"And what if I am?" Her tone was light-hearted.

"Nothing." Matt was assailed by a sudden stab of intense dislike for David. He was so right-on and decent, always supporting causes and organizing charity things and being so caring.

"I'm on the bike," Maeve said.

Matt looked blank.

"I can't have more than one drink if I'm on the bike," she explained. "I'd rather have none than one."

Instantly, Matt shifted his dislike from David to Maeve's bike, like it was a chaperone keeping him from her.

"Well, I'm going for a drink," Matt said, with defiance that he didn't really understand.

"More power to you."

"Yes, more power to me."

In the pub, Nat asked, "Where's Maeve?"

"Not coming."

"She's not?" Nat seemed disproportionately disappointed.

Matt looked at her warily. "What's up?"

"Maeve's finishing her training next week."

"Already?"

"Two weeks early. It's a secret. She's done really well. I want her on my team."

But I want her.

"And she wants to be on Team Nat?"

"I haven't asked her. I was going to float it tonight."

"So she doesn't know anything about it yet?"

"No."

I' ll get to her first.

When Matt persuaded Pong from Thailand to leave his team for Nat's and took Maeve for himself, Nat seemed a little shaken by Matt's treachery. Nevertheless, she raised a glass and declared him "a worthy adversary."

In the following weeks, Matt started saying "guff " and "more power to you" and sometimes "more power to your elbow."

"More power to my elbow?" Nat laughed. "My little Galwegian boy."

It was her joke. As if she, the lovely Natalie, would ever go out with a Galwegian.

Day 61 . . .

By 11:30 p.m. Star Street had fallen silent. I'd been waiting for Katie to come home and I realized she wasn't going to. I located her across the city, entering a large Victorian house, about to receive a birthday pleasuring from potent Conall.

She was very chatty. The result of large quantities of champagne. Conall was trying, with admirable good humor, to unlock his front door and simultaneously keep Katie upright.

"Who'd beat who in a fight?" Katie was asking. "Hedge-fund manager or you?"

"Me." Conall's tone of voice gave me to understand that this line of questioning had been going on for some time.

His fingers circled her arm, as he led them into the house and disabled the alarm.

Katie leaned against a light switch and exclaimed in drunken delight as half the house lit up. "I do that? Let there be light! No need to hold on to me, I won't fall over."

"Fall over if you like. It's your birthday."

"I drank a lot of champagne." She nodded her head seriously. "Bit pissed. Could happen."

Conall steered her to the staircase and together, very slowly, they ascended, Katie having to take frequent pauses to laugh for no reason.

On step four she refused to budge. "This is a good one! Conall, who'd beat who in a fight? President of the World Bank or you?"

"Me."

"It's nice to just lean back, you know? Like this." She allowed all her weight to fall against the arm Conall had around her waist. "You won't let me fall. Used to do it at school, see how much we trusted someone."

"Ups-a-daisy. We'll keep moving."

On the ninth step she stopped again. "Who'd beat who in a fight? The CEO of Jasmine Foods or you?"

"Me. With both hands tied behind my back."

That made her laugh long and wheezily, and all progress halted. "Can't walk and laugh at same time."

Finally, they reached the landing and he opened the bedroom door. Katie toppled in, made it as far as the bed, lay on her back and stuck one leg up in the air. "Take off my boots."

"No, leave them on."

"Oh? Ooh. Okay. Who'd beat who in a-"

He covered her mouth with his and, after a moment, she ceased her questioning. She would never know who would beat who in a fight, the head of the International Monetary Fund or Conall, but suddenly it no longer seemed important. The birthday pleasuring had begun.

In her wardrobe in Star Street, I compressed myself into a red-soled, peep-toe shoe and accessed some of her memories.

How Katie met Conall . . .

Well, just like Matt and Maeve's story, this too happened at work. Katie was head publicist at Apex Entertainment Ireland. They called themselves Apex Entertainment, because they wanted to seem twenty-first-century and multimedia, but basically they were a record company, the Irish outpost of a much bigger multinational. Katie had been there for five years, welcoming visiting rock stars to Ireland, organizing their interviews, hanging around backstage wearing a laminated pass, then-the most important part of her job as far as she could see-taking them drinking. It was harder than it sounded, because she was the one who had to remain sober and coherent enough to sign for all the bottles of Cristal, get the artistes home to bed, then show up at her desk at ten o'clock the following morning after four hours' sleep.

If you met her at a christening, you'd probably never guess she worked for a record company. Admittedly, she always wore high heels and sometimes tight jeans but she didn't take cocaine and her thighs were wider than her knees. Despite these impediments, Katie was popular with the visiting rock stars, who referred to her as "Auntie Katie," which she didn't mind too much. Or "Mum," which she did. Artistes returning to Ireland greeted her like an old friend and sometimes, late at night, they tried to wrestle her and her thighs into bed, but she knew their heart was never really in it, it was just an instinctive reaction, something they'd been programmed to do in the presence of any woman. She almost always turned them down.

So yes, Katie was working away, not exactly happy but not exactly unhappy either, when a rumor started doing the rounds that the European arm of Apex was going to be cut free from their U.S. owners and sold to the highest bidder, who would promptly sack everyone. But that particular rumor regularly did the rounds, so Katie decided not to bother worrying. She didn't have the same energy she used to have and over the years she'd wasted too much adrenaline and anxiety on disasters that had never had the decency to occur.

Then it really happened. A press release announced that they'd been bought by Sony, who planned to keep Apex as a separate label. The relief engendered by this was short-lived because the next sentence said that Apex would be "rationalized" by Morehampton Green.

"Who are they?" Tamsin asked. (Low-grade frequency. Not too bright. Wore white lipstick. Long legs, large breasts. Popular with visiting artistes.) "Who cares?" Katie said. Her frequency had gone haywire, quivering with fear. It wasn't as though she loved her job but now that there was a chance she might lose it . . .

"Vultures," Danno said, with contempt. (Danno, aged twenty-three. Shrill, fast-vibrating frequency. Needed very little sleep. Always wore black. Could consume copious amounts of cocaine without any apparent ill effects. Also popular with visiting artistes.) "Morehampton Green descend on companies that are underperforming," Danno explained. "Strip them of their assets, sack most of the staff and leave nothing in their wake but shock and awe."

"And what good's that?" Katie asked.

"They make it much more efficient, save loads of money, the usual. Normally, Morehampton Green ply their nasty business in Southeast Asia, but they're prepared to make an exception for us."

"Decent of them."

"What's going to happen to us, Katie?" Tamsin asked.

"I don't know."

In a strange hierarchical glitch, Katie didn't really have a boss. Officially, her manager was Howard Cookman, president of European publicity, but he was based in London and had no interest at all in the Irish end of things, which usually suited Katie just fine because he had a tendency to bore on in an atrocious accent, part LA, part EastEnders, about the times he'd met a) Mark Knopfler, b) Simon Le Bon and c) Debbie Gibson.

Katie had made it a point to protect her little slice of autonomy, but all of a sudden she was sorry. It wasn't nice being the only grown-up and she yearned for someone with more power than her to come along and promise that everything was going to be okay.

Alerted by a swishing noise, everyone present (all six of the Public Relations staff and all fourteen of Marketing) turned to the Star Trek-style automatic glass doors. It was Graham from Human Resources. Under normal circumstances he exuded smug confident vibrations but today his life force was much reduced.

Silently, he gave a memo to everyone in the room: two brief lines that said a Mr. Conall Hathaway would be making contact "shortly."

"Who's he?" Katie asked.

"The axman sent by our new owners," Graham said. "He is Morehampton Green."

"What do you mean, he is Morehampton Green?" Danno asked, irate that someone knew more than him.

"I mean Morehampton Green is pretty much a one-man band. He's bound to have a busload of number-crunchers with him but Conall Hathaway makes all the decisions."

"Control freak," Danno said, with great contempt.

"Why will he be contacting me?" Tamsin cried.

Graham bowed his head and said nothing.

"To let you know whether you still have a job or not," Katie deduced. "Am I right, Graham?"

Graham nodded, with resignation.

"Conall Hathaway? Surely you mean Conall the Barbarian?" said Danno. Danno enjoyed nicknames. (Those on his frequency usually do.) For two days nothing happened. Everyone continued working as normal, because until something occurred there was always a chance that it mightn't. But on the afternoon of the third day, Danno was in possession of such an important tidbit of news to share with his colleagues that the glass doors didn't swish open quickly enough and Danno crashed into them, catching an unpleasant blow to his right temple. "Open, you useless pieces of-" he yelped, stamping around on the floor, trying to activate whatever needed to be activated. At this point he had the attention of everyone within. Finally, the doors juddered apart and Danno burst into the office, like he'd been spat from a machine.

"He has the cold dead eyes of a killer!" Danno declared. "He got into the lift with me just now and, I swear, I nearly shat myself."

"Who?"

"Slasher Hathaway. Conall the Barbarian. He's come to sack us all!"

"So soon?" Katie was alarmed. "It's almost indecent."

"He's got several orcs with him, pimply younglings learning his dirty trade, but he's a hands-on merchant. He'll be on the prowl," Danno warned. "Keep an eye out. We'll be toast before this day is out."

Katie eyed him with uncertainty. Danno was a catastrophist; he seemed to thrive on disaster. More than once she'd wondered if he was perhaps addicted to adrenaline, the poor man's cocaine.

She summoned Audrey. (A vibration that was so muted it was almost apologetic. Reliable, trustworthy, meticulous. Not as popular with visiting artistes as Tamsin or Danno.) "Go and check on this Conall character. Be discreet."

Within minutes, Audrey had reappeared, wearing her hangman's face. "It's true. He's in with Graham. They're going through personnel contracts."

Katie bit her knuckle. "What does he look like?"

After consideration, Audrey said, "Cruel."

"Christ!"

"Lean and hungry."

"That's not so bad."

"Lean and hungry and cruel." Then she added, "He's eating chocolate."

"What?"

"There's a huge bar of Mint Crisp on the desk and he's eating it while he's talking to Graham. Entire rows in one go. Not breaking it into squares or anything."

"How huge? A hundred grams? Two hundred grams?"

"One of those massive ones you can only get in the duty-free. Five hundred grams, I think. You know what, Katie? He's actually really good-looking. I think I fancy him. I always fancy men who have power over me."

"Don't fancy him," Katie said. "You think that all a cruel-looking man needs is the love of a good woman and then he won't be cruel any more. But he stays cruel and you eat your heart out." It made her feel old, giving this sort of advice.

"You might fancy him too," Audrey suggested.

"I won't fancy him."

"Say what you like, but we have no control over these things," Audrey warned darkly.

The phone rang: the cars had arrived.

Katie had a moment, a delicious little pinprick of a moment, when she considered just walking away from it all and sparing herself tonight's ordeal with Knight Ryders and their grumpiness. If she was going to be made redundant anyway . . .

But what if she was one of the ones who got to keep her job?

"Okay," Katie called. "Danno, Audrey, saddle up, the cars are here."