It wasn’t feng shui. It was this. As he stared, he seemed to be looking into the wall, as though the paintwork’s whorls and imperfections were a vast landscape and he was a satellite high overhead, squinting down at a great snowy waste. He felt a lurch of vertigo, imagining himself falling into the endless plain far below. By way of some nameless sense, he felt the distance expand far beyond the bounds of his flat, the building, the whole street. And there, in that other direction, was Mr. Rove.

Daniel Rove was close on sixty, by May’s reckoning, but looked a well-preserved forty at most. He was trim and toned, narrow-framed. He’d worn glasses when May first met him, a neat little affectation he’d outgrown since. He was still wearing his understatedly expensive suits, but the dim background behind him had changed: no longer the boardrooms or the huge chambers of Rove’s various residences. There was a constant sense of motion around him, as though a vast, out-of-focus factory floor spread behind him in the darkness. The ceiling seemed perilously close to Rove’s hairline, irregular and lumpy with vents and industrial processes. May honestly wondered if the man had his own private space station now, or perhaps a volcano lair.

Rove’s air of energetic bluntness was the thing that never really changed.

“So, piss-up, brewery, May?”

“I’m sorry, sir.” May had seen Rove spitting mad a couple of times, and that had been bad news. People in Rove’s personal guard didn’t get to tender their resignation, not with what they knew. His own elevation had come after a “reassignment,” and May had never found out how much of a euphemism that was. He did know you couldn’t run or hide. Once you were in, then Rove would always find you eventually.

Rove made an impatient gesture, and May took a deep breath.

“White did what we wanted. He moved in, almost professional. I have full confidence that he’d have snatched Khan and brought him out. My team was in place. We’d have taken Khan off White’s hands and Khan would have been shaking our hands, sir, as rescuers. We’d have had him delivered to you without a hitch. Except…”

“Yes, except.” Rove would have heard at least something by now, via his other channels.

“White’s dead; someone took him and his people out. There’s one left that might tell us something. I’ve a man at the hospital, watching. My team said two people came out of Khan’s flat, right after the fighting. They left the scene just before the police arrived. And they were fast, sir. From White going in to these two coming out was under two minutes. They took out four big guys that quickly.”

“Who were they?”