Shortly after this, he climbed in the back along with Coran, extracting the surgical saw from his waterproof holdall. Coran’s head came off easily, though messily, and digging the ID implant out of his arm wasn’t much of a problem either. Head and saw then went into the holdall, shortly followed by Coran’s palmtop and the contents of his pockets, but Saul retained the ID implant as he stepped out of the rear of the vehicle, depositing the holdall on the ground before closing the back door and climbing into the front alongside Sheila.

With her ID implant operating in near-proximity, the car’s console was still running. He programmed a course into the autopilot, out and away from Brussels and over towards London, then took one final item from his pocket – a short black cylinder with a timer nestling in a recess in one end. He placed it on the floor below the console, just over the forward aerofan, and set the timer running. Next he took her ID implant out of the tester and replaced it with Coran’s, and dropped the tester into his pocket. Her chip he dropped on the seat beside her. It would shut down in a short while, but that would not affect the autopilot.

Again starting up the aerofans, he jerked up the joystick and applied its lock. He had just enough time to step out of the vehicle, slamming the door behind him, before the fans got up enough speed to develop lift. He stepped back, dust blasting all around him as the car rose into the sky. About twenty metres above him, the autopilot kicked in and guided the vehicle off over the cityscape.

When the Hyex grenade detonated, about midway across the English Channel, its devastating effect would be complemented by the aerofans flying apart. The car and the two bodies inside would be shredded, to rain down in tiny fragments. Most of those fragments, being bubblemetal, would float, but the rest would simply disappear. Since he’d cut off Coran’s head inside the car they wouldn’t know he now had it, even after studying the satellite images, and they’d never recover enough for proper forensic reconstruction, at least not in sufficient time. Staff files took over two weeks to update, so no one but those directly involved would know that Coran was dead.