‘Oh, you can try,’ Twigg replied. ‘You can try until you’re blue in the face, but it won’t get you anywhere. I must’ve called the US Embassy in Kabul a hundred times until it turned out the reason they weren’t answering the phone was they were shut down and relocated to some makeshift new premises in Qatar. It appears that the ambassador got out on the same flight that Madison was supposed to have been on, along with all the diplomats and workers.’

‘Have you called there too?’ Ben asked.

‘You bet I have, and every time you get through to some new staffer who doesn’t have any better idea than we do what the hell’s going on out there. And it’s the same picture back here in the States. All anyone can tell you for sure is that any US citizen or any of our allies left stranded there now are totally on their own. Thousands of them. There’s nobody left in Afghanistan to look out for their interests, and nobody’s coming to help. Meanwhile there are all these terrible rumours online that the Taliban are going door to door, targeting Americans or anyone else who helped the occupying forces, slaughtering them and hanging their dead bodies out of helicopters circling the city. Like an example to what’s gonna happen to any westerner they catch. It’s barbaric, and it’s like nobody in our so-called civilised world, including our own administration, gives a damn what’s happening. And the whole time, still no word from Madison, Aziz or anyone.’

The picture was a grim one, for sure. The next question now had to be what to do about it. Ben broke into Twigg’s rapid flow of words by asking, ‘How did you get my number?’