Behind her — set either side of the over-carved door — were two oil paintings, striking in their honesty and cruelty. The larger oil was Christian Schad’s 1927 Count d’Anneaucourt, a portrait of a thin man in a black dinner jacket standing between two hatchet-faced women. The other showed an anorexically thin woman splayed on a bed in the background while another starvling sat in front of her, sad eyes staring at the floor, one jewelled hand absent-mindedly touching her own shaved vulva. It too was by Schad but painted the following year.

Each one had cost more than even Lady Clare earned in a year. Of course, Lady Clare hadn’t needed to buy them. Both had been bribes from a Flemish cocaine dealer ten years before, the year Lady Clare was confirmed as aide to the Prince Imperial. The dealer had bought them on the open market. Sotheby’s, probably.

Lady Clare sighed.

In the corner of her room a green diode was flashing quietly. But Lady Clare made herself wait until she’d struggled into a heavy red Kenzo dressing gown. Only then did she sit on the edge of her huge, unshared bed and power up her Toshiba smartbook.

On the screen a small envelope was revolving... So they weren’t using e-vid, which was interesting in itself, or maybe not. Lady Clare was finding it increasingly hard to recognize what was a significant clue and what wasn’t. But then, that was life. As her predecessor as His Highness’s aide de camp used to point out, jigsaw pieces only had relationships if you knew the picture. Though that probably wasn’t why he blew his brains out with an antique Smith & Wesson.

The e-mail was simple, even brutal. The life of Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio would be forfeit unless Lady Clare Fabio voted in favour of an immediate surrender of Paris to the armies of the Reich. So it wasn’t money they were after, Lady Clare realized with shock. The kidnappers didn’t even want access codes for S3’s famous, triple-encrypted orbiting database. Lady Clare had to throw in her lot with the Reich. Nothing else would do.

It was time to summon an official car. Always assuming Les Tourelles had a Renault that was still functioning — and even that wasn’t a certainty. But then again, these days what was? Lady Clare opened her vast cupboard and started to take out dry clothes, laying them neatly on the bed.

Chapter Nine

Laughing Boy

“If you don’t let me out I’m going to...”

What? Scream? She’d tried that. Howling obscenities at the polycrete walls until her throat was sore and her voice worn down to a croaking whisper. LizAlec had tried the lot, from dignified silence through shouting to trying to flirt with Laughing Boy. None had been successful — and now she was wired up to the eyeballs with PMS and felt like a Niponshi Zeppelin. Periods and one-sixth G didn’t go together at all.

Not that LizAlec knew how long she’d been there: her Circadian rhythms were on shutdown, her melatonin levels down to pitiful, her pituitary on strike... It was near impossible to judge time accurately in the dark. LizAlec hadn’t realized that before, but it was true.

They weren’t watching her. At least, LizAlec didn’t think they were. At the start she’d been embarrassed at using the bucket they brought her just in case Mickey or Laughing Boy somehow had her up on screen, but in the end basic need and the ache in her gut won out. That was on the second day, and when Mickey brought her food next time round he’d taken away her soiled bucket without comment.

They didn’t talk to her, neither of them ever did. She insulted them, joked at them, pleaded... but they might as well have been deaf. She knew just what they were doing, of course: distancing themselves, in case they had to kill her. LizAlec had no idea how she knew that, but she did. Maybe it was something about the way they wouldn’t look at her whenever they came into her cell. Though they used the light these days and had done ever since she’d had a visit from the suit.

The sequence would go: blinding light from overhead, clang of door as the outside bolt was flung back and then the sullen thud of feet and the clatter of a tray being slid onto the table. By the time her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, whichever one it was would already be on his way out, slop bucket in hand, while the other stood in the doorway holding a Browning pulse rifle.

“I’m due on tomorrow,” LizAlec shouted at the door. “Ragging, blood, period. What are you going to do then?” Like they cared. Other girls at St Lucius had taken the implant as advised, but LizAlec had been too bloody-minded. Low-gravity menstruation was unpleasant at the best of times — or so LizAlec had been warned — and stripped virtually naked in a cell wasn’t the best of times, or places, not by anybody’s standards.

She’d refused the implant, just as she’d later refused inflight sedatives and the stewardess’s offer of an injection for zero-gravity sickness. LizAlec didn’t want to be at St Lucius and she’d had no intention of letting anyone forget the fact, especially herself.

But that was then and this was now — and it was time to get a grip. LizAlec was going to escape. That thought was now burned so firmly into her brain she no longer doubted it would happen. Sure, doubt flickered somewhere in her limbic system, but it was mostly unnoticed. Consciousness was happening high up on the surface, fierce feeling tucked into the wet-flannel folds of her cortex as chemical intimations of anger.

Her breathing was steadying now. The last screaming fit was hours behind her — and even howling like a banshee was more balanced than punching the door, even if it couldn’t punch back. LizAlec wouldn’t let herself let rip like that again; histrionics trashed too much of her dwindling energy. Of course, she could always eat the reprocessed slop that Mickey offered her but every time LizAlec ate their food she dropped into deep sleep.

The first time she’d assumed it was just tiredness, but not the second time or the third.

Not that hunger was all bad. For a start it kept the terror at bay. The way it worked was that LizAlec was so busy trying to ignore the gnawing in her hollow gut that no time was left for all the other discomforts. Of which there were many...

Cold, dark and too small — her cell was walled with rough polycrete blocks and roofed with slabs of some shiny black stone she couldn’t reach. There were only three ways out of the cell. Well, only three that LizAlec could see in the brief seconds she grabbed each time her eyes adjusted to the light. One was the door, the other two were small air vents just above floor level, both covered with a steel grille and epoxyed to the wall. She’d already broken most of her nails trying to prise away one of the grilles.

Set into the wall at waist height was what might have been a fourth way, but LizAlec was afraid to go too close. Half the time the rusting metal plate radiated a bitter chill that leeched heat from her cell and body, the rest of the time it burned like a heater. The only time she’d tried to touch it, cold had glued her index finger to its edge and she’d lost skin from her fingertip trying to pull herself free.

“Oh shit.” PMS from hell, no way out and she didn’t even have Fixx to shout at... LizAlec rolled over in the grit and pushed herself to her feet. Three paces to the right, then a wall, turn ninety degrees and then eight paces to the next wall, six paces and a turn. Another eight paces and one more turn would bring her back to the original wall. And another three paces would bring her back to where she started. Now she knew exactly what a lab rat felt like.

Not expecting much, LizAlec pulled at the grille over an air vent. No movement at all. Maybe if she had a blade it might shift. But her slop came on a paper plate with a paper spoon. And anyway a blade would probably just snap on her, knowing her recent luck. What she really needed was explosive. An H&K eight-shot would be nice, and maybe some molywire, toggled up into a lariat. LizAlec smiled to herself in the dark, surprised to find she suddenly felt better. It had to be all that screaming.