By the time Kristen rejoined him downstairs, fresher and feeling much better, Manoj had the guts of the thing dismembered on a table top in the back of the shop.

"Huh. Can't find anything wrong with it," he said, putting the pieces back into the case in a way that suggested that they were going in exactly in the same way they'd come out. "It's slotted up, though. First it spewed out a list of names and some IDs, but now it won't do a fraggin' thing."

She picked up the small coil of paper that had scrolled from the tiny printer he'd connected to the device.

"Look, girl what you getting me into?" he said almost angrily. "One of these names here, it's the guy who got kidnapped last night down by Ocean View. What do you know about that, honey?"

Kristen wanted to bluff her way out, but she paused just an instant too long trying to look innocent. She'd hosed it.

"Look, Manoj, I just picked it up off the ground, yeah? It was lying by the other guy's body. The one who got scragged. Frag it, you know me better than to think I'm into scragging people. Me?"

He looked at her s'uspiciously. "Who else knows about this?"

"No one. I brought it straight to you," she said miserably.

"Well, I ain't gonna buy it. You know there ain't much I won't handle in the way of stolen goods, but if it's been within a whiff of a stiff, then you can forget it." He almost slammed the last small screw into the casing and shoved it roughly back at her.

Kristen was almost to the doorway on her way out when his tone softened.

"Look, maybe we can do each other a favor. I was on the lookout for somebody to run me an errand anyway. Get the bus to Simon's Town and fetch something for me, yeah?"

She turned round and looked at him with a wide-eyed smile. There was going to be money in this.

"Take that to my half-brother John. The white one, you've met him," Manoj said with only a little bitterness. Like her, he was of mixed race, but being half-Indian rather than half-Xhosa, he didn't face quite the same

scale of problems as she did. He still got more than enough to be resentful, though.

"Here's the address," he said, scribbling something on the top leaf of a notepad. "Oh, frag it, I forgot you can't read. Look, get a cab at the bus station and show the driver this, got it? No, better still, I'll tell you and you memorize it, yeah?"

"I can do that," she said happily. Being illiterate, she'd had to learn to.

"He might buy this for junk value. The parts might be worth something to him, I don't know. Anyway, he'll give you something to bring back with you, you got it? Fifty rand for you when you get it back here. If you don't come back, girl, you end up in the harbor after I've dealt with you. You scan?"

Drugs, probably, she thought. It wasn't much money for risking five years in Parliament. The city had converted the old Houses of Parliament into a prison twenty years ago, but that irony did nothing to make the idea of spending time there any more pleasant.

When he'd finished reciting the address to her, and she'd proved that she could parrot it perfectly, Manoj mused over the printout for a moment.

"Strange collection of names here. Some big cheese from Vienna, someone from London, England, some weirdo with an elven name from Seattle. All over the place. Huh." He was about to crumple up the piece of paper when, on impulse, Kristen stopped him. It was impossible, obviously, but she had to know.

"The elf. What's his name?"

"Serrin Shamandar. What's it to you?"

Kristen felt like she'd been kicked by a Ramskop buck.

"Jack squat," she managed to lie, picking up the piece of scrunched paper. "I'll get this to your brother. Be back by nightfall."

"You'd better be," he growled.

When they crawled in, bleary-eyed, at breakfast time the following morning, Serrin and Tom were astounded by Michael's fifteenth-floor apartment in Soho. The Englishman looked as dapper as usual, unaffected by sleeplessness. Serrin felt like a shop dummy in his ridiculous clothes, but Tom assured him that he looked really flash. Serrin hadn't turned round fast enough to see the smile, never suspecting Tom had a talent for sarcasm.

Michael had six rooms, half the building's top floor. Two of them were filled entirely with cyberdecks and associated tech, machines cannibalized and rewired until they looked like something from another planet.

"It's a bit Heath Robinson, but it works," the Englishman said as he swept in and flicked on the lights. Serrin noticed there weren't any windows, at least not in the rooms he could see.

"What's Heath Robinson?" he asked.

"An artist who designed ridiculous machines that looked like they might work."

"What, you mean, like, Rube Goldberg?" Serrin asked.

Michael gave him a smile. "Yes, folks, it's that old 'One nation divided by a common language' time again," he chuckled. "Anyway, you two can catch some sleep if you want. I've got work to do. I think Gerald will have finished the business in Germany by now."

"Gerald? Who's he?" Serrin demanded irritably. It was becoming tiresome the way this Englishman always seemed to be so far ahead of it all.

"Gerald's a smart frame. I like to give them names after designing them. Anyway, I got Gerald off to his stuff last night with the remote while you were changing

clothes. I must say, old boy, you look spiffing in them." The troll sniggered.

"A smart frame working from here? Spirits, isn't that risky? Surely there'll be trace 1C in a military system," Serrin said doubtfully.

"That's why Gerald was re-routed through BIG in Dallas/Fort Worth. If the Germans trace him, they'll think it was someone in the Texas corp who's been snooping on them. From past experience I know that Gerald can infiltrate BIC and that they won't be able to trace him. I'll download what he's got. By then, Tracey should have finished analyzing flight schedule data and setting up options for MP checks," Michael replied smoothly.

"Don't even ask about Tracey," Tom whispered to Serrin.

"Chummer, what is there that you can't do?" Serrin asked caustically.

The Englishman paused to think for a moment. "I wouldn't want to try busting into Aztechnology in Aztlan, old boy. Not unless someone gave me a million up front and I had a top-notch team of paramedics sitting around me at the deck. Apart from that, and one or two of the hush-hush Japanese sculpted systems, I'm not intimidated by anything, really.

"Geraint says I'm a controlled hypomanic. That's when he's being nice. And if you ask him after his latest affaire d'amour has gone down the tubes, he'll probably say that I'm crazy," Michael said. "But if I do something, it gets done. Now let me order out for some bagels and let's see what we've got here."

Even on a cool winter's day, it was an unpleasant ride out to Simon's Town. A bus that was supposed to carry only sixty people was stuffed with nearer to a hundred, and the interior was hot, sweaty, and stifling. At first Kristen thought she was seated among half a dozen jockeys headed for the ostrich races, but soon she realized that they were just wannabes, kids hoping to attract the attention of the right person at the track. They chattered and laughed and pointedly ignored her, which suited her; she stayed quiet and just waited, increasingly miserably,

for the trip to end. The ride took nearly two hours, the bus crawling around the western coastline before it veered east past Da Gama Park on the way to the broken-down old naval port. Next time, she thought, I'll make Manoj give me the extra rand for the train.

The big old houses on Main Street had long since decayed into a warren of ghettos. Azania didn't maintain much of a navy these days and more than half the people of the town were unemployed, most of the rest having to commute into Cape Town itself to find work. The few who were lucky, or trusted, enough to get work as gem-stone polishers in Topstones lived in their own arcology, far from their fellows down the hillside. There were too many empty eyes in the streets looking for people whose money might buy them a few hours of oblivion in some wretched indulgence or other.