He spent some time grateful to be out of the sun, trying to assess the situation away from the glare of the midday and the curiosity of the islanders’ gazes. Had Rory been with Petra and Connor that night? What had he got involved in? Eventually, Kane gave up on rest and brought up the satellite map. Rory had last been seen passing the British base at around six thirty p.m. on the night he died. That was strange. Kane couldn’t understand where you could go from there without being seen by someone else. The road west—the direction he’d been traveling in—would have taken him past the airfield and into Georgetown. Yet no one saw him again until his body turned up. Kane thought of the witness statement he’d glimpsed in Morrogh’s file—Connor and Petra seen cycling, direction south east on New Mountain Road. He located that on the map and it placed them nearby. The three of them were converging. But where? Kane studied the map and decided he needed to take a look at the area in person.

13

Vauxhall Cross at seven a.m. on a Friday morning was peaceful. A few keen analysts digested reports in time for morning briefings, security officers patrolled. The Thames slid murkily by outside. Taylor stood at her office window and watched the traffic junction below, around which the humans waiting to cross appeared small and defenseless.

After Kudus’s alert about someone probing Kane’s cover she’d done what she could, instructing their resident signals expert to look into it, then spent an anxious evening in awkward conversation with an old university friend, her lawyer husband, and the man they had hoped to set her up with, maintaining her side of a dinner party conversation about London property prices and governmental incompetence while thinking about Kane and the missing girl. She’d had awful nightmares all night, then come in to find yesterday’s headache in paper form on her desk.

Dominic Bower at GCHQ was keen to impress on her that work on the cable had begun. The black box processing center parts were ready for shipment, disguised as components for the cable station. Their optical splitter was to be housed in a secure building adjacent to the island’s telescope observatory. He needed an update from her end. The next message was from DCI Rehman, restating her demand for access to Rory Bannatyne’s former colleagues. Then Gabriel Skinner: “Could you confirm that you have suspended operations? Why am I under the impression that you haven’t?”

Fuck that. He couldn’t stop her. She replied, Further discussion regarding the GCHQ program should be conducted via the chief’s office. Talk to C.

Finally, reports from the overnight signals team: There’d been no more searches on Edward Pearce identified. No other evidence of attention on Kane. They were still working on determining the source of the original probe.