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silence descended.
    â€˜Agent Terry has our full confidence.’ Representative Horrington leapt into the breach. ‘Something awkward has come up…’ He tailed off, seeing Tulsa emerge from the room something gripped tightly in one fist.
    Scott had only ever seen a bug once before, but he knew what they were – and they weren’t woodlice that had somehow managed to hibernate through the winter on the seventeenth floor.
    â€˜Not a word, Mr Horrington, but I suggest you instruct the marines not to let anyone leave. Do you have a back– ’
    A door slammed. Sean Terry swivelled round sprinting for the kitchen. Scott caught a glimpse of startled faces and a tray, loaded with sandwiches, left unattended on the buffet table.

Five
    The sound of feet jumping their way down concrete steps reverberated throughout the fire escape stairs. It faded abruptly as the discordant jangling of an alarm took over – warning staff throughout the building of an emergency. Scott caught the heavy thumps and guessed Sean Terry was taking the stairs three at a time, Tulsa hot on his heels.
    Scott eyed the roomful of people, their expressions both shocked and dismayed. Most had collapsed into a conveniently placed chair, waiting anxiously for news – although what was the point? Every word that had been spoken, every telephone conversation, identities of the speakers verified and noted, not a single sound would have gone unnoticed by a bug that remained on duty twenty-four hours a day. And for how long? That morning only? Longer? Two days, three days…more? Were these men and women even now wondering if they would become the target of an assassin’s bullet on their way home that night?
    The Secretary of State, her expression unchanged, stared impassively at the photograph of the current president; the diamonds on her fingers creating shafts of brilliance as she moved her wrist to check the time. But it was the change in Emma Arneson that really shocked Scott. The woman had turned as white as a sheet. He caught sight of her hands trembling before his father covered them with his own, turning her away from the room so no one else would witness her distress.
    But why? What had she been saying? It had to have been something pretty catastrophic to produce a reaction like that.
    A feeling of guilt swept over Scott, rumbling around like the hunger pains of a moment before. Fancy chatting up a terrorist. And she was so pretty too. How could anyone that pretty possibly belong to a terrorist organisation? Holy crap!
How could he have been so stupid!
He’d never live it down.
    The kitchen doors swung open. Heads jerked round. Sean Terry, his expression grim, stood in the doorway. He didn’t speak, still panting harshly from his manic pursuit of the girl. Instead, he drew his finger across his throat and shook his head.
    She’d got away?
How could that be?
Sean Terry was fast, Scott knew that. The girl had obviously been faster or had an escape route already planned. The horrendous thought that someone so innocent-looking needed an escape route knocked Scott’s breath out of him. He drew in a lungful of air, ashamed at what he might have let slip if Sean Terry hadn’t arrived in the nick of time to stop him.
    Nodding, Stewart Horrington picked up the phone. ‘Most embarrassing!’ he muttered, pausing long enough to punch in a group of numbers.
    Scott caught at a bubble of hysterical laughter in his throat. Coughing to disguise it, he swung back to the window, staring down at the streets of Geneva where normality reigned. It certainly didn’t in this office.
Embarrassing!
The man had to be joking. He had a roomful of people on his hands, most of them scared silly, including him, and the only word he could come up with was embarrassing.
Devastating, disturbing, horrific, unbelievable
– any of them would have fitted the circumstances better.
    â€˜I’m afraid, ladies and