.

It was at Lake Ravenna that Anne met and married the government scientist Jack Moretti.

Fischer saw Taylor staring at the screen.

“Does this mean something to you?” he asked. The other BND officers had gathered around, sensing a breakthrough. Taylor logged in to her own emails, found Perryman’s cache, the interview with Moretti’s colleague.

Someone said his wife was having an affair. She worked there too. Jack found out a few days before he killed himself. I think she married the other guy a few months later. Lake Ravenna’s full of black tech, but I’m not sure there’s anything mysterious about Jack Moretti’s suicide.

Taylor no longer felt sure that the final statement followed from the rest.

“She remarried. She’s with someone on the island. Who is he?” Taylor asked. “What have we got on her current husband?”

“Thomas Lindgren,” Kudus said. “We have a full CV from when he applied to work in the Ascension Conservation Department, plus a scan of his passport. Finnish, came to the US a couple of decades back, studied environmental sciences at the University of California, then worked various jobs: lab assistant, landscape gardener, some teaching work. They married in 2010, around the same time she goes into the military. I can’t get her exact role, but it coincides with the development of the US Space Force. It looks like she was helping put it together. Went to Ascension six years ago.”

“Send me what you’ve got on Thomas Lindgren.”

Kudus sent it through. According to the CV, Thomas Lindgren had completed his course at the University of California, San Diego, then got a job with a company called Green Desert Landscape and Gardening. He remained in LA for several years, doing a combination of gardening, tuition, some delivery driving, and general maintenance. He moved out to the suburbs in 1997: Apple Valley, then Santa Clarita.

Taylor was bringing up the map when Kudus said: “They’re both near Lake Ravenna.”

“Right.”

There was banging in the background at Kudus’s end.

“What’s going on?” Taylor said.

“They’re trying to get in.”

“Where are you?”

“Your office. I got the feeling I might be taken off duties very soon. I’ve blocked the door.”

“Are you okay?”

“So long as the door holds.”

Taylor read Thomas Lindgren’s CV as a narrative now, testing it for logic. Aged twenty-nine, he moves to the States, qualifies as an environmental scientist, then works a series of menial jobs that allow him to geographically circulate one of the most sensitive defense research sites in the country . . . She heard more banging, then an alert flashed up on the BND monitor: Three Chinese-flagged fishing vessels had been stopped approaching the Marshall Islands. The US Coast Guard was holding sixty crew members. Fischer swore, spoke with his colleagues to one side, then returned to the monitor.