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conflict. But ... what’s the opposite of a tug of war? MI-6 said we could have the case. His dying here made this an internal matter, they said. Could well fall into counterterrorism or counterespionage, they said. Bastards. We said that as he was a member of a fellow foreign intelligence agency, they should take charge and liaise with your people.” Fretwell shrugged. “We lost the coin toss.”
    “I see.” Meacham did, her heart sinking still further. She sensed the chance of a reborn career shrink to nothing. She thought she could hear Korda laughing somewhere. Still, if she completed the mission, maybe she could at least hang on to her pension. She mentally rolled up her sleeves. Time to work. “Anything worth pointing out now?” she asked.
    “That depends on your taste for the absurd,” Fretwell said. “As you can see, there’s plenty of electronic equipment.” He gestured to the first two tables. “Some of it has potential espionage applications. Recording devices, low-light and zero-light cameras, that sort of thing. Nothing for transmitting, though, so douse your hopes for a good, clean double-agent story right now. Everything here is geared toward reception. And then there are these.” He handed Meacham a stack of spiral-bound notebooks. She flipped through first one. Page after page of draftsman-crisp printing of recorded temperatures, times, weather conditions, types of experiments, and the results, which, at first glance, were negative across the board. She checked the dates. The oldest notebooks were from years ago. Adams had been riding his hobby horse for a long time and in far more places than Gethsemane Hall. “Completely obsessive and completely ridiculous,” Fretwell observed. “If this is a cover, it’s bloody brilliant.”
    “I wish.” She picked up a MiniDV cassette and looked a question at Fretwell.
    “Ah,” he said, uncomfortable now. “Yes. That. You’ll be wanting to take a look at that.” He took her over to a workstation that had a monitor and every form of media player.
    “You’ve seen it,” she said as she slipped the cassette into a camcorder at least a decade old.
    “I have.”
    “And ...?”
    “It’s one of the reasons we’re happy to step aside. The tape is cued up to the relevant sequence.”
    The scene was grainy and green, a staircase shot in infrared. The camera was at the stop of the stairs, looking down. The image was too murky for detail, but the steps looked steep and old. The picture flickered steadily. “Time lapse?” Meacham asked.
    “Yes. One second shots, every ten seconds. He could fit an entire night onto one tape.”
    Meacham watched. The flicker began to work on her head. She hadn’t slept on the plane and was still on her feet after arriving at Heathrow at five in the morning. She struggled to keep her vision clear and hoped her pulse wouldn’t pick up the rhythm of the picture and start throbbing. “I don’t see anything,” she said.
    “You won’t. Listen for it.”
    When it came, she jumped. She glared at Fretwell, but he wasn’t laughing. He was still uncomfortable and a little green around the edges. The sound was a one-second slice from the centre of a scream. It was deafening, piercing, a siren that was redolent of rage and agony. When Meacham’s heart steadied, she noticed that her throat was sore, as if in sympathy with the howl of vocal chords scraped by broken glass. The effect of the scream was made worse by its truncation. There was no origin, and no conclusion, only an in media res stab to the senses. Meacham waited until she felt composed again. She cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “Is there more?”
    “No.” Fretwell sounded relieved.
    “Okay,” she said again. She stopped the playback anyway, eliminating any chance of another surprise. “Excuse me, but what the fuck was that?”
    “We don’t know. Neither, according to this,” Fretwell held up a hardbound diary, “did Adams, though you can