‘And you want me to persuade Nightingale,’ I said.

‘Would you?’ said Kimberley. ‘Because that would be swell.’

‘So what do you plan to offer us?’

Kimberley smiled.

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, and pulled out a USB pen and put it on the table between us. ‘I’ve got their names, the organisational structure and history of the Virginia Gentleman’s Company and, most importantly, details of what got them over here in the first place.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked.

Kimberley said she had never driven out to Fort Meade, Maryland to gaze upon the collection of gargantuan modernist blocks that made up the headquarters of the National Security Agency. But she liked to imagine it a honeycomb of bland little cubicles. All the cubicles would be almost identical, but to the trained eye there would be subtle variations of status and purpose. Those cubicles tasked with monitoring global communications for unsuspecting terrorist suspects would have bigger, flatter monitors, nicer desk calendars, maybe the ones with a humorous daily proverb, and first crack at the sandwich trolley when it came past.

‘How much sleep have you had recently?’ I asked.

‘Bear with me,’ said Kimberley, and described the cubicles furthest from the canteen, the ones with the worrying smell from the pipes overhead, whose inhabitants walked the furthest to find their cars at home time. This was where the information gathered from open sources on the internet, twitter, eBay, Facebook, Tumblr and the like was processed. It was flagged by machine, of course, but some poor schlub still had to go through the items and decide which organ of the state might want to know who was selling a used pink bathrobe for suspiciously large sums of money – possible money laundering – or a rare mint snow globe – potential hazardous material transfer. There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President, was the government contractee Alderman Technical Solutions, AKA the Virginia Gentleman’s Company.

So when the right flag was triggered the cubicle jockey dutifully notified an organisation which should have been taken off that list ever since an unspecified disaster in Fallujah had got them struck off another list – that of approved contractors.

I asked what had happened in Fallujah, but Kimberley shook her head.

‘That information was so redacted that I only know it happened in Fallujah because someone missed a reference in the document authorising the redaction,’ she said. She couldn’t even discover what they were doing in Iraq although there were references to something called ‘area shade suppression’ and ‘TechSub’.