But the guy facing him was albino-white; death-mask face with jet-black lips, a close-cropped Mohican strip of titian hair running from the bridge of his nose over his crown and disappearing below the collar of his biker jacket. Ade O'Donal knew the look. Tribal. The guy was from Stoneygate.

Stoneygate wasn't somewhere Ade O'Donal went even in daytime, loaded with freaked-out psychos. Five tribes protecting Leicester's syntho vats, from the police and from each other, that district was wound up but tight.

Ade O'Donal dropped the Alitalia bags, making a dull slap on the hall tiles. "Brune?" it came out all wavery, like a whimper. And the broken thing on the floor was Brune, a puddle of blood spreading from a jagged rip in the dermal membrane. An ocean of blood, glistening sickly.

"Tentimes?" asked the Stoney.

"Shit, like no way. I ain't never heard of him."

"Lying, O'Donal, dey squirt me yo' file."

"Shit, man, I never told those two nothing, not a byte."

"No crap, Tentimes. No interested."

Ade O'Donal closed his eyes, didn't want to see the gun, or knife or whatever. Praying it would be quick.

"Job for yo'."

He risked a peek, ready to slam his eyes shut again. The Stoney was looking at him contemptuously.

"Say what?"

"Job. Burn."

"That's it?"

"Yay."

"All you want is like a fucking burn, and you waste Brune for that! You syntho-crashed shit." Ade O'Donal wanted to smash the Stoney with his fists, pound him into a pulp. His life was exploding into the all-time downer. People out of his nightmares kept coming for him, like every shitty deal in the world was his fault.

There was a tiny click, and a matt-grey ten-centimetre blade appeared a centimetre from Ade O'Donal's eye, diamond tip reflecting tiny slivers of cold blue light. "Don' gi' me lip, I slice yo'."

"Sure, OK, no problem, just cool it, man, right?"

"Where yo' terminal?"

The temptation to let the Stoney open the door was near-overwhelming. But he was wearing leather gloves, the charge might not be enough to penetrate. Too dangerous. "Down here," Ade O'Donal sighed.

The Stoney took in the wine cellar's hardware with a stoic gaze. "Alien," he murmured.

Ade O'Donal crumpled into his chair behind the table that held his terminals. "What's the burn?"

"Wolf say finish Event Horizon, d' core. Suit yo'?"

"How?"

A shrug.

"Shit."

"Be good. I break cover fo' yo'."

Cover? What the hell did that mean? No way could this arsehole be Wolf in person. This was getting extreme deep, the kind of deep he wasn't likely to climb out from. "Hey, listen, how are you gonna know if I take out the core? I mean, you're gonna leave me alone if I pull this off, right?"

"Friends, dey watching."

"And if it works?"

"Yo' still jiving tomorrow."

Ade O'Donal nodded slowly, as low as he'd ever been. But the Stoney needed him. If he did the burn there was a chance. Small, though, fucking small. Brune drowning in blood.

There were only two terminals on line, that psychic hardline bastard had screwed the Hitachi and the Akai, the super cancer from the gate had crashed the Burrows; that just left the Event Horizon and the Honeywell. And no way was he going to use the Event Horizon terminal, that name was too much bad karma right now.

Ade O'Donal tapped the Honeywell's power stud, slipping its throat mike round his neck; muttering, typing, eyes locked into the cube. A melt virus got him into Event Horizon's datanet, disguised as a civil engineering contractor's bid for a new flatscreen factory at Stafford. He loaded a memox Wolf had given him for the blitz, studying company procedure. Bids would be processed by the finance division, the lowest three forwarded to the freaky Turing core for a final decision.

He pulled a memox from the shelves, one he'd planned on taking with him. "This is like the best I've ever written, you know," he said, a sudden urge to explain, to let the Stoney know he was dealing with a real pro hotrod. "It scrambles databus management programs. That's the beauty of it, man; once it's in, you can't access the system to flush it out. Total internal communication shutdown. The core will be sliced right out of the datanet, along with anything it's interfaced with."

"Dat sound sweet."

"OK." Ade O'Donal pushed the memox into the Honeywell's slot, hands quivering.

The cube showed the bid's data package wrapping around the virus, geometric tentacles choking a crystalline egg. Ade O'Donal probed the finished Trojan with tracer programs. There was no chink in the covering, nothing that hinted at the black treasure beneath the surface. Smooth. And he had made the quotes for the factory ridiculously low, the bid package would be shunted to the core, no sweat.

Idiotically, pride overrode his depression. This was it, his construct, all his own, a solo hotrod burn. Tentimes had made solo.

O'Donal fed the Trojan an activation code keyed to the core's dump order. It would pass clean through the finance division processors, then once they forwarded it to the core the fucker would detonate, digital H-bomb. Wipe-out time.

Index finger tapped: download.

"Might take a while," O'Donal said.

"No matter."

The diamond-tipped blade clicked softly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Julia had insisted on relieving the nurse at Katerina's bedside in the afternoon, keeping a solitary vigil over her brain-wasted friend. She hated every second of it, knowing she deserved it. Pushing Kats towards Kendric had seemed so clever at the time, an elegant solution. Everybody would wind up with what they wanted, no tears, no heartache.

Greg was right, she'd only thought of the deed, never the consequences. Too shallow and self-obsessed. Still a child. Idiot savant.

Katerina stirred, turning, her sleep troubled. Dr. Taylor had given her a trauma suppressor. Short-term amnesiac, the woman had explained, it'll kill the craving for now; but she'd made sure Katerina was infused with tranquillisers throughout the day, only leaving a few periods of brief semi-lucidity for eating and going to the toilet.

Julia had been the one spooning soup into her. Katerina had swallowed automatically, incapable of coherent speech. Compounding the anguish.

Julia had got three of Event Horizon's premier-grade executives working flat out on securing Katerina that Caribbean treatment, trying to buy a place in the detox clinic. They'd been told there was an eight-month waiting list. Julia refused to let that bother her, pulling in the company's favours, bullying the clinic with financial and political pressure. Dr. Taylor had warned her that Katerina's cranial blood vessels were saturated with the symbiont; if its grip was ever going to be broken then it would have to be done swiftly.

She'd buy that bloody Caribbean island if necessary. Anything. Anything at all. She just wanted Kats back to her old self. Frivolous, vaguely annoying, and utterly carefree.

The sun had nearly dropped below the horizon, fluorescing a cloud-slashed western sky to a royal gold, fading to black at its zenith. Julia watched it from the bedroom window, seeing the shadows pool in hollows and nooks across Wilholm's grounds, spilling out over the grass. The fountain in the lily pond died down spluttering, its light sensors switching off the pump.

Julia activated a single wall-mounted biolum, then crossed the room and drew the heavy Tudor curtains across both windows. When she'd first left America and the desert she'd been entranced by dawn and dusk in Europe, cool blues and greens gleaming dully under fiery skies, always different. It'd been magical, the expected sadness that she'd miss the desert's beauty never materialising.

Tonight the sight left her totally unmoved. Her emotions seemed to have shut down. The climax would come tonight, she was sure of it. The game had ceased to be a game. And she was responsible, she and Grandpa. Kendric's manoeuvrings and power ploys had been thwarted at every stage. She'd stalemated him all across the board. There was nothing left to him now but the physical. Kendric would have no qualms about that.