Gavin was nervous and unconvinced. ‘There’s no reception in here.’

Adrian snatched his phone from his pocket. It was true: the bar-chart symbol at the top of the screen was empty and had a cross against it. ‘Search then! Maybe there’s a spot somewhere in this room!’ Holding his phone aloft like a Geiger counter, he started sweeping it along the bare walls and into the corners, then above the thin conference table and the plastic school-chairs. Gavin reluctantly copied him, waving his phone in un-meticulous circles, but asked, ‘Don’t you think we should just let them kick us out? They sound pretty serious.’

Adrian didn’t interrupt his search. ‘You wanted more action! Now you’ve got it!’

‘But seriously, don’t you think we should, you know, call it a day? It’s been great and everything, but haven’t we maybe taken it far enough? And actually, if they kick us out, we can just go back to the office and write up the story.’

‘Ha! You think they’d let us do that?’ Adrian scowled. ‘Who equips a meeting room without putting a phone in it? They won’t give us an inch!’

Gavin stopped even pretending to scan the air. ‘But how are they going to stop us leaving? They can’t arrest us, they’re not the police.’

‘Oh, they won’t let that stop them!’ Adrian dropped to his knees and crawled under the table, moving jerkily as he swung his phone from side to side.

‘Seriously though…’ Gavin addressed the blank tabletop.

Adrian didn’t reply. But, after a moment, he emerged from under the table and stood up, breathing heavily. He said, ‘They’re journalistic geniuses, Gavin. They’ll do whatever they can think of. We have to do the same. There’s no signal, so we’ll have to try something else.’

In the newsroom, at the other end of the line that connected the door to the muzzle of the Editor’s pistol, Geraldine asked, ‘Who are these two?’

The Editor’s gaze didn’t shift. ‘We don’t know. They’re white though.’

‘Bloody hell. White jihadis. And we thought it was bad enough that that hijacker was married to a Brit. How on earth did they get inside?’

‘Stand back now, Geraldine,’ said the Editor. He’d noticed the door handle slowly angling down away from the horizontal. The door’s left edge detached itself from the frame and began slowly to pivot outwards. The newsroom’s staff hunkered down into cover. Anna’s camera clicked and clicked. The door, once it had pivoted enough for a slim person to slip through, stopped moving.

Anna was trying to take pictures through the gap but wasn’t getting anything. Will edged away from the door and knelt down behind a thick industrial printer. The Editor breathed out, settling himself further.

They waited.