‘Thank God for that,’ Dreyfuss had added in an undertone as she poured tea from a huge tin pot. The tea was the same colour as the wall decoration, which gave Hepton an idea as to the mural’s genesis.

They sat at the only table not to have been wiped and stacked with four upended chairs. The table came from the same family, it seemed, as Parfit’s desk upstairs: cream plastic and chipboard. This was a sad country, Hepton thought, a stupid country. But it still didn’t deserve to be handed over to Villiers and Harry.

‘It’s not a coup,’ Dreyfuss stated. ‘A coup would be simpler, more out in the open.’

‘Maybe the Yanks want to annex us?’

Dreyfuss shook his head. ‘They did that a long time ago. It’s just that nobody noticed. No … I don’t know.’ He threw up his hands. ‘And neither do that lot upstairs. There’s only one way to find out.’

‘How?’ Hepton was sure they were working along similar lines of thought. Dreyfuss’ answer confirmed it.

‘Your little tracking station.’

Hepton nodded. It made sense, didn’t it? The only way Villiers and his crew could keep an eye on the Buchan operation was to use Binbrook. He thought about what the Russian Vitalis had told him. That Cam Devereux had found another room in the Argos base. There could be another room at Binbrook, too, a whole series of rooms, fitted with computers and screens showing what Zephyr was really seeing. Now that he considered it, he realised that there were portions of Binbrook that were off-limits to personnel. Locked doors: someone had called them storage areas, someone else had said they were disused and awaiting redecoration. Those locked doors might well be hiding a small, dedicated tracking station. A box within a box, like Izzard’s. And if such were the case, there would probably be someone there to watch: someone like Fagin, of course, but perhaps also Villiers himself. And where Villiers was, Jilly might be …

‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked.

‘I’m suggesting …’ Dreyfuss brought his head closer to Hepton’s. His eyes burned with something other than drugged or drugless pain, ‘that we do something other than sitting around here on our arses. There isn’t much time. I’m not saying that we go barging in there, but is everyone on the base in on this COFFIN thing? I think the answer is a definite no, or they wouldn’t be moving them out. Okay, so there’s the chance that you’ – his finger made a circle in the air – ‘could move freely inside the base. As far as they’re aware, you’ve been on holiday. So just tell them you’ve come back early.’

‘What about you?’