I extract my little ormolu pill case from my coat and study it. I shall probably next take one of the tiny capsules it contains while ten kilometres above the Atlantic, or over the Alps, or while looking down at the Sahara. Or I could wait until I arrive wherever it is I decide to go. In any event, how do these little white pills – small enough for one to fit three or four on the nail of one’s smallest finger – actually work? Who manufactures them, where? Who invented them, tried and tested them? I work the sweetener case conventionally, causing it to produce a perfectly normal sweetener such as any diet-conscious person might slip into their tea or coffee (while often, of course, tucking one’s snout into a glistening cream bun). It is almost identical to the special pills, lacking only a tiny blue dot – scarcely visible to the naked eye – in the very centre of one face. I slide open the end of the ormolu case and replace the sweetener.

The little case itself is quite an exquisite piece of work. Used as one would expect it to be used it will happily dispense sweeteners and nothing but sweeteners all day until they run out; only by holding and pressing it just so may one access the small compartment concealed within that contains its real treasure, so that it releases one of the little pills which lead one to flit, bringing about a transition, flicking one into another soul and another world.

Questions, questions. I know how I am supposed to think. I am supposed to think that one day I might rise to the level of Madame d’Ortolan and her ilk, and discover some of the answers. Eliding everybody on the list my orders contained might well be quite enough by itself to ensure just such an elevation, and I should think so too; such a close-packed sequence of elisions would require my best work, and success would by no means be assured.

Anyway – sadly, as far as Madame d’Ortolan’s purposes are concerned – I have no intention of killing the people on the list. On the contrary: I will save them if I can (with any luck, in a sense I already have). No, I intend to go quite diametrically off-message in this matter.

I already have, of course; Lord Harmyle wasn’t even on the list.

Ah, our profession. Mine, and those who will now be looking for me. My peers, I suppose. Though I was peerless, if I say so myself. There was – especially at the more colourful end of the reality spectrum – an insane grace to my elisions, a contrived but outrageous elegance. As evidence, the fiery fate of one Yerge Aushauser, arbitrageur. Or perhaps you would prefer the brain-frying exit of Mr Max Fitching, lead singer of Gun Puppy, the first true World Band in more realities than we cared to count. Or the painful and I’m afraid protracted end of Marit Shauoon, stunt driver, businessman and politician.

For Yerge, I arranged a special bubble bath at his Nevada ranch, replacing the air feed to the nozzles in his hot tub with hydrogen. The cylinders, hidden under the wooden decking around the tub, were controlled by a radio-activated valve. I was watching from the other side of the world through a digital camera attached to a spotting scope, a sunlight-powered computer and a proprietary satellite uplink, all sitting disguised by sage bushes on a hillside a mile away. A motion sensor alerted me that the hot tub was in use while I was asleep in my hotel in Sierra Leone. When I gazed, bleary-eyed, into my phone I saw Yerge Aushauser striding up to the tub, alone for once. I swung out of bed, woke the laptop for a higher-definition view and waited until he was sitting there in the frothing water, all hairy arms and furious expression. Probably another expensive night at the gaming tables. He usually brought home a girl or two to knock around on such occasions, but perhaps this morning he was tired. The view was quite clear through the cool morning air, untroubled by thermals. I could see him put something long and dark to his mouth, then hold something to its end. A spark. His fat fingers would be closing round his Gran Corona, his throat exposed as he put his head back against the cushion on the tub’s rim and blew the first mouthful of smoke into the clear blue Nevada sky.

I punched in the code for the valve controlling the feed from the hydrogen cylinders. Seconds later, half a world away, the water frothed crazily, briefly seemed to steam as though boiling, hiding first Yerge and then the tub in a ball of vapour. This erupted almost immediately into an intense yellow-white fireball which engulfed the tub and all the nearby decking. Even in the early morning sunshine it blazed brightly.

Amazingly, after a few seconds, while the pillar of roaring flame piled towards the heavens like an upside-down rocket plume, Yerge stumbled out of the conflagration and across the decking, hair on fire, skin blackened, strips of it hanging off him like dark rags. He fell down some steps and lay there, motionless, minus his cigar but still – in a sense – smoking.

Until the decking itself caught fire – Yerge’s servants had run out from the house and dragged him away by then – there was little smoke; oxygen and hydrogen burn perfectly, producing, of course, only water. Most of the initial burst of smoke, now drifting and dissipating in the cool morning breeze and heading towards the distant grey sierras, would have come from Yerge himself.

He had ninety-five per cent burns, and lungs seared by flame inhalation. They managed to keep him alive for nearly a week, which was remarkable.

Max Fitching was a god amongst mortals, a man with the voice of an angel and the proclivities of a satyr. I killed Max while he sat in a seriously pimped open-top half-track in Jakarta, waiting for a roadie to return with his drugs (Max never did get the hang of dressing down. Or going incognito). The Israeli laser weapon was originally an experimental device designed to bring down Iranian missiles while they were still over Syria, or, better still, Iraq. I fired it from a container truck a block down the street from Max’s idling half-track. Even attenuated to the minimum it was grossly overpowered for the job and rather than drill a neat hole straight through Max’s fashionably pale, heavily sunglassed, wildly dreadlocked head, it blew it to smithereens. Windows shattered three storeys up.

This was not elegant – far from it. The elegance came from the fact that the laser burst was not a single brutally simple pulse but one which had been precisely frequency-modulated to mirror the digitalised information of a high-sample-rate MP3 signal, compressed into a microsecond. What hit Max was effectively an MP3 copy of “Woke Up Down,” Gun Puppy’s first worldwide hit and the song that had made Max truly famous.

Marit Shauoon was a populist politician in the Perón mould, and, like the others, I had been reliably informed that he would, if left alone, take the world to a Very Bad Place, in his case starting with South and Central America. (As if any of this really mattered to me. Craft, my trade, was all. I let those who handed me my orders worry about the morality of it.) He had been a motorcycle stunt rider, the most famous in Brazil and then in the world. He crashed a lot but that just added to the excitement, anticipation and sense of jeopardy in the crowd. All four of his major limbs were pinned and strengthened with extensive amounts of surgical steel and even without those there were enough metal implants in the rest of his body to set off airport security scanners while he was still walking stiffly from the car park.

I found an induction furnace for him. He heated up, quite slowly, from the inside, to the sound of vastly thrumming magnets all around him, and his own screams.

… What? Why, why, and why? I would have had no idea if I had not been told, and even once I was told frankly I still didn’t care. (I am mildly surprised I recall any of the reasons given below at all.)