“Always. Burning the midnight oil twice as brightly at both ends, you know me,” she agreed. “Screw it for this evening, though. The world’ll just have to not set itself on fire until civilized o’clock tomorrow morning.” And yet he could tell, by the way she sat, that a sliver of her attention was still on the screens, no matter what. It was the meat and drink of the conversations she had with her Service-vetted therapist and the final knife in the back of her marriage. Alison was a professional worrier. It meant that as an analyst she turned over a lot more stones than most of her peers, but she couldn’t turn it off. “I don’t watch the news, you know?” she’d told him years ago, when he was the one providing safe haven. “An analyst who can’t read the headlines without breaking out in a cold sweat. Because I’ve got no control over it, at that remove. At least when I’m working I feel I’ve got leverage.”

The conversation hovered about work like a fly over food for as long as either of them could keep it up. Yes, John was doing well enough at school. Derek, the departed Mr. Alison, was being a pain in the arse about contact with the girls again, unless by now it was just the girls themselves. Alison’s latest Netflix obsession turned out to be something he’d seen two years before. And eventually Alison just jabbed him painfully in the arm and said, “Say it.”

“Dr. K got in touch.” Because this was something he needed to air, and there was nobody else he was willing to talk it over with.

“Told you she would.” Alison topped up their glasses. “Say why?”

“Probably wants to let me know we’re not doing enough. Which might be true, but it’s all we can do within budget.”

“Budget,” she echoed. “James Budget, licenced to spend as little as possible. She’ll get your personal email next.”

“How?”

“Science-fu,” Alison supplied unhelpfully. Julian reflected that this might be close to the truth. One of the major applications of Khan’s work had supposedly been codebreaking—by some kind of arcane data transformation that just sidestepped conventional security. Plenty of high-ups in the Service had been alternately rubbing their hands and crapping themselves over the possibility. Khan was no hacker, but if anyone could magic up email addresses out of pure maths, it was her.

“Just go get permission to meet somewhere secure. Better sooner,” was Alison’s advice. Before she causes some godawful data breach went unsaid, as did a great deal of what actually passed between them. They were old hands, and they’d known each other too many years. Even here, in Alison’s fortress, sensitive information remained implicit wherever possible.

“It’s probably nothing,” she added after a while.