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The view suddenly tumbled, the ROV corkscrewing down the pipe as it finally kicked free. Matt struggled to regain control. ‘How far, how far?’

‘Ten metres,’ said Rad.

The water level was still falling. The camera breached the surface, rivulets streaming down the lens.

Another few seconds, and the robot submarine would run aground . . .

‘Almost there!’ Rad cried. ‘Three metres, two—’

The pipe widened out. The ROV had reached an access shaft, a rusting ladder rising upwards. Matt reversed the propeller. Servo skidded to a stop on the bottom of the pipe, kicking up a bow wave.

‘Bloody hell,’ the Australian said, blowing out a long breath. ‘That was way too close.’

Karima examined the screen, seeing nothing but the pipeline disappearing into the distance. ‘Where’s the junction box?’

‘Above, in the shaft.’ He switched to a second set of controls to operate the ROV’s manipulator arm. It had a camera of its own mounted on its ‘wrist’; the view changed to an even more fish-eyed angle as the arm unfolded. The bottom of the image was dominated by a pointed probe: a cutter. ‘Let’s have a dekko . . .’

The camera tilted upwards, an LED spotlight flicking on to illuminate the shaft. The small lens made it hard to judge scale, the ladder seeming to have been made for giants, but the manhole cover at the top was probably less than three metres above. Far nearer was their objective - a fibre-optic junction box fixed to the shaft’s side. The main cable trunk ran through it, but another thick line emerged from its top and ran upwards, connecting the UN’s underground data centre to the rest of the digital world.

‘That’s it,’ said Rad, relieved. He indicated a lock on the box’s front panel. ‘Can you cut through that?’

‘No worries,’ Matt told him, guiding the arm closer. He flicked a switch; in seconds, the cutter’s tip glowed red hot. Carefully tweaking the controls, he touched the tool to the panel and moved it in a circle round the lock. The junction box’s casing was anodised aluminium, watertight and protected against corrosion, but the sheet metal was only thin. Molten droplets fell into the water as the cutter sliced through it.

In less than a minute, the entire lock dropped out of the panel. Matt switched off the cutter and retracted it, a robotic claw swinging up to take its place. It took hold of the edge of the burned hole and tugged until the panel opened. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now what?’

Rad examined a schematic. ‘My source said that the diagnostic port is . . . this one.’ He indicated one of several sockets on the printout. Matt moved the arm to give them a better look at its real-life counterpart. ‘Second row, the bottom one.’

Matt pulled the arm back, tipping it down to look at Servo’s equipment bay. Inside was a length of fibre-optic cable, plug connectors on each end. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to hook up the data link through Servo. You sure this program of yours’ll work?’

Rad dismissed the map from the second laptop’s screen, starting up another application. An unappealingly functional program titled Levenex FODN Diagnostic 3.2a appeared. ‘He says there’s a back door that’ll get us into the UN system. I’ve got the instructions - once we’re in, I can find the digital feeds for the vault’s cameras.’

‘This contact of yours,’ Karima said dubiously, ‘he is reliable, isn’t he?’

Rad smiled. ‘Well, I obviously can’t reveal my sources, but I trust him.’ A beat, the smile turning down a notch. ‘More or less.’

‘I see . . . Still, I’ll call Eddie and tell him we’re in position.’ She took out her phone.

Eddie hadn’t sat down the whole time he was waiting, instead pacing around Nina’s office until his phone rang. ‘Okay. I’m moving,’ he told Karima, then hung up. He collected the case and walked out.

Lola mouthed ‘Good luck’ as he passed. He nodded, then went to the elevators. Steeling himself, he pushed the lowest button and began his descent to the third basement level.

To his relief, his journey was uninterrupted, nobody else boarding the lift. At the