‘You didn’t think melting the generator would keep us in the dark forever, did you?’ asked Pearce.

‘No.’

‘Well, Grant’s a big fan of renewable energy sources. You wouldn’t think it – the son of Francis Grant abandoning his family’s obsession with fossil fuels. But we had a whole spring’s worth of solar power stored in industrial batteries, just waiting to be connected to the main grid.’

McCormick did not respond. Marshall swiped his keycard and revealed the carpeted corridor that led to his office. Pearce’s handgun prodded McCormick in the base of his spine, and forced him to tiptoe bare-footed into the bright and colourful Floor B. One level down from the villains’ bedrooms, this was as close as the Citadel got to a relaxed, cultured environment. McCormick had often wondered how Ewan and Charlie had felt inside that officers’ sector with its leather sofas, sky-blue wallpaper and fluffy carpets, but it must have paled in comparison to this corridor. He even spotted a recreation room, complete with table football and videogame consoles, and…

Wait – is that a real Monet painting? Seized from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square?

McCormick was dragged into a wide, spacious room that dwarfed any of his university offices. One of Marshall’s walls was overloaded with a fancy collection of war photography, as well as a large television screen. The mahogany desk displayed good quality model fighter jets, a photo of his daughters, and another of his wife in a lesser quality frame. Hannah Marshall, if McCormick remembered right. Shannon had told him about some of the people she had known on Floor A, and there had been a little less venom in her voice whenever she had talked about Hannah. Perhaps Iain Marshall’s wife didn’t share his nature.

Turning around, McCormick could see why the nearest wall was so heavily decorated. The other three were filled from floor to ceiling with the biggest and brightest computer system he had ever laid eyes on. The AME computer was secured against Iain Marshall’s own office walls, each panel a foot thick and filled with a storm of circuit boards, LEDs, transistors, capacitors and other odds and ends that McCormick vaguely remembered from his old electronics classes. The whole three-walled computer seemed to be inside its own huge glass aquarium, filled with a blue liquid that McCormick assumed to be a cooling system. Any computer big enough to power such a feat of technological futurism was bound to need a lot of coolant, and McCormick was embarrassed that the thought hadn’t occurred to him before that moment.

Behind him, Pearce was laughing.

‘Bet you thought you could just come up here, find Iain’s desktop computer and put a bullet through the hard drive,’ he sneered. ‘Unfortunately, the computer for the AME shield is rather big. And protected with bullet-resistant glass.’