“Just emerging from wintering in a castle I own in Shetland,” Geraint told him. “With his wife.”

“Ah, yes,” Michael said, chuckling gently. “My own ex, I do recall. That was a most peculiar business. Still, it all got sorted out in tke end.”

“I don't think I wish to know the intimate details,” Geraint said dryly. “Anyway, that’s enough for now. Call me when you get back. No, leave it until tomorrow. It’s the early hours of the morning here, you troublesome wretch.”

“I’ll leave you to get back to Dinah. Another blond, I presume?” Michael cut the connection before the Welshman could hurl an insult of his own. Grinning, pocketing the quantum scrambler, he called for a cab and began to make plans.

Money’s good, he thought. When I get back I’ll dial up that code Kryzinski gave me and collect the hundred thou deposit. They’re buying me for the next couple of weeks, almost, and I’m worth it.

But it’s a lot upfront.

Second-level CPUs?

Yeah, right.

2

Michael’s body protested at the alarm call. Two suborbitals in a day were too much provocation for flesh that still had to cope with the effects of a long-term injury, and a sharp stab of pain in his lower back made him wince. He lay quite still for a few seconds and then negotiated his way off the futon, slipping off sideways and getting upright gingerly and with no little care. He rubbed his eyes, scratched at his disordered hair and took a long gulp from the steely mineral water with the chunk of fresh lime on the bedside table. The bitterness of the citrus made him shake his head like a dog emerging from a river, and he headed for the bathroom and the pleasant ritual of the morning shave.

The smart frames he’d set to work upon returning to New York had disgorged their usual mass of data. The icon left for Renraku had been matched very swiftly, and a two-version printout, one with keywords and a short summary and the other a lengthy document with references and appendices, were awaiting his attention. He picked up the precis as he waited for the squeezer to mangle the oranges and deliver his breakfast.

The torso was the Shroud of Turin, the summary told him. Allegedly the shroud that covered the body of Christ in Joseph’s tomb, it had been established as a fake late last century by radiocarbon dating, which had placed the date of the cloth as somewhere between 700 and 850 years of age. The precis directed him to a technical detail regarding three-dimensional image-depth data in the longer printout.

Hmmm, he mused. I thought I recognized it, vaguely. There was a heap of controversy about it sixty, seventy years ago, but ever since the scientists had proved incontrovertibly that the Shroud was a fake, it had lapsed into obscurity. Yet the image was still compelling and powerful, even to a man with no devotion to the absurdities of religion.

By the time the orange juice was drained, leaving only an untidy tide-mark of fruit flesh lingering around the edges of the glass, Michael had found the referenced detail and was frowning over it.

There is an estimated discontinuity in image depth relating to the body and head, the text read. Image integrity is not sufficient for further analysis.

Well, big deal, he thought. The head is obviously a separate image anyway, and the whole damn thing is a collage. So what if there’s different image depth on the head and body? At the back of his mind, though, was a vague apprehension, a feeling that he knew something intuitively that stubbornly refused to rise into his conscious mind. Then he spotted two key words lower down the page.

Mona Lisa.

The image of the face is a transformed image based on the template of the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonando da Vinci, the text stated simply.

He extracted the chromalin from the scanning peripherals and studied it closely. It was by no means apparent to him. But the familiar, indeed over-familiar, image of the Mona Lisa was so well-known in its normal form that his brain refused to perceive the same face as a photographic negative, which was how the black woman’s face appeared. The confusion was even greater given that the image of the man’s body was itself rendered in a photographic negative, just as Shroudman had been by his creator.

Then he jolted back for an instant. Wait a minute. How do I know this is the face of a black woman? If this face is in negative, like the torso, it would be the face of a white woman, wouldn’t it? Yet I know that she’s black. How do I know that?

He looked again at the impassive smile and for a moment indulged a flight of fancy, musing over how many millions of men had fantasized and wondered about the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic almost-smile. Dissatisfied with himself, he replaced the chromalin and keyed in instructions for enlargements, enhancements, and various image transformations. While the system began its work, he made a swift decision and initiated some archival work by his frames.

Crossref Shroud/Leonardo, he instructed, It took the intelligent analytical program barely five seconds to flash the answer up on the screen.

One theory of the creation of the Shroud is that it was manufactured by Leonardo da Vinci in the first half of the 1490s at the probable behest of Pope innocent Vii. The process of manufacture employed a primitive, quasi-photographic technique using the principle of the camera obscura and light-sensitive pigments available to Leonardo at the time. Recreations of the suggested technique by British and South African researchers have been regarded by critical authorities as lending support to this theory, initially suggested in 1994. Consult the following references…

Michael skipped the listing that followed. So I have a decker with a Leonardo fixation, he thought. Well, he’s only the latest in a very long line. There must be more viruses named after da Vinci than anyone or anything else, and I’ve lost track of the number of deckers I’ve seen masquerading as him in the Matrix.

One final hunch made him key in a final query.

Crossref 2 May/Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci died on 2 May 1518.

Well, there we are, he thought with a grin. Now, let’s get the frames to work on every Leonardo-wannabee documented by sysops, deckers, and corporate sources in the last five years. Then we can start sorting the wheat from the chaff and offer Renraku a list of possibles. They almost certainly have the same list themselves by now, or will have shortly. This is elementary stuff, but I have to jump through the right hoops to get to the next stage and some serious money.

His thoughts turned to more difficult tasks. The next step was to jack into the Renraku system and find out exactly how much damage had been done to them. There was an element of real cat-and-mouse about this; he guessed that Renraku night well expect him to do precisely this. What he didn’t know was whether they would treat his intrusion as acceptable-and evidence of his skill and ability to define his own goals for himself-or whether they’d be seriously slotted off.

Well, stuff it, he thought. I’m going to get right down deep into their data stores and see just how heavy this drek is. And I’m going to need some help.

He called the London number. Within an hour, he had a reservation for another suborbital flight, and his body was already groaning at the prospect.

Big Ben was chiming ten when the limo delivered Michael to the House of Nobles in the Westminster District of London. He stepped out of one limo and straight into another, this one upholstered with ermine-trimmed crimson silk and satin, and with the crest of His Majesty on all available surfaces, or so it appeared.