Draining the last of his coffee, Gene Newman turned back to the tabloids. EINSTEIN ASSASSIN DISCOVERS ULTIMATE POWER -- FORMULA FEARED LOST FOREVER. Actually, that was one of the broadsheets.

"You got the answers yet?"

Across the Oval Office Isabel Gorst shook her head. "I'll get on to it," she said. "Meanwhile here's the list of people who've called." She walked round the eagle on the carpet, as she always walked round the eagle, and put the list into his hand. Neither of them mentioned that his in-tray was bigger than ever.

"Petra Mayer?"

"Oh yes," Isabel Gorst said. "She's going to call in an hour."

"Okay," said the President. "Have Paula remind the Secretary of Defense that I'm still waiting for some answers."

Colonel Borgenicht was going to have to explain exactly what had happened at five a.m. yesterday morning at Camp Freedom and who thought using a fire hose to blast the twenty-first century's very own version of Newton's Principia off the mesh would be a good idea.

Rage had put most of the medals on Sergeant Saez's chest and the ribbons went right over the place where the rage hid. It formed a fist-sized chunk where his heart should be and had carried him out of the Philadelphia projects and into a life where he had two kids, a nu-school BMW complete with tinted windows, and a bunch of men who trusted him not to throw away their lives.

His kids lived with his ex-wife in a house he'd more or less built by himself, after buying a pull-down on the edge of Belleville. It was a good house and he tried not to be angry about living somewhere else these days.

Michael Saez knew why he was angry and his ex-wife knew why he was angry. So Sergeant Saez couldn't fault her logic in leaving. He didn't want the boys to turn into him either.

All the same, he resented being stuck on a desolate little island in the middle of nowhere. And resentment made him drink more of a bottle of Jack Daniel's than was decent and wake before the birds, still drunk and with a filthy headache, not to mention a marked reluctance to spend his morning guarding a cage covered in shit.

There were other things that made Sergeant Saez furious and these came out in the days following, when the damage was already done and most of the questions were more about filling in gaps for Colonel Borgenicht's paperwork than building a true picture of anyone's state of mind.

Not all of these made it into Dr. Petrov's rider to the Borgenicht Report, but the ones which did included the fact the Italians had been printing lies about how the marines were treating the Arab, the fact that the weights room had apparently begun to smell worse than a brick shithouse and Sergeant Saez's fury when the so-called Arab turned out to be American. Strangely enough, Saez never mentioned the fact his cousin had been piloting the helicopter brought down in Marrakech. Although Dr. Petrov included it anyway.

After the shit had been blasted from the mesh with fire hoses and the original blanket and mattress had been removed to dry in the sun, new bedding was brought in and Sergeant Saez woke the two embedded cameramen so they could photograph the newly clean cage. (One of them was from Fox News, the other had an uncle in the Pentagon Press Office.)

Sergeant Saez then climbed into the cage himself and made sure the two men photographed him as he knelt on the floor, pulling and twisting at the plastic-coated mesh until his hands hurt. Then he showed the cameras his own fingers, which were now raw from the effort and beginning very slightly to blister.

"You see?" he said. "The prisoner damaged his own hands trying to dig his way out." Even the man from Fox News looked doubtful.

While Master Sergeant Saez was busy bringing Colonel Borgenicht to the attention of the President, Prisoner Zero was having an early morning appointment with Katie Petrov, who was too busy taking a call on a hotel phone to notice that her patient was drawing a spaceship in the dust on the floor with his foot.

"Lower the blind."

"Why?"

Turning on her office's portable television, Katie zapped to the channel mentioned by Bill Logan, still on loan to the marines from CavourCohen Media and currently CCM's most famous VP.

"Shit." It was true. The helicopter off the edge of the cliff really had been hired by Amnesty and a long lens was focused on her window. She could watch herself staring out of a window at the very helicopter taking the photograph of her staring out of the window at the very helicopter...

It was recursive to the point of insanity.

And to make matters worse the channel was busy broadcasting the verbal warnings it received as it received them. So now the whole world knew that the marine Colonel in charge of Camp Freedom had just threatened to blow an Italian helicopter out of the sky.

As Dr. Katie Petrov walked back to her desk, she inadvertently scuffed out a sketch of a needle-like racing yacht which would have told her more about Prisoner Zero's grasp on reality than carefully logging his reactions to a hundred unanswered questions.

The prisoner was quite obviously aware of what went on around him and every CT scan suggested he understood exactly what was being said. And if even half the medical data Katie had on file proved accurate, then the man was actually busy answering her questions inside his head. She'd spent the last few days coming out of their sessions only to discover that Prisoner Zero's silence had been the shell to an entire world's worth of hidden speech.

"You do know," said Katie, "that you have only six days left to live?"

Dark eyes watched her and, to make matters worse, Katie could swear that her attempt to focus Prisoner Zero's mind on his fate only left the man amused.

"It doesn't worry you?"

Again those eyes. That blankness.

Not only was he waiting for death. He was unafraid of it. As Katie wrote this on her notepad she realized it was probably the first thing she'd written in over a week that struck her as unquestionably true. Yet little in his daily ritual suggested he was certifiably religious. Maybe it was a variation on suicide by cop.

One of Katie's earliest clients had opened fire on a police car from his wheelchair and been killed in the answering fire. It had been his fifth attempt in three years.

Possible, but unlikely.

She had, Katie was forced to admit, almost no real handle on Prisoner Zero, which made her no better or worse than the psychiatrist originally brought in by the Pentagon. And if Colonel Borgenicht was getting increasingly upset by Katie's inability to reach a verdict then she could only repeat what she'd already told him.

She'd rather be late than wrong.

Of course, she wasn't the one with helicopters buzzing round her head like flies. Well, actually she was but they weren't after her. They were after the men who ripped fingernails from a world-class mathematician; because, apparently, that's who Prisoner Zero was...

Katie put her head in her hands.

It got worse.

Her mentor, the renowned Harvard academic Petra Mayer, had taken a single glance at the Vice Questore's photograph, ignored the prisoner altogether and speed-dialled the NASA theoretician with the cynical sense of humour. After that she called a Chinese refugee teaching quantum physics at Padua University and Dr. Natalia Aziz in Cairo, who specialized in the mathematics of low probability/high impact events.

Each one agreed to report their first findings to her within the hour.

Authenticating the half code, proofs, theorems, fractured formulae and incomplete sketches visible in the background of Pier Angelo's photograph took a joint effort rare in academia and rarer than kindness in the paranoid world of high mathematics and quantum research.

And only when Petra Mayer had taken one shocked call after another did she pick up her own phone and speed-dial the President direct. A lot was made of this point. And though it wasn't so surprising to discover that half a dozen of Harvard's finest had Gene Newman's direct line only Petra Mayer had the number for his cell phone.