Her instructors were pleased with her.

The family travelled with Vasily when he was assigned to the Russian embassy in London.

Her hacking continued. Questions of legality were easily ignored. Property was effectively communal; if she wanted something, she took it. She set up dummy accounts and pilfered Amazon for whatever she fancied. A PayPal hack allowed her to transfer money she did not have. She bought and sold credit card information. She joined collectives that vandalised the pages of corporations with whose politics — and often their very existence — she disagreed. After six months, they told her to draw attention to herself. She left bigger and bigger clues, not so big as to have been left obviously — or to have been the mark of an obvious amateur, which would have disqualified her from her designated future just as completely — but obvious enough to be visible to a vigilant watcher. She was just twenty-two when, from the bedroom of her boyfriend’s house, she had hacked into ninety-seven military computers in the Pentagon and NASA. She was downloading a grainy black-and-white photograph of what she thought was an alien spacecraft from a NASA server at the John Space Centre in Houston when she was caught. They tracked her down and charged her. Espionage. The Americans threatened extradition. Life imprisonment. The British pretended to co-operate, but then, at the last minute, they countered with a proposal of their own.

Come and work for us.

She appeared to be all out of options.

That was what she wanted them to think.

She had accepted.

Anna sat down at her desk. It was, as usual, a dreadful mess. The cubicle’s flimsy walls were covered with geek bric-a-brac: a sign warning DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES; a clock designed to look like an over-sized wristwatch; replicas of the Enterprise and the TARDIS; a Pacman stress ball, complete with felt ghosts; a Spiderman action figure. A rear-view mirror stuck to the edge of a monitor made sure it was impossible to approach without her knowledge.

She took a good slug of her coffee, and fired up both of her computers, high performance Macs with the large, cinema screens. On the screen to her right, she double-clicked on Milton’s file. Her credentials were checked and the classified file — marked EYES ONLY — was opened. A series of pictures were available, taken at various points throughout his life. There were pictures of him at Cambridge, dressed in cross-country gear and with mud slathered up and down his legs. Long, shaggy hair, lively eyes, a coltish look to him. A handsome boy, she caught herself thinking. Attractive. A picture of him in a tuxedo, some university ball perhaps, a pretty but ditzy-looking redhead hanging off his arm. A series of him taken at the time that he enlisted: a blank, vaguely hostile glare into the camera when he signed his papers; a press shot of him on patrol in Derry, camouflage gear, his rifle pointed down, the stock pressed to his chest; a shot of him in ceremonial dress accepting the Military Medal. Maybe a dozen pictures from that part of his life. There were just two from his time in the SAS: a group shot with his unit hanging out of the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk and another, the most recent, a head and shoulders shot: his face was smothered with camouflage cream, black war paint, his eyes were unsmiling, a comma of dark hair curled over his forehead. The relaxed, fresh-faced youngster was a distant memory; in those pictures he was coldly and efficiently handsome.

Anna turned to the data. There were eight gigabytes of material. She ran another of her homebrew algorithms to disqualify the extraneous material — she would return to review the chaff later, while she was running the first sweep — reducing it to a more manageable three gigs. Now she read carefully, cutting and pasting key information into a document she had opened on the screen to her left. When she had finished, three hours later, she had a comprehensive sketch of Milton’s background.

She went through her notes more carefully, highlighting the most useful components. He was born in 1973, making him forty. He was an orphan, his parents killed in an Autobahn smash when he was twelve, and so there would be no communications to be had with them. There had been a nomadic childhood before that, trailing his father around the Middle East as he followed a career in petrochemicals. There were no siblings, and the Aunt and Uncle who had raised him had died ten years earlier. He had never been married and not was there any suggestion that he enjoyed meaningful relationships with women. There were no children. It appeared that he had no friends, either, at least none that were obviously apparent. Milton, she thought to herself as she dragged the cursor down two lines, highlighting them in yellow, you must be a very lonely man.

David McClellan, the analyst who worked next to her, kicked away from his desk and rolled his chair in her direction. “What you working on?”

“You know better than that.”

McClellan had worked opposite Anna for the last three months. He’d been square — for a hacker, at least — but he had started to make changes in the last few weeks. He’d stopped wearing a tie. He occasionally came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt (although the t-shirts were so crisp and new that Anna knew he had just bought them, probably on the site that she used, after she had recommended it to him). It was obvious that he had a thing for her. He was a nice guy, brain as big as a planet, a little dull, and he tried too hard.

“Come on — throw me a bone.”

“Above your clearance,” she said, with an indulgent grin. McClellan returned her smile, faltered a little when he realised that she wasn’t joking, but then looked set to continue the conversation until she took up her noise cancelling headphones, slipped them over her ears and tapped them, with a shrug.

Sorry, she mouthed. Can’t hear you.

She turned back to her screens. Milton’s parents had left a considerable amount in trust for him, and his education had been the best that money could buy. He had gone up to Eton for three terms until he was expelled — she could not discover the reason — and then Fettes and Cambridge, where he read law. He passed through the university with barely a ripple left in his wake; Anna started to suspect that someone had been through his file, carefully airbrushing him from history.

She watched in the mirror as McClennan rolled back towards her again.

Coffee? he mouthed.

Anna nodded, if only to get him out of the way.

Milton’s army career had been spectacular. Sandhurst for officer training and then the Royal Green Jackets, posted to the Rifle Depot in Winchester, and then special forces: Air Troop, B Squadron, 22 SAS. He had served in Gibraltar, Ireland, Kosovo and the Middle East. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and that, added to the Military Medal he had been given for his service in Belfast, briefly made him the Army’s most decorated serving soldier.

She filleted the names of the soldiers who had served with him. Emails, telephone numbers, everything she could find.

McClennan returned with her coffee. She mouthed thanks, but he did not leave. He said something but she couldn’t hear. With a tight smile, she pushed one of the headphones further up her head. “Thanks,” she repeated.

“You having trouble?”

“Why —?”

“You’re frowning.”

She shrugged. “Seriously, David. Enough. I’m not going to tell you.”

He gave up.

She pulled the headphones down again and turned back to her notes.

The next ten years, the time Milton had spent in the Group, were redacted.

Classified!

Dammit! she exclaimed under her breath.

She couldn’t get into the contemporaneous stuff?

They were tying both hands behind her back.

It was impossible.

She watched McClellan, scrubbing a pencil against his scalp, and corrected herself: impossible for most people. Hard for her, not impossible.