‘Yep, that makes a lot of sense.’

‘That’s all the sense you’re going to get out of me today, Agent Savano. Maybe when you’ve proven yourself as a serious podite I’ll share some details. Until then you live on-site, you never stray more than a mile from the house, and I watch the pod while you sleep.’

‘Where do I sleep?’

‘The flat upstairs. You’ll love it.’

‘Where do you sleep? In bonnie Scotland?’

Orange smiled again. ‘The top floor. I get the penthouse. One perk of being the boss.’

He handed Chevie a smartphone. ‘All the numbers are pre-programmed. And there are apps for the alarm and surveillance. You see this alarm-button icon? Don’t press that if you don’t want all hell breaking loose. Got it?’

Chevie took the phone. ‘I got it, Agent.’

‘Good.’ Orange turned back to the pod, his fingers tripping across multiple old-fashioned plastic keyboards bolted on to its surface. ‘If you do well here, keep your head down for a couple of years, then let’s see if we can’t sneak you back into the US without the press noticing. By that time you will be almost old enough to apply for Quantico.’

Chevie scowled at Orange’s grey back. In two years she would be ancient. Almost nineteen.

‘Wow, that would be great. Two years’ babysitting. I am so glad I did all those firearms courses.’

Orange left the pod chamber without looking back. ‘Keep trying, Agent,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Some day you will say something that is actually funny.’

I hate that guy already, thought Chevie Savano.

Now, several months later, Chevie had lost touch with most of her friends in California, while she waited for some mystery guy to pop out of a space pod in the basement. She hadn’t fired her weapon once, even on a firing range, which made her extremely nervous, and she realized that she was not only talking to herself on a regular basis but answering herself too.

‘You need to stop that,’ she said to herself. ‘People will think you’re crazy.’

Really? What people? It wasn’t as if she had talked to anybody other than Orange for over six weeks. She had even celebrated her seventeenth birthday on her own with a chocolate brownie and a single pathetic candle.

The house on Bedford Square had become like her second home, or maybe her prison. She knew every inch of the building better than she knew her own cottage on the Malibu Bluffs, where she could legally live alone when she turned eighteen in less than a year.