‘Well, he’s holding up – I think he’ll stay the course! Jesus! I wouldn’t want to be out there with that pack of dogs. He’s doing a fine job. I hate the press. Bad news sells newspapers; that’s all those bastards are out there for, selling their newspapers. The more they can twist Doug’s words into prophesies of doom, the more copies they’ll sell. Bad news is the only thing that sells newspapers – when do you remember reading a newspaper article in support of nuclear power stations?’ He didn’t wait for my reply. ‘Never, that’s when you last read one. Never!’ He pulled hard on his drink.

It was two weeks since my meeting with Ahmed in the men’s room at the Royal Lancaster, and I was now ten days into my new job: hatchet man for the Secretary of State for Energy. With a faked background of ten years’ training with the consultancy arm of Peat, Marwick and Mitchell, I had been given an office and carte blanche at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority to go anywhere, anytime, and look at anything, in order to produce a report on productivity and cost-efficiency within the British nuclear energy industry. The industry was so vast, and spread out, both geographically and in terms of different companies and organizations, that it was an impossible task for one person. The person responsible for putting me in this job knew that too; it was the Director General of MI5, Fifeshire. He didn’t care a damn about their cost-efficiency: he just cared about keeping them intact.

This was the third power station I had visited in a week, and I would be visiting the remaining thirteen within the next few weeks.

‘What’s your view on the safety of these things?’ I asked Tenney.

‘They’re fine – but they’re not infallible. Nothing is. It’s possible for things to go wrong. It would be possible for terrorists to sabotage this place – not easy, but possible. God knows what damage would be done if anything did happen.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘I’m here because I don’t believe it will happen; the odds are small enough to make it an acceptable risk. Any place has hazards, and any job has hazards. I don’t feel I’m any more at risk working here than doing anything else – just as long as no bunch of crazed loonies anywhere out beyond that perimeter fencing is plotting to blow us up!’

‘Do you believe what Doug Yeodall was saying about an escape of steam?’