“Not my territory,” Madoc said with a shrug. “You want me to ask around, right?”

“It’s more complicated than that. The Operator in question named Conrad Helier as an enemy of mankind. When you’re through, okay?”

Madoc looked at him sharply before nodding. Even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier, and Madoc knew how privileged he was to have been let in on the secret. He’d probably have found out anyway—Madoc knew some very light-footed Webwalkers, first-rate poachers who had not yet turned gamekeeper—but he hadn’t had to go digging. Damon had trusted him, and obviously trusted him still. Damon knew that he could rely on Madoc to do everything he could to help, for pride’s sake as well as anything else he might be offered.

Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes slightly averted as Madoc turned back to concentrate fully on the business in hand, but he couldn’t turn away. He could feel the stir and surge of his own adrenalin, and his muscles were tensing as he put himself in the shoes of the younger fighter, trying to urge the boy on with his body language.

It didn’t work, of course.

A roar went up from the watchers as Brady finally rammed home his advantage. Poor Lenny was on the ground, screaming. The blade had gone deep, but the wound wasn’t mortal.

Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain; the physical dimensions of the shock and the horror. It would all be ready digitized, ripe for manipulation and refinement. The tape doctor would take a little longer to tease it into proper shape than the real doctor would take to stitch up the fighters, but once the tape was made it would be fixed and finished. Lenny Garon might never be the same. His wounds would mend, leaving no obvious scars, but. . . .

He abandoned the train of thought. This affair seemed to be feeding an unhealthy tendency to melodrama. He reminded himself of what he’d told Diana about the porn tape. By the time the doctor had finished with the recordings there’d be nothing of Lennyleft at all; there’d only be the actions and the reactions, dissected out and purified as a marketable commodity. The fighter on the tape might have Lenny’s face and Lenny’s pain, but it wouldn’t be him. It would be an artifact, less than a shadow and nothing like a soul.

The whole thing was in rank bad taste, of course, but it was a living for all concerned. For the first few months after he had quit fighting, it had been his ownliving, and it had been based in talents that were entirely and exclusivelyhis own, using nothing that Conrad Helier had left to him—in his will, at least.

Damon had wanted then, and he wanted still, to be his own man.

Madoc Tamlin had moved forward to help the stricken street-fighter, not because he was overly concerned for the boy’s health but because he wanted to make certain that the equipment was still in good order. Not until the silvery web had been stripped away were the two fighters handed over to the amateur ambulance drivers waiting nearby. Brady got in under his own steam but Lenny Garon had to be carried.

The crowd drifted away, evaporating into the concrete wilderness.

Damon waited patiently until Madoc’s gear was all packed up and the produce of the day had been handed on to the next phase of its development.

“Your place or mine?” Madoc said, waving his hand in a lazy arc which took in both their cars. Damon led the way to his own vehicle and the older man followed. Damon waited until both doors had closed before starting to set out his proposition.

“If this thing turns out to be serious,” Damon said, stressing the if, “I’d be willing to lay out serious credit to pursue it.”

“How serious?” Madoc asked, for form’s sake.

“I’ve got some put away,” Damon said, knowing that his friend would understand exactly what he meant. He fished a smartcard out of his pocket and held it out. “I’ll call the bank in the morning and authorize it for cash withdrawals,” he said. “Everything’s aboveboard—there’s no need to hide the transactions. I’ll fix it so that you can draw ten thousand with no questions asked. If you need more, call me—but it had better be worth paying for.”

“What am I looking for?” Madoc asked mildly. “Apart from Operator one-oh-one, that is.”

“Silas was with a girl named Catherine Praill when he was snatched. The police don’t think she was involved, but you’d better check her out. Interpol also mentioned the name of another biotechnologist by the name of Surinder Nahal, recently resident in San Diego. That might also be irrelevant, but it has to be checked. If you can find Silas, or identify the people who took him, I’ll pay a suitable finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Madoc said equably. “Are you going to tell me what Operator one-oh-one has posted, or do I have to go trawling through the Eliminators’ favorite netboards?”

“He posted a message saying that Conrad Helier is still alive and calling him an enemy of mankind. He also sent me a personal message, which Interpol might not know about.”

Damon took the piece of paper from his suitskin’s inner pocket and handed it to Madoc Tamlin. Madoc read it and gave it back. “Could be from anybody,” he observed.

“Could be,” admitted Damon, “but whoever carried it up to the thirteenth floor took the trouble to crash Building Security. A playful move—but sometimes playful is serious in disguise. Somebody’s trying to jerk my strings, and I’d like to know who—and why.”

Madoc nodded, carefully furrowing his remarkable eyebrows. “Hywood’s another of your foster parents, right?”

“Right. Eveline Hywood. Currently resident in Lagrange-Five, allegedly very busy with important experiments of an unspecified nature. I doubt that she’ll return my call.”

“It won’t be easy to check her out. The Lagrangists don’t play by our rules, and they have their own playspace way out on the lunatic fringe of the Web.”

“Don’t worry too much about that. I can’t imagine that Eveline’s involved in the kidnapping or the Eliminator messages, even if she does have some relevant information. What do you know about Ahasuerus?”

“The original guy or the foundation?”

“I presume that the reference is to the foundation, rather than the legend,” Damon said, refusing to treat the issue as a joke.

“Not much,” Madoc admitted. “Been around for the best part of two hundred years. Major players in the longevity game, funding research here, there, and probably everywhere. Reputation ever-so-slightly shady because of a certain bad odor attached to their start-up capital, although it beats me why anybody should care after all this time. Every fortune in the world can be traced back to some initial act of piracy, isn’t that what they say? What was it they used to call the Ahasuerus guy, way back when?”

“The Man Who Stole the World,” Damon said.

“Yeah—that’s right. Zimmer, was it? Or Zimmerman?”

“Zimmerman.”

“Right.” Madoc nodded, as if he were the one answering instead of the one who’d asked. “Well, if he didsteal the world, we seem to have got it back again, don’t we?”

Damon didn’t want to get sidetracked. “I’ll dig up what I can about connections between Ahasuerus and my father,” he said, “although it’d be no surprise at all to find that they’d had extensive dealings. Ahasuerus must have had dealings with every biotech team in the world if they’ve been handing out cash to longevity researchers since the days before the Crash.

Madoc stroked his chin pensively. It seemed that his green eyes now glowed a little more powerfully than they had before. “What that note implies,” he said, “is that Arnett was taken because he knows something about Conrad Helier—something dirty. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that is, do you?”