The Persona Protocol

11


Who Is Adam Gray?


Despite still being livid about her treatment by Harper, and appalled by Kiddrick’s ethics, Bianca couldn’t help but be impressed by the large room to which Morgan took her. Now this was worthy of Bond or Bauer! The moodily lit chamber brought to mind NASA’s mission control, banks of workstations facing a wall of large screens.

However, there were currently no missions to control. Most of the displays were either blank or displaying the STS logo on a screensaver background. There were enough workstations to accommodate thirty or forty people, with space for more towards the rear of the room, but only about half were currently active. Whatever work was going on appeared to be bureaucratic or system maintenance rather than high-pressure espionage.

‘This is the Bullpen,’ Morgan announced. ‘Its official name is the Project Operational Command and Control Centre, but nobody much likes the acronym.’

‘It’s not as good as PERSONA, no,’ said Bianca.

‘That was more of a backronym, really. You can thank Dr Albion for it. But this is where we oversee missions when our people are out in the field.’

‘It’s impressive,’ she had to admit. ‘Looks expensive, too.’

‘It wasn’t built just for the Persona Project, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s an existing facility that Persona has been assigned. We don’t like to throw money away on black projects, whatever the public perception may be.’ He led Bianca, Tony and Kiddrick through the room. ‘Here, I’ll introduce you to the team.’

Of the twenty or so people present, most were clustered around one particular workstation. An enthusiastic male voice was the focus of their attention. ‘Levon must have a new puzzle,’ Morgan said.

Kiddrick was not impressed. ‘Don’t your people have anything better to do?’

Tony gave him a half-smile. ‘You’re only saying that because you can’t solve them.’ They stopped at the edge of the group to listen.

Bianca peered through the crowd. The speaker was an overweight young black man with a shaved head, eyes darting behind Coke-bottle glasses as he swivelled his chair to make sure everyone was taking in his words. ‘So, that’s the assignment. The diamond will be taken out of the vault by its owner in exactly twenty-four hours. You have to get that diamond. Question is . . .’ a broad smile, ‘how are you going to do it?’

‘Bribe the guards,’ Tony suggested.

The question master – Bianca assumed this to be Levon – shook his head. ‘The guards are very loyal to their employer. It would cost more to bribe them than the diamond is worth.’

Another man, older and rougher-looking, had an alternative approach. ‘Tactical assault. Eliminate the guards and blow the safe, then withdraw before local law enforcement arrives. Five minutes after the alarm’s set off, you said. That should easily be enough time.’

‘Wow, bloodthirsty,’ said a slender woman with long blond hair, shaking her head.

‘Uh-uh,’ said Levon to the man. ‘You’ve got selective hearing, Mr Baxter! Like I said, it’ll take at least an hour to force your way into the safe by any means you have available.’

Baxter wasn’t giving up on his idea. ‘A shaped charge would do it.’

‘My puzzle, my rules. You’ve got to work inside the limitations of the scenario. That’s kinda the whole point. Doesn’t matter what you use – explosives, drills, lasers, whatever – it’ll take sixty minutes to break that safe. I set the hard limits; now you gotta figure out ways around them.’

A dismissive grunt. ‘Sounds like some sort of unrealistic Mission: Impossible crap. Count me out of this one.’

‘I’ll take your place if you like, John,’ said Morgan. ‘Make sure you copy me in on the rules, Levon. What was the solution to the last one, by the way?’

‘The power lines,’ said a tanned twenty-something man with a heavily gelled haircut. ‘Take out the substation in the town to cut off the juice, then climb along the lines to get over the perimeter defences. Simple.’

‘Yeah, Kyle, so simple you didn’t think of it until two days after Tony,’ said Levon. ‘And a day after Holly Jo. And—’

Kyle waved his hands dismissively. ‘Yeah, yeah. The point is, that was the right answer. And I got it. Just like I’m going to get this one.’

‘Not before me,’ said the blonde. ‘And I’m going to beat Tony this time as well. A huge diamond? That is so mine.’

‘Just don’t spend too much time thinking about it while you’re on duty,’ said Morgan. The undertone of fun’s over, now get back to work was faint, but firm. It had the desired effect; the group began to disperse. ‘Not all of you – there’s someone I want the chief specialists to meet.’ He waited until only six people remained. ‘This is Dr Bianca Childs. She’s agreed to stand in for Roger until he’s fit to return to work.’

‘“Agreed” is rather a simplistic way of putting it,’ said Bianca.

Baxter was instantly suspicious on hearing her voice. ‘She’s not an American? Isn’t that going to be a security issue, sir?’

‘For the moment, Dr Childs has been granted limited security clearance on the authority of the Director of National Intelligence,’ Morgan replied. ‘In due course, she’ll receive whatever she needs to carry out her role.’ Baxter didn’t seem entirely mollified, but nodded. ‘Dr Childs, these are the senior members of the Persona Project.’

He made the introductions. The slender blonde in expensive stilettos was Holly Jo Voss, communications specialist. John Baxter, tactical commander; Bianca assumed from his general demeanour that he was a soldier. The puzzle-setting Levon James – his desk cluttered with Transformer toys – was the information and systems specialist, or as he jokingly put it, ‘chief hacker’. Smug hair-model Kyle had the improbable surname Falconetti and the title of surveillance controller; his job – as far as Bianca could tell from his boastful but vague description – was some sort of pilot.

There was another man, standing behind the others. Until Morgan gestured him forward she had barely registered his presence. Brown hair, dark grey eyes, far from unattractive but . . .

Normally she thought she was good at reading people, but this man was giving nothing away. His expression was neutral, body language unrevealing. But it didn’t seem a deliberate attempt to shield his true self.

It was almost as if he had nothing to shield.

‘This is our lead agent,’ said Morgan. ‘At the moment, also our only agent, but . . . well, we’ll see. Dr Childs, this is Adam Gray.’

The agent needed only a moment to perform his own assessment, she saw. No wasted time, just a clinical, almost machine-like sweep of his gaze over her. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hi.’ They shook hands. Again, she could draw no conclusions about him. This grip was neither clammy like Kiddrick’s, nor as domineering as Harper’s. Firm, cool . . . blank. It told her nothing.

He released her hand. She expected him to say something else, but he stayed silent.

‘Okay,’ said Morgan. ‘Adam, Tony, I’d like Dr Childs to see a demonstration of PERSONA. Dr Kiddrick?’

Kiddrick led the way out of the Bullpen. The group headed through several security doors to a lab, what resembled an operating table in the centre with a pair of curved benches near its head. Computer workstations occupied the room’s far end, a large metal cabinet between them.

‘I’ll set everything up,’ said Kiddrick.

Adam lay on the table as the scientist opened the cabinet. The upper shelves were filled with row after row of what Bianca at first thought were DVD cases before realising they were somewhat larger, while below them were racks containing glass bottles and phials of various sizes. The drugs Roger had developed?

‘Need a hand?’ Tony asked as Kiddrick fumbled with the two weighty metal cases he had taken from the bottom shelf.

‘No, I’ve got it,’ Kiddrick muttered. He clomped back to the benches, putting one case on each side of the operating table. The first one he opened contained the piece of equipment from Kiddrick’s slide show – though Bianca noticed it was somewhat bulkier and less sleek than its illustration, with an almost jury-rigged appearance; a prototype rather than a production model. The other contained a similar device, but thicker still and with a prominent slot set into its front. ‘Who do you want to use for the demonstration?’

‘Who aren’t we likely to need?’ asked Morgan. ‘We don’t want to waste someone who might be useful in the future.’

Kiddrick took the second device from its case. ‘What about, ah . . . Wilmar, he’ll do. Conrad Wilmar.’

‘Do we have any video of him?’ said Morgan. ‘It would help to show Dr Childs how effective PERSONA is.’

‘There should be a recording on the server,’ said Tony, going to one of the computers.

‘Now, Dr Childs,’ Kiddrick said, ‘I’ll explain the procedure in more detail when the time comes to train you on it. For now, this,’ he indicated the first machine, which he had just connected to its companion with a fat length of cable, ‘is the PERSONA device itself, which handles the reading, transfer and imprinting of the subject’s synaptic patterns into the agent. Adam, I mean.’ Bianca glanced at the man in question, who was staring silently up at the overhead light cluster. ‘The other device is the recorder.’ His tone became critical. ‘It’s a separate unit because it was only intended to be used in lab conditions, but that plan went by the wayside.’

‘It gives us more flexibility,’ insisted Morgan.

‘Well, if it breaks, don’t blame me; I advised against it. Still, at least I don’t have to haul the whole system around. It’s rather heavy.’ The mocking look he gave Bianca suggested he expected that to be her responsibility.

‘I found the video of Wilmar,’ said Tony from the workstation.

‘Good,’ Morgan said. ‘Dr Childs, take a look at this, please.’

She went with him to the computer while Kiddrick continued to fuss with his equipment. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Just get a handle on his personality,’ Tony told her. He clicked the mouse, and a video began playing.

Conrad Wilmar, it turned out, was a middle-aged man with large glasses and crinkled, receding red hair. ‘No, no, that’s fine,’ he said to someone off-camera. ‘Okay, so, what do you need me to do? Are you going to ask me questions, or . . . ?’

‘No,’ said Albion’s voice. ‘Just tell us about yourself and your area of expertise.’ Bianca recognised the background as the lab in which she was standing.

‘Sure, sure, no problem,’ Wilmar replied. He had squirrelly, fidgety mannerisms, as if his brain were working slightly faster than his body could handle and was dumping its excess energy straight into his nervous system. He looked directly into the lens. ‘You want me to start? Okay, my name is Conrad Wilmar, and I’m a professor of biochemistry at Carnegie Mellon. I’m currently working with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Resear— Hey, is it okay for me to be talking about this?’ He looked towards his interviewer. ‘I know we’ve all got proper clearance, but I don’t want to take any chances, y’know?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Albion.

‘Okay, right. So, what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I’m working with DARPA to develop battlefield treatments and inoculants against biological weapons. Specifically, against weaponised strains of Bacillus anthracis and Neisseria meningitidis, which if anyone is ever mad enough to employ bioweapons in warfare are likely to be among the prime threats . . .’

Wilmar kept speaking, but Bianca had already drawn some conclusions about his personality. Very smart, jittery and seeming socially inept on the surface – but with an inner confidence emerging upon moving on to his specialist subject. An alpha nerd, then; someone who could seem nervous and bumbling when out of their usual element . . . but anyone underestimating them did so at their own risk. She knew the type. She had worked with quite a few of them.

‘Okay,’ said Kiddrick. Bianca looked round to see him fitting Adam with the complex skullcap of electrodes from the slideshow, a cable running from it to the PERSONA device. ‘Tony, can you find Wilmar’s disk?’

Tony went to the cabinet and ran his finger along the cases. ‘Vulich, Wagner, Wall, Warner . . . here we are.’ He slipped the box out from its companions.

Bianca regarded it dubiously. ‘So, how big are these disks if they can supposedly record the complete memories of a human brain? You’d need more than just a blank CD.’

He opened the case to show her. Inside was a flat, dark grey slab of plastic, about an inch thick. ‘It’s not really a disk – we just call them that because it’s easier than saying . . . God, I can’t even remember the full name. High-Capacity Rapid Access Multiplexing Static Memory Module? Something like that.’

She tried to pronounce the acronym. ‘Hurk . . . huckramsumm?’

Tony grinned. ‘Yeah, that’s why we stick to “disk”. Anyway, it’s basically a very, very big and fast flash drive.’

‘I still don’t see how any kind of computer memory would be big enough to record a person’s entire memories, though. The brain has billions of neurons – trillions of synapses. Storing them all would be like trying to fit the entire Internet on an iPod.’

‘On a normal, direct transfer, it’s just a matter of having enough bandwidth to push the data through,’ Kiddrick explained patronisingly as he finished securing the skullcap. ‘Which we do. Recording takes longer, though, because it has to encode and compress everything to fit on the module. To continue your iPod analogy, it’s like shrinking a raw audio file down to an MP3. It sounds the same, but takes up far less space.’

‘I know some audiophiles who’d argue at extremely tedious length about it sounding the same,’ said Bianca. ‘And doesn’t an MP3 lose some of the data when it’s compressed?’

‘The brain interpolates the missing information and fills in the gaps.’

‘That doesn’t sound a good idea when you’re talking about memories. People already have enough holes in their recollection as it is.’

‘Well,’ said Kiddrick, stepping back, ‘you’ll see for yourself in a minute. Everything’s ready. Tony, can I have that disk?’

Tony brought it to him, Bianca and Morgan joining them at the table. Kiddrick opened the PERSONA’s screen and waited for the machine to start up, then carefully inserted the disk into the recorder’s slot. He checked some figures in another window, then returned to the cabinet. ‘The drug we use to prime the agent to accept a new persona is called Neutharsine. Roger’s name; I’m not keen on it myself. It’s the protein inhibitor I mentioned.’ He returned with a jet injector, carefully loading a small vial of liquid. ‘It suppresses certain parts of the target brain’s memory, and it’s also used after a mission to erase the implanted persona.’

Bianca looked down at Adam. He was still staring silently up at the lights, unmoving. ‘Are you sure there aren’t any long-term side effects?’ she felt compelled to ask. ‘Especially if you’re giving him repeated doses.’

Kiddrick shot a look at Tony – whether seeking his permission to speak or warning him not to say anything, Bianca couldn’t tell – before replying. ‘There are side effects, yes, but they’re minor and easily managed. Now, watch this.’ He moved to the head of the operating table and positioned the injector against Adam’s neck. ‘Ready?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam, without emotion.

Kiddrick pulled the trigger. Adam grimaced, then relaxed. Bianca watched him closely. Though it was hard to imagine how, he seemed to become even more expressionless, as if the little personality that he had expressed was draining away.

After half a minute, Kiddrick clicked his fingers above Adam’s face. The agent’s gaze instantly locked on to them. ‘Okay, Adam. Does everything feel normal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ He examined the PERSONA’s screen, seeing a ready message. ‘Okay. Here we go.’

He typed in a command. New windows appeared, one displaying a simplified graphic of a brain. Coloured patterns drifted across it – then flared into brilliant, manic life.

Adam’s whole body spasmed. Bianca jerked back in surprise, before leaning in for a closer look. His eyes were flickering rapidly from side to side. She also saw that his hands had twisted into gnarled fists. ‘Is he in pain?’ she asked, concerned.

She expected Kiddrick to answer, but Tony spoke first. ‘No. It’s not exactly pleasant, but it doesn’t hurt.’

‘Okay, the transfer is in progress,’ said Kiddrick, looking up from the machine. ‘It’ll take six or seven minutes. That’s longer than a direct transfer would take, because it has to decompress the data.’

Bianca kept watching Adam. His eye movements, she realised, mirrored the unconscious flicks of a person recalling memories – but at a far greater speed. ‘You know, I have real trouble reducing the sum total of a person’s self to just “data”.’

‘Would you prefer if I called it the “soul”?’ Kiddrick replied sarcastically.

They waited for the device to do its work. The whirlwind of colours on the graphic eventually dimmed and slowed. Kiddrick peered at some numbers on the screen, then nodded. ‘Okay, it’s done. Now, Dr Childs.’ He gestured theatrically at Adam. ‘I’d like you to meet . . . Conrad Wilmar.’

Adam sat up, blinking. His gaze hopped to each person around the table. ‘Okay, ah . . . yeah, I can do without the whole staring thing, thanks.’

Bianca was no expert in American accents, but even from those few words she could tell that Adam’s had changed. It did sound like Wilmar’s, but she wasn’t prepared to accept that alone as proof that the PERSONA process genuinely worked.

‘The memory check?’ Tony prompted.

‘Yes, yes.’ Kiddrick signalled for Adam to face him. ‘Okay. What’s your full name?’

‘Conrad Mathias Wilmar,’ said Adam, peering quizzically back at him.

‘What was your date of birth?’

‘June twelfth, 1959. At twelve minutes past six. So, six twelve on six twelve.’ A lopsided grin at the quirky coincidence.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Bridgeport, Connecticut.’

‘Your mother’s maiden name?’

‘Schumacher.’

Kiddrick nodded, then an oily little smirk crept on to his face. ‘Now . . . what’s your most guilty secret? The one that you’d least want anyone else to ever know?’

‘I . . .’ Adam’s expression suddenly turned to one of shame, even alarm. ‘I, I mean he, he . . . I’ve been unfaithful to my wife. There’s another woman, Meg, I’ve been seeing. We work together.’

To Bianca, it felt as though each word was being forced out of him at gunpoint, so clear was his reluctance to make the admission. She looked at the others, to find that the three men were regarding Adam with anything from mild curiosity – Tony – to Kiddrick’s outright amusement. ‘Wait a minute,’ the latter said. ‘Not Meg Garner, surely?’

Adam nodded frantically. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

Kiddrick chuckled. ‘Well, that should be fun next time I go down to Carnegie Mellon!’ Adam’s face expressed utter dismay.

‘Wait a minute,’ protested Bianca. ‘You just got Adam – Conrad – whichever, to confess his biggest secret, and you’re treating it all as a big laugh? I mean, he’s . . .’ She stopped, unsure exactly what to say. Did she mean Adam, or Conrad? Who was the man in front of her?

‘Everything we learn using the PERSONA process remains top secret,’ Morgan said. ‘For reasons of national security. Nothing we discover can be used in a court of law, because we don’t officially exist.’

If he had been trying to reassure her, it had almost entirely the opposite effect. ‘That implies you’re operating outside the law.’ Morgan said nothing.

‘Ah, we have a bleeding heart in our midst,’ said Kiddrick. ‘I suppose you’re going to say we should reach out to terrorists,’ an airy wave of one hand, ‘and try to empathise with their issues – rather than putting Hellfire missiles through their windows.’

‘I suppose you’re going to say we should bomb them because “they hate us for our freedoms”, or something equally idiotic,’ she shot back. Morgan was less than impressed, but Tony seemed to have a more nuanced outlook, giving her a small smile.

‘We’re not here to argue about politics,’ Morgan said impatiently. ‘Dr Childs, what do you think of PERSONA? The results, I mean – not the ethics.’

‘Damn, and I was just about to start a ten-minute rant about that,’ she replied, before turning back to Adam. ‘It’s still hard to believe. I mean, I can’t imagine why you would, but you might just be acting.’ If he was, she had to admit, he was delivering an Oscar-worthy performance. His anguish at exposing Wilmar’s affair had appeared utterly genuine and heartfelt.

‘It’s not an act,’ said Kiddrick. ‘To all intents and purposes, right now Adam Gray is Conrad Wilmar. Whatever Wilmar knows, he does. That’s one reason I picked Wilmar’s persona for this test. He doesn’t work in quite the same field as you, but there’s some crossover. Agent briefings don’t go so far as to give them a doctorate in biochemistry, so test him for yourself.’

‘If he’s now Conrad Wilmar, then where’s Adam Gray?’

‘Oh, I’m still Adam,’ said Adam, swinging himself off the table and standing up. ‘It’s not as if I’ve, y’know, disappeared? Or been subsumed, anything like that. I’m still me, I’m always in control. It’s just that now there’s this whole temporary other me in here too.’ His hands flicked excitedly in time with his words, as if trying to fan them towards her more quickly. ‘So, yeah, test me. What do you want to know?’

He certainly had Wilmar’s mannerisms and rat-a-tat speech pattern. ‘Okay,’ Bianca said hesitantly. ‘You said you were working on treatments for biological weapons?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Specifically, meningitis?’

He nodded. ‘We’ve encountered a strain of N. meningitidis that’s a lot more virulent than normal, and resistant to the standard vaccines. Nasty little SOB! Not sure where it came from, but we’ve got our suspicions. Da, comrades!’ He tapped the side of his nose.

‘What’s the effect on the brain?’

‘What you’d expect; swelling of the meninges, particularly concentrated in the pia mater. It has a tendency to spread to the spinal pia too, but only once the initial infection is firmly established.’

‘What’s the treatment?’

‘Straight in with empirics, of course, backed up by an adjuvant course of corticosteroids. The doses need to be higher than normal, but at this stage we’re just trying to stabilise things.’ His speech quickened. ‘Then we’ve got a suite of new antibiotics that we can tailor to the exact results of the CSF test – I can’t tell you the specific compositions, though. You don’t have clearance. Sorry.’ He seemed genuinely apologetic.

‘That’s okay.’ What he had told her was accurate enough, rattled out without hesitation, but Kiddrick clearly wanted to test her as much as she was supposed to test Adam. She drew on her own memories to devise something particularly probing. ‘There was a paper that came out about two years ago, on the effects of new-generation cephalosporins on brain chemistry, particularly enzyme—’

‘Oh, yeah, yeah!’ Adam interrupted, with great enthusiasm. ‘Hartmann and Yun’s paper. Yes, I read it. Helped a lot with the transpeptidation issues of our new drugs. Smart guys.’

‘Yeah, they are.’ Bianca was startled that not only had he heard of a decidedly esoteric scientific paper, but also that he had correctly – and instantly – identified its authors based on only a most general description. That was definitely beyond anything she could imagine his having been briefed on.

Kiddrick regarded her smugly. ‘Convinced?’

‘I’d have to say . . . yes,’ she admitted.

‘Good. Adam, there’s nothing else we should know about Wilmar, is there? He’s not selling secrets to the Chinese or plotting to release anthrax on the New York subway?’

Adam shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. Jeez, suspicious much?’

‘It’s best to be sure while we have the opportunity,’ said Morgan. ‘Okay, Dr Kiddrick, bring him back to normal.’

Kiddrick picked up the injector again and told Adam to return to the operating table. Another hiss from the gun, and Adam closed his eyes. Bianca watched in fascination as Wilmar’s twitchiness seemed to dissolve, returning him to the same blank, unrevealing state as before.

‘How much will he remember?’ she asked.

‘From Wilmar? Only anything he specifically recalled from the implanted persona,’ Kiddrick answered. ‘Other than that, nothing.’

‘We’ll check, though,’ said Tony. ‘Adam – what pets did Conrad Wilmar have as a kid? What were they called?’

Adam sat up. ‘He had . . .’ He trailed off. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The name of his high school?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But he still remembers things like the day Wilmar was born?’ said Bianca.

‘Six twelve, six twelve,’ Adam cut in before she could continue.

‘Yes, like that. How does that happen?’

Kiddrick began to remove the skullcap. ‘The same way any memory is kept. Short-term to long-term transfer, if you go by the Atkinson–Shiffrin model.’

‘I’m more of a Baddeley theorist myself, but I understand what you mean. If he brings something out of the persona’s memory, it stays in his?’

‘Exactly.’ He tugged the cap free. ‘All right, Adam, you can get down now.’

Adam climbed off the table. Unlike when he had hopped down as Wilmar, his movements were smooth, precise, with no wasted energy. He stood, watching the others impassively.

Bianca had a question. ‘Adam?’

‘Yes?’

‘You remember things from Wilmar’s memories – but do you actually remember what it was like to be him?’

A fleeting look of incomprehension. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you remember his feelings? The enthusiasm when he – I mean, you, were talking about his work, or the . . . the shame when you told us about his affair?’

‘Meg Garner,’ Kiddrick said quietly, chuckling again. ‘Who would have thought?’

Bianca shot him a dirty look before returning her attention to Adam, trying to judge what was going on behind his mask. But she could pick up nothing conclusive. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said at last.

‘Well, anyway,’ said Kiddrick, ‘now you’ve seen that PERSONA works as advertised, you’ll need to know how to operate the device in the field. We’ll start the lessons tomorrow, at nine sharp.’

‘I think we need to give Dr Childs some time to acclimatise first,’ said Tony, politely but firmly. ‘Considering that she’s just flown here from England with, what, one change of clothes?’

‘Yeah, afraid so,’ she replied. ‘I was rather under the impression that I’d be flying back home tomorrow.’

Tony smiled. ‘I’m sure our budget can stretch to a trip to Macy’s, at the very least. Can’t it, Martin?’

Morgan was less amused. ‘As I said earlier, Dr Childs, we’ll set you up with everything you need while you’re here. We’ll take care of everything regarding your absence from Luminica as well.’

‘That’s work – what about personal matters?’ Tony asked. ‘Have you even told your family and friends about this yet?’ One eyebrow rose slightly. ‘Boyfriend?’

‘No, I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone,’ she complained. ‘My parents’ll think I’ve gone mad when I say I’ve suddenly gone to the States for no reason I can tell them about. And no, I don’t have a boyfriend.’ The eyebrow rose higher. She tried to hide a smile, feeling her cheeks flush a little at his suggestive attention.

‘It’ll all be taken care of,’ Morgan reiterated. ‘Okay, we still have some more points to cover, so Dr Childs, if you’ll come with me?’

‘Good to have you aboard,’ said Tony as Morgan led her to the door.

‘Thanks.’ She gave him a small smile in reply, then glanced back at Adam.

His face was completely void of expression.