‘How the hell can you know about that?’

‘You don’t have high enough clearance even to ask me that fucking question,’ Donohue replied angrily.

‘Before you sent me after Hanover, you told me I had a chance of finding out who blew the Galileo link – and that whoever did it was linked to Hsiu-Chuan. Or was all of that just so much bullshit?’

A Black Dog clumped past them, followed by two sonar tanks, only blurrily visible through the opaqued glass. The car trembled under the impact of their passing.

Donohue pulled himself more upright, one corner of his mouth twitching up into the same sneer Saul remembered from Hong Kong. ‘I don’t have to tell you,’ he said, enunciating the words carefully, ‘One. Fucking. Thing.’

Saul shot him in the thigh, taking a chance that the din of surrounding machinery would drown out the sound of the gun firing. Donohue screamed and jerked back against the door, his face turning alabaster white as he grabbed at his wounded leg. He seemed to grow suddenly smaller, his breath hissing in and out in small, tight gasps between his clenched teeth.

Saul leaned in closer, his gun now angled towards Donohue’s crotch. ‘I just want you to understand exactly how I’m feeling,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ve been waiting ten long, miserable fucking years just so I can find out if my wife and daughter are even alive. I want to know who did this thing – what person is responsible for putting my life on hold for all this time. So I want you, Agent Donohue, to tell me every last fucking thing you know. I’ve been arrested, held prisoner, tortured, had guns pointed at me, you name it – and if there’s one person around here who seems to have a better grasp of whatever the fuck is really going on, it’s you.’

‘Or what?’ Donohue gasped. ‘Or you’ll kill me?’

Saul shook his head. ‘No, I’m a lot more imaginative than that. First I’ll blow your right arm off.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Then the left. Then I’ll drill a hole through your balls. Then—’

‘All right,’ said Donohue. ‘All right. Jesus, I’ll tell you.’

Saul leaned back and waited, the loup-garou making him feel superhuman, invulnerable.

‘It was never really about Galileo,’ said Donohue. ‘When we sent you after Hanover, I mean. It was just about the shipment.’

‘The artefacts from the far future? What exactly were they carrying in that shipment?’

Donohue laughed weakly and rolled his eyes. ‘What the hell do you think was in that shipment? It was something that triggered the growths, left behind by whatever it was that built the Founder Network. But we got careless.’ He winced in pain and shifted slightly. ‘Turns out that shipment went to the bottom of the Pacific before it even managed to reach Taiwan.’

‘And that’s the cause of all this?’