“Okay, by the authority vested in me I hereby declare this to be the designated committee with need-to-know clearance for BLUE DANDELION forty-six slash alpha, Bob’s most recent Code Blue. And everyone here by definition has confidential keyword OPERA CAPE, which covers the nature of the, um, people Bob discovered. Everyone agree?”

Lockhart gives his assent, then sends me a quelling look. “Mr. Howard, if you’d be so good as to wait in the quiet corner?” he asks. It’s an order disguised as a request. I stand up and shuffle over to the corner and stand facing the wall. All the sounds from behind me are abruptly muffled, as if a great distance away. Most of our meeting rooms are fitted with these cones of silence, for just this sort of situation: I may be part of this committee but I’m not, apparently, trusted to see the contents of Mhari’s HR transcript. Which just goes to show that not everyone here is irredeemably stupid (or, alternatively, willing to let me compromise myself).

Standing in the corner like a naughty toddler gets old fast, but just as I’m contemplating tapping my toes and whistling something annoying to speed things along I faintly hear Lockhart call out: “Mr. Howard! You can come out now!”

I turn round and approach the table. The attaché case is zipped up and padlocked again, bulging like a snake that has just swallowed a rabbit. “What am I allowed to know?” I ask.

Jez gives Andy a significant look, then turns to face me. She’s standing by the board again. “You’re off the hook, Bob. Ms. Murphy was still on the permanent-inactive list for an hour after you called Code Blue. She didn’t call in and ask to be reactivated until lunchtime yesterday. Off the record, I gather she might have tried to talk an old friend into backdating her activation a month or so—but HR aren’t idiots. You very nearly caught her out.”

“Whoa.” I slump into my chair. “So you’re saying whatever she was doing with that team of quants was not a deniable operation? She was actively up to something on the outside, and got a chill and decided to cover her ass at the last moment? That it’s just pure bloody coincidence that I didn’t catch her red-handed?”

Jez nods, very seriously. “It looks like they were waiting for you—or someone. We’re going to find it hard to prove and harder to pin any culpability on her in view of her bringing it home before you caught up with them, but at the least it’s going to go down as a big fat question mark on her record. The initial analysis suggests that whatever they stumbled on happened more than four weeks ago, and she should have reported it right away if she wanted to keep her nose clean.”