‘So what do we do now?’ I asked, sitting and listening to the engine rumble. ‘It sounds to me like you’ve got rock-solid evidence. Are you going to take it to Bramnik?’

She hesitated as I rolled the SUV back from the wreck of the other vehicle. ‘Bramnik is absent from the island. Again.’

‘Maybe Kip Mayer . . . ?’

‘I need to run some tests first,’ she said, her jaws clenched.

I couldn’t understand her reticence. ‘Surely you just found definitive evidence someone sabotaged our mission?’

‘Not necessarily.’

I looked sideways at her, hardly believing what she had said. ‘Oh, come on . . .’

‘It’s a question of knowing who to trust,’ she said.

‘So that’s it?’ I snapped. ‘You dragged me all the way back to this shitty, dreadful place, and now you’re just going to sit on what you found?’

‘What we need to do,’ she said, ‘is bide our time. We need to build a strong case. That’s what Nadia would have said. She understood these things. For all I know, if we go running to Bramnik or anyone else, they’ll suggest we planted the scent-marker. Or maybe they’ll make us quietly disappear, or set some other act of sabotage to disguise our sudden and unexpected deaths. Until we’ve got a better idea just what Nadia and your predecessor were on to, we watch, and we wait.’

‘And if we don’t ever find out?’ I asked.

‘You’ve got to have faith, Jerry,’ she said, her voice tight, ‘and faith is all I have left.’

We made it there and back with surprising speed, no more than a couple of hours either way. It came to me that, if not for the apparently engineered incident that cost Nadia her life, the mission with her and Oskar would probably have been entirely uneventful.

‘Thank Christ you’re done,’ said Dom the rig technician, when we finally materialized back on the main hangar stage. ‘Now get the hell out of here before anyone sees you.’

I stepped back outside, Rozalia by my side, and saw it was getting close to dawn. The same guard as before nodded to us with clear relief.

Rozalia turned and called back in to Dom. ‘Thanks again.’

‘This is a one-time deal,’ he shouted back, jabbing a finger at the both of us. ‘We clear on that? Never again.’

She nodded. ‘As daylight.’

Twenty minutes later we had cycled back to my front door. Rozalia dismounted, then pulled me into a hug.

‘Damn,’ she said, regarding me with apparent affection. ‘You know how easy it is to get the two of you confused? You and the other Jerry, that is.’

I didn’t know what to say. ‘I should get at least a couple of hours’ sleep before we head back out,’ I mumbled. ‘Got that mission later, remember?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll see you and the others then.’