While there was a trail to follow, she might as well be on it—and if it transpired that Oscar Wilde was the layer of the trail as well as its follower, she wanted to be the one to arrest him.

Charlotte turned to Reginald Quan, trying hard to give the impression that everything was comfortably under control. The image of the UN police had to be preserved at all costs. “Our forensic team will have to examine these things,” she said. “The biotechnics are almost certainly illicit, perhaps dangerous. Hal Watson will sort out the details.” Quan shrugged. “Going somewhere?” he inquired innocently, with a nod toward the receipt. Her attempts to screen it from his view had obviously not been entirely successful.

“Yes, we are,” she said, pausing only to pass the relevant details to Hal before handing the document to its rightful owner, “and there’s no time to lose.” While they took the elevator down to the car park, Hal gave Charlotte a rapid update on his most recent findings. The car-hire company had reported that they had delivered the vehicle three days earlier, and that they had no knowledge of any route or destination which might have been programmed into its systems after dispatch.

“It looks as if we’re going on a mystery tour,” she said to Oscar Wilde dourly.

“We’ve been on a mystery tour since yesterday afternoon,” he pointed out. “I do hope that our next destination will be a little more interesting than the places we have so far visited.” Hal also reported that he’d launched an investigation of the account used to pay for the hire car, although it appeared that it had been set up entirely for that purpose. The initial deposit had been adequate to cover the car’s expenses for three days’ storage and a journey of two thousand kilometers.

“That could take you as far north as Anchorage or as far south as Guatemala,” Hal pointed out unhelpfully. “I can’t tell for sure how many more accounts there might be on which Rappaccini and the woman might draw, but the transfers made so far have allowed me to trace several that are held under other names; it’s possible that one of them is his current name.” “What are they?” Oscar Wilde inquired.

“Samuel Cramer, Gustave Moreau, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, and Thomas De Quincey.” Wilde sighed. “Samuel Cramer is the hero of a novella by Baudelaire,” he said.

“Gustave Moreau was a French painter associated with the French decadent movement. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a critic and murderer who was the subject of an essay by my namesake called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’—an exercise partly inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s more celebrated essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ I fear that these aliases are little more than a series of jokes—decorative embellishments of the unfolding plot.” “The names don’t matter,” said Hal. “What matters is where the money that fed the accounts originated, and where it goes when it makes its exits. I already have surfers going through the books of Rappaccini Inc. with a fine-toothed comb. At present, the money trail seems more likely to deliver the goods than the picture searches. With luck, I’ll eventually be able to find out where the man who used to use the Rappaccini name and our mysterious nonexistent woman have their basic supplies delivered—food, equipment, and so on—and when I know that, I’ll know where they are, and what names they use when they’re not using silly pseudonyms. Then we can pick them both up and charge them.” “What about this brainwave of Lowenthal’s?” Charlotte asked—having reported the conjecture while the maglev was pulling into the San Francisco station. “Have you found any evidence to suggest that Czastka might have set up the Biasiolo identity?” “Not yet,” said Hal noncommittally. Charlotte guessed that Hal wasn’t taking Lowenthal’s hypothesis any more seriously than Wilde was. Although he was reluctant to say so, Hal was presumably still beavering away at the brainfeed link—which could easily extend from King, Urashima, and Rappaccini to Kwiatek, but not to Czastka. Or to Wilde, for that matter, Charlotte admitted to herself.

Despite her aggressive question about whether he had ever used brainfeed equipment, she had found not the slightest shred of evidence that he had ever had a substantial financial or practical interest in the field.

The car which awaited them in the underground garage was roomy and powerful.

Once it was free of the city’s traffic-control computers it would be able to zip along the transcontinental at two hundred kilometers per hour. If they were headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they’d be there sometime around midnight They’d need a couple of thermal suits.

Michael Lowenthal opened the door to the seat which faced the driver’s control panel and politely stood aside, offering it to her—but she remembered their journey across Manhattan only too well. She shook her head, leaving him no alternative but to take the front himself while Charlotte got into the rear with Oscar Wilde.

As soon as they were all settled, Wilde activated the car’s program. The car slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street.

Michael Lowenthal, who had skipped breakfast on the maglev in order to lay his beautiful hypothesis before the stern gaze of Oscar Wilde, called up a menu from the car’s synthesizer and looked it over unappreciatively.

“I fear,” said Wilde as he scanned the duplicate which had appeared in the panel on the back of the seat in front of him, “that we are in for a rather Spartan trip.” Most hire cars only stocked manna with a choice of artificial flavorings; this one was a deluxe model, but it didn’t have anything else to offer.

“The time to worry about that,” Charlotte said tersely, “is when we reach Guadalajara.” She had taken note of the fact that the car had turned southeast, heading for intersection nine of the transcontinental instead of eight. Wherever they were headed, it was not Alaska.

Lowenthal was obviously used to better fare than the car had to offer; he decided not to bother with breakfast after all.

Charlotte plugged her beltphone into the screen mounted in the back of the drive compartment and began scrolling through more data that Hal’s silvers had collated while she had been otherwise occupied. The artificial geniuses had found a great many links between Gabriel King and Michi Urashima to add to the coincidence of their possible attendance at the same university—more links, in fact, than anyone could reasonably have expected, even allowing for the fact that they had been acquainted for more than a hundred and seventy years. There was, however, no clear evidence as yet that King’s funding of Urashima’s various exploits had been compensated by slightly larger sums paid to him by third parties who did not wish to be seen funding brain-feed research themselves.

Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down to the real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King’s was likely to be completely clean, especially if he’d been in business, but a man in his position could keep secrets even in today’s world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that his murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but to Charlotte’s admittedly naive eyes King’s laundry basket seemed fuller than anyone could have expected. She began to wonder whether Lowenthal had made a mistake in starting at the beginning of the King/Urashima relationship rather than the end. Even when Michi Urashima had landed in deep trouble, it seemed, his connections with King had remained intact, but they had been hidden. King had not only funded Urashima but had helped to establish all kinds of shields to hide his work and its spin-off. Hal’s silvers had only just begun to build Paul Kwiatek into the picture, but they had already uncovered some commercial links between King and Kwiatek that were as surprising in their way as the links between King and Urashima. Rappaccini’s involvement with Urashima was, by contrast, beginning to seem perfectly straightforward.