She opened her briefcase and slid out quite the thinnest laptop that Claire had ever seen. It was matt black and had not a single logo visible. It seemed to exude a penetrating pale blue light from underneath. After a few keystrokes, she looked up, the reflected light of the screen giving her eyes an almost sci-fi luminosity. ‘I’ve got the secure connection that we need. I have authorised the activation, which will be undertaken from our base in Cheltenham.’

‘I’m amazed that you can take an electronic device that is off, and turn it on,’ said the chief constable, batting her eyelashes at the woman. My God, she’s flirting, thought Claire.

Dr Steele’s green eyes widened further. ‘When a human is asleep, the heart still beats, the breath continues and the circadian rhythms still operate. Likewise, the concepts of on and off in telecommunication devices are a little mutable at the margin. We just whisper a few significant words into their sleeping ears.’

‘Fantastic.’ Rigby’s shoulders eased back, as if the woman had caressed her with this poetic simile. The chief constable was playing with the chain at her neck, her eyes radiating their most powerful blue. Claire caught Rob Townsend’s eye across the table, expecting to share a knowing glance, but as chief office nerd he seemed oblivious to the chemistry being stirred up in this darkened room. Instead he absent-mindedly scratched his ear.

Chris Steele returned to her laptop, tucking a hank of hair behind her ear as she did so. The gentle clack of keys continued. ‘The target device is now awake, the firmware under our control. The GPS chip is being bootstrapped; the next pass from the satellite transponder may take a few seconds, but it will give us the information you need.’ She looked across at Townsend, whose own laptop was open. ‘I’ll make you my slave, for the data,’ she said, reaching across and connecting the two laptops’ USB ports with a cable. ‘You’ll get an exact copy in real-time. This phone is a slave to an emulator constructed by my colleague on Taurus, our computer at Cheltenham. Sadly, Edward Snowden revealed a lot of our techniques back in 2015, though we have developed many more since then.’

Rigby leaned over Townsend, ostensibly to see the screen better, but also giving both Claire and the spook the benefit of some cleavage. Claire eyed the intelligence officer to see whether her transponders had been lit by the chief constable’s all-frequency broadcast. The woman was such a cyborg it was impossible to tell.

‘I’ve got the map,’ Townsend said excitedly. ‘The phone is travelling west of Woking towards Basingstoke.’

‘You want the video?’ Steele asked.

‘Yes, let’s try to see what’s going on,’ Rigby said.

Townsend’s screen remained blank, and the only noises were a deep rumbling. ‘He’s in a car with a phone in a pocket, or possibly in a case,’ he said.

‘But we still know where,’ Rigby said.

Otara was on his own phone. ‘I want two vehicles on the B3400,’ he said. ‘Target has just left Pirbright, heading west. Can we get one to intercept from the Basingstoke end?’