"Call your squad now."

"Right." He tugged his cybofax out of an inner pocket. "Your nose is bleeding."

Greg dabbed at the flow with some of Ellis's tissues while Victor yammered out increasingly urgent instructions. Flies were beginning to feed on the open skull. Greg pulled a white lace tablecloth over Ellis, and collapsed into one of the low chairs, exhausted.

"On their way," said Victor. "You want to flit, find a doctor or something?"

"No. I think I'll just sit here for a minute. Oh, and be sure to have this place swept for bugs." His nose had stopped bleeding.

Victor hovered anxiously, head swivelling round the apartment, missing the body each time. "Bloody hell, what a cock-up."

"Not your fault. But it proves one thing."

"What's that?"

Greg gave him a battle-weary smile. "I'm close."

"Yeah, but Greg… What have you got left now?"

"A name. Confirmation."

"That di Girolamo character you mentioned?"

"Yep. It was beautiful the way Ellis's mind funked out. You should've seen it."

"If you say so. This is all way above my head. Surveillance and backup, Walshaw says. You sit there and take it easy for a while. I'll see to the clean-up."

"Sure." Greg drew his cybofax out of his leather jacket's inside pocket, taking care not to make any sudden motions. His brain sloshed from ear to ear each time his head moved.

He flipped the cybofax open, and keyed the phone function with difficulty. His fingers were stiff, devoid of feeling.

The cybofax bleeped for an incoming call. Unsurprised, he let it through. Knowing.

Gabriel's face appeared on the little screen. "No," she said, with ominous resolution.

"I'm sorry, but you have to. There's no one else."

"No, Gregory."

"Look at me, a proper look. Right now I couldn't even sense a tiger's brain if it was biting me."

"Tell you, I've got to have psi coverage to get that girl out. You'll be saving lives, Gabriel. The Trinities will bloodbath the Miriam without perfect intelligence information—where Katerina is, where the crew are, and what they're tooled up with."

"You're a bastard, Mandel."

"No messing. See you at the briefing."

After that, it was the difficult call. Eleanor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

True to prediction, one of the yachts docked at the same quay as the Mirriam was hosting a party. A brassy, high-wattage rave; hysterical guests spilling out on to the quay itself, dancing, drawing syntho, swilling down champagne. Perfect cover. By two o'clock in the morning it still hadn't peaked.

At five minutes past two Greg walked down the quay with Suzi, the pair of them holding hands and laughing without a care in the world. He wore a dinner jacket that felt as though it was made of canvas, and reeked of starch. Suzi had slipped into a 1920s gold lamé dress, low-cut with near-invisible straps, a blonde bob wig covering her gelled-down spikes. With her size and figure she looked impossibly young—fourteen, fifteen, something like that. He reckoned that as a couple they fitted the scene perfectly. Anyone would think it was fathers and daughters night. Thank heavens for café society, immutable in a fluid world.

They infiltrated the party fringes, anthropoid chameleons.

Big Amstrad projectors were mounted on the yacht, firing holographic fireworks into the night. Upturned faces were painted in spicy shades of scarlet and green by carnation bursts of ephemeral meteorites.

Suzi lingered to watch a girl dressed in a sequin bikini and dyed ostrich feathers limbo her way under a boathook held by two semi-paralytic Hoorays.

Greg checked his watch and tugged Suzi's arm with gentle insistence, steering her into the wrap of darkness at the end of the quay. Three minutes before they had to be in position. The snatch had to be performed with exact timing; one mistake, one delay, a hesitation, and they'd be heading down the wrong Tau line and all Gabriel's planning would come to naught. He'd tried to emphasise that to the Trinities, drilling it in.

The limbo girl failed to make it, overbalancing and winding up flat on her back. The flesh of her overripe body quivered with helpless laughter. One of the Hoorays poured champagne into her mouth straight from the magnum. She lapped at the foamy spray spilling down her cheeks, her mind light-years away.

Greg and Suzi tottered away from the revellers. Nobody was paying them a second glance.

"Lady Gee was right," Suzi said from the corner of her mouth. He could sense how tight her small body was wired, rigid with restless tension.

The Trinities had been, to say the least, sceptical when Gabriel began outlining the evening's events. Their agnosticism had been whipped in staggered increments as the prophecies unfurled with uncanny precision—the party, which crewmen would leave the Mirriam for the evening, the exact time Kendric and Hermione left for the Blue Ball, the fact that Katerina had been left behind.

Other couples had drifted into the seclusion of the quay beyond the party, exploiting the penumbra of privacy provided by covered gangplanks. Greg kept his eyes firmly on the Mirriam ahead; Suzi peeped unashamedly, chortling occasionally.

Mirriam looked deserted, lit only by the intermittent spectral backwash from the Amstrads. Yet Gabriel had said there were seven people on board, two of Kendric's bodyguards, four sailors, and Katerina. She'd even reeled off their locations.

Greg wished he could use his espersense to confirm, but that was a definite no-no. The anaemia which the neurohormones had inflicted on the rest of his body had lifted during the afternoon and physically he was shaping up, but another secretion would cripple his brain.

They reached the Mirriam's gangplank and folded into the midnight shadows it exuded. He checked his watch again.

"How about we go for total realism?" Suzi whispered with a giggle in her voice as she twined her hands round his neck.

"Twelve seconds," he answered. The gangplank was one long pressure pad according to Gabriel.

"Oh, Daddy, give it to me good," she yodelled.

He could feel her shaking with laughter and a crazy burn of exhilaration.

Right on time a voice said, "Hey, sorry folks, but you're gonna have to move along."

Greg was facing the quay so he couldn't see the speaker, but he recognised Toby's baritone rumble. Besides, Gabriel said it would be him. He carried on smooching with Suzi.

There was a faint vibration as Toby walked down the gangplank.

"I said—"

Suzi's Armscor stunshot spat a dart of electric-blue flame. Greg heard a startled grunt and turned just in time to catch Toby before he hit the gangplank. Asking himself why the hell he bothered.

Suzi was racing up the gangplank. Greg followed dragging Toby. The bodyguard's breathing was ragged, slitted whites of his eyes showing in the fallout from the silent twinkling light-storm overhead.

As always Greg experienced the conviction of operating under divine protection. With Gabriel's guidance he'd become omnipotent.

Suzi ducked into the darker oval of an open hatch, fumbling her photon amp into place as she went.

Greg pulled his own photon amp out of the dinner jacket's pocket. That reassuringly familiar pinching as the band annealed to his skin. Mirriam resolved into cold hard reality around him, nebulous leaden shadows stabilising into sharply defined blue and grey outlines.

02:12:29, flashed the yellow digits.

"At two hours, twelve minutes and thirty-five seconds GMT the crewman will exit the cabin-lounge door on to the afterdeck," Gabriel had said, her voice raised above the Trinities' scoffing.

Greg dumped Toby on the glossy polished decking and ran for the afterdeck, black leather shoes squeaking.