He took a seat two chairs from Alison—no point in seeming in cahoots, after all. Their respective minders took up places at an angle, leaving the head end of the big table expectantly vacant. They wore impeccable suits, what Julian would have worn had their positions been reversed. Neither was armed, but he knew damn well there was a police officer with a Heckler & Koch MP5 down the hall if anything kicked off. Knowing as he did that things might indeed kick off without warning, via parties who didn’t require conventional means of ingress, he was glad of it. Their minders were theoretically bussed in from elsewhere in the country, to avoid even a hint of collusion, but Alison’s was named Dave something-or-other. Julian had met him at a Christmas do two years ago. He recalled only that the man was a monomaniac about minor distinctions between small-batch artisanal fruit gins. Not something it would be easy to shoehorn into conversation to generate rapport. The other man, greyer and broader, kept glancing at his phone in a precise manner. Julian reckoned he was checking some kind of sports results.

His superiors had debriefed him alone in the last two interviews, and he’d been doing his best not to enjoy himself. Yes, he was neck deep in a Very Serious Security Matter and so forth. Except he kept being tempted to replay an exercise he’d been on, some training malarkey, where they’d taken it in turns to play the uncooperative prisoner for each other. It struck him as ridiculous that the department had accidentally trained him to be an awkward sod in exactly this situation. He had conquered the instinct, though. He had told his interviewers everything. For one, the parts of the story that were career suicide couldn’t be obfuscated. For two, he had a duty to his nation. And the nation was apparently under threat of…some damn thing. Having seen what he’d seen in the shadow of the skeletal whale, he honestly didn’t know what it was, except a threat.

What Alison had told them, he had no idea, but his best guess was that she’d be frank with them as well.

They’d given him one phone call, and Josie had been simultaneously frantic and angry. She’d demanded to know details he couldn’t give her, including when she and John might actually see him again. She wanted to know why people with official search warrants and stony expressions were searching the goddamn house. He had only allayed her fears to the very small degree that spousal honesty permitted, and hadn’t mentioned anything about getting shot. He reckoned it was a forgivable omission in the circumstances.