It was 3.45A .M. Exactly one hour and forty-five minutes after he walked through the door. With a satisfied smile, Mike reset the alarm on his Rolex and checked that it was off-line for all functions. It would be extremely inconvenient if some overzealous Iskandryian cop was to use station switching to check Mike’s progress across the city at a later date.

“This way.”

She nodded, her face so unguarded as to be almost infantile. Wrapping his arm tight around her shoulders, Mike steered her through the emergency door at the back of Neutropic and into a parking lot packed with cars but empty of people.

“Which one do you like?”

Dark eyes regarded him gravely.

“Tell me.” It was an order.

“That one,” said the girl without hesitation. The red Mazda to which she pointed was exactly what he’d have expected of her. Flash without being that well made. This was the difference between him and the girl. He’d have gone for something expensive but understated. Which, obviously enough, was why he’d got her to make the choice. That way police had a harder time trying to construct a profile.

Pulling a thin grey card from the pocket of his trousers, he rested it against the lock of the little Mazda and let the internal electronics do their magic. Commercial versions of the universal key did stupid things like ping when the right combination was found or have diodes that flashed up the side in sequence, as if part of some scanning routine.

His version had no diodes and made no noise. So the only way to know if the lock was disengaged and the alarm disabled was to listen very carefully to the tumblers.

“Get in.”

Without waiting to see if the girl would do what she was told—she would—Mike climbed into the driver’s seat and slid his card into the key slot. Lights lit on the faux-metal dash and the engine fired up. So did the sound system, which the owner had left tuned to some shit station that pumped dance.

“Find something you like.”

“I like this,” said the girl, nodding towards a speaker.

He sighed. “Something else,” Mike said and waited while she found some woman singing about the taste on her tongue.

Whatever . . . First gear meshed into third, then fifth, as he skipped second and fourth. From where they were to where he needed to be was next to no distance. Except that it would be best if the clock showed he’d driven somewhere else first, especially if he hadn’t . . . Or at least nowhere that mattered.

A rip out along the Corniche added some distance, the little Mazda nipping in and out of the sparse traffic, hugging in behind trucks or bigger cars every time a camera came into view. One of them might actually have picked out his licence plate but, chances were, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be gone and the car dumped.

As for her . . .

“Enjoying yourself?”

The girl nodded. She had goose bumps on her bare arms and her slight tummy pushed its way over the waist of trousers not really designed for sitting, but her smile was still happy and he believed her.

“Good.” He flipped the Mazda off the Corniche and down a side street, overtaking a VW camper. The traffic was thinning to nonexistent and the sky looked less dark than it had.

“We’ve arrived,” he told the girl, parking alongside a metal gate set in a heavy-duty fence. A rusty iron padlock hung from the bolt. “Time to get out . . .”

Obediently she climbed from her seat and stood beside the car.

“In here.”

The padlock looked tight but since it only shut on itself and the casino’s rear gate was actually closed off with a twist of wire, that didn’t matter. Only one security light lit the gate and that badly, the other two lights having been vandalized. But then everything in life was down to preplanning and, before he’d retired, the man calling himself Mike Estelle had been extremely good at that.

The best in fact. Most controls were pure amateurs when it came to setting the stage and arranging the props. Both of those he could do without thinking. It was the wet work he didn’t usually handle.

“Where are we?”

The man glanced round at the smiling girl, noticing again her pale hair and the wide face of someone whose ancestors farmed a bleak edge of the fjords. She shouldn’t have been asking him questions, only answering those he asked and doing exactly what she was told . . . Which, pretty soon, was going to involve taking off that silver bra and climbing out of those stupid trousers.

“We’re at another club,” he told her. “A different kind.” Which was the truth but wasn’t about to set her free. “Here,” he added, pulling a second purple kite from his pouch. “Take this, you’ll like it.”

She looked at him, puzzled, her eyes trying to look past something inside her head.

“Go on.”

Obediently, she swallowed the kite without waiting to let it dissolve on her tongue. Again that grin. And anyone inside her head who might still have been at home switched off the last of the lights and moved out.

“This way.” He snipped the wire holding shut the gate with tiny, orange-handled clippers and discarded them on the gravel, secure in the knowledge that the latex gloves he wore were surgical specials. In the ordinary run of things, his prints might still have been visible to forensics, but each fingerprint had been softened earlier that evening, using a simple solution of household bleach.

Just inside the gate stood a security hut, mirrored glass in its only window, looking out at a road that led from the gates to a loading bay, where a pull-down shutter was locked to a clasp set in concrete. The loading bay clasp was properly padlocked.

Mike shrugged. The key would be where those keys always were. Hung on a board inside the hut, should he need it, which was unlikely. So far so predictable . . .

The grey card he’d used on the little Mazda also worked for the door of the security hut. Whoever had decided to replace a standard Chubb with a Japanese box had made a bad mistake. It was still way harder to pick an old-fashioned mortise than jazz some chip, probably always would be.

Inside, the hut was the usual clutter: a microwave, so old its inside was enamelled with fat, a stained Braun coffeemaker, five mugs, none of them matching, no saucers and more discarded packaging around the plastic swing bin than inside it.

The man sighed. This was why he’d never taken to fieldwork . . . “Clean the mess up,” he told the girl and she nodded.

“All done now.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if she found nothing odd in having happily picked up someone else’s rubbish, scrubbed down all the work surfaces and cleaned out the inside of an old microwave; but then the drugs ensured there was nothing odd about the situation for her to find.

“Good girl.”

Closing his borrowed copy of Hustler, illegal in all of North Africa, if slightly less illegal in El Isk than most other cities, Mike stretched, pushed himself up from where he sat and walked across to where the American girl stood smiling.

At 5.49A .M. Saturday morning. The Quitrimala Casino. The call to prayer had come and gone. It was time, more or less.