‘Abbott thought he was about to hit the mother lode, too. Same principle.’

Shelton considered it, and nodded slowly. ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

‘If I’m right,’ Ben said, ‘then if the agency had agreed to take him on, the final draft he’d have given them would be totally uncensored, with all the stuff he’d taken out put back in again. And I’m certain that Seaward and Laverack knew that’s what he was planning. Hence, the real reason why they got cold feet and declined his book. Explosive’s not the word for the effect it would have had.’

‘Fine, fine, whatever you say,’ Shelton replied impatiently. ‘But why are we even discussing this? It’s an academic point, considering that the redacted version – assuming that’s what it is – is all we have, all anybody’s ever going to see. Right?’

Ben replied, ‘Wrong. Abbott’s laptop with the original version on it is inside my bag.’

‘Thanks to moi,’ Wolf said, stabbing his chest with his thumb and then pointing at Ben. ‘He was going to leave it behind.’

Shelton stared at them both. ‘If you are right about this, then it could blow the whole thing wide open for us. It would reveal who they are.’

‘Just one thing, though,’ Ben said. ‘Abbott had his book manuscript password-protected and we couldn’t get into it. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘Hey, I’m a multi-millionaire tech wizard who wrote the code that revolutionised the internet,’ Shelton said. ‘If I can’t get into someone’s laptop file, then nobody can.’

‘That’s what I was hoping you were going to say,’ Ben said. ‘Then get to it, Veritas.’

Shelton detached himself from the desk chair and went padding off in haste to retrieve Abbott’s laptop from the crate in the other room. He returned a few moments later, puffing hard and clutching the shiny black Dell under his arm. Back in his chair, he cleared a space among the debris to set it down and get to work. He examined the ports on the laptop, then from a bale of tangled wires selected an interface cable to hook it up to his own, much more powerful, system, before grabbing a remote keyboard and launching himself into a flurry of key-tapping like a concert pianist. Jasper Shelton couldn’t move his body very fast, but his fingers were a blur.

‘This might take a while,’ he warned. ‘The decryption application has to process millions and millions of digit combinations.’

‘How long?’

‘Maybe as much as six or seven minutes,’ Shelton said, unimpressed by such primitive steam-age technology. ‘Someday I’ll get around to remapping the data code. But it’ll do for now.’