"I was highly disorientated," said Arthur, his memory of at least this part of his journey now all too uppermost in his mind. "I walked out of the woods and a man was suddenly there pointing a shotgun at me. He fired a warning shot but it only missed me by a couple of feet. I couldn't tell whether he was a very good shot or a bad one and had meant to blow my head off." He managed a small laugh. "It's not the sort of thing you want to happen twice."
"It's not your fault," I said, "it's whoever sabotaged your mind that's to blame."
"While he was reloading I panicked and rushed him. I grabbed the gun and smacked him around the head as hard as I could with the butt. He fell and struck his head on the ground. I wasn't sure he was dead but he looked it. I didn't know if anyone else was around so I just ran back through the woods, dumping the shotgun somewhere on the way. It soon became clear that nobody was following me so I walked back to the car. I may have sat there for a while trying to calm down and work out what was going on."
He seemed relieved to have got it off his chest.
"Are you okay to carry on?"
"Yes," he replied, "what do we do next?"
"Did you get all that," I asked, going back to join Adam and Hannah.
"The gist," said Hannah. "So do we just leave, or what?"
"I don't know," I said, "I tried phoning the boss but there's no signal here."
"Ssh!" hissed Adam. "There's a vehicle approaching."
"Cover me," I whispered, moving just out of the trees and focusing the binoculars. "I thought so, it's John, he must have heard the shot."
"If that woman thinks she's surrounded," said Hannah, "she may decide to go out in a blaze of glory."
"I agree," said Adam, "Jen, you'll have to risk signalling John in morse."
Using the glint of the sun on the lenses I flashed the word halt three times. I saw no return signal but the car stopped and reversed a few yards, then the engine petered out.
"As we can't use our phones here we'll have to call this ourselves. Suggestions?" I asked.
"We turn around and go back to the main road and leave her to it?" offered Hannah.
"We capture and interrogate her, make sure she didn't follow Agent 4 and learn anything she shouldn't know?"
"I told you," said Arthur, "I wasn't followed."
"Sorry, but we can't rely on your memory. You only have partial recall; she could have followed you back to your car, taken the license plate and called the cops. Or you could have come back here - there are still two hours unaccounted for."
Arthur nodded in agreement, but also threw an angry glance at Adam.
"What do you think?" I asked him.
"I'm not sure. I can't even be sure I did kill him, he may be wounded inside the house or in hospital. Regardless of that, she hasn't actually seen me, but then I don't think she did when I was first here. If we leave then she can't identify me. If the man survived I doubt he's in a state to identify me. I know I don't have total recall yet but why would I start blurting out state secrets for no reason? The mangled code just screwed with my memory, it didn't do anything else."
"So far as we know," said Adam.
"Well we can't stay here all day," I summarised, "we have no food or anything except handguns. We don't know how many people are inside, or how many dogs they have. They may be government-hating, survivalist maniacs with booby traps in their back garden. I vote we get out of here pronto and report back. They can check out local police and hospital records for any mention of the incident. I think on balance we have nothing to worry about here."
Adam nodded reluctantly.
I signalled to John to go back to the main road and we set off back through the trees.