“You missed something.” Miriam stabbed a finger in Paulette’s direction. “You. What do you get?”

“Me?” Paulette covered her heart with one hand, pulled a disbelieving face. “Since when did I get a vote?”

“Since, hell, since I got you into this mess. I figure I owe you. Noblesse oblige. You’re a friend, and I don’t drop friends in it, even by omission.”

“Friendship and fifty cents will buy you a coffee.” Paulie paused for a moment, then grinned. “But I’m glad, all the same.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t get the law job.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you stop doing that? Every chance you get to beat yourself up for getting me fired, you’re down on your knees asking for forgiveness!”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was getting on your nerves,” Miriam said contritely.

“Fuck off!” Paulette giggled. “Pardon my French. Anyway. Think about what I said. Tomorrow you can mail that disk to the FBI if you want, then go on a long vacation. Or stick around and we’ll work on writing a story that’ll get you the Pulitzer. You can catch all the bullets from the goodfella hit men while I’ll be your loyal little gofer, get myself a star-spangled reference and a few points of the gross. Like, fifty percent. Deal?”

“Deal. I think my head hurts.” Miriam shuffled around and stood up. She felt a little shaky: Maybe it was the alcohol hitting her head on an empty stomach. “Where’s that takeout?”

Paulette looked blank. “You ordered it?”

“No.” Miriam snapped her fingers in frustration. “I’ll go do that right now. I think we have some forward planning to do.” She paused unevenly in the doorway, looking at Paulette.

“What?”

“Are you in?” she asked.

“Am I in? Are you nuts? I wouldn’t miss this for anything!”

They came for her in the early hours, long after Paulette had called a taxi and Miriam had slunk into bed with a stomach full of lemon chicken and a head full of schemes. They came with stealth, black vans, and Mac-10s: They didn’t know or care about her plans. They were soldiers. They had their orders; this was the house the damp brown chair was collocated with, and so this was the target. That was all they needed.

Miriam slept through the breaking of the french window in her den because the two men on entry detail crowbarred the screens open, then rolled transparent sticky polyurethane film across the glass before they struck it with rubber mallets, then peeled the starred sheets right out of the frame. The phone line had been cut minutes before; there was a cell-phone jammer in the back garden.

The two break-and-enter men took point, rolling into the den and taking up positions at either side of the room. The light shed by the LEDs on her stereo and computer glinted dimly off their night-vision goggles and the optics of their guns as they waited tensely, listening for any sign of activity.

Hand signals relayed the news from outside, that Control hadn’t seen any signs of motion through the bedroom curtains. His short-wavelength radar imager let him see what the snatch crew’s night-vision gear missed: It could pinpoint the telltale pulse of warm blood right through a dry wall siding. Two more soldiers in goggles, helmets, and flak jackets darted through the opening and into the hall, cautiously extending small mirrors on telescoping arms past open doorways to see if anyone was inside. Within thirty seconds they had the entire ground floor swept clean. Now they moved the thermal imager inside: Control swept each ceiling carefully before pausing in the living room and circling his index finger under the light fitting for the others to see. One body, sleeping, right overhead.

Four figures in black body armour ghosted up the staircase, two with guns, and two behind them with specialist equipment. The master bedroom opened off the small landing at the top of the stairs—the plan was to charge straight through and neutralize the occupant directly.

However, they hadn’t counted on Miriam’s domestic untidiness. Living alone and working a sixty-hour week, she had precious little time for homemaking: All her neat-freakery got left behind at work each evening. The landing was crowded, an overflowing basket of dirty clothing waiting for a trip down to the basement beside a couple of bookcases that narrowed the upstairs hall so that they had to go in single-file. But there were worse obstacles to come. Miriam’s house was full of books. Right now, a dog-eared copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto lay facedown at one side of the step immediately below the landing. It was precisely as cold as the carpet it lay on, so to the night-vision goggles it was almost invisible. The first three intruders stepped over it without noticing, but the fourth placed his right boot on it, and the effect was as dramatic as if it had been a banana skin.

Miriam jolted awake in terror, hearing a horrible clattering noise on the landing. Her mind was a blank, the word intruder running through it in neon letters the size of headlines—she sat bolt upright and fumbled on the dressing table for the pistol, which she’d placed there when she found she could feel it through the pillow. The noise of the bedroom door shoving open was infinitely frightening and as she brought the gun around, trying to get it untangled from the pillowcase—Brilliant light lanced through her eyelids, a flashlight: “Drop it, lady!”

Miriam fumbled her finger into the trigger guard—

“Drop it!” The light came closer, right in her face. “Now!”

Something like a freight locomotive came out of the darkness and slammed into the side of her right arm.

Someone said, “Shee-it” with heartfelt feeling, and a huge weight landed on her belly. Miriam gathered breath to scream, but she couldn’t feel her right arm and something was pressing on her face. She was choking: The air was acrid and sweet-smelling and thick, a cloying flowery laboratory stink. She kicked out hard, legs tangled in the comforter, gasping and screaming deep in her throat, but they were muffling her with the stench and everything was fuzzy at the edges.

She couldn’t move. “Not funny,” someone a long way away at the end of a black tunnel tried to say. The lights were on now, but everything was dark. Figures moved around her and her arm hurt—distantly. She couldn’t move. Tired. There was something in her mouth. Is this an ambulance? she wondered. Lights out.

The dogpile on the bed slowly shifted, standing up. Specialist A worked on the subject with tongue depressor and tubes, readying her for assisted ventilation. The chloroform pad sitting on the pillow was an acrid nuisance: For the journey ahead, something safer and more reliable was necessary. Specialist B worked on her at the same time, sliding the collapsible gurney under her and strapping her to it at legs, hips, wrists, and shoulders.

“That was a fucking mess,” snarled Control, picking up the little snub-nosed revolver in one black-gloved hand. “Safety catch was on, luckily. Who screwed up on the landing?”

“Sir.” It was Point B. “There was a book. On the stairs.”

“Bitchin’. Okay, get little Miss Lethal here loaded and ready to move. Bravo, start the cleanup. I want her personal files, wherever she keeps them. And her computer, and all the disks. Whoever the hell was with her this evening, I want to know who they are too. And everything else. Charlie, pack her bags like she’s going on vacation—a long vacation. Clothing, bathroom stuff. Don’t make a mess of it. I want to be ready to evacuate in twenty minutes.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Control nodded. Point B was going to pull a shitwork detail when they got home, but you didn’t discipline people in the field unless they’d fucked up bad enough to pull a nine-millimetre discharge. And Point B hadn’t. A month cleaning the latrines would give him time to think on how close he’d come to getting plugged by a sleepy woman with a thirty-eight revolver.