Back in the days of television, McCormick had seen Marshall and Pearce on the news once or twice. Not quite as often as Nicholas Grant, but he still remembered what they had looked like with their posh suits and professional haircuts. The casual clothes and bitter scowls had not been part of their onscreen personas.

‘This is him?’ sneered Marshall.

‘Yeah,’ answered Roth. ‘Disappointing, right?’

McCormick wasn’t insulted. He knew what he looked like. But it was quite a compliment that they had expected him to be something more.

‘Don’t underestimate him,’ said Pearce. ‘Before he takes one more step towards Floor B, he’s getting a full search.’

‘Volunteering, are you?’

‘You’re performing the search, sunshine,’ Marshall growled towards Roth with fierce eyes, ‘because this is your fault. If you’d got to him three secondsearlier you’d have saved the Citadel’s power, and we could have just marched him through the X-ray on Floor D! Cover every millimetre from head to toe, because there’s no way he’s coming to my office without a full search for weapons.’

‘Your office?’ laughed Roth. ‘The one with the computer he’s trying to destroy?’

‘Trust me, there’s a plan. You know about the bomb, don’t you?’

Roth threw a glare towards his prisoner. McCormick could not see it in the darkness, but felt it.

‘Actually, yeah,’ Roth answered. ‘I believe it was me who called it in.’

McCormick held his firmest poker face, amused that he had been right. The people at the top of Grant’s empire really did hate each other. He had predicted as much: power-hungry people never truly liked their colleagues.

‘Good,’ finished Marshall. ‘Now McCormick, there’s a spare storage room over there. Would you kindly go inside and strip down?’

The exhausted McCormick ambled away towards the spare room, Roth’s assault rifle poking his back. He walked inside, and Roth closed the door behind him rather than follow.

It always made McCormick smile, how people assumed they could not be heard on the other side of a closed door. Especially people with Roth’s level of overconfidence.

‘You mentioned a plan?’ he asked. ‘One that involves moving a live prisoner to Iain’s office?’

‘Nick’s orders,’ answered Marshall’s voice. ‘Until we know where the bomb is, he doesn’t want us spread out.’

‘We’ll be one big target.’

‘That’s right – one big target, right next to a man who knows exactly where the bomb is. My office is almost certainly outside the blast radius, but if it’s not, we’ll wait for McCormick to start sweating. Then we’ll evacuate to the other end of the Citadel and get someone to find and defuse it.’