“That’ll be the chrysotile from Union Quebecois,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“It should be. If they haven’t sent us rock salt by mistake again.” He laid down his crowbar and straightened up panting, his breath steaming in the cold air.

“If they have, they’ll pay for it.” She grinned. “Go make yourself a pot of tea, I don’t want you freezing to death on the job.”

“Um, yes, Ma’am.” Roger shuffled toward the other back room—the one Miriam intended to have converted into that luxury, a kitchen and indoor toilet block for the work force—that currently held only a cast-iron wood stove, a stack of lumber, and a kettle. He gave her a wide berth, as if being female in the workplace might be contagious. Miriam watched his back disappear before she knelt to pick up the crowbar, and went around the lid of the crate levering out the retaining nails. Men. She laid the crowbar down and dusted her skirt off before he returned, bearing a chipped mug containing some liquid as dark as coffee.

“I think you’ll find it easier to open now,” Miriam remarked, laying one hand on the lid. “What have you got in mind for resin processing this week?”

“I was thinking about the vulcanization process,” Roger muttered. “I want to see how varying the sulfate concentration affects the stiffness of the finished mixture.”

“I was asking about resins,” Miriam pointed out. “In particular, the epoxide sample I suggested you look into on Thursday. Have you done anything with it yet?”

“Um, I was getting to it.” Roger glanced at her face then looked away bashfully.

“That’s why I suggested a timetable,” said Miriam. “You can estimate how long each batch will take to run; you already do that for yourself, don’t you? Put the timetable on the blackboard and I won’t have to keep asking you the same questions.”

“Oh, alright then.” He nodded.

“I wanted the epoxide sample running as soon as possible because we have a possible customer,” she added.

“A customer?” He brightened visibly.

“Yes, a customer.” She kept her face sober. “But we won’t have them if we don’t have a suitable product, will we? They’re going to want an extensive range of samples in about four weeks time, for their own materials testing people. That’s why I want you to get on to the epoxide-based samples as soon as possible. If you time the kiln runs right, you can probably put your sulfate experiments through at the same time. Just as long as they don’t hold up the epoxide.”

Oh, right. I’ll do it that way, then,” he said, almost carelessly. And he would. She’d met Roger’s type before, hammering keyboards into submission in dot-com start-ups. He’d work overnight if he had to, without even noticing, just to get the product ready to meet the deadline—as long as he had a target to aim for. All this thrashing about with rubber and vulcanization processes was just a distraction.

“I’m going to be in the office today,” she added. “I’ve got an idea to work on. The carpenter will be in here tomorrow to work on the fume cupboard, and then the kitchen. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t happen to know any model engineers looking for work? I have some mechanical assemblies to get started.”

“Mechanical—” he almost went cross-eyed. “Why?”

“A better way of applying this wonderful high-friction material to the task of stopping a moving vehicle,” she pointed out. “You think this high-friction compound will work well if you just clamp it to a pneumonic? It’ll work—right until the rubber wall of the wheel wears through and it blows out. What we need is a hub-mounted disk bolted to the wheel with a block of brake material to either side, which can be clamped or released by hydraulic calipers, balanced to apply force evenly. With me so far?”

“Um, I think so.” He looked abstracted. “I, I don’t know any model artificers. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’ll find someone.”

“Oh I think I will, indeed I do.” She headed back to the office, leaving Roger wrestling a ten-kilogram lump of very high-grade rock wool onto his workbench.

The day passed in a blur. Miriam had rigged a travel transformer for her laptop, which she kept in a locked drawer in the office along with an inkjet printer and a small digitizer tablet. The CAD software was a pain to use with such a small screen, but far better than the huge draftsman’s board and ink pens in the far corner of the room. Between calls she lost herself in an extruded 3D model of a brake assembly—one of her own invention, crude but recognizable as the ancestor of late twentieth-century disk brakes. Another file awaited her attention—steel radial bands for reinforcing tires. The idea was sound, but she kept having to divert into her physics and engineering textbooks. Her calculus was rustier than she was willing to admit, and she was finding some of the work extremely hard.

But perfection didn’t matter. Getting there first mattered. Get there first and just-good-enough and you could buy the specialists to polish the design to perfection later. This was the lesson Miriam had learned from watching over the shoulders of her Silicon Valley colleagues, and from watching a myriad of biotech companies rise and fall—and it was the lesson she intended to shove up New Britain’s industrialists so hard it made them squeak.

One o’clock. Miriam blinked, suddenly dizzy. Her buttocks ached from the hard stool, she was hungry, and she needed the lavatory. She stood up and put the notebook PC away, then headed for the toilet—an outhouse in the backyard. Afterwards she slipped out the front door in search of lunch. Of such elements were a working day made.

In the public environment of the hotel, or the lab, she cut an eccentric, possibly scandalous figure. On the streets she was just another woman, better dressed than most, hurrying about her errands. Anonymity of a kind: Treasure it while you can, she told herself as she lined up at a street corner where a baker’s boy had set up a stand to sell hot bacon rolls. It won’t last.

She returned to the office and had been busy for an hour—phoning her lawyer, then calling a commercial agent at what passed for a recruiting house—when there was a peremptory knock on the side window. “Who’s there?” she demanded, standing up to open it.

“Police. Inspector Smith at your service.” A bushy moustache and a suspicious, beefy face stood behind an imposing warrant card with a crown and heraldic beasts cavorting atop it chased her in through the open window. “Homeland Defense Bureau. Are you Mrs. Fletcher?”

“Uh, yes.” Flustered, Miriam tried to pull herself together. “How can I be of service?”

“I’d like a word with you if I may.”

“Ah, do come in, then.” Miriam hurried to open the door. Shit, what did I do wrong? She wondered. There was a deep hollow icy feeling in her stomach as she hauled the door open and smiled, ingratiatingly. “What can I do for you, officer?” she asked, leaving the door and retreating behind the front desk.

“Ah, well.” He nodded, then remembered his manners and took his hat off.

Bizarre, thought Miriam, fascinated as a bird facing a snake. To her surprise she realized that she wasn’t frightened for herself—only for her plans, which depended on continuity and legality for their success.

“Been in business long?” asked the Inspector.

“No,” she said, tight-lipped. “This is a new venture.”

“Ah well.”

He looked around slowly. Luckily she’d put the computer away before lunch, and everything was much as it should be in an office. He moved to shove the door closed. “Don’t do that,” Miriam said quickly.

“Alright.” He found the one comfortable chair in the office—a wooden swivel chair too low to work at the writing desks—and looked her in the eyes. “How long have you known Erasmus Burgeson?”

“Huh?” Miriam blinked. “Not long. A few weeks?”

“I see.” Smith nodded portentiously. “How did you come to know him?”