Once again Liam complied. His fear was such that he had difficulty controlling his limbs and his mind was rebelling against taking in any more horror but he could now see that the damage to Hausman’s face and bare chest where his shirt had been ripped open had not been done by beating. The thick glass bottle on the desk and the glass dropper beside it testified to that. Smoke was curling up from the neck of the open bottle. Liam recognised the swimming baths smell — the fumes of hydrochloric acid. Hausman’s left cheek was blistering badly and his lower lip was already deformed.

Liam struggled to say something and Khan hit him sharply across the back of his neck with the side of his hand, a blow hard enough to stun him and make sure that he was only vaguely aware of being trussed up with tape like Hausman. When he struggled back into full consciousness his assailant asked, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Liam Kelly... I’m a student.’

‘Your colleague here has something I want, Mr Kelly. He’s being rather awkward about it. But then he’s CIA... all that training.’

‘CIA?’ exclaimed Liam, hoping that somewhere in his croaking reply, surprise had registered.

‘I keep telling you...’ groaned Hausman through burnt lips, ‘I don’t have the damned key...’

‘Of course you do,’ said Khan with a calm assurance that Liam found chilling. ‘You’re a credit to your service, but perhaps you’ll feel differently about things when you watch me trickle acid slowly down Mr Kelly’s forehead and see it enter his eyes.’

Liam lost control of his bladder sphincter as his head was jerked back by the hair and Khan filled the pipette with acid. ‘Aren’t you CIA chaps supposed to protect the innocent? Or is that just so much American crap, the sort of stuff your president spouts every time he steps in front of a camera?’

‘He hasn’t got it,’ said Liam, his voice becoming a scream, having risen a full octave. ‘It didn’t come here. Dr Ricard sent it somewhere else.’

Khan seemed surprised. ‘What the hell do you know about this?’

‘Not much,’ Liam gasped as his head was jerked back further. ‘Just that she sent the key you’re looking for to a friend.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off the glass dropper and its contents. It was being held about six inches from his face. The fumes from the open bottle of acid on the desk were already attacking his nasal mucosa.

‘What friend?’

‘Dr Steven Dunbar of the Sci-Med Inspectorate.’

‘Where do you fit into the picture?’

‘Steven has the key; he doesn’t have the disk.’

‘So he asked you to get it?’

‘Sort of.’

‘That’s why you’re here?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s Dunbar’s interest?’

‘Dr Ricard was his friend. He doesn’t believe her death was an accident.’

Khan didn’t comment but he put down the dropper and replaced the top on the acid bottle. ‘Is that his only interest?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did he want the disk?’

‘If Dr Ricard sent him the encryption key, he thought she must have had a reason.’

Khan nodded, seemingly satisfied.

Liam could see that Hausman was losing consciousness. He desperately needed medical help. Liam said so to Khan.

‘Indeed,’ Khan agreed. ‘Where do I find Dunbar?’

‘I don’t know.’

Khan looked sceptical. ‘So how did you plan to tell him if you’d been successful?’

‘He gave me a phone number.’

‘Give me it.’

‘It’s on my phone.’

Khan removed Liam’s mobile from the pocket of his denim jacket and flicked through Contacts. ‘Steven D?’

‘That’s him.’

Khan nodded and picked up his pistol, which he’d laid down while he held Liam. He checked the tightness of the silencer before shooting both men through the back of the head.

Twenty three

It had been a bad day, Steven decided. He’d been harbouring notions of some kind of double celebration at the end of it with Tally being told she’d got the job at Great Ormond Street and Charlie Malloy agreeing to the scheme that was going to see progress in the investigation at a rate of knots. Instead, Tally had turned up at the flat at four thirty, feeling less than optimistic about her chances after a long day of interviews which she thought hadn’t gone well. ‘I think maybe I let my tongue run away with me on more than one occasion,’ she reported. ‘And I’m pretty sure I didn’t say what they wanted to hear.’

Steven had tried reassuring her that they wouldn’t be looking for a subservient, box-ticking wimp as one of their consultants: they’d welcome a woman with strong views and a sense of what was right rather than what was politic but failed to convince even himself. They both knew the establishment tended to prefer people who ‘fitted in’, people who, like the royal family, tended to avoid expressing views on anything.