Back in Leytonstone, the link goes live. Z has just looked up O. M shouts out to her team leader, who scrambles across to her desk. Colleagues patting her on the shoulder, team leader looking her in the eye and nodding. This’ll be worth something at the April board.

Well apparently there are Hindus in Bangladesh. Who knew?

Z has acquired a typewriter. He puts on some heavy metal and turns up the volume to drown out the keystrokes.

J, together with some associates, is planning a distributed denial-of-service attack, to take place on Thursday, on the Tory party HQ.

Anyway, who’s to say a Hindu wouldn’t be a terrorist?

Agents of the Security Service supply the black-market shops of Roman Road and Whitechapel with pre-bugged Nokias. (Whatever happened to honour amongst thieves?)

Come to think of it, if you were a Muslim terrorist, pretending to be a Hindu would be a really good cover.

*

On Thursday M’s team leader takes her out for drinks, to a pub on their respective way home. She asks M about her plans and makes careful reference to going for the next board. Opportunities will be coming up, she says. Project leaders will be needed.

At the anti-fascist vigil Z goes bananas at his friend H, who has sent him something via Dropbox – are you crazy? he says. Are you on glue?

You’re fucking paranoid, she says, and she walks away.

As she lets herself in, M wonders about a sideways move into one of the international teams, perhaps on secondment, rather than moving up where she is and getting stuck.

J and his colleagues exchange virtual high-fives after they succeed in bringing down the Tory party site. J celebrates alone, with a midnight spliff.

Z’s various phones, batteries, SIM cards and Oyster cards are scattered on his bedside table. His head hurts and he can’t actually remember which ones he used yesterday – normally he has a mnemonic for this.

That girl he met last night. He’s wondering if her accent seemed a little off – didn’t seem to match her clothes and teeth. The teeth a bit too straight to be straight, if you know what I mean. He’s trying to remember what he might have said to her.

*

The spooks in Cheltenham clock the status change on the board as they arrive for their morning shift. Not that these things ever come as a surprise.

An algorithm at NatWest Bank has identified a pattern in the planned randomness of Z’s cash withdrawals, and triggered a report.

(Interestingly, algorithm is derived from the name of بن موسى الخوارزمی‎ محمد – Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi – a mathematician-astronomer during the Abbasid Caliphate in ninth-century Baghdad, whose achievements include popularizing the use of algebra and introducing positional notation to the West. Every day a school day, huh?)

A manager looks at it, scanning the cash amounts. Petty drug trade, maybe? Something or nothing. Probably not worth bothering the Met.