Kristen was carrying the heavy knife she'd brought from Manoj's place, not an item she would normally touch in Cape Town itself, where she could get two years just for its presence in her bag. Right here, right now, though, she was glad to have it. All the way to the villa, set back off Main Street by a fringe of security railings and heavy flowering bushes, she got more and more paranoid. By the time she rang the bell at the plain gray gates, she was desperate to be off the street. The gates swung slowly open just long enough to allow her admittance, then immediately snapped shut behind her.

Then she walked up to the front door which was opened by a lean, gaunt-faced white man holding a heavy pistol leveled at her chest.

"Drop the bag and put your hands on your head," he ordered. She complied at once. Keeping the gun, and his eyes, trained on her, the man sank down onto one knee to open the bag. He pulled out her knife, spat at her, and kept it in one hand as he told her to retrieve the bag. She did so very slowly.

"Thought you'd cut me up for the goods, huh?" he snarled at her.

"Look, chummer, I'm just the errand girl," she said wearily. "I walked down Main Street to get here. What kind of idiot would do that without a blade?"

He nodded reluctantly and edged back into the hallway. "You better come in. I ain't going to just pull everything out in plain view of anyone keeping their eyes open," he said. Sighing, she followed him in, being careful to move slowly and deliberately.

The man put the knife down on the table and, keeping his eyes on her, walked over to a desk and picked up an old, crudely made radio. Carrying it over to her, he stuffed it into her bag.

"It's in there," he said. "Tell Manoj he can keep the radio. It still works." For a moment he almost allowed himself a smile and then thought better of it. "Tell him the other half of the money had better be here by tomorrow morning or he's going to get a visit from some men. Now, buzz."

Kristen wasn't yet ready to abandon the chance to make some extra money. "I've got something Manoj said you might want to buy." The man laughed derisively, but that didn't put her off. "In the bag. A computer."

He extracted the radio again and put it to one side, then removed the small box. The fact that he didn't stare at it like it was something that had just crawled into a hole and died was promising.

"Let me scope it," he said. "But you'd better come with me. I ain't trusting you to sit in here."

Still watching her like a veldt hawk, he led her into the back room, where he told her to sit opposite him at a work table. He laid the gun down within reach and flicked the tiny power button on the computer.

"Manoj couldn't get it to work. He said maybe you could use the parts," Kristen told him. He unscrewed the casing and checked the insides.

"Nothing really wrong with it. I could use some of this, maybe," he said coolly. "Give you a hundred rand for it."

That was chicken fodder, really. But even though she didn't know what the little machine was worth, Kristen wasn't in much of a bargaining position. She'd learned that a small gain now was better than the possibility of a big gain later, so she decided to take the money.

"Sure. If you help me with one thing."

"Huh?" he grunted. She pushed the unfurled printout at

him. "One of the names on this list. Serrin Shamandar. Any way of getting more information?"

He looked at the digits on the paper. "There's a telecom number," he said. "Why ain't you tried it, stupid?"

"I can't read, stupid," she snapped, stung.

"Look, I'm not making any calls to someone I never even heard of," he said. "Some people have permanent traces that switch on as soon as you call 'em. If you want to talk to this bugger, get someone to make the call for you when you get back home. Use a public phone."

If I can find one that hasn't been fragged, she thought. The only ones still working were in parts of town where Kristen's dark skin would be out of place and make her look as suspicious as hell.

"Look, it's only a phone call," she said miserably. "He's not going to come looking for you all the way from Seattle just because somebody calls him from Cape Town, is he? Twenty bucks I can pay you."

"Where did you get dollars? No, I won't ask," he said drily. "All right. You get half a minute, that's all."

He entered the code on his telecom, cutting the visual channel. The whine that came back left him grinning.

"That's no phone number, gal. It's a fax. Words only. You want me to type in a message? Cost you ten bucks a half-minute."

Kristen didn't want him to know what she was going to say. She didn't even know what she wanted to say. She tried to think of someone she'd trust enough to do it back in Cape Town. She got up to leave, but he leveled the gun at her.

"Twenty bucks, you said."

She threw him half of that. "You made the connection, but I didn't get to talk. Half rate," she said, staring defiantly at him. He sniffed and looked away from her.

"Have it your way. Take your knife and get back in one piece. Manoj will be really slotted off if you don't make it." He unrolled a couple of fifties from his pocket and exchanged them for the fives on the table.

By the time the gates had closed behind her and she'd run the gauntlet of eyes along the highway again, Kristen

wasn't looking forward to the bus trip home. She was carrying a five-to-ten sentence in her bag and was ten dollars poorer for nothing. Even with a hundred rand, by the time she'd bought a drink to survive the ride home she'd have spent almost as much as she was supposed to get paid for this trip. Kristen sighed. Well, that was the thing about luck. Sometimes a run of it ended just too soon.

"Lunch time, you chaps," came an infuriatingly cheerful voice. "You've had three hours' kip. Sleep any longer and you won't sleep tonight. Come on, you missed the food by time it got here."

Serrin opened his eyes and yawned. Rolling off the bed, he went burrowing into his case for his toothbrush. He was just heading for the bathroom while the troll snored thunderously on when Michael stopped him in his tracks.

"Well, it's not the Damascus League who's after you," the Englishman told him. "German info is that they wanted to scrag Small because he's cuddling up too close to the Jewish vote. They've got a list of targets, but you're not on it. You will also be pleased to know that Renraku, Aztechnology, HKB in London who, I gather, have a special interest in you and a handful of other power-players might be keeping tabs on you, but with little in the way of homicidal intent."

"You mean you've cracked the surveillance files of Renraku? Aztechnology? Are you for real?" Serrin gasped.

"Of course not. I have a few contacts, that's all. Asking them to confirm that you're not on anything above zero-priority level isn't calling in such a high-level favor. By the way, Frieda in Frankfurt remembers a completely anonymous man in a chauffeur's uniform. Average height, average build, shades, peaked cap. long coat. No identifying characteristics whatsoever. She said he had a sexy voice, though."

"Great," Serrin grumbled. "Next time some drekhead tries to shoot me I'll remember to notice that."

"So we've established some negatives. Now Tracey's

doing her stuff on missing mages. Separated by race and tagged for corporate politics, obviously. She's doing the easy stuff now, but I think I'll jump into the pool and do the difficult ones myself while you're having lunch. I wouldn't want to leave her to the mercies of British 1C, for instance. Digging into the heavier corporates for unre-ported losses might be tricky, too."

"Don't you ever sleep?" Serrin wondered.

"I don't need more than three hours a night. Not since I started meditating twice a day. Ten minutes of that is as good as two hours sleep, believe me. I've got an overac-tive dopaminergic circuit, Geraint tells me. He once made me pee into some flask for one of his bloody experiments to test for some metabolites or other when we were at Cambridge. He did chromatography and assays on it and told me that, depending on how I handled it, I'd be either one of the best deckers in the business or a schizophrenic."