A door slammed. I looked to my right. The interns I had passed on the way downstairs were now making their way down the corridor towards us.

‘Don’t get me wrong, this has been fun. Playing the part of helpful colleague. You liked me, didn’t you? I think you did. I can do likeable very well. And you’re nice. You’re strong. You’re impressive.’ He reached a hand out and cupped my chin. ‘It’s a shame we didn’t get to fuck.’ He said this a little more loudly. The interns must’ve heard – they both turned to us briefly and smirked.

I waited until they’d passed us before pushing Frederick’s hand off my chin.

Frederick shook his head. ‘I just don’t understand why you Rats are called the elite. You’ve proven to be a worthy adversary. Just not good enough to beat me.’

‘We have beaten you. I could kill you right here.’

‘If you do that everyone dies. Forty pounds of C-4 are set to go off the minute the auction starts.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That gives you eight minutes. Eight minutes isn’t long to find and locate a bomb. Eight minutes isn’t really long enough to evacuate. Or is it?’

Hattie crackled into my ear, ‘G, join Jake on the vault search. Bring a defuser.’ A defuser was a crack device of Geraint’s that was able to mimic the frequency of the bomb and reconfigure the detonator. It had an eighty-nine per cent success rate in testing.

‘Just think about what you’re doing. I saw you after you killed that Ghost at the Platform. You couldn’t fake that kind of horror. You don’t want the deaths of that many people on your conscience.’

Frederick laughed. ‘I was horrified not because I’d killed someone but because that dirty little man bled all over my shoes. It was disgusting.’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t care about killing people. I just don’t like being the one that does it. It’s so messy.’ He shuddered.

I remembered how he made the same grimace at his daughter’s bleeding. He was happy for people to die just as long as their bodily fluids didn’t touch any part of him.

‘Let me go. You need to find the bomb.’

‘You could be bluffing.’

‘Yesterday morning, at 10.03 a.m., I came to Christie’s flashing my MI6 card with a large ornament of significant international importance that we have asked them to keep safe while we negotiate the terms of its sale. Check with whoever you have listening in there.’ He motioned towards my earpiece.

‘I’m on it, hun,’ said Pixie. ‘I’ve already set up the SigBlock.’ The SigBlock stopped remote detonation through a mobile or wireless network. It was only effective outside a radius of twenty feet. Within that range and the bomber could still detonate.