The whispers grew bolder, caressing her.

Exit.

The nodes shut off with an almost audible snap.

She took a deep gulp of air, shuddering violently.

"What is it?" Morgan asked sharply.

"I'm all right." She held up her hands, surprised to find them trembling. "I was accessing some of the paradigm's visual routines, that's all. Greg's right, it is made up from Bursken's memories." She stopped, remembering the confused montage. A smell of the street's sweet fresh rain lingered in the executive conference room. And she detested the God-violator Edward Kitchener. Feeling a wild primitive joy that he was dead dead dead. "Dear Lord, he's not human." She stared at Greg. "And you looked into his mind all the time you interviewed him?"

"Goes with the job."

"Yech!"

"So that settles it, then," Greg said. "Royan, do you understand the paradigm?"

MOST SECTIONS ARE ANALOGUE BUT THERE IS ONE SEQUENCE WHICH IS A DIGITAL COMPOSITION.

"Is it the instruction to kill Kitchener?"

GREEDY GREEDY GREEDY IS WHAT YOU ARE! THE DIGITAL SEQUENCE IS STRANGE, I WILL HAVE TO WRITE A DECRYPTION PROGRAM. TELL YOU TOMORROW.

"OK," Greg said casually, as though he didn't care.

Liar! Julia thought.

Teddy walked back from the drinks cabinet to stand next to Greg, a dumpy German beer bottle in his hand, condensation mottling its silver and ice-blue label. "Hell, man, all this shit about paradigms turning the Beswick kid into a cyborg, it's kinda screwy, but I'll buy it. But you still ain't told us the why of it. How come this MacLennan guy wants to snuff his old teacher? He did all right by Kitchener. Christ, made it to the top in his field. Head of a premier-grade research institution, respected man, big bucks backing him. What's he wanna go and risk all that for?"

"Wrong question," Gabriel said. She was smiling faintly, head tilted right back on her chair, stating at the ceiling.

"What you ought to ask is why did MacLennan kill Clarissa Wynne? That's the real question. After he murdered her he had to get rid of Kitchener; it was inevitable. He was covering himself to protect that cushy number he's wound up with."

"The neurohormone!" Julia exclaimed, quietly pleased she could keep up with Gabriel.

WELL DONE, SNOWY

Morgan flicked an ironic glance at the camera.

Gabriel suddenly leant forward, resting her elbows on the table, fixing Teddy with an intent stare. "MacLennan must have been worried that once Kitchener perfected the retrospective neurohormone he would look into the past and see him murdering Clarissa. That's why poor old Nicholas Beswick was also ordered to destroy the bioware which produced the neurohormone, and wipe the Abbey's Bendix. To eliminate any possibility of anybody looking back. Lucky he missed those ampoules. I don't suppose MacLennan could think of every contingency."

"I couldn't have seen that far back," Eleanor said. "A week was a hell of an effort. Eleven years would have been utterly impossible."

"Yes," Gabriel said. "I never used to look more than a couple of days into the future when I had my gland. That was partly psychological, admittedly. But… well, with Kitchener working on it, who knows what might have been accomplished in the end."

"I think I've found the reason why she was murdered," Philip said.

"Yeah?" Greg perked up. "Go on."

"Ten years ago there was a paper published on the possibilities of laser paradigms applied to education. The first of its kind. It was co-authored by James MacLennan and Clarissa Wynne."

"Ten years?" Morgan asked. "We confirmed that World Bank loan was eleven years ago."

"Published posthumously," Greg said. "That's why MacLennan killed her. I'll give you good odds that Clarissa did the real breakthrough work on paradigms while she was at Launde. And MacLennan was sharp enough to realize the possibilities. He was very keen to stress that when I talked to him. Once they are perfected, paradigms will be worth a fortune. He reckoned the entire penal system would have be rebuilt from the ground up, and not just in this country. I suppose it would be the same for schools and universities as well, paradigms could replace lessons and lectures. And he's leading the project. He'll get all the fame and the glory, not to mention a share of the royalties. And it should have been her in charge of Berkeley's team."

"Ah!" Julia cried. She grinned at the curious faces. "Grandpa, that financial profile we assembled on Diessenburg Mercantile should still be in our finance division memory core. Access it, and run a check for me. See how much money Diessenburg Mercantile is loaning the Berkeley company."

"You all hear that?" Philip's voice boomed. "Now that is a true Evans. Laser sharp. My granddaughter."

There were times—like now—when she wished the NN core was only loaded with a simple Turing management program.

"Got it," Philip said. "The Berkeley company has borrowed eight hundred million Eurofrancs from Diessenburg Mercantile. There are extension options covering another two and a half billion, but they're all subject to some kind of clause. Dunno what, it's classified, board members only."

"MacLennan succeeding with the laser paradigms?" Morgan suggested.

"Very probable," Philip agreed.

"Three and a half billion," Julia said, ruminating out loud. "That's more than Diessenburg loaned us before Prior's Fen."

"How much would it cost to build and operate an entire continent's educational and penal services?" Greg asked.

"A lot," she said. "And Karl Hildebrandt is on holiday. Unavailable for two months. I asked his office yesterday after you said you wanted to meet him."

"We can't really blame them," Morgan said. "They were just protecting their investment. Natural corporate reflex."

Julia didn't approve of that attitude at all. "That doesn't take away the fact that MacLennan is a double murderer, nor that an innocent man is in jail because of him."

"You'll have a terrible job trying to establish degrees of complicity," Morgan said. "I doubt Karl will ever reappear anywhere under English jurisdiction. The Diessenburg Mercantile directors will disclaim any knowledge of the affair. And if the bank does allow any of them to come into our courts to testify, you can be sure they will be genuinely ignorant so that Greg here won't be able to implicate them."

"Maybe," Greg said. "But at least we've got MacLennan nailed."

"Yes," Morgan said. "I'll get on to the Home Office, they'll have MacLennan arrested first thing tomorrow morning."

"I'd like the Oakham police to handle the actual arrest," Greg said. "They need the credit. I'll rap with Langley, explain what actually happened. And we'd better have a premier-grade programmer on hand to serve the data warrant. I'd hate anything to happen to that paradigm now."

"Right." Morgan loaded a note into his cybofax.

Greg climbed to his feet, stretching laboriously.

Julia stood and tugged her windcheater jacket from the back of the chair. "Thanks again for helping, Teddy."

He took a last swig from his beer bottle, and gave her a shrewd look. "No problem, gal, does me good to get out and about, keep my hand in. But you leave off Greg once this case is over, hear me? He's a fucking orange farmer now. Nothing else."

"I hear you, Teddy." She blew him a kiss.