‘I knew I could count on you. I hope it won’t be too onerous. You’ll have to press a lot of flesh, wow the crowd, spin a few yarns about your time in the field. They need to know we’re for real. And they want to feel reassured that I’ve got the right people around me.’

Rolt clearly felt Tom was doing him a favour. The man was hard not to like. And so far he had seemed to be completely straight with him, which was more than he could say for Woolf.

‘We’ll keep this to ourselves, shall we? With all the heightened tension around the hostel, we don’t want any unnecessary attention, do we?’

‘Fine by me,’ Tom told him.

On his iPad was the file Rolt had sent him. It was sketchy: a profile of Skip Lederer, boy genius and founder of Oryxis, a dramatically expanding software start-up, and a bit about the chairman, Aaron Stutz, a seasoned operator with a raft of business interests, including oil exploration, risk management and private security. He was more than twice Lederer’s age. Quite what their interest in Invicta was he would have to find out. Even after he had digested the details, Tom was hardly any the wiser about that aspect of it. And Rolt had not revealed how much he was hoping they would invest.

‘It’s a very large figure,’ Rolt had told him, ‘but I don’t want to tempt Fate by telling you. All you have to do is make them want to open their pockets just that bit more. Also,’ he added cryptically, ‘they may put you through a few hoops. But nothing you’ll be unfamiliar with.’

Tom had made a few notes for his speech, and chosen a mission from his past, which he thought would be just the sort of thing they’d want to hear. In 2006, as part of a four-man squad, he had sprung a CIA operator from a heavily defended house in Kandahar. Using the rescue drills they had perfected under live fire back in Hereford, they had fast-roped onto the roof from a Black Hawk, blasted the occupants with flash-bangs, and snatched the chained and blindfolded agent from right under the noses of his captors. It was a do-or-die operation in the best tradition of the Regiment, all done and dusted in under twenty minutes. He would leave out the fact that the American was a total arsehole who had demanded to know what had taken them so long – and that they had been seriously tempted to boot him off the deck of the Black Hawk as soon as they were in the air.