“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.” Alison shuffled the open windows on one screen and came up with a scanned transcript, at the end of which was a photofit picture that had obviously been clipped to the original. “Here’s a statement from Emil Novotny, recorded last year. Czech hacker taken up on a drugs charge. He ended up plea-bargaining to reduce his sentence, admitting that he’d been hired to steal DST personnel files in 2012…just when Khan was working for the lab.”

“He confessed what?” Julian demanded.

Alison grinned and topped his wine up. “Well, quite. And I’m not talking about the Czech guy doing ‘into the Matrix’-style hacking, either. He just sent a plausible email to a cabinet minister who shall remain redacted, alas, who ended up giving him all manner of access privileges, because some of our elected representatives do not pay attention in their security briefings. Makes you wonder what you don’t know, doesn’t it? Anyway, this is the hacker’s best shot at what his employer looked like, according to him. Needless to say, the investigation’s gone nowhere since.”

The photofit face looked like a child had Frankensteined it together out of ill-matched parts, showing a heavily bearded man with staring eyes like Rasputin’s. But with the benefit of recent hindsight, Julian could see how it might be another member of the same group. He shook his head wonderingly. “Is this like…some espionage version of The Hills Have Eyes? Some inbred clan of…hereditary information brokers, or…?”

“I call ’em the Plug-uglies,” Alison said firmly. “Although that is not going in my report. Look, I haven’t screwed with your mind enough yet. See this.”

She pulled up security camera footage—February 2015, from the date in the corner. It showed a spartan-looking corner of a mostly white room, the walls lined with cabinets.

“Department of Science and Technology, Sevenoaks,” Alison said. The clip was only fourteen seconds long.

A figure walked into shot: broad and heavyset, wearing a dark shirt and trousers, with a satchel slung across their body. Julian would have said a man, but now he’d seen the photo of the Belgian importer he wasn’t sure. Whoever it was knew what they were doing, though. They unlocked one cabinet and opened it, selected three files and stowed them in the satchel, then turned and left. Julian saw enough of the face to recognize if not an individual at least the same heredity as the others.

“What was taken?” he asked.

“Redacted,” Alison answered brightly. “Context suggests one of the DST people—no, not Khan—had become paranoid about electronic records. Was keeping everything on paper. In one letter there’s a complaint from tech staff that they can’t find any sign of the electronic intrusions that whoever—also redacted—was complaining about.”

“Been a lot of that recently,” Julian noted glumly.