The words “pot,” “kettle,” and “black” floated unbidden into Lisa’s mind, but she resisted the temptation to extend the thought. Ever since Judith Kenna had begun to hunt for evidence of the twentieth-century habits Lisa had allegedly failed to transcend, she had been trying to update her stock of cliches.

Smith turned around again. “It’s Ginny,” he said. “Chan Kwai Keung’s at the booth outside the lot. He must have followed us out from the Renaissance. He wants to talk to you, Lisa. He says it’s a private matter that he’s not prepared to discuss with anyone else until he’s cleared it with you.”

Lisa could hardly help but infer that whatever Chan had to say, it must have an urgent bearing on Morgan Miller’s kidnapping—but she had no more idea than Smith of why Chan couldn’t have told the police, or the MOD man Smith had instructed to talk to him.

“I’d better go down,” she said.

Smith obviously resented being dragged away from an interview he didn’t consider to be complete, but it was equally obvious that he wasn’t about to let Lisa talk to Chan without being there to hear what was said. He turned away again, although all he said into the mouthpiece of the phone was: “Tell the guard to let him in. We’re on our way—we’ll be there in five minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” said Goldfarb, “but I really don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you.”

“That’s okay,” Smith said insincerely. “We’ll take a look at the transcript while we’re on the road to Swindon, and if there’s anything we need to come back for, we’ll contact you by phone.”

“I’ll call you an elevator,” Goldfarb said, reaching out to make good his word. His eagerness to be rid of them would be understandable, Lisa thought, even if he had a conscience as pure as—

She swallowed the intended reference to driven snow, cursing at the necessity of censoring her private thoughts.

The elevator had arrived at the door of the outer office by the time Goldfarb had ushered them out of his little empire. Goldfarb didn’t actually push them into it, but the little man’s hands were fluttering with ill-restrained impatience. “I do hope you find Professor Miller before any harm comes to him,” he said anxiously. “A terrible thing—and Edgar Burdillon hurt! Terrible! A man held in the greatest respect throughout ourorganization, I can assure you.”

“Did Miller mention Burdillon when he came to see you?” Smith asked, pausing on the threshold of the elevator.

“No,” said Goldfarb. “At least, I don’t think—”

The bespectacled man was still in mid-sentence when the door slid shut and the elevator slid sideways toward its shaft.

A universal transformermight be as useful to researchers in the longevity field as any other, Lisa thought as they descended. Was it possible that Morgan had been talking about the main line of his research, albeit from a slightly odd angle? The transformer he never found might have been even more useful to people determined to give humankind a hefty shove up the evolutionary ladder. If Morgan hadbeen talking to Goldfarb about his own Holy Grail, and someone misunderstood…. Maybe he’d recently seen some results obtained by one of the researchers sponsored by Ahasuerus that connected in a nonobvious way with what he’d been doing for the last forty years—something that made him see some of his former results in a new light. Maybe his old hopefulness had been stirred up again.

She abandoned the train of thought when she noticed that Peter Grimmett Smith was frowning. His mind was still on Chan Kwai Keung, and Chan’s insistence on speaking to Lisa. All the suspicions Smith had generously set aside in order to make use of her expertise had obviously been reawakened. He looked like a man who was wondering whether he might have made a serious mistake. Given his age, he must be in the same position relative to compulsory retirement that Lisa was, and he probably had an equally thin margin for error,

Lisa wished that she’d had more sleep and that she didn’t feel so ragged. Despite the smartish dressing, her right arm had begun to ache all the way from the elbow to the palm of her hand.

Fortunately, Smith still remembered the code when the elevator reached its destination on the ground floor. The teenage receptionist hardly glanced at them as they crossed the lobby to the other elevator; she was busy with her computer, making a great show of concern, although the dullness of her blue eyes gave the lie to her performance.

“Do you think he was lying?” Lisa asked Smith, hoping to distract his attention from more embarrassing possibilities. “Goldfarb, I mean.”

“Difficult to say,” Smith replied, catching his lower lip with his teeth as he put on a show of bringing the question into focus. “The trouble with organizations like Ahasuerus is that they’re a law unto themselves. They think they’re above petty national concerns. If Miller hadgiven them something they considered valuable, I’m not at all sure that they’d tell us what it was just because the poor devil has been kidnapped. They’d be more likely to hire some fancy mercenary group to go after the kidnappers for them—but we’ve had no indication yet of any such move, and even if Ahasuerus’s private enclave of the net is as secure as Goldfarb thinks it is, there isn’t a mercenary outfit in these parts whose communications are any more solid than a sieve.”

“And if he isn’ttelling the truth,” Lisa said, “why make up such a peculiar story? Why take the trouble to tell us that whatever Morgan wanted to give him, it’s forty years out of date? And why throw in all those impressions? It’s not the kind of smoke screen I’d have—”

She broke off as the elevator stopped and its twin doors parted.

“Oh, fuck!”she breathed.

Directly ahead of them, about fifteen meters away, the body of Peter Grimmett Smith’s driver lay supine on the concrete, unconscious or dead. There was an obscenely large gun in her outstretched right hand, pointed in the direction of a yellow Fiat that was skewed across the entry.

If appearances could be trusted, the Fiat had been shunted into that position by a black Daf van, both of whose doors were yawning wide. The huge screen shielding the entrance to the parking lot had almost completed its descent a couple of meters behind the van.

Chan Kwai Keung was standing beside the Fiat, having apparently exited the driver’s seat in some distress. There was blood on his forehead and naked fear in his face as he stared at a black-helmeted figure who was pointing a gun almost as large as Ginny’s at his chest, from little more than arm’s distance.

TEN

Peter Grimmett Smith was obviously a senior spook, who had presumably been desk-bound for many years, but he must have known more active days and he hadn’t lost the reflexes instilled by his early training. No sooner had he seen the body of his driver than he threw himself forward, leaning low in anticipation of plucking the gun—which Ginny had presumably failed to use to any significant effect—out of her limp hand.

Lisa understood, of course, why Smith had felt compelled to go for the gun. He was unarmed, and the person who had felled the driver would know that, because he or she would know he would not have been allowed to carry a gun into the lobby. Smith had no idea of how many adversaries he might be facing, but he did know that once he got a gun in his hand, he would be no mean opponent.

Unfortunately, he was by no means the only one who knew that and understood its implications.

As Smith went for the gun, the black-helmeted figure who had Chan covered immediately turned in order to take care of the new hazard. As the gun fired, Lisa winced reflexively, but the sound was nowhere near as loud as she had anticipated.