She takes a deep breath and runs.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouts at the top of the voice, sprinting down the path, away from Putin, dreading the imminent agony. ‘Hey! Help!’

  She gets further than she expected – almost five yards – before she’s cut down by the shock and thrown to the ground. The pain is so much worse than before. Far worse. She’s in too much agony to scream or shout. This time she might actually die.

  ‘That was so stupid,’ Putin says, walking over to her. ‘So fucking stupid.’ He’s mad with anger, the veins bulging at his temples.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasps. The pain has stopped, but she’s terrified by what he might do next.

  Putin looks around, checking to see if anyone has heard her shouts. Then he kicks her in the stomach. And again, harder this time. And again.

  ‘Stop it! Are you crazy?’ a woman shouts as Kate begins to pass out. ‘Stop it!’

  101

  Silas

  Silas gazes up at the palm trees spilling over the top of the roof. He doesn’t expect to be able to enter the penthouse suite, he just wants to see the area for himself, get a feel for Rob’s wealth, the Shoreditch side of his life.

  ‘Average price paid for properties in this street?’ Strover says. ‘£1.9 million.’

  ‘The penthouses must go for way more,’ Silas says. ‘£4 million? £5 million?’

  He’s given a second briefing to the SIO in charge of the Dr Varma homicide and told him that he’ll be staying in London for a few hours. The potential link to the Cornish murder was relatively easy to explain – NABIS has all the ballistics and Silas expects a match with the markings on the bullet that passed through Dr Varma’s skull. That there might also be a connection with the disappearance of several super recognisers from across the UK and Europe left the SIO scratching his head. One thing did become clear: the Met need to interview Rob and Gilmour as a matter of urgency. Silas refrained from muddying the waters further by suggesting that one was being framed by the other. At the moment, no one knows where either of the men are.

  Silas’s phone rings. It’s his boss, Detective Superintendent Ward.

  ‘I owe you an apology,’ Ward begins, wrong-footing Silas. His boss never apologises. ‘You’re right. Someone is trying to take down Rob. And it sounds like it’s this “doppelgänger”, just as you suspected. I was wrong to respond so cynically to your earlier suggestion.’

  What’s got into Ward? Silas has never heard him like this before. ‘That’s OK, sir,’ he says. ‘It’s a complex case. May I ask what’s made it clearer?’

  ‘Rob did. He’s just been in to see me. Brought Kate along with him too – a pleasant surprise. Seems to have made a full recovery from her accident.’

  Silas can hardly believe what he’s hearing. ‘Sorry, sir, did you say Rob and Kate have just been in to see you at Gablecross?’

  Strover looks up from her own phone. Silas shakes his head in disbelief.

  ‘And I know what you’re going to say,’ Ward continues. ‘Rob brought his passport and driving licence along. Kate had her passport too. I made a point of asking.’

  Silas’s head spins as he tries to process his boss’s words. Kate definitely flew to France earlier today. The general aviation report submitted to Border Force confirmed it.

  ‘How did Rob get there?’ Silas asks.

  ‘I didn’t inquire,’ Ward says. ‘Apparently, he’s been meaning to talk to us about his fears for some time. And then yesterday he was sent a speeding fine for a car he doesn’t own, which focused his mind. It’s registered in the name of Gilmour Martin, this lookalike who made threats against him in Thailand nine years ago. And now one of his employees, Dr Varma, has been murdered. He’s quite frightened, actually. I explained that the Met wants to interview him and he’s on his way up to London to talk to the SIO now. They also offered to hand in their passports until the matter’s resolved, and I agreed.’

  Silas is speechless, doesn’t know where to begin. ‘Did you ask him about the missing super recognisers?’ he asks.

  ‘I would have done if you’d told me more about them, Silas. In due course, he’ll need to account for his movements when these super recognisers apparently disappeared. He’s not going anywhere, said he’s staying at his London apartment tonight.’

  Silas still can’t get his head around the timings. Kate must have turned around as soon as she touched down in France, flying back to the UK with Rob in his private helicopter and landing somewhere near Swindon. Beats crawling along the M4.

  ‘It’s not all bad news, though,’ Ward continues. ‘Rob confirmed that Centaur’s finally coming on-stream tonight. Our all-new facial-recognition software. Man and machine working in perfect harmony.’

  102

  Kate

  ‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ a woman is saying. ‘You were not to be harmed. Strict orders. He will be in trouble.’

  Kate’s at the kitchen table in the house, barely conscious, sipping from a mug of mint tea. The woman is young and pretty and wearing what looks like a nurse’s uniform. Kate can’t place her foreign accent, but it’s similar to Putin’s. Slavic. Kate’s neck is still sore, but it’s her ribs that are throbbing. They feel badly bruised, possibly broken. Her lower back’s agony too.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says to the woman, feeling a little stronger. ‘For the tea.’

  It’s so weird to be sitting in this familiar kitchen, the light flooding in from all directions, a painting of Stretch on the easel to her left.

  ‘If he laid a finger on your head, he would have been killed,’ the woman says, glancing up at the rear kitchen door that leads out to the warehouse.

  ‘My head?’ Kate says, thinking back to Putin, how he aimed all his blows at her torso.

  ‘Your brain.’ The woman nods at Kate’s tea. ‘Drink it quickly.’

  Kate closes her eyes. ‘What’s outside?’ she asks. ‘In the warehouse.’

  The woman casts her eyes downwards, pressing her lips together. ‘It’s better you don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Tell me,’ Kate says, almost shouting, eyes alert with an animal fear.

  ‘I wish there was a way I could help you,’ the woman says, turning away. ‘You’re lucky he didn’t throw you into the swimming pool. He did that to me once, knew that I can’t swim. Can you?’

  ‘I prefer the sea,’ Kate says, remembering how she was nearly suffocated by the pool cover in Cornwall.

  The woman stares at Kate for a moment. ‘You’re a strong swimmer?’

  ‘When I don’t get cramp. Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’ But Kate knows she’s holding something back. The woman checks the kitchen door again. Kate does the same.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Kate asks, her voice quiet now. She glances up at the woman’s head, searching for scars.

  ‘I’m not like the others who work here,’ the woman says. ‘I’m desperate to leave.’

  ‘So, why don’t you?’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve tried. Like you. Several times.’

  ‘But you’re not wearing a neckband.’

  ‘I used to.’ She touches her throat, as if remembering the pain. ‘Now I have an implant.’ She pulls down the top of her blouse to reveal a scar across her chest, above her heart. ‘If I leave here, go beyond the perimeter fence, pick up a mobile phone, do anything to try to escape, my heart will…’

  The back door swings open. Putin breezes in and Kate recoils, tensing her legs and stomach. More pain.

  ‘Time to go,’ he barks, avoiding eye contact with her.

  Putin says something to the woman that Kate doesn’t understand, then marches Kate out of the kitchen and up towards the warehouse. It’s agony to move, but he ignores her pleas to slow down, dragging her by her wrist when she tries to stop. In his other hand he’s holding the remote for the neckband.

  ‘Try anything and I will use this again,’ he says, waving the remote in her face as they approach the warehouse.

  When they reach the door, Putin looks around and pulls out his phone, which is buzzing.

  ‘One minute,’ he says, holding a finger up at her. He seems distracted and starts to chat quietly but urgently on the phone.

  Kate stares at the warehouse door, wondering what lies behind it. A chill runs through her. The sky is pewter grey now, the sea dark and choppy. The woman’s right. There’s no escape from here. Her one attempt failed. The van driver was too far away to have heard her. It’s hopeless.

  Putin is becoming more animated on the phone, defensive. Is he being reprimanded for beating her up? She turns away and her heart misses a beat. On the far hillside, across the bay, a familiar figure, a distinctive lumbering gait. She stays very still, aware that she mustn’t alert Putin. Despite the distance, she knows at once that she’s made a spot. It’s Jake. His ursine profile.

  Putin hasn’t seen him. He’s still talking on his phone.

  ‘Can I wave goodbye to Cornwall?’ she manages to say, loudly, to Putin. ‘To England.’ The urge to scream, call out to Jake, is almost unbearable, but she knows that the pain from the neckband will be far worse. ‘It’s somewhere out there.’

  He puts a hand over his phone, glances at her and then at the sea, before returning to his conversation. She’s not sure if he’s understood her question. The wind ruffles her hair as she starts to wave out to sea. She checks on Putin and looks towards Jake in the far distance again. She can hear the waves thumping against the rocks, somewhere out of sight far below her. The drop must be vertical. She scans the bay again. High tide, the sea right up against the cliffs where Jake is still visible. She became obsessed with tides in Cornwall, living in tune with their ebb and flow.

  And then Putin is off the phone and grabbing her by her wrist again.

  ‘Come,’ he says, dragging her to the door.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she protests as he pulls out a card with his other hand and holds it against the lock of the warehouse door. She turns to look back one last time. Is that a wave from Jake? Has he seen her? She feels stronger just knowing that he’s nearby. Braver too as she is dragged inside, the door locking behind her.

  103

  Silas

  Silas is still on the phone to his boss, Detective Inspector Ward, stunned by the news that Centaur is about to go live. News that was apparently confirmed by Rob in person.

  ‘Sir, what exactly has Rob got to do with Centaur?’ he asks, standing outside Rob’s apartment in Shoreditch with Strover.

  For a while now Strover has been trying without success to find out who is behind the force’s imminent new facial-recognition software. The details surrounding the Centaur contract are opaque, to put it mildly.

  ‘It’s one of his start-ups,’ Ward says. ‘He invested in it a while back.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ Silas asks incredulously.

  ‘Believe me, I would have done if I could, Silas, but these things are very commercially sensitive. There were also some teething problems. Delays.’

  ‘And you don’t think his involvement in a facial-recognition firm has any bearing on Kate’s accident or his subsequent relationship with her, a super recogniser?’ Silas knows he’s out of order now, adopting the wrong tone for speaking with his boss.

  ‘Not as far as I can see,’ Ward says. ‘Except perhaps in the context of Gilmour Martin trying to frame him. From what Rob’s told me today, it seems certain now that it was Gilmour at the scene of Kate’s accident that night.’

  ‘How many other forces are using Centaur?’ Silas asks.

  ‘Just us at the moment, but then Swindon has got more surveillance cameras than most. We’re in a position to make the best use of it. If the software lives up to its promises, Centaur’s going to drive crime off the streets of this town.’

  Rob is proving a very good friend to Swindon.

  ‘The Irish are also looking at it,’ Ward continues. ‘So are the Germans. And I had a call from my opposite number in Nottingham last night. I’m not surprised. It’s a potential game changer. Promises closer interaction between humans and computers. No more embarrassingly high error rates.’ He pauses. ‘Are you liaising with the Met over Dr Varma? I don’t want any reports of non-cooperation.’

  ‘I’ve told them everything I know,’ Silas says. Almost everything.

  Silas signs off and briefs Strover about Centaur. She’d already got the gist of it and is equally shocked.

  ‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell us,’ Silas says.

  ‘It’s the name that’s bothering me,’ Strover says, searching for something on her phone. ‘Know what a centaur looks like?’

  Silas nods. He’d read about them when he visited the Pelion peninsula in Greece a few years back, when Conor still came with them on family holidays.

  ‘Half man, half horse,’ Strover continues, holding out her phone to show him a picture. ‘The combination of a computer’s artificial intelligence and the human brain is also known as the centaur model. After Garry Kasparov lost against IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1997, he invented “advanced chess”, or “centaur chess”, in which grandmasters play against each other with computers.’

  Silas made the mistake once of challenging Strover to a game. And he considers himself a half-decent player. He thinks about the documents on Dr Varma’s desk. The P3 brainwave, the articles on frozen addicts and locked-in syndrome. Centaur’s coming on-stream tonight – the day Dr Varma was killed, the day Kate was taken to France after having finally recovered her recognition skills.

  His phone starts to ring. It’s Jake.

  ‘Where are you?’ Silas asks.

  ‘On a hillside in Brittany overlooking Rob’s house.’

  The man is a like a dog with a bone. If he’d shown the same dedication to writing crime thrillers, he’d be a bestselling author by now.

  ‘Have the French police been alerted?’ Jake continues. ‘I can’t see anyone around.’

  Silas takes a deep breath and surveys the street. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not as straightforward as that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jake says. ‘I thought there was an arrest warrant out for Gilmour? Kate’s in real trouble. I think I’ve just seen her. Behind the house, up on the cliffs.’

  There’s no easy way to tell him. ‘Kate’s back in the UK, Jake,’ Silas begins. ‘With Rob. He’s just visited Gablecross police station. Claims he’s being framed by Gilmour.’

  ‘What?’ Jake’s sense of disbelief is even greater than Silas’s. ‘That’s not possible. It can’t be Kate. It must be someone else. You’ve got to believe me.’

  Jake describes his encounter at the petrol station in Saint-Renan.

  ‘And you’re sure it was Rob the woman was with?’ Silas asks.

  ‘I’m not sure, no. It definitely wasn’t Kate, though. She had a different accent, different… I don’t know, presence. Physically, sure, she looked just like Kate, but… I lived with Kate for twelve years. I’d recognise her anywhere. And this woman looked terrible. Pained. Terrified. Kept begging me to leave. She also told me that Kate was back in the house. You’ve got to help me. I’m on my own here.’

  104

  Kate

  The low lighting in the warehouse is a sickly blue, like a morgue at dawn. The temperature is low too. Putin is beside Kate, letting her take in the hideous scene.

  ‘Your new home,’ he says, but she’s not listening. She’s staring ahead, trying to comprehend the nightmare laid out before her, the saline tubes and TV screens, the smell of disinfectant. She’s back at the hospital again, bruised and battered in the dark early days after the accident, listening to the anguished cries of other patients as they call out through the night. The flickering screens remind her too of the very worst days in the super-recogniser unit, the endless scrutiny of human faces in a cramped, late-night office.

  Her hands start to shake. She clutches her arms, pulling the thin gown tighter around her sore ribs. She’s got to get away from here.

  She forces herself to count a total of eleven people, six men and five women. They appear insensate, lying in separate cubicles, torpid faces staring up at large display screens suspended from the low ceiling above them. Their eyes are pegged open in some strange way, giving the impression of gross, misshapen eyelashes. They are all wearing gowns and what look like EEG headsets, identical to the one she was made to use, and they’re breathing through ventilators. Drips are attached to their arms.

  ‘Gil wanted you to see this first,’ Putin says. ‘He’s very proud of what he’s achieved. But this is not normal, you being here like this. We usually induce catatonic stasis before they are brought in.’

  He nods towards a door off to their right. Kate tries to speak, ask what he means by catatonic stasis, but she’s too choked up for any words to come out. Her whole body is shaking now. One bed, at the far end, is empty. Her bed. She knows what’s on the screens. Human faces, at least ten a second, just like Ajay showed her. And then she notices that several of the screens are showing moving images. It’s hard to see clearly because of the angle, but the footage – it looks like CCTV – seems much faster than normal, as if it’s been sped up.

  She wonders if she’s imagining all this and starts to pinch the skin on her forearm, squeezing it harder and harder, twisting the fold of flesh until it hurts too much, hoping that she’ll wake up from this bad dream.

  The woman who gave her mint tea enters the warehouse from the far end with a clipboard and starts to check on the people, moving from one bed to the next. Kate tries to catch her eye, but the woman doesn’t look in her direction. Daren’t risk her heart.

  ‘We have to put moisturiser in their eyes,’ Putin says, almost proudly, observing the woman as she leans over one of the captives. ‘Otherwise they dry out. They hardly ever sleep – the drug we give also induces hyposomnia. But we can tell when they do from the EEC monitors. And then we close their eyes. But it’s never for very long.’