“It’s been going on for a while,” Hind said quietly. “It’s getting worse too. Some of these are from operations I oversaw. Others were obtained by less standard means, and often via the back door from sources associated with Daniel Rove or his companies. I won a couple in a blackjack game with a Luxembourg embassy clerk.” There was no way to know if she was joking. God knew her expression was deadpan enough to murder a dozen comedians. “For a long time I didn’t realize there was a ‘this’—a wave of related events. It was Rove who showed me the truth, ironically. He was recruiting or, in some cases, disappearing people who had any link to it. He was buying artefacts, both biological and otherwise. And with such secrecy it couldn’t but raise alarms when you saw the pattern. If he’d played the clueless tycoon buying gauche souvenirs, it might have escaped my notice, to be honest.” There was the slightest fragility about her as she regarded them, and Julian suddenly realized that Hind was worried they’d denounce her as mad. Monsters, really? Someone call the men in white coats, old Hind’s gone off her trolley! But he’d seen enough not to bat an eyelid, and Alison had likely seen twice that. At any rate, whatever Hind saw in their faces reassured her.

“Heads of this department have inherited files, passed down from hand to hand…never mentioned openly, like a dirty secret. We’ve not known what to do with them. And any attempt to properly investigate, well…” Hind shrugged. “The whole Service would become a laughing stock. So we sat on it. And then, on my watch, the pace seemed to accelerate. I thought we were just better at picking this nonsense up, but no.” She sighed. “Apparently it really is getting worse. We won’t be able to keep hiding it away in these files any longer. And this freak show is just the trimmings, unfortunately. There’s also a worrying up-tick in cyber-intrusions into government systems, into major corporate systems, which is somehow linked. Intrusions that walk through our protections as though they’re not there. And again, we only see the fingerprints, not the hand. The true scale of the problem is unknowable. The best technical minds of our generation tell me someone must have cracked some magic piece of virtual legerdemain. Apparently we abandoned our attempt at it—and the only person still saying it could be done has been taken.”

“Dr. Khan? This is her project?” Julian asked.

“They have her?” Alison asked, pointing to the Plug-ugly morgue photos.

“They say not,” Hind replied grimly. “They say Rove and those verminous monsters do.”

“Why? What’s this to him?” Julian asked. What is so tempting that he’ll send armed thugs and monsters to get what he wants?