He turned in through an open doorway. There were Venetian blinds at the window. He adjusted them to blank out the glass and the night beyond, then turned his attention to the computer. He pulled a small roll of insulating tape out of his pocket, tore a piece off and placed it over the camera above the computer screen. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said, catching Wada’s eye. Then he switched the computer on. ‘Leaving machines on standby is verboten, according to Ragnar,’ he added. ‘We’d better hope the code he’s given me works.’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’ asked Wada.

‘No reason, I guess. Just … you know.’ The screen lit up. ‘Well, here goes.’ He carefully tapped in eleven digits. A moment passed. ‘Yes. We’re in.’

Wada sat down beside him. A crowded desktop appeared, with file names in Japanese. Scanning the names, she spotted what she was looking for almost immediately. Emergence. She pointed to it and whispered into Kristjan’s ear, ‘There.’

He clicked on it. A forest of sub-files appeared, again with titles in Japanese. Emergence parcel 1, 2, 3 and so on. She translated for Kristjan.

‘I don’t see any numbers,’ he objected.

‘They have used kanji instead of Arabic numbers,’ Wada explained. ‘Unusual, I would say, in an administrative system.’

‘Harder for a non-Japanese speaker to understand.’

‘This is true.’

‘Lucky I’ve got you.’ He stood up and ushered her into the seat.

She opened parcel 1. More numbers appeared in kanji form, in groups of four. Each group appeared to be linked to a set of notes elsewhere in the document. This was all she could glean at a glance. It would clearly take time to understand what it all amounted to.

‘Well?’ asked Kristjan.

‘Not sure what to make of this. It’s … complex.’

‘But you can read it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then let’s load the whole fucking lot on to a memory stick and get out of here.’

He slipped a stick out of his pocket and plugged it into the back of the computer. Wada looked at the groups of numbers as they waited for the machine to recognize the stick. At that point, she noticed the kanji for north and west imbedded amongst the numbers. North and west? Appended to groups of six numbers? They had to be geographical coordinates, surely, with the kanji for degrees, minutes and seconds omitted.

The machine’s recognition of the stick distracted her in that moment. She triggered the download. And … nothing. The download didn’t happen. The message Invalid procedure flashed on to the screen.

‘It’s not working.’

‘Why the fuck not?’ Kristjan almost pulled Wada out of the chair and started whirling the mouse and clicking. It didn’t go any better for him, though. Invalid procedure. ‘They’ve blocked downloading.’

‘Then I’ll just have to sit here and read it all.’