For once, Evan couldn’t wait to spend the day at his desk. He arrived a half-hour early at the office Monday morning, this time taking the bus from West George Street to Festival Park. It was the commute with the least amount of walking, a relief after his strenuous bedtime adventures with Ben.

Today he and his team would figure out who was behind Saturday’s shenanigans at St. Andrew’s Square. Or at least start the process of figuring it out. Or at least follow a few leads and hope they led somewhere. Intelligence work often required the patience of a sedated saint, to use a Ben catchphrase.

Without even fetching a coffee, Evan dived straight into the investigation. First he wanted to determine whether someone from the BVP rally could have been lurking outside St. Andrew’s in the white SUV.

Using the city’s CCTV database, he brought up the footage at the top of Buchanan Street. If the rally had still been in progress during the wedding, it would eliminate his primary suspect: Jordan Lithgow.

But the footage showed the street in its normal Saturday afternoon shopping bustle. The rally was over, its participants gone.

No surprise there. Detective Sergeant Fowles had told Evan the BVP folk and their counter-protesters had been ordered to disperse at one o’clock. They could have been anywhere by the time the wedding started at two.

Kay approached his desk. “I’ve sent your warrant request for David Wallace up to the Home Office for final approval.”

“Thanks.” Last night Evan had plugged the phone numbers of David and Jordan into Ben’s open-source intelligence software WhoWhatWhere. It had produced no results, as both men were canny enough to turn off the location setting on the mobile phones they used for British Values Party business.

MI5 surveillance, on the other hand, didn’t need GPS to track a phone—with a warrant, they could do it using mobile-tower signals alone.

“How long do you think approval will take?” Evan asked Kay.

“Anywhere from a day to never.”

“Never?” The Home Office rarely rejected surveillance warrants—mostly because MI5 officers rarely requested them without substantial cause. No one wanted the extra work involved in surveillance unless it was crucial to an operation.

Kay sighed. “Due to the Service’s notorious history of surveilling politicians, Her Majesty’s Government is now reluctant to sign off on a warrant for members of political parties.”

Lewis looked up from his desk. “Sorry to eavesdrop, but BVP’s not a real party. They’ve no candidates.”

Kay turned to him. “They claim they plan to stand someone in the next council elections.”

“They can claim whatever they like,” Evan said, “but that doesn’t make it true.”

“Seriously, Kay,” Lewis added. “All anyone’s got to do now to avoid surveillance is stick the word ‘party’ in their name?”

“Of course not,” Kay said. “There’s simply a higher threshold of suspicion for politically active persons.”

“We’re five months post-independence referendum,” Evan said. “Everyone in Scotland is politically active.”

“Everyone but us. That’s the point.” Kay patted his shoulder before walking away.

“My feeling?” Lewis said to Evan in a low voice. “The public already think we stalk everyone, so we might as well do it. Either way no one trusts us, but if we spy, at least we get something out of it.”

Evan gave a noncommittal grunt, unsure how to respond. Lewis was barely thirty. Would Evan be that jaded in five short years? Would it even take that long?

Turning back to the job in hand, he logged into MI5’s image search software, which would retrieve every photo and video posted to social-media platforms within provided parameters. He included the more obscure social networks, figuring a terrorist might prefer to upload an image to a site with little active traffic so it could be shared with associates but kept out of the public eye.

In one of these images, Evan hoped to find evidence of pre-wedding reconnaissance, or maybe even a clearer picture of the occupants of the white Outlander—which the rental-car company claimed had been stolen after their office closed Saturday at noon.

He drew a one-kilometer radius around a satellite image of St. Andrew’s in the Square, then entered a date range of the previous Friday through the present. The program digested the request, its creeping status bar telling Evan he had time to finally get a coffee.

When he returned to his desk, the search was still going. He eased his tension by cleaning protein-bar crumbs out of his keyboard and refereeing an office debate on whether Sam Allardyce should see out the season managing West Ham United.

Finally a list of images appeared. Evan groaned at its size: 1,056 photos, 213 videos.

He viewed a short, shaky video of the evacuation itself, taken by one of the bridesmaids. Ben appeared briefly, assisting one of the older guests across a junction near Glasgow Green. Evan saved the video in case it contained details he didn’t yet know were useful.

Then he sifted through dozens more photos and videos taken throughout the weekend, mostly by tourists with a chronic lack of imagination. After two hours without a break, his eyelids began to itch, and his neck felt like a steel spike. With cramping fingers, he scrolled one more time.

“Well, hello.” A video’s display frame showed the wedding guests filing out of St. Andrew’s. The angle was high, perhaps from an upper floor of one of the three-story blocks of flats on the square. The ten-minute video had been posted Saturday night to Imageo, the site Ben had reminded Evan about on their first date. It was titled 12520_7121197125_165189198.mp4—probably a file name generated automatically by the device.

In defiance of his stiff neck, Evan clicked.

The video began with a slow scan of the square and the side of St. Andrew’s. The image was slightly blurred by the window a few inches in front of what seemed a simple phone camera.

The pavement outside St. Andrew’s was empty but for a few passing pedestrians, as was the loading bay. Evan’s heart raced faster with every second that nothing happened.

“What are you waiting for?” he whispered. Had the filmmaker phoned in the anonymous tip? Or were they working with a potential attacker and wanted to record what they thought would be the ensuing carnage?

The white Outlander appeared at last, pulling slowly into the loading bay and giving Evan a sense of déjà vu. Soon Ben appeared from the front of St. Andrew’s. As the wedding party and guests filed out, the camera grew shakier. Evan turned up the volume on his earphones to hear what sounded like rapid, nervous breathing.

After dealing with a wedding-party kerfuffle and stopping a tiny tuxedo-kilted pageboy from running into the street, Ben trudged toward the Outlander with determination. Though Evan knew what was going to happen, he struggled not to chew his nails in suspense.

The SUV drove off, the squeal of tires audible even through the pane of glass.

Hang on. Evan rewound the video, restarting it before the Outlander left the loading bay.

There it was—just as Ben neared the vehicle, the man filming let out what sounded like a soft curse. Evan couldn’t make out the word and wasn’t sure it was in English. He let the video play on.

Minutes passed. Ben helped arrange the wedding party, then disappeared inside St. Andrew’s.

Suddenly the phone camera tilted, then swooped downward. There came a clattering, and the video went dark for a few seconds.

When the camera swept back up to face the window, the man had shifted to the left. Evan could now see a reflection in the glass near one edge of the video’s frame.

His pulse quickened. The reflection was of a laptop, sitting open behind the man. On the screen was a—

The video ended.

“Fuck.” Evan replayed the last ten seconds frame by frame, trying to get a better look at the reflected laptop, but the image was too blurry, showing nothing but a white glow on a dark background. “Fuck!”

“Need help?” came a voice beside him.

Evan looked up at Ned. “Did I summon you with my thoughts?”

“You summoned me with your cursing. I know computer-generated frustration when I hear it.”

“If a photo is uploaded to a platform before it’s cropped, you can find the full version, right?”

“Aye, it’s easy. You just—”

“Can the same be done with videos?” Nothing in the video suggested it had been cropped, but it was too suspicious not to examine every possibility.

“Sometimes.” Ned peered at Evan’s screen. “People still use Imageo?”

“Not if they want the world to see their posts.”

“Hm, I can’t keep up with what’s popular. My daughter says she’s leaving Facebook cos it’s got too many old people. When did you want to give her that goalkeeper training session, by the way?”

“Next week, after our cup tie,” Evan said. “Will you reconstruct this video for me?”

“I’ll give it a go.”

Evan sent his colleague the link, then followed him to his desk. Ned opened the page and said, “That’s an odd title.”

“Probably just the file name generated by the device.”

“Nah, those names are usually date, underscore, time. That’s not the structure here.”

“You’re right.” Evan felt stupid for missing the pattern. “Maybe the number is a code. The XRW types like to use A for 1, B for 2, et cetera, for their tattoos and all.” He thought of Jordan’s knuckles inked in a calligraphic 88, which equaled HH or Heil Hitler. “But this can’t be that simple.”

“Go and try it.” Ned flicked his hand toward Evan’s desk. “It’ll keep you out of my nonexistent hair while I work.”

Evan hurried back to his desk and copied the file name onto his jotter:

12520_7121197125_165189198

The first group of numerals gave him ABEB0. There were no relevant results for the word or acronym ABEB, which meant the code had a higher-level key than the A = 1, B = 2 code used by the extreme-right-wingers. Cryptology wasn’t his strong suit, but their office’s GCHQ liaison had a copy of the world’s best decryption software.

He tore the sheet from his jotter and started toward her desk. Then he stopped and looked down at the paper, for the first time seeing the 2 and the 0 as a unit.

It’s a 20, you fool.

Relieved he’d not embarrassed himself, Evan went back to his desk and changed B0 to T, the twentieth letter of the alphabet.

ABET. A real word—one associated with crime, no less.

The conversion of the second set of numerals, GABAAIBE, gave him no joy. He went back to the first grouping. 1 and 2 could be 12, which would make the first word…LET. And the second word definitely began with G.

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh fuck no.

It took but a minute to confirm that the file name spelled out the same three words that had rasped over the anti-terrorism hotline Saturday afternoon:

LET GLASGAY PERISH

“Got it!” Ned raised both fists high. “There’s an extra forty-three seconds at the end of the video.”

Evan took the sheet of paper with the code and went over to Ned, who started the video at the original ending.

Through the window, a few dozen guests roamed beside St. Andrew’s while the wedding party took pictures on the portico. A woman in a yellow bridesmaid dress came out of the front door and was greeted with what looked like relief.

Evan’s gaze flicked between this main scene and the reflection in the glass. Assuming the phone’s camera was using autofocus, a tiny adjustment in position might bring the laptop into momentary clarity.

The man filming the video let out a frustrated noise, then shifted his weight.

“There!” Evan said. “Go back.”

Ned stopped the video, then reversed frame by frame until the reflection came into sharp relief. The laptop was sitting on what was probably a bed, based on the height relative to the windowsill. On the mostly white screen was a black rectangle featuring white Arabic letters above a white disc with black letters.

Evan drew in a breath. “Is that…”

“I hope not,” Ned whispered. Then he raised his voice. “Adira, can we trouble you for a second?”

She held up a finger, then after a final word with one of the junior analysts, came over to Ned’s desk. “What do you—” Adira stopped when she saw the screen, then looked up at Evan. “Tell me that’s not part of Operation Caps Lock.”

“It is. Tell me that’s not the flag of ISIL.”

“I’m afraid so.” Adira sighed. “Whoever this is, they’re either part of or inspired by the group calling itself the Islamic State.”