Jim turned around to his wife, and the four children sleeping in the back seat. ‘I just wish the public were as publicly-spirited as we are,’ he said. ‘I think about these kids, and what their future’s going to be, and I can tell you something, Ed, it makes me frightened.’

‘Me too, Jim,’ said Ed, as comfortingly as he could. ‘Just give me five minutes, and then we’ll find a place to stay for the night.’

He walked back to the office building and climbed the stairs. It was so dark inside that he had to feel his way up by the handrail. There was a smell of burned paper and urine. He reached the second-storey landing, and he was just about to climb up to the third when Della appeared from a doorway beside him.

‘They’re in here,’ she said. ‘Or, at least, they were in here.’

Ed stepped into a small reception area, divided off with reeded glass. On the wall was a calendar supplied by Mitsubishi Aircraft, with a picture of the Diamond I executive jet flying over San Francisco Bay. There was a grey filing-cabinet, with all its drawers open and empty, and an IBM typewriter with its keys jammed together, and a blank piece of note-paper still protruding from the carriage.

‘They didn’t even leave a telephone,’ said Della. ‘But I’m going to write a message and pin it to the wall. Maybe one of their agents will come by and contact us.’

‘And meanwhile we have to keep Shearson Jones captive?’

‘What else do you suggest we do with him?’

Ed looked around the deserted, shadowy office. ‘I suggest we let him go. Both him and Peter Kaiser. There’s no chance at all that we can bring either of them to trial. Not now. And, really, what does it. matter any more?’

‘You were the one who thought it was so important to expose Shearson on coast-to-coast television,’ said Della. ‘Now you want to let him go?’

Ed sat down at the receptionist’s desk, and tugged the piece of notepaper out of the typewriter. He read the letterhead carefully, and then laid the paper on the desk beside him. When he spoke, his voice was quite changed – distant and unfriendly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want to let him go because none of this famine crisis has turned out to be what it seemed to be.’

‘You’re not making sense.’

‘I know. But neither is anything else. If this is a safe house for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as you claim it is, then why were they using notepaper for Your Spread From The Sky, Inc.?’

Della frowned. ‘That was their cover. An aerial photography outfit. That’s all. You don’t expect them to put “J. Edgar Hoover” on their paper do you?’