“If you had any sense, Maddie,” she told him, “you’d have a nice safe job with PicoCon—an honest job, with prospects. There’s no real profit in living on the edge, you know. It might be more fun, but it won’t take you anywhere in the long run. The day of the buccaneers is long gone.”

This new argumentative tack was even more irritating than the one she’d set aside. “Did Damon tell you that?” Madoc said acidly. “Did you consider the possibility that he might have been trying to convince himself? There’s alwaysscope for buccaneers. Rumor has it that the best and boldest of the old ones are still alive, if not exactly kicking. Adam Zimmerman never died, so they say—and if Conrad Helier didn’t, my bet is that he’s sleeping right next door.” He realized, belatedly, that he had been so concerned to score the debating point—off Damon rather than Diana—that he had let discretion slip a little.

Diana didn’t seem to realize that she’d just got a partial answer to her question about what else he’d found out while digging on Damon’s behalf. “Who’s Adam Zimmerman?” she asked, attacking the more basic question.

“The guy who set up the Ahasuerus Foundation. Known in his own day—or shortly thereafter—as the Man Who Cornered the Future or the Man Who Stole the World. Born some time before the turn of the millennium, vanished some time after.”

“But he’d be more than two hundred years old,” Diana objected. “The oldest man alive only passed a hundred and sixty a year or two back—the news tapes are always harping on about the record being broken.”

“The record only applies to those alive and kicking,” Madoc told her. “Back in the twentieth century, people who wanted to live forever knew they weren’t going to make it to the foot of the escalator. Some elected to be put in the freezer as soon as they were dead, looking forward to the day when it would be possible to resurrect them and give them back their youth. Multimillionaires who couldn’t take it with them sometimes spent their dotage pouring money into longevity research, stone-age rejuve technologies and susan—that’s short for suspended animation. Long-term freezing did a lot of damage, you see—very difficult to thaw out tissues without mangling all or most of the cells. The tale they tell is that Zimmerman tried to ride a susan escalator to the foot of the emortality escalator, commissioning the foundation he established to keep him alive and ageless by whatever means they could, until the time becomes ripe for him to wake up and drink from the fount of youth. Now that’sbold buccaneering, wouldn’t you say.”

“And you think Conrad Helier went to Ahasuerus in search of a similar deal?” Diana said, picking up the point which he shouldn’t have let fall. “You think he mightbe still alive, and that if he is, that’s where Ahasuerus comes in.”

“I don’t think anything,” Madoc said, wishing that he could sound more convincing, “but if there’s some kind of interesting link between Ahasuerus and Helier, that would be a candidate. It’s impossible to say—Ahasuerus is stitched up very tight indeed. They’re verykeen on privacy. It’s partly a hangover from the days when they faced a lot of hostility because of their founder’s reputation, but it’s more than just a habit. Who knows how many famous men might be lurking in the vaults, sleeping their way to immortality because they were born too early to make it while awake? I’d be willing to bet that there wouldn’t be one in ten that the Eliminators would consider worthy of immortality.”

For once, Diana had no reply ready. She seemed to be thinking over the implications of this intriguing item of urban folklore, which obviously hadn’t come her way before. It hadn’t come Madoc’s way either, but the Old Lady had a long memory.

It was perhaps as well, Madoc thought, that Diana had finally fallen silent. There was work to be done, and if she intended to play her part she’d need to keep her head.

Madoc stopped the car, then checked the deserted street and its glassless windows very carefully, searching for signs of movement or occupation. There was no sign that anything was amiss. At night there would have been rats, cats, and dogs roaming around, but at noonday those kinds of scavengers stayed out of sight.

He reached under his seat to pick up the bag he’d brought from the apartment, opening it briefly to pull out a couple of the items he’d stashed within it.

“Are we here?” Diana asked—and then, without waiting for an answer, added: “Is that a crowbar?” Obviously she’d had her mind on higher things while he’d been getting the stuff together.

“No,” he said, “and yes. That is, no, we still have a couple of blocks to walk, on tiptoe—and yes, it’s a crowbar. Sometimes scanners and slashcards are second best to brute force. You doknow how to tiptoe, don’t you?”

“I can be as quiet as you,” she assured him, “but it seems silly to tiptoe in broad daylight.”

“Just go carefully,” Madoc said, with a slight sigh, “and carry this.” He gave her a flamecutter, refusing to listen to her protest that it was at least three times as heavy as the crowbar and twice as heavy as whatever remained in the bag.

Madoc got out of the car and closed the door quietly. Diana did likewise. He set off along the rubble-littered pavement, treading as carefully as he could. She followed, matching his studied quietness.

When they got to the particular ruin that he was looking for, Madoc set about examining its interior with scrupulous patience. There were no obvious signs of recent gantzing on the crumbling walls, but a host of tiny details inside the shell revealed to Madoc’s forewarned eye that this was not the rubble heap it pretended to be. In a corner of the room that was furthest away from the street he found the head of a flight of stone steps leading down into what had been a cellar, and once he’d eased aside the charred planks that were blocking the way down it was easy enough to see that the door at the bottom was perfectly solid. When he’d tiptoed down to it he found that it had two locks, one of which was electronic and one of which was crudely mechanical. Madoc put the crowbar aside for the moment and set to work with a scanner.

It took two minutes of wizardry to release the electronic lock, and five of patient leverage to dislodge the screws holding the mechanical lock. Madoc eased the door open and stepped gingerly inside, checking the corridor within before letting Diana in behind him. No attempt had been made to conceal the fact that the walls had been recently gantzed.

When Diana had pulled the door closed behind her Madoc plucked a flashlight from his satchel and switched it on. The flashlight showed him that the corridor was at least twenty meters long, and that it had another door at the further end. There were several alcoves let into the walls, which might or might not hide further doors. Fixing the field of illumination on the floor ahead of him, Madoc began to move deeper into what now seemed to him to be an unexpectedly complex network of cellars. He figured that all the inner doors would be locked at least as securely as the one through which they’d come, and that it might require considerable effort to locate the one behind which the excavation’s real treasures were concealed. As things turned out, however, the first shadowy covert let into the corridor wall turned out to have no door within it—it was simply a portal giving uninterrupted access to a room about three meters by four.

The floor of the room was even more glittery than the sand-gantzed exterior of the PicoCon building; it looked almost as if it had been compounded out of broken glass. Stretched out on the gleaming surface, with both arms awkwardly outstretched, was a blackened humanoid shape which Madoc mistook at first for some kind of weird sculpture. It was, in fact, Diana who first leaped to the more ominous conclusion, which Madoc deduced when her sharp intake of breath hissed in his right ear.