Kipper leaned back and tapped his pen on the table. Some of what Blackstone said made sense, but he couldn’t help but feel they were paving a path to their own doom with good intentions.

‘The fallout, we’ll deal with,’ he said. ‘We have some experience of it now, thanks to the pollutant storms. They were a bit of a left-handed gift that way, I suppose. But I am serious, General – this police-state bullshit won’t stand. It weakens us in the long run. I’m going to suggest that one of the first things the Executive Committee could do – when it’s re-formed with its original, elected members, is look at exactly what restrictions are necessary.’

Blackstone looked like he was going to choke.

‘Or we can take it up the line to Admiral Ritchie,’ Kip suggested helpfully.

‘Goddamn, this is why we need a proper chain of command,’ grumbled Blackstone. ‘These decisions should be no-brainers. Instead, I’ve got a bunch of no-brain pen-pushers telling me how to do my job.’

Kip sensed Marv Basco stirring beside him. His sanitation chief was slow to anger, but he did hold grudges and he wasn’t one for ignoring a personal slight. There was no sense in letting this get out of hand, seeing as how things had gone so much better than they’d expected.

‘Listen, if an elected official tried on this KGB stuff, fine. There’s checks and balances to constrain them, and they can always get ass-whupped at the polls. But you’re not elected, General. You have force. But you have no power. Nobody consented to being ruled by you, and that’s what’s been happening. Rule by decree. It has to end. We have to get back to first principles, now more than ever.’

Blackstone’s hands were clasped, thick fingers knitted together, but they barely moved. He had stilled himself again. ‘We will agree to disagree on the necessity of certain emergency measures, Mr Kipper,’ he said slowly. ‘For now, martial law will remain in place, as it remains in place throughout Alaska and Hawaii, without all of the amateur dramatics we’ve endured here. But I will release your councillors – on the proviso that they understand the extremity of our situation, and the absolute necessity of matching ends to means.’

‘I will do my best, General,’ replied Kipper, in as conciliatory a manner as he could. ‘I guess we can get on with business. And I guess that business has to be the Middle East and any fallout that might reach us.’ He felt Marv Basco nudge him with an elbow. ‘Oh… and on a sort of related topic, we really need to talk about the nuclear plants back behind the Wave. Marv here thinks some of them are going to melt down.’

Everything had been going so well. Pieraro had spoken very quietly to a deputy manager at the Fairmont (the manager being a complete wanker) and between them they had quietly drawn up a short list of potential passengers for Julianne. The deputy manager did not seek transport, merely a cut of the shakedown. A sum was agreed upon, discreet contacts were made, and a meeting was duly arranged in one of the resort’s more expensive bars. It had all taken about four hours but everything was going swimmingly. And then some fucker turned on the telly.

Even Jules, who had an unnatural ability to maintain her focus under the worst of circumstances, was blind-sided by the reports coming out of the Middle East. If there’d been any upside to recent events, it was the sudden collapse of the media’s obsession with that benighted shithole. Even the Iraqi war news still ran a poor second to the Disappearance. But sixty, maybe seventy million dead in a nuclear strike… that did get your attention.

She had gathered a small group of potential customers around a table, sipping cocktails at hyper-inflated prices, and eating macadamias that weren’t quite worth their weight in gold. The bar filled up as the day waned, mostly with displaced Americans and wealthy vacationers from Mexico City. Her grandfather, Lord Rupert, had been in Singapore just before the Japanese took it in ‘42 and Jules wondered idly if Raffles had felt like this. A genteel outpost surrounded by a gathering darkness. It was hard to tell which group was more desperate: the Americans, who filled up the room with booming voices and sheer physical presence; or the Mexican elite, whose anxiety was quieter and, if possible, much more extreme. For her purposes, however, only the gringos held any interest.

Jules had been following enough of the news to know that she could get the displaced Yanks into port legitimately at a number of places around the Pacific as part of some deal called Operation Uplift. She could even hit up the remains of the American Government for her fuel and supply costs if she felt really cheeky – and could be arsed filling out the appropriate forms for lodgement at the nearest consulate or embassy. The wealthy Mexicans, however, had nothing even resembling the wreckage of a government to lobby foreign capitals on their behalf, and Jules wasn’t willing to take the risk of running them all the way to Sydney only to have some little immigration Nazi with a clipboard tell her they couldn’t land. Miguel and his family, she’d get in somewhere by other means, but that marked the outer limits of her largesse.

So they’d been sitting at a table in the coolest, darkest corner of the bar, a small band of super-rich refugees, negotiating payment for passage, when the background buzz in the place suddenly spiked upwards and drowned out all conversation. Somebody screamed ‘No!’ and Jules tensed up, instinctively reaching for the pistol hidden in her small carry-all, but staying her hand once she realised nothing was going down. A small crowd had gathered under a television fixed high in another corner of the bar and something had set them off. Briefly she fought down a surge of panic, like a rat twisting in her mind, terrified that the Wave had expanded again.

A barman turned up the volume as people argued and shushed each other, and Jules recognised the voice of the BBC World presenter Mishal Husain. Poor old Pete’d had the hots for her. Jules smiled sadly at the memory of him drunk on Jamaican rum, stoned on hash and growling at the TV about exactly what he’d like to be doing to Ms Husain while she burbled on about some EU trade meeting. She missed him terribly.

‘In Tehran alone,’ read Husain, ‘it is estimated that three million died in the initial blast and firestorm, which extended more than a dozen miles from ground zero. Many more died quickly from radiation exposure, and experts say that the final toll in that city alone may reach six million. Other Iranian cities destroyed in the attack include Qom, Isfahan…’

Pieraro crossed himself as the news silenced the entire bar for a second. Her Gurkhas, Shah and Thapa, standing a few feet away, providing a formidable barrier to anybody wanting to approach them, did not visibly react. Their eyes continued to sweep the room like cameras.

‘That’s it. I’m not going to Hawaii,’ said the construction magnate.

‘What?’ asked Jules, still straining to hear the television.