Three minutes and forty seconds. Usually a malfunction could be located and corrected within sixty seconds. There were backup systems, a computer locked into every function of the satellite, ready to pinpoint the failure and repair it. After sixty seconds, you could assume that the computers had failed to find the fault, and you began to worry. So you went to manual, checking everything yourself. At the two-minute mark, you panicked.

Three minutes and forty seconds. The brass had seemed satisfied. Fagin seemed satisfied. Paul Vincent had reported his findings, but nobody seemed to want to know. What the hell was going on?

Hepton went to the toilets, then checked the canteen, the recreation area and the TV room: nothing. The table tennis players hadn’t seen Paul Vincent, the guys watching a porn film hadn’t seen Paul Vincent, nobody had seen Paul Vincent. He had disappeared. Hepton sat down in the TV room to think. The porn film was in German, not that a degree in languages was necessary to understand the plot. The film was being beamed via satellite, probably from a mainland European station. One bored weekend they’d spent several hours using the base’s sophisticated communications technology to home in on a couple of television satellites. Now they could pick up just about any station they liked and decode any scrambled signal. The picture today wasn’t the sharpest, but the cameraman was in close enough so that this didn’t really matter …

Zephyr. What did Paul Vincent know about Zephyr?

Hepton caught up with Nick Christopher in the canteen, where he was scooping up chips and beans with a fork and holding open a book with his free hand.

‘What are you reading?’ Hepton asked.

Christopher showed him the cover, ‘Albert Camus, The Fall. I found it in the library.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing’s happened yet. What’s wrong?’

Hepton realised that he was sitting with head in hands, elbows propped on the table.

‘I can’t find Paul,’ he said.

‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to be found,’ said Christopher, scooping up another mouthful of beans.

‘Maybe you’re right at that,’ said Hepton, stealing a limp lukewarm chip from the plate.

The afternoon drifted back into ordinariness. After the break, it was back to the consoles. The system, though, was failing to yield the source of the malfunction. Fagin walked from monitor to monitor, for all the world like a factory-line foreman. He stopped at Hepton’s desk.

‘It seems Paul Vincent has been taken ill,’ he said, scribbling something on his clipboard.

‘Ill? Can I go see him?’

‘He’s not in the rest room. They’ve had to take him to hospital.’

‘Christ, that was a bit sudden.’

‘The doctor thinks it might be simple exhaustion.’