He paused and surveyed the sea of rapt faces. Then he turned to the giant screen behind him and aimed a remote. ‘I’ll tell you what happens. The Boston Marathon happens . . . Fort Hood happens . . . Times Square happens. No warning. No intelligence.’

The faces of the perpetrators of each attack flashed up, followed by the burning Twin Towers.

‘Another problem. Nine/Eleven. Some of those guys were in the system. They had a few names, but no one joined up the dots.’

The screen changed to an image of a huge football crowd: faces of all types, all ages, all colours.

‘Where’s Waldo? Where’s the next guy on no one’s radar who comes out of nowhere and goes bang? Does the NSA know about him? The hell it does. Even though he’s in their system somewhere.’

Skip was rewarded with a volley of evangelical Right ons and You said its. Evidently his appearance and mode of delivery had done nothing to dampen the audience’s enthusiasm for his pitch. He shook his head mournfully and jumped up into a standing position.

‘Here’s the thing. The NSA’s retrieval technology is supposed to be state-of-the-art. Their programmes have cool names like “Prism” but they suck. Why? Because their systems can only tell you the past, what the bad guys have done. And if they haven’t done anything bad yet? Who’s watching out for them? The freaks who blew up the Boston Marathon. Who knew? How long are we in America gonna have to go around looking at the guy next to us on the street, at the bus station, on the subway, wondering what’s in his backpack, what’s under his vest? Well, let me tell you, the wait is almost over.’

The audience were now on their feet, clapping and cheering. What they were hearing made George Orwell look like an optimist, but they were loving it.

‘For those of you who are tired of wondering when the next bomb is coming, when the next lone bomber is gonna strike, Oryxis has the solution.’

He turned to the screen again and waved the remote. Over the Times Square throng appeared the words Threat Elimination.

‘Our software is designed not only to mine the information, but to process it in real time. Soon, what NSA desk jockeys take a week to do, we’ll be doing in thirty seconds. And we can do a thousand times the volume.’

He paused while the room erupted with more whoops and applause. They didn’t need convincing.

‘But here’s what else we can do.’

The screen flashed with another headline: Predictive Tracking.