‘And you think your girlfriend’s going to enjoy seeing some shed blown up?’

‘Yep. She loves a bang, y’know.’

Now Oddur smiled awkwardly.

‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,’ he said and shook his head in disbelief.

‘She just loves explosions,’ Anton continued excitedly. ‘New Year’s Eve is her favourite. She’ll just love it.’

He could hear the lies in his own voice and hoped that Oddur wouldn’t see through him.

‘Then why not just have a firework display for her?’

‘That’s the plan,’ Anton said. ‘But blowing up the shed is the high point of the firework display.’

He was taken by surprise by just how quickly the lies had spun themselves. It was as if all this make-believe emerged effortlessly.

‘And where are you going to get the money to pay me?’

‘I have money,’ Anton said. ‘I’m a silver-spoon kid.’

Oddur smiled again.

‘I need to think it over,’ he said. ‘I can easily make what you’re looking for, but I’m not sure that I’d want to. It depends whether I want to take the risk that someone could get hurt and it would be my fault.’

Anton nodded gravely to show that he appreciated Oddur’s concerns.

‘That’s why I wanted to ask if you could come up with something smart. My friend offered to make some kind of a detonator using a petrol bomb. That sounds far too dangerous.’

It had the required effect. ‘Christ…’ Oddur breathed.

‘I reckon there’s far less risk of someone getting hurt if you could make a high-tech remote control,’ Anton went on. ‘I want everyone to be well clear when the dynamite goes off.’

‘You’re completely off your head,’ Oddur said, getting to his feet. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’ll think it over and let you know.’

Oddur had left the coffee house when Anton remembered something important: he should have mentioned that this had to remain strictly between the two of them. He hurried after Oddur, who turned as he heard Anton call his name.

‘Hey,’ Anton said. ‘Don’t forget this is just a potential scenario, and we keep it between you and me.’

Oddur waved a hand and nodded, but his eyes flashed nervously from side to side, so that Anton wondered if a boy two years older than he was, a coffee-drinking robotics genius, was actually frightened of him.

47

María didn’t have to wait for long for a truck to turn up at the warehouse. She had been parked in the shade of a threadbare tree for only a few minutes when two trucks drove up at the same time. She sat up straight and finished the weak coffee in her paper cup. She knew the trucks spent around a quarter of an hour inside the building before emerging at the far end. Considering how packed the place was, there was unlikely to be any loading or unloading going on, so she guessed that the fifteen minutes were simply a coffee break for the drivers.