‘And that of Mike Dreyfuss,’ Hepton continued. ‘You see, I work at the control base for the Zephyr satellite, and somehow that satellite is tied up with the Argos shuttle. It looks as though the shuttle was trying to tap into Zephyr. We don’t know why. Maybe Zephyr was doing something – something secret and something somebody wanted to know about.’

‘Send a satellite to trap a satellite, huh?’

Hepton smiled. ‘Maybe. But then the shuttle crashed, making the whole thing look like a suicide mission.’

‘Not suicide,’ Devereux said sharply, examining his empty glass. ‘Murder. Sabotage, if you like.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Hell, I don’t know why I’m telling you this … or maybe I do.’

He paused again, as if thinking things through. Then he began to speak.

‘The day of the launch,’ he said, ‘some new guy turned up in the control room. He had a console tucked away in a far corner. A console they’d brought in the previous week. Well, he told me his name, but not much else. I can’t even remember now what he said his name was. He knew what he was doing, though; I mean, he knew how to operate the computer, but he wasn’t like one of us. I took a look at his screen that day, and he was in touch with the onboard computer. It was as if he knew something we didn’t.’

‘Such as?’ asked Hepton.

‘Such as that the whole onboard computer program had been fixed before the shuttle went up, and all it needed was the touch of the right buttons in the right order to bring a doomsday code into operation.’

‘A doomsday code?’ The question was Jilly’s.

‘Self-destruct,’ Hepton explained. ‘Zephyr has one too, in case it falls into the wrong hands.’

Sanders was enthralled. ‘So this man caused the shuttle to malfunction?’

Devereux was staring into his glass still. He’d played these scenes out a hundred times before in his head. ‘You should have seen his monitor. It was like a Christmas tree, all these lights …’

There was a pause. Hepton broke it. ‘Did you tell anyone about this?’ He was thinking how closely Devereux’s story followed his own, or even Paul Vincent’s.

‘Yes,’ Devereux said. ‘That was when they strongly suggested that I take a holiday.’

Hepton nodded. ‘So what’s it all about, Cam?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’ Devereux looked up from his glass at last. ‘No, that’s a lie. I do want to know. I can tell you this: that wasn’t a comms satellite Argos was launching. It was something else, something secret. Something for the military. There were a couple of the chiefs on site to watch the launch …’

Hepton remembered the brass who had watched over his own side of things. It couldn’t be a coincidence.