He lastly checked Mitchell’s records. His death was recorded as having taken place a month earlier, but wen Saul tried to pull up the post-mortem report, he quickly discovered even his own security clearance wasn’t high enough to let him see it.

He woke several hours later, still sprawled in the armchair, to find another call alert waiting for him.

‘Saul,’ Olivia sounded breathless, when he returned her call, ‘have you seen the news?’

Saul pulled his rumpled form upright, the muscles in the back of his neck protesting at the awkward angle they’d been forced into for much of the night. It was still dark outside.

He glanced at the wall-mounted TriView at the other end of the room. ‘Why?’ he mumbled.

‘Just turn it on, Saul. Turn it on right now. Then get back to me.’

He disconnected and watched the news, while he waited for the room to make him some coffee. By the time it was ready, the first glimmer of dawn had started to push its way above the mountains.

Everything else in the news – even the border incidents down Mexical way – had been pushed to one side by the appearance of what some people described as an artificial island, and a few others were even calling an alien invasion.

Endless aerial shots paraded across the screen, one after the other, of a vast flower-like growth rising out of the Pacific Ocean near the Mariana Islands. There were reports of loud booms being heard and seismic activity within the vicinity, which some claimed were both connected to the rash of earthquakes that had already claimed thousands of lives throughout the Asian Pacific region in just the last few days. Saul struggled to take any of it seriously, deciding it was too much like some overwrought science-fiction drama to be remotely believable.

He pulled up other news feeds, expecting to find nothing but the usual sober mix about politicians and murder hunts. Instead he saw those very same politicians being forced to admit they had no idea what was happening out in the Pacific.

It dawned on him gradually that what he was seeing was real – and now, it seemed, there were more of them pushing up from the deep rock-bed of the ocean floor, scattered at distances from the first growth of up to a few thousand kilometres.

Badly shaken, Saul kept a news feed running as his car pulled back out on to the road an hour later, heading south-west. A tsunami had just hit the south-west coast of Japan, and news of further quakes was coming in from other parts of the world. Two talking heads argued over whether or not those things were powering their massive growth with thermal energy drawn from the Earth’s deep crust, which just might explain the unprecedented build-up in seismic activity. By the time the interview ended, the two of them were nearly coming to blows.