All the same, Mencius had been worried enough to make contact with a conveniently placed ballerina. And one of the General’s best, no less... In the circumstances, it seemed just as well. The General needed to know that Anchee was safe, and not just because Anchee was his daughter. His fortune, his history, the soul of his family rested in that little silver shrine, maybe even his luck.

“Pan in,” demanded the General crossly, wishing he could see the woman’s eyes...

Mencius did as he asked, cropping out most of the face on screen until only eyes remained, framed top and bottom by an elegant brow and the start of an aquiline nose. The woman was lying, that the General didn’t doubt. The only question was, about what?

Without knowing it, the General drummed out a repetitive three-beat rhythm with his index finger, his elegantly trimmed nail clicking softly against the top of a priceless desk. Its top was cut from a single slab of jade carved around the edges with tiny, intricate immortals. The original slab had been cut from a vast jade boulder found in Burma at the start of the nineteenth century, but the carving was late nineteenth, when the Manchu dynasty was in terminal decline and the Empress Tz’u Hi was already dying.

The General, like most of his ancestors, disliked the Manchu and their memory. And even two centuries after their final collapse, he still regarded them as little more than incoming barbarians. It was just one of the things that hadn’t made him popular in Beijing.

The monitor on his desk was a new-model Samsung, so small it looked like an unrolled banknote until his voice called it awake. An S3e monitor might cost a week’s salary for one of his houseboys, but the General still had a drawerful, rolled tight like scrolls and tied with red ribbon. He used each monitor once only and then had it destroyed. Not sold, deconstructed or recycled but burnt in a furnace in his basement.

It was the General’s firm belief that whatever had once been fired onto the screen’s pixels could be recalled like blast shadows on a wall, if the software artisan doing the recalling was skilled enough. There was no proof of this, no scientific evidence. But it was his unshakeable belief all the same.

So far he’d wasted half a dozen screens and three hours of Sunday morning trying to decide what was wrong with the picture in front of him. Apart from the fact Ms Gwyneth was lying. The lies showed in her eyes every time he replayed the download.

Part of General Que wanted to commandeer the next commercial flight to the Moon and go find out for himself. A Beretta pushed hard against the temples often had a way of freeing the truth. But he couldn’t, there were no flights. None at all. At the first rumour that the Azerbaijani virus had reached Brazil, the Moon had been declared off-limits to all Earth traffic.

The General snorted in disgust. Skyscrapers collapsed in Sao Paulo all the time. If he’d had to bet on it, he’d place his money on bribed building inspectors or sub-quality concrete. But the rumours had been enough for Planetside to lock off the landing computer and declare a Luna-wide low-orbit exclusion zone.

Now he was in Shanghai and Anchee was up there, apparently unable to take his call. Oh, he’d seen his daughter right enough, asleep in her bed at St Lucius. Or rather asleep in a bed in the school sanatorium. She’d been lying there, tucked under a crisp cotton sheet and resting on a clean, brand-new polyfoam slab. Her breathing was slow and regular, and when the shot panned in on her face, her closed eyes had flickered and jumped with healthy — perfectly healthy — rapid eye movement.

“Anchee’s being rested,” announced the headmistress, pointing to a tiny tube inserted into the girl’s thin wrist. He’d been told why too. So Anchee’s immune system could avoid stress while her white blood cells fought off a viral infection; one that his daughter must have caught at home in Shanghai. No one mentioned chicken flu, but the inference rested there between them.

The General was left in no doubt that he was somehow to blame.

“Let me talk to...” On screen, the General was fumbling for the name of the noisy foreign girl. That his quiet, dutiful daughter had nevertheless made friends with her while so many other Han attended St Lucius worried him, but Anchee had. Still frowning into the lens, the General pulled LizAlec’s name from his memory.

On screen, the woman shook her head. “Lady Elizabeth is away for a few days...”

Which meant what? General Que still didn’t know.

“Then wake my daughter.” He’d been losing his temper by this point, irritation overcoming his usual manners.

“No,” said a woman he’d never seen before, “that I can’t allow...” The new woman had a wide face and firm but smiling eyes. Her black hair was scraped back into little snakes and trapped under a nurse’s cap. “She must rest, I insist.”

Absent-mindedly, the nurse smoothed the front of her uniform, which was as white and as crisp as Anchee’s turned-back sheet. Everything about the scene was reassuringly normal. Much too normal, in the General’s opinion.

If that nurse was a vActor then her coding was better than anything the General had met before — and in his late teens he’d dealt with the best. The Chinese Army prided itself on its coding brigades, fit-triggering black ice, instant firewalls, self-setting trapdoors, he’d seen them all.

And he hadn’t walked away from the Army of the East empty-handed. Mencius retained military-strength crypt capabilities, not to mention grade one vActor-stripping software. But try as Mencius might, he couldn’t break down that picture.

Time and again, each new Samsung screen refreshed the opening image and Mencius set about stripping the scene back to basics. Except the basics weren’t there to be stripped back to. No skin peeled away, no flesh vanished, no crude polygonal-construct appeared in place of his daughter’s skull. The nurse, the walls, the fresh flowers, even the little oil painting of Bruges, they all checked out as real.

Which meant that if the touching little scene was computer-ghosted, then it was the best he’d seen. Scarily good. In his head the General tried to balance the screen shot of his daughter sleeping peacefully in her bed with the thinly disguised ransom demand from Brother Michael and the worrying, gut-churning fact that Brother Michael had Anchee’s bracelet on the desk beside him.

The General made no better a job of the problem than Mencius had done twelve hours earlier or than Mencius’s pet semiTuring had done twelve hours before that. The facts didn’t balance and that meant someone was lying. Which, as always, made the General want to reach for his gun.

General Que sighed. The greatest strategist of his century and he was unable to come up with a logical answer... Oh, he didn’t doubt something was badly wrong: he just couldn’t believe one of the most exclusive school franchises in existence could be implicated in trying to cover up the disappearance of one of its own pupils.

For a brief moment, he considered hiring mercenaries, launching his own raid on the St Lucius O’Neill, but the General dismissed the idea immediately. He was forty-three, for God’s sake, and an outright attack on somewhere his daughter probably wasn’t was the response of an angry child. What he needed to do was make contact with the parents of Anchee’s foreign friend. Find out if she was missing too, see if they’d had a message from Brother Michael.

As the General flicked off the little screen and tossed it into a rattan bin ready for burning, he wondered idly what was happening with his pet ballerina.