‘Marlon and Herschel have set up a regular little home from home not far from here,’ he told me. We were in a garden area at the rear of the pub, a wooden table and a half-finished shepherd’s pie separating us. ‘A farmhouse, set back from the road in the middle of a couple of acres.’ He sipped at his latte. ‘Nice place, too.’

‘Last time I spoke to you, they’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.’

‘We think they had prepared identities,’ he replied. ‘Ones they could just walk into when things got too hot.’

I laughed uneasily. ‘This is all getting a bit James Bond for me.’

He regarded me stonily. ‘This is all quite serious, Jerry.’

‘And you really still think they’re working on these . . . these cultures they stole?’

‘They’ve been ordering lots of specialist equipment,’ he explained, ‘through shell companies. It took a great deal of work to trace them. That kind of thing takes an enormous amount of planning.’

‘You’re talking about Red Harvest again, aren’t you?’

He raised his shoulders, then let them fall again. ‘Red Harvest is wealthy,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a lot of rich members. Marlon and Herschel couldn’t manage all this on their own. The question is, how far along are they with what they’re planning?’

‘What are they planning, Floyd?’ I shook my head. ‘You never made it clear.’

‘We don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘But it’s what we don’t know that worries us.’

‘That makes absolutely no sense.’

‘Let me describe the equipment they’ve been ordering through those shell companies: incubation units; HEPA filters; lab equipment and sterilizing equipment; hazmat gear. What does that suggest to you, other than that they’re growing bugs on behalf of their nut-job religion?’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘GreenTech vetted everyone. There were psychological tests, batteries of them. If Marlon and Herschel really were that crazy, it would have shown up.’

‘You can learn how to pass those tests,’ he said, with such an air of authority I hesitated at pursuing it further.

‘If you’re so sure about all this,’ I insisted, desperation edging into my voice, ‘why don’t you just go in there and arrest them?’

It was Floyd’s turn to hesitate. ‘There’ve been some fuck-ups. Technically, we don’t yet have the necessary clearance or authority to be operating in the UK.’ He glanced around in the most furtive manner possible. ‘The thing is, time is running out, and I don’t know if we can wait much longer.’

Then it dawned on me. ‘You’re not supposed to be here at all, are you?’

‘I need to get in there,’ he said, ‘and see just what they’re up to. But you’re the expert in this kind of thing. I want you to come with me and take a look at whatever set-up they have running in there.’

‘You mean . . . break in?’