Saul really sucked the smoke into his lungs until he couldn’t fill them any more. The tingling sensation that ran down the sides of his body from the crown of his head, like an overflowing fountain of electricity, was the prelude to a sense of gargantuan well-being and authority. He sank back in his armchair, exhaled and closed his eyes. He was now in territory he had never visited before. His mind was a far more powerful instrument than he had ever dared to imagine. It was like a great Alaskan river after a spring melt, but instead of flowing with churning brown water, this river flowed with mercury, the brilliant mirror of its surroundings reflecting the sky and the trees and the clouds, but also endowed with a penetrating intelligence that knew them for what they were. A few droplets scattered like scouts on to the banks of the quicksilver river could decipher the atomic structure of the rocks on which they landed and, joining together again, trickle their knowledge back into the imperious flood. If he could just get the world’s fifty top scientists and make them feel what he was feeling now, they could join into a single super-mind, they could build the pyramid, they could make all of human knowledge spring out of the desert in a perfect, monumental geometry.

‘Pyramid,’ he whispered.

Hunter clasped his hand and hoisted him out of the chair.

‘What did you say?’ he asked.

‘We can build the pyramid,’ said Saul, unclicking his eyelids and looking fervently into Hunter’s dilated pupils.

‘Yes!’ said Hunter, raising his free arm and bending it with a clenched fist, like a boy inviting admiration for his biceps. ‘Yes, we can!’

Things had gone downhill from there. They had stayed up all night, which had not been part of the plan, and although Hunter had been given an extremely high-dose vitamin C and mineral drip, a vitamin B shot, enough antioxidants to annihilate all the free radicals in New York City, and had managed to pass out during a four-hour session with Ocean, his favourite New York masseuse, he still felt like shit when he got on the plane. He ensured a heavy night’s sleep on the journey, but it was too short and as they approached Farnborough he popped an orange Adderall, the strong one, so he could be resolute and attentive at all those meetings Lucy had set up with a succession of supposedly brilliant scientists.