‘Gil wanted you to see this first,’ Putin says. ‘He’s very proud of what he’s achieved. But this is not normal, you being here like this. We usually induce catatonic stasis before they are brought in.’

He nods towards a door off to their right. Kate tries to speak, ask what he means by catatonic stasis, but she’s too choked up for any words to come out. Her whole body is shaking now. One bed, at the far end, is empty. Her bed. She knows what’s on the screens. Human faces, at least ten a second, just like Ajay showed her. And then she notices that several of the screens are showing moving images. It’s hard to see clearly because of the angle, but the footage – it looks like CCTV – seems much faster than normal, as if it’s been sped up.

She wonders if she’s imagining all this and starts to pinch the skin on her forearm, squeezing it harder and harder, twisting the fold of flesh until it hurts too much, hoping that she’ll wake up from this bad dream.

The woman who gave her mint tea enters the warehouse from the far end with a clipboard and starts to check on the people, moving from one bed to the next. Kate tries to catch her eye, but the woman doesn’t look in her direction. Daren’t risk her heart.

‘We have to put moisturiser in their eyes,’ Putin says, almost proudly, observing the woman as she leans over one of the captives. ‘Otherwise they dry out. They hardly ever sleep – the drug we give also induces hyposomnia. But we can tell when they do from the EEC monitors. And then we close their eyes. But it’s never for very long.’

‘Are they conscious?’ she manages to ask. Her voice is barely a whisper.

‘Fully.’

She closes her own eyes, trying to imagine what these people are suffering. She assumes they are all super recognisers, like her. She had a repeat nightmare in her last months in the police unit. Told to identify a decapitated head, she had to watch a stream of thousands of contorted, disfigured faces until she could bear it no more and woke up in a cold sweat. For a second she wonders if Rob’s lying here too, whether they’ll be incarcerated together, side by side, but she doesn’t recognise any of the faces.

‘Sometimes we let them see a movie,’ Putin says, glancing at his watch. ‘It’s a little in-joke of ours – we call it the Ludovico hour.’

105

Silas

Silas moves fast after ending the call with Jake. Ward isn’t happy about forensics coming into his own office to check for fingerprints, but he agrees when Silas tells him on the phone about Jake’s encounter at the Carrefour petrol station with Kate’s double – and possibly Rob’s too.