Kristjan grimaced. ‘The longer we’re here the more exposed we are. That’s a bad idea.’

‘You have a better one?’

‘Maybe.’ More clicks of the mouse followed. ‘It looks like we might be able to print the file even if we can’t download it. Which is good enough, right?’

‘Sure. But I see no printer.’

‘It must be in another room. Let’s see what happens if I …’

A few seconds later, the sound of a printer operating carried to them along the corridor.

‘Check it out,’ said Kristjan. ‘It looks like I’ll have to move it on from one sub-file to the next, so I’ll stay here.’

Wada followed the chunking sound down the corridor and into a windowless room where several PCs faced each other across a large table, cabled up to hard drives that hummed away gently behind louvred steel cabinet doors. There was a heavy-duty printer as well, currently flicking pages into a tray. She lifted the latest page out. Yes. It was what she’d seen in Emergence parcel 1.

She was about to head back to give Kristjan the good news when the printer suddenly died. Silence fell. And a red light blinked on the machine’s control panel. It was out of paper. Wada began opening cupboard doors in search of more. And then—

She heard a voice that wasn’t Kristjan’s, raised in what sounded like a command. A man, speaking in Icelandic. Another man, equally insistent.

Then Kristjan said, loudly and clearly, in English, ‘You’re police officers. Why are you here?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes. There’s no one else here.’

Wada’s mind raced. Kristjan was covering for her as best he could. He was speaking English so she’d know what was happening. And he’d pointed out that the men talking to him were police officers for the same reason.

Had they triggered some kind of silent alarm when they entered the office? Or had Ragnar betrayed them? The answer didn’t really matter for the moment. Wada scooped the twenty or so pages that had already been printed out of the tray and rolled them up. She grabbed a rubber band from a stationery basket as she headed towards the door and sheathed it on to the roll.

Peering out carefully, she could see the uniformed back of one of the policemen blocking the doorway of the room Kristjan was in. ‘What are you doing?’ was the next question she heard them fire at him.

‘I’m working late. Catching up with a project.’

‘Our information is you don’t work here.’

‘Who told you that?’