‘How could you know this? And what possible reason could anyone have to do something like that?’

‘Good question. Anyway, a while back, he came to talk to Nadia about a specific incident that nearly got a lot of people killed.’

I licked my lips. ‘What happened, exactly?’

‘At the time, it had been arranged that Mort Bramnik was going to join some of us on an expedition to a recently opened alternate. Bramnik was intending to show some people from the Authority’s own alternate around, and we were expected to talk to them as if we were nothing more than inter-dimensional fucking tourist guides. I don’t know who these people were, but from the way Bramnik was acting towards them, not to mention the fact that they were getting the grand tour, it wasn’t hard to guess they were important.’

She leaned back, turning her coffee mug in her hands. ‘Something went wrong not long after we crossed over into the alternate, along with all the Authority tourists. We ran into something big and nasty that’d make you shit your pants in a second flat. Mort Bramnik himself nearly got killed as a result. Until that moment, we’d had every reason to believe we would be entirely safe, but the whole thing turned into a fuck-up of truly epic proportions.’ She looked up at me. ‘And until last night, that was the worst incident of all – even including the whole debacle in those vaults you saved me from. The only reason nobody got killed on that outing with the tourists was because Casey just about single-handedly saved our collective asses.’

‘So what happened after that?’ I asked.

‘The Patriot agents started showing up, snooping around the island and generally getting in everyone’s face. I think Bramnik’s been under a lot of pressure because of that first bad incident. Over the past year, he’s been away from the island with such frequency we started wondering if he’d ever come back, or who his replacement might be.’

‘If he’s screwing up so badly, maybe a replacement for him isn’t such a bad idea,’ I ventured.

‘Except that Agent Greenbrooke would most likely be his replacement, the way things have been going around here. And if Greenbrooke wound up running things, there isn’t one of us who’d be able to so much as take a shit without half a dozen Patriot agents taking photographs and writing extensive reports on the subversive nature of our bowel movements. Believe me, nobody wants Greenbrooke in charge.’

Having met the man, I could only agree. ‘So Nadia had suspicions about my predecessor’s death.’ It still felt strange, saying the words.