Her smile then was brief and fragile. “Well, you’ve done the first thing, which is to not just dismiss it all as some kind of ‘episode.’ Because I know how this sounds. And I could have faked these photos.”

Julian weighed it all up, every word of it, and nodded slowly. “It does sound like that, but yes, I’m not dismissing it. Possibly awaiting further evidence, but…Rove Denton could be a lead?”

“I can’t ask you to dig into them, not based on this nonsense,” she said briskly, as though agreeing with a statement he hadn’t heard himself make.

“Of course,” he confirmed, and that was enough said.

II

In the office the next morning, Julian put in a request for whatever they had on Rove Denton, assuming they had anything. It was innocent enough, and he covered it as part of the initial preparation for Op Mouser, the operation that would be keeping tabs on Dr. Khan and taking hard looks at whoever wanted to poach her. It was Julian’s show at the moment, and it was on-grid, meaning the director had allocated a decent slice of the resource pie. Khan had been out of the government’s direct employ for years, but there remained an implicit understanding that the contents of her head were HM Government’s property—as and when they might be required.

Of course, to work out who else was interested, it would be useful to understand what Khan was an expert in: that particular meeting point of advanced maths and theoretical physics which apparently had such implications for national security. He put in a request for more on that, too, without much hope. Most likely it was either above his pay grade or beyond his comprehension.

In the interim, though, a tentative ID had come in for one of the pair that had savaged Billy White’s lads.

The one surviving casualty of that little affray had been conscious long enough to answer a few police questions, but he’d had little to add to that blurry security footage photo. As expected, the big, slab-faced man had done the fist work. But White’s lad had no idea who he’d been or why he’d ambushed them—except that the man had obviously been a foreigner, and therefore the enemy of everything White represented. Even hiked to the gills on painkillers and with a dozen broken bones, it was depressing how quickly the witness descended into rhetoric. The police were reasonably satisfied that the man was being candid, though, and Julian played the recording through and agreed. The big man and his friend had been there for Khan, not White, and if not for White’s blundering then maybe they’d have snatched Khan instead. A tangled web.