“I’ll deal with these gentlemen, Lenora.”

“Oof. And you thought it was cold outside,” said Petrovitch. He rested his carpet bag, now inexpertly repaired with ragged strips of wide silver tape, on the desk. The woman gave it a hard stare, as if she could make it disappear by willpower alone.

“Agent Newcomen. This is yours.” She gave him a lanyard attached to a holographic card. “And this, Dr Petrovitch, is yours. You have to wear it visibly at all times, and return it to me when you leave. Do you understand?”

She dangled a visitor’s pass towards him, with its bright red text face out.

“Well,” said Petrovitch, and Newcomen kicked him.

“Yes. He understands, and I’ll make sure he complies.” He took the tag and hung it over Petrovitch’s head. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll behave.”

Newcomen led them to the lifts, where Petrovitch had the novelty of waiting. Making sure there was a car ready for them would have been a little too obvious. Even as he tapped his toe, he could see out of the corner of his eye one of the security guys passing a variety of objects through the screen to see if it was still working.

The lift door opened, and two men were inside, talking animatedly. They stepped out together, and suddenly noticed who was standing in their way.

“Newcomen.”

“Baxter. Gowan.”

“How was, er, how was Europe?” said Baxter. Maybe it was something about deliberately engineering for tall, muscular, blond-haired men, but the Bureau had more than its fair share of them.

“Big,” said Newcomen, and showed no sign of moving. “Noisy. Where were you last night?”

“I’m a suspect in one of your cases?” Baxter pressed his palm to his chest in mock surprise.

“You know exactly what I mean. The pair of you should have been at the Hilton with him,” and he pointed at Petrovitch with a rigid, trembling finger, “last night.”

“Him?” said Gowan. “This the cyborg?”

He leaned in for a closer look, checking Petrovitch’s face for an access hatch or a data port. Petrovitch considered his options, the chief of which, and the one he personally favoured, was bringing his forehead smartly into contact with the bridge of Gowan’s nose. Instead, he made his eyes glow a charnel red, and blinked slowly.

Gowan recoiled.

Petrovitch looked up at Gowan and his partner. They were so far down the food chain as to be the equivalent of krill. Even Newcomen was more important. They certainly weren’t worth having an international incident over.

“Real people have work to do,” said Petrovitch, “so why don’t you two just fuck off? That would be brilliant.”

Baxter stiffened. “That’s…”

“And we’re keeping the Assistant Director waiting,” said Newcomen. “I’ll be happy to tell him why we’re late.”

He held his hand up and turned it vertically so he could slice his way between the men, pushing first one then the other aside to make a gap big enough for him to fit through. He walked between them into the lift car and put his foot against the door to prevent it from closing.

Petrovitch joined him, and faced outwards. He extended his middle finger in the direction of travel and kept it there as the doors shushed shut.

“They have no idea what’s going on, do they?” said Petrovitch.

“None. None at all. To be fair, neither do we.”

“Let’s hope your Buchannan can be a bit more forthcoming, then. I want some answers.” He tapped his visitor’s pass so that it bounced against his chest. “Is there anything you don’t bug?”

Newcomen glanced down. “Doesn’t look that way. Can you deal with it?”

“Sure.”

They travelled up to executive country, where the important people were. The staff they met in the corridor moved aside for them. Perhaps they could smell the frustration and anger. Perhaps they didn’t want to touch the eldritch foreigner, and perhaps they knew that Newcomen was a dead man walking, and there was no reason to catch that infection.

They passed a kitchen area. Someone was inside, making coffee, and Petrovitch heard the sound of the clinking spoon.

“Hang on a second.” He stuck his head around the corner and spied the microwave. “Yeah, that’ll do.”

The woman in the pencil skirt busied herself with putting cups on a tray, and only turned around when she heard the beep of the cooker’s timer.

“What? What are you doing?”

Petrovitch looked up from peering at his FBI tag going around on the revolving plate inside.

“Just, you know. Fixing stuff.” He gave it thirty seconds and sprung the door. The tag was warm, and had a couple of burn marks where the electronics inside had arced. He dropped the lanyard over his head again.

Newcomen, propping up the door frame, shrugged uselessly, before standing aside for Petrovitch, who marched past and carried on down the corridor like he hadn’t just destroyed federal property.

They reached the door marked with Buchannan’s nameplate. Newcomen knocked, and a breezy voice told them to enter.

In days past, Buchannan would have been half invisible through air hazy blue with cigarette smoke, while the two of them were invited to sit in the slanting light coming through the nearly closed blinds on the window. They would have all worn hats – a trilby, a fedora: something dangerous – and they’d have talked over glasses of whiskey poured from a bottle hidden in the back of a filing cabinet. There’d have been trench coats hanging from the bentwood stand by the frosted-glass door, and the shadows of people walking by would have made them drop their voices and speak in short, clipped sentences.

As it was, Petrovitch missed the trappings. They would have reminded him of what was at stake, and made the whole proceedings less clinical and anodyne. At least the glass walls of the Assistant Director’s office could be dialled opaque. There were bookshelves, with real books; photographs of friends and family; mementoes gained from thirty-five years of faithful service. Buchannan’s first day as an FBI agent was the day before Armageddon. All his working life had been spent working against, and yet fearing, the actinic flash of a nuclear bomb.

Petrovitch had best remember that. He took the leftmost seat and placed his bag on his lap. Newcomen waited for Buchannan to indicate he could sit, which he did with an open gesture at the chair to Petrovitch’s right.

“Dr Petrovitch? Welcome to America.”

“No thanks, I’ve had enough already.” He pressed the lock on his bag and unzipped it. “Do you mind if I check for bugs?”

“The whole building is regularly swept, Doctor.”

“But not by me.” He picked out a variety of devices and dumped the bag on the floor.

It was inevitable that he found five different radio transmitters within the confines of the four walls, and in trying to trace a sixth, he tabbed the motor on the window blinds to reveal a palm-sized mosquito drone hovering just outside, eight floors up.

Buchannan had the decency to look embarrassed. “Such matters seem to be out of my control, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Maybe we should go for a walk,” suggested Newcomen.

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Petrovitch had a better one. “Your boss isn’t going to tell us anything in private that he’s not going to in public. Firstly, he’s part of the machine; he’s not going offmessage for us, for you, or he would already have done so. Secondly, he knows I’m one big recording device, and he’s probably already seen footage of our little incident back at the hotel. Let’s save ourselves the biting cold and let him make his carefully rehearsed speech here, where at least it’s warm and there’s the possibility of a decent cup of coffee.”

“I guess so.”

They waited in silence for a secretary to bring them drinks. Buchannan, too old to have been gengineered, too squeamish to stand the smell of his own corneas cooking by going under a laser, wore small, round glasses. Like Petrovitch used to have. He took them off and polished them with a cloth handkerchief.