“And when I said the thing about diplomatic immunity, it wasn’t a joke. Uncle Sam can kick me out, but not arrest me. For anything.” Dinner arrived sizzling, and Petrovitch moved his mug out of the drop zone. “Even that.”

“You’re not going to kill me.” Newcomen looked through the steam and smoke rising from his plate. “It’s a steak.”

“Yes. Yes it is. Well spotted. And you’re right, of course. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to rely on your fear that I will kill you to make you do pretty much everything I want. Only at the very end will you find you had a choice all along.”

Wong returned with a big bowl of glistening chips and a leafy green salad that didn’t look like it had been hanging around in the back of the fridge for a week.

“This actually looks edible. I owe your Mr Wong an apology.”

“No you don’t. Just dig in.” Petrovitch twirled his knife between his fingers and started to slice into his meat.

The steak was just how Newcomen liked it: seared on the outside, still pink in the middle. He ate some fries, and moved salad to the edge of his plate. “Things will be different,” he said between mouthfuls, “when we get to America.”

“I know they will,” said Petrovitch. “That’s why it’s important we do this now.”

“Do what?”

“Eat, drink and be merry. We’re free to fall out into the street, worse for wear from baijiu. We’re free to say fuck and shit and call each other bastards. We’re free to wear what we want, no matter how immodest. Now, I know you think that these aren’t freedoms at all, that all we’re doing is enslaving ourselves to our passions, but you’d be wrong.”

“And why would my whole country be wrong?”

“Because you’re lying to yourselves. You can think we’re all foul-mouthed drunks and our women dress like whores, but you’re missing the point. Underneath the veneer of Reconstruction, you’re all monsters. In the Freezone, no one ever goes hungry. If they fall sick, we cure them if we can and look after them if we can’t. No one’s lonely, because there’s always someone listening. We take care of each other, and we all have a say in the big decisions. Which is pretty much how we got to this point.”

Newcomen realised he couldn’t feel his fingertips any more. Nor his toes. He tried to stand, and fell hard against the bare boards of Wong’s empty dining room. Everyone else had left while they were hidden behind the pillar. Even the kitchen space, all flame and spice beforehand, was silent.

“What…” he managed before his tongue grew thick and unworkable in his mouth.

Petrovitch scraped his chair back and went to the door. No slab-bodied bouncer, but Madeleine, Valentina and Tabletop. “Give it another minute. He’s almost there.”

He came back and sat cross-legged in front of Newcomen’s paralysed form.

“You see, the whole point of this evening was genuinely to find out what you were like. If you weren’t such a craven, self-absorbed careerist, you might have saved yourself from what happens next. But we’d already made the decision based on what we knew of you, and we’ve decided that the only way we can ensure your single-minded dedication to the task of finding Lucy is by planting a bomb in your chest. The irony is that we just want you to do the job you’re paid to do. Do it, and you’ll be fine.”

Petrovitch reached out and rolled the unresisting Newcomen flat.

“The drug’s very specific and quickly metabolised. No ill-effects afterwards.” He knelt up and started to unbutton the agent’s shirt and unknot his tie. “You won’t feel a thing.”

Tabletop placed a slim case on the floor next to Newcomen’s head and opened it. Inside was a scalpel, and she was already wearing surgical gloves. She held the blade up to the light, then without doubt or hesitation, brought it down.

5

Petrovitch sat on a chair at the end of the bed, hunched over in the shadows thrown by the drawn curtains. Metrozone sounds leaked in, despite the triple glazing, and outside in the corridor a man and a woman laughed on their way to breakfast.

Newcomen stirred, buried his head deeper into his soft white pillow, then opened his eyes. He gasped and sat up, clutching at his bare, almost hairless chest.

“It wasn’t a dream,” said Petrovitch.

There was a small strip of canned skin, just left of Newcomen’s sternum, no longer or wider than his thumb. The colour matching was good enough, and in time there wouldn’t even be a scar.

“What have you done to me? Where am I? How did I get here?” He pulled the duvet up to his chin. It made a poor shield against Petrovitch’s forensic gaze.

“You’re in your hotel room, I carried you in, and we have to be at the airport in a few hours.” Petrovitch levered himself upright and pulled the curtains back to reveal the north bank of the Thames. “As for the rest of it? Michael’s been busy calculating the odds of not just getting Lucy back, but even getting me back. Frankly, they weren’t looking good, so we’ve shortened them. A little. What we’ve done is really shitty, especially since it seems you’re not actually that important in the whole scheme of things, but we have to work with what we’ve got.”

He went to the wardrobe where he’d hung up Newcomen’s suit, more or less neatly, and laid it across the bottom of the bed. There was a freshly ironed shirt, and the phone tie too, and he’d previously found spare socks and boxers in the ridiculously sized suitcase.

“You need to get up, get washed and dressed, then meet me in the restaurant downstairs. Unless you want me to call room service.”

“I have a bomb? In here?” Newcomen’s fingers searched where the wound should have been.

“Okay, yes. May as well fill you in on the details. We’ve inserted an explosive capsule into the muscle surrounding your left ventricle. It is very small, very difficult to find even if someone’s looking for it, and we’ve made it as radio-transparent as we can so it doesn’t trip any sort of scanner. Despite its size, it’s more than capable of making a hole big enough that you’ll bleed out in five seconds. Ten tops, but your blood pressure will fall like a stone and you’ll probably be unconscious for most of that.”

While Newcomen digested this, Petrovitch buffed a pair of brown leather shoes with his sleeve.

“What,” said the American, “what if I don’t co-operate?”

“What sort of dumb-arse question is that? I had hoped that despite all your shortcomings, you were at least smart.” Petrovitch put the shoes on the floor as a pair, toes pointing out. “This is the deal: if I die, you die. If I’m about to die, you die. If my diplomatic status is revoked and I’m imprisoned, you die. If I discover that you and your Federal colleagues have been giving me the runaround, withholding information and generally pissing me off, guess what? You die. If you try to take the bomb out, you die. If you tell anyone about the bomb, you die. Simply put, if you don’t do your damnedest to get my daughter back, you die.”

“She’s not even your…” started Newcomen, then caught himself.

“She’s mine. She’s all of the Freezone’s, too, but she is mine. Now get up: I expect you to be downstairs in ten minutes.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” It wasn’t so much a rebellion from Newcomen as a flash of petulance.

“I’m not going to go around making you my suka because I can. I will, however, kick your sorry arse every time you act like a peesa. Just grow a pair, will you?” He tapped his non-existent wristwatch. “Ten.”

Petrovitch walked out and down the corridor that seemed both too narrow and too low-ceilinged to be sensible. He could reach up and touch the recessed lights. There were lifts, but he ignored them and took the stairwell instead, bouncing down the steps two and three at a time.