“Yes, you have the qualifications, you’ve taken command of raids before.”

“Okay.” He was trying not to smile.

“Maggie, you’re with me.”

They caught up with Adam Elvin as he was taking a slow, seemingly random walk through Burghal Park. He did something similar most mornings, an amble through a wide-open space where it was difficult for the team to follow unobtrusively on foot.

Paula and Maggie waited in the back of a ten-seater car that was parked at the north end of Burghal Park. The team had the rest of their vehicles spaced evenly around the perimeter, with three officers on foot using their retinal inserts to track his position, never getting closer than five hundred meters, boxing him the whole time. The Burghal was a huge area in the middle of the city, with small lakes, games pitches, tracks, and long greenways of trees brought in from over seventy different planets.

“That’s twice he’s doubled back on his route,” Maggie said. They were watching the images relayed from the retinal inserts on a small screen in the car.

“Standard for him,” Paula said. “He’s a creature of habit. They might be good habits, but any routine will betray you in the end.”

“Is that how you tracked him?”

“Uh-huh. He never uses the same planet twice. And he nearly always uses the Intersolar Socialist Party to set up the first meeting with the local dealer.”

“So you turned Sabbah into your informant and waited.”

“Yes.”

“For nine years. Bloody hell. How many informants do you have, on how many planets?”

“Classified.”

“The way you operate, though, always arresting them for their crimes. That doesn’t make for cooperative informants. You’re taking a big risk on a case this important.”

“They broke the law. They must go to court and take responsibility for their crimes.”

“Hell, you really believe that, don’t you?”

“You’ve accessed my official file. Three times now since this case started.”

Maggie knew she was blushing.

That day Adam Elvin finished his walk in Burghal Park and caught a taxi to a little Italian restaurant on the bank of the River Guhal, which meandered through the eastern districts of the city. While eating a large and leisurely lunch he placed a call to Rachael Lancier, which the metropolitan police had no trouble intercepting.

ELVIN:Something’s come up. I need to talk to you again.

LANCIER:The vehicle you wanted is almost ready for collection, Mr. North. I hope there’s no problem at your end.

ELVIN:No, no problem about the vehicle. I just need to discuss its specifications with you.

LANCIER:The specifications have been agreed upon. As has the price.

ELVIN:This is not an alteration of either. I simply need to speak with you personally to clarify some details.

LANCIER:I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

ELVIN:It’s essential, I’m afraid.

LANCIER:Very well. You know my favorite place. I’ll be there at the usual time today.

ELVIN:Thank you.

LANCIER:And it had better be as important as you say.

Paula shook her head. “Routine,” she said disapprovingly.

Eighteen police officers converged on the Scarred Suit club. Don Mares dispatched the first three within two minutes of the conversation. The club wasn’t open, of course, they simply had to find three observation points around it and dig in.

Two of Lancier’s people arrived at eight o’clock that night, and performed their own surveillance checks before calling back to their boss.

When Adam Elvin finally arrived at one o’clock in the morning, ten officers were already inside. As before, they had managed to blend in well enough to prevent him from identifying any of them for what they were. Some of them assumed the role of business types looking for some bad action after a long day in the office. Three of them hung around the stage, identical to the other losers frantically waving their grubby dollars at the glorious bodies of the Sunset Angels. One had even managed to get a job, trying out as a waiter for the night, and was making reasonable tips. Renne Kempasa was sitting in one of the booths, the hazy e-seal protecting her from view.

The remainder of the team were outside, ready for pursuit duties when the meeting was over. Paula, Maggie, and Tarlo were parked a street away in a battered old van, with the logo of a domestic service company on the side. The two screens they’d set up in the back showed images taken by the officers inside the club. Rachael Lancier was already in her booth, a different one this time. Her skinny-looking bodyguard was with her: identified by headquarters as Simon Kavanagh, a man with a long list of petty convictions stretching back three decades, nearly all of them violence-related. When he arrived he’d swept the booth twice, scanning for any covert electronic or bioneural circuitry. The passive sensors carried by the officers nearby nearly went off the scale. He was using some very sophisticated equipment—as was to be expected from someone who worked for an arms dealer.

Paula watched Lancier and Elvin tentatively shake hands. The arms dealer gave her buyer an inhospitable look, then the e-seal around the booth was switched on. Its screening was immediately reinforced by the units that Kavanagh activated. One of them was an illegally strong janglepulse capable of frying the cerebral ganglia of any insect within a four-meter radius.

“Okay,” Paula said. “Let’s find out what’s so important to Mr. Elvin.”

A meter above the booth’s table, a Bratation spindlefly was clinging to the furry plastic fabric of the wall matting. Amid the artificial purple and green fibers, its translucent, two-millimeter-long body was effectively invisible. As well as a chameleon-effect body, evolution on its planet had provided it with a unique neurone fiber that used a photo luminescent molecule as the primary transmitter, making it immune to a standard janglepulse. It had only half the expected life span of a natural spindlefly because its genetic code had been altered by a small specialist company on a Directorate contract, replacing half of its digestion sac with a more complex organic structure of receptor cells. In its abdomen was an engorged secretion gland that threw out a superfine gossamer strand. When it had flown in from the neighboring booth, it had trailed the gossamer behind it. Gentle lambent nerve impulses from the receptor cells now flowed along the strand to a more standard semiorganic processor that Renne carried in her jacket pocket.

In the middle of Paula’s screen a grainy gray and white image formed. She was looking down on the heads of three people sitting around the booth table.

“So what the hell has happened?” Rachael Lancier asked. “I didn’t expect to see you until completion, Huw. I don’t like this. It makes me nervous.”

“I got some new instructions,” Elvin said. “How else was I supposed to get them to you?”

“All right, what sort of instructions?”

“A couple of additions to the list. Major ones.”

“I still don’t like it. I’m this close to calling the whole thing off.”

“No you’re not. We’ll pay for your inconvenience.”

“I don’t know. The inconvenience is getting pretty fucking huge. All it’s going to take is one suspicious policeman walking into my dealership, and I’m totally screwed. There’s a lot of hardware stacking up there. Expensive hardware.”

Elvin sighed and reached into a pocket. “To ease the inconvenience.” He put a brick-sized wad of notes on the table and pushed them over to Simon Kavanagh.

The bodyguard glanced at Lancier, who nodded permission. He put the notes into his own jacket pocket.

“All right, Huw, what sort of goodies do you need now?”

Elvin held up the small black disk of a memory crystal, which she took from him.

“This is the last time,” she said. “Nothing else changes. I don’t care what you want, or how much you pay, understood? This is the end of this deal. If you want anything else, it has to wait until next time. Got that?”