Rove watched her, and she could feel the tension in his studied pose.

“So what’s going on, Mr. Rove?”

He shifted his attention to Julian once again. “Mr. Sabreur, you’re a good servant of the Crown, are you not? A loyal man? You’ve seen the circus they’re running here, a zoo where all the cages are open. I can’t believe any of this sits well with you.”

Julian said nothing, but Rove obviously read something encouraging in his face, because he went on, “We are facing the destruction of everything we know. But even if this ludicrous plan of Khan’s succeeds, do you really think the things we truly value will survive? Do you think life can go on as before, with our country riddled with rat-creatures and cavemen and who knows what else? Do you honestly think that once our monstrous host has dropped us back in England it will simply go away? Why should it, when it has all of us to lord over? The Earth was a prehistoric wasteland when it left; now there’s a whole planet of slaves for it to play god to. There’ll be religions and cults within a week, once we’re back. And these cavemen have been infiltrating our society for decades. That woman has a seat at a U.S. university, for God’s sake. Do you really think they’ve not been pulling strings elsewhere, in the Oval Office, at Downing Street? Believe me, I’ve been opposing their machinations for a long time.”

“So what’s your alternative?” he demanded.

“Reset the clock, Mr. Sabreur. Burn away the rot that’s been degrading our society, this monstrous fifth column. Rebuild something truly human, English, from the ruins. After all, you saw how things were collapsing back home, when we left. What sort of state do you think things are in by now?”

Alison had only been half listening, struggling past her headache to focus on what the Ice Mind had built for Rove. She hoped Julian wasn’t wavering, even though Rove had a good idea of what levers and buttons lay beneath old Spiker’s skin.

“Enough,” Julian snapped. “Save it for the debriefing.”

Then Alison suddenly understood the plan, pulling her viewpoint out from under the tangled complexity of details until she could see the broad strokes. All those armies of equations and figures were making up a single vast transformation, an inversion that turned Khan’s complex, many-stranded piece of universal engineering into…

Rove’s phone buzzed. In her mind’s eye, Alison saw the signal from Volkovska: Ready.

Possibly some of the Cousins had noticed something odd by now. Or maybe Cam’s vast intelligence had already foreseen and neutralized Rove’s treachery. Yet ultimately, she couldn’t rely on anything but herself. She lunged forwards and slapped Rove’s phone out of his hand.