“It’s tea,” explained a deep voice.

“I don’t drink tea,” she said, contradicting herself by taking a tentative sip. “And I wouldn’t take sugar if I did,” she added, grimacing.

“Drink it anyway,” the brown-eyed man advised. He was wearing a smartsuit made from the same fabric as Peter Grimmett Smith’s but cut in a contemporary style. Its quiet elegance made Lisa all the more conscious of her own lack of clothing and the fact that her undershirt was far from smart in any sense of the word.

She drank some more tea, figuring that the only thing that really mattered, given the circumstances, was its wetness. It moistened her mouth and moderated the intensity of her thirst. Then she said, “Who are you?”

“The man who saved you from abduction by two crazy women. Abduction—or worse,” he replied. He obviously knew that she was a police officer, and felt obliged to establish his moral credentials in case she felt—as she was surely entitled to do—that wherever she was it was not the place she ought to be.

“Crazy women?” Lisa queried.

“You didn’t know they were women? Or was it that you didn’t know they were crazy?” He was trying to make a slight joke, but she wasn’t in the mood.

“Those matte-black one-pieces aren’t the most figure-flattering garments in the world,” she pointed out. “Who areyou—and what were you doing crashing into the parking area like that?”

“You can call me Leland,” he said in an offhand manner calculated to suggest that it probably wasn’t his real name, first or last. “We were paying a call on someone in the building. We figured that something must be wrong when we saw the security guard unconscious, hanging halfway out of the hatchway. It seemed to be our duty as honest citizens to ride to the rescue.”

“It probably was,” Lisa conceded. “But you must have checked the ID in my pouch, so the fact that you’ve brought me here makes you guilty of obstructing justice, as well as abduction and unlawful imprisonment, so you can cut the honest-citizen crap. Why did you take my clothes?”

“They were dirty and torn,” Leland told her. “Even smart fabric wouldn’t have been able to cope with all that rolling around on the concrete, and there were some old bloodstains too. Your belt wasn’t clean either—police personnel really ought to be more careful about pollution, especially the metaphorical kind. Intruders in the night don’t just take things away, you know.”

“They bugged my belt?”

“I’ve cleaned it—but if you’ve said anything you shouldn’t have in the last eighteen or twenty hours, you’d better start thinking of ways to limit the damage. I think I can find you a shirt and some slacks to wear until your own clothes have been cleaned—Jeff’s, not mine. He’s more your size. He was with me in the van; you owe him for the rescue too.” The man still seemed amused. Lisa didn’t have time for a mental run-through of all the conversations of the early morning and late afternoon, but she was fairly certain that her own ignorance would have prevented her from giving away anything of real value to Morgan’s kidnappers.

“Where am I?” Lisa asked. “Why aren’t we at East Central Police Station?”

“Well, that’s a long story,” Leland told her. “I admit that I fell prey to temptation—but I honestly believe that you might thank me for it. I thought we might be able to scratch one another’s backs. No pressure at all, of course—you can have your phone back at any time, and call whomever you want, so there’s no question of unlawful imprisonment or obstructing justice. It wasn’t me who shot you, but you did get a whiff of the gas we used against the shooters, so I felt obliged to render what first aid I could. If you feel that you have to cry for help right now, I’ll just fade quietly way, leaving you here with the two women. I’d understand your determination to play by the book, in spite of your personal involvement. On the other hand, if you happened to decide that you’d rather have a word with the people who tried to shoot you beforetheir lawyers get involved—or if you’d simply like to listen in while I have a word—I’d understand that too.”

“Where am I?” Lisa repeated stubbornly.

“A little way out in the country,” Leland said. “Not far from the cityplex. You could be back home inside an hour, by car—ten minutes if they care to send the MOD helicopter. There’s nothing of much interest happening back there, though. Here’s where it’s at, for the moment. I really do think that we could help one another, and that you and I stand a better chance of figuring this thing out together than either of us would have if we followed separate lines of investigation. If your first priority is to get Morgan Miller out in one piece, I could be a lot more useful than Kenna’s blindfolded plods or Smith’s third eleven spooks. What do you say, Dr. Friemann?”

Lisa’s head was still aching, and the tea hadn’t yet quenched her thirst. She didn’t want to make any decisions just yet. She made a show of inspecting the sealant on her arm and hand. The old wounds hadn’t been reopened, but she noticed a new graze on her elbow. Her upper left arm, where she’d been darted, was much uglier but it didn’t hurt at all. Leland, or his friend Jeff, had sprayed sealant on it.

“Who are you working for?” she asked.

“Can’t tell you that,” he replied unapologetically.

“Who were you going to visit when you interrupted our little melodrama?”

“Goldfarb, of course. We don’t know much more than you do, so we were following the same trail. Really lucked out, didn’t we? All we had to do to crack the case was smash down the door. The crazies had already kayoed all three of you, so it was just a matter of picking up the bad girls and getting the hell out before the cityplex police arrived. Your response times stink, by the way.”

He hadn’t mentioned Chan, Lisa noted. Maybe he didn’t know that Chan had been there. He obviously thought the “bad girls” had been after her, and hadn’t realized that the pulverized Fiat had anything to do with the case. Maybe Chan was still loose, still carrying whatever item of information he had that he wanted to confide to her and her alone.

“Try to see it from my point of view,” the big man urged. “I had to take the opportunity to grab the two women, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to bring you along too. Technically, as you’ve carefully pointed out, it’s illegal, but we’re on the same side. We both want Morgan Miller out, and we’re both burningto know why he was snatched in the first place. As proof of my good intentions, I’m prepared to give you the one bit of valuable information I have that you don’t, without asking anything in return but a little of your time. Want to hear it?”

“Go on,” said Lisa, making no promises.

“Smith’s got his knickers in a twist for nothing. The project Burdillon was working on is redundant. It never mattered a damn whether he succeeded or not. The government spent so much time dithering that the war arrived before they were halfway ready, but my guys were always ahead of the game. They already have the product, and they’ll be the ones who’ll determine its distribution. It’s quite possible, of course, that the crazy ladies didn’t realize that and thought it might be salable, but if that’s so, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup of no real significance. If it were something else of Miller’s—something unconnected with the war work—I’d be as puzzled as you are by the fact that he doesn’t seem to have confided in you. If that’sso, there must be a verygood reason for it, don’t you think?”

It was a tricky question, and Lisa thought about it for a full minute before replying. She had finished the tea and was desperate for a refill, even though she didn’t drink tea. “I think this whole stupid affair is a comedy of errors either way,” she said eventually. “If it’s not Morgan’s recent work that sparked this off, then Goldfarb, or his opposite number in Swindon, must have put two and two together and made twenty-two. Someone mightthink that Morgan has stumbled across some kind of longevity treatment, and the rumor may have been exaggerated as the whisper was passed on, but I can’t believe there’s anything really there. If Morgan says he failed, he really did fail.”