Once we'd gone through Security in the lobby, we went our separate ways, he up to the exec floors, me to the basement to see an old friend.

'That one's a Bell-K connector.'

Allan Fleming was, as usual, a mess.  He'd been in a wheelchair for twenty years since a climbing accident in his teens, and despite having a very nice wife called Monica, who was totally devoted to him and turned him out neatly every day, it usually only took him minutes after he arrived at work to look as if he'd spent the last month sleeping rough.  Sometimes he accomplished this between the garage — where he parked his converted Mini — and his workshop.

Allan was Suzrin House's resident computer nerd.  His workshop — somewhere deep under the main building and way below the surface of the Thames even at low water — was like a museum of computing, filled to its high ceilings with bewildering amounts of electronic hardware ancient and modern, but mostly ancient (which in computer terms, for the truly, seriously, antediluvian stuff, of course meant about the same age as him or me).  We'd known each other since post-grad days, when we'd both been in that year's Security intake, before I'd come to my senses and left to be a proper exec, specialising in hi-tech.

Allan was in charge of computer and IT security, specifically here in Suzrin and the other outlying London offices, but in effect — along with a few other similarly gifted geek-wizards in the States — also anywhere the Business had modems and computers.  He was our insurance against hackers: if he couldn't worm his way into your system, probably nobody else could either.  I'd shown him the plugs and other bits and pieces that David Rennell had brought me from Silex.

'What's a Bell-K connector?' I asked, staring at his cardigan and wondering how he'd managed to get so many buttons done up through the wrong holes.  I bet he hadn't left the house like that.

'It's a specialist phone-line connector,' he said, pulling absently at some of his curly brown hair and twisting it so that it stood out from his head like a tiny horizontal pigtail.  'A dedicated land line, probably; very high capacity, especially for the time.  Better than ISDN.  Made by Bell Laboratories, as you might expect, in the States.  Still copper technology, however; your next step up would be your optical.'

'What was its "time"?'

'Oh, just a few years ago.'

'Sort of thing you might find in a chip-manufacturing plant?'

'Hmm.' Allan turned the little connector over in his hands, then took off his unfashionably large-framed glasses and blew on each lens in turn, holding them up to the light and blinking. 'Not particularly.  You wouldn't want it for telephony purposes, I'd have thought, and your standard Parallel, Serial and SCSI ports would handle most non-specialist applications.'

'I thought this was specialist.'

'Yes, as I said.  But this is for specialist telephonic applications.'

'Such as?'

Allan replaced his glasses, asquint, on his nose.  He rocked back in the chair and looked thoughtful.  'Actually, the place you'd most likely see something like this would be in the stock exchange, or a futures market, somewhere like that.  They use high capacity dedicated land lines.  So I understand.'

I sat back in the ancient peeling plywood and black tubing seat, an idea forming in my mind. I pulled the Polaroid of a desk out of my pocket.  'See this?'

Allan sat forward and peered.  'It's a desk,' he said helpfully.

I flipped the photograph round and looked at it myself.  'Well, my copy of Jane's Book of Fighting Desks is not to hand. But now you mention it…'

He took the photo from my hand and studied it.  'Yes. Lots of holes for cabling.  And that extra level, that raised shelf.  It does look a little like the sort of desk that might belong to a commodities trader, or someone of a similar nature, doesn't it?'

'Yes.  Yes, it does, doesn't it?'

'Kate, I'm in a fucking meeting.  What the hell is so important you have to get me called out of it?'

'I'm at your dentist's, Mike.  Mr Adatai is quite rightly concerned.  I need you to tell him to let me see your file.'

'You what?  You pull rank on me for that?'

'Look, don't blame me; I thought you were supposed to be here in London.  I didn't know you were going to go jetting off to Frankfurt.'

'Yes, to meet some very important — oh, for Christ's sake.  What is all this about?  Quickly, Kate, please, I need to get back in there.'

'It's very important I see your dental-records file, Michael.  I'm going to hand you over to Mr Adatai now.  Please authorise him to let me see it, then you can get back to your meeting.'

'Okay, okay; put him on.'

The standard human mouth contains thirty-two teeth.  Mike Daniels must have had good, conscientious parents who got him to brush his teeth thoroughly after each meal and snack and in the evening before retiring, because he had had a full set — with just a couple of fillings in lower bicuspid molars — when he'd been drugged in a London club a month earlier, had about half of his teeth removed and then been left in his own bed in his flat in Chelsea.

I sat in Mr Adatai's warm and luxurious waiting room with a bunch of recent Vogues (well, this was Chelsea), National Geographics (of course) and Country Lifes (I thought of the dowager Queen in her giant bed in the old palace, and — sitting in that warmth — shivered).

I looked at the diagram of Mike Daniels' teeth.  I took a note of those that had been taken and those that had been left.  I closed the file, stared at a potted palm across the room and did some mental arithmetic.

In base ten, a ten-figure number.  Two point one billion and some change.  No need to use your fingers at all.

My mouth went dry.

From the start that morning I'd considered staying in London overnight, and had brought a few bits and pieces in a travelling bag, but in the end, after leaving Mr Adatai's — in fact, on the kerb while the taxi was pulling up — I decided to head back to Yorkshire.  I rang Miss H to tell her I'd be staying at Blysecrag that night.

We had dinner on the train, my lap-top and I, looking through a load of files I'd downloaded about the Pejantan Island deal and the Shimani Aerospace Corporation.  This was the deal that Mike Daniels had been flying out to Tokyo to sign when he'd been dentally assaulted — hence the anguished call to me that night in Glasgow.

Pejantan Island is a piece of guano-covered rock in the middle of the southern part of the South China Sea, between Borneo and Sumatra.  It is, to put it politely, undistinguished, except for one thing: it is almost bang on the equator.  Shift the place three kilometres south and the zero degrees line would go straight over it.  It's less than an hour's flight from Singapore, just big enough for our purposes — or, rather, the purposes of the Shimani Aerospace Corporation, for we were merely investors — and it was uninhabited.  The idea was to build a spaceport there.

Now, this is high-horse territory for me — though I do know what I'm talking about, and it is my job — but space, and anything associated with getting into it, is going to be so fucking big, and soon, it's frightening.  Space is already very big business indeed and it's going to get a lot bigger in the near future.  The US through NASA, Europe through ESA, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and various other minor players are all desperate to grab as much of the launch market as possible, and private enterprise is determined to catch up.

I've seen detailed plans of about a dozen different ways of getting into space — even leaving out the exotic far-future stuff like giant elevators, rail guns and giant lasers — using craft with helicopter-like rotors with rockets in the tips or — well, never mind; the point is not that, if we're lucky, one of them might just work, it's that all of them might work.