She slipped off her shoes and bolted for home. Will was left standing, momentarily furious; it should be him to bring in the news. He sprinted after her, catching up as she reached the edge of the tarmac. He stopped as she pulled her shoes on, looking back through the trees, and then jogged beside her as her heels clopped on the blacktop; he did not want to be seen to have left a girl behind. He could hear her panting in the hot stillness and he was thinking: Max, yes; not Newsdesk or the chief. Max was the person to tell. And when they were back under the shadow of the building his stride lengthened a little, so that he was a few paces in front when they plunged, blinded, into the inner darkness.

21

For the second time in five minutes, Nigel Willis went over to the water cooler further down the sterile greenish hospital corridor, held his plastic cup under the spigot and depressed the little blue lever before remembering that the cooler was empty. Hardly noticing his mistake, he scrunched the cup in his fist and, as he walked back towards where he’d started, began to straighten it out again, his fingers quickly working kinks out of the plastic.

Choudry hadn’t given up anything about the plot. He’d given up where he thought Kayani and Ranjha were. He’d given up the imam at the West Acton mosque. He’d given up more names of those who’d organized their travel to Syria. He’d even given up two cousins who hadn’t been under suspicion. Only tremulously alive, handcuffed to the rails at the sides of the bed and jacked awake with whatever it was they’d injected into him, he’d readily whispered any detail they asked about. But he’d given up nothing about a bomb plot against the Daily Beast. He just kept saying that there was no plot or that, if there was, neither he nor Mian, who’d been killed by police bullets on Nigel’s order, nor Kayani nor Ranjha, whom Nigel’s men were now chasing down, knew anything about it.

Nigel looked around to throw the cup away and remembered that there was no bin. There was nothing in this corridor but the officer sitting on a chair next to the door to Choudry’s room. Dan Felsenburg was in there still, going over things just one more time, endlessly. His persistence scratched across Nigel’s mind like a nail. He was having to force himself not to scream at Felsenburg to leave the man alone. Because the appalling truth was that, as Choudry denied and denied that there was any plan to attack the Beast, Nigel was starting to believe him.