The officer listened to him quizzically. 'Can you prove your identity?' he asked.

'My wallet's in my holdall. It's outside. I can get it if you like.'

'Just tell us where it is.'

He described where he'd left his bag. Five minutes later the officer had his driving licence. 'Assuming the document is genuine, you are Dr Leon Anawak, resident in Vancouver.'

'That's what I've been saying all along.'

'People say the damnedest things. Do you want some coffee? You look frozen.'

'I am frozen.'

The officer got up from the desk and went to the coffee machine. He pressed a button. A paper cup dropped down and filled with steaming liquid. He gave it to Anawak. 'Well, I don't know what to make of your story,' he said. 'If you're part of the committee, why didn't you request permission in advance?'

'Ask your superiors. I've been trying to contact Inglewood for weeks.'

The officer's brow furrowed. 'You're working in an advisory capacity?'

'Yes.' Anawak glanced around. He suspected that the room, with its plastic chairs and shabby tables, was usually occupied by dock workers on their breaks. It had evidently been converted into a temporary military base. 'What now?' he asked.

'Now?' The officer sat opposite him and clasped his hands on the table. 'I'm going to ask you to stay here for a while. I can't just let you go – this is a military exclusion zone.'

'With all due respect, I didn't see any signs.'

'Well, there's no sign saying you can break in either.'

Anawak was in no position to argue. It had been a crazy idea in the first place, although it hadn't been completely fruitless – at least now he knew that the military was involved and that the organisms on the hull were alive and under observation. But the mussels he'd collected would never get to Nanaimo, if the authorities kept stalling.

The officer pulled a radio out from his belt and made a brief call. 'You're in luck,' he said. 'Someone's on their way to take care of you.'

'Why don't you just take my details and let me go?'

'It's not as easy as that.'

'But I haven't done anything wrong,' said Anawak. He didn't sound convincing, even to himself.

The officer smiled. 'Committee or no committee, trespassing's a crime.'

He walked out, leaving Anawak with the other soldiers. They didn't talk to him, but they were watching him closely. He felt warmer now, with the coffee – and with irritation at himself for messing up. The only comfort was the prospect of finding out more from whoever was coming to 'take care' of him.

Half an hour passed. Then Anawak heard a helicopter approaching. He turned to look out of the window facing the dock. For a moment the noise of the rotors was deafening as the helicopter swept over the building and came in to land.

Steps rang out on the paving outside. Snatches of conversation drifted through the open door. Two soldiers came in, followed by an officer. 'A visitor for you, Dr Anawak.' He stepped aside as a fourth person appeared in the doorway. Anawak recognised her immediately. She walked up to him, and he found himself gazing into her clear blue eyes. Aquamarine in an Oriental face. 'Good evening,' she said, in a soft, cultivated voice.

It was General Commander Judith Li.

3 May

Thorvaldson, Norwegian Continental Slope

Clifford Stone had been born in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, the second of three children. By the time he reached his first birthday there was nothing cute about him. He was small, scrawny and unusually ugly. His family treated him as though he were an accident- an embarrassing glitch that might go unnoticed if they ignored it. Unlike his older brother, he wasn't deemed worthy of responsibility, and no one spoiled him as they did his younger sister. He wasn't treated badly – in fact, he didn't want for anything, except attention and warmth.

As a child he had no friends, and at eighteen, when his hair receded, he didn't have a girlfriend either. At school he passed all of his exams with flying colours, but even that met with little interest from his family.

Stone went on to study engineering. He had a talent for it and at last – practically overnight – he received the acknowledgement he'd always desired. But it was strictly professional. Stone the man was disappearing – not so much because no one was interested in him, but because he didn't allow himself a private life. The idea terrified him: it meant a return to being overlooked. While the gifted engineer Clifford Stone rose through the ranks at Statoil, he learned to despise the insecure bald man who went home alone.

The company became his life, his family and his fulfilment because it gave him something he'd never known before: the knowledge that he was better at something than everyone else, that he was in the lead. It was intoxicating yet agonising – a constant rush to stay ahead. Before long he was so preoccupied with his quest for the ultimate achievement that none of his successes pleased him. He simply rushed on, trying to overtake himself. To stop would have meant catching a glimpse of the scrawny boy with the oddly adult face, who'd been disregarded for too long to have any regard for himself. There was nothing Stone feared more than looking into his own dark, defiant eyes.

In recent years Statoil had set up a new division for the development of emergent technologies. Stone was quick to recognise the opportunities offered by a switch to fully automated plants. He presented the board with a range of proposals, and was entrusted with building a subsea processor designed by FMC Kongsberg, the renowned Norwegian firm. A number of sub-surface units were already in use elsewhere, but the Kongsberg prototype was an entirely new system, which promised enormous savings and would revolutionise offshore processing. The construction of the prototype took place with the knowledge and approval of the Norwegian government, although officially it never happened. Stone was aware that they'd put it into operation sooner than some people would have liked. Greenpeace, in particular, would have insisted on another set of tests, which would have taken months to complete. The distrust was understandable: on the scale of human and moral failure, the damage done by the petroleum industry was hard to exceed. No other business had the planet in such a stranglehold, with its web of vested interests. So the project stayed secret. Even when Kongsberg released a concept study on its website, the Statoil operation remained under wraps. A spectre was at work on the seabed, and the only reason it wasn't haunting its creators was because it functioned perfectly.

It would never have occurred to Stone to think otherwise. After endless tests he was convinced that they'd considered every risk. Why look further? It would only indulge the tendency towards indecision that Stone discerned and despised at the heart of the state-owned company. Besides, two factors made hesitation impossible. The first was the chance Stone saw to continue his technological trailblazing as a member of the board. The second was that the oil war was about to be lost by all parties. It wasn't a question of when the last drop of oil would flow but when extracting it ceased to make financial sense. An oilfield's typical yield obeyed the laws of physics. When a field was first drilled, oil shot out at high pressure and continued to do so for the next few decades. In time, the pressure decreased – the Earth held on to the oil in tiny pores by capillary pressure. Oil that had risen up of its own accord had to be pumped out at exorbitant cost. The yield fell rapidly, long before the reservoir was empty. It didn't matter how much oil was left: when extracting it consumed more energy than the oil itself could generate, it was better to leave it alone.