Julian caught up with the most recent addenda from the Extremist Analysis Unit, which still reckoned White would huff and puff but not actually blow anyone’s house down, or indeed up. Next he needed to check what White’s antagonist had done overnight that might have added more fuel to this fire.

Dr. Kay Amal Khan was never going to be one of Billy White’s favourite people, even back when she was a he. Julian remembered her from way back, when she was still deep within the DST crowd—Defence Science & Technology. A slender man with a pencil-thin moustache and sideburns; he’d been awkward, gangling, frustrated—a brilliant mind unable to express itself. Academically and in the workplace he’d ended up losing the spotlight to more forthright colleagues. But Julian and his superiors were well aware who was really giving them the clever sums, and who therefore needed to have an eye kept on them. Following Khan’s transition, she had…come out of her shell, Julian supposed. She was like a different person, and that included not backing down or taking shit from anyone. Her social media profile (which the analysts endlessly dissected) now read like a war journal. She regularly clashed with bigots and white supremacists, hence the current reason she was giving Julian Sabreur a headache. More than one of his team was muttering about “PC gone mad,” too. Traditional values being hardwired into the Secret Service, it wasn’t hard to find people there who scowled at the whole idea of Khan and obstinately clung on to their masculine pronouns.

Julian had met Khan twice himself, once before and once after. Prepping for the second interview, he’d braced himself, expecting to experience his own establishmental knee-jerk of prejudice, which he knew must reside within him. And then Khan had turned up, a tall woman, elegantly dressed in a turquoise-and-gold kameez. Loud, quick to laugh, foul-mouthed, a world away from the retiring young man Julian remembered. Halfway through the interview, when she went out for a cigarette (because she smoked now), he had to admit that being a woman suited Khan a whole lot better. She was obviously far more comfortable in her own skin and making more progress with her rarefied work.

As for Khan’s faded-red-carpet treatment by the security services, she was a world-class authority within a tiny niche of experimental mathematics, one of only three people who had ever made any headway with whatever the hell it was, and the only one HM Government could call on. She was therefore gently discouraged from meeting too many foreign nationals or going on holidays abroad.

Catching up with the Extremist Analysis Unit’s report took Julian to midday. It told him that while White’s followers were still rattling sabres against Khan, this was likely as far as it would go.