‘First up,’ said Saul, ‘the ice-pharm was out in the middle of a fucking ocean, well outside of anybody’s official jurisdiction.’ He realized with a mounting sense of doom that they must have found some way to recover Jacob’s body from the pharm, otherwise how could they possibly have known so much?

Donohue regarded him with an amused expression. ‘The standard rules of jurisdiction cease to apply when enough people start shooting at each other, at which point the corporations and government interests controlling the legal pharms seek to protect their interests. Coalition peacekeepers were called in to help keep the peace.’

‘I’m sure they were,’ Saul muttered.

‘There’s something I want you to take a look at,’ said Donohue, gesturing to the other agent. Sanders stood up and pulled a folder from inside his jacket, before stepping over. He handed it to Saul, who found it contained nothing more than a single sheet of charged paper.

‘What is this?’ Saul took the sheet out of the folder and regarded it with suspicion.

Sanders leaned down and tapped one corner of the sheet. Dense lines of single-spaced text materialized on its crisp white surface, and Saul recognized it as the incident report he had fled the day after waking up in a Copernican hospital ward.

‘Skip to the end,’ Donohue advised, as Sanders stepped back and out of the way. ‘There’s some additional material you might find of interest.’

Saul found a detailed analysis was tagged on to the end of his own report. It described a covert raid on the ice-pharm, following his escape. There were orbital satellite photos showing it as a misshapen white lump standing stark against the black of Kepler’s largest ocean. Video footage, recorded at extreme magnification, replayed his dash to the helicopter.

‘You were tailing me the whole way,’ Saul muttered, dropping the sheet back into his lap.

‘There were questions about Jacob Maks,’ said Sanders, from beside him, ‘and about the nature of his relationship with Lee Hsingyun. We had reckoned for a while that he might be on the take. Kepler’s black pharms are enormously lucrative, after all, and the Tian Di Hui finances a significant portion of their activities from the proceeds of the pharms they control. Maks wouldn’t be the first to decide that working for them was a better bet than holding out for an ASI pension.’

‘So you think he cut a deal with Hsingyun?’ Saul asked.

Donohue shrugged. ‘That’s what we thought at first. He was spending a lot more money than any field agent might be expected to have, so naturally that raised an immediate flag. You know how the ASI can’t afford to take chances when it comes to compromising our investigations.’

‘So you put him under surveillance.’

‘Both him and you, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t the first time you’d worked together.’