Jacob blinks under intense fluorescent lights when the hood is pulled off. He’s sitting in a cell or interrogation room. Perhaps it’s just a storage closet. Concrete floors and brick walls. Hands cuffed to a stainless steel table. There is no window, only a steel door, and Myriam is standing in front of it, staring at him impassively. There’s something close to pity in her eyes.

‘I’ll take it from here,’ she says to the man in a Kevlar vest who’s just jerked Jacob’s hood off.

The man exits and Jacob can hear the door being locked behind him. The room is so cold he shivers, and it looks like smoke coming out of his mouth whenever he takes a quick, terrified breath.

‘Yassim,’ he says. ‘Where is he?’

‘You think Yassim is some kind of Snowden,’ she says. ‘He gathered information about some unnamed war crimes. And helping him makes you a hero.’

Jacob blinks, doing all he can not to give anything else away. Could it really be possible that’s all she knows?

‘But you’re swimming in some deep fucking water,’ she continues. ‘And there’s no going back for you now, Jacob.’

Somewhere outside his cell, he hears engines. Enormous engines revving up, and then becoming ever more distant. He recognizes that sound – it’s an airplane lifting off.

Why are they at an airport? Myriam also hears the sound of the plane, doesn’t speak until it’s gone. Then she sits down in front of him.

‘You have one chance,’ she says. ‘One chance to save yourself and your beloved Yassim now. Tell me where that chip is.’

‘I want a lawyer,’ Jacob says.

Why did he say that? Because he’s seen it in movies. Because he can’t stand to be alone in this room with her.

Myriam just looks at him as if he’s speaking in some incomprehensible language. ‘Excuse me?’ she says. ‘Do you think you’ve been arrested?’

She leans forward, staring at him, her eyes completely cold now.

‘We aren’t the police, you little pussy,’ she says. ‘This is an intelligence operation. We’re in the shadows now. There are no courts or lawyers here. Nobody knows where you are, nobody knows where you’re heading.’

She squats down next to him. Hopelessness burns inside him.

‘You can’t do this,’ he whispers. ‘There are rules, there are processes…’