"I think we have to assume Royan's alien is the source," Victor said. "There's just too much interest being shown in his whereabouts, by too many people, for any other conclusion."

"No messing," Greg muttered. He took a salmon sandwich from a plate on the table, surprised at how hungry he was. "Have you come up with a proper profile on that maid, Nia Korovilla?"

"Not a thing," Julia's NN core image said. "The only data we have on her is the file my personality package squirted out of the Colonel Maitland's 'ware. You saw it, it tells us very little."

Greg finished the sandwich, and started on another. There was a jumble of impressions cluttering up his mind, all the knowledge he'd picked up today. There was no order to it, not yet. But there could be. He was sure of that. Intuition. Something would link it all together, a key, a connecting factor, some word or phrase. It was just a question of looking at it from the right angle, afterwards it would be obvious. Of course, he could force it, use the gland. One of the Mindstar psychologists involved with his training had called his intuition a foresight equal to everyone else's hindsight.

He swallowed the last of the salmon sandwiches, and started on the beef ones. It was almost completely dark outside now, the platforms had switched on floodlights to illuminate their superstructure. "What about the observation team in the Prezda well?" he asked.

"I'm afraid you and Suzi are the only ones who saw them," Victor said. "Certainly Prezda security has no knowledge of them."

"So we've no idea who this third party is?"

"None," Victor agreed.

"Someone who can afford to keep a sleeper on the Colonel Maitland for eight years," Greg observed pensively.

"Expensive," Victor said. "I wonder if her controller was behind the observers in the Prezda?"

"If it wasn't, then there's a fourth organization involved," Greg said.

"Too many. You think Korovilla was tied in with the Prezda observers rather than Reiger and Jepson?"

"I would say yes," Julia said. "She was anxious to avoid contact with Reiger's tekmerc squad."

"So who was she working for?" Greg asked.

"The organization that took the sample from the flower?" Julia suggested.

"Good point," Greg said. "It could be easily the same organization. But then where does Jason Whitehurst fit in? He was obviously acting independently. Yet he knew how valuable Fielder was, that she was linked with atomic structuring, but not the nature of that link. He certainly hadn't heard about the alien. So how did he find out she was valuable?"

"Jesus!" The word came out like a bark from Rick. He looked round the table, his neck jerking mechanically. "I'm sorry, but you people… You're making it all so complicated. Who's this bloke working for, these two are plugged in together, where does she fit in? It doesn't matter! There's an alien here, in our own solar system, making contact. God knows, it's a strange kind of contact, but it wants to talk to us. Just ask this Fielder girl where Royan is, and go. Where's the problem?"

"Atta, boy," Philip Evans said. "You tell 'em."

Julia at the table, and the Julias on the screens all scowled together. "Behave, Grandpa," they chorused.

Philip Evans rolled his synthesized eyes.

Greg looked at Rick, knowing exactly how he felt. Itching to do something positive, to see some action. He'd been like that himself when he joined the Army. Physical got everything solved, and you could see it happening. That particular fallacy took a long time and a lot of grief to unlearn. "It's like this," he said sympathetically. "Charlotte Fielder's in a bad way. She's a twenty-three-year-old girl who's known nothing but the good life for the last five years. All that got shattered today; she's been threatened, chased, shot at, had her fingers broken, seen her patron killed, and found out someone's snuffed her sponsor. Right now she just wants to curl up into a ball and shut out the outside world. If I start interrogating her now, she isn't going to co-operate, her mind will close up like a night-time flower. I'll miss things; good as I am, I'm not infallible. But if we wait until tomorrow, she'll have started to bounce back. She'll want to help, she'll want revenge on whoever terrorized her, she'll open right up to us. And when that happens, I need to know the right questions to ask her."

"Listen to him, Rick," Philip Evans said. "He knows more about how people's minds work than a pub full of shrinks."

Julia gave Greg an impish glance. "And the fact that she's devastatingly beautiful has nothing at all to do with wanting to go easy on her."

Greg flashed her a feline smile, and snatched another sandwich. Victor was chuckling.

The tight fabric of Rick's jacket rippled as he offered a shrug. "Sorry, I'm not used to this."

"We need to go through it, Rick," Julia said. "I've got to have the complete picture before I decide what responses to initiate. And right now there are too many unknowns involved. There will be a common thread linking these faceless dealers. If we can correlate the data we've amassed so far we should be able to find it."

Greg smiled inwardly. Julia was doing the same thing as him. Tearing into the problem from all sides until she came up with a solution. The only difference was that she used the logic her nodes supplied, he used intuition.

He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, not enough for an espersense effusion, but just animating his grey cells, tweaking them above the ordinary. A dreamy calmness settled round him, almost a physical veil, dimming the conference room, muting the voices. He let the images of the day slipstream through his mind. There were faces and places, vaporous collages. An overwhelming sense of certainty rose.

"Russia," he said. "Russia is the connection."

"How?" Julia asked.

"Tell you, intuition is always better than logic." He cancelled the gland secretion.

"Greg!" she snapped.

"Spit it out, boy," Philip Evans said.

"Nia Korovilla and Dmitri Baronski."

Victor clicked his fingers. "Bloody hell, they're both Russian emigres."

"No messing," Greg swung his chair round to face the three teleconference screens. "Run a search program," he told the NN cores. "Every profile you've assembled today, every person, place, and company involved. I want to know every and any link they have with Russia, however tenuous."

"We're on it," Julia's NN core two image said. She and Philip Evans froze.

"Thank you, Greg," Julia said.

"I want Royan back too."

A horizontal flicker line ran down the teleconference screens. The images returned to life. "Greg was right. There are two more references, possibly three."

"Go ahead," Julia said.

"Thirty-two per cent of the Mutizen kombinate is owned by Moscow's Narodny Bank. And nearly twenty-five per cent of Jason Whitehurst's trade is with the East Europe Federation, half of that with Russia itself."

"And the third connection?" Victor asked.

"It is somewhat more speculative, but the Colonel Maitland had originally filed a flight plan from Monaco to Odessa, it was changed the night Charlotte Fielder was lifted from the principality. Odessa is in Ukraine, also part of the East Europe Federation."

"That fits," Greg said. "I should have thought of that one myself. Baronski mentioned it."

"Fits how, exactly?" Julia asked.

"Tell you, we're up against a premier-grade Russian dealer here, right?"

"Yes."

"OK, so he finds out about the Fielder girl somehow, that she's a courier of some kind, so he takes a sample of the flower and discovers it's extraterrestrial. Assume Jason Whitehurst does business with him—God knows the kind of trading Jason does is complicated enough to need dodgy contacts—he owes the dealer a few favours. The dealer tells Jason Whitehurst to lift Charlotte Fielder from Monaco after she's completed the delivery to you, and bring her to Odessa where he can take over. That's where Baronski thought she was going, he arranged it, he was the go-between. But then Jason Whitehurst realizes how big a deal this is, and decides to play his own game. So he puts Charlotte Fielder up for sale. That's why there were watchers in the Prezda; our Russian dealer didn't know where she was either. And Baronski was the obvious link, we all wound up going to him, If there was anybody who knew where she was, it was going to be him. A pimp always keeps track of his girls."