Half an hour later, Smith had fixed the generator, the storm was still raging outside and Whitefield still had not returned from the Jeep. We were all waiting to see who would crack first and suggest going to look for him. Apart from Timkowski, who was concentrating on his surveillance equipment, going up and down through the different wavelengths, trying to see if he could pick up anything useful.

Davenport had attempted to make conversation by asking if anyone had thought to check the weather forecast before we headed out here. Smith, with more forbearance than I'd have given him credit for, replied that it was a freak storm, so by definition it wasn't on the forecast. I'd admired Davenport's ability to ignore the fact that he'd just annoyed the hell out of everyone in the room, and that all but one of us carried a gun. Silence followed, accompanied by a lot of staring into the distance, wondering what we were going to do now and wondering how long we'd be stuck here. There was no way we could drive back to the Army base through this.

I was sat going through my translation of what we'd picked up from our surveillance for about the fourth or fifth time, and I was fed up with looking at it. Frankly, I was bored. I'm used to spending hours concentrating on complex tasks. Most people are aware that you can't translate literally from one language into another. The rules are different (in English, say, you put the adjective before the verb, in French it's the other way around), but, more than that, a language grows out of its culture. Translating direct speech in another language is not a mechanical matter of finding which word matches. You have not only find the words, but hunt after the sense behind what the person is saying, then find a way of conveying that in the language you're translating into, whilst at the same time still listening to what the person speaking is saying and translating that too… it requires very fast, complex thinking.

This kind of thing is one of the reasons I hate meetings so much. I'm not good at the sort of patience you need to put up with other people's posturing. Of course, I work as part of a team most of the time, but that's different. The interplay of other similar minds, other intelligent minds, is just fun, even when we've been arguing with each other over the precise meaning of three sentences for the past hour. I tend to win a lot of those arguments, partly because I have a real gift for languages, having been brought up speaking three tongues from birth and learning more along the way.

Recently, though, I'd been aware that I was beginning to enjoy the challenge of the arguments about the meaning of the intelligence we were working on almost more than the actual translating. It was one of the reasons I'd pushed to come along on this operation. I was beginning to no longer feel stretched by the job I was doing, feeling bored… I sighed, and looked around. Smith and Davenport were still staring into space, each ignoring the other, Timkowski was still hunched over the surveillance gear, and Goren was standing by the window, staring out at the storm.

In a desperate attempt to prevent my brain from suffocating due to the boredom, I decided to play the Animal Game inside my head. It's one of my many mental tricks for surviving dull meetings, and doesn't require a pen and paper, unlike the Translating Game, of which the less said the better… I was still kicking myself about playing that in our meeting earlier in the day. It's quite simple. You try to match the other people in the room to animals, either real or imaginary. (A fellow translator at Interpol taught me this. We used to play it together in dull meetings. He then tried to teach me the Funeral Game, where you kill time by planning the funeral of everyone present in the room. Boy, I was relieved when he got fed up with Interpol and transferred out.)

With the Animal Game, you get bonus points for a particularly apt or non-cliched match. I wouldn't win many points with the selections I was making here. Timkowski was obviously a bat, with his listening skills. Bats are quite small and dainty, though, which wasn't really him. He obviously lifted weights on a regular basis. You got quite big bats in rainforests though... he could be a flying fox, perhaps. Yes, that matched him quite nicely. Smith, with his tendency to sit dead still, then suddenly dart out and annoy everyone, reminded me of nothing so much as a lizard. It was something about the way he seemed to sit still, coldly calculating the best course of action… that, and he had mean eyes. It was a shame; with his regular features and neatly cropped brown hair, he could have been quite good-looking. Nevertheless, there was just something about his perpetually cold expression that instinctively had me raising my guard around him. I didn't trust him further than I could throw him, and since he was half a foot taller than I and obviously in shape, that wasn't far.

Davenport? If he'd had dark hair, he'd have been a crow, or perhaps a raven. Something about the pointy nose and sharp eyes… That, and they're intelligent birds. Davenport didn't quite buzz with intelligence the way Goren did, but you couldn't spend any length of time with him and not pick up the way he evaluated everything around him, quickly assessing anything he saw or heard and then processing it in that cynical way of his. And Goren himself? Interesting question. With his size, that neat, small nose and those elegant folded-back ears, the obvious answer was, a big cat of some sort. Maybe a panther, with that black hair? Nah, panthers are too feminine. Did you get black-furred lions? Maybe that was too much of a cliché… Besides, with lions it's the females who do the hunting, and Goren was too obviously a hunter himself for that analogy to work. Unless I tried casting myself in the role of a young lioness of the pride, part of his harem….

Okay, time to stop playing this game, this was getting silly. I wandered across to the window to see if the storm was dying down. Behind me, Smith reached across and snagged the transcripts I'd been working on. Not for the first time, I wondered exactly why he and Timkowski were on this mission instead of, say, the FBI, given that terrorists on US soil fall under the purview of the FBI. The official answer was that they had better knowledge of Shorokogat's activities than the FBI, since he hadn't previously been active in the US. Given that he was only in the US for a short period of time, it made more sense to send them along than try to bring the FBI up to speed.

I had my own theory that the unofficial answer might involve questions along the lines of "Back during the Cold War, where did Shorokogat get the money to set up in business in the first place?" and "Where did we used to get information about what the Soviets were up to in Yugoslavia?". I very strongly suspected that Shorokogat might have once been one of those criminals who happened to be very useful to the intelligence-gathering community, and a few things Tim Whitefield had said on the way over made me think he had his suspicions about the exact relationship between Shorokogat and the CIA too. I hadn't pursued this theory further because, frankly, I neither needed nor wanted to know any more than I did.

As I joined Goren at the window, I noticed that although he seemed still, his muscles were tense and his hands were twitching, just slightly. I had the weirdest impression that his hands were doing the equivalent of an entire body's-worth of fidgeting. He was staring out at the churning sea. The storm seemed to be dying down slightly, and a murky grey light was beginning to appear. I heard footsteps behind us; Davenport peered over my shoulder. We stood in depressed silence.

"Well, at least we know more than we did when we set out," I said, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

"True. We know more than we did about someone who's almost certainly drowned," Davenport said morosely. I stared at the raging sea, imagined being stuck in a sailboat out there, and couldn't find the heart to argue. Davenport seemed to be taking this personally. I'd seen the same reaction a few times before. No-one in law enforcement of any kind likes to see their prey get away from them.

"They say drowning's an awful way to go," Davenport remarked, more thoughtfully. Beside me, Goren nodded vaguely. Davenport continued. "People think it's peaceful, but I read somewhere you can be conscious right up to the point where your lungs burst." The thought seemed to cheer him up; he was apparently oblivious to the fact that one of us was ignoring him and the other was fervently wishing he'd shut the hell up. "Unless something knocked you over the head first, I suppose…"

Goren turned his head and glowered at Davenport. "There was a kid on that boat."

Davenport stopped in mid-sentence. Then, in a more subdued voice, replied "Thank you for reminding me." We did some more staring in silence. I wondered what exactly Goren was finding so fascinating. His eyes were fixed on one point in particular… "What are you looking at?" I asked.

He stabbed at the window with one long finger. "Over there." We followed where he was pointing. As we looked, there was a bright flash of orange, then another. Then darkness. "Is that lightning?"

"I don't think you get orange lightning…" Goren replied in a thoughtful tone of voice. He was frowning now… Suddenly, Timkowski looked up from his equipment and called us over. His face was white. "Listen to this." He adjusted the equipment so that we could all hear. "This is the Coast Guard radio frequency…"

Crackling out into the room, we heard what was obviously a radio conversation between the local Coast Guard station and some kind of helicopter or search plane…

"…Have you found them?"

"Negative, and we're going to have to return now. I can't risk leaving it any longer, we're already dangerously low on fuel. Is anyone else able to take over? Over."

"Negative. The conditions are too risky. Over."

"They'll have to hope that the tide takes them into that beach… Returning now. Over and out."

"Given the listening range of this equipment, that plane is not more than a few miles from us," Timkowski added. We stared at each other in confusion. "Found who?" Davenport muttered, almost under his breath. I picked up what he must be thinking. Was Shorokogat still alive?