'I want those buildings taken out right now,' Arvam told his aide.

The pair of drones fired TOW missiles to the right and left, smashing holes in the buildings along the far perimeter of the park, setting the remains on fire. The marines bounded away across the park as debris began to drop out of expanding clouds of dust and smoke.

'This is the diehard element,' Arvam said. 'Dead-enders. Suicide jockeys. Even if we get a line open to Marisa Bassi, I doubt they'll surrender. But we have to try. After all, we are not barbarians.'

'They didn't do too badly for civilians armed only with mortars,' Yamil Cho said.

He must have been amped up by the brief firefight; he wouldn't usually speak out of turn.

'A lucky strike,' Arvam said lightly. It seemed that nothing could dent his invincible good humour.

'Perhaps they recognised you,' Sri said, angry because he'd put her in the line of fire.

'Perhaps they did.' Arvam seemed pleased by the thought. He shaded his eyes with his wrist and watched as the marines disappeared one after the other between two smouldering buildings, then told Sri that he had a little job for her: he wanted to see if Avernus had left behind anything of interest.

There was a spray of pockmarks on the wall by the entrance to the compound, but it was otherwise undamaged. A short tunnel with doors at either end led to a courtyard garden roofed with irregular panes of diamond tinted pink and yellow and set in a spiderweb of fullerene composite. Sleeping pods were scattered amongst stands and beds of tropical plants. A colonnade along one side sheltered several open-plan rooms; rugs and cushions had been dragged out and scattered across the garden or thrown into the bowl of a fountain where water pulsed from the top of a chunk of black rock and rippled down its sides. Someone had daubed in red paint a chicken-foot symbol in a circle on the white wall facing the colonnade.

Printed books lay in heaps on the floor of one room. When Sri picked one up, it fell open to the first page and a young man's voice said, 'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by someone else, these pages must show . . .' A sentiment that so precisely echoed her present situation that she felt a little shock, as if someone had crept up behind her and suddenly spoken into her ear.

It took only a few minutes to ascertain that nothing was left of Avernus's personal possessions apart from the books and a clear shard of plastic that Yamil Cho passed to Sri. It came alive when she touched it, showing a looped segment of a panning shot across a cavern floor crowded with strange organic shapes. She put it in one of the patch pockets of her pressure suit and walked twice around the garden and saw nothing unusual. She did not know what she had been expecting to find, but she felt disappointed. The plants were common-or-garden species saw-toothed palmettos, bamboos, a cluster of dwarf date palms, flowering acacias. A fig tree sprawled over the wall opposite the entrance. Yamil Cho found a small lizard clinging to one of the branches, its skin the exact shade and texture of the smooth grey bark, changing to jagged pulses of scarlet and black when Sri plucked it from its perch and snipped off one of its toes and dropped it in a sample tube. A pale cricket twice as long as her thumb crouched in a cage woven from bamboo slivers. Sri tapped the cage and it sang a clear pure snatch of melody.

'Mozart, I believe,' Arvam said, surprising her.

'I saw ones like this in a green market in Rainbow Bridge,' Sri said.

'They're common to all the moons.'

'Take it,' Arvam said. 'And check everything else.'

'The plants are just plants. Nothing special.'

'The lizard looked like an ordinary lizard until you disturbed it.'

'Chameleonism is hardly a novel cut.'

Arvam stared at Sri for a moment, then took the slate that his aide held out to him and turned his back on her.

She set to work with a cold fury, snipping samples from everything and dropping them in tubes that Yamil Cho labelled. They'd worked halfway across the courtyard garden when there was a sound like a huge door slamming deep underground. A sudden breeze bent bamboos and shook waxy leaves; needles pushed into Sri's ears; the doors of the short entrance tunnel slid shut. Overhead, the spiderweb roof creaked and groaned and the pastel colours of its diamond panes brightened as beyond them veils of smoke were sucked away, revealing the lights hung under the roof of the tent, stark against the black sky.

Across the garden, Arvam Peixoto shoved the slate at his aide, ordering the man to find out where the breach had occurred, and Sri realised that Paris had just lost its air.

7.

It was a long walk to the city, across rolling, lightly cratered terrain, through pieced vacuum-organism fields. Every few minutes Loc turned and scanned the fields for any movement or flash of colour, but it seemed that he had managed to escape free and clear. He told himself that he'd had no choice, that he'd been woefully outnumbered and running away had been his only option. He told himself that he'd get his revenge. He'd surrender to the first Brazilian soldiers he encountered, find their commanding officer, explain that he knew where to find Avernus, and insist on leading the search for her. The gene wizard was a great prize; he was bound to be rewarded handsomely after he captured her. The thought of that, and ideas about what he'd do to Macy Minnot after she was handed to him for questioning, kept his spirits up as he loped along in the ill-fitting prison-issue pressure suit with only his elongated shadow for company.

Loc had been walking for almost an hour, and had used up more than half his air supply, when he left the last field behind and crabbed down a slope of rubble to a mesh roadway that ran across dusty and rubble-strewn flats towards the crater rim, curved across the horizon like a range of low hills. The city's long tent slanted up a shallow slope, bright as a splinter of sunlight under the black sky. On either side of the city and along the rim's flat crest thready plumes of dust spurted up and dropped straight back some kind of bombardment going on. Everything sharp and small and vivid, the explosions soundless.

He hadn't been following the road for very long when he came upon the twisted remains of a rolligon that had been struck by a missile. Fragments of composite panelling and glass and quick-frozen bodies and pieces of bodies were strewn all around a fresh crater, but a quick search failed to turn up any kind of weapon, so he went on at a steady lope. At last he left the roadway and headed out across open ground towards the spaceport, where two transports sat gleaming fat and beautiful in the level light of the newly risen sun, their blunt noses blazoned with the green and blue flags of Greater Brazil and the European Union. The radio in his pressure suit had only one short-range channel, and there was no traffic on it. So he couldn't contact the attacking forces and let them know who he was and what he wanted to do; he could only hope for the best and march forward with his hands raised in the universal sign of surrender.

Loc was approaching a cluster of small blockhouses at the edge of the raised landing field when dust snapped up to his left, little spouts of dust walking in a line towards him. He realised that he was being shot at and back-pedalled and fell flat on his back. It probably saved his life. Before he could get to his feet, something smacked into the ground a few metres away and a soundless flash sent a flat fan of debris scything above his head.

He crawled backward to the shelter of a bank of ice rubble and sat there until the pulse of adrenalin had faded away and he was no longer trembling. It was clear that he couldn't risk trying to reach the transports; he didn't have any way of talking to the Brazilian troops and he was wearing an orange pressure suit with black numbers stencilled across its chest that marked him as an escaped Outer criminal. No, he was going to have to find a way into the city.

Loc had less than an hour of air left now, and it took most of that time to navigate the chevron berms and traps and trenches of the defences that the citizens of Paris had so laboriously constructed and so quickly abandoned. He had to climb in and out of more trenches than he cared to count, but he had one piece of luck when he found five bodies flung out around a fresh crater. They'd all been carrying guns, and one was still functional.

By now he could see that the freight yards at the tip of the city had been flattened, and that the airlocks were guarded by battle drones that would no doubt shred him without compunction if he got too close. Luckily, he'd visited Paris soon after he'd been posted to the Saturn System, had spent some time touring its perimeter, gathering information that without doubt had been of vital importance when the invasion plans had been drawn up. There were plenty of other ways in through the secondary domes and tents, and after a little thought he cut to the east, where a row of farm tubes lay at right-angles to the main tent.

The airlock at the end of the first farm tube was blocked by a pile of big ice blocks, and the farm's roof had been ripped open: the rows of bushes and plots of corn inside frozen solid in near darkness. The next farm tube was intact, green and lighted, but its airlock was blocked off too, and so was the next, and the one after that. Loc choked down his panic - he had about ten minutes of air left now - and after a few seconds' thought found a service ladder, swarmed up it, and with huge loping strides ran along the top of the curved roof. Rows of fruiting bushes were visible beneath the transparent panes, vivid heartbreaking green that triggered a pang of homesickness. He took one last bounding stride and pushed off in a huge arc that took him across the two-hundred-metre gap between the farm tube and the main tent, a record-breaking leap on Earth but nothing extraordinary in Dione's low gravity. His aim was just about perfect. He struck a slanted pane full-length, rebounded and tumbled backward onto the walkway below, and caught the rail and lay still for a moment, his heart pounding in his chest and his breath loud and harsh inside his helmet.

The steep quilting of the tent stretched away on either side. Here and there faint featherings of vapour jetted into the black sky - air venting through joints stressed by explosions or through small holes drilled by kinetic and energy weapons. It was a stark reminder of his own perilous situation, that his suit had only a few minutes of air left. As he crabbed along the walkway each breath seemed harder to take than the last and it wasn't easy to stay calm, especially when the hatch of the first access point he found wouldn't open because the mechanism had been disabled from the inside. He moved on, panting from the exertion of trying to force the hatch, his heart pounding in his chest, and tried the second hatch. It swung open silently and smoothly and he swarmed inside and pulled it shut behind him. There was a sharp hiss as the tiny compartment pressurised, and he yanked off his helmet and took great gulps of cold fresh air before he opened the inner hatch, scrambling out onto a walkway tucked between the slanting roof of the tent and the flat roof of one of the square apartment blocks that had been part of the original city before it had been extended up the slope of the rimwall.

Thirty seconds later Loc was at street level, standing at the mouth of an alley, clutching the pistol he'd taken off the dead man and looking up and down a broad avenue lined with big chestnut trees. Smoke shrouded the roof of the tent and dimmed the chandelier lamps. Inverted whirlpools in the smoke marked the locations of small leaks. The sound of small-arms fire crackled near and far, punctuated now and then by the crump of an explosion or the brief scream of an energy weapon. To his left, apartment blocks receded into a grey haze; to his right, a barricade blocked the avenue. Something had ploughed through it and bodies in pressure suits lay on either side of the gap. Good. It meant that the attackers had taken the position and advanced deeper into the city; it meant that he was behind friendly lines. All he had to do was find someone to whom he could safely surrender. He thought about taking off his pressure suit because the damn thing made him a highly visible target, but remembered the smashed farm tube and the small leaks in the tent's roof and decided that it would be better to keep it on in case there was a major blow-out.

He reached the barricade in three long strides and crouched behind a tumble of water-filled plastic blocks. The dead men and women had been stripped of any weapons they might have carried. Most had been shot in the head. Loc was nerving himself to run down the avenue to the next barricade when someone shouted behind him. He turned and saw two men standing in the middle of the rubble-strewn street, aiming pulse rifles at him. Both of them were Outers; both were wearing pressure suits with helmets hanging from their belts like grotesque fruits.

'I'm a friend,' Loc said quickly, and raised his hands.

'I think you better drop that pistol, friend,' one of the men said. He was in his forties, with receding blond hair cropped close to his skull. 'And lose that knife I see in your belt, too.'

Loc stooped and set down the pistol and the ceramic knife and straightened. The blond man told him to move to one side, and his companion stepped forward, scooped up the pistol, and stepped back.

'Maybe you can tell us what you're doing here, and why you're wearing a correctional-facility suit,' the blond man said.

'He looks like one of the enemy to me,' his companion said, giving Loc a hard stare.

Loc ignored him and told the blond man, 'I was in the correctional facility, yes. Some of us volunteered to fight, but on the way here our rolligon was hit by a missile. I'm the only survivor.'

'Yeah? How did you get into the city?' the second man said.

'I walked.'

'Past the fuckers who took the yards?'

'I came in through one of the maintenance locks up on the roof.'

'Ease up on him, Ward, you can see the man's with us,' the blond man said, and slung his pulse rifle over his shoulder and came forward and shook Loc's hand. 'Al Wilson.'

'Corey Wilcox,' Loc said. It was the name of one of his interrogators.

Al Wilson introduced his friend, Ward Zuniga, explained that they were one of the hit-and-run teams that were harassing the enemy behind the battle line. 'Look up,' he said.

A drone hung high above the avenue, its sleek triangle hazed by drifting smoke.

'How we spotted you, Corey,' AI Wilson said. 'How we spot the enemy, too. But we're done with that now. It's time to make a stand.'

'Why don't you point me towards the enemy?' Loc said. 'I want to kill as many of them as I can. For my dead comrades.'

'I reckon you'd do better if you came along with us,' AI Wilson said.

'Do I get my pistol back?' Loc said, smiling at him.

'Later on.'

'Right now, you can take point,' Ward Zuniga said. 'Go on now. Through those apartments across the street.'

They cut through the apartment block. In its central courtyard the bodies of men, women and children sprawled amongst wreckage fallen from the shattered canopy. All the windows overlooking the courtyard were broken and ribbons of smoke drifted from most of them. A short passageway on the far side led out to another broad avenue where people were rebuilding and reinforcing a barricade and cutting down a grove of small trees in an island garden at a T-junction to improve sight lines.

Al Wilson talked briefly with a young woman and followed her to the far side of the barricade; Ward Zuniga grabbed Loc's arm and told him that he could get to work right away. He pushed him towards a group of men and women who were filling hollow plastic blocks at a water bowser and dragging them to the base of the barricade, where they were passed from hand to hand up a chain of people to the top.

The water-filled blocks weighed little in the low gravity but were awkward to move. As he worked, sweating hard inside his pressure suit, Loc felt giddy with anger and barely suppressed hysteria. He'd trekked across the hostile surface of the moon, he'd been shot at by his own people, he'd barely had time to find a way into the city before his air ran out, and after all that he'd ended up working for the tweaks. But there was no chance of making a run for it: there were too many people milling around the barricade and the mean-eyed fellow, Ward Zuniga, was sitting on a block with his pulse rifle laid across his lap, watching him. So Loc had no choice but to toil to and fro until at last there was a stir in the little crowd around him. He looked up and saw a stocky man walking amongst the people, shaking hands.

It was the mayor of Paris, Marisa Bassi. Loc, who had once met the mayor at a reception, turned away and busied himself filling a block with water, frightened that he would be recognised. As the mayor drew closer, Ward Zuniga stood up and shook hands with him, and Loc took the chance to edge away. He found AI Wilson talking with another man, the two of them consulting a slate. AI Wilson was full of good humour, telling Loc that Marisa Bassi had been captured by enemy soldiers just two hours ago, but he'd manage to escape and make his way to the Bourse and broadcast a final message of defiance.

'It's wonderful news,' Loc said. 'But what is he doing here?'

'Organising the last stand, of course.' AI Wilson showed Loc the slate - an aerial view of the city patched from the viewpoints of those drones still aloft - and explained that the enemy had entered at the top and bottom and was moving towards the centre. 'We booby-trapped most of the buildings in the centre and then we used service tunnels to cut behind the enemy, here. When the two enemy lines meet, the whole area will go up in flames. We'll stand fast and deal with the survivors when they retreat.'

Loc had a falling sensation. 'How do you know they'll come this way?'

'Because our people will lead them here.' AI Wilson clapped Loc on the back. 'We still have a chance at winning the battle. And even if Paris falls, the war won't end until we drive these swine off Dione and out of the system.'

Flasks were being passed around. People toasted each other, drank. Loc took the opportunity, while work stopped for a moment and everyone was distracted, to start moving sideways through the crowd. If he didn't make a run for it now he would never get another chance. He would the here, trapped amongst fools prepared to give up their lives in a grand but ridiculously stupid gesture. But before he could reach the edge of the crowd Ward Zuniga stepped in front of him and shoved a flask at him and told him to drink up, it looked like he needed some courage.

Loc wiped the top of the straw, sucked up a slug of foully sweet fruit brandy, and handed back the flask and asked for his pistol.

'I'll give it you when the time comes. Meanwhile, you can get back to work,' the brute said, clearly enjoying himself.

Loc was dragging a block towards the barricade when another stir of excitement passed through his fellow workers. Some clustered around slates; others scrambled up the barricade. A flash of red light lit the smoky distance and there was a ragged sound of thunder. The ground trembled gently. All around Loc, people cheered and clapped. The trap had been sprung. The fools had blown up their own city in a vain attempt to save themselves.

Beyond the litter of felled trees at the T-junction a tall curtain of thick black smoke swirled into the avenue, and out of its rolling base came a man riding a fat-tyred trike at speed, braking so hard in front of the hedgehog of angled girders at the foot of the barricade that the trike briefly lifted onto its front wheel. The man bounded off and swarmed up the steep face of the barricade, shouting over and over again that the enemy was right behind him. Half a dozen people reached down and hauled him over the top. He was very young and very tall and very skinny. His white pressure suit was splashed with blood at the thigh and his eyes were wide and staring as he looked about and said breathlessly that the enemy would be here at any moment, could someone please give him a fucking gun.

Marisa Bassi strode amongst the people at the bottom of the barricade, tearing slates from their hands, shoving them towards the barricade.

'This is our moment!' he shouted. His voice was hoarse and he was unshaven and haggard, but he was full of energy. Someone handed him a pulse rifle and he lifted it above his head in a two-handed grip. 'This is our moment! What we do here may live on in infamy or it may live on in glory but I promise you that it will not be forgotten! You will not be forgotten! Fight not for your lives but for the city and for the freedom of all our worlds!'

Marisa Bassi held his stupid pose while people cheered his blowhard rhetoric to the echo. Loc ducked away when the mayor's gaze passed over his face; then AI Wilson was at his side, sweating and cheerful, handing him a pistol. Other people were pressing behind, so Loc had no choice but to scramble up the blocky face of the tall barricade - he knew that he would be shot down like a stray dog if he tried to run.

He found a footing next to AI Wilson at the top of the barricade. People crouched side by side, peering through chinks along the top of the barricade, lowering helmets over their heads and locking them in place, checking their weapons. Loc reached for his own helmet, but remembered with a chill that his lifepack was almost out of air. A muscle under his jaw was jumping and there was a fine tremor in his arms and legs and he felt that at any moment he might faint. The curtain of black smoke drifted down the avenue with dreamy slowness and battle drones stepped out of it so quickly that it was as if they had materialised out of thin air.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the drones exploded into motion and everyone except Loc started to fire at them as they pounded forward in a threshing of long spiky limbs. Explosions thudded along the walls of the buildings on either side of the avenue and the drones were caught in a vast loom of sticky threads, a web that contracted the instant after it formed and lifted them into the air.

Everyone was firing through chinks in the barricade, the noise tremendous. Compressor guns started up with a loud roar. Chains of people passed up cylinders of polished concrete that were fitted into the fat breeches of the guns, and with percussive thumps the guns flung the cylinders straight into the struggling tangle of machines, smashing carapaces and shearing away limbs. But the drones were already chopping free of the threads that bound them, bringing their own weapons to bear. Heavy rounds knocked chunks from the grassy roadway, sparked from angled girders, struck the barricade. Water spouted from shattered blocks and people fell backward, shot through the head or chest. One man howled and whirled around, spraying his neighbours with blood hosing from his half-severed arm. AI Wilson grunted in surprise, spun in a half-circle to show Loc the raw meat where his face had been, and collapsed.

Loc tumbled after the dead man, letting himself bounce loose-limbed to the base of the barricade. Someone stepped on his hand as they scrambled up to take his place and he bit down on a scream. He looked around without moving his head and then slowly and carefully pushed to his feet and started to creep to the edge of the barricade. But before he was halfway there he was grabbed from behind and lifted and turned and dumped on his back. He stared at Ward Zuniga's angry face and jerked up his pistol and fired and kept firing as the man fell backward, smoking holes blown in his pressure suit by the explosive rounds, the noise of the shots lost in the ragged fusillade along the top of the barricade and the industrial roar and thump of the compressor guns.

Loc scrambled to his feet and ran, didn't stop until he reached the entrance of the nearest apartment block. He glanced back, saw a battle drone leap clear over the top of the barricade. It was missing several limbs but turned with balletic grace as it flew through the air and killed three people with precise head shots before a round from one of the compressor guns smashed it sideways. Then the centre of the barricade blew apart in a smash of flame and smoke that sent bodies and parts of bodies cartwheeling into the air. Loc turned and ran down the short passage into the apartment block's garden, tripping over the body of a woman, falling flat on his face and bouncing straight up and running on through the passage on the other side, almost into the arms of a marine in an armoured pressure suit.

Loc shouted that he was a friend, then caught himself and shouted it again in Portuguese as the marine brought his short-barrelled carbine up on its sling. Loc saw himself in the silvery mirror of the marine's faceplate. His orange pressure suit was spattered with blood and his face was the face of a madman.

'I'm a diplomat! A prisoner of war!' he screamed, and a huge wind got up out of nowhere, showering them with dust and debris and leaves stripped from threshing trees. Loc's ears popped. A banner torn from its moorings eeled down the street and wrapped itself around the marine, and Loc jerked up his pistol and fired into the mirror of the marine's faceplate. The first shot starred Loc's reflection; the second shattered it. The marine toppled backward, the banner still wrapped around him.

Across the road, flames flared in a row of broken windows and guttered and went out. Everything was suddenly still and quiet. Loc tried to take a breath but there was nothing to breathe. Knives twisted in his chest as air ripped from his lungs. He pulled his helmet from his belt and with jittery haste fitted it over his head. Air hissed across his face and he took a deep breath and snorted blood from his nose. The undulating ceiling of smoke was entirely gone. Chandelier lamps shone bright and stark.

A pinlight blinked under Loc's chin, warning him that the air in his lifepack was almost exhausted, and something else gleamed red in the corner of his vision. He turned, saw a light blinking above the door that had slammed across the entrance to the apartment's block. The inner door would have shut too, turning the passageway into an emergency airlock. He opened the access panel set in the wall beside of entrance, studied a short list of instructions and pulled down one of the knife switches. The door juddered back and he grabbed the dead marine by one arm and hauled him inside. After a moment's thought he tossed the pistol as far as he could down the avenue, then found the panel inside the passageway and closed the door.

Loc unlatched the marine's helmet as the airlock pressurised. His stomach clenched when he saw what the explosive round had done to the man's face and the back of his skull: using only his fingertips he stripped away the microphone-and-earpiece headset and wiped blood and gore from it as best he could, then took off his own helmet and hooked the headset around his ear. He switched from channel to channel, listening to marines talking to one another, and quickly realised that they had breached the tent to extinguish the fires before they raged out of control, and were now moving block by block, mopping up the last of the resistance. He switched on the microphone and reported his position and said that a man was down, repeating this over and over until at last a voice requested ID.

'Loc Ifrahim. I am Loc Ifrahim. The diplomat taken prisoner by the government of Paris. Your man was shot while rescuing me,' Loc said. 'I'm in a place of safety but I can't leave. I'm wearing an Outer pressure suit and I have only a little air left.'

The voice asked him if the marine was wounded or dead, and Loc explained that he had pulled the man into an airlock and tried to give him first aid, but he was dead.

'He died a hero's death,' he said, pleased that he had thought to get rid of the pistol.

'Sit tight, sir,' the voice said. 'We have a lock on Specialist Bambata's beacon. We'll be right there.'

Ten minutes later, Loc was climbing aboard a transport sledge. The marine's body was loaded beside him and with a jolt of acceleration the sledge flew straight up above the roofs of the apartment blocks and out of a huge ragged hole punched in the side of the tent. Through the port beside his acceleration couch Loc watched the city dwindle as the sledge rose and rose, a fallen star gleaming on one edge of the long arc that Romulus Crater shared with Remus Crater, the two interlocked craters shrinking, lost in a cratered plain that curved into a crescent as the sledge headed towards the nightside of the moon.

Loc was taken aboard the Glory of Gaia without ceremony. A medical technician gave him a cursory check and he was assigned a thoroughly inadequate cubicle and given a change of clothes and a lukewarm meal of beans and rice and shredded mystery meat. A staff sergeant tried to get him to make a preliminary statement, but Loc told the sergeant that he would talk only to General Peixoto - it was a matter of supreme importance concerning the gene wizard Avernus.

The sergeant promised that she would do all she could, but after an hour had passed she still hadn't returned. Loc, convinced that he'd been forgotten or overlooked, tried to make his way to the command level but couldn't bluff his way past the guards at the connecting shaft. When a harassed captain ordered him to return to his cubicle, Loc lost his temper and told the man that he would be punished for preventing a senior diplomat from carrying out his duty. The captain shrugged this off and ordered a marine to escort Mr Ifrahim back to his berth and told Loc that he would be thrown in the brig if he was found wandering around again.

Another hour crept past. Loc ran through everything he needed to say, the story that would make him a hero and win him recognition and compensation for all that he had sacrificed for Greater Brazil. He thought of ways to make sure that the upstart captain would thoroughly regret his impudence. He tried to suppress his anxiety that Macy Minnot and Avernus would somehow evade him.

At last the sergeant who'd asked Loc for a statement returned, told him that he had a visitor. Loc sat up,. straightened his badly fitting coveralls. But the person the sergeant ushered in wasn't the general; it was the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen. Loc took a few moments to suppress his shock, then assembled his best smile and told the woman that it was a surprise, a pleasant one, to meet her in such strange circumstances.

'Just tell me where she is,' Sri Hong-Owen said brusquely.

'She was in prison with me, but of course she will not be there now.'

Loc paused, savouring the woman's anger and desperation. Things had changed since their last encounter. This time he had the upper hand. 'Did you really come all this way to find her?'

'If you can't tell me where she is, I'm wasting my time,' Sri Hong-Owen said.

'I share your anxiety,' Loc said. 'I should have presented my information to the appropriate person hours ago, but I was prevented by unimaginative fools. But now we have a chance to work together for the benefit of Greater Brazil. Come in, please. Sit down. Let me explain everything.'