There was a moment of beautifully awkward silence, as Pearce’s smile dropped even further. At the other end of the table, Marshall wore his poker face to conceal how amusing he must have found the telling-off. Roth didn’t bother, and openly snorted with laughter. Nathaniel Pearce, pharmaceuticals genius and creator of the clone soldier, picked up his sandwich and walked over to the corner bin like a naughty primary school child. With his brunch thrown away he sauntered back to the table and sat down, trying not to look too embarrassed.

‘Now,’ said Roth in his most jovial voice, ‘where were we?’

‘First things first,’ said Grant’s voice, ‘talk to me about the results from the AME test centre.’

Otherwise known as Oakenfold Retard School.

‘Things are looking rather positive,’ said Pearce.

‘You’ve had a day and a half to sift through your results,’ said Grant. ‘I want more than “rather positive”.’

‘Based on the performance of Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation at the test location, I can confirm a near one hundred per cent likelihood of success when we apply the same technology on a larger scale – to an area the size of New London Citadel, for example.’

Pearce continued with scientific terms that Roth did not understand. And the longer the Chief Scientist’s monologue, the more sour the expression on Marshall’s face. Roth thought back once again to those rants of old, about how Iain Marshall’s best mate from university had stopped existing under the leadership of Nicholas Grant, replaced by a creepy smiler who used big words to impress important people. A man who had vanished into the lab for days on end, stopped heading to the Red Lion for a pint at the weekends, and even ignored Marshall’s social calls.

Roth wondered whether they could have been reconciled when Grant finally sat them down and told them about his plans for Great Britain. But Marshall had screwed it up catastrophically, and Roth was glad—

‘Iain,’ said Grant. ‘Anything to add?’

Roth looked to the ceiling, and found the camera. At his side, Marshall was still searching, as subtly as he could.

‘No,’ Marshall replied, ‘I think Nat covered it neatly. If I may talk for a moment about the rebels—’

‘I don’t care about them. They’re thirty-five hours from being irrelevant.’

You do care about them, thought Roth. Otherwise you wouldn’t have hosted the AME testsat Oakenfold.

Oh, and there’s also the Ginelli P roject.

And your daughter.

Looking at Marshall’s face, he had clearly had the same thought.

‘Shannon’s still with them, sir,’ Marshall said. ‘The destruction of the clone factory proves it. They used Lambourne’s technology, which they could only have got from her—’

‘And how many of them are left, exactly? It was your idea to lure them to the test centre. Did it work?’